The Last of the Library Book Bloggers

Women of the Simple Way

Where Once I Wrote

A long time ago, I wrote a blog. I wrote more than one, but one prevailed. It chronicled our lives as homeschoolers, homesteaders, if you will. It told the story of our family and our land. It was a diary, a record of the passing of days.

Towards its end (it has not technically ended. I go back now and again, and append a random thought. I updated it when the pandemic happened, and when it ceased happening, but by and large, it is over) I broke my heart over the land, and where it was at that time. This quote is from nearly 6 years ago, but appears to come from another century.

This land, on which we have done so much - on which our children played, and rode, and worked. On which they grew up, from toddlers to grown women. The land where they kept their first cute ponies, and I my last, loved horse. The land where we started a business and it grew and fed  people. The land where we grew a big flock of beautiful jacob sheep, and then they were sold. It's still ours - well, the tenancy is still ours, for another 8 years - and it's still there and it's still precious and just now and then when I get to stand at the top of it and breathe, it still makes my heart sing. But it's doing - nothing. It's ungrazed, unworked, unloved. The hay crop which should have come in last month in the heat now stands overgrown and damp. Waiting to know what we will do.

Tall girls far away. Cornwall 2017

It feels quite horribly metaphorical. It's a metaphor for ... well, me.

On the edge of change, with change behind me, struggling to give voice to a new life after all this. After they go away in September - both of them this time - to build their own lives at University. After the long sweet years at home and on the land, trying to come to terms with years locked away indoors. It's a good and worthy job that I do, but it's inside.

I feel the weight of the deep wet hay. Tears rise to realise it had no purpose. It just stands wilting. There is no one needing the shelter of the barn, and the nurture of its provision this winter. For our two goats and half a dozen sheep, last year's surplus will more than suffice.

Where once were lovely, pretty sheep, and goats and kids, and sweet milk and soft cheese. Where once were row upon row of succulent peas, and chubby fingers picking and popping. Where once when we called, heads raised, and nostrils flared, and tiny hooves came thundering. There is an open green space. It's not malevolent. It's blank. It can be what it wants to be?

Surely? It can be something new? Something worth being? Can't it?

Well, 2020 came and went. It brought, for us, terrible personal sadness, as well as the global kind. Since then the land has been something very special - a Community Supported Agriculture project which fed people through lockdown and beyond. When plague was overtaken by penury, however, it collapsed ungraciously, leaving me to find yet another way to put bread on the table.

In the Company of Strangers

When I wrote back then, on Blogger, it was common, as you will know, if you were around, to have a ‘blogroll’ and to share those people you followed with your followers, comment on their posts, as they would comment on yours.

Yeh, that sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it? No money changed hands however.

There were people even then whose Blogs were business. Either they sold something from their blog, or promoted a service or store, or even hosted advertisements (you had to be quite a big shot to do that). 

I followed a few of them, but in all honesty, they were not my tribe. My tribe, my heart, my dearest strangers were the folks (usually women) whom I dubbed ‘The Library Book Bloggers’. This became a shorthand for a certain type of content, and to this day, I miss those people like a much loved flannel nightie or that flavoured coffee they used to do in Lidls at Christmas.

Library Book Bloggers got their name because some of them would weekly share the titles they’d take out of the library, sometimes following up with a brief review, but really, just to let you know, over your Yorkshire Tea and two digestives,  what they might read that week.

Mostly frugal, thrift orientated people, they would share their experiences of saving a few quid here and there, and there was freshness about that stuff back then. No-one called it a hack. No-one created a blog post twenty five paragraphs long that you had to scroll through in order to get  to the recipe or the tip.  They just told you.

The Journey Home

I’ve gone back, to see if they are still there, and to my sheer delight, a very few actually are.

I can find one or two who seem to have flagged in 2022 and one at least who has very much rebranded and come up to date, but one who actually truly still carries on, regardless!

This blog carries a badge declaring it ‘an award free blog’! Do you remember the curse of the pyramid award?! People for ever nominating people for awards which entailed adding badges to your blog, with links to who knew what and most of us couldn’t do it anyway, since we were working on nailed down templates and had no clue how to change anything!

I trailed back through this precious artifact to an early post and surely enough I found one entitled Taking it Easy which began:

It's been one of those 'slow but sure' days today. Went out first thing to return and get more library books (just in case Santa forgets).

My day was well and truly made! Please do take a look at Frugal in Norfolk if you’re feeling nostalgic and would like a trip back to the days of innocence!

The Queen of Them All

At the head of the worthy phalanx of Library Book Bloggers, must surely be the inimitable Rhonda Hetzel.

Rhonda, a feisty Australian woman who had turned her back on the corporate world to explore the joys of simplicity and homekeeping,  began her blog ‘Down to Earth’  in May of 2007 with the words:

‘The Brandywines are growing fast. It's incredible to think that this pair has been in for just eight weeks and the small, firm, green tomatoes are already the size of golf balls, and there are many flowers. If you don't know Brandywine tomatoes, they're an old heirloom variety, supposedly cultivated by the Amish in the 1800s. They have a superb taste, just like those old tomatoes we grew up with, before supermarkets encouraged the growth of tomatoes with cardboard skin and no taste. I am hoping to get about 25 kilos off each of these bushes, enough for a million salads and for some tomato sauce and paste preserved in jars with my trusty old Fowlers Vacola preserving unit.’

Together with her husband, Hanno, she inspired millions of us for many years. Her blog shows a pageview count of over 36 million and her two best selling books ‘Down to Earth’, and ‘The Simple Home’ stand by me still. When Hanno died in May of last year, Rhonda began to tidy up her online space with admirable grace and discretion, and posted her last entry in February of this year. She does still hop onto Instagram, now and again. Her blog ended with the words:

During the 16 years I've written here I've felt loved and appreciated and I thank you all for that. I also say a special thanks to the people who commented - that's what kept me going. Having that contact with like-minded folk gave me a better understanding of the world around me, helped me come up with ideas to write about and showed me that despite what we see on the news, the world is full of people who are trying to do their best.

Thank you for being here with me.  ❤️

The Last and the First

In the end, I retitled this piece.  Originally, it was ‘Lament for the Library Book Bloggers’.

I asked myself why I typed ‘Lament for …’, instead of ‘Search for…’ or ‘Remembering the …’ and I concluded that, try as I might, I do feel sad for the passing of those days because, as a person carving out a life of slowness and simplicity, into my sixties, in a  new world, with a different family, I look at the landscape of words around me and find they are all for sale. My heart was reaching back to ‘The Last of the Library Book Bloggers.’

To reinstate that peaceful camaraderie of the blogosphere there is, however, a simple step to take, and I am thinking deeply about that step as I write today.

I can choose to find some other means of supporting myself which both meets the bills, and allows me some time, and in that time I can live, love, and share the simple life I have doggedly hung onto for all those years. 

One day, I hope I’ll finish the book. One day, I hope I’ll get to share it all with you. Until then though, here I am. The first of the Library Book Substackers.