This week, Sally is entertaining a visitor to the narrowboat - her eight-year-old neighbour Maeve Magnus - for their regular evening ritual of watching Poirot and honing their impressions of the TV show’s characters. Sally harkens back to her eight-year-old self, reading her way through Agatha Christie’s stories, each tale representing a world of fresh possibilities and alternative ways of living.  She savours one of her favourite passages, the opening of The Body in the Library, with its skilful prose, its evocation of place, time and architecture, its sharp observations of class and money, and its vivid characterisations. This is a novel which influenced Sally in writing her first autobiographical book, Girl With Dove. Sally reflects on why she wanted to be Miss Marple at the age of eight – and why she still does. She ponders the similarities between the fictional detective and the writer, observing quietly, searching for clues and insights, assessing character and building a narrative. Agatha Christie (1890 to 1976) is the best-selling novelist of all time. She wrote 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections; she created Miss Marple in 1927 and featured her in 12 novels and 20 stories. When the Body in Library was published in 1942, Christie wrote in a foreword that she had decided to write a crime novel which would take head-on one of the biggest cliches in all of fiction; a body is found in the library. The novel is acclaimed for its original plotting and its gentle subversion of traditional detective tropes. Sally also mentions a short story by Virginia Woolf, The Death of a Moth, with its close attention to insect life all around us. The story was published posthumously, in 1942, the year after Woolf’s death: https://www.sanjuan.edu/cms/lib8/CA01902727/Centricity/Domain/3981/Death%20of%20A%20Moth-Virginia%20Woolf%20copy.pdf You can find out more about Girl With Dove, along with her other books, on Sally's website: https://sallybayley.com/books The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus. We have been able to launch and continue to run this podcast thanks to the kind help of donors, to whom we are profoundly grateful; any new listeners who might be willing to support us, please do have a look at the crowd-funding site we have set up - https://gofund.me/d5bef397  

This week, Sally is reading The Girls of Slender Means, a novella by one of her favourite writers, Scottish novelist, poet and essayist Muriel Spark (1918 to 2006). During the Second World War, Spark came to London to work in British intelligence. She took up residence at the Helena Club in London, a hostel in Lancaster Gate, described as “a strict club for young ladies”.  In 1963, she published A Girl of Slender Means, based on her experiences at the Helena Club. Spark was also editor of the Poetry Review from 1947 to 1948; one of the few female editors of the time. She wrote other acclaimed novels such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961).  Sally also reads a passage from Twelfth Night, a speech by Viola. Shipwrecked, posing as a servant, uncertain of her position and future, and in love, Viola is some ways a girl of slender means. The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.

Sally starts the podcast with a brief poem by Philip Larkin, a complex poem of springtime, grief, and renewal. The trees all around the boat take Sally’s mind back to the horse chestnut tree of her youth, where she and her brother used to play, and which became a companion to her as she started to read books. A hunt for a pack of pesky wasp invaders, headed by an indignant Queen, ends up with Sally pruning the nearby hawthorn and willow trees, in whose branches the neighbourhood water vole has been spotted, and listening to the chirruping of the birds. She turns to a work by novelist John Fowles – who, just like Sally, grew up feeling deeply connected to trees, drawing on them for creative inspiration. Arguing passionately for the importance of preserving nature in its wild state, Fowles felt connected to trees all his life, from the orchards of his childhood to the woodlands of Devon and Dorset. Fowles published his autobiographical book The Tree in 1979, describing nature and writing as interconnected,  “siblings, branches of one tree”.   The book is considered to have created a new genre, “nature-as-memoir”, taken up later by authors including Richard Mabey, who Sally mentions towards the end of the episode. Mabey, born in 1941, is a pioneering nature-and-culture writer, someone who did a huge amount to bring to public attention the networked, social nature of trees, writing books such as Nature Cure and The Ash and The Beech. The interconnected roots of trees, the way they can communicate with and support each other, has also been explored in books such as The Hidden Life of Trees (by Peter Wohlleben). The Trees one of the best known poems by the leading 20th century poet Philip Larkin (1922 to 1985), can be found here: https://poetryarchive.org/poem/trees/ The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.

Sally reads Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem Frost at Midnight, and reflects on the importance of finding ways to escape, now and again, from a stressful world - to find a place of tranquillity, where we can think and create, connect with ourselves and with the natural world. It's a fundamental need, but very hard to achieve. So Sally outlines a plan - to create a "retreat", a way to provide our listeners with a temporary but meaningful respite from the world. As Sally explains, we are thinking of creating a longer form of A Reading Life, A Writing Life.  It will be recorded, edited and produced in exactly the same style as the podcast, but it will be made over an extended period of time, and it will be much longer - perhaps about six or seven hours - instead of the usual 20 or so minutes. We are thinking of it as the audio equivalent of a writer’s retreat - a journey we can take together, created by words, sounds and music, a journey to a place of calm, quietude and deep reflection. We are calling the concept an “audio retreat”. The aim is to produce a mental space which you are invited into. It will be a place to hear Sally's thoughts on her reading, and how it relates to her life, how she is inspired to create, and how she writes, in extended, close-up, multi-layered detail. Our audio retreat will be a meditative experience, a way of disconnecting from the distractions, the clutter and mess of daily life. We hope it will help you unlock your own creativity and explore the corners of your own mind. And of course, as is usual in the podcast, Sally will continue to recount the joys and difficulties of living on a narrowboat as the seasons pass, while providing an eclectic, idiosyncratic and joyful guide to some of her favourite books and authors.  The audio retreat will take many hours of production, so it's something we can only make if at least some of our listeners are interested in supporting it.  So we want to ask you, the listeners, what do you think about the idea of "A Reading Life, A Writing Life  - An Audio Retreat"? Please do let us know! You can message us through Twitter  - @SallyBayley1 Or email us at [email protected] or [email protected] The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.

Sally starts by telling us the tale of the Boiler That Went Bang in the Night, and the Bird That Never Was. She’s preparing a zoom class for some schoolchildren which draws on her first book of memoirs – or anti-memoirs, as she prefers to call them – called Girl With Dove. Sally pulls out the book's manuscript and we hear about her upbringing in a slum area on the south coast, and her earliest memories of her granny and Mum, growing roses on a scrubby patch of land. She tells us about her baby brother David, and what happened to him; an event which changed all their lives.   Further Reading There’s only one book referred to in this week’s episode – Sally’s own book, Girl With Dove. You can find out more about it here: https://sallybayley.com/girl-with-dove The producer of the podcast is Andrew Smith: https://www.fleetingyearfilms.com The extra voice in this episode is Emma Fielding. A number of the music tracks were composed and performed by Simon Turner.   We have been able to launch and continue to run this podcast thanks to the kind help of donors, to whom we are profoundly grateful. Any new listeners who might be willing to support us, please do visit our crowd-funding site - https://gofund.me/d5bef397   Thanks to everyone who has supported us so far. Special thanks go to Violet Henderson, Kris Dyer, and Maeve Magnus.