F is for Fundraisers

 For every group, every charity, every village,  fundraising is key to keeping things going. My favourite sort of fundraiser is a charity book sale - of course!

 I miss jolly old jumble sales which was the way most fund raising was done in the 70's and 80's with a special Christmas sale each December - Father Christmas in attendance. With Scouts we also had a wonderful summer fete with a knobbly knee competition  and plate smashing was always popular too, and we were one of the first places to run a car boot sale.

For many years I travelled down to Colchester each October for the giant NSPCC book sale, but this year I just couldn't be bothered- even though it's the last one they were going to have after 20 years - and here is the problem in so many places - it's  often retired people who keep things going and they get older and run out of energy. There was a worrying message on a local Facebook page that the village hall where we have our Keep Moving Group urgently needs more people for the their management committee, as the treasurer and bookings clerk have been doing their jobs for years and would like a break. 

Where are the 30 and 40 year old's with energy? 

So I didn't go to the big Colchester book sale to start November  but I did visit one in Suffolk, a fundraiser for their Village Hall, they always have a nice lot of books. These are what I found. No grey cover Persephone books again but these below are interesting and there at the bottom of the pile is one to add to one of my other collections - The Little Toller Nature Classics series. I've read the one on the top of the heap but don't own a copy and it's a war time mystery so will be a good one to keep.

Just like the shops who have to make much of their profits at this time of the year, the run up to Christmas is peak time for fundraising for villages and groups too, hence the huge number of Christmas Fairs coming up.

There is a lovely list of local Fairs to visit to cheer up my November and December weekends, I might not spend much but I do need to find a few Christmas gifts this year as it's not been a successful year for finding things at boot sales.

My diary has filled up with ideas for places to visit....................

November 8th Monks Eleigh or Stuston; 

15th/16th Diss or Stowupland or  Eye;

 22nd/23rd Haughley or Otley;

 29th/30th Burgate, Stoke Ash, Thorndon, Debenham, Finborough or Stowmarket.

 December 6th/7th Cotton, Wetherden, Stonham, Mendlesham, Thornham Walled Garden or Rickinghall.

Then everything comes to a halt!

How many can I manage to get to? Will I have coffee and cake at some? - Not all! that would be silly.

Are there as many Christmas Fairs and sales in other places or is it just here?

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Big Spender at the Car-boot Sale

 I went mad at last  Saturday's Car-Boot sale and spent the grand total of £6 plus 75p on two giant tomatoes - forgot to get tomatoes when I was shopping and there was only one vegetable seller at the car boot with only these giants.

I was pleased to spot another of the Little Toller Books Nature Classic reprints and paid £1 - I've now got a collection of 10 - whoops!

The packs of  grow your own cress seeds for children  were 3 for £1 (2 grandchildren to be entertained here next Sunday) and the handy set of measuring cup/spoons were also £1. I've never had a full set like this before.

But my favourite find was a very old scrapbook full of all sorts of pictures and cuttings going back to the 1930's/40s. I had to pay £3 as it wasn't in one of the house clearance boxes but being sold by more of an antique seller lady - a lady who sells antiques rather than a very old woman!

It's got some interesting pages. I'm going to take out my favourite pictures and add them to my own scrapbooks.

Had my first-of-the-year whippy 99 ice cream too. It was a bit odd having ice cream for breakfast at 8.30 am, and will probably be the first and last time - but the sun was shining and it seemed like a good idea at the time!

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Sue

Charity Shop Finds

After months of finding nothing in charity shops I had some good book finds in Bury St Edmunds when I had a morning  there last week

 Found this for 50p, it's yet another book that I owned once when there were over 1,000 books on the shelves and regretted getting rid of it later during one of the moves.

And I've added to my small Little Toller Books Collection with this for £2.99. Thought I'd not read it but it's in my 'Book of Books Read' from many years ago. Can't remember anything about it so it will be interesting to read again.

And finally a very unusual find for £2.50 were these - 4 copies of a quarterly publication,  a literary magazine by Slightly Foxed who reprint books from the past and sell other books too. Described on their website.............

Slightly Foxed is the quarterly magazine that introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it’s more like a well-read friend than a literary magazine. Every issue of Slightly Foxed includes fiction and non-fiction, books that have stood the test of time and have left their mark on the people who write about them. It’s an eclectic mix, and our contributors are an eclectic bunch too – some well-known, others not so, but all passionate about sharing their enthusiasm for a book or author.

From £56 per year, with subscriber discounts and benefits.

All 80 back issues are available from them for £1,160! and lots are on Amazon for around £4 or on Abebooks for £2 each. My 4 copies at £2.50 were quite a bargain and plenty of interesting reading. Books about books are always good.

