involved in raising money for the centre. They used to phone up and ask what they could do and I was running out ofideas until my secretary said that did I know there were 44 jumble sales planned for 6 September. It started from there.’ The target number ofsales is 200 of which over 125 are already booked and Maxwell is confident the double century will be reached. Although most ofthe sales are taking place at home, there will also be some in Australia, India, Austria, Germany, Canada, Zimbabwe and America, all starting at 2pm local time and Maxwell claims that ‘for 24 hours the sun will not set on our jumble.‘ There are some exotic locations for the sales: one is taking place on top of Ben Nevis and another on a ferry in San Francisco. Maxwell is also hard at work planning an underwater sale, but ‘It don‘t know where that will be yet.‘
The primary aim of the sales is not to raise money directly. but rather to
; gain publicity. ‘We‘ve had thousands
of pounds worth of free publicity so far,’ Maxwell explains, ‘ifI phone up a local radio station and ask to be interviewed about the Iona Community they’ll tell me to go and boil my head, but ifI ask to talk about the biggest jumble sale in the world they are more interested. I don’t expect to make much from the jumble sales themselves, but hopefully they’ll make people sympathetic enough to send money in — which they have started to do already.’ The organisation ofthe sale has involved making hundreds of phone calls and writing about 4000 letters as well as preparing packs of stickers, balloons etc, so it is hardly surprising that when asked what sale he is attending Maxwell replies, ‘None. I’ll be asleep.‘
The following venues are amongst those taking part in The Biggest Jumble Sale in the World — more are being added all the time so it is not comprehensive. Unless stated otherwise they all begin at 2pm amd are free.
EDINBURGH
The Auld Kirk Muirhouse Parkway. Muirhouse Church Pennywell Meadway.
St Bemard’s Stockbridge.
Boswell Parkway Scout Hall.
St George's West Shandwick Place. South Lelth Church Hails.
Holy Comer Church Centre Morningside.
30/1 West Pilion Gardens.
St Aiden's Duddingstone Park South. The North Klrlt Hall Penicuik.
Queen Street Parish Church South Queensferry.
St John's Oxgangs.
GLASGOW
Ciarirston Church Airdrie.
St Clare's RC 18 Drumlanrig Avenue. Hillhead Baptist Church Cresswell Street. (£1.50 admission includes glass of wine).
SiJohn's Episcopal Church Greenock. Roystoe Youth Group 15 Glenbar Street, Roystonhill.
Pollokshlelds Primary School.
JUST PUBLISHED
0 Among You Taking Notes Naomi Mitchison (£3.95 Oxford UP) A selection from the author’s voluminous journal of the Second World War which she spent mainly on her Carradale estate in the West ofScotland. Kept at the behest of Mass Observation it reveals an indomitable, pushy personality,
i whom Mitchison herself doesn’t care l
consciousness, democracy, feminism ’
for; one, understandably, obsessed with raising issues of political
and Scottish nationalism in a conservative and closed community. But the real narrative force comes from the War and particularly its terrible personal consquences.
o The Complete Women’s Heierence Book Mary Gostelow (£6.95 Penguin) Bibliotherapy to help you cope with life’s problems; from buying a car to coping with school bullies, starting a business to recommended reading en vacance (“A new Iris Murdoch - or an old one’). Sensible and encyclopaedic, though a mite over-reliant on referrals.
0 Letters from Hollywood Michael Moorcock (£10.95 Harrap) Like Evelyn Waugh and sundry others before him, the sci-fi guru decamped for Tinsel Town to coin it by writing film scripts. His letters home to 1.0. Ballard, abetted by Michael Foreman’s appealing decorations, evoke colourfully and with wry humour a country where it helps to be short of the full shilling — but not in the bank.
0 Woody Allen: His Films and Career Douglas Brode (£8.95 Columbus Books) Stills-stuffed crit with casts and credits. Intelligent but overly-deferential to ephemeral film pundits.
o The Loose on the Locks of Literature: John Churton Collins Anthony Kearney (£12.50 Scottish Academic Press) The title’s derogatory epithet was volunteered by Tennyson, for Collins had a reputation as a vicious reviewer, castigating the slipshod (‘There is not a chapter in the book which does not teem with errors,’ he wrote of Edmund Gosse’s Short History of English Literature) and vilifying feeble stylists. But he was not all vitriol, as his biographer competently shows, and he became an eloquent propagandist for the introduction of English Literature on university syllabuses. So should we bury or praise him?
