I recently undertook an eight hour coach journey.Irritatingly, it was not one of those that people on Radio 4 or The Guardian witter on about, travelling in some far flung part of the globe in order to go and patronise some poor people and make their lives in a small, and yet significant, way ever so slightly worse. No, this was a journey from Newcastle to Birmingham (insert own joke here) via Leicester and Nottingham.I was obliged to go this longer way owing to the increasingly insane cost of rail travel in this fair and royalist land.£100 Richard Branson wanted from me and for that amount I expect luxury on a scale that would Louis XIV of France, the Sun King himself, mutter ‘Steady on old boy.’.
Actually, it was a rather pleasant journey.Certainly nicer than the overcrowded hell that is Virgin cross-country these days.Not only was there room for your luggage, there was even room to stretch out your legs and even turn a page of your book without nudging your neighbour, none of which is possible on Beardie’s trains.
It’s not the longest single journey I’ve undertaken in my time.That would be the thirty-two hour ferry crossing from Ireland to France I undertook in 1985 during which I tasted frogs’ legs for the only time, found out that members of the US Marine Corps are obliged to shave their legs* and saw the first Police Academy film.
Those were the golden days of travel.
Incidentally, I will not divulge the name of the coach company with which I travelled.This blog is not for hire.Meanwhile, here’s a song for you:
It does, but only because of the argument put forward by those who cannot bear the idea that a glover’s son from Stratford could be England’s greatest writer.Once you strip away the glitter of their argument it comes down to simple snobbery and as such needs to be resisted rather than ignored.The idea that a provincial with a reasonable but not amazing education could achieve what Shakespeare achieved has to be celebrated, not furiously denied.Interestingly, so angry are the Shakespeare sceptics at the effrontery of the man’s persistent refusal to be well-born, they rarely even use his name, preferring to refer to him as ‘the glover’s son’ or ‘a Stratford actor’. They even call themselves anti-Stratfordians, which does rather reveal the wellspring of their denial.Refute and then ignore is my humble advice.You can find the facts you need in Bill Bryson’s excellent biography, Shakespeare, though doubtless the sceptics would refuse to accept his arguments because he’s American or too popular or whatever.As Macbeth says:
…it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
On a better note, once again here’s the reason why we should celebrate this day with, as it is also St George’s Day, John Gielgud as John of Gaunt in Richard II stating why he rather likes England but is a bit upset about recent events.He shouldn’t worry, it will all turn out for the best a couple of plays down the line, well, for England anyway, not so much for France:
So, Michael Gove thinks children should read 50 books a year.Seems a lot to me, that’s one a week with a fortnight off at Christmas presumably, but what do I know?Reactions were as to be expected.Some people boasting that fifty was not nearly enough, one on-line commentator threatening violence if any of the fifty were Harry Potter or Twilight books, which seemed hard, and most agreeing that quality not quantity was the issue.I have to say, I’m not so sure.
Reading is many things.At its basis, it’s a way of sharing information with others.It’s a form of pleasure for some.For others it is a kind of moral duty and there are some for whom it is a way to parade their superiority to others.Each, save the last, seems valid.But it is the idea that there are books that should be read (and by serious and worrying implication, books that should not be read) that I find truly troublesome.I know I failed that test badly as a child by spending a year obsessively reading Enid Blyton (the Famous 5 and the Adventure stories to be precise) which confession casts me into the outer darkness as far as some are concerned.In the pre-video/i-player days I read novelisations of my favourite television series, Dr Who and Space: 1999 in particular.As a teenager, or Young Adult as they are now designated by the publishing industry, it was Alistair MacLean and science fiction.Then as an older Young Adult (if that makes sense) I discovered Penguin Modern Classics and dismayed my friends and family by always having one in my pocket, green spine to the fore so that it could be seen, identified and admired.And of all of them, I cannot think of a single book that I have ever regretted reading and that, surely is the important thing.The act of reading is neutral and to attempt to indoctrinate children into thinking otherwise is as dubious as not allowing them to read at all.
I’m a bit sad about that as for most of my life I did and it’s a bit like an old toy finally falling irrevocably apart.I also no longer enjoy the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser, but I’m not sad about that.Tastes change over a life and it’s curious, to me anyway, which are mourned and which are not.Like Mr Banks, I feel a surge of great satisfaction, though for me it is the knowledge that I shall never again read The Lord of the Rings, that burden has been taken from me.On the other hand, I was upset to discover that I now find T H White’s The Once And Future King almost unreadable.That was the first book that I read after my university final exams and as I studied Eng Lit, was therefore the first book I had read out of choice for three years.I loved it.Tried it again just before Christmas, didn’t like it and felt a pang of loss.But the Bond novels are a special case.I partly defined myself as a reader of Bond books, defending them from criticisms that seemed to mainly arise from snobbery or ignorance. Furthermore, I am now nervous about the films.What if I no longer enjoy them?After all, the reason I write is because of the James Bond films.I adored them as a child and was horrified to discover that Ian Fleming was dead and so no longer writing which, I reasoned, meant that there would come a day when there would be no more Bond films, a horrifying prospect.Then I noticed that someone else had written a Bond novel, one Robert Markham (a pseudonym for Kingsley Amis, no honestly).The relief was overwhelming and with a prelapsarian ignorance of the laws of copyright, I wrote a Bond story myself.It was the first thing I ever wrote because I wanted to as opposed to being told to by school.It was called One By One, had a Russian villain called Ivan (after consultation with my brother had elicited the information that Ivan was what most Russians are called, and him a Man From U.N.C.L.E. fan) and featured a cunning plan to kidnap scientists.I then wrote a Bond screenplay, I forget the title, which was set on a cross-channel ferry and had 007 thwarting a hi-jack attempt.Sadly, both manuscripts are lost, but I’m sure if Barbara Broccoli calls, I could put something together.
