Out of the way

Under Milk Wood made book 45. I walked past it in a box outside a shop this morning, on my way from Russell Square toward Victoria (which I still haven't reached). 5 for £4, or a quid each, the decision was made by having £3 of coins in my pocket. The fatal shore, and Chrétien de Troyes "romans de la table ronde" will make it to the list by and by. Under Milk Wood which I had never read through before, somehow seems a glorious book to read in the park on a day of doing nothing.

In Bloomsbury square, between breakfast and the Leicester square bookshop, I finished Mad Cows, by Kathy Lette - book number 44. Something has dated it. Maybe we are now able to laugh with the malevolent yet loving humour of a mother more easily now than when this was a new kind of book from the icnioclast who wrote 'Puberty Blues' decades before the genre became a staple. Expectant mothers now don't eat sausages or ham, stick to alcohol-free beer without yeast, and avoid green. As a matter of course, with no sense of bringing up the wonder-child. Or maybe now all children are the wunderkind that used to be the preserve of the neurotic with not enough to do in their own life. Or maybe the more extreme amongst the available neuroses of the late thirties are no longer quite as funny when they belong to my generation. Hard to say, but either something has changed for me since reading Kathy Lette's 90's output in the 90s, or this book wasn't one of her better ones.

And 43 was another Terry Pratchett - one of the early ones. "Strata" has all the observation of how people are through the slightly distorted lens that shows us more clearly, but lacks most of the familiarity of the disc world novels, populated by a series of characters who have become familiar and taken on further depth even as they have served just as the bare clothes horses of caricature who model an idea or speak a truth that has an existence of its own. Strata is really an ætiology for a discworld, as well as an enjoyable read in its own right.

And so I sit, and wonder whether to go to a pub and spend my last few bob on a pint as the price of using the loo, or whether to sit here and save it up for Gatwick where you can still let loose for free. My Granny used to spend a penny, but now the going rate is two bob. And I have, before, paid a euro for the privelige. When every shop and restaurant has them "only for paying customers", with a lock to keep out the opportunist, and the public supply is limited to train stations even for those with the cash, the ragged edges of public hygiene are likely to remain unwashed a while longer.