31 stranger

Social media, nothing stranger.
Possible apocalyptic nuclear wipe out just around the corner.
Let's all post pictures of pumpkins.

page 31 word 31 stranger
Tender is the Night
F.Scott Fitzgerald.

And all of his stories have that tender spot, that bruising at the centre, a kind of despair, barely discernible amongst the flapping and drinking and craziness of obscene wealth and lives idling in some glamourous lay-by in the South of France or Long Island. 

This has been a challenging project but having to overcome the sometimes tedium and often having to search for even a few words has been good training for NaNoWriMo which starts tomorrow. I will be doing it and I'm going to try my hardest to be doing it every single day. I won't be trying to reach the word target of 50,000 but hopefully I'll be able to match my last year's total of 16,000. It all depends on how the story unfolds.

30 lane

There was a lane at the back of our old house in Queens Road. It ran up from Auntie Anne's in Baldwin Road, up past our houses, then round to the right and out into Queens Road further up. We used to call it The Alley. Right outside our house was a bomb shelter, a square, red brick building - but as I think about it now, it wasn't under ground so what use would it have been? There was a small bit of open ground next to it, where my dad used to keep his old car and where all the neighbours used to contribute regularly to bonfires. That's where I found the letter.


page 31 word 30 lane
The Wishing Chair Again 
Enid Blyton  - 

And appropriately, to echo this childhood memory, here is one of my beloved childhood books by my most beloved author Enid Blyton. Quite a few years ago some idiot educationalists decided that Blyton was a terrible influence on us and banned her books from public libraries and not because of the Golly. No. Because those of us who read and loved and lived and breathed  the Famous Five were exposed to dangerous upper class values which might have given us poor working class children the impression that the majority of other kids had parents who owned small islands off the coast of Cornwall, went to boarding school and loved it, had boats and endless holidays and adventures and drank only ginger beer and ate only thick ham sandwiches  and chunks of home made fruit cake cut by plump and kindly farmers wives, and had ice cream all the time, except Timmy the dog because it was a waste of time giving an ice to Timmy as he just gulped it all down in one and went off camping in caves where they made wonderful beds out of armfulls of fragrant springy heather and feasted off tinned sardines and tinned peaches and ....it is Enid Blyton I have to thank for my lifelong love of books and what they can be to us. Hurrah!

29 talk

Less is always much much more.




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The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro

Stunningly written and hauntingly sad story which I read just after one of his other books, Never Let Me Go. I love being melancholy in a too sad to cry sort of way. But I have yet to finish The Unconsoled as I ran out of courage. I will return. The Remains of the Day was also adapted into a superb film, which again involved Emma Thompson, this time acting opposite Anthony Hopkins. This film is second on my list of those that made me weep, the first on the list also involves Anthony Hopkins but that's another story.

28 clothes

I still have those flared pants, the jersey ones
two pairs, flowery, brown and blue.
I still squeeze into them now and again
Just for old times sake.


Heartfelt thanks to my sister in law Jackie Perry for everything.


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The New York Trilogy
Paul Auster
I love me some bizarre and this book is still crazy after all these years and so influential for me still because it never fails to remind me that the rules don't have to be followed. For some reason it has also  always reminded me of you James Spader, perhaps I read it around the time I saw Sex, Lies and Videotape and the two have got melded together in the big memory pot.  We're both older now and we both have less hair. You still do that funny sideways kink with your mouth, you are still beautiful.

27 Kent

Oast houses
Apple orchards and a paper mill
Cherry trees laden with fruit and birds
White weather boarded cottages
Peonies and hollyhocks
A pint of Shepherd Neame
Southend at night
The forts and the Isle of Grain
Wild cliff tops and pebbly beaches
Hag stones and sea glass
The train to school, the lifting bridge
Bluebell woods and dockyards
I am a Maid of Kent.

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The Noel Coward Diaries
edited by Graham Pyne  and Sheridan Morley

'something eggy on a tray' 
Again I thank my mother for one of the best reads I'll ever have and keep having.

26 cheap

Love costs nothing, but it doesn't come cheap.

page 31 word 26 cheap

Venice 
Jan Morris

I imagine it would be filed under Travel Guide but really this is a love letter to the most hauntingly beautiful   city in the world. I fell hopelessly in love with Venice one early evening about 15 years ago, as the No 1 vaporetto from the bus station turned into the Canale Grande. This book brings me back to those first heady days of our love affair.  

25 needed

pale golden space
a window open to endless blue
curtains lilting
incense and beads
somewhere a bird is singing


page 31 word 25 needed
The Lovely Bones
Alice Sebold

The only book that has ever made sense  to me  of the concept of heaven.