Temple Cloud

A few years ago, a drug addict friend of mine invited me to come with him to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting that was open to friends and family of members. I could see that the group was helpful to a lot of people, but I was deeply disturbed by one thing.   It had the mantra: ‘The problem is not drugs – the problem is me.’   Not ‘the problem is with me,’ or, ‘the problem is my behaviour, my misuse of drugs,’ but, ‘the problem is me .’ It is an important distinction, as I argued to my friend on the way home.   If you tell me that I have a problem, it implies that I need to seek help in overcoming my problem.   If you tell me that I am the problem, it implies that I ought to rid the world of that problem by committing suicide. My friend tried to explain that I didn’t know what it was like.   ‘You’re not an addict, so it’s different for you,’ he said.   ‘All of us in there are into really self-destructive behaviour, so it’s true about us.’ I wasn’t...

Have you discovered the meaning of liff? According to Douglas Adams , a liff is ‘A book, the contents of which are totally belied by its cover.   For instance, any book the dust jacket of which bears the words: “This book will change your life”.’ In fairness, some books can change the course of your life, or at least nudge it in one direction or another.   The trouble is that the books which you most need in order to change your thinking, are not necessarily the ones which have the most sudden and dramatic impact. I have read plenty of wise, thoughtful, and beautiful books that told me exactly what I needed to learn.   Unfortunately, I either ignored them, misunderstood them, or latched onto an over-simplistic interpretation of what the author said in the first paragraph and refused to believe anything he/she said to qualify it later on.   Alternatively, if the book was both enjoyable to read and easy to understand, I read it avidly, wept at its beauty as I...

When I was single, I thought I had a fair idea of what couples did in bed: Have sex. Argue over whether to keep the bedroom window open or closed. Keep each other awake by snoring. One item that would almost certainly not have been on my list, however, is: read to each other. As a small child, I loved it when my mother read picture books to me.   By the time I was a year old, I probably owned more books than a mediaeval scholar could hope to acquire in a lifetime (maybe twenty), though admittedly mine had titles like Mr Gumpy’s Outing and TheTeddy Bears’ ABC rather than DeConsolatione Philosophiae .   We visited the library every week, where there were toddler-height boxes to allow a child to select new books.   Most often, though, I chose old favourites again and again, like Bringing The Rain To Kapiti Plain , Verna Aardema’s verse retelling of a Kenyan legend of how a herdsman ended a terrible drought. My mother began teaching me my letters early on, and ...

Somerset has wonderfully evocative place names. You could people a fantasy novel with them.   Probably Rodney Stoke is an ordinary, rather nerdy man until he stumbles into a parallel universe, where he is befriended by the mysterious Ben Noel Hill and his huge, hairy friends Yarley and Chew Magna.   There are exotic monsters, such as Vobsters and Mendips. I think this world would have several religious traditions.   There is the established church in which the sinister Bishop Sutton is garnering power.   The Bacchanalian, sometimes violent rites of the Goat Church are presided over by bearded, horned priests, irreverently known as the Beardly Batch.   But the most mystical form of devotion is found in the way of the Temple Cloud. In real life, the village of Temple Cloud, in north-east Somerset, was probably named Cloud after someone called Cloda, and later ‘Temple Cloud’ after the Knights Templar who held the manor of Cloud in the 13 th century.  ...

‘Temple Cloud’ wasn’t my first choice of screen name. I initially toyed with the idea of calling myself Fliegenbein, after a character in the fantasy novel Dragon Rider by Cornelia Funke.   On our honeymoon, my husband and I found an English version of Dragon Rider in a second-hand bookshop, and read it to each other as a bedtime story.   I loved it so much that when we got home, I read Drachenreiter and its sequel, Die Feder Eines Greifs , in the original German with the aid of a dictionary.   Since this was the first time I had attempted to read anything in German since completing my GCSEs twenty years earlier, at first I made my way through the books at about the pace of an ant crawling across the page, peering back across the great vista of a German sentence to try to reconstruct what on earth had been going on. The plot of Dragon Rider is approximately what Watership Down would be if it starred dragons instead of rabbits, with a touch of Kipling’s The ...