Special Note

Dear friends of Barter Books –

First, I want to say how much I appreciate your support of our talks series.

All I can say, at a personal level, is how much I like the talks, myself. Just for starters, it gives me a wonderful chance to hear and meet people I might never have heard or met otherwise – and that includes you.

One problem that we do have, however, is with Sell-Outs. That’s a happy problem to have in one sense – one that, by the very nature of things, we don’t always get but that we all devoutly want, including the speakers!

But it’s not happy when, on the night, you see empty seats that had been booked for an event that, on paper, had sold-out. Seats that could so easily have gone to someone else who really wanted to come - someone on the waiting list, or even someone who had just shown up on the night, - had the holders simply let us know, if at all possible, in advance.

What to do?

We decided simply to try to copy the solution of others who have the same problem. And that is to ask those who book in advance to pay in advance (note: we can take payment over the phone!), as well. And if they can’t come, to please let us know as much in advance as possible, and their money will be refunded.

This way, with any luck, any empty seats would be more likely to be empty because the event, itself, was simply geared to more specialised interests.

We do hope the new way of booking seats will make the same sense to you as it does to us. In addition, please know that, for most talks, booking isn’t essential. But as you can never tell when it might be, it is a safeguard. In any case, here’s hoping the new system works out better in future for all of us.

With best wishes and many thanks again for your support,

Mary

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One of the perks I value most about having a bookshop is that our talks series, such as it is (roughly a speaker a month between September – June) enables me to meet professionals in every field (the arts, sciences, even sports) who I would otherwise never have had the opportunity to meet. Some few are well-known to the public – hey! It´s a long way up here, the fee is risible, and the Old Waiting Room wherein the talks take place only holds 50 people tops (60 if they´re skinny).

Still, some serious names (serious names with big hearts) have been willing to make the perilous journey above Watford, eg, Joanna Trollope, David Aaronovitch, Richard Ingrams, Anne Stevenson, James Fleming, Tony Harrison, and the late (loved) (missed!) Miles Kington.

But forget famous; all our speakers are well-known within their field and have given some of the most spell-binding talks of all, enough to have created their very own fan club. (Just try dropping the name ‘Richard Lomas’ around these parts ­ Dick´s the Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Durham ­ and wait for the absolutely slavering response.) Anyway, all the talks begin at 7.30 and cost £5 (and that includes a glass of plonk no less.)

FORTHCOMING TALKS ...

Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Prostate Cancer But Jolly Well Should!

 

 

Breast cancer has had, as well it should, huge publicity. The Breast Cancer Screening Programme (mammograms) has saved many thousands of lives. Equally, thousands of articles by women who have had breast cancer inform, encourage, and support other women in their own fight against breast cancer. 

All this to the extent that almost everyone knows the significance of the pink bracelet which symbolizes that fight. 

 

But what about the fight against prostate cancer - the most common (1 in 8) form 

of cancer in men?  Did you know that more men now die of prostate cancer than women of breast cancer? And how particularly vicious prostate cancer can be? And yet what is the equivalent of the Screening Programme for men? Where are the articles for men (nevermind by men) that inform, encourage, and support them in their own fight against the disease? And what can we do to encourage men, notoriously unwilling to get medical advice, to do just that? 

 

The programme for this event includes: brief accounts from Cathie Gascoigne and Gilllies Owens (both of Prostate Cancer UK) and Mark Hobrough (Ambassador for the men's health organization, Movember) about their experience with the disease;  illustrated talks by three prostate cancer specialists: Professor Jim Allan (genetics), Dr Luke Gaughan (research), and Nick Willis (Freeman radiotherapist); and, finally,  a Q/A session. After which everyone is invited for a restorative glass (or two!) of wine and sausages in our Buffet. Men of the North: Die fighting singlehandedly against alien invaders, if you must, but, please, don't die of ignorance. 

 

 

Place:  Barter Books   

Date and Time:  Monday, February 10th, 7.30pm

Entrance:  10GBP (Please book in advance at the shop or telephone 01665 604999. All Proceeds to Prostate Cancer UK.)

David Steel

Bird Life on the Isle of May, the Jewel of The Forth

David Steel was born in Durham and has had a passion for the outdoors and birds, particularly seabirds, from an early age. After studying Ornithology at degree level, he went around the world to see all he could of its remarkable bird life. After David returned to the North East, he lived and worked for fourteen years among the sea birds, themselves, as Head Ranger on the remote Farne Islands. It was here on that rugged archipelago that David studied and worked with some of the UK's most iconic wildlife, including the Atlantic Puffin and one of the largest Grey Seal colonies in the country.

