A self-proclaimed bookworm

or

His writing is not about something.  It is the thing itself

I've always loved reading.  I can still remember my first books.  I had several from the Read it Yourself series and can still remember reading Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Little Red Riding Hood, The Elves and The Shoemaker.  A quick search shows they're still available.  They provided me with hours of entertainment before I could even walk!  (Before you think I'm exagerating or was some kind of child genius, I guess you should know that I couldn't really walk before the age of about 4½ due to hip problems).  I also remember the Mister Men.  Mr Bump was always my favourite, possibly because I was well used to being in a plaster cast.

Some of my favourite books

Later I moved on to AA Milne's Winnie the Pooh and the wonderful world of Enid Blighton.  I still have Now We Are Six, which I think I got on my 6th birthday and contains possibly the first poem I learned off by heart.  It ends -

"But now I am Six, I'm as clever as clever,
So I think I'll be six now for ever and ever."

I still wish I was six.  It was a great time.  My 6th birthday was the first day I was allowed to cross the main road and go to the shop all by myself.  Little did I know that I'd be crossing that road to that shop to buy the morning paper every morning until I finally moved out of the parental home 19 years later!  Yeah, 6 was a pretty good age to be!

I was rarely without a book as a child.  In the car, at the dinner-table, in bed.  I would totally immerse myself in the story and become completely oblivious to the world around me.  I retreated, very happily, into the fantastic world that these stories introduced to me.  I was lucky to come from a home filled with books.  There were (and still are) only two rooms in my parents' house that did not contain bookcases; the bathroom and the kitchen.  Even the kitchen contained books in the form of recipe books.  There was always something to read; TS Eliot, Edna O'Brien, Shakespeare, Liam O'Flaherty, George Orwell.  A seemingly never-ending library to choose from.

And if that was not sufficient to satisfy my appetite, I could borrow Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes from my brother or Virginia Andrews and Stephen King books from my sister.  The years passed and I found my own niche.  I discovered the world of fantasy and science fiction, nourished further when I went to college.  By this stage, people were starting to have PCs and the fact my boyfriend of the time got a present of the role-playing computer game Dune, closely matching to Frank Herbert's series of books which were the book du jour of the time, was the icing on the cake.  It is just as well I was with him when he bought his first computer, or I could have been accused of being with him for his technology!

Time moved ever onwards, and I began to expand, ever so slightly, my range of reading material.  For many years, I waited longingly for pay-day when I could scour the bookshops and get my fill of literature for the month.  My default genre is still fantasy.  For some reason, science fiction has no longer holds the same allure, although Douglas Adams has to be one of my favourite authors.  One of my favourite passages in any of his books (and believe me I have many) is from The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul and the whole pizza incident.  Of course the Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is his better known trilogy in five parts.
 
I guess he's more comedic sci-fi rather that Arthur C Clare and his ilk territory.  However there is a comfort in returning to fantasy books.  They are, by and large, fairly formulaic.  There's a journey, a lot of descriptive passages (which admittedly I do sometimes skim), a lot of drinking and wenching and fighting, a battle between good and evil with good ultimately triumphing.  Yes, they're predictable but that makes them comforting.  You know what to expect.  At the end of a long day's work, you can pick up an old favourite and escape for a while.  It doesn't matter if you fall asleep in the middle of it.  They're not too taxing on the brain.  I read my favourites over and over again and never tire of them.  As Oscar Wilde said

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all"

While I automatically reach for the crime and fantasy books,  I do try and break free and seek out new horizons every now and then.  I love randomly coming across a new author and having a whole new world opened up to me.  I remember my first Georges Simenom, introduced to me by another boyfriend.  (Good taste in books is not my only criteria for a date, honest!).  What a joy to discover someone so prolific - 75 novels and 28 short stories about his detective Maigret alone!  And yet some of my favourites wouldn't feature Maigret at all!


Other joys randomly discovered include Louise de Bernieres Birds Without Wings, a book I would whole-heartedly recommend.  He, of course is the author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin with that magical passage where the captain is about to give a mandolin recital and when the doctor, in frustration at the seemingly needless wait, asks when he is about to start, the captain remonstrates that he was counting his bars rest at the start of the piece.  I guess you may have to be a musician to appreciate that, but it had been giggling for hours and even now the thought of it raises a smile.  More recently I discovered David Lodge's Deaf Sentence, a hilarious book published in 2008 and one you really should read.

And of course, the best thing about books is that they are such good value for money.  For less than a tenner, it is possible to buy a book, that depending on your reading speed and the number of pages, you can enjoy for an evening or a month.  And even if a tenner is a tenner more than you can spare, there is also the library.  There you can browse and borrow to your heart's content and find new worlds to take you away from the drudgery of the daily grind.

Following the Herd

or

Sheep are Cool!

I live beside The Curragh, a land of sheep, shite and soldiers, as Martin McDonough describes in his book of the same name. It can be uplifting in early morning on the way to work to see the sheep grazing and the thoroughbreds being worked on the gallops.

Sheep are often regarded as stupid creatures. They follow each other blindly and one tends to come across the odd deaf one on the road. I think they're just fooling us all. The ones that get killed are the kamikaze division, probably ailing anyway, who conspire with their owner to get some compensation.

When the rest of them march along in single file, I like to think they're they're organizing a rally somewhere, perhaps a protest demanding better grass to munch on or more access to the Camp now that it has been fenced off to them. On the other hand, maybe I spend too much time watching Shaun The Sheep, an excellent programme right up there with Top Cat.

This all came into my head due to a recent holiday. As luck would have it, I got a seat in row 3 of the aeroplane with extra leg room. There were two rows of seats (no row 1) on my side of the 'plane to match three on the other. Then, as we disembarked, the people in the row ahead of me had other family members further down the aeroplane and so hung back to wait on them. This meant that I ended up being leader of the pack.

The funny thing about homosapiens is that while we laugh at sheep following each other blindly, we exhibit exactly the same behaviour. I set off, with no idea where to go, with my newly formed herd behind me. Now I'm quite good at finding my way around unfamiliar surroundings so I was fairly confident I wouldn't get lost but there was one wee problem. Those of you who know me, well don't need to be told that I'm a bit of a cripple. I need a walking stick to get around, can't move quickly and the more I walk the slower I get.

I found it particularly hilarious that not one of my acquired posse passed me out! There were even some murmurings about the speed we were going and why we didn't go faster but, I repeat, NOT ONE person took the initiative to go ahead. Passport control was a doddle. I just breezed through and again, because I was on my own and didn't have to wait for anyone, I was first on the bus!

This whole incident put me in mind of the great, late Douglas Adams and Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (I think that's the book anyway). Dirk believes you should navigate by picking a car at random and following them. As he says (I'm paraphrasing here), he may not get where he intended to but he always ended up somewhere interesting (on second thought, may he said he always ended up where he needed to, but you get my drift). Maybe we should stop laughing at the sheep and start admiring them for their philosophical outlook on life...