“Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else.”

I can only apologise for the slowness of my reading progress. I’m sure you wait avidly by your computer for a daily update of what I’ve read and what I am about to read, and yet you are consistently disappointed when I get through about one book every couple of months (at least, that’s what it seems like).

I’m always fascinated by people who plough through books like there’s no tomorrow. I cycle to work mostly, now, so I don’t even get my tube reading time. These people! Where do they get the time? Don’t their bottoms become numb? I suppose for some people, it’s their job; other than that, I don’t know what your excuse is.

Anyhow, I’m going to be out of commission for a while now. I’m not blinded or anything, just that I got hold of a three-in-one copy of Cormac McCarthy‘s Border Trilogy, which can only be described as ‘fat’. It might have to be broken down into chunks but if McCarthy continues the searing paucity and undertone of All The Pretty Horses, I may just end up devouring the lot.

Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia was lovely though – everything a travel book should be, and more. It was one of those rare moments of literature that makes me want to do something with my life: not just hop off to South America on a whim, but write, write about travel, or being at home, or going to the shops, anything, write it down. He’s a good egg, that one.

Work it?

Snow day 2.0 today; as it turns out I’d already booked the day off for other purposes, so just a quicky. Have not long returned from Muswell Hill (still so Muswell Hill, if you know what I mean), where charity shop raiding was done. The car is stuck behind a bank of ice preventing me escaping the camber, so off to the bus stop it was. 

All in all, was very pleasant – apparently, the most productive way to work is not to sit down and slog at it for hours on end, but to take proper breaks. 

On the way home, clutching my fat, new (old) hardback of Nicholas Shakespeare‘s biography of Bruce Chatwin (my interesting man of the week), I listened to a slightly too-old young mother discussing how someone who had offended her friend would be duly struck off Facebook. Ah, the heady days in which we live.

Albatrosses and penguins are the last birds I’d want to murder

 

Bruce Chatwin

I’ve tried writing fiction before. I wrote a short story at the behest of a friend, but I didn’t really enjoy the process all that much. I like writing well enough, but piling on top of that the pressure of coming up with a good storyline, that seems too much like dooming myself to failure.

 

I’ve recently been a bit more tempted by travel writing. Now, it’s not that straightforward: I’m not the type to pull a Bruce Chatwin and just hop it somewhere remote, informing my employers of my absence via telegram, chronicling my exploits via branded stationery. I think if anything, I’d be writing about what I know, the Britain that I’m steadily exploring via the means of Google Maps. About the holiday destinations, etc, the charity shop destinations, the Chilterns and the North Downs, the chalklands of the south and the bad lands of Sheppey. 

The problem is, it’s not much of a read, to hear somebody go on about their holiday like that. Whether it’s Jonathan Raban wandering around Montana, or Chatwin in Patagonia, or Norman Mailer in Kinshasa, what makes the books so wonderful is almost not the place – it’s the people. That’s where I’d struggle, I think. I’ve not inherited my dad’s embarassing trait of talking to people in shops (“busy today?”). I think if I ever wanted to write about places, I’d need to learn to talk to people…

Maybe one day. I’ll add it to my list of things to do before I die.

Texts

I finished Italo Calvino‘s If on a winter’s night a traveller. It was pretty much hard work. I’m told it’s one a lot of people give up, so I persevered, and it was interesting, I suppose – creative in a postmodern way, where everything’s relative and related, where there’s as much value in falsehood as in truth, where nothing is ever as it seems first, and then sometimes is.

I don’t know, I like when a novel has a bit of, well, novelty, about it: I love reading Eco, or Murakami, and so on, and I can handle a looping, nonlinear, narrative as much as anyone. But I think Calvino wrote something of a catwalk hat here, a style/approach that was much copied after, and which filtered down through more manageable tomes, but is a bit… much, on first reading.

Anyway, I’ve progressed onto Bruce Chatwin‘s In Patagonia, which is far more straightforward. I’ll write a travel book someday, you see if I don’t. I’m planning to update It Isn’t Far From London, but with charity shops instead of walks.