Yesterday and tomorrow

Yesterday:

My granddaughter told me over the phone she was going to

eat muffins –

her mother was just baking them.

She said this in perfect German;

I answered in perfect English,

and she got bored.

 

 

I read the papers and

I went into the garden,

where  I trimmed shrubs and

helped cut hedges,

including the wire of the electric hedge cutter.

The wire needed a big black plaster.

 

The sun was out,  it was mild, not raining at all.

And I took off my jumper and

the shrubs had grown really thick and fearsome over the wet summer.

So they needed a saw to cut through.

 

I also read the book reviews in the papers,

including  the one in the Independent:

about the future of books and reading and

about people who no longer read books.

About e-books and print on demand, but

it was the ’not-reading-people’ that twirled through my mind.

  

25% of British people have not read a single

book last year.

Does that include babies and young people?

And people who cannot read or write?

What does that say about the education

system?

 

And then this view:

Will books exist in 50 years time?

Answer:

Definitely, but they will also be just one of the many ways we experience art

I feel quite cynical about the cloak of preciousness that’s been

woven around the novel: it’s such a recent medium –

we’ve only had it a few hundred years and yet you often

hear people say

We’ve always had novels

 

And I?

I dislike this self righteous verdict about

‘the cynical cloak of preciousness’

I love books. 

I love words and sentences and paragraphs.

and how they can evoke worlds and emotions

that no other medium can.

 

Tomorrow:

I will post my review on Coetzee.

Definitely.

 

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