The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I badly need my towel. Coming face-to-face with two mice in such a short time can take it out of a witch. One [dead] mouse the day I finished reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the next one – highly alive – on the eve publication day, which is today.

To celebrate the fact that it’s been 42 years since Douglas Adams iconic guide was first published, it’s been reissued, filled to the brim with illustrations by Chris Riddell. Except I have to admit to having been so taken with reading this book again, that I barely had time to look at the pictures of Zaphod and Marvin and the rest.

This is surely testament to the book’s charm; that rereading it after decades it’s almost as if it was new, except that I remember most of the witty quotes as though it was yesterday. Basically, dear reader, this book is as much fun as it ever was. Possibly more.

I’m hoping that 42 years on there will be countless new readers discovering this story about hitching lifts through space. For me, it’s almost impossible to decide whether I like Arthur Dent or Marvin the most. It used to be Marvin, but Arthur is so very, well, British. ‘Why, do you think it’s the sort of thing you’re likely to say?’

And I’m almost getting the Ford Prefect name thing now. It was a completely meaningless joke four decades ago. As it was to Ford Prefect himself.

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Hitchhiking again

I’m not too proud to republish an old post. It’s saying exactly what I wanted to say and I’m too lazy to write it again. It’s from October 2009. Doesn’t time fly?

“Who needs it? The history. The background to one of the funniest ideas in – well, in what? – literature? Broadcasting? Television? Film?

I started at the wrong end, if there is one. I read the books first. Though, come to think of it, since the radio series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a lot better than the books, it would have been more disappointing to go the other way. OK, maybe I did it the right way. In fact, I have a feeling I may even have watched the television series before getting to the radio. It was on just as I met the Resident IT Consultant, and I recall us watching it in the early days.

I looked on in fascination as the trilogy grew to five books. That’s British humour for you. It’s why I like my adoptive country so much. It has stuff like H2G2.

Fast forward to the unfashionable end of the last century, when I came across the radio series on audio cassette in the mobile library, and borrowed it for Son. I thought he might like it. He did. It wasn’t exactly news at the time. Nobody much – other than nerds – talked about it, so Son was educated in something vaguely historical and dated. Who cared, as long as he laughed and learnt a few new good quotes. It turned out useful, too. How his leaders at Pilots at the local church could even begin to think that children his age would be able to answer any questions on this subject in their fun quiz, is beyond me. Old-fashioned Son could, but his friends had never heard of it. Very handy, too, when it came to dressing up for World Book Day at school. We just needed to send Son to school in his dressing gown, holding a ‘book’ which said Don’t Panic.

From then on I’d say that H2G2 woke up again. More stuff on the radio, a film, and now the sixth book, written by Eoin Colfer. He is not Douglas Adams, but since we can’t have him, Eoin is a good second. I hope.

Anyway, that history. Who needs to know? I mean, who doesn’t already know about it? There was a long description/history thing in the Guardian a week ago, and I just wondered what the point was. As a fan, I do like reading about what I like, but there was something not quite right about this article. And I don’t just mean the fact that facts were wrong. Ford and Arthur did not hitch a ride with Zaphod when Earth was demolished.

The point of the new book is surely to educate a new generation of readers, and anybody old who happened to miss it the first time?”

Dog days

Cartoon borrowed from Sara Paretsky’s blog, quite a few years ago now…

A piccalilli pair of days

Sometimes I just need to go back in time.

My 2015 piccalilli trip to London, as I think of it, was full of serendipities. It began when Liz Kessler wrote to ask if I could make it to her London book launch. And I felt I could; having determined that something special was all I required to invest in train tickets. I’d obviously need to stay two nights, before and after, to make sure I was there for the main event.

And then I started looking to see what else might be on.

The Society of Authors had an event on the evening I arrived in London. It was ‘only’ Philip Pullman and Penelope Lively chatting to Daniel Hahn at Waterstones Piccadilly, but I was happy enough with that. 😉

Son bought me a ticket for the event, which I wasn’t supposed to use. So I bought another. When Anne Rooney realised she wanted to go but was too late to buy a ticket, wasn’t it handy that I just happened to have a Society of Authors member ticket? Yes it was. And her predictive texting gave me the piccalilli.

It was Celia Rees who had told me about the event, so she was around too. And then there was the sighting of Judith Kerr one row in front of mine. That wasn’t a half bad evening.

