Me, myself and I: my blogging identity

One of the things that attracted me to blogging was what I perceived as the blissful anonymity. I liked the idea of having somewhere I could speak freely, say anything I wanted, free of the constraints of being 'me'. I adopted my online name and off I went.

Of course, that's not how it has worked out, and for a number of reasons. Even if you adopt an anonymous identity, you are still yourself and the longer you blog, the more invested you become in your online identity. And where there are people, there is no absolute freedom to 'say anything'. There are always consequences for the things we say. It is simply a question of what those consequences are and whether we are prepared to live with them.

Amongst the stuff I've produced online, I've posted things I've regretted. I've given reviews of books that have been both too harsh and too kind. I've made comments that are probably snarky at times. At other times, I've pulled my punches when I ought not to have. I've posted comments too quickly. I've posted comments that don't properly express my views and that I've had to go back and clarify. I've had to make apologies at times.

I've discovered a number of things about myself.

I've realised that I care a lot about what people think about that 'inner me', the anonymised real-life-me. And I find I want to be honest about things - who I am, what my views are - often painfully honest. I find I want to correct misapprehensions. I find that I want to be viewed as reasonable and ethical.

Does this suggest that my sense of self - and sense of responsibility for that self - go beyond my name and circumstances; that it is more inherent than I had appreciated? Alternatively, by adopting an online name and founding my own blog, did I put in place the parameters of a 'self' that in fact did away with the 'benefits' of anonymity?

Another thing that's surprised me is that my personality - that 'real me' - keeps coming through, over and over. For example, I've got a tendancy to be outwardly very positive and cheerful, no matter how I may feel in myself. I had fondly imagined that I could leave that behind me in my online life, but of course, I can't. I do online just what I do in real life. I paste a smile on my face and say everything is fine even when I'm having a crappy day. Because that is who I am.

When I started blogging I saw it as an escape. It's not really turned out that way. Yes, it's valuable to me, but far from giving me the freedom to 'say anything', it's made me appreciate - more profoundly than I did before - that you own what you say.

In which Tumperkin stretches her metaphors

I am just back from a lovely weekend. The in-laws had the children for a night and Mr T and I went off for a very grown up night away in a fancy hotel with a Michelin starred restaurant. How exciting.

I packed Another Eden by Patricia Gaffney, a book I've long-wished to read and that Laura Vivanco recently gave me. I'd been saving it for a special occasion.

I am about halfway through Another Eden just now so this is not a review. However, I am richly enjoying it. Though I am not finding it an easy read. The heroine is married - very unhappily - to a man who uses her son as a weapon against her. The hero has been employed by her husband as his architect. The relationship between H/H at this moment is unconsummated, and slowly growing. The husband is dreadful but no pantomime-villain. There is a tiny kernel of something in him, a glimmer of something that stops him being wholly evil, a subtle sense that he bears a poisoned sort of love for the heroine. Their little boy is his direct contrast, a loving, delicate, sensitive child. He is like a vessel for the heroine's soul, a precious thing that seems constantly in danger. Throughout the book there is almost unbearable tension, a sense that something dreadful is about to happen (Gaffney's great gift) even as the romance grows. All of this makes this a far from easy read, but an extremely satisfying one.

Which chimes rather neatly with our special dinner. It was extraordinary. I would type the menu out in full if I wasn't worried about boring you. Suffice to say that it was incredible, a fantastic array of flavours and textures, richness and delicacy, from the light and airy to the dense and earthy.

Very satisfying. Very rich.

Afterwards, Mr T and I wondered if we could eat like that every day. We concluded we could not. It was wonderful, but intense. Aspirational. A high water mark for us.

But sometimes we don't want that. Sometimes, more than anything, we crave good plain fayre, substantial and nutritious.




A Sunday roast, if you will.

Sometimes, we want comfort food, stodgy and plain, soothing and mild.




And sometimes we just want something fun and silly.

Reading romance is rather like that. I loved my experience of haute cuisine but I couldn't eat it all the time. And I tend to devour the haute cuisine sort of books in small portions, like 70% plain chocolate, a square at a time. Another Eden is proving to be such a book.

Other times - most of the time - I want what is good and well-cooked and balanced. The sort of book I can read in a sitting or two and enjoy thoroughly, feeling pleased and satisfied at the end of it.

