Being Me

Before you click 'Join' for an online conference call or meeting, in which you show off your bookshelf behind you, which 10 books should you remove?  Haemorrhoid Hell: When You're Not Sitting Comfortably  Sex Without Socks On: The Ultimate Guide to Middle-aged Intimacy  Joyce's Ulysses : The Facts You Need to Fool your Friends  Rock-Solid Excuses for Parties, Weddings and Baby Showers How to Re-Gift Christmas presents by the 27th Warts and All: Advice about Ugly Growths in Awkward Places Unfollowing and Muting: Social Media Without Fear Kitchen Trickery: Making Waitrose-made-it Look Like You-made-it When Will They Bloody Leave? - 10 tips for getting dinner guests out of your hall and, of course, finally - The Pandemic Bookshelf - Because They Will Be Looking     

Lennie Small - Of Mice and Men Lennie has been seated at the very back of the class so that other pupils can see the board. He cannot be faulted for effort in his academic studies but struggles with most aspects of the curriculum. He does love nature, especially animals, although since the unfortunate incident when Lennie was allowed to take the class gerbils home for the holidays, we have tried to divert his interests. He is generally well-behaved in school; nevertheless, he did receive a detention for shouting 'I like my beans with ketchup' repeatedly across the school dining room, upsetting the catering staff. Also, he has joined the after-school Film Studies club but continually insists they watch clips of 'Watership Down'; other pupils are wearying of this. Lennie usually does relate well to other pupils, but is less popular with the girls, most of whom have taken to wearing pastel colours to school. With further work on his social skills, Lennie should have a brig...

A strange man offered me a handful of his dog's fur this morning while I was walking to church.  Am I right in thinking you can't say the same happened to you? I'd been watching him while I approached.  He was standing with his two young children, and had bent down to groom his big hairy dog with the palm of his hand.  I heard him saying, 'Look at all this moulting fur, boys.  Look at this.'  As I walked past the group, the dad obviously thought I was his wife (who was in fact walking behind me), so he stood up suddenly and thrust a large clump of fur right into my face, saying, 'Will you look at all that?' It's only after the event, isn't it, that you think of all the things you could have said in reply?  I wished I'd said, 'I will, if you like, because I haven't had such a kind offer in ages' or 'No, thanks.  I've already had my dog fur fix for the day' or 'Only if you promise I can show you my treasury tag colle...

I'd hate you to have run out of my shortened fairy tales for those evenings when you are reading to your children/grandchildren/child you are meant to be responsibly babysitting. The Three Bears and the Brief Appearance of Goldilocks The three bears lived in a cottage in the woods.  One morning, they were all eating breakfast as usual, unaware that a blonde girl was peering in at them from outside their window.  (Only the omniscient narrator was aware of this fact.)             A tense argument was raging because Mother Bear never seemed to get the porridge right.  Father Bear complained that his was too cold, and Baby Bear cried because his was too hot.  Mother Bear was getting flustered.  Hers seemed fine.  Men were SO fussy.               The phone rang.  Mother Bear went to answer it.  ‘That’ll be Auntie Freda,’ she ...

Now I am to become a grandmother, I need to get my stock of fairy tales sorted in case I'm asked to babysit.  They're so LONG, though, aren't they?  What were the Grimms THINKING?!  Didn't THEY ever need to get downstairs in time for Coronation Street?   It's no good.  Some cuts will have to be made.  So ... Even Littler Red Riding Hood Little Red Riding Hood lived near the forest with her mother.  One day, her mother said, ‘If I bake some cakes, will you take them to Grandmother?  Only, be careful as you walk through the forest, because of the wolf.  He is dangerous and fierce and will eat you.’              The little girl had barely been on the forest path for five minutes before she saw the wolf.  She stopped, petrified.  But the wolf did not seem to even notice her at first.  He had his hairy head buried in a book called ‘Lupine Anger Management - Module...

