Just A Summary

I sometimes think that I should have published the lyrics to Child of the Library with a bibliography. The references in the second verse are all obvious to me, but I’m a white middle class English boy who grew up around boats. My childhood reading and yours may not intersect all that much.

So…

The Walkers and the Blacketts

Also known as the Swallows and Amazons. Swallows and Amazons is the first ‘big’ book that I can remember reading for myself. We were in Cornwall, holidaying at the same place my mum’s been going to since she was a kid. Mum was reading Swallows and Amazons to us, and it was great, but I was impatient to find out what happened next, so I took the book to bed with me and read it for myself. I haven’t stopped yet. Swallows and Amazons was the book that opened my door to reading for pleasure. It opened up a way of looking at the world too. I can’t imagine who I’d be if I’d never read any Ransome.

The Pevensies

The Pevensies are the family in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, the first of the Narnia books. I have a slightly troubled relationship with these books now. I really don’t get on with C. S. Lewis’s view of the world (I once hurled a taped reading of The Screwtape Letters out of the car rather than listen to another word of the bloody things), but I wasn’t reading between the lines when I was nine. I was just loving the stories and the images they put in my head. And what images…

Simp, the Canine Cannonball

What do you mean, you’ve never read Cannonball Simp? You poor thing!

Cannonball Simp, by John Burningham is the library book for me. Back when I was 4 or 5, I would walk with my dad from Regent’s Square to the Doncaster Central Library every Saturday morning, with three books clutched under my arm. I’d hand them over the counter, receiving in exchange 3 buff cardboard library slip holders. I would then go over to the childrens’ books section and pull out three new (to me) books and take them to the counter. The librarian would remove the slip from the library bookplate, place it in one of my surrendered holders and stamp the slip and the bookplate with the date, three weeks hence, by which the book must be renewed.

Well, that’s how it worked until weekend I came back with Cannonball Simp. I loved it. I didn’t want to take it back because I hadn’t learned it yet. Sure I could ‘read’ along with Dad – I knew all the words by then – but the pictures were another thing entirely. They were beautiful. They still are.

That’s when I learned of the magic of ‘renewal’. Instead of handing the book back, I showed it to the librarian and said “I’d like to renew this, please,” and instead of giving me my library card back, they just stamped the book and slip with a new date. Wow! It was like I owned the book.

I don’t know how many times I renewed that book. I’m afraid I don’t remember the words any more. But I still remember the pleasure that it gave me.

Galadriel the Fair

On the last day of junior school our form teacher, Miss Rees, wrote a long list of books on the board and asked us to copy the list into the back of our exercise books. She said that these were books we should try and read. I don’t have the exercise book any more and I remember very little of the list. I do remember that I’d already read some of them. And I remember The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Oh boy, do I remember The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Terry Pratchett said that if you’re a 14 year old boy and you don’t think that The Lord of the Rings is the best book ever written then there may be something wrong with you, but if you’re 28 and you still think it’s the best book ever written then there’s definitely something wrong with you. I was that 14 year old boy. I stayed up all night reading it. I fell asleep reading it. I read the appendices. I worked out how to write my name in Elvish script. I even read The Silmarillion and thought I enjoyed it. I can still recite some of the poetry. In Elvish. I’ve forgotten the words of Cannonball Simp, but get me going with “A Elbereth Gilthoniel…” and I can just about reel off the rest of the poem. What’s wrong with me?

By the time I was 28, LotR wasn’t the best book ever written. I’m no longer sure that there is such a thing as “The Best Book Ever Written”. Still, if you haven’t at least read The Hobbit you should take steps to rectify matters. Or wait for the Peter Jackson movie.

The Daughter of a Pirate King

Confession time: I haven’t read Pippi Longstocking. The ‘I’ of A Child of the Library is a composite of Gill and me. Pippi Longstocking was her Nancy Blackett. The Bastables were her Pevensies.

Paddington the Bear

Once I’d learned that reading for myself was pure pleasure, I read anything and everything I could find in the library and I discovered Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear. Paddington was a well meaning young bear from Peru who was found, wearing a duffel coat and a label reading “Please look after this bear”, at Paddington Station by the Brown Family. The Browns took him in immediately, named him Paddington after the station and… ‘hijinks ensue’.

I would be quietly reading these books to myself when some episode or another (“Baked Elastic”; the Russian ballet dancer; the wobbly table…) would cause me to laugh out loud and my brother would demand to know what was funny and made me read whatever it was aloud to him. I have to confess, I resented this, but not enough to dent my enjoyment. The Paddington books are made of joy.

If you were to ask me what my current preoccupations were, the top three would probably be breadmaking, ruby and folk music. This last week has been a pretty decent week on all three fronts.