Macaroni cheese? That's the sort of book that isn't necessarily very balanced or good for me but that still leaves me feeling happy and as though I've had a proper meal, as it were.

And then there's space dust. Sometimes I love a bit of space dust.

All of which brings me neatly back to my fine dining experience. Our pre-dessert (yes! Pre-dessert) was 'Walnut Whip' a deconstructed haute-cuisine version of the 1970s bit of classic confectionary much-loved by my granny. This featured a cone of coffee ice-cream with a topping of walnut cream. And a secret ingredient.

Space dust!

Warning: this "review" tells you very little about the book really

I've read most of Liz Carlyle's oeuvre now but one I seemed to have missed was No True Gentleman, the story of Max de Rohan and Catherine Wodeway (nee Rutledge). I'd read about Max, and to a lesser extent, Catherine, in a number of Carlyle's other novels and kept meaning to pick this up. This weekend, I finally did it.


Liz Carlyle was one of the first historical authors I picked up when I started re-reading romance a few years ago after a fifteen year or so hiatus. I rate her. I've blogged about this before so I won't repeat myself but her books are well-researched and avoid that Regency cliche of setting all the action in the smallish setting of the Ton (a shorthand I hate to use except it's so useful that you'll all know what I'm talking about).


My first Carlyle was The Devil You Know, a book I adored and I've enjoyed pretty much every Carlyle book I've read since. My top 3 are The Devil You Know, The Devil to Pay and now, probably, No True Gentleman.


No True Gentleman surprised me. My sense of Max - from the other books he appears in - was that he was a bit grim and bit dull. And indeed, that is how Max does appear to people. But getting the benefit of his internal POV and Catherine's take on him just transformed him in my eyes. I really really liked him. And Catherine is a fab heroine. She's an active character and she drives the plot - and the romance - forward. She's a breath of fresh air as a historical heroine: kind without being passive, forgiving without being a doormat. She recognises when she loves Max and acts on it. Funnily enough I often don't like when protagonists have too much self-awareness about love but it worked with Catherine for me. And I really liked Max's take on Catherine, as this sort of Earth goddess who is everything that is good and productive. If I was to be picky, I'd have to say that I found the detail of Max's difficulties with love and marriage to be under-developed. But that's a minor nitpick given how much enjoyed the romance arc and pace of resolution. Basically, I just loved this book. And when I finished it, I had to then get out The Devil You Know again.


And yes, I read The Devil You Know all over again - at quite a pace - and enjoyed - nay loved - it all over again. Just everything about it. The fact that they're so young (Bentley is 26 and Freddie is 18); the fact that Bentley is one my favourite kinds of heroes - the wounded soul who masquerades as a light-hearted fool; the fact that Freddie cries all the time, something romance heroines don't do enough in my book. (Really, I am going to blog about my glitch with indomitable heroines at some stage). The fact that very little happens. Just lots of H/H action. I love that.

One of the interesting things about TDYK is that it's overflowing with characters Carlyle has already written about, something that can really not work with series. But it worked here. I read TDYK (3 or more years ago now?) and decided I wanted to know all about these people, and now that I think about it, I probably picked each 'next read' in accordance with how interesting those 'secondary' characters seemed to me.

Which is how I came to read a NTG almost last of all, and lo and behold, it turned out to be a bobby dazzler!

Isn't that a pip?

The Moral Maze #1: The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf

My obsession, right now, is morals within romance novels. Moral setting, moral assumptions, the morality of the characters and how all of that interacts with the reader. Fascinating.

It's been simmering for a while. I've touched on it in this post, and in this one. And mused on it further thanks to this post of Jessica's. And it's related too to other questions that have been interesting me about the reader-writer relationship and where the reader is when she reads and indeed who she is.

Now, I want to try and address it a bit more, probably through a series of irregular posts.

So I thought, where to start? And decided on a fairy tale.

