Do You Remember Harry Carpenter? (Even Great Books Can Die). Also Books Bought And Borrowed

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

Let's start with the question in the title. That's for anyone living in what will probably soon be named the Disunited Kingdom. A land whose government is apparently telling people living here originally from the EU that they might not be allowed to stay post BREXIT.

No matter that you worked here, started up businesses and/or a family

With every day that has followed since the referendum this Kingdom seems to be slowly moving to a very dark place indeed. A look here,a remark there, a graffitied wall strewn with racial insults, in some cases violence.

Britain has become a very worrying place to live right now. And I say this as a white male with a British passport.

So I went today to Porthcawl mainly to go to the library. Here is the Porthcawl view of the day.

Metaphor time

That view seemed to match my mood. Calm but with a sense of foreboding.

Before I went to Poundland for a few odd groceries. Poundland sell small stocks of stuff mainly for, surprise, surprise a pound. Now they do sell books most of which deserve to stay there. Some though will surprise you. There was a Howard Jacobson. But that wasn't the book that caught my eye. It was this.

Martin Booth - The American

This attracted me because it was set in Tuscany, where my Italian relatives live. Remember starting to watch the film on TV and nodding off but liking what I saw before seductive power of the nap took over.

It's not a Penguin paperback I know. But as it was only a pound it was bought.

And so to the library. Picking the football book to read was easier than I thought.

Andrew Jennings - The Dirty Game

Well the cover says it all really.

I was about to leave when in the corner of my eye I noticed this.

Sue Townsend - The Public Confessions Of A Middle-Aged Woman

Sue Townsend wrote the Adrian Mole books (I've read when he was a teenager but not those as an adult) but she also wrote some other stuff as well (I remember a novel...though not the title... where the Royal family were moved in a Republican Britain to a council house). These are a selection of columns she wrote on various subjects. I borrowed it, pathetic as it sounds, because I thought it would make me laugh. How sad is that?

So to the question Do You Remember Harry Carpenter? If you do then I've finished my "car book", Glued To The Box by Clive James. Let me say now that the next car book is volume one of  Michael Palin's Diaries bought a couple of weeks back. I now have five books on the go. I'll never kick the habit of reading but I've got to learn to control it. Thing is I don't know how.

This was his final published collection of his TV columns for The Observer between 1979-1982. It's quite simply just as good as I remember it all those years ago. Funny yet erudite. Here is a man capable of talking about an opera and then move on to The Rockford Files (that was in an earlier book - Just lumped that in to say that The Rockford Files seem to be one of the few seventies detective shows that has stood the test of time - I liked The Rockford Files - It seemed to be written and performed by adults - Clive James liked it as well).

He is the best critic I have ever read. One of the few that I would look forward to reading (or perhaps even prefer listening to, as I mentioned when discussing the book of his radio show he used to do called A Point Of View).

But........

Do you remember Harry Carpenter? He was a BBC sports presenter in the seventies and eighties. He was mainly known for his Boxing commentary but he'd also present The British Open and Wimbledon. Clive James writes about him here. If you do then you will read the book with a wistful smile about a time long gone.

If you don't then the bulk of this book is not for you. It'll mention programmes and people long since forgotten unless you look them up on Google or Youtube. I don't know why book or literary or theatre criticism (Christopher Hitchen,Dorothy Parker, Kenneth Tynan) survives but TV doesn't, certainly not for this period anyway.

So when the last person to remember Harry Carpenter dies. This book, great as it is will die with it.

Until the next time.