For some reason I find myself in the market for some comfort reading. Despite an unprecedentedly brutal recent cull, I have more than 5,000 books. There must be something.
But finding the right comfort read is a delicate art. If you’re looking for something to while away the time when you are ill or convalescing, it can be relatively straightforward. Something you have already read – and reread, and reread – and which it will take virtually no energy at all to reread again. Hell, I could probably lie back, close my eyes and recite Maeve Binchy’s Light a Penny Candle to myself if I had to. In fact, I know I could. It’s how I get through sex.
But if you’re banishing a mood rather than a condition, things are trickier. I am looking at my beloved Wodehouses at the moment and want to burn them. You unthinking fool, Wooster! You lucky, prewar, club-dwelling bastard! Where’s my Jeeves? Where’s the omniscient valet the nation needs to clean up a proliferating set of potentially disastrous consequences set in motion by the idiocies of a group of pea-brained Old Etonians like yourself? Where do you get off, being fictional when the rest of us are stuck in the real world? Wodehouse will not serve today.
Children’s books – they’re almost always a safe bet. I could head back down the burrow with the Wombles, or escape through the back of a wardrobe with the Pevensies, or have my spiritual agonies soothed by The Secret Garden. The Little House on the Prairie books might do the job too – imagine striking out for the west, further and further on until there was nothing but grass below and sky above, with nowt to do but build a log cabin and start wrenching a living from the earth. The simple – if frequently locust-and-scarlet-fever-filled – life.
But sometimes when you read the books of your childhood, it just makes you miss those halcyon days too much.
“Hello darkness, my old friend,” I whisper as I glide towards the shelf of apocalyptic’n’post-apocalyptic fiction, where barren wastelands are peopled by stunned protagonists doing their best to make sense of their new worlds. A former shelf of entertainment and escapism transforms into a shelf of how-to manuals. Learning, not escapism, is the watchword for these perilous times. And nothing can be too bad with John Christopher as your guide.
Bully for them
New research from Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City vouchsafes us the news that bullying gives some people the same amount of pleasure as most of us get from eating chocolate. A few questions:
1 YOU DON’T SAY?
2 Where did you find the research subjects? Who replies to an advert saying “Bullies wanted! For brain experiments!”
3 Could you not have discovered this 30 years ago when I was trying to pay off my bullies in Mars Bars but they kept banging my face on the water fountain instead? “The dopamine hit’s the same!” I could have cried through my splintered teeth.
My disc drive is full
Yesterday I told my husband that I “didn’t have the bandwith” to deal with his latest health crisis (suspected finger cancer) because I was “too busy processing all my emotions about everything”. Apparently I’m a computer now.
Technology has colonised our language as well as everything else. And all I can think is that I am ready for IBM’s latest answer to Deep Blue to come in and do the job. Take my emotions, crunch the data and give me a printout of what to do next.