And of course I may return to the written Bond, because, as every fan of the films knows as a certainty:
Another by-election, another small turn out and doubtless soon to follow we will have the usual laments about voter apathy which always seem to have the sinister undercurrent that the whole system should be abolished and we should resign ourselves to autocratic rule by those who know best.There may well be laments about how more people vote in X Factor or whatever than vote in elections.But as Mark Steel has pointed out more than once, people don’t bother to vote because they can’t be bothered with democracy, they don’t vote because they can’t see the point.Their votes have no concrete effect.He may be right.On a local level, Tesco recently failed to get permission to build a new shop near where my mother lives, said permission turned down by the democratically voted local council.Tesco then trotted off to London to get that decision over-ruled by a government made up of two parties who failed to win the last election.David Cameron wants to privatise just about the entire state which I don’t remember being mentioned in the TV debates and Nick Clegg justifies breaking his university fees pledge on the grounds that not enough people voted for him which is not so much realpolitik as petulance.‘Manifestos are poetry, policies are prose’ says a character in The West Wing.Maybe, but I reserve the right to get annoyed if I am sold a book which is advertised as being by Oscar Wilde but is in fact written by Jeffrey Archer.
There must, as they say, be something in the water.First we have two football bods being rude about female match officials, then Jeremy Clarkson and his droogs mocking Mexicans and now Martin ‘son of Kingsley’ Amis has had a go at children’s authors.You may have missed the last.It was in a TV interview with Sebastian ‘literary writer’ Faulks in the course of which Amis fils stated that he would require to be ‘brain-damaged’ before he could write a book for children.
What is it about children’s books that so irritate Britain’s intelligentsia?I assume it has something to do with Harry Potter being so successful but I don’t remember Roald Dahl getting it in the neck in this way.He would be criticised for being too dark or otherwise unsuitable, but I cannot recall anyone saying that he must have suffered some kind of mental collapse between writing all those ‘tales of the much as we expected’ (as Peter Cook called them) and James & The Giant Peach.
As always when one of these attacks on children’s books pops up, I am reminded of Philip Pullman, a writer who, as a friend once said about Derek Jarman’s films, I don’t really like but I’m very glad he’s there.His reply to someone’s query as to when he was going to start writing grown-up books was to comment that an equivalent was to ask a paediatrician when they were going to start doing grown-up medicine.He also once smugly noted that when the Dark Materials trilogy, which deals with the existence of God and the role of religion amongst other things, was top of the children’s best-selling charts, the best-selling adult’s novel was Does My Bum Look Big In This?.
During the debates over healthcare in the United States recently, it was interesting to see the misconceptions that young nation has about the NHS.Remember all that talk about ‘death panels’ deciding who lives and who dies?It got to the point where one was required to point out that Dr Shipman was the exception, not the norm.But we in dear old Blighty should restrain from mocking too much.We too have our own fiercely held beliefs that must seem peculiar to those not blessed to dwell among us.This was borne out recently by a survey that Radio 4’s been burbling on about concerning immigration.Apparently we don’t want any more immigrants on the grounds that the country is, in some way that I for one have not noticed, ‘full’ and furthermore we don’t want the immigrants we have got to receive any care or attention from the aforementioned NHS.So far, so Daily Mail.Then it gets weird because it turns out that we do want immigrants after all, but only if they are doctors or carers for the elderly.
Is this really a good idea?Maybe I’m a wuss in these things, but I am leery of being treated by someone who is denied the very care and treatment that s/he is giving me.I can see there being ‘potential issues’, as a manager I once had used to call foreseeable consequences, arising.
And then there’s this business of the country being ‘full’.This one’s been doing the rounds for as long as I can remember but it seems to be peaking at the moment.A lot of this, I suspect, is a result of the disgraceful scaremongering during the last government by the party previously known as Labour, but it seems to be also driven by all those southern shandypants who can’t tell the difference between the United Kingdom and South East England who get into a tizzy every time they can’t get a seat on the tube. Fret not my little metropolitan friends, once the housing benefit caps come in there’ll be loads of room.Curiously Holland does not think it's full despite having a higher percentage of immigrants and being smaller than us and, indeed flatter.Must be the waffles.