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Sue

The Shining Levels

 The Shining levels by John Wyatt was first published in 1973 and is the authors story of his time working as a forester in the Lake District.

My copy is a Little Toller Nature Classic reprint from 2012. The cover is from a detail from Lake Landscapes by L.S. Lowry.

John Wyatt was born in 1925 in among the factories and cotton mills of Lancashire but always felt like a country boy - escaping anytime he could to the fells and woods above the town. His first visit to the Lake District was with his Scout Group, where he found he loved the freedom and the closeness to nature. After leaving school aged 15 he spent a while working in a newspaper office, then as  telegraphist in the Navy during WWII. On leaving the navy he had a few jobs but  was desperate to get back to the countryside and took a job as a forest worker while doing a correspondence course on writing. He lived alone in a small hut working for the landowner and learning about the wildlife around his home. 

He became a campsite warden and then the first Park Ranger for the Lake District National Park in 1961 - working alone covering 866 square miles as the Park got busier with visitors. As more Rangers were hired he became Chief Ranger in 1973 and was awarded an M.B.E. for services to the National Park.

The Shining Levels is about the early days, before the National Park when he is working for one of the landowners at coppicing, hedging and ditching while living in a small rough hut - which comes with the job. 

I put my modest luggage on the bunk in the corner and leant my axe against the wall. I thought of tea. I followed the beaten path to the well, There was a frog in it , but it didn't bother me. If the water was good enough for him I would not object.........................

The only heat and way of cooking was from a wood fire which smoked terribly. Wyatt soon became an expert on wood-smoke and all the different fragrances. 

A lot of the story is about him taking in a tiny Roe Deer brought to him by some well meaning Scouts who had found it "abandoned". He manages to keep it alive and calls it Buck. Buck grows and thrives and follows him around - answering to his call.

My copy of the book has illustrations of wood engravings of the Lakes by Norman Ackroyd, which don't really add much to the book. I noticed on Amazon that the original had line drawings, which look much more relevant.

Stock Image

 

After retiring he wrote more books about The Lakes and wrote the first official guide to the national Park in 1987.

He died in 2006 and was buried in a green burial site in the Lake District  with a Yew tree planted over his grave.

A good read about a man who went back to nature before it became the in thing!

---

Back Tomorrow

Sue

Wanderers In The New Forest

 Wanderers in the New Forest by Juliette De Baïracli Levy was originally published in 1958. This new edition is published by Little Toller Books in their Nature Classics series.

She was born in Manchester in 1912 and went on to become one of the first herbalists to promote holistic veterinary medicine. After studying at universities in Manchester and Liverpool she left England to study herbal medicine in Europe, Turkey, North Africa, Palestine and Greece. Living with farmers and livestock breeders to study the animals, she was specially keen to learn Romani ways of natural animal medicines in all these countries.

Wanderers in The New Forest is one of several books she published and this tells the story of her three years living with her two small children in a small basic cottage in the New Forest in Hampshire.

They lived a very simple life, swimming regularly in a forest pool, drawing water from the Abbots Well and foraging for fruit and fungi. She made a garden and grew much of her own fruit and vegetables which they ate raw most of the time. Her friends were the Romany people and the locals who ran their ponies in the forest and kept their animals in the old ways.

Her book 'Herbal Handbook for Farm and Stable' was reprinted many times but her other books about her life in Spain, New York and Galilee and of travelling with the Gypsies were only reprinted in the US.

She died in Switzerland in 2009.

Coincidentally I discovered that this week on the Greek Island where she lived there are people taking part in a 'Herbal Medicine Tour' in her honour run by a Greek Herbalist. Details HERE.

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Sue

Someone Liked the Same Books As Me.

(Or should that be "as I". I got told off by a pedantic Roderick (whoever He is) last week when I inadvertently missed an apostrophe - one apostrophe good grief!)

 

Anyway.............  These were a surprise find at the Wednesday Car-boot sale. They were (yet again) in the boxes of house clearance stuff and only £3 for the lot. 

 

 I said to the man selling that they must have cleared a house belonging to someone who had the same taste in books that I do.

Two are the lovely Little Toller Books books and perhaps if I look on Ziffit they will all be worth more than the 50p each I paid for them, although I'd better read them first as I've not read any of them before.

I started straight away on the one by Simon Barnes which is about his home close to one of the Norfolk Broads and is a really good read.

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Sue

The Wild Silence By Raynor Winn

 I loved her first book " The Salt Path" - which tells the story of their walk around the South West Coastal path after being made homeless,penniless and with her husbands diagnoses of a terminal illness hanging over them.

This is her second book and is the story of how she came to write the first book, how her husband finds ways to fight  disease, their new home thanks to a kind reader and a trek through Iceland.