More typo-lit, one of my favourite genres: To Kilt a Mockingbird - a tale set in the Southern States of America in which a young family move into the area from Aberdeen.  The children are found dressing the local wildlife in tartan and have to be taught that clothing innocent victims in bright material is not acceptable.  The little girl (Scot) says, 'Shoot, Pa, that's the darndest thing I ever did hear!' and there is surprise all round at her adoption of the local dialect in such a short time. To Kiln a Mockingbird - a tale set in the Southern States of America in which a wise father teaches his children that to put an innocent bird into a red-hot oven, converting it into an attractive china piece for the kitchen, was bound to upset Aunt Alexandra when given as a birthday present, and if this was indeed their intention, they deserved a whipping.   They don't get the whipping; the father can't stand Aunt Alexandra either. To Bill a Mockingbird - a tale set ...

I'm reading a book about pies.  It's by James M Cain and it's called 'Mildred Pierce', and I think if you asked the author what his book was about he'd say something posh like 'family conflict' or 'survival in the face of circumstances' or 'loss of love', but basically it's about pies.  Have you read it?  (Or seen the mini-series which had Kate Winslet in it?  There was a lot of noise about it, all of which I evidently missed.) It starts with a husband and wife splitting up.  This happens while they're in the kitchen where she's making pies .  Then they split, and she starts selling pies to earn money.  Then she starts working in a cafe and finds that the pies they buy are inferior to her pies .  So she persuades the cafe owner to buy her pies instead.  Then she starts a pie restaurant.  Now I read that she's running a take-away pie service as well as the restaurant. That's as far as I've got, but things are bu...

I'm just doing a re-read of Dracula  ready for going back to school next week (sob ..) and, I have to say, I find his 'sleep in the daytime, stay awake at night' lifestyle intriguing. (And, another thing, I'm loving the absence of mirrors - I mean, I like this man's think ing!) Anyhow, I've been considering whether to adopt his nocturnal habit, and it's meant going through some of the pros and cons. 1. I wouldn't be able to shop for clothes in Britain because the High Streets would be closed, so I could phone fashionable stores in Japan or China to see if they had the jeans I'd just seen online..... BUT I'd have to be prepared either to lose half my body weight or wear the jeans only on my feet and have the rest flapping along behind me. 2. I would have to give up teaching as a career ('Hi, I've rung about the English teacher post ... oh, you mean, it's in the daytime?.... it never said on the ad ..... oh well, never MIND! *...

What I love about the word 'antonym' is that it means 'opposite' and 'antonym' is the opposite of the word 'synonym' - it's so cool when things turn out like that. What would have happened had some famous novelists thought, 'Nah!  Stupid idea!  I'll do just the opposite.'  I have had a think about this, and here I offer you some 'Antonymised (?) Book Titles' and the storylines which may have emerged ... A Room Without a View - A young middle-class woman visits Italy and gets a room with a beautiful view.  Some chaps next door offer to swap it for one which overlooks the hotel boiler room and a yard where the dustbins are kept.  She feels she can't say no and gives in.  This leads to more giving in when someone called Cecil asks her to marry him.  Having settled for a view of a hotel boiler room and dustbin yard, marrying someone called Cecil seems to fit into the general picture of settling for second best.  Just in time, ...

Some old novels need bringing up to date, methinks. Ta-DAH!  I bring you ....  Techno-lit! Cyber with Rosie ... in which a Gloucestershire lad in very baggy trousers strolls through a field with a young girl with plaits and a gingham dress.  The sun is out.  They can hear cows.  They discuss life at the village school, the cooking smells in his mother's kitchen, and his new Apple iMac with its 27-inch LED backlit display and widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio.  They kiss. Orange is Not the Only Fruit - A well-known mobile phone company brings out a new range of apple and banana shaped handsets which they market primarily in a depressing Northern town.  A repressed teenager with rhetorical skills honed in the Pentecostal church abandons her ambitions to go to Oxford, leaves home under a cloud, and joins the phone company as their main Northern rep.  There is a touching reconciliation with her mother after she contributes an idea for an organ musi...

