My week in pictures
Category: Blog
Family matters
This week I have been preoccupied with family. My sister is visiting from the US for the first time in over three years so we are spending lots of time catching up, wondering whether to visit some sights or just carry on chatting. Talking is winning, partly thanks to the abysmal weather.
I have always been a person to rate my friends over my family but that’s not to say I don’t love my family. We’re not that similar as people but we obviously have shared history and I know from experience that my family will always be there for me, no matter what. I like to think my friends would as well but I haven’t tested them nearly as thoroughly!
There’s a great comfort in turning up at my childhood home and letting that huge catalogue of memories wash over me. It’s changed but is still the same. I know every picture on the walls and the history behind them, even as the furnishings gradually get replaced. I know each contour of the garden and where things are kept in the kitchen. At my Dad’s encouragement I help myself to food and drink at all times of day and night like I’m a teenager again. I scan through the bookshelves lovingly, picking out books from my childhood or degree course that ended up here.
It must be quite different for my sister who left home younger than I did and has been back far less frequently. She doesn’t know the story of the “best cutlery” in the box under the sofa and far fewer of her belongings are scattered around here, muddled up with everything else. I must talk to her about this tomorrow.
My sister and I are close in age and, perhaps for the first time, at essentially the same place in our lives, so we have a lot to talk about. It’s fun to chat as adults (although there’s still plenty of whinging about parents) and we relate better now than we ever have before. That said, seeing so little of one another puts us in that awkward position where we’re not familiar enough with each other’s daily life, friends, boss, etc to discuss them freely the way you can with friends you see all the time. And having such a short time together means you avoid any potentially touchy subjects. I know that my sister and I are capable of fighting – we shared a room for most of our childhood!
Still, it’s been great to have this time and I will be sad on Sunday when she’s gone. Will definitely have to add “Save up money and annual leave to visit Ruth next year” to the to do list.
High culture v low culture
This is a topic that fascinates me. It has been debated over and over whether “low culture” (by which I mean such things as gossip magazines, tabloid newspapers, celebrity biographies, trashy romance novels, generic Hollywood romcoms, generic Hollywood action films, reality TV, soaps, graffiti, all-girl pop bands, etc etc) is somehow a threat to “real” art and artists, or perhaps to society as a whole. Is it demeaning to people in general to pitch the majority of culture to the lowest common denominator? Or does popular culture exist because people…want it?
I have no problem with debate but I do get annoyed with the demand that you must take one of two extreme opposite sides and if you don’t you are indecisive, woolly and not worth listening to. I am perfectly capable of forming an opinion. Sometimes that opinion sits squarely, or close to, one side of a debate. But not always. Sometimes my opinion is genuinely inbetween two extremes or a combination of both sides. Sometimes I struggle to see why there has to be division in the first place. But that’s just me (I’m not naive, just peaceloving).
In this case I am a lover of some forms of both high and low culture. I mean, there’s examples of both that I consider to be vile, but we’ll steer clear of that for now. I have read both Ulysses and Harry Potter and did not love either. I am a big fan of the theatre and films but I am also a telly addict and have spent many happy hours watching Scrubs, How I Met Your Mother, Black Books and a host of other shows. Not reality TV though. None of that.
If I had one wish I'd ask for infinite wishes
A barman at our local asked the other day what I would wish for if I had one wish. I think my answer – “I would wish to never be ill” – threw him a little but it was the first thing my brain came up with. It’s a pretty selfish wish, when I could have plumped for world peace, or an end to all suffering, or for the proposed solutions to global warming to all immediately be put in place and to work…lots of things really.
The thing is, I’m ill a lot of the time. It sucks. I have a handful of chronic diseases that together conspire to have me overtired, in pain or otherwise non-functional for far too much of the time. I mean – just think what I could achieve if I didn’t have to rest for half the day and sleep for 10 hours a night; if I had bounding energy and enthusiasm. I could be an unstoppable force for good!
Which is not only selfish but megalomaniacal. Because who’s to say that I’ve got it right? That my ideas will make the world any better? We all think that if we ruled the world we could sort all the shit out but it’s not that simple, obviously. We all think differently. My perfect world is another man’s nightmare. Which is the basis for many brilliant books.
Do all politicians start out thinking that they’re going to make the world a better place? It must be so disappointing when it turns out to be all compromise and stalemates. Which of course was the take-home lesson of West Wing.
Anyway, assuming that you’re not allowed to ask for more wishes, which would clearly be cheating, what would you wish for?
On being a book lover
I love to read. I mean, I really love to read. I was that child whose parents had to wrestle the book from my hands at the dinner table to get me to eat, who had to seriously weigh up severe car travel sickness against the awful idea of a (sick-free) journey without reading, who read almost every book at the local library so was greatly relieved when they largely restocked in my early teens, who in a recent house move packaged up my most beloved books more carefully than the crystal wine glasses. In my defence I know that Debenhams still sells those glasses.
The point is that I write about books because I love them. I love the look, feel and smell of them, old and new. I love the shape of words on a page. I love the language of books: folio, typography, endpapers, head and tail bands.
But mostly I love to read. As a grown-up I read a lot less than that book-obsessed child I once was, because reading has to fit around work and housekeeping and socialising and all the rest of it, but reading is still a great pleasure, a guaranteed escape to a good place (no matter what the book is about).
My favourite books is an ever-changing list, partly because there are so many great books out there. But my favourite ever grown-up book is probably Sophie’s Choice by William Styron.
My favourite books as a child were much more clearcut. They were:
- The Ghosts of Motley Hall by Richard Carpenter
- Alpaca by Rosemary Billam
- Carbonel by Barbara Sleigh
- The Wickedest Witch in the World by Beverley Nichols
- The Jolly Postman by Janet and Allen Ahlberg
Plus I also devoured everything by Roald Dahl, Colin Dann, Brian Jacques, Noel Streatfield and Frances Hodgson Burnett over and over again. Which is probably a more sophisticated list than the five I’ve picked out above, but taste is taste and they were my absolute favourites.
It’s personal, it’s about you the reader as much as anything else, it can be hard to put a finger on. I rate enjoyment of a book separately from quality of writing or storyline or characters because sometimes an author does everything well but I still don’t enjoy the book. And vice versa.
So, without further ado, my first Nose in a book review is here.