It was a bit of a struggle to read this, not because it's hard going but because of connections to my life.

Firstly of course is the diagnoses of terminal illness - a different illness to Colin but just as devastating . Treatable but not curable we were told - sadly they didn't say that treatment rarely works for very long. Ray's husband Moth is still fighting but my Colin died after just 2½ years.

 And then the book starts with the death of Ray's mother and Ray having to spend a couple of weeks with her mother in hospital and having to decide when to stop treatment. It was a bit too close to May 2018 and I remember all too well sitting with Colin and trying to sleep on a fold out bed beside him as his breathing got worse and knowing he couldn't hear me talking to him anymore.

 Then another but nicer connection when Ray is asked by "A small publishing company" to write the introduction to a book being reprinted. I knew straight away the company were Little Toller Books   

and I knew well the book she too knew well from her youth. Copsford by  Walter Murray

I wrote about it here  in July 2019. As a young man Murray, desperate to get out of the city, spent 10 months living in a semi-derelict cottage in the middle of nowhere, harvesting and  drying wild plants which back then (just after WWI) were sold to companies to produce medicines.

I'm now  re-reading  Copsford as it's many years since I last read it.

(Direct Debits for Council Tax, Phones, Car Breakdown Insurance,Charity Donation Total £260)

1st.        No Spend

2nd        Food  £33 + Cat £6 +  Diesel £18 + Printer Paper £4.          = £61  

3rd         No Spend

4th        Swimming £2.25

5th         No Spend 

6th        No Spend

7th          No Spend

8th         No Spend

9th        No spend

10th       Food £18 + Cat £5 + Kitchen stuff £2.50 + Pharmacy £3.80 

               Christmas bits £3.50      = £32

Back Tomorrow

Sue

 

The First August Library Book Photo................

.......................................why the first? because the library van comes four weekly there are two visits August.

Another heap of happiness, collected last week,  all books I've ordered online except for the 1 by Donna Leon and the Persephone, which I plucked from the shelves.

Starting from the bottom "Homesick" is subtitled "Why I live in a shed", I think it's about the lack of housing for young people. After finding out about Little Toller Books a couple of weeks ago I looked on the library site and found they had the Little Toller Books re-print of "Home Country" by Richard Mabey. I've read several of his more recent books so ordered this to read.
Jack Monroes latest book "Tin Can Cook". Then there are some old recently re-printed crime fiction and a crime author I hadn't heard of... Julia Chapman. Another Dean Street Press edition that the library have bought is "The Native Heath" by Elizabeth Fair.


This was what I brought home in July

 The 2 crime fiction  books by authors I'd not read before went back unread- couldn't get into them.  21st Century Yokel has also gone back without reading properly  as it wasn't very interesting.  Short description of books read are on the separate page (tab at the top under the photo). Despite someone telling me not to read "Go set a Watchman" ( surely a reason to definitely read it!!) I found it interesting......a look at the Southern States of the USA when racial tension was causing all sorts of problems...........something that never seems to go away.


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Sue

Country Classic Reprints

The new edition

Quiet a few companies are reprinting crime and other fiction from past decades but I recently came across Little Toller Books........just a bit late as it's 10 years since they started.

A book they have recently re-published popped up on my Amazon Recommendations and I knew it was a book that I had a much, much older copy of on my shelves.

My copy came from one of the charity book sales several years ago. I thought then I'd found something quite unusual, something long forgotten.

My old copy

 I discovered it wasn't completely unique when I spotted a copy on the shelves of the B&B place we stayed in when Eldest Daughter got married.










And now it's been brought back for new readers.

The classic account of a young man’s life in rural Sussex, away from his city life – a year in which he rented a derelict cottage and scratched a living from selling dried herbs and wildflowers. Bearing comparison to Thoreau’s Walden, Murray’s intense feeling for his place is evident on every page. For all that it is no simple story of a rural idyll – life at Copsford was difficult and Murray does not shy away from the occasional terrors of a house that had its hauntings.


This was originally published in 1948 and tells the story of his 10 months in the cottage not long after WWI.

This is one of a series called Nature Classics reprinted by Little Toller Books in the last 10 years. 21 are still available from them but there are many more earlier ones no longer in print. Quite a lot I've seen in their original editions  and once owned especially during the years we bought and sold country and farming books at the Suffolk Smallholder show.

 One they no longer have available is something I read many years ago, when it was around for the first time and loved and have never seen since.

Picture from Amazon

Just look at how good a collection of their books would look on a shelf!

Picture from Little Toller website

(Just should say this isn't a sponsored post or advertising but if they want to send me a copy of any of their books I would be well pleased!)

Back Tomorrow
Sue