I recently bought Alice Munro's latest collection of short stories, Dear Life, in my favourite second hand bookshop in Wirksworth. I’ve long been an admirer of Alice Munro – those characters so sparingly, but brilliantly created, the seemingly inconsequential moments that add up to something far more significant and life-changing, the land and townscapes that evoke such powerful atmospheres. We have a sense that she knows her characters and their setting inside out, and she chooses to give us but a few moments, a few scenes, until a whole world is revealed to us at precisely the right time. In this way her stories are as broad and deep as the best novels – in miniature.
Amundsen is the second story in this collection, and the most brilliant of Alice Munro’s I’ve yet read. It’s set in a bleak settlement near Toronto, in a sanatorium for children with tuberculosis. A young woman arrives there by train and electric car. She notices how beautiful the birches are in the winter sun. She’s going to be the teacher, though there are no guidelines as to what she should teach, and her pupils are frequently absent through acute illness or death. She arrives to scant welcome except from a needy and rather desperate child. She meets the doctor, who is a strange, rather distant character. What unfolds is a love story, in the most unconventional sense. Alice Munro not only enables us to feel the emotions and inhabit the mind of her main character, but also to see with absolute objective clarity, the awfulness of the situation she finds herself in. Yet so much is withheld.
I read it over two nights because I couldn’t bear to finish it in one. Two days later, I’m left with a sense of being haunted –I’m still thinking about the narrative and its shocking conclusion, and the characters still resound in my imagination, as if they’re real. And I think this will go. It’s a story I’ll return to and remember. For me there’s something so uplifting about reading really great literature – encountering in the deepest sense the mystery of life and creativity.   
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In the early seventies, when my father taught at Ellesmere Port Grammar School, we  sometimes went as a family to see his school productions. Although Dad taught history, he was passionate about theatre, and for a time he directed all the school plays. It was always an event – early tea and the bus to Ellesmere Port, and arrival at a school that seemed so big to us primary school children. I remember the excitement I felt, drawn into the world of theatre and the anticipation of seeing Dad’s pupils who seemed so grown-up. I remember a haunting play called  The Fire Raisers, by Max Frisch, about two sinister men who go around setting fire to people’s homes. I didn’t understand then that it was a parable about the rise of Nazism, about complacency and collusion. To me it was a strange unsettling world, where a chorus of firemen chanted warnings, and Fritz Beidermann joked about helping to lay the fuse wire to his attic of petrol drums. And I recall the words ‘the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone,’ from Ibsen’s The Enemy of the People. The standard of acting was excellent and I particularly remember Dad’s star pupils Peter Cann, with his long chestnut hair and beard, and Mark Dornford- May, whose father was drama advisor for Cheshire for many years. They seemed to me to be very grown-up and talented, and the aura of glamour remained even when later I worked alongside Mark in Hammond School and Chester Theatre Club productions, and realised there wasn’t such a gap in our ages.
Yesterday was the anniversary of the day my father was moved from hospital to the care home, where he spent the last four months of his life. My sister and I had coordinated dates with everyone concerned, and arranged time off work to help settle him in. Then, without our knowledge, he was moved a day early. He was told by staff that he was going home. He had his bag packed and would have anticipated the peace of his own room after weeks of a noisy ward. Then he was driven to a strange building, and taken in a lift to a bleak room only just vacated by the last resident. I was told by phone of his despair and rage. The thought of it disturbs me still – the sense of failing him.
And yesterday too, I met Mark Dornford-May for the first time in forty years, at the Young Vic Theatre, where his company, Isango Ensemble previewed A Man of Good Hope. I’m certain this story of Asad Abdullahi, of hope and love in the face of the most harrowing events, will receive great reviews in the weeks to come, so I won’t add my own. Just to say the energy, skill, musicality and physicality of each performer was astounding and uplifting – and the production full of the joy and magic of theatre. We were engrossed. But most heart-warming was hearing Mark talk about my father in the bar beforehand – of how he’d been inspired by him in so many ways, not least his love of theatre, and how rare good teaching is. I am touched both by the play and the encounter. It seemed a fitting way to celebrate my father.