Funfare for the Common Man

I thought I’d take a break from my ‘Reflections on Reading’ to take a nostalgic trip down memory lane. I’m a bit of a sucker for yearly milestones. I probably spend far too much time having maudlin moments, reflecting on the past, asking myself what I was doing at this point 5 years ago…or 10 years ago…or 20 years ago. I get it from my mother and I blame her entirely for this. As a kid, my mother would often say ‘this time last week we were…’ or ‘this time 25 years ago I was in the midst of intense labour with you’. I do this with historical events as well. When 2014 kicked off, I started diving into WWI-related books. Last month marked 50 years (April 1968) since 2001: A Space Odyssey, so I of course went and re-watched that. No doubt that if I’m still alive and kicking in 2066 I’ll be commemorating a millennium since the Battle of Hastings by reading recently de-classified material. Regular, devoted readers dating back to when this blog started in 2009 will be fully aware o...

‘We are all familiar with the after-the-fact tone – weary, self-justificatory, aggrieved, apologetic – shared by ship’s captains appearing before boards of inquiry to explain how they came to run their vessels aground and by authors composing Forewords.’ ( John Lanchester, The Debt to Pleasure) A Foreword First, I should probably add a [sic] to the quote above, just after ‘authors’. Second, what I am posting below is a very lightly edited little ditty that I wrote specifically for my teenage students a couple of weeks ago. Though it didn’t take me long to write, I’m pretty hard-pressed to find much free time to write these days and so I didn’t want it to go completely to waste. I think (or hope) some of them appreciated it or at least found it mildly interesting, and I even turned into a sort of reading ‘test’. It fit in with the topic of the unit we were studying, the media, and I figured they might have been fed up or bored with my endless crapping on about the ‘good...