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Hello and welcome to the Spectators' Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week my guest is the writer Alan Garner, whose new book is Pousels and Thrums, a tapestry of a creative

life. Now, Alan, welcome to the podcast. Can I start by asking what many of our readers will wonder?

What is a pousal and what is a thrum?

They go together. Our family in the 19th century were hand-room weavers,

and they, by tradition, carried their thread from market to the handloom, worked on it for a week, took the cloth

back to the market and came back so it was back and two, back and two.

And as a result of that, they acquired lots of off-cuts, if you like, bit snipped off the

end of the loom. And they were for the use of the weaver, and they were powels and thrums, which I suppose

just means bits and pieces.

But it meant that the weaver could do what he wanted with them, and so the Weaver's family tended to look a bit like

pipe pipers.

And the dedicatee of this book is your grandfather, is it not?

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