Puck of Pook's Hill, by Rudyard Kipling

This is not the most obvious book to start a new resolution - to blog about what I've been reading - but I came across it on the shelf when I was doing the dusting and couldn't remember whether I had read it so long ago as to have forgotten it, or whether I had never read it at all. It is a yellowing Papermac edition that cost me 45p when I bought it, which from the date inside was in September 1972. So that's more than 40 years ago.

I'm not even sure whether it is meant to be for children or for adults, though it isn't an overtly children's edition. Someone who saw me reading it commented that Kipling has a dark side, but I never found it in this book.

Not being much of a historian, I can't comment on the book's veracity but suspect it is a carefully airbrushed version of events. Perhaps if I had been more of a historian I would have been more annoyed by it, but although I recognise its sentimentality I didn't find it so cloying as to be bothered by it.

Its charm, as far as I am concerned, came from its setting in Sussex. Having been brought up on the Kent-Sussex border, and having had many family holidays on the Sussex coast not so far from Pevensey, the depiction of the sun-dappled past was like getting into a warm bath. Of course I don't remember as far back as 1906, when the book was first published, but even allowing for false and selective memory there was something immediately familiar and comforting about it.

It also had the great advantage for a commuter of being broken into separate, albeit related, stories, each one just about the right length for a journey.  Which is no way to judge literature, I know, but is a factor when it comes to choice of reading.

So - a pleasant read but not a life-enhancing one and I think it is likely to go back on the shelf for another 40 years.

"That's right, Mrs. J., of course the devil has a sideboard"

"Time for your medication!"

I haven't thought a lot about the end of my days, but speaking purely statistically it is likely to come in some kind of institutional care, whether a hospice, a care home or sheltered accommodation. And where old folk are gathered, there is encouragement for them to come together and share memories. Thinking of my parents' generation, that meant swapping punchlines from ITMA, and singing along to Vera Lynn or Rodgers and Hammerstein.

I am of a generation that doesn't "get" ITMA but can recite the dead parrot sketch, and knows that the ultimate answer to the ultimate question is 42. All together in the Day Room, I suppose we'll be cracking jokes about, "Not the comfy chair!" while our care assistants exchange looks of indulgent incomprehension. What are they going to think of us, though, when we all start to sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody?

I hope I am there when the circle of wrinklies launches into a tuneless but enthusiastic rendition of, "God save the Queen. The fascist regime", banging their heads against their Zimmer frames and gobbing into their cupasoups.

Blinking cursors

For the third (and, for the moment, final) post about the naked evils of word processing, I will rant about the cursor. There it sits, every time you pause, doing the equivalent of drumming its fingers on the table in impatience at having to wait for you. It never gets tired, never sleeps, just sits there blinking and winking and somehow making you feel very inadequate and slow. So you rush into typing the first thing that comes into your head without thinking too clearly about it, and bingo, you've proved the cursor right - you really are stupid.

There, I've just done it.

Cut and paste

Another thing about word processing (I am hitting a trend here) is the facility to cut and paste, and again it is affecting the way we think and learn. We don't look things up, read around, understand and then express something, but instead we find the first answer in Google and then cut and paste it undigested into whatever we are writing, bypassing any need to absorb and understand it, let alone express it in our own words.

In higher education nowadays, students are taught how to avoid plagiarism by learning how to paraphrase instead of pasting unchanged text into their essays. Note that they are not encouraged to understand and absorb an idea, just taught how much they need to alter what they have found so that they don't get found out by their cut and paste.

Bullet points

I don't think that bullet points existed until word-processing. I certainly don't remember them. Until then, if you wrote a report or an essay, you were required to compare and contrast; or, weigh the pros and cons; or, consider the implications. You had to think ideas through carefully and express them as clearly as you could. If you took a pride in it, you balanced the ideas through the prose, thesis and antithesis.

Nowadays, if someone asks you for a report, they ask for half-a-dozen bullet points, no more than a page of A4.

I can't help but think that something has been lost, in the expression but also in the understanding. 

Billy

Billy was a rabbit
Billy was a frog
Billy was a blackbird
Billy was a dog

Billy was the only slave
Of a mad magician
Who used to change his shape
To suit each new position

So Billy was a carthorse
When he pulled the plough
But when the milkman didn't come
Billy was a cow

Billy was a hairless cat
To warm his master's bed
But when the pipes were frozen
He used dragon's breath instead

Billy wasn't very bright
And didn't think it strange
That when he questioned why this was
It was called "resisting change"

Billy was the only slave
In his master's hall
But knew that he was fortunate
To have a job at all

And Billy counts his blessings
Despite the constant stress
As there are private companies
Who'd do the job for less

So Billy learns to cram himself
Into each different form
And sometimes he's an elephant
And sometimes he's a worm

Sometimes he's a crocodile
And sometimes he's an ape
Just as his master forces him
Into each different shape

And as there is no helping hand
And all the work to do
Billy isn't Billy
Billy is a zoo

So it's pretty much like working in the public sector under a conservative government

Day bag

When the children were little, Husband and I never went anywhere without the "day bag", which we kept packed with all those things - nappies, wipes, bottles, toys, more wipes - that small children need during the course of the day. As far as possible it was kept ready packed, with just a quick top-up needed each day of things which had run out or which needed to be fresh.

Son and Daughter have left home for university but the old folk still have the "day bag" for holidays and days out. What does it hold now? A rather sad collection of essentials for the not-so-young - prescription medicines, reading glasses, binoculars, spare plastic carrier bags.