All Change

Suddenly, everything is different. After years of being out of the education system, my older son is happy at his new school and is expected to do well in his exams. He has just turned 16, which seems extraordinary.

My younger son is also at a new school and comes home full of enthusiasm, eager to tell us how he has spent his day. The school seems to be preparing its pupils for a forthcoming disaster, as there is a strong emphasis on crafts, woodcraft and self-sufficiency, but I've never seen a classroom with so many happy children. Other schools could learn something.

On the downside, my business is slowly dying - partly because I have to spend a sizeable chunk of the day ferrying my sons around, but also because I'm struggling to find a supplier. Two years ago, it was relatively easy to find stock, but the recycling industry is under far more pressure and separating old books is now regarded as too time consuming.

But even that isn't the end of the world, as my wife has just managed to secure a job in a publishing company. If we continue to live frugally we should survive.

As for me, I will try to juggle the demands of the school run, maintaining my business and running a house, however I realise that this is a normal day for thousands of working mothers, so I won't be expecting a special badge. As long as I have a strict routine, it should be straightforward enough.

In my darker moments, I worry about what I'll be doing in a few years' time, but that's an utterly pointless activity. The important thing is to focus on the present and make the most of it.

On the subject of making the most of the present, here's another batch of photos that I uploaded to Instagram recently. It's just a random selection of shots of East Sussex, but they all capture different aspects of the things I like about the local area at this time of year:

Heaven in a Wild Flower

I seem to be exiled in Sussex at the moment, but I can think of worse places to be. Like the main character in the Stanley Middleton novel I've just read, I'm finding pleasure in small things: a hedgerow in blossom, a hatched bird's egg, a flint wall covered in lichen, a Victorian letter box, a fish-shaped weather vane...

I hadn't read Stanley Middleton before. I first knew him as the author whose name I didn't recognise on a list of Booker Prize winners (he shared the prize with Nadine Gordimer in 1973). His novels were usually conspicuous by their absence from bookshop shelves.

Middleton's 'Necessary Ends' is a novel about an old man by an old man and deals with death, regret and loneliness in a way that is never mawkish or sentimental, eschewing melodrama in favour of an almost forensic realism.

A hostile critic might complain that the end result of this realism is a novel in which nothing happens. That would be unfair. In one scene a pub lunch is arranged, in another chocolate biscuits are served on a small plate. There is even an episode that involves the misuse of a front lawn.

But I'm being flippant about what is actually an exquisite, beautifully observed novel, written with great warmth and humanity. And once you realise that the author isn't going to resort to any of the predictable plot devices for a novel about an octogenarian - the heart attack, the violent burglary, the estranged child - you're left with a story in which even the most trivial events are loaded with significance.

In its quiet, understated way, 'Necessary Ends' has the same dramatic and redemptive qualities as any novel I could mention, but they are more subtle and nebulous. A pub lunch that might seem mundane to most of us becomes a transfigurative event and is quietly uplifting, suggesting that we can be surprised by joy at any age.

Which brings me back to the theme of finding pleasure in the familiar, or as Blake put it, heaven in a wild flower. Here are a few photos from the last week:

 

But for me, the best picture is the one below: my older son, running along the local beach for the first time in two years, laughing and playing with his brother. Thanks to a number of people, things are at last changing for the better.

Away With the White Horses

It has been an odd couple of days. Yesterday, a man turned up at work on a white horse, as if he was inviting me to join him on a quest. I would have said yes, but I was busy trying to move ten thousand books to a new building, one car load at a time.

I never found out what he wanted.

In the evening, a friend casually told us that he had done the voiceover for an advert that was voted the greatest UK television commercial of all time. Why hadn't he mentioned it before? I'm still telling people that I was on BBC Radio Five 14 years ago.

This morning I woke up to the sound of horses hooves and as I stood on one leg to place our broken blind in the small gap between the roller and ceiling, I saw some men in chainmail walk past. Then I remembered that it was the 750th anniversary of the Battle of Lewes.

The actual anniversary was a few days ago. At least, that's what everyone seems to think, but didn't we change our calendar in 1752 and lose eleven days?

Today, the town ground to a halt and a group of volunters recreated the Battle of Lewes, following the original route of 1264:

It was all good fun, unlike the original battle.

I always mixed feelings at events like these. On the one hand, I enjoy living in a town that cherishes its past (I imagine that in a hundred years' time, Lewes will look almost the same as it does today). But I also feel conscious of being, as the song goes, on the outside looking in. Perhaps I'll never be a Lewesian.

But enough of Lewes. This is supposed to be a book blog, so I'll move on to some of my favourite discoveries from last week, beginning with this striking frontispiece:

It comes from a 1920s book on aircraft, which was surprisingly worthless. I threw away the book but kept the frontispiece.

The next illustration has a very odd caption underneath:

"A quick desperate wriggle and his legs were over the board and the rest of him followed anyhow." Well, yes.

This illustration is from a rather disturbing 1920s book about the mind:

It comes from a chapter called "Cretins and Dunces", in which the author expresses view that weren't out of step with the times. The widespread enthusiasm for eugenics shocks us today, but of course it enjoyed a wide range of supporters that included Churchill, H G Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg and Marie Stopes.

Finally, two completely bonkers 1960s sci-fi novels:

Androids with whips? For some reason, that reminds me of this atrocious song.

As for this, perhaps it was a thoughtful novel about eugenics that was given a less than enlightened cover treatment to boost sales. I don't know. I can safely say that I will never read this book to find out.