Fifty five years a reader... part 2

So where then after Biggles and Blyton? The first real adult literature I read was Wuthering Heights, one rainy Saturday afternoon when I was sixteen. So there is a long long gap in which I had to satisfy my voracious reading appetite. I did reread a lot - I had to - I would read all the books in the school even though I had been allowed to go and help chose the books from the library bus that came round. Of course I joined the library - that first trip there, getting my junior library ticket,  going into the small room that served for children's books. That access was magical, truly magical, but I lacked guidance in what to read as my mum's tastes weren't really mine. At the time I found Pooh Bear a bit simplistic and frankly weird, Wind in the Willows I only came to appreciate later. Of course I was read to as a child, but I cannot remember a single story or book that I was read. The only memory of reading with my mother I can access is being in front of the fire with the Jack and Jill comic, colouring in the dots. But comics! Of course comics - loyal to Valiant mostly, while my brother had Buster, but with occasional frays into The Eagle, Boy's World the Beano, a faintly scurrilous funny called Wham and at the other end of the spectrum Look and Learn. Always torn by Look and Learn - it had enough text to actually give me more than a few minutes reading - even then I read very fast, but it only had one comic strip and it was often a bit dull.  Valiant was my favourite - the stories and story-lines were exactly tuned to my sensibilities - Captain Hurricane - the obligatory 2nd World War hero, Legg's Eleven - a terrific football serial, The Wild Twins, and a text only story about a man with X-ray eyes. They came every Monday, early, and I would read the entire comic cover to cover before breakfast.

But books.. I picked out The Hobbit from the library early on, probably when I was about seven years old, because of its fairy tale cover and description - I had no idea who Tolkien was, no idea it was a famous book. It was strange disturbing reading, the dwarves and Bilbo himself seemed amoral, they weren't "good" characters at all, not even particularly nice characters. Mirkwood scared me to death, and I took the book back the first time without having got any further, but like a persistent itch I need to know what happened, so I got it out again - but failed once more to make it through Mirkwood - it took a third attempt, probably a year or so later, maybe more, to actually finish it.

Fifty five years a reader... part 1

It's been along time since the Janet & John books ( I seem to still remember the very particular style and colours of those books, the way the text was so clearly laid out on the page with lots of white space around it as if presaging the white space look of the uncluttered   web page, but i can't remember any of the words. The next book was green, I think, and had the story of chicken-licken which at the time I was vaguely disturbed by, just as I was by the later knowledge, when I was nine or ten, that the sun would eventually blaze up and engulf the earth, this fact conflicting with my dimly felt sense of immortality.

I remember going up to read to the teacher - a Mrs Cohen, a smily, dark haired bird of a woman, slight and short, who nevertheless once banged mine and Simon Collis's heads together in the cloakroom of Halsford Park School because we had made dire and plain nasty threats that we would smash a little girl's dollies - I don't know why we did that, but I do remember the clash of heads. (You'd think this was a predicate of a bad future, these bullying little boys of six picking on a smaller girl in the class (actually she might not have been smaller - I can't even remember who she was|), but I did OK, and Simon Collis, according to my mother's best  friend and Google was the British Ambassador to Iraq from 2012 to 2014 among other achievements). And I have to say that we were usually pretty well-behaved and peaceable children, but for some reason this event did happen).

 When you read to Mrs Cohen you were allowed to read until you made a mistake and I was always keyed up and anxious, so wishing to read on and on and.. but I would always trip over a word or a pronunciation and that would be it, back to my table in the class. The next memory, though, is the same class./ I'm reading on my own Enid Blyton's Magic Faraway Tree, completely swept up in it. It is Mrs Cohen's personal copy because I have read every single reading book in the class. Somehow,. somewhere a reading bomb exploded in my head and I never stopped.

Never stopped reading, yes, but what did I read? I didn't come from a well  educated home - my Dad left school at 14 and was apprenticed as a draughtsman, my Mum had been at what was essentially a lower middle class finishing school until she was sixteen before she joined the Civil Service as a typist. From my Mum's background I had the children's classics - most of the Swallows and Amazons series, Richmal Crompton's William books, but I didn't care for them that much. There was one book though that I read and reread even though I didn't like the strong musty smell from its faux leather binding - Arthur Ransom's Old Peter's Russian Tales.  (The smell is one that I love now, faded though it is, I bury my nose in the pages to inhale the feeling of reading these strange light and dark tales).

 I like to think, I do think, it was the narrative excitement of Blyton and Biggles that kept me reading and reading but the powerful heart of fairy tales that eventually brought me to literature - and kept me sane.

Postscript - 15th January 2019
I was searching for somewhere in this blog where I thought I remembered  lamenting how little time there was - but there isn't a search facility in this damn cheap  blog software - all I found was the first part of Fifty five years a reader from three years ago, so even less time now - maybe not even the time to reread all the books I want to read again, let alone the new.
Oh and Simon Collis is now the British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia , and the only Ambassador to complete the Hajj - good on him!

