Life must be filled up

More letters, this time written by the late racing correspondent Roger Mortimer to his son Charlie. When I’d finished the book I browsed for reviews; everyone loved the book it seems. The Guardian reviewer began with this: If you're one of those flinty-hearted souls not charmed by books where everyone's pissed up on gin, has a nickname like Pongo (sic. Pongo is a dog), Bingbong or Wiffwaff and comments that the doctors in a hospital are "as black as ten feet up a factory chimney", this may not be for you. I find I am rather that sort of soul which is why, when I began this book, I simply hated it. I warmed to it because Roger Mortimer was a genuinely good and funny writer; I laughed out loud a few times. As the book goes on, although still funny it becomes rather touching, revealing an ageing man in declining health for whom the world (his world, anyway) is going to hell in a handcart. He bears it all with a very English stoical resignation, just as he copes with an alcoholic wife and a wastrel son with wry humour. You can’t help liking him.

I wish I could say the same for Charlie. The original, awful Lupin is much more to my taste than his namesake. CM would no doubt find my dreary middle class disapproval highly amusing.

Yesterday I watched the 2007 TV series of The Diary of a Nobody. This is a brilliant one-man performance by Hugh Bonneville, one of the best interpretations I know. The interiors are a delight and watch out for the Pooters' yellow breakfast set: I have a part tea set in the very same pattern!



Or similar.

My copy was recorded off the TV but if you live in the UK you have to wait until March this year to get a DVD. Why such a well-kept secret? Americans can buy it on Amazon.com right now.
My reading and TV watching are linked at the moment. Watching the David Jason version made me re-read The Darling Buds of May; I re-read The Diary of a Nobody last month; the other evening I watched I Capture the Castle and now have a strong urge to read that again.

Note that everything I'm watching is a recording. This is because, just when the weather is at its worst and TV and knitting call, there is NOTHING ON in real time. Another treat has been to start watching my Christmas DVD: the complete series of Outnumbered. Utterly brilliant! And at one point the Hugh Dennis character is channel hopping (with rude remarks) and complains, '47 channels!' and he still can't find anything to watch. Back to the DVD then.

What’s this, all dressed up and even titled, like a chick lit novel? It’s a serious social history of the development of the consumer society in the nineteenth century and my current non fiction read. Perhaps someone bought it in error and that’s how I was able to get this Fine/Fine copy in a local charity shop.

Judith Flanders is the author of The Victorian House, which was a bestseller and deservedly so: it is a fascinating glimpse into domestic history, full of details about Victorian housekeeping. The new book (it came out last year) is perhaps more overtly historical and so may not enjoy the same success. The author deals with the growth of a public hungry for entertainment (books, theatres, holidays) and for consumer goods of a kind previously unthought of. A large section of the book is a history of shopping, and very good, too. By the end of it, I am sure, the reader will understand the background to the lifestyle of Charles and Carrie Pooter.

I’ve only just started reading and am on The Great Exhibition of 1851. To reflect on the energy and enterprise of the Victorians, the speed with which the Crystal Palace was designed and built, the fantastic success of the whole venture, and then to compare it with the doomed Millennium Dome, or Wembley Stadium, or the Olympic waste of money, is enough to make you weep.