Beoslug – A breathtakingly exciting Anglo-Saxon tale in which a creature slithers from the earth, after undergoing some 'be an instant literary hero' training, and silently creeps up on a green monster, who then slips on Beoslug and brains himself on the edge of a table made from real oak, measuring forty feet by eighty feet and holding thirteen pigs with apples in their mouths and some tankards made from Celts' teeth and thigh bones.  Beoslug is rewarded for his endeavours by firstly being scraped up by a buxom maiden (although he is not in a state to notice this) and then being immortalised in a long, long poem in a form of English no one can understand but which doesn't stop everyone from swearing blind they've read the whole thing from start to finish. L ord of the Wasps – a group of boys land on a desert island and immediately begin to hate each other.  One of the reasons for this is that some of the littluns swear they’ve seen a man in a yellow and black st...

Welcome to the world of homophone literature.  A homophone is a word which sounds the same as another word but which is spelled differently, like 'bear' and 'bare'.  So, homophone literature is what could have happened had some famous authors (or their editors) had spelling problems.  We might have had ... Grate Expectations … in which a young, orphaned boy visits an old lady still dressed in her wedding clothes who makes him clean out her fireplace and, because he doesn’t do it properly, forces him to re-do it many times until he gets it perfect.  The novel ends with him hand in hand with a young lady called Estella, although she is hesitant because of his blackened fingernails and grimy palms, forcing a somewhat ambiguous ending. Around the World in Eighty Daze … in which an octogenarian, confused and reeling from the fact that he has reached such an advanced age, embarks on a world tour, spurred on by a wager from his gentleman’s club.  He does complete ...

An icy wind whipped around the head of Captain Walton as he stood on the deck of his stranded ship, staring into the whiteness.  He hadn't seen this much white since making that washing powder advert in his failed-actor days.  It stretched for miles into the distance, like a ... like a .... helluva lot of white. Suddenly, a Dark Shape emerged as if out of the snowy wastes themselves.  It came nearer and nearer.  What could it be?  [A Dark Shape, you fool.  You just said .] As it approached, Walton saw that the Dark Shape was actually a man.  [Oh. Okay.] A man who looked exhausted, spent, drained, shattered, worn out, and, moreover, tired.  When he reached the ship, Walton hauled him onto the deck where he lay spread-eagled, for all the world like a spreaded eagle.  Do I know this man? Walton thought.  Something about him looked familiar.  He had never seen a spreaded eagle, so it couldn't have been that. It was as the man was ...

HEALTH WARNING: THIS POST IS WELL LONG.  YOU MAY NEED A PLATE OF SANDWICHES, SLICE OF PIZZA AND A BEER OR TWO.  DON'T SAY I DIDN'T WARN YOU.  I PROMISE A HAIKU OR SOMETHING NEXT TIME ... Once upon a time, there was a boy called Jack who lived with his mother.  They were poor, so poor that they only had the choice of fifty-four channels on their cable TV network.  Yes, that poor. One day, Jack's mother, frustrated with this lack of choice, switched off the shopping channel, lobbed the remote control at Jack's head and yelled, 'Get off your backside and go and sell our cow at the market.  We need more money.' Jack was shocked.  Not because she'd suggested selling the cow that they had bought as a calf, fed, raised and nurtured like a member of the family, but because the day before he had already sold the cow to a local abattoir for a good price and updated his collection of Grand Theft Auto games with the money. But he had to pretend.  'Ok...

On the other hand, perhaps I'm wrong, and it's not that some famous novelists hyped up their stories too much as I suggested in my recent post in which I dumbed-down novel titles . Perhaps novelists have, in fact, been over-cautious.  Maybe some classic literature would be improved if the authors had just pushed the limits a little and not been so circumspect...... Louisa May Alcott might have written  Great Big Humungous Women, in which a genteel 19th century American family reacts to the pressures of life with Marmee and life without Dardee by slathering Nutella onto enormous pieces of cornbread, making the search for contentedness in family life somewhat more difficult, particularly when the budgeting for dress material gets tricky.  When one of the four daughters gets a terminal illness, there are unseemly fights over who gets her portion, and Marmee becomes distressed, particularly as, when a wealthy neighbour offers them a Christmas feast, the girls are too...

