Passage booked…

CHRIS BENNETT starts gearing up for the Christmas book season.

UNDOUBTEDLY, by now you will have had a chance to visit Ramsgate Stationers in their beautiful new premises in the Southcoast Mall.

I say undoubtedly largely out of bias, or if you prefer, bibliomania.

Once a year we are exhorted by our leading educators, at least I think that is the term, to encourage children to read; although I am probably wrong, I can’t help thinking that is all that happens: we encourage children to read once a year.

The problem, as seems usually to be the case, lays not so much with the children as with the parents: so few people have the time, let alone the inclination, to read a book.

I recently finished a semi-autobiographical novel, the first fiction, if fiction it be, I’ve read in years. It was The Edwardians, by that gifted and extraordinary character, Vita Sackville-West. It was published in Tavistock Square, London, in 1931 by her friends Leonard and Virginia Woolf.

You may recall that VSW was the wife of the colourful diplomat Harold Nicolson. Their son Nigel is the Nicolson of the publishers Wiedenfeld and Nicolson.

As a child Sackville-West had grown up in another monumental house, Knole, an upbringing which more than qualified her to write this extraordinary book. Its subject is the manners and customs of the English aristocracy in the reign of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, from about 1902 until 1910, the Edwardian period of a century ago.

What drew me to the book was that in the first place it has been on my shelf for years and in the second place a dip into it revealed Vita’s exquisite use of English.

Not only is it beautiful to read and think about, but, of course, it emphasises her ability to marshal her thoughts; what we used to call lucidity and fluency.

Before I leave the subject of reading, I came across a BBC blog last week by the writer/broadcaster Sue Lawler. At least I think it was she; in the blog she wrote:

“I live with the tensions between the world out there I want to see, and even contemplate, and the inner world to which the book gives me access. It is the inner rewards of reading a book in a private and concentrated way that lead you into realms of your own imagination and thought that no other process offers. Something happens between the words and the brain that is unique to the moment and to your own sensibilities.”

I am increasingly of the belief that something similar will be said of the electronic reader before too long.

My friend Larry Routledge’s talk on his dramatic and rather alarming experiences in the Southern Ocean, given in Palm Beach last week, was well attended. It is a rare thing to listen to someone whose experiences are so far removed for the ordinary that they take on a life of their own.

The captain of the vessel used in most of the blocking activities aimed at the Japanese whalers, the Ady Gil, was Pete Bethune. The day of Larry’s talk there arrived in the post Bethune’s account of the episode Whale Warriors.

As whales are such an integral part of our lives on the South Coast I think the book would make a good Christmas present. A Hodder Moa book, it is published in New Zealand by Hachette of Auckland, and should soon be available at Ramsgate Stationers in the Southcoast Mall.