Fairy tales are often heavily imbued with moral principles. One that I felt strongly about when I was a child was The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, a not terribly well known Hans Christian Andersen story. The eponymous girl, Inger, is presented at the outset as unpleasant, spoiled, selfish and cruel, though her crimes will be familiar to anyone who has ever been a child: she picks the wings off flies, fails to value the things she is given and treats her mother with disdain. Inger is given a place with a wealthier family who treat her like their own daughter. She is given fine clothes by them. When urged to visit her mother, she doesn't do so. One day her mistress sends her again to see her mother and gives her a loaf of good bread to take. But she decides to use the bread to protect her shoes from a muddy puddle. Unfortunately for her, she sinks through the puddle and into the underground brewery of the Marsh Wife. Even more unfortunately for her, the devil is visiting that day with his grandmother and the latter decides that Inger has 'aptitude'. She takes Inger to be a pedestal in her house.

And she got her. And this is how little Inger came to hell. People don't always rush straight down there, but they can get there by a roundabout way - when they have the aptitude!

Inger lives in hell for many long years. She hears her mother's last words as she dies. She hears her tale being told to children and their horrified reactions. She is motionless, stood on her pedestal of bread, ever open-eyed. Wingless flies crawl on her and she cannot brush them off. And all the time she is there, she is famished. She can't reach the bread beneath her feet.

She is angry and bitter. She blames others for her plight. Eventually, one day, one little girl cries for her and says Poor Inger. It creates a little teeny crack in Inger's anger. Long years later, as that little girl lies dying as an old old woman, she remembers the girl who trod on bread again and sends a prayer to God. We don't know if the prayer moves God, but it moves Inger. She accepts her responsibility and reaches her lowest moment of despair. It is her redemptive moment:

And then, much faster than the snowflake falling on the warm mouth of a child melts away to a drop, Inger's petrified figure faded away. A tiny bird, zigzagging like lightning, soared up to the world of mortals.

Inger has become a bird. And she spends her little bird-life collecting thousands upon thousands of crumbs of bread and giving them to other hungry birds until she has collected the equivalent of that whole loaf.

And when the very last bread crumb had been found and given away, the bird's grey wings turned white and spread out wide.

"A tern is flying over the sea!" said the children who saw the white bird. Now it ducked down into the sea, now it soared in the bright sunshine; it shone, it wasn't possible to see what had become of it. They said that it flew straight into the sun."

And that is the story of The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf; dire warning to small, stroppy children; harshly judgemental morality tale; uplifting story of a hard-won redemption.

This is a story that appears to have a rigid moral setting, so much so that I found it deeply disturbing as a wee girl. Inger is harshly punished for her crimes. She is spoiled - cruel even - but do these youthful character flaws justify the decades of unspeakable torment she suffers? Or the redemptive act she has to perform as a bird? It seems an unusually harsh morality tale.

You could read it that way. But there is another way of looking at it. Perhaps as a well-meant cautionary tale; a warning that life is harsh and your least transgressions may be your undoing. Or as something more allegorical. A reflection on the fact that it is these small and thoughtless transgressions that take us on a roundabout way to hell. A warning that the little things matter.

I love this story even as I find it troublesome. The language is interesting. At times, Andersen almost seems to gloat at times over Inger's suffering, suggesting a moral architecture that is set in stone. At other times, the tone is charity itself. And strangely, the sheer harshness of the treatment that Inger receives makes the reader question the degree of her moral turpitude and to cause the reader to question notions of fairness, proportionality, crime and punishment.

And so it seems to me that even when the moral setting is seemingly unyielding, there may be some 'wiggle room' for the reader.

I'm back! Call the sheep to the hillocks!

I have a new modem. It works and everything!

This week, I have mostly been humming this song that my granny used to sing. It's a little known Burns song called Ca' the Yowes tae the Knowes (translation above). I'd forgotten about it.

Joanna Newsome does a really nice version although she pronounces 'knowes' as 'nose' instead of 'nows'.

Actually I really love it.

Terrible 2s

I have been blogging for two years this week. I'm rather surprised to still find myself at it. Particularly given the state of my internet connection.

My modem is a strange, temperamental thing. It has been for a long time. Months ago, determined to do something about it, Mr T called our broadband provider's call centre in India. He quickly lost the will to live and since we had developed a knack for getting 2 green lights by slowly waving it around in the air then staying absolutely still for a few minutes, we just kept soldiering on.

