Working with Granta - with wine and clay

 

 Last night Granta Magazine gave a party and we talked with readers about its new issue titled, Work - about skills-training for genocide, about being the only vet in a small African country and about why the Editor of the TLS wrote about life on a housing estate of radar engineers while telling the story of the Spartacus Slave War.

A good time was had by all - discussing the dogs of Sierra Leone with Aminatta Forna and the machete rhythms of Rwanda with Martin Kimani and wondering what my father (above) would have thought about being included with me here if he had still been alive.

In a previous post, I said that Essex Clay, my contribution from On the Spartacus Road, was not available on line. But now, thanks to an increasingly active Granta website, it is. There is a review of the book too from The Scotsman.

Comments

[Phillip B. Wade]

FYI, as posted on the Granta site:

I enjoyed memoir. I consider your father, and thousands of others, as my 'professional ancestor.' I'm an engineer, you see. I look at the world through an engineer's eyes and seek the "how does that work" of everything.

As with your father, none of my offspring have followed a technical path. As with your father, they are doing (not doing?) so with my love and blessing.

What they do have, as I see in your writing that you have, is an appreciation for the father's way of relating to the world.

Yes, the differences do become gradually accepted ... and appreciated.

Thanks for the glimpse of one of my forebarers and his progeny.