In this article I include a sort of travel diary, a restaurant review, several music videos, and another glimpse inside Freedman Towers. To support my work and save me from having to get a proper job or go out busking, please upgrade to a paid subscription.
Greetings!
Today’s Start the Week contains all the stuff I mentioned above, rendering this paragraph entirely pointless. So enough of this persiflage, and on with the newsletter!
Correction
One of the things I'm assiduous about is checking and double-checking the accuracy of my statements when writing book reviews. Yet mistakes very occasionally happen. In my review of The Notebook I said I was surprised that Victor Klemperer did not appear in the index. The author, Roland Allen, has pointed out that it does, but perhaps I'd been sent an advance proof rather than the final product. I’ve no idea what happened there, but I looked again and the entry was staring me in the face. I’ve added a correction and apology to the original article.
Here’s a shorter review. I wrote it for Teach Secondary magazine, which stipulates a word count of 150.
Review of The Notebook
Who would have thought that a material as commonplace as paper could have such a rich history and profound effect on our lives? In The Notebook we discover, for instance, that notebooks were used to create the first double-entry bookkeeping system, before later seeing use as climate logs, being used to store recipes and employed in all sorts of ways by different authors.
Teachers will find this to be a rich source of information and history that can really resonate with students’ modern-day experiences and interests. Some may find it useful to find out how bullet journaling has been used to counteract ADHD; that MRI scans have shown how artists construct pictures; and that writing down traumatic experiences seems to have all kinds of health benefits, besides the obvious.
Well-researched and highly readable, it’s a compelling collection of facts, findings and ideas.
This review was first published in Teach Secondary magazine.
Southwold sojourn
Last week I had a break in Southwold. The map on the left below shows the general location of Southwold. It’s on the Eastern bit of England that bulges out1. The map on the right shows where Southwold is in relation to other places. London is down a bit and to the left2, around 90 miles away.
The worst part of it was the stairs where I was staying. It was a self-catering place right at the top of an old house. Lugging a suitcase plus a couple of boxes of foodstuffs etc was no joke. Don’t believe me? Get a load of this then.
All I could think of, as I dragged my carcass up all those steps, was Eddie Cochran’s song, Twenty Flight Rock. This tells the story of a bloke who wants to go and see his girlfriend, but she lives in an apartment on the twentieth floor, and the elevator has broken down. He ends up in bed with aching feet, but he can’t stay away so he goes to see her again. In the last verse, he says:
“All this climbing is a-getting me down;
You’ll find my corpse draped over a rail.”
I know exactly how he felt. Here’s a clip of him performing the song, from the film The Girl Can’t Help It:
This was me after a couple of days of this:
I spent the week going for long walks. Like the one from Southwold to Walberswick, which is around 8 miles. I’d intended to do a circular walk, but on the way back I decided to take the ferry across the river rather than the road and back over the bridge. Not because my feet were aching, but because my phone had run out of juice. I didn’t think it very safe to risk having an accident miles from anywhere with no means of communication. Time to have walked back over the bridge: an hour. Time to cross by boat: five minutes to walk to the ferry and then five minutes crossing. Here’s a picture to prove it:
The drawing is not entirely accurate: the ferry was basically a rowing boat with a motor and a steering wheel.
On my travels I passed a sign telling cattle to keep out:
This photo shows the bridge in the distance.
Here’s another map:
After all that walking I had to have a decent meal, so I booked a table at the recently-opened Doh Pizzeria.
Two families recently took over the place, which used to be Enzo’s. Elaine and I knew Enzo from when we patronised his gaffe in East London. He’s a nice bloke and a good laugh.
I have to say I prefer Doh, because there’s more variety and you don’t have to book ages in advance or pay a £30 deposit.
I went twice. The first time I had the Five Cheeses and watched my cholesterol level go off the scale. But what a way to go. It was delicious, it just sort of melted in my mouth. The next time I had the Mediterranean because it had peppers and aubergines and other healthy stuff. That was very nice too.
Purely in the interests of being able to give a full review, I treated myself to a dessert on each occasion. The one called the Gay One was really nice: not too sweet. The other one I tried, called the Malty One, was a bit too sweet for my taste but still nice.
The service was friendly and efficient. The only thing I didn’t like was that I found the music a bit loud. Fortunately, it was not bad music and also once the room filled up the sound was deadened.
Definitely a place to visit if you find yourself in Southwold.
There’s more to share from my short trip to Southwold, but this newsletter is already getting a bit long so I’ll round off with one more item and then some links for you to explore.
Inside Freedman Towers
Me (having just put on Laura by Dexter Gordon — see below): Babes, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.
Elaine: I hate this sort of jazz.
Me: As that well-known philosopher Long John Baldry said3, if you feel that you just can't dig it, you know you don't know what it's all about.
Articles you may have missed
Spotting the bullsh*t — my review of Stephen Potter’s One Upmanship books, especially Lifemanship. Practical advice plus a good laugh. This was published by
on The Books That Made Us.Experiments in style: mystery version — another version of a very simple story. It really is quite astonishing how many different ways a story can be told. I’ll be taking a deep dive into this one in a post for paying subscribers, and giving a preview of the next in the series, if I’ve managed to write it by then!
I am way behind in my Substack reading, but I just had to share this post by
It’s her job history in headlines. I’m thinking of changing my Linkedin entries to the same format, because it’s not only nowhere near as boring, it’s also not the usual bragfest. Most chortlesome.On Wednesday it’s the turn of
to reply to my recent letter. Do subscribe to her newsletter to ensure you don’t miss it.Thanks for reading this. See you soon.
I was never much good at geography at school.
Please see footnote 1.
In his seminal work, Don’t Try To Lay No Boogie-Woogie On The King of Rock and Roll:
Terry, sorry. I misspelled the author. It's Crosley (not Crossley). I learned about her from a book review about another essay writer.
Hi Terry, I usually choose and Victor usually reads, although the other night I read him a short piece I'd just found that I thought was hilarious, so sometimes it changes (that was the first essay, "Wheels Up," in Sloane Crossley's book "Look Alive Out There"). I do mostly have an idea of what Victor would like to read so my choosing is usually fine with him. I think maybe I choose often because I read a slightly wider range of subjects than he does, and it works because I can't read one of the things he loves--science fiction (it can get too depressing for me) but also we like finding new things together on certain subjects such as biographies. We've been slowly reading through one of the best Bach biographies, for example. while also read a friend's new book, and some other subjects in between.