Koyaannisqatsi

I first saw and heard  Koyaannisqatsi on a bad quality VHS tape on a video player borrowed from the social work centre where I worked. It was stunning then, and through the years I watched it again on a DVD - took Thomas and Jacob to see it at the cinema one afternoon when they were six and nine (that was amazing), then a couple of years ago(?) Tom and I saw Philip Glass and the Ensemble perform it live in the Brighton Dome. Now I listen to it more than see it as all the images are in my head anyway. One sticks though. Always when I watch it  I try to make myself  pay attention to each person that appears (it's a bit manic in the crowd scenes, so I often try to see people I haven't seen before). But I have my favourites - and the best is this - the hot lazy beach, a woman sleeping in the sun on a towel with her child sleeping beside her, then the camara pans out and up the beach to bring the San Ofre Nuclear Generating Station - just up the coast from San Diego - into focus. Who is / was she who is /was the child?  - there's a whole pointless quest where I'd like to know what happened to every single one of the people in the film. But this image stays with me  on its own. I don't need or want to know anymore, it's perfect.

Scenes from an unclerical life 2

extract from "Scenes from an unclerical life" - "The Unreliable Narrator"
"What they loved was a crisp shining New Years day with the fire fresh lit in the grate, the Christmas lights still shining, friends popping round for mince pies and mulled wine, the New Years Concert from Vienna playing as it happened - a complete first - remembered, switched the radio on, actually listened to it. Glowing and rosy cheeked from their morning walk they all gather round the fire - everyone's up, friends have decided to stay on for tea and drinks. The day before, he had made a vast turkey and ham pie with an equally vast salad with two dressings, one hot and strong it's little fiery tips of chilies peeping out from the glistening oil like the pointy ends of elves  boots, another flush with the green of basil plucked fresh from the plant on the window sill.

But all this is not so.

New Year finds our hapless couple in the throes of sickness and self mortification, unable to rise from their rumpled bed without vertigo, nausea and blunt shafts of pain that take the place of any sunshine that might have shone into their room if the curtains were open and if there were any sun anyway. A peep though the gaps shows a light but dull grey, unbroken seamless cloud. She tries to remember what they did last night - did they actually finish? - an exploratory hand confirms that she is wet and swampy, and the involuntary sniff of her fingers confirms, also, the cod liver fish oil smell of last nights sex. "

The writing conveys the listless regretful sense of too much partying for too little gain. A realistic bit ultimately depressing picture that I enjoy all the more because I am bright, awake and unhungover - I may have missed the New Years Concert but it's all eminently repeatable on Spotify. Janice has been up for hours, deciding to clean the kitchen and bake cheese straws to eat round the fire - so thankful that we ordered that extra load of logs so that we didn't run out for the New Year. Jacob and Marisa are cooking a fragrant Thai curry with lemon grass and lime leaves for supper later. The house vibrates with positive energy and thankfulness for an other years dawn.  There is something fragrant and life-giving in making the decision to stay in, watch a joyful Jools Holland and go to bed about 1.30am. 

Scenes from an unclerical life

The relationship book I'm reading has cracking dialogue. In one scene one of the couples around whom the book is centered are sitting in bed, a soft stuffed animal propped between them (why is never explained, but somehow it adds to the atmosphere - perhaps it's hers from childhood, perhaps it's one of their grown up children, who knows).
he says
"I really need psychoanalysis , not counselling, psychoanalysis, someone who will just shut the fuck up and listen to me."
"That's me isn't it" she says.
"No, you answer back."

The Garden of Evening Mists - Eng, Tan Twan, oh and Terms of Enlistment - Marco Kloos

So the Garden continues along its slow path, but less garden and more relationship, so the juxtaposition of formality and beauty against politics and war is muddied by the silt of the protagonist's relationships. It's as if we are dipping into the mundane - well people have to live - even characters in books. Where the book felt like a spacious canvas, on which well spaced pebbles and plants were lining up for the perfect formal garden, now we are stuck in one of the service paths, overgrown with all sorts of plants that shouldn't really be there, if we want to keep our beauty intact.

And then there's Terms of Enlistment - free again through Kindle Unlimited, in the sub-genre Military Sci-fi, and firmly entrenched in every single cliche of genre - but nonetheless readable for that. It is Starship Troopers written all over again - Heinlein perfected the genre even as he started it (well he may not have started it but he was the first one that I read). I am a sucker for these - the escape into the platoon, the training and the drill sergeants where most people drop out - everything the same even down to the female recruits being the ones who get to be the pilots (so much less messy than being a marine don't you think). I suppose I'll finish it, but I have a feeling that it ain't going anywhere that I haven't been before.

The Garden of Evening Mists - Eng, Tan Twan

One of the first books I saw for my trial subscription on Kindle Unlimited. I had clocked it in a Guardian review and put it on the back burner - I can't buy every book I read about. But, here, for free - absolutely. But it is far better than that. So far so generic - so to say something meaningful about it.  The descriptions ( fuck this is going to sound like a school essay) of the garden are so wonderfully peaceful and well formed. They contrast with the horror that is laid on in spades of the wars and politics that surround the concept and making of the peaceful garden. The cruelty of the Japanese internment in Malaysia, the Malaya "Emergency" - a war by any other name but so called so that the planters could still claim on their insurance (apparently - source Wikipedia), the Boer Wars and the British savageries there - don't forget the Brits invented the concentration camp. There is a beautiful moment where the protagonist dips her head to take some water from a stone basin, and in the act of doing so is able to see the mountains framed by a gap in the hedge only visible if you dip your head to take the water. It is a mimicry or copy ( wrong words) of a famous garden in Japan where, against all the advice a master gardener cut off the view of the mountains with a hedge  as it  was too precious to be seen without effort and humility.