At any time I'm likely to devour books on practically any subject from sport to history, music to fiction, although I don't read a lot of fiction.
As with writing, I don't know where this love of literature comes from. My father only read westerns and I don't remember my mother reading anything much.
As a boy I made regular visits to my local library in the days when you could only take out four books at a time. That was probably a good idea as nowadays I seem to take out so many that the percentage I read is very low.
So what books do I remember from my childhood? Firstly I don't remember ever having any read to me, although I do have a vague recollection of liking Enid Blyton's Noddy books. Maybe I read these to myself. Many of them are now off limits with their reference to the evil Gollywogs. Gollywogs loomed large in my childhood, being featured on Robertson's Jam and marmalade and also in the Black and White Minstrel Show which has been rated the most racist show ever. I dealt with a difficult situation when I was working for the police. A white officer was blacked up to reconstruct a robbery. But that's another story for another day. I remember young children carrying Gollywogs round with them and years ago we visited Grosmont in Yorkshire which is the village featured in the TV series Heartbeat. It was done up just like a film set and one of the shop windows had a gollywog in it.
I have a photograph in my study of a very smart looking me. I look about seven or eight. I'm sitting in a chair and am pretending to read a book. I still remember it's title "Speed Speed Speed". I don't remember anything else about it. I have tried to trace it but have no idea who wrote it.
That picture was taken by Bill Ayton who was a professional photographer who lived just round the corner from us. I have an inkling that he may have been a press photographer in the days long before I joined Eastern Counties Newspapers. I went to school with his daughter Monica.
But back to the books I did read. Top of the list were The Billy Bunter books by Frank Richards whose real name wasn't Frank Richards. It was Charles Hamilton and he was a story in himself. Just look him up on the internet and you will find out just how much he wrote (even more than me). I remember the television series where Bunter a schoolboy was played by Gerald Campion who was actually in his thirties.
Looking back these books now seem ridiculous. Bunter was fat and forever being bullied and the language was very much from a bygone day. I also like the Jennings books of Anthony Buckeridge and the Dr Doolittle books of Hugh Lofting.
There were many more as well. There was always a big divide at the library. I'm sure that under a certain age you couldn't take out books from the adult section. I'm sure my friend Biddy will confirm whether that was the case.
So I cannot say at what point I moved up to adult books. That's adult with a small a and not Adult as in Adult content.
Now as I've said I will pretty much tackle anything. "Jingle Jangle Morning" has a large opening section on the day Bob Dylan went electric and whether he was cheered or jeered off stage. This was a big deal in the folk music world and led to a loud cry of Judas from a man who felt Dylan had sold out on his roots.
I have to say that quite a bit of the time I lose interest in a book and don't make it to the end and on other occasions my butterfly brain takes over and I flit from one book to another, often having five or six on the go at once with no real hope of actually finishing any of them. I start out with good intentions but all too often get bored.
But enough about books. How did we spend Bank Holiday Monday? Well we went for a long walk in the Shropshire countryside along some very narrow roads where we were passed by three vehicles on two hours. It said the walk was three and a half miles but it felt more like five and we were only just back on time to watch Norwich City surrender to Leicester in a match they lost 3-1 but which might as well have been 7-0 for all the effort they put in. It was yet another glorious display of backwards and sideways football.
Took a few photos of the walk and included these along with yesterday's of Carding Mill Valley.
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Sometimes I just hate technology or should I say changing technologies.
At Hethersett in keeping with many other villages and towns and cities in the country we have an archive. It would be good to have the archive digitised but there lies a problem. Today's technology is tomorrow's trash can junk. Floppy discs gave way to CD Roms which gave way to USB and portable drives which gave way to the cloud. So however you keep records today, it will be obselete tomorrow. So there's nothing better than put it all in paper form in folders. Then of course the whole lot gets hit in a flood or burnt to cinders. C'est La Vie.
I mention this because a couple of days ago I decided to upload some more photos to one of my sites. After doing that, I decided to have a genera check of the site and I found that a load of my previously uploaded photographic galleries no longer existed. These were ones where I used a Google external app to take the links to another site. This site no longer exists. I was warned it was being shut down at the end of last year but forgot to do anything about it. The result is none of these links now work which is annoying as I will have to search through all my photos to find the relevant ones and set up new pages which will be time consuming.
My big worry is that I have a number of partly finished websites on Weebly. They are all free and I have literally thousands of photos on them. I don't know what happens if Weebly suddenly stops doing free sites as I just cannot justify spending thousands on having paid for sites that could suffer the same fate.
Perhaps I should go back to printing everything out, but to what end? Such is life and technology.