Reading is best!

A second dip in the pool.

There was still sunshine covering more than half the pool when I got back home and it was hardly an effort to discard my school clothes and march resolutely towards the water.

Swimming in the pool at the moment is to immerse oneself in a shining mote filled universe.  The pine pollen is caught in suspension and illuminated by the sun so that one swims through a myriad pinpricks of gold.  It reminded me of my times in East Moors Steel Works in Cardiff when the air glittered with coal dust, fragments of black diamonds in the sunshine.

I’m not sure what I feel like swimming in the progenative dust of pullulating pines but it is certainly refreshing after the sweaty proximity of too many pupils and anyway I always have a shower after swimming!

Waiting for me at home was one of the many books that I have ordered in an untrammelled spate of book buying over the internet.

The one which has arrived first is “Beacon for Change – How the 1951 Festival of Britain shaped the modern age” by Barry Turner.

The Festival of Britain has always been one of my enthusiasms because it falls in the so-called Age of Austerity which stretches in Britain from 1945 to 1954 and the end of rationing.  I think part of my fascination can be traced back to the effect of a Penguin book called “Age of Austerity” edited by Michael Sissons and Philip French which had a series of engaging readable essays on this period in British history.  This is a book I unhesitatingly recommend, as indeed is the Turner book I am reading now.

“Beacon for Change” takes an unashamedly personal view of the period and the exhibition and produces something which is as gripping as a novel.

I am someone who possesses a Festival crown, bought for me I hastily add, by one of our Leeds neighbours who ventured down into the smoke and came back with something for the baby for him to treasure.  I have a very hazy memory of the Battersea Fun Fair, but I no longer know if it is mine or something which I have reconstructed from photographs and old film.  I remember shocking a teacher by recognizing and naming the Skylon in a photograph when the poor old festival was all but forgotten.

Talking of Skylon, I remember something on the radio a year or so back that suggested that the thing might be lying in the Thames somewhere and that we should find, retrieve and re-construct the illuminated exclamation mark.  I wholeheartedly subscribe to such a wanton use of scarce money!  I was always in favour of doing it to mark the 2012 Olympics in London and act as a symbol, but other more vulgar counsel prevailed!

I went to the exhibition in the Victoria and Albert some years ago and revelled in the amount of memorabilia and the photographs I had never seen before.  It was a delight!  And I still have the catalogue.

The Turner book gives an historical account, but it is filled with well-chosen quotations and anecdotes which enliven the narrative.  I have read the first 170 pages in the page turning way in which I usually read my guilty pleasures of science fiction or fantasy and have had to tell myself to go to bed because, as ever, I am teaching tomorrow!

More books should be on the way!