On Friday, I drove down to Shipton Mill near Tetbury, one of the finest millers in the country, and picked up around 40 kilos of interesting flour at splendidly wholesale prices (substantially cheaper than I was paying at my local suppliers and with far greater variety). I expect to have fun experimenting with a few new bread formulae as I work through that lot. After that, I took a quick trip to the VSCC’s Prescott meeting, where my brother was selling tyres

A Longstone Tyres employee admires Chris Williams skill in using their products as the Napier Bentley leaves the line at Prescott 2006

Prescott’s really lovely, a beautiful site, some spectacular cars and a great atmosphere on the campsite. There were that many family members and Longstone staff on the site there was a virtual Longstone compound. I was sorry I couldn’t stay for the barbecued legs of lamb but I was spending the night with friends in Bath.

On Saturday morning it was off to the Sidmouth Folk Week. Sidmouth is one of the great institutions of British folk music – a week long festival that’s been running for over 50 years. These last couple of years have been run by a new set of organizers and things have been scaled back a little. It’s still Sidmouth though. I last went in 1998 (I think), so it’s been a while, but it still felt just like I remembered. I was crashing with a friend of mine who’s a Sidmouth virgin and acted as a semi-native guide. I think she might be hooked on it too.

I spent a fair amount of time with the Anchor Middle Bar Singers, a festival fringe institution that, whilst not quite as old as the festival, has been running for some time (they recently retired from competing in the “who can raise the most money for festival funds” stakes having been undefeated in this respect since about 1981). The Middle Bar is a twice daily singaround concentrating exclusively on unaccompanied singing, preferably with a chorus. It’s hot, loud, and has its own set of traditions for How Things Are Done.

For Instance, some songs have a ‘standing chorus’; when the singing reaches the chorus of, say, Thousands or More everyone stands for the choruses so, if you’re not completely au fait with which songs have standing choruses, it pays to keep your eyes open.

Monday night was my last night in Sidmouth and when it looked like the twig wasn’t going to make it around the room more than once (a twig is passed around the room to signify who’s singing next) I mentioned that I would really appreciate getting a second song to one of the people on the bench (the people who run the session and who start and finish the singing) and, bless him, he swapped places with me at the end of the night so I was one of the last three singers.

I sang Si Kahn’s song Here is my home, a secular hymn about the fellowship of singing in harmony. It’s a great song with plenty of opportunity for the chorus to join in (it doesn’t just have a chorus between verses, it has them within the verses too) and the singers in the bar were on top form that night, they were sounding wonderful. What nearly stopped me singing though was when the last chorus came around. I’d closed my eyes as I went into it and when I opened them again the whole bar was on its feet belting it out with me. Not something I’ll forget in a hurry.

So, that’s bread making and folk music attended to

On Tuesday I spent the morning in another singaround in the theatre bar before heading off to London for the London Ruby Users’ Group meeting at Skills Matter. A couple of cracking talks (about Domain Specific Languages and tips on working well with front end types) both excellent, one of which was very much last minute after Geoffrey Grossenbach had to cancel when a proposed London workshop he was planning to give fell through. Once the technical stuff was out of the way (I might write more about them when I’ve mulled them over a bit more) we retired to the pub and spent the rest of the evening talking about Ruby, Rails, Smalltalk, Perl 6 and probably a bunch of other stuff. I shall have to make it down to London more often.

Estimating driving time from Devon to London is never going to be an exact science, so I arrived in Clerkenwell about an hour before the meeting and, not being one for sitting in a pub by myself, I repaired to a nice shady bench, pulled out my powerbook and did a bit of light hacking on stuff. I was just starting to get a bit of flow going when someone came into the park and recognized me. Which is just weird. This is the first time I’ve ever been recognized by a stranger. Admittedly, I was wearing the same shirt as I’m wearing in the photo in the sidebar, but still. Embarrassingly, I’ve forgotten the chap’s name – with any luck he’ll comment here and jog my memory.

So, in all a jolly good extended weekend. Flour, songs, and my first microfame moment. Now, if I could just work out how to do that for a living…

Exercise 4 of chromatic’s Write Your Life tells me to:

Create a new invention, change your life circumstances, or somehow write away a difficult or time-consuming task. First define the problem, show how it affects you, and then invent it away.

But I’m not going to do that, exactly, because I already did it.

Exercise 3 in the Write Your Life project.

On a typical morning, I wake up before the alarm goes at 0630, stumble through into the bathroom, then back into the sitting room where I get suited and booted for the day. (Gill, being a sensible type, gets to sleep in some more, so banging around the bedroom in the dark isn’t a particularly good idea). If I’m running to time, I nip into the office, check my mail and skim through my RSS feeds.

This is exercise 2 in chromatic’s excellent Write your life exercise.

Home. Four letters. Easy to understand. Hard to pin down.

If we take home as being “The place where one sleeps”, then home is a two bedroomed first floor Tyneside flat. If you are fortunate enough to know Tyneside well, then I’ve just told you a great deal about where I live; you can probably sketch the floorplan, especially if I tell you that there’s the usual extension at the back with a kitchen and bathroom in it.

This is the first exercise in chromatic’s Write Your Life essay writing project. Follow the link for more information.