August 2009 – Page 4 – For the fainthearted . . .

Silly things

One review of Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Home” says that “it makes all other writing seem jejune for ages afterwards”. Reading the 600 pages of Vera Brittain’s “Testament of Youth” straight after finishing the novel, the “ages” did not last very long, but the review did prompt thoughts as to how something changes one’s perceptions of all that follows. An email from a friend in Rwanda served as a reminder that the sense that what comes afterwards is naïve is not confined to writing, there are experiences that set things that …

It’s the little things that count

“A friend had phoned that I hadn’t talked to for a long time. He said he was going on to bed. ‘I’ll be up in a while’, I said. When I went up, he was gone. I had put new sheets on the bed that morning, he didn’t get much use from them”.

The comment about the sheets almost prompted laughter, hardly appropriate when discussing with someone the sudden death of her husband while she chatted with a friend. It did highlight the way that the little things, the trivial …

Going downhill

There is a line in Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ that has about it a great schoolboy appeal (well, more precisely an appeal to schoolboy ideas of geography). Treebeard declares to the hobbits Merry and Pippin that he always liked going south, he felt it was like going downhill. Heading south from a cool and damp Ireland will always seem like going downhill; it means foreign countries and warmer weather and memories of holidays. At 53 degrees north, Dublin sits on the same latitude as Hudson Bay, which is under …

Coming back

Sitting at a pavement cafe on the Rue des Medicis looking across to the Jardin de Luxembourg, the afternoon seemed very pleasant. Staring at the world over the top of a glass of Kronenbourg, this seemed a fine place to be. A Protestant sense of guilt and foreboding disturbed the moment, “Bet it’s not like this in November”

It is probably not.

The canopies that stretched out over the pavement had rolled up within them transparent plastic walls that would stretch down to the ground when the weather turned. The …

Meeting a thinker

Statues were of dead people – dead rich, dead famous, or just plain dead. The rich and the famous paid for their statues, which probably explains the fine classical look of many of the subjects. Would you really depict his lordship wih three chins and a pot belly if it meant that you would never again get work from him, or from any of his friends? The striking poses and noble air pleased the person paying the bill; they hardly provided much interest or excitement to future generations, each of …

East Coast Thoughts

Five posts from this blog were recycled to provide five ‘thoughts for the day’ for East Coast Radio for the Sundays during August- this is the second.

If you’re as old as me, you might remember Reasons to be Cheerful a pop song from thirty years ago. It was by Ian Dury and the Blockheads and was a lengthy list of things that made him feel cheerful. Ian Dury’s list included a whole load of odd and daft stuff:

Some of Buddy Holly, the working folly
Good Golly Miss Molly …