Skye’s November despatch
Fieldfare Notes
Issue 3 is here!
Hello friends,
I’m writing to you with a pile of copies of Issue 3 next to me — hurray!
People in the UK should have received their pre-orders by now, and those further afield may have started to receive theirs (although in between postal delays and Royal Mail strikes it’s hard to predict).
We hope you like it. And we’d love to see any photos of Fieldfare “in the wild”, so to speak — do tag us on Instagram (@fieldfarepress) so we can share them with our readers.
Since my last newsletter I’ve been travelling around a little bit within the UK during the half-term school holidays — Scotland, Yorkshire and Norfolk to be precise. I’m always reminded again of what a pleasure and a treat it feels to be able to take even trips within the UK post-pandemic. (Are we post-pandemic yet?! I’m never quite sure. But we’re certainly a lot less restricted than we were 18 months ago.)
While I was in Scotland visiting my husband’s family in St Andrews, we popped over to Crail, a little fishing village along a stretch of coast quaintly called the East Neuk (pronounced “nook”, but you have to try and do it with a Scottish accent). It’s the village where my mother-in-law taught at the local primary school for many years and where my husband went to school, so it has a lot of fond memories for him, and we’ve visited it many times over the years. As luck would have it, it’s also where one of our stockists, The Beehive, is located. It’s one of our most remote stockists (well, remote from London!) so I’m including some images of it below to encourage people to visit it if they’re ever in the area.
This part of the east coast of Scotland always seems to me to encapsulate so much of what we try and share here at Fieldfare. Places that aren’t overrun with tourists, which have character and heritage, and which are interlaced with personal stories and meaning.
Bonus links
On that note, I’ve been enjoying this series of articles in The Guardian: “Where tourists seldom tread”. It looks at towns with hidden histories, in particular those with an industrial past, that aren’t on the usual tourist trail but, for those interested in going a little off-piste, still fascinating places. You can find the other articles in the series here and here.
On my bedside table at the moment: Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers. Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2021, it tells the story of Jean Swinney, an investigative journalist on a local paper who sets out to discover the truth of a woman’s claim to have had a virgin birth. Set in the suburbs of south-east London (with which I am very familiar!) it is partly driven by the central mystery of the plot but also by the sympathetic portrayal of Jean, a woman approaching 40 who lives with and cares for her elderly mother. Set in 1957, it brings to life the frugality of post-war Britain, and the plot twists keep you gripped even as you long for Jean to find happiness
And on that note, I’ll thank you all for reading along and wish you all a good weekend!
Skye xx