Some authors, you know, just need to CALM DOWN a little, get less emotional, exaggerate less about stuff.  The literary canon could be so different, so much quieter and softer and less stressy ... The Grapes of Mild Annoyance - John Steinbeck Minor Offences and Verbal Warnings - Fyodor  Dostoevsky A Short Scuffle and Peace - Leo Tolstoy Narrow Strip of Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys Slightly Unstable Medium Slopes - Emily Bronte To Threaten a TeasingBird - Harper Lee Not Particularly Cheery House - Charles Dickens A Touch of Arrogance and A Mild Tendency to Judge Others -  Jane Austen Minor Influence - Jane Austen The Kinda Okay Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald The Trip - Homer Lady Chatterley's Casual Acquaintance - D H Lawrence A Room with a Windowbox - E M Forster Minimal Adaptation - Franz Kafka The Divine Lame Joke - Dante Moderate Hopes - Charles Dickens Les Mildly-Fedupables - Victor Hugo Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Peeping Tom - John Le Carre...

I once saw a student misspell 'Turn of the Screw' as 'Turn of the Shrew' ... So, what else to do, but to browse one's bookshelves for other potential animal classics ...? ' Mansfield Bark' - a novel set in 18th century England countryside in which the main characters are well brought up dogs who wear bonnets, bows and dresses.  These dresses reveal a not-inconsiderable portion of their chests.  They live in a manor house and hold a ball for all the local, lower-class dogs, during which there is a competition to see which of the dogs has the best bark.  Of course, the Mansfield dogs win, as it would not be seemly for dogs of a lower status to do so.  The dogs leave the ball, but do not dare complain about the injustice until they reach the end of the two mile long driveway.  Then, they all leave their calling cards just inside the tall, iron gates, even though that usually only happens between 2 and 3 in the afternoons. ' Purrsuasion' - Same s...

Have you heard of the novel called 'Turn Off the Screw'?  I noticed it mentioned in a student's exercise book once and I was most intrigued.  I have read one with a similar title by Henry James, but this one was new to me.  Perhaps it was about some children whose governess has special skills in plumbing and who, to keep them busy and to keep their minds off some strange behaviours she indulges in, gets them involved in helping her sort out all the water systems in their large Gothic house.  (Large Gothic houses are well known for not having the best plumbing - this explains why so many of them burn so easily and quickly in books.) How different things would have been if similar misspellings had changed the titles of other well-known classic texts ... The Picture off Dorian Gray - the tale of Mr Gray, a handsome young Victorian who has his portrait painted, but then refuses to have it hung on the wall, instead insisting on taking it everywhere with him.  Th...

I have amused myself greatly with my own foolishness today. Was on the bus (where else?) and opened up the book I'm currently reading or, more accurately, struggling with. You might have spotted in my 'What I am currently reading' sidebar that I was complaining about a book by William Trevor in which he seemed to have introduced a wide variety of sub-plots which I was hoping would come together at some point. I knew the novel was all set in Ireland, but apart from that, couldn't see any links at all between the characters or their situations. Chapter by chapter, it just seemed to get even more complicated. Still, I was determined to persevere. In fact, I was even a little proud of myself for sticking with a postmodern narrative. I'm an English teacher, after all, I comforted myself. I ought to be able to cope. Opened up to the seventh chapter. A new character, a new story, a new setting. That was it! I slapped the book shut. English teacher, or no English t...

Most disconcerting. Waited at the bus stop, and was pleased to see it come round the corner within a couple of minutes. Bit disturbed, though, to hear, just as it was pulling in, that someone was murdering a dog nearby. I didn't know how they were murdering it, but they weren't doing it nicely, that's for sure. There was a painful, loud, 'OOOWWWRROOOOOO' which seemed to go on for ages. I looked round as I got on the bus, but no sign of ex-dog or murderer. Saying a prayer for dogs everywhere to the Dog-God, I got on, and promptly forgot all about the terrible events because I was reading Jane Eyre, and, my word, that book's a cracker. One sentence about Rochester's granite profile and storm-filled eyes and I couldn't have cared less if someone had disembowelled a new-born puppy in the next seat. Then the bus started off. And, then, as it stopped at the first junction, I realised the dog murderer wasn't back there at the bus station, but he/she/i...