Bookwitch

Should I blame myself or the mobile library? For a while when Son was at an impressionable age (11-12), we had a stop for the mobile library just outside our house, so it received a lot of visits from me. Offspring could only go in the school holidays, as the bus called mid morning. Son was at the stage where he required endless audio books to go to sleep with.

As a child I had quite enjoyed the Paul Temple cartoons in our daily newspaper, so when I saw the dramatised radio series on cassette, I carted lots of them home. Son liked them so much, that when the library supply came to an end, he spent his book tokens from birthdays on buying cassettes for himself. I suspect that by now he owns every one there is.

The series is quite old, and you can tell from the style of dramatisation. Genuinely retro and very non pc. Son was excited a couple of years ago when it was announced that they were going to record more episodes, and in a similar retro style. It was made all the more interesting, because the part of Paul Temple was going to be played by an actor friend of the Grandmother.

A while ago we were having dinner in Grandmother’s kitchen (she lives 200 miles away) when the phone rang. Son got up to answer it, and then handed the phone to his Grandmother; “It’s Paul Temple”.