Susan’s Bookshelves (The Complete Uxbridge English Dictionary by Tim Brooke-Taylor et al)

It all started when, in my usual wordy way, I used the word “olfactory” on the family WhatsApp group. I loathe, detest, abhor, hate and dislike (sorry) the stench of popcorn and my crosspatch comment was to the effect that I was going to dock a star from the show I’d just seen for olfactory reasons. It set both my sons off in a welter of silly puns. Lucas, in particular, has inherited punophilia (is that a word?) from his maternal grandfather and has been addicted to Radio 4’s I’m Sorry I haven’t a Clue for so long that he can trot them out almost as fast as they can.

Fast forward a few weeks to Boxing Day, when we had a family party in Felix’s house and Lucas gave Felix and me each a copy of The Complete Uxbridge English Dictionary, first published in 2016. We opened our presents at about 1pm and screamed, or in my case wept, with laughter for the rest of the day as we read them out to each other. It was one of the cheeriest Christmases for years.

It’s a spoof dictionary of course, laid out in alphabetical order with faux-soulful pencil drawings by Graeme Garden and Jon Naismith. The definitions (“Germination: A very unhealthy country” or “Fly tipping: gratuities to insects”) are by past and present members of the I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue team: Tim Brooke-Taylor, Barry Cryer, and Ian Pattinson along with Garden and Naismith.

Since Christmas I have read it from cover to cover, sitting at my desk at home allowing myself stints of 20 minutes a day. And I have laughed until I rattle. “Hoedown: Agricultural Strike” and “Apres midi d’une faune: You’ve been on the phone since lunch”.

If I can manage to stop guffawing long enough to think about this seriously, I admire the talents of these five men enormously because you really need to understand a language to be able to pull it about like this (“Prehensile: An island formerly occupied by chickens”). I wonder if they laugh at each other when they’re coining them? I rather suspect they do. I also wonder whether you can pun to this extent in other languages? I doubt it. English has a much larger lexicon than most other comparable European languages because it has drawn its vocabulary from so many sources over thousands of years. So there’s a lot there to play with.

Not that any of that matters. The jokes are the thing. January has a reputation for being a blue, gloomy, depressing, miserable, cold, unhappy, anticlimactic (not sorry) month. It won’t be if you buy and read this book. Promise. Even writing this piece has reduced me to fits of giggles.

PS “Macadam: A Scottish brothel keeper” “Frog-spawn: Blue movies for the French” “Definite: Street slang for hard of hearing”

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

A brick of a book, Caledonian Road (2024) is almost Dickensian in scope. Loosely rooted in the eponymous, diverse Islington street, it explores contemporary society from the rich and famous to drug dealing and subversion, all linked by a shimmering web of connections.

Campbell Flynn is a well known art historian with two very different adult children, one of whom, an influencer, has much more fame than his has-been father. Now short of money, Flynn has written a lifestyle book entitled “Why Men Weep in Cars” which is completely different from anything he has done before such as his groundbreaking and widely respected book about Vermeer. He therefore hires an actor to masquerade as author and promote it for him. What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile gullible Flynn befriends/is groomed by one of his students, Milo. He has highly advanced hacking skills,  a ruthlessly worthy agenda and many friends in the drug-driven underworld. Among other things, Milo is out to destroy William Byre, an old university friend of Flynn’s now involved in organised crime. Then there’s his brother-in-law who is a wealthy hereditary peer and master of shady dealings and contacts. Flynn is a mere, unwitting conduit. Underneath all this are drug farms in Kent, sweat shops in Leicester, human trafficking gangs, immigration issues, knife crime and much more.

Of course the immaculately interwoven themes are serious in this complex novel but this is, effectively, a satire and it’s often very funny. I loved loaded observations such as “It occurred to Campbell that Candy might weigh less than her necklace” and “Her face was dismanted with make up”.

