To read is to live!

It is difficult to tell if the dead cactus I planted to commemorate the cessation of my scholastic striving in Sitges has changed its status.

It was planted in a fit of confused metaphorical angst, but now I feel a certain proprietary concern about its future. One of the girls pointed out, “It does look a little bit grey!” but I persist in a stubborn belief that its wasted sides and spikes have become a little plumper since I have lavished care on it. I think I will try and ignore it for a few days and then be surprised by a cheeky green bud or a potential poniard shyly pointing skywards!

I wonder if Tim Burton has purchased the rights to film The Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. If he hasn’t he should have: it would be a perfect vehicle for the portrayal of his sombre visual humour. No obvious part for Johnny Depp though; but there again, perhaps he could do the voice over for the character of Death!

The book was a present from Cardiff and I devoured it. Terry Pratchett is something like a banned substance for me. I remember reading my first Discworld novel and mentally registering that this could be trouble. If you are not immediately repulsed by the grubbily twee ideas featured in Pratchett’s novels then you will probably be hooked by the end of your first. Some people, of course, recognize this proclivity and immediately set up fire walls to protect themselves.

I have had some practice at this having had to defend myself from the novels and short stories of Robert Heinlein,

Isaac Asimov, Evelyn Waugh, Tom Sharpe, P G Wodehouse, Agatha Christie (especially the Miss Marple series) and Penguin Modern Classics when they had all those wonderful modern paintings on the covers. Some of these writers have an addictive quality that makes heroin look like sherbet.

I remember with the writings of Robert Heinlein that I had to set a number of strict rules to prevent my total overdose on his eminently readable books. I vowed that I would only buy his works second hand, in one second hand book shop and for a small sum of money. A sum, indeed so small that I hesitate to bring it to mind as it merely demonstrates with stark clarity the inroads that inflation has made in the ensuing years!

With Terry Pratchett I have had to rely on even stricter fire walls and only read volumes that I am given or find lying around. For example, if there had been a Pratchett novel among the books on the borrowing shelf in my last school then it would have been taken and read as one of my first coherent actions in the place. But there weren’t so it wasn’t.

Read it your own peril. A thorough delight!

The other book which I finished this morning while waiting for the girls to arise and go forth to fry was ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns’ by Khaled Hosseini.

This was given to me by our absconding assistant unit manager (obviously before she absconded. Isn’t that a wonderful sounding word? Absconded. I think its something to do with the daring juxtaposition of a plosive and sibilant) with the smiling injunction that I was to cry as I read it. I didn’t.

It is set in Afghanistan and uses religion, sectional infighting and the effect of world politics to provide some of the impetus for the drive of the narrative. The basic story is “in the end it is love that triumphs over death and destruction.” I know this because it says so on the back of the book. I found sections of it gripping and I found it hard not to sympathise with the final act of violence – but overall I was not enthusiastic. I would however recommend it as a painless way of reading about the misogynistic hypocrisy of the regime of the Taliban. One feels like making some trite comment about the inequities of religion and the inevitable genocidal extinction that comes with the logical extension of a faulty hypothesis which is based on revealed knowledge which is true by faith. That oxymoron, ‘revealed knowledge’ has brought so much misery into the world one doesn’t know how to find the words to give an adequately venomous response to the lazy beliefs founded by the sons of pregnant virgins, angels talking to business men, oddly disappearing golden tablets, stone engraved tablets and the rest of the magic rubbish.

I’m only guessing, but I think that the previous paragraph has its genesis in a bout of extended cleaning of the flat. There is nothing like brushing, sweeping and polishing to get me in a thoroughly unphilosophical state of mind.

Perhaps when the scent of the various aerosols I have used has dissipated I can get back to the state of placid cynicism which is my default setting!