Reading

I’m a hopeless technophobe. I dislike the stylish laptop I’m using and its subdued pad pad pad. I still long for the clatter and ting of my old typewriter. It was a sturdy soul, utterly obedient, only needing a new ribbon occasionally. It lived for 40 years before being interred in a quiet corner of my attic. I’ve had several computers since and they have all been tricksy. I often fantasise about tracking down another ancient typewriter that could be coaxed back into service. There are still several writers determinedly tapping away. The American novelist Danielle Steel has achieved a billion sales by working on a 1946 typewriter. Jilly Cooper wrote her recent bestseller Tackle! on a red manual called Monica.

A princess of Hanover wrote in her diary: ‘My 30th birthday. There must be some mistake.’ Substitute 30th for 80th and you have how I feel this week. But age is all relative, being dependent on your genes, immune system and how it was primed in childhood; on your location, your income and luck. I had long-lived grandparents on both sides; had measles, rubella, mumps, chicken pox, whooping cough and scarlet fever before five; and in spite of semi-permanent tonsillitis was 20 before any antibiotic entered my body. I spent the years until 16 on the north-east coast of Yorkshire, through bitter snowbound winters, my lungs loaded with fresh sea air. Attitude and expectations are important too.

I have an American friend who loves reading, but is clueless about technology. The last time I visited him he was still using Internet Explorer, which even Microsoft has given up on. My friend was puzzled when he walked into his local bookshop and was met by a table of books with the sign ‘#BookTok made me read it’. Soon afterwards I received a bewildered WhatsApp message: ‘What is BookTok?!’ Until recently, I didn’t know. Before the pandemic, I was a working stand-up comic. I’ve never been on television and you probably haven’t heard of me, but I was happy. I worked six nights a week, made enough to pay the bills and was recognised occasionally by someone in Tesco. And then came lockdown.

According to a charity called Fight For Sight, 38 per cent of people who’ve been using screens more during lockdown believe their eyesight has deteriorated. I am definitely in that category. This time last year, I didn’t need reading glasses; now I do. When I’m working at my desk this doesn’t much matter, but it has made reading in bed more difficult because I was in the habit of doing this on an iPad under the covers so as not to wake Caroline. Keeping my glasses in place while lying on my side, with one hand clutching my iPad and the other pulling the duvet tight over my head to eliminate any light pollution, is surprisingly difficult. The upshot is I’ve switched over to talking books.

New York I received a letter from a long-time Spectator reader, James Hackett, enquiring about books I am reading. It is not often that I get letters that delight me, as this one did. It is a far cry from the readers’ letters you see in newspapers and magazines in the United States. Lots of them seem sanctimonious, holier than thou; others, I suspect, are written by the glossy magazines themselves promoting their own celebrity culture worship. James Hackett is an American gent whom I’ve never met, and I hope I don’t disappoint with my choices. The last time I read novels was literally some 50 years ago.

‘Yes, I will have a coffee,’ said the van driver. He’d driven down to the south of France from Devon. I motioned him to take a pew at the kitchen table and asked him about himself. Ron was ex-army. Aged 17, he was faced with a stark choice: the building site or the army. Because he’d seen his builder father working in a trench all day with water up to his waist, he chose the army. He joined the Royal Engineers and trained as a driver. In the early 1970s he drove two SAS men around Belfast in an unmarked saloon car. That was the job. All day every day. Everywhere Gerry Adams went Ron followed him. Gerry Adams knew he had a tail and would give a friendly or an unfriendly wave, depending on how he was feeling. Yes, he enjoyed the army.

A few years ago, I was surprised to open a newspaper and read that the head teacher of a London public school had decided to ban my books from his library. He described the adventures of Alex Rider, which have sold around 20  million- copies worldwide, in terms so derogatory that I have no mind to repeat them. Suffice it to say that the article quite put me off my cornflakes. But the strange thing was that — once I had got past the sheer offensiveness of his language and a mindset that believed that banning books could ever have good connotations — I was actually quite sympathetic to his wider point of view. Everyone agrees that children benefit from reading, but we seldom discuss what exactly we would like them to read.

My reactionary first world war reading jag continues. The literature is vast, but so is my capacity and fascination. I began reading systematically, then went in search of thrills. Typing ‘my top ten first world war books’ into a search engine has also been a wonderfully fruitful source of leads. Space, and probably your boredom threshold, won’t allow me to list mine. I want to stick my neck out, however, and give a cheer for two books by liaison officers: one a Anglophile Frenchman liaising with the British, the other a Francophile Englishman liaising with the French. As one might imagine, both books are tragicomic. Emile Herzog was the son of a textile tycoon. In the first world war he served as an interpreter, then as a liaison officer.

For parents of primary school children, the first Thursday in March has got to be the worst day of the year. Even an attendance Nazi like me, who won’t countenance any excuse for keeping a child home from school, would accept that on this occasion a ‘tummy ache’ is a perfectly legitimate reason. Why do I say this? Because the first Thursday of March is World Book Day. Now, for those of you without children, or whose children went to school before this annual ritual was invented by Unesco in 1995, I should explain that the reason it’s such a colossal bore is because parents are expected to mark the occasion by sending their offspring to school dressed as their favourite fictional character.