Husbands, pickles, Canada
Heya,
RIGHT, I am BACK from Canada and here are my observations:
Wow people in Canada sure are into pickles
Specifically, the sort of pickle that I’d call a gherkin: a long green pickled cucumber
For example, there was a big indoor market that had two separate pickle stores (or two branches of one pickle store maybe?)
Also, multiple signs in different cities saying PICKLES AVAILABLE HERE despite pickles being available pretty much everywhere so honestly I think we could just have assumed
On more than one occasion I bought an unrelated food product (eg bagel, glass of beer) and was given a free pickle alongside it
Additionally: “frickles”
Other thank the pickle situation I had a lovely time - I was at two festivals, Wordfest and Vancouver Writers’ Festival, and they were both wonderful. They were particularly great, I thought, at getting a lot of the attending writers chatting to each other; I left feeling like I’d made a bunch of new friends.
I didn’t have time to explore Calgary much but I had a couple of free days in Vancouver, which I mostly spent thinking why did nobody ever tell me Vancouver was nice, how dare they keep this from me. But people definitely did tell me it was nice, and I just ignored them: it’s not that I thought they were lying, but I definitely didn’t think it would be so nice.
It’s always a good sign for a city, I think, if you ask three or four people for bookshop recommendations and they all tell you something completely different.
WOULD YOU LIKE SOME HUSBANDS CARDS?
So, I printed up some Husbands cards for a couple of events. These are basically cards with sentence fragments on them that you can combine to make different husbands. And I have some left over!
Plus, a couple of people have told me that they’re getting a friend a copy of The Husbands for the holidays.
SO, if this applies to YOU and you’re getting a copy of the book for someone else this year, and you’d like to have a few of the cards to pop in to make the gift a little bit more fancy, please fill in this form in the next week or two and I’ll send you at least six cards - enough for two husbands.
This is currently UK/Ireland only, sorry (and only for people signed up to this newsletter)! Postage elsewhere gets very expensive (though if you’re in the US/Canada and would want this let me know - if there’s enough people I’ll see if I can print a few there and get a friend to send them out, no guarantees though).
THINGS I’VE BEEN ENJOYING
Here’s some things I’ve been enjoying lately:
The current season of Perverse, a (free) online poetry magazine edited by Chrissy Williams - it’s particularly focused on strange or hard-to-explain or experimental poems, things that require awkward typography or a lot of thinking “wait, what?”, and it’s always a surprise and a treat when it arrives
I’ve also been reading a bunch of minor Dodie Smith (who’s most famous for 101 Dalmations and I Capture the Castle). Her less famous books were mostly written in the 60s and I wouldn’t say I recommend them, exactly. But I do enjoy them. They’re extremely readable, and she has a real habit of implying that a particular plot or series of events is imminent, and then just writing something entirely different. The books are not on the face of it particularly experimental, and they have a very light cheerful style, but they keep veering close to a familiar plot shape and then just swerving off on a weird jaunt instead. Setups imply an eventual romance that doesn’t happen, plot elements don’t quite pay off, buildings that you assume will be very on fire by the end of the book are actually fine, etc.
Terry and I recently started watching Taskmaster, a show of approximately ninety million episodes in which slightly famous people compete to eg pour a precise quantity of custard into a bucket while blindfolded. It’s extremely popular among both the general public and people who care a bit too much about game design, but I steered clear of it for a while because a friend warned me it was “full of English people”. But you know what, so is London and I like that too.
Rearranging my bookshelves to “make more space” (it’s unclear at this point how moving things slightly will make them smaller but you have to trust the process)
The fact that you can now order dark chocolate timtams from UK supermarkets
I am NOT enjoying the whole grey skies short days thing but what can you do? Other than lean your cheek despondently against any south-facing window and wait for spring.
Speak soon,
Holly