Dear Blog,
Crikey, I haven't written anything here since last November! Heck, better put something up quick!
So, here's the thing, I have been busy, on other blogs and stuff. Always busy, busy, busy.
And I've been reading novels and biographies, too, which is odd for me, but having accumulated over 100 downloaded free books on my Kindle, it did kind of prompt me to action. There again, what I've actually read on the Kindle is paltry.
I have gotten through some REAL books - the autobiography of
Eric Sykes, If I Don’t Write It Nobody Else Will which was hanging around my parent's house after my father passed away last summer. As Dad lived in Blackpool, it was small comfort to know that the young Eric Sykes visited the pub at the top of Dad's road, Uncle Tom's Cabin, though these days it's a revue bar in the Ma Kelly chain. 7/10
Then there was
David Jason, Only Fools and Stories: From Del Boy to Granville, Pop Larkin to Frost which had some great nuggets in it like how he came to do the falling into the bar area when the counter was left up in the air - all down to impeccable comic timing and amazing willpower. It's not easy controlling your arms when falling as they are programmed to stop you causing personal injury. Then, the tricky transition out of being typecast as Delboy to becoming a cosy favourite as Pop Larkin and further contrast with the deep-thinking Detective Inspector Jack Frost. 8/10
I next moved on to
Neil Armstrong: A Life of Flight Hardcover by Jay Barbree . The book is written by someone who knew Neil very well throughout his life. The book acknowledges that people would typically expect the first man to stand upon the Moon's surface to have subsequently made himself the richest man on Earth, and sets out to explain that Neil saw himself as just one part of a very large, but select, team of people, some of whom gave their lives in catastrophic failures in space-related disasters. Neil Armstrong was never out for the glory. A really good read. 10/10.
Looking for further recommendations, I asked
The Mundane Appreciation Society if they could help. Of their suggestions, I opted for
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson which wasn't quite the thing I was looking for, but I got hold of it anyway. And it turned out to be a real barrel of laughs! It tied together many of the major world events over the past 80 years with the preposterous but heartwarmingly jovial idea that this fortunate, or unfortunate whichever way you look at it, a Swedish man was responsible for, one way or another, shall we say, influencing the events that have unfolded. Like, for solving the problem of the Atom bomb, and then suggesting that he helped the Russians towards a similar goal, also saving General Franco's life, and escaping a Vladivostok camp with Einstein's unintelligent half-brother, Herbert, after insulting Josef Stalin. It's a great idea for story writing to weave history together in such a fashion, and to do it in such a humoured way is a masterstroke. 10/10
So that's books.
The dream
Now, what really prompted me to make a jotting in this blog today, was my dream of last night. I had been listening to audio clips of David Walliams reading aloud from some of his books prior to going to bed and that might have had something to do with it. So here it is. In the dream ...
... I walked into a charity shop (I have spent time looking around such establishments in the recent past for a rummage) and picked up a card (we just had Mother's Day, and the card I picked up was not unlike the one in the dream). Examining the card I could see that it looked quite normal and ordinary. It had a picture on the front, blank on the inside cover, some text on the next page, and the usual 'Printed By' guff on the back.
I asked how much? The assistant picked it up, and at first, said "£550".
I gave him a typically eye-popping look and said, "Pardon?"
The assistant said, "Sorry" and called over a colleague.
The colleague, I surmised that he might have been the manager, turned the card over and said, "This is worth thousands".
I said, "You're joking, it's just a card! Let me see it again."
He handed it back to me saying that he couldn't possibly sell it to me.
Why ever not? I turned the card over in my hands. The front changed to text. I turned a page over. That had text on it, too. So did the opposite page, as did the next pages and so on to the back cover. In all, there were 8 pages, or sides, to this 'card' which wasn't a card but a book.
I turned to the front page again. The text had changed again, it was the continuing story from the back page. But - but, how? Oh! It's a magic book! No wonder it's so valuable!
... footnote ...
Dad passed away 17 July.
