Paula Bardell-Hedley

An end of week recap “Think before you speak. Read before you think.” – Fran Lebowitz The Fran Lebowitz Reader I will shortly be taking to the high seas for a fortnight with Mrs Jotter and friends, so this will, alas, be my final wind up of the month. All being well, WUTW #72 should sail into your inboxes on 13th June. In the meantime, I thought it rather nice to celebrate the sea in this issue –…

An end of week recap “Everything is broken and messed up and completely fine. That is what life is. It’s only the ratios that change. Usually on their own. As soon as you think that’s it, it’s going to be like this forever, they change again.” – Meg Mason Sorrow and Bliss Today is National Biographers Day – when we remember the 16th May 1763 meeting of Samuel Johnson and James Boswell in London –…

An end of week recap “Darwin may have been quite correct in his theory that man descended from the apes of the forest, but surely woman rose from the frothy sea, as resplendent as Aphrodite on her scalloped chariot.” – Margot Datz A Survival Guide for Landlocked Mermaids Thank you so much to everyone who wished my wife’s mum well. Sadly, she passed away last Sunday. It is Europe Day today, an…

A springboard into the next labyrinthine burrow… This is a place for me to hold forth on matters both serious and silly. You are invited to participate. Daylight saving allowed an extra hour of reading in the evening, should I have needed it (which I did), for in recent weeks there has been much harvesting of quotations, scribbling of notes and affixing of sticky tabs to anything that looks…

An end of week fortnight recap “Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and feel the wind blowing.” – Iris Murdoch Sadly, I didn’t make it to Oban (as announced in WUTW #467) because my wife’s mother was taken ill. Since I hadn’t expected to be home, there was no wind up scheduled for last weekend, so I turned my attention…

A reflection on Olivier Norek’s historical novel and the wartime Finland that shaped Tove Jansson “War often takes us by surprise, and there has to be a first death on our land for us to truly believe in it.” – Olivier Norek (July 2025) This isn’t the sort of story I would normally choose to read before drifting off to sleep at night. Planet Paula is a humdrumish sort of place, with creaking…

An end of week recap “A book, like a culture, says to its reader: My dear, I’m yours. You are free to do with me what you will. I am your entrance into yourself and into history at the same time.” – Jerzy Kosinski Next week I will be taking another short break in Oban (you may recall, I went there last April), a lovely little town on the west coast of Scotland. I won’t return until the middle of…

An end of week recap “To a bibliophile, there is but one thing better than a box of new books, and that is a box of old ones.” – Will Thomas Tomorrow is D.E.A.R. Day, observed wherever in the world you choose to ‘Drop Everything and Read’. Then, from Sunday until 18th April, it is Hate Week – when readers gather en masse in the fictional superstate of Oceania (that is, online) to “celebrate”…

An end of week recap “April Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” – Edna St. Vincent Millay It is currently National Poetry Month in the USA and Canada, a thirty-day celebration of verse in all its forms; and in the States, it is also National School Librarian Day. I feel sure that Argentine chocoholics will be delighted to learn that there are still two more days of the Bariloche…

My latest contribution to the Tove Trove Library is a substantial collection of letters written by Tove Jansson to her closest friends and loved ones during her life “I find myself talking to you about all the great joys, all the agonies, all my thoughts… – Letter to Eva Konikova, 1946.  On my second reading of Letters from Tove, I spent nine months slowly poring over every page and taking…

An end of week fortnight recap “and when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.” – Ruskin Bond Here in the UK, we are in the midst of Shakespeare Week – a national celebration centred on schools and families across the country, designed to introduce children to the life and imaginative world of the Bard.🎭  Furthermore, Respect Your Cat Day is observed internationally today,…