Perfect Morning

My perfect morning occurred on the recent Bank Holiday. With three children, a lie-in is not really a possibility, but there are advantages to rising early. The day dawned clear and forget-me-not blue, with a heat already in the air that promised a scorching day ahead. Mr Pram took the children downstairs for breakfast in the garden, ran me a bath and brought me breakfast in bed. Wholemeal toast, honey and a cup of Yannoh, a feather duvet, silence, sunshine and an Iris Murdoch (The Nice And The Good). Couldn't think of a better start to the day. If only every day began this way, I'd be in permanent Mary Poppins mood.

The Schlock of the New

I'm finding it harder and harder to find contemporary writers that I love. There are some I like. Patrick Gale. Helen Simpson. Some I really like - Esther Freud springs to mind. I'm always a little bit excited when she has a new book due out (I really must get a life).




But none I love, in the way that I love Antonia White, or Charlotte Bronte, or Wodehouse. I find myself more and more agitated these days trawling round Waterstones trying to find the book that'll hit the spot. Nothing's exciting. Everything's too tame and boringly middle class. Nobody dares any more. So although I threw down Nancy Mitford in exasperation last week, I still enjoyed the utter revelling in privilege in which she indulges. It felt good to be irritated.





No fettering of taste and correctness. Boldness. That's what's lacking now, and honesty. Nobody dares to offend anyone, or if they do, it's calculated - someone trying desperately to uncover a new taboo. Even then they're coming from that same place of Guardian-reading earnestness that taints everything with a liberal, moral high ground.

So for sheer kicks I sought out the politically incorrect and the truly shocking. I read Flannery O'Connor. Fabulous.

I tossed aside the fluffy and emasculated horror of The Gruffalo at Little Boy's bedtime and instead read to him(with relish) a 1930s version of Hans Christian Andersen's The Tinder Box, complete with deliciously frightening descriptions of the dog with eyes as big as towers that swivelled round and round. He loved it, along with the graphic details of cutting off the witch's head with a sword.

I balanced out the terror by making chocolate cornflake cakes with him the next day (organic cornflakes, natch), so could still profess to being a good and thoughtful mummy. I over-reached myself a couple of days later, however. Spurred on by escaping the good and the bland, I re-told him the story of Little Red Riding Hood and decided to reclaim the wolf's true horror from the sing-songy cartoon versions of modern fairy tale books. Eschewing books completely, I told the tale with gusto, creeping up close to him to narrate the wolf's part with, if I say so myself, impressive lupine veracity. Sheer fright overtook him and he cracked me hard between the eyes with the heel of his hand. I really did see stars. I bet that's never happened to Julia Donaldson.

Fictional Diaries

Well, I've been shamed into writing a new post, after many months absence. Life had taken over, I'm afraid. But nobody wants a run-down of the dull minutiae of my life. Or do they? Diaries are some of my favourite books for that very reason. Real diaries are fascinating in their own right - not for dazzling political or intellectual insights, but for the tiny crumbs of trivia, the petty details and ridiculous foibles of the great and the good - but fictional diaries are even better: funny, and crammed with the kind of domestic detail that make me want to pour myself a cup of earl grey and imagine myself at someone else's kitchen table, eavesdropping and flicking crumbs off the oilcloth.

King of the fictional diaries has to be Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, written back in the 1890s. The premise sounds deeply unpromising: the life of a clerk in Victorian London. But boy, oh boy, it's funny. Utterly English, fascinating in its revelations of Victorian life, but most of all, one of those books that you wish you're still to discover. I love it, and it's hero, Charles Pooter, a man whose personality can be summed up in the entry, "I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat".

Here are more of my favourites:

The Diary of A Provincial Lady by EM Delafield (see previous posts for more on this book)

Mrs Miniver by Jan Struther  - more mid-twentieth century afternoon teas

The Hens Dancing series by Raffaella Barker - modern, eccentric, but with the same vibe

The Dulcie Domum books by Sue Limb -a late 20th century Mrs Miniver

And the ones I can't bear to read, because I couldn't stand it if they weren't as good as the ones I've listed above:

The Bridget Jones diaries, by Helen Fielding.

Let me know if you have any more recommendations.