I was wondering, as I read a long introduction to Erich Auerbach’s critical study of reality in western literature, if other people have little techniques and quirks for keeping their place when reading. Obviously, most people use bookmarks, the sensible, purpose-built tool for reliable book navigation, although some others, horror of horrors!, actually deface books by folding over the corners of their pages. My mother does this occasionally with her second-hand thrillers; my father has at several times expressed a severe distaste for the act. Personally, I can’t bring myself to damage any book, however poor its writing may be. I remember once last year, at a private view I attended, I believe for the Visual Studies course, my heart gave a lurch when I saw an artwork involving the cultivation of cress upon the partially-shredded pages of an open book. I experienced another cardiological shudder when, after reading only a few lines between the vibrant foliage, I realised the book was none other than Richard Adams’ Watership Down, doubtlessly one of the best books about talking rabbits ever written. Fortunately, my consternation was somewhat mitigated by the relative merit of the piece, which was actually rather well executed.

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Stories aren’t emotions, aren’t ideas, aren’t people and places: stories are just a series of words on a page, placed in a certain order, separated by various grammatical signposts we call punctuation. Less than that, they are a jumble of twenty-six different abstract shapes we call letters, jammed together into discrete bundles. It’s amazing therefore how certain words in a particular order can elicit a strong emotional respons, how a good story becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. Tom’s Midnight Garden is a good story. I supposed it must have been since I remembered significant portions of it from a single reading in my childhood, but these were only fragmentary and vague, and it was not until I finished it for the second time last night, maybe a decade after my first reading, that I realised how good it is, how nearly perfect even, it is.

Superficially, Tom’s Midnight Garden is a story about a boy, Tom, who is forced by his brother’s outbreak of measles at the start of the summer holiday, to stay with his aunt and uncle in their small city flat. Philippa Pearce wrote the book in 1958, and it is set around about then though, like all the best books, it is timeless. The only reason a reader would know the book was set in the late fifties / early sixties rather than at any other time, if they did not know when it was written, is from certain events near its end, and from Tom in the second line on the first page being said to have “looked his good-bye at the garden, and raged that he had to leave it.” Obviously this is a time when children were more inclined to play outside, to ‘make their own fun’; a time before videogames, or even widespread television, when being shut up inside a small flat for hours on end was torture rather than a preference.

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I suppose this is a sequel to my October post.

I got back from Nottingham today, after chilling out and eating my family’s food for a few days. Been cooking with pumpkins a lot lately: Me and my friend Chloe made two pumpkin pies on Saturday, though weren’t sure if we’d done it right or not, since neither of us had ever tasted pumpkin pie before. They were pretty good though, in my opinion.

Today, I used another quarter of the big pumpkin we used for the pie to make soup. Again, I’ve never made soup before, and didn’t have any recipe, so I thought it worked surprisingly well with my combination of onion, pumpkin, and mooli. I’d post pictures if I’d taken any.

I guess that’s not really a lot, nor is it that interesting, but I am becoming a fan of pumpkins.
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