Stories that make sense
This summer I have been working on translating my concept of money from ‘ESOTERIC MAGIC: CLOSE YOUR EYES AND HOPE FOR THE BEST’ to ‘SCIENCE! OBSERVE AND UNDERSTAND!’ I’m hoping this book will help with that. Though you will note that I am using a purple velvet robe to bridge the gap.
If Swallows and Amazons was among the best children’s series of the twentieth century, the Casson family series has got to be up there for the twenty-first. Saffy’s Angel remains my favourite, mostly because Saffy herself is.
And the sequence where Caddy, having eventually and reluctantly passed her driving test, is prevailed upon by her younger siblings to drive to Wales to look for the eponymous angel, is hysterical.
I thought about taking the label off, but it seemed disingenuous to pretend either that I don’t buy books in charity shops, or that I always remember to take the price tag off things.
Well, I’m thinking of the rabbit scene. Dick and Dorothea are my favourite characters in the Swallows and Amazons series; I may have grown up in the country, but I wouldn’t know where to start with skinning a rabbit either.
And Ransome’s trick of overlaying an imaginary landscape on a real one – well, an imaginary-real one – is masterful. I honestly believe that these were among the best children’s books of the last century.
I’ve been reading my way through the Discworld books at bedtime. I’ve got a bit stuck on Unseen Academicals; I’m not sure whether the book isn’t clicking or whether reading in bed just isn’t a summer thing for me.
This is a book about travel and it is a travelling book. It has been registered at www.BookCrossing.com, which means that its progress can be tracked around the world. This is a particularly well-travelled book; it started in California and has been through Canada, six other states of the USA, Australia, France, the Netherlands, and Belarus on its way to me. Who knows where it’ll end up next?
If the Himalayas aren’t a skyline, I don’t know what is.
This book was a gift from my best friend, who is Norton’s great-granddaughter. Reading it, we discover that he also was prone to blisters. So there you go.
When I was little, we had some traveller friends who lived in a converted bus in our back yard. Since most of our other friends lived a mile down a very busy road, my brothers and I spent quite a lot of time with Ed and Jenni, Izak and Riley. When it was fine, we played in the garden. When it was raining, we went to the bus.
Jenni had a copy of Mary Berry’s Step By Step Desserts. I spent many happy hours looking through this book. Later, they moved to France, and we moved to the Isle of Wight, and I haven’t seen them in years, though my father and brother visited them a few weeks ago.
All the same, when I saw a copy in a charity shop I snapped it up. I make recipes out of it occasionally, but mostly I just look, and remember contented rainy afternoons, and very hospitable friends.
I’ve seen Slow Time described as ‘The Artist’s Way, but for time’. It’s a twelve-week workbook for exploring one’s relationship with time and seasons, and, like all these things, you skip the bits that make you roll your eyes (the astrology, for me) and play with the bits that appeal.
I wouldn’t recommend it to hardcore Quakers who Don’t Do Festivals, but I was surprised how much I, as a wacky but orthodox Anglican, got out of it.
My family game is Racing Demon*. It’s a fast, vicious game played with several packs of cards, which get strewn across the table in the course of play and have to be sorted out at the end of the round. Therefore it’s useful to have cards with distinctive backs. It’s rough on the cards: therefore it’s useful to have a lot of cheap packs.
Over the years, I’ve collected quite a few packs of playing cards. If all my aunts and uncles and cousins turn up at once, I’ll be ready. It’s become a bit of a thing. At least this means that people always know what to give me for Christmas. Playing cards, or books about playing cards. This was one of them.
*Rules vary: that link was the best description on the first page of Google, but in our house it’s ten points for a king, none for going out (going out is advantage enough in itself, for heaven’s sake!). And adding an extra card to your hellpile if you went out in the last round is not optional at all. You do get to take it off again if somebody else goes out in the next one, though.
Kathleen Jowitt 