Here is a sentence you won’t often read in this retirement blog – I read the weekend papers and found plenty of interest. I have written before about my frustrations with finding very little in the papers written for people like me – whoever they may be. This last weekend I found plenty.
Of course I always enjoy the Guardian Review (of books) -as in photo above. but even more so with Christmas coming up and me looking for presents mostly for myself, but also Mrs Summerhouse. My choices have to be books I wouldn’t just go out and buy throughout the year. So no cheap paperback crime novels, but rather books that are a bit unusual and more expensive. I have just sent off for 3 books I’ll tell you about at a later date. The choices were made on the basis of reviews in the Review. Makes sense?
I thought I’d got a couple of options for Mrs SH, never the easiest person to buy Christmas and birthday presents for (they’re close together), so I thought I was on to a good thing. But when I searched for them one had reviews that made me think again and the second simply did not seem to exist at all. So not so good but at least my presents will be there*. Selfish, moi?
Elsewhere I found a restaurant review by Jay Rayner. If he ever stops writing for The Observer, I stop reading it. A white, overweight, male writing nicely about food and I don’t even like restaurant reviews, mainly on the grounds that we never go any more. Since the dogs our meals out are to dog-friendly pubs not restaurants. But he can write and we don’t feel a million miles apart.
I wrote out this paragraph, ‘the outer panels of the Hydra arena, down by the Clyde (he was in Glasgow) are glowing in candy shades of pink and sky blue as if ready to return to the planet that dispatched it and, on Queen Street, the gutters are over flowing.’ Nice.
Just to prove it’s not only white, over-weight, male writers I admire I read an article by a young black guy, name of Derek Owusu. He just had a book published and he was talking about his mental health problems. He was asked if he thought people were more willing to talk about mental health issues these days and replied, “I think we’re de-stigmatising particular mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. But then you don’t get many men talking about personality disorders or schizophrenia. The mental health issues that people find scary aren’t talked about – that’s where the conversation needs to go”
He said how happy he was to get a label of Borderline Personality Disorder. Before he got it, he said I just used to think ‘I was strange’. My emotions were always fluctuating. I was often angry. When I was diagnosed it was a relief.
I used to spend a fair bit of my time professionally arguing against the use of labels (although unfortunately in the system then (and now) they were required to get funding. Overall my view of labels was that they offered false comfort. I’d rather be ‘strange’ than have label. But hey, what do I know. Interesting guy though.
A little further on there was an article by one of the paper’s regular columnists – David Mitchell. There are a couple of things about him I admire – first, he writes a regular, weekly column and as somebody who sometimes struggles to turn out one, or even two (shorter) blogs a week, I can only admire how he manages this under the pressure of a deadline and of course the pay-check. Nobody pays me and I think it would completely stymie me if they did.
Second, he’s an all-rounder and I’ve always been rather envious of people who can do more than one thing. It’s why I try to play piano and guitar, run a vineyard and write a blog and so on. My early hero was Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci, because he was good at different stuff – helicopters, drainage systems and an odd spot of painting. David writes the column and TV scripts and stars in some of them, so similar.
He was asked why he continued to write the column when he had all the other stuff going on. Probably Leonardo was asked a similar question – why bother with the painting etc. His (David’s) answer was in parts, but partially, he said, because he liked the immediacy of the column and it was unlike TV programmes that needed other people and took ages to come to the screen. This is exactly how I feel about this blog, write it down, bish, bash, bosh, put it out there, stand back and bask in the glory. Well, similar any way.
And there was other stuff, fascinating series of articles by four East German (as was and seems still are) authors about their lives since the wall came down. I had no idea it was still such an issue in Germany. I thought it was just the good old UK that was completely fucked up by its history. Just goes to show I should get out a bit more or at least keep reading the papers instead of complaining about them.
*Actually I shouldn’t have been so smug, Amazon cancelled my account, a credit card problem, I think. Serves me right you’re thinking.