The spring edition arrived on Saturday – one of the first signs of spring – thank you! I jumped on the tube at Tottenham Hale, and noticed that the man opposite was not reading a newspaper like everyone else.  I identified it by the print of snowdrops.  ‘Excuse me’, I said to him, ‘Snap!’ – waving my copy.  ‘Just arrived?’ ‘Yes’, and we both settled down with a smile to read our copies.

Across

1 Just beat Miss Woodhouse after noon (3,4) PIP EMMA

7 see 9 across

9, 7 She was penned by a horseman, exhausted (5,7) RIDER HAGGARD

10 Yosser, Dixie, George and Chrissie: his able lads exploded with energy (9) BLEASDALE

11 Irish flower for Tennessee Williams’s Larry (7) SHANNON

14 New Englanders seek any resort (7) YANKEES

16 His Norman lady is welcome, but flare flickers after puff of wind (7,8) GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

18 One caught in thicket, a one caught by the tongue (7) ARAMAIC

20 A clicky true, he might have said (7) SPOONER

22 In us all we turn to a Welsh poet (4,5) ALUN LEWIS

25 I give a card to Wilde’s husband (5) IDEAL

27 John’s mother on a reel, spinning (7)ELEANOR

28, 16 down Strange Thames hankering; energy needed for author of river idyll (7,7) KENNETH GRAHAME

Down

1 Copied from new map edition (4) APED

2 Old essayist needs a doctor after fifty (4) LAMB

3 Happy, almost in heaven, Chas and Ed gave Nick a job (10) CHEERYBLES

4 Encourages breakfast being cooked? (4,2) EGGS ON

5 One seduced Helen, another loved Juliet (5)  PARIS

6 Tempestuous woman? Yes and no (7) MIRANDA

8 Sunken river dog, say, swallows shilling (4-3) DEEP SET

12 Italian city goes back in a format so alpine (5) AOSTA

13 His hay fever, a feverish Cold War one (4,6) NOEL COWARD

15 Free-hitting batsman has this – probably two of them (3,2) EYE IN

16 see 28 across

17 Moreish? (7) UTOPIAN

19 Unwell, not succeeding, capital gone (6) AILING

21 Udall’s blustering coward inside a regular alpha male (5) RALPH

23 Benefits of ownership, like Hoggart’s of literacy (4) USES

24 His Bassington – such a kind individual at the start? Not so (4) SAKI

26 Steinbeck’s Trasks east of this project (4) EDEN

Please visit the shop website for more information.

In his prizewinning memoir The High Path, Ted Walker recreates with unusual vividness his secure, happy childhood in the England of the Thirties and Forties, and the influences that made a working-class boy into a poet.

Most telling, perhaps, was his relationship with his father, a carpenter who had come to the Sussex coast from Birmingham in search of work before Ted’s birth. The affection between the two shines out from the tender portrait of him, cruising the last mile home from work on his Ariel motorbike, playing backyard cricket with typical concentration, or struggling to master French with Ted, urged on by their loveably eccentric teacher Mr Jupp.

A sense of history came from magical visits to his father’s family in the Worcestershire countryside, and sensuous pleasure from the grocer’s shop managed by ‘Grandad Harry’ – an Aladdin’s Cave where ‘a wondrous blend of smells: nutmeg and cinnamon, dog biscuits and bran, wax polish, ripe cheese and Brasso all harmonized to give a sense of good things kept in spotless order’. It is a picture of a proud and thrifty working-class world now utterly lost.

With grammar school and a place at university a gap began to open between Ted and his parents. These new experiences brought intellectual confusion, romantic longing, sexual frustration, but the warmth of his happy childhood was still his bedrock. The High Path is a beautiful book, written with all the honesty and sensitivity of the poet Ted Walker became.

www.hoskinghouses.co.uk

In weather like this, there’s nothing quite like SF to curl up with and we recommend you do so, in a comfy chair in front of a fire if possible. Or if you’ve already devoured the latest issue, there’s our new Slightly Foxed Edition, James Lees-Milne’s Another Self to keep you occupied.

And finally, here’s another small but very nice mention of our bookshop in the Times.

Nicholas Clee in the Times

]]> http://www.foxedquarterly.com/2010/01/january-201/feed/ 0 http://www.foxedquarterly.com/2009/12/its-official/ http://www.foxedquarterly.com/2009/12/its-official/#comments Fri, 18 Dec 2009 13:49:53 +0000 jennie http://www.foxedquarterly.com/?p=1433 A gift subscription to Slightly Foxed is (according to the Daily Telegraph’s ultimate gift guide 2009) one of the top ten gifts ‘for him’! We think a subscription to SF makes a great gift for any book lover really but we’re very pleased to be mentioned.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/christmas/christmas-gift-ideas/6826564/Christmas-2009-the-ultimate-gift-guide-for-him.html

Now it’s no more parties for the time being and all hands to the deck to get gift-wrapped copies of the Winter issue, books and back issues off in time for Christmas. We’ve got quite a production line of ribbon-tying, parcel-wrapping, card-writing, envelope-stuffing and posting (not to mention dog-walking and tea-making) on the go.

We’re also having fun planning the shop’s New Year facelift and have been thrilled to hear nice things about both the shop and SF from the literary world.

Robert McCrum in the Guardian

Boyd Tonkin in the Independent

We’re thrilled to have Quentin Blake as our Winter 2009 cover artist.