March round-up
Everything that doesn't fit neatly elsewhere
Things I’ve picked up from The Book of Days
Arsenic poisoning? In a strange plot twist I had to shelve the Book of Days for half of March as I suddenly remembered an article I’d read last year, and had a wobble on whether or not it was one of the mid-19th century green books that was coloured with an arsenic compound1. It’s almost certainly not, according to the helpful researchers at St Andrew’s university who have now seen a close-up photo of the binding in good light, but they reminded me not to drink my habitual mug of Earl Grey while I’m flicking through it and to wash my hands afterwards, as it could well have other unpleasant stuff embedded in it. The Victorians were buggers for using harmful substances in everyday household items. If you have any questionable books of your own, the University of Delaware has a flow-chart that may help, and St Andrew’s are aiming to make a relatively affordable device available this summer so that libraries or serious collectors could have their own testing kit available — get in touch with them if you might be interested.
Other reading
I finished Family Britain by David Kynaston! If you enjoyed, or liked the sound of, Austerity Britain 1945-51 then you will probably enjoy this 1951-57 sequel as we slide out of rationing and into changing attitudes and rock n roll. Incidentally I have also finally got round to listening to last year’s BBC radio series Postwar, on which David Kynaston occasionally pops up. It’s the story of ‘the 1945 election and the dawn of a new age’ and even I, who can bore for Britain on this topic, have learnt some new stuff from it. The episodes are only about a quarter of an hour long, bite-sized chunks if you will, and thus fairly easy to fit into your day.
This month’s PG Wodehouse2 was A Pelican at Blandings, with a starring role for Lord Emsworth’s younger brother Galahad Threepwood, one of my favourite Wodehouse characters. Nobody stole Emsworth’s pig, for a change, but there were a couple of sets of star-crossed lovers and a spot of light blackmail. It is, I think, the final completed Blandings novel — there was another underway when Wodehouse died but it was incomplete.
Being further in the mood for lightly comic reading material I picked a couple of rom-coms at random from the BorrowBox app for library e-books, but neither of them were quite my cup of tea. There’s an awful lot of them around that I don’t find funny, or can’t stand the world of, or are just plain badly-written3. However, I did then buy a decent one which I reviewed recently: Funny Story by Emily Henry. It happened to be set in the USA, whereas I have thus far read British ones of one sort or another, so that was interesting.
Writing
I did manage a last-minute entry to the BBC Write Across Bradford development scheme for TV writing. I didn’t get any further with my stories for the Midsummer spoken word night, however, because I was ill for the second half of March — unrelated to arsenic, you’ll be pleased to know; I went ‘old lady clubbing’ as it’s known around here thanks to an article in The Guardian my dad spotted the day before one of my afternoon jaunts, and picked up some sort of wintry virus that took a while to shake off. I’m hoping for a more productive April.
In the meantime, of course, you can always listen to past episodes of my audio sitcom Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, go here: https://poisonous-books.wp.st-andrews.ac.uk
I’m not deliberately setting out to read one a month, it just seems to have fallen that way so far
If anyone had tried reading the first one out loud, they would have realised how unwieldy and awkward the sentences were. And this is coming from me, the master of the long meandering sentence.