0 Chronicles oi Carilngtord and The Rector and the Doctor’s iamlly Mrs Oliphant (£3.50 Virago) Wallyford’s greatest novelist has been compared to Trollope (Anthony not Fanny),
both for her industry and her evocation of provincial England. These short novels confirm the comparison for she is witty, leisurely and very 19th century.
0 Boy Roald Dahl (£2.95 Penguin) Boyhood days in Wales and Norway recalled in prose of childlike simplicity and charm. Particularly moving is Dahl’s account of fagging at Repton for the sadistic Wilberforce who used him as a bog-seat warmer, an occupation he turned to his advantage by reading the works of Dickens.
REVIEWS
0 Growing up in the Gothals Ralph Glasser (£10.95) Chatto and Windus) Ralph Glasser has an
autodidact’s impeccable credentials.
The precocious son of emigre Russian Jews, he spent his childhood years between the two wars in the Gorbals, tiptoeing through dark closes and overflowing sewers to relieve himself in the communal loo. It was a rough, poor and squalid upbringing but a gift to the autobiographer. He supplemented his rudimentary school education with frequent trips to the cavernous Mitchell Library where his bookishness earned him the soubriquet ‘The Young Professor’, which shows that librarians are seers as well as servants for Glasser eventually won a scholarship to Oxford on the strength of an essay entitled ‘Has Science Increased Human Happiness?’ Then, as now, his answer was no. What happened when he arrived in Academe, and the subsequent culture shock suffered by the boy who had to learn that three pairs of pyjamas were now de rigeur where none had sufficed previously, is promised in a sequel to Growing up in the Gorbals. In the meantime we must content ourselves with incest, socialism (including the philanthropic summer camps), prostitutes for the price of a bag of fish and chips, a sighting of Einstein and one of few memorable descriptions of the working class parliament in session under the showers of the public baths. It is the
told in mauve prose, and with
perhaps too many VL'l‘i‘idl iiii conversations for ci‘cdibiliii 1 why doesthc young ( dam u «. speak the same aigot as his mi: pals?) but his relationship it. ii'ii'. unrelenting father. Ulliilll"ii..~ Annie and diSliiUSltlllt ii H it-.. well realised and com ll ii ii 2" Glasser himselfremaiiix\Im i obscureJude ainongtlit .i. .i: theslums,butonewhosi .iiulitx and instinct lead him to In. '.« u. scholar‘s‘torch‘ lilijtfinl'ii 1i: : compulsive though this in. MI instalment is. I suspect that. is still to come. when M. ( .l. concerns himself with that .i. ;: u prospect fora Scotchiiimi iii. 1. road leading him south
(Alan Taylor)
0 The Wlld Frontier: SCUiimv Wall (Moubray lioiisc l'i 1. Maps and photos pcppu uh undoubtedly the most mo in . on Roman Scotland )Ll v. i ll :. Wild Frontier is both a win. l. guide to the Antonino Wali probingaccountofihi-hii oi legionaries who. if‘sewagi or 1 analysis is to be belicvt-d. h~ . .i’t rasps and hazelnuts, and i:~.. .i (re-used?) moss on stick» to. 2 paper. Plenty ofqucsiii Ill\ l« historical detecthes to [in k:. plenty of fresh air IUI put 4.! neglected hikinglxmts lil‘wl .. written in this vibrant st). It ill universal appeal in thc 9 iii‘ T' .i group. (Andrew Bethum )
ALI
Nata-rial and International (:IIOIQ'U‘I' m .i.» A. 'i
i .' ' ‘3. (go-7... . a fig“. It :1?- I. x . ' "é; flzmxzéjfific’ -.:'i‘s"-'. T - .- '3. V i ‘ ‘7'?"- -~. ~ ,- 2 .8" ‘e .2 ‘ ‘~; ’42:" .t. ' jfl". t ‘ I
oAlba Ed.PeterHill(i it ‘t’
quarterly magazine ‘rctiui l commenting upon the SlitlL ~ t
visual arts within Scotland ..i..i internationally", and is tht~ m \. ; manifestation Ofthe coiiliih li- story of a mean city, unsentimentally
currently characterising the \d
FIRST OF {yous
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