I also enjoyed the characterisation. Milo’s Polish girlfriend is good as are Mrs Kruppa and Jakub in their various ways. And Flynn’s eccentric mother-in-law who lives aboard an ocean-going yacht is entertaining.  In the basement flat of the house on a leafy square which Campbell shares with his patient wife, Elizabeth, is an irascible, impossible, elderly, sitting tenant named Mrs Voyles. She isn’t – in her patrician and devious unreasonableness – a million miles from Alan Bennett’s (real life) Miss Shepherd. A long-term thorn in Flynn’s side, she turns out to be the ultimate trigger.

Warmly recommended to anyone who wants to start the new year with a meaty read and to all who love expansive fiction –  and, of course, London which is colourfully, even affectionately, depicted.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Complete Uxbridge English Dictionary by Tim Brooke-Taylor, Barry Cryer, Graeme Garden, Jon Naismith & Ian Pattinson

Petroc Trelawny is a much loved Radio 3 presenter: urbane, warm, witty, knowledgeable and never patronising. And with a name like his, the Cornish roots are obvious.

Now, I have a dear friend who, like Trelawny has deep ancestral ties with Cornwall. She now lives in Penryn where I have stayed with her several times. When I boarded the big GWR train from Paddington to Truro in September, I took newly published Trelawny’s Cornwall  to her as a thank-you-for-having-me gift. Like me, she is life-long music maker and Radio 3 buff so it seemed a perfect fit. Of course I couldn’t resist reading the opening pages before I gave it to her which meant – inevitably – that I had to buy another copy for myself because he drew me in hook, line and sinker, as a Cornish fisherman might say.

It’s not an easy book to categorise because it seamlessly blends travelogue, memoir, history, geography, economics and a lot more. And I learned a huge amount as I walked and drove through England’s most southerly and westerly county with this man, youngest of five brothers, who went to school in Helston after his father retired from the Army and moved the family “home” to Cornwall.

He leads us through Helston with its attractive buildings, tells us about the Flora Dance and the silly (but very catchy!)  song which made it famous, He’s a bit of a railway nerd so he tells us about the Cornish stations and lines closed as the result of the 1963 report by Richard Beeching, acknowledging ruefully that although the cuts were heartbreaking for local communities they did enable the rest of the pretty extensive national network to thrive and develop. He visits some of these stations or their sites. Today, if they haven’t been demolished and built over, some are cafes or community centres thus still serving local people. And, of course, we marvel at Brunel’s railway bridge across the Tamar, which incidentally Trelawney tracks to its source a few miles south of Bude.

I had no idea that Cornwall was once the country’s, if not the world’s, communication centre when cables were laid on sea beds in the late 19th century so that people could send messages to America, India and Australia in just a few minutes. Much later came satellite dishes named after characters in Arthurian legend although most of the Cornish ones are no longer operational. We stand with Trelawny on the wind-swept cliffs and marvel.

Mining, formerly Cornwall’s industrial mainstay, is another dominant strand and he’s very good on how and when the industry developed, what brought about its demise and the situation today. There is lithium in Cornwall and it’s essential for car and other batteries. At present it has to be imported.  Can one of the start-up entrepreneurs Trelawny talks to (he’s every inch a journalist and interviews many people in this book) find an economic way of extracting it in Cornwall?

He introduces us to personalities such as John Betjeman, whose father had a holiday home in Cornwall so his son wrote about it, later bought a house of his own and died in the county. I was glad to see Charles Causley in the mix too. He was a wonderful poet but oddly underrated. I used, incidentally, to teach Betjeman and Causley together as required by the O level syllabus we were using in the 1980s. Perhaps Trelawny studied the same set of poets when he did his O levels at Helston. He was in one of the last cohorts to take O levels before the introduction of GCSE. He then chose not to go to university but to develop his ambition to be a broadcaster by taking a job and learning the ropes as he went.

Whether you know Cornwall or not, this book is richly compelling. And once you’ve read it you will – I guarantee – want to hop on God’s Wonderful Railway, or into the car headed for A30, and get down there. Happily, I’m booked to visit my friend again in March for another Cornwall fix.

