Jim Granter

To get to our friends’ health food shop you have to walk past the Age UK (formerly Help the Aged) charity shop. Always worth a look, for the odd shirt or book. This week on a mission to the health food shop, I discovered at Age UK several boxes of books that had just arrived and were being sorted by a volunteer. They appeared quite attractive (the books, not the volunteer, though he was nice), as they were all quite left wing or left field anyway, so I thought one would be a treat. Then I noticed that the previous owner had put his name in one of them. On investigation, all four boxes were from the same household. The previous owner had been my wife’s tutor at Manchester Metropolitan University many years ago, had died several years ago and my wife knew that his wife died last week. She told me this when I got home with my three chosen books and we enthusiastically went back for more. Ended up with about 50 books for a “job lot” price of £20. When I suggested to one of the assistants (who won’t see 60 again) that perhaps I could make the manageress an offer for the pile we had assembled, she walked over to the bottom of the stairs and to the amusement of a full shop called upstairs to Margaret that I would like to make her an offer and then I’d like to offer to buy some books too. They say women are dirtier minded than men, as a rule. Anyway, Edgar’s books have found a good home and should give as much pleasure to their new owners as they did to him.  Made it to the health food shop 2 days later.

Have been renovating my bike, bought a pannier rack and pannier and the weather has been kind. Several rides through the lanes of South Cheshire have been increasingly enjoyable. I am learning how to do this cycling for pleasure lark, now I’m pretty confident I’m not about to run out of energy after half an hour. It’s where I am at at any particular time that gives the great pleasure – hedgerows, scenery, (saw Jodrell Bank 11 miles away to day) and only the slightest hint of noise from the M6, though even this disappears sometimes, giving way not to silence, which the countryside rarely allows, but noises generated by whatever bird or insect or animal or breeze is in that particular location at that particular time.

Next doors arrived back from Normandy yesterday and last night I made sure there were still 8 stick insects alive before handing them back today. Phew!

It’s a new month and so I feel it’s also time for a few blogged thoughts. Have received news that Keele University have chosen to close all their Continuing Education classes ( at least the ones I have been attending for the last 2 years – see blog of 10 February, 2010 ). They don’t call it that of course. Couched in some vague euphemisms about retirements in the Department, reduced and devolved budgets and such.  However, now the good news. Have also heard that some of the old stalwarts of one of the classes and the tutor have combined their not inconsiderable wills, intellects and regard for their fellow human beings to arrange with our local pub for our new classes to use the pub’s function room and the tutor has already put together our new syllabus on the theme of  Twentieth Century Liberation movements. To be studied through eight sessions on literature, with a further session devoted to related movements in art and one more on a play yet to be chosen. Wonderful. (If this is what the latest pathetic slogan of  our government means by the Big Society, then I like it. But it isn’t really, is it). How we pay the tutor is nobody else’s business. I already have Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, used to have Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City but had to buy it again along with Meridian (Alice Walker), Disgrace (J M Coetzee) and The Help ( Kathryn Stockett ). How good is that, to have a real reason to buy some new books. The accompanying links are there for me to see some background and also because sometimes such links means you follow one and don’t get back to where you came from for hours, if at all.

Been to Leek today to meet up with someone doing their family tree and who has discovered she is related to my wife. Leek is not like any other town round here and since we spent most of our 2 hours today in a cafe talking, we plan to return soon for a prolonged mooch around the streets, back streets and shops.

Looking after next door’s stick insects – am told there are 8 in the two containers but have only spotted 6 so far amongst the foliage. Hope they are all apparent when I hand them back in 10 days time…… What odd pets.

Two very different treatments of the deal between Amazon.com and the Wylie Agency: straight reporting verging on promotion in The Independent and a critique of the whole move in The Guardian today.

Not sure I’ll ever need to face up to having to read a novel on a ‘tablet’ as there’s enough unread stuff on my shelves already in real books that smell right and feel even better.  And there’s so much else can happen with books that you can’t do with an e-book – take it to a charity shop? Find it in a charity shop? Pile it up on a ‘to read’ pile that just looks good anyway? Reserve it online at the local public library and pick it up a few days later when an e-mail says it’s there, for a £1 fee? Lend it out and not ever get it back?

A long time ago in a town far away (well 80 miles) I came 28th out of 29 in Woodwork at my grammar school. This didn’t bother anybody too much, as my Dad’s life experience up to that time told him that working with your hands was to be avoided if at all possible, since it meant low wages and being treated badly altogether. This he was keen to tell me, so as to encourage me in more “academic” pursuits which he hoped would lead to a world he knew very little about, but he knew was desirable – anything where brain work was involved, something called “the professions” and it looked like I might make it there if I kept working at the school work that wasn’t Woodwork or Metalwork. His observations were based on a career which started at 14 in the workhouse, (still operating in 1926), through french polishing furniture and spraying cars, coupled with the odd encounter with a solicitor he had to visit to put a deposit down on our house and a dentist for whom he did some french polishing. Such programming against manual work was supported by the school, with its public school pretensions, so what years later came to be called Design and Technology was dropped from the curriculum for clever pupils. Fifty years later I can knock a nail straight in a piece of wood fairly successfully, say 9 times out of 10 and saw a pretty straight line if I concentrate really hard. The shelves I build don’t wobble. The quiet thrill such achievements now create equates in a funny sort of way to the non-manual work high points or “achievements” I sometimes reached working with rebellious adolescent school pupils for many years (after a disastrous stop-off for 2 years in accountancy training).

I have so far read the first 40 pages of  The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good by Matthew Crawford and am liking what he is saying very much indeed. I loved my non-manual, “professional” job most of the time and I don’t think Crawford is so much arguing against such jobs as campaigning for a shift in middle class attitudes towards manual workers that is a bit more respectful than the commonplace “We’ve found a marvellous, plumber and he’s so cheap…!”. I may return to this theme after completing the book.

Back in the “60s”, which by now is recognizable as a period  which started for a lot of us in the late 50s and went on well into the 70s (and is still going on for some!), we bought our Che Guevara t-shirts and posters. We are not disappointed or disillusioned with that Cuban revolution and the way things have turned out so far. In the light, though, of what we learn about the high standards of health care and literacy in Cuba in spite of the USA trade embargo and the end of support from the USSR, we read of the lives of dissenters from the political system as manifested in restrictions to free speech. In a recent NYRB article, two Human Rights Watch workers write that “Some outside observers contend that the existence of around two hundred political prisoners has little impact on the lives of the 11 million other Cubans…. [however] .. The political prisoners may be small in number , but they are a chilling reminder to all Cubans of what has been a basic fact of life for half a century: to criticize the Castros is to condemn oneself to years of enforced solitude”. Cuban prison cells for solitary confinement of 3 feet by 6, Guantanamo Bay, the Gulag, rendition, darkness at noon and it ain’t volcanic ash causing it.

In the meantime we have our coalition government proposing to cut quangos by 2% of the £80+ billion (that’s £80+ billion) they apparently cost to run, to help to reduce the “national deficit”.  That should do it.

Anyway, to get away from it all a good read is always available, the current one being The Family Mashber by Der Nister which promises to enthrall for some time to come. Makes a change too from a prolonged period of Am Lit.