For the next morning I’d agreed to have coffee with Marnie Riches, who just happened to be in town, before leaving again. From there I almost had to run to get to my next meeting, having booked an interview with Anthony McGowan, seeing as I had so much time on my hands! Somewhere there must have been a brief opportunity to eat my lunch sandwich. I’ve forgotten. Although I can tell you that the Hampstead pub we met in could use a longer setting for the light in the Ladies. Good thing I have arms to wave.

Tony was also going to Liz’s launch, which is where we went next. And basically everyone was at the launch.

For my second morning I had arranged to do brunch with Candy Gourlay before hopping on a northbound train.

It’s amazing how many authors can be fitted into slightly less than 48 hours. I keep living in hope, but there has yet to be a repeat of this.

And we’re out

We emerged from Bookwitch Towers, a little bit like the Moomins after hibernation. After over a hundred days of only seeing the Sainsbury’s delivery driver and the odd medical person, or limiting chatting to the neighbours on a one-to-one basis, this new freedom felt strange.

And the weather was good! While nice, it’s not essential, but did mean we could ‘party’ at long last. The very kind Helen Grant volunteered to be our first this week, and she came and sat in our garden and drank tea and talked, and we were quite literary and almost intellectual for a while there.

(We’d obviously been frightfully interesting all by ourselves for months on end, but this was different.)

After a pleasant interlude midweek at the dentist’s, came Friday, and our next volunteers. It seemed only fitting that on a day when quite a few people mentioned Shakespeare for some reason or other, we should have two authors visiting.

Alex Nye and Kirkland Ciccone braved the even hotter and sunnier weather for, yes, tea and some Krispy Kremes in the garden. We were loud. (Sorry.) And we gossiped long and hard and some ears are bound to have burned a bit, somewhere. There are a lot of interesting things one can discuss when finally meeting in person. Like, does Orion wear trousers?

And I don’t think we are done. There will have to be more tea. Our first three are always welcome back, and other volunteers can apply here. Today’s got properly fried in the sunshine, but we worked out one can go all Victorian and use umbrellas. And those would work in that other kind of weather too, I suppose. The wet, Scottish kind.

A little light night listening

I don’t know what to think. Well, I do know that when I see Daughter loading up yet one more listen to The Hunger Games for her bedtime audiobook experience, that it really doesn’t sound cheerful. I mean, really.

She prefers audiobooks that she has previously read as a book. If she were to – god forbid! – nod off while listening, it helps to know the story. Has to be long books/series, so they last. Hence The Hunger Games. Also Anne of Green Gables. His Dark Materials. A decade or more of Harry Potter.

But she’d quite like to listen to Michael Grant’s Front Lines trilogy. It’s been read and it has been enjoyed. And it’s far better than The Hunger Games.

It appears to exist.

But it also appears not to be possible to buy or otherwise access from the UK. This seems nonsensical, as surely both the publisher and the audiobook company should want to sell their products.

You know me. I went to the source and asked Michael. Did he know why, and could he push, or something?

His response was that Daughter has excellent taste. I know that. So he can’t quite understand why there is no audiobook of Front Lines.

You see what happened there? Michael believes there is no audiobook.

And still, what are we to make of this:

Kissing frogs

When we were in the front garden a while back, with the Resident IT Consultant doing the gardening and me sitting comfortably, issuing instructions, the neighbour next door gave us two frogs. I suspect they were ours originally, and we do have a tiny pond they can live near.

Those are not the frogs I am kissing. Wouldn’t dream of it. But it struck me, not long ago, as I was contemplating what to read and why, that it’s a bit like kissing frogs, to see if they will turn into princes. Sometimes you have to kiss quite a few frogs, to find a book worth spending your time on. (This might be a mixed metaphor. I am hazy about those, but I suspect frogs and books are not interchangeable.)

So, I kiss fewer frogs these days, and am not able to bother with quite a few of them, even if they really are princes, deep down. And far too many have no blue blood in them at all.

Not sure how our frogs are doing, as I’m rarely out there searching for them. At the time we had a lot of frog spawn, however. Whether they will grow up into handsome princes, I have no idea.

Once a week Daughter has online tea with some friends/colleagues. On some occasion the chat turned to books (one can never be certain those academic types actually read…) and one of them mentioned she’d loved a Swedish thriller recently. Some more digging revealed a title and the mention of two authors, which in turn made me sort of, nearly, remember something. She had read it in Dutch, as the English version isn’t out yet. It will be, though, seeing as my inkling confirmed that it’s one of Son’s translations.

This week he received his copies of another Swedish crime novel – Gustaf Skördeman’s Geiger – which is out sooner. Both of these books have been much talked about, enough so even I could hear it and be a little aware of things.

