I find it difficult myself to recall how young I was when I applied to join my local library.
I can still see, after all the years that have passed, the look of disbelief on the assistant’s face, as she looked from where I had claimed the minimum qualifying age of eleven to where I stood, wide eyed with innocence and with feet ready to dodge and run.
Instead she sighed and handed me the requisite two tickets. I don’t know why, but I hope she had a long and happy life thereafter.
A lifelong card holder
Since then I have never been without my tickets.
My first visit after settling into any new locality has always been to see what treasures the local shelves had to offer. And in those cold dark days when I was unemployed they showed their golden worth by keeping me on an even keel.
Now, having reached the advanced age of best not to think about it I find that my appetite for fiction is grown considerably jaded.
In fact it has been some time since I have been able to select a book at random and – no matter how hyped up, Booker-Prized or bestseller-listed it might be – get beyond the first chapter or so without admitting to myself that I really could not give a fig what happens to the characters or their problems.
The call of history
Instead I have turned to the far more interesting world – to me that is – of the history book. And here, Lord Louis has proved to be of like mind, his Newport Library a treasure trove of unrelated, but always interesting volumes on everything from the design and development of the Wellington bomber to the history of the Celts.
And as a result, my skull is a quarry so crammed with detritus that much, if not most of it, has sunk into the subconscious mud beneath.
Yet always ready to surface in defence of some point of view I want to put across.
Knowing what went on in the past, I find, is the only true way of understanding what’s going on now – or will go on in the future. Still I remain aware of what I’m missing in the world of fiction.
So I go on trying, selecting books more or less at random.
And just occasionally I strike lucky.
The Sharpe adventures were one. Outrageously heroic though he be – well able to give James Bond a good kicking should they ever meet – the rifleman was able to draw me into his world of Wellington’s Spain so deeply I was genuinely dismayed when the saga ended.
Lust for Le Carre
Then there came, quite recently, Le Carre. I first had a go at The Spy Who Came In from The Cold many years ago. And dismissed it as dull and incomprehensible. But by chance I tried it again and now read anything by that gifted writer that I can lay hands on.
And right now, a trilogy about the first landings on Mars and what the characters might find, how they will cope. A trilogy based on a mountain of research and an imagination I can only envy.
Just three prizes then rummaged from a whole mountain of quick glance and discard. Three valuable prizes.
That I would not have stumbled upon if I had not had access to shelves lined with books of all hues, all authors, all subjects.