However, I think we are now at the stage where the modem is, to quote Miracle Max, mostly dead. It's taken forever tonight, but I finally got a connection by wedging a copy of The Idylls of the King and a CD underneath the cable where it feeds into the USB port and taping the cable down. It seems to be working - for now. But it's already gone off once and had to be fiddled with again and really, I think it's on its way out. So we need to phone India again. Or maybe move provider altogether.

All of which is a very long way of saying, I may not be around much for the forseeable future and may not be answering emails very promptly!

Love-hate romances

I've just finished Courting Julia by Mary Balogh, a 220 page old Signet Regency romance (1993) that the lovely Janet Webb sent to Laura Vivanco who then passed it to me. To give you an idea of the value of this experience to me, this book costs £19.95 used on Amazon UK or £62.98 new!

Given the chance to wallow in Balogh's extensive back catalogue, I would happily take a week off work. I tried to savour this one, I really did. But I ended up gobbling it up with all the greed of Augustus Gloop in a chocolate river.

Courting Julia features a particular trope I sometimes dislike: the love-hate relationship. It's something of a romance cliche, and in my view, often done quite badly. Here, however, I thought it was done pretty well and that's down to what's at the root of the conflicted feelings. Many love-hate relationships seem to be predicated upon genuine dislike or - even worse - nothing at all. Just a poorly executed seemingly invented conflict to keep the H/H apart till the end.

In Courting Julia, the hero, Daniel, is repressed and stodgy (having inherited substantial responsibilities at the age of 14), while Julia is lively and imprudent. Her behaviour irks him because he has spent years making himself behave in a sober and responsible manner. He believes he should disapprove of her behaviour but even as he's disapproving, he's attracted to it. He secretly wants to be at the heart of her ungoverned joy for life. Balogh also makes the sexual attraction a further point of conflict, creating a moment in their shared past when Daniel felt a moment of sexual attraction to Julia when he was 23 and she was 15 and he has some unacknowledged guilt over that that.

In some books, heroes seem to be angered merely by the fact that they're attracted to the heroine (and vice versa) but in this book, it's not the existence of the desire that causes the love-hate conflict in the hero. It's the fact that the desire goes completely against the character of the man he has tried to mould himself into. His desire for Julia challenges everything he values. We see a similar relationship in The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer, with the responsible, put-open Charles and the unconventional tornado-like Sophy. I quite like this trope of the conventional hero being nettled out of their complacency by the more unconventional heroine. (And there are so many heroes in historical romance who are wildly flawed rakes with gargantuan sexual appetites, that it's quite refreshing to come across a hero whose worst crime is being a bit stodgy).

Daniel's feelings for Julia are often described in terms of frustration and impotence. He repeatedly mentions his desire to 'throttle' her and threatens her with spanking. He accuses her of acting like a tease and a flirt and inviting 'ravishment'. If this sounds unappealing, Balogh at least has Julia fight her corner:

"My God, woman," he said, his fists clenched tightly at his sides. "Do you have no understanding of life at all? Or of men?"...

...."Yes. I understand men, Daniel. Some men anyway. I understand that they can desire what they hate and despise. I understand that they can accuse men of doing what they would like to do themselves. You would like to ravish me, wouldn't you Daniel? But of course the thought horrifies you because you are the very proper Earl of Beaconswood. And so all the wrong must be mine. There is nothing improper in my swimming here early in the morning, but because you have seen me here, and because you have desired me, then I must be a wanton..."

It's not all him being angry at her though. Balogh shows Daniel's preoccupation with Julia in other ways, like when they are in a family party visiting an old ruined castle and Daniel is fretting because Julia has insisted on visiting an unsafe part of the ruin with her cousin:

...Freddie was stretched out on the grass, basking in the sun, one arm thrown over his eyes. Viola and Stella sat beside him, talking. Les and Susan had strolled over to where one low wall would give them a view out over the countryside on the opposite side from the river. No one else was pacing, worrying that she would lean against the parapet and it would give way from the weight of her body and plunge her to her death. No one else kept glancing at the doorway into the tower...worried that she would miss her footing on the stairs and come plummeting down to her death.

Everyone else was fond of Julia and not one whit worried about her...

If the resolution, when it comes, is a little facile (and helped along in its way by a textbook 'flawed father' to further explain Daniel's preoccupation with conventionality) well this is a light Regency category romance.

So do you think of love-hate stories? Love 'em? Hate 'em?