“I find I do not often have anything to say which it would interest other people to hear. Though other people talk about things I am not interested in and I am happy to listen, so maybe it is not others’ lack of the will to listen but my lack of interest in speaking that is at fault.”

Pied oystercatcher, Lindisfarne Bay, Hobart. May 2021.

Meet Me at the Museum by Anne Youngson

I shall now repeat the opening sentence from an earlier review. The greatest challenge for the epistolary novel is to create engaging characters who engender enough sympathy (or at least interest in their lives) to hold a reader's interest. Anne Youngson has achieved this admirably in Meet Me at the Museum.

This lovely novel consists of an exchange of letters between two very different people at a similar age in life. The correspondence between the practical farmer's wife Tina in England's East Anglia and the precise, scientific widower who is a curator at Silkeborg Museum flourishes as they find the other fulfilling a function that to that point neither had realised that they needed.

There is a gentleness here that hints at deeper emotions. Yet, there is an organic way that these two older strangers emerge to serve as allies to help each other reconcile with their grief (one for her best friend, another his wife) and move on with the next stage of life.

When I started reading this, I expected a light, slightly twee bit of fluff extolling sprightly wrinklies. Instead, what I found was an eloquent and moving tale of the potential for growth and happiness at all stages of life. A beautiful little book that I couldn't recommend more highly!

⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2

Comments

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

Hold me now, oh hold me now, until this hour has gone around. And I'm gone on the rising tide, to face Van Dieman's Land

Theme Thursday again, and this one is rather easy. I am Tasmanian, you see, and aside from being all around general geniuses - as I have amply described previously - we are also very familiar with the concept of WATER. Tasmania is the ONLY island state of an ISLAND continent. That means, we're surrounded by WATER. That should help explain why I take so many photographs of water . Tasmania was for a long time the place where the British (an island race terrified of water) sent their poor people most vile and horrid criminals. The sort of folk who would face the stark choice of a death sentence , or transportation to the other end of the world. Their catalogue of crimes is horrifying : stealing bread assault stealing gentlemen's handkerchiefs drunken assault being poor affray ladies being overly friendly with gentlemen for money hitting people having a drink and a laugh public drunkenness being Irish Fenian terrorist activities being Catholic religious subversion. ...

This will hurt me...

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