And both Daughter and Son have recently sent off copies of their theses to GP Cousin, who was foolish enough to ask to read them. Those books are definitely not frogs. At all. I know, because I have read them. One a bit more closely than the other, but I pride myself on believing that I understood more than GP will. (Which is unkind, because he is a boy and he is four years older than I am, so…)

Some books actually are about frogs. They can be quite good too.

Down #4 Memory Lane

It’s not every author who has an understairs cupboard to offer a Bookwitch to sleep in, on short acquaintance. But after we bonded briefly over coffee ice cream, Candy Gourlay opened her home to the witch. And then continued doing so, with such tact and generosity, not to mention friendliness, sharing her family with me.

(Not that I was looking for a home, or needed more children, but if I had done, hers was what I’d be wanting. Actually, when house-hunting some years ago, my goal was for a ‘Candy house’.)

Recently, Candy shared the news that her mother had died, and the eulogy she recorded for her mother’s memorial. In fact, all family members celebrated the life of this woman in so many ways, and it brought home to me that the younger generations are the way they are, because of older role models. And good genes.

There was music. This I had almost forgotten about, but it was something I discovered Swedes and Filipinos have in common, when the assembled people at the Embassy burst into song, much the way Swedes do.

Anyway, I was introduced to Candy as a treat [for me], courtesy of Random House Children’s Books, shortly before her debut novel Tall Story was published. This was in January, and I knew already that it would be my favourite book of the year.

And after that Candy let me spend the night, and not under the stairs, either, but in perfect comfort in her son’s bed. (He was not in it.) Then there was the Embassy, and there were talks and awards events, an interview, meetings for ‘coffee’, another launch, followed by a lovely party in that dream back garden, and back to the same bed again. In more recent years people in Scotland have had the good sense to invite Candy to do events here, and perhaps one day she will visit my not so perfect garden, and I can offer her Son’s bed in return.

I’ll ask the Resident IT Consultant to get some coffee ice cream in.

The decency boundary

I suppose we all know that the stories coming from the Brothers Grimm were really pretty grim on occasion. But after reading them as children, we can agree that they are not truly children’s stories, but more for adults. And that excuses the content.

I suppose.

I believe that Swedish children, today and back in my time, are exposed to more questionable literary content when they read. There is more gate-keeping in Britain.

I don’t really know what’s OK. I seem to be more delicate now than I ever was before.

Anyway, a few evenings ago Daughter read me another Swedish story. It was probably about the last eligible book we had, and to be honest, I had already sort of decided against it, on account of it being boring.

I misremembered. And Daughter is aghast. When she realised where Kattresan by Ivar Arosenius was heading, she couldn’t quite believe her eyes. And I suppose I didn’t help by pointing out that Arosenius wrote and illustrated the book for his own little girl, many years ago. 1909 seems to have been the date.

They were made of stronger stuff in those days.

In case it works as a spoiler, or you really are so tender-hearted that you don’t want to see what she saw, I will just leave the link – to Swedish Bookwitch – here. Then you can click on it and feast your eyes on what happened to the cat.

In fairness, the very young Bookwitch used to be somewhat disgusted/puzzled/disturbed as well.

🙂

A Street Dog Named Pup

I seem to be – figuratively – surrounded by dogs these days, mostly rescue dogs. In A Street Dog Named Pup, by Gill Lewis, you meet many dogs, all of them personalities for you to like or love. Pup especially.

We meet him when he’s being removed from his boy in the middle of the night. He loves his boy and the boy loves Pup. But both are young and at the mercy of adults. It doesn’t seem to count that they were made for each other.

Pup ends up with a group of dogs in the street, and they teach him how to survive and what to look out for. But all Pup wants is to get back to his boy. The other dogs know this is unlikely, especially as they understand Pup was left on the street for a reason.

They are wise and kind dogs and Pup is lucky to have been found by them. This story isn’t quite as sweet as the Eva Ibbotson book about another dog and another boy. But you feel there must be a good ending, in some way. Except, what can an eleven-year-old boy do? Or his puppy?

I’ve learned a lot, both about dogs (I hope it’s all true), and about their humans. The story also reflects on what society today is like, what people want and what people can do. And how dogs love them anyway.

This is another heartrending story from Gill, going deeper into the relationship between humans and animals than ever before.

Each chapter is headed by a black and white drawing and I was quite captivated by the beautiful illustrations, without realising that they were by Gill herself. The cover showing Pup against a night city backdrop, is by Levi Pinfold. So there is much loveliness.