Susan’s Bookshelves was originally a 2021 lockdown project, suggested by my daughter-out-law who thought that as I read widely, compulsively and a lot, it would make sense to write about the books which grab me – for whatever reason and in whatever circumstances. So that’s what I did. Nearly four years later I have written over 200 of these blogs, ranging across fiction, non-fiction, biography, several centuries and many countries. The only theme is that whatever it is, it took my fancy or drew me back for a re-read. And I’m open to anything except fantasy. Spare me dragons, witches, elves, and unicorns, please. From time to time I wonder whether the idea has run its course but whenever I mention that my regular readers tell me to carry on, so I do. This is the last for 2024 (during which I have gobbled 130 books, although only 52 found their way here) so Happy New Year to you all and, of course, happy reading. See you on 01 January 2025.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves:Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan

My attention was drawn to this 2005 novel by a friend whose book club has it scheduled for discussion and she wondered what I thought. The first thing to note, is the date of publication. It was published seventeen years before Ukraine’s current war. Be aware too that it’s fiction – as I wasn’t – until, very curious, I read the first page and realised that the title is ruefully ironic. This is a novel about a family of Ukrainian descent living in Peterborough, or at least that’s where the family home is.

Nadezsha (Nadia) who narrates, is a happily married sociology lecturer at Anglia Polytechnic University in Cambridge. She is worried about her 84 year old widowed father. He is a highly educated engineer who, eventually escaped the horrors of World War Two, Stalin and camps and came to England with his wife Ludmilla. She too had lived through terrible experiences in her homeland, alongside her elder daughter Vera.

Pappa is writing a history of tractors, whose title provides the title of the novel. It is also, incidentally, a history of the Soviet Union, including, of course, Ukraine. He regards tractors as the basis of all political outcomes as he patiently explains at length and many time to Nadia’s rather wonderful husband Mike while Nadia tries to sort out the mess her father has allowed his life to get into.

The mess is called Valentina. She is a blousy, not very law-abiding Ukranian women with huge breasts (Nadia discovers a bill for their enlargement) and no money.  Fifty years younger than Pappa, she is on the make, wants to stay in Britain and targets the old man who is lonely and very susceptible. Well Reader, he marries her and the situation gets ever more complicated. But Lewycka is too good a novelist just to make Valentina into a scheming pantomime villain preceded by her grossly enlarged assets.  Yes, she isn’t very nice and you want Pappa to get shot of her (although he’s capriciously ambivalent) but she’s also a quite hardworking woman trying to maximise opportunities for her teenage son in a culture she doesn’t fully understand. So we, and Nadia, do feel some sympathy.

The characterisation in this novel is splendid. There is a long-standing feud between Nadia and her sister although they do have to co-operate now because of Pappa. Gradually we learn the roots of the conflict. Vera is ten years older and remembers the camps. She is a tough divorcee and despises Nadia, born in Britain, for her liberal views but there is slow burn reconciliation which is rather uplifting – and an intelligent exploration of how misunderstandings and simply not knowing the truth can fester in a family. Also beautifully drawn is Valentina’s ex-husband, an academic working in Ukraine – calm, measured, determined and likeable.

I learned a lot from this novel about the history of Ukraine and how the experiences they have lived through must have shaped people like Pappa and Valentina. I also chuckled – often. Lewycka has, consciously, or not, borrowed a technique from Dickens which worked comically for him every time as it does for her. When she gets on the warpath Nadia dubs herself “Mrs Flog-‘em-and-send-‘em-home” and sustains the joke at her own expense for hundreds of pages. Pappa is forced to buy Valentina, who has never passed a driving test, a car (well three, actually) one of which is dismissed by her as “crap car” because it won’t go. Her English is short on conjunctions, articles and verbs but contains strings of angry nouns.  Nadia refers to it as “crap car” for the rest of the novel. There is a lot of tragic-comedy in Lewyck’s writing and it makes this novel as appealing as it is revealing.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Trelawny’s Cornwall by Petroc Trelawny