When David finally left the Farnes to get a new experience of bird life, he moved north to become Scottish Natural Heritage's Reserve Manager for the Isle of May - another nationally important seabird colony and a hidden gem at the mouth of the Firth of Forth. Over 285 bird species have been recorded on the island, and at the height of the mating season it can host over 200,000 seabirds. Grey Seals also abound, as well as the third largest Puffin colony in the UK, with visitors allowed on the island between April and September.

David's talk will focus on the stunning wildlife that makes the Isle of May its home; on what it's like to actually live there as he does nine months of the year, as well as the island's long cultural history. David is so well known here after his fourteen years on the Farnes that we'll all be welcoming him back big time and look forward to a talk we know in advance will be enthralling.

Place : Barter Books

Date and Time : Monday, February 17th, 7.30pm; wine and nibbles after.

Entrance : 10GBP (Please book in advance at the shop or call 01665 604999.)

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The most recent programme is shown below. If you require further information, please contact Roger Jermy on 01665 606168.

Meetings of the society are held in the Waiting Room, Alnwick Station at 7.00 pm for 7.30pm. They are open to members, their guests and visitors for a small donation towards costs. Refreshments will be available from 7.00 pm.

INDOOR MEETINGS PROGRAMME

Thursday 20th April 2017:

“An evening with Pat Murphy”. Pat is the AVR's Civil Engineer and a noted photographer. He switches from being an audience member to speaker this evening to entertain us with some of his railway pictures.

May 2017: (Date to be confirmed.)

The annual quiz evening when the Aln Valley Railway team competes against the team from Gunnerton Railway Circle for “The Flat Bottomed Trophy”.

 

The Barter Books Book Group meets once a month, 7-9, at the bookshop, and has actually grown into two groups, the Monday and Tuesday night groups, both of which read the same material.

Its year is divided into two sessions, the Autumn session (September to December) and the Spring session (January to the end of May), with the reading for both sessions ranging over a wide range of choices, both classic and modern, fiction and nonfiction. The specific books to be read within that range are chosen by the leader (with an ear to suggestions from the group) according to a theme.

The Book Club is led by Rosemary Hartill, a former BBC correspondent, who has reported from some thirty countries (including BBC World Service broadcasts). Among the radio series Rosemary has presented for the BBC are: Meridian Books (World Service books programme), Writers Revealed (fourteen interviews on Radio 4 with authors ranging from Iris Murdoch to Anthony Burgess), and Immortal Diamonds (a Radio 4 series about poets). The recipient of two honorary doctorates in literature, Rosemary has also written for the Guardian and the Times Educational Supplement and is the author of several books.

Two separate groups meet once a month in Barter Books, 7-9 pm – one group meets on a Monday, another on a Tuesday.

Cost: £36.

For more information about joining the Book Group, please contact: Dan Robinson

Book Group: Spring 2020

 

20^th and 21^th January 2020 

On Kindness by Barbara Taylor (2009)

A re-imagining of Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor present an elegant, thoughtful and concise analysis of kindness in history, in life and in the modern world. Suggesting that acts of kindness occur when we are at our most open and honest, they ask why it is that our faith in kindness has been shaken - and why we are all too ready to believe that antagonism has taken its place.

 

then:Theme: Green and Black - the Natural World ... 

24^st and 25^nd February 2020

The Wild Places by Robert McFarnlane (2008) 

This is a journey which 'explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the salt marshes and estuaries of Essex and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places. ...At once a wonder voyage, an adventure story, an exercise in visionary cartography, and a work of natural history. 

 

30^th and 31^th March 2020

Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (2009)

272pp. Subversive, entertaining noir novel by the Nobel Literature prize-winner, Olga Tokarczuk. In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . . A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?' 'A brilliant literary murder mystery" - Chicago Tribune  

 

27^th and 28^th April 2020

Harvest by Jim Crace

Independent: 'Sometime in the pre-industrial period, an isolated and self-sufficient English village finds its common fields stolen for enclosure as collective agriculture yields to remotely-owned pasturage: "the sheaf is giving way to sheep". Rich interlopers conspire to ruin a traditional, seasonal - and largely egalitarian - way of life... Around the world, this kind of appropriation still happens in many different accents. Crace's incandescent visit to a near-mythical Deep England - in a style quite as hallucinatory as the effects of the "fairy-caps" his characters munch - results in a story both topical, and global. No recent English novel has deeper roots, yet casts so broad a shade.'

May 2020 - TBA

Book Group Archive ... here