Escaping the Sunday terror

I'm coming round to the idea that there's a point to the Sunday evening murder mystery and nostalgic feelgood series such as Heartbeat.

After a hearty Sunday lunch finished off with too much red wine and a snooze on the sofa before the evening's lightweight TV entertainment starts, there's little else but the remnants of the weekend's glossy supplements to see out our 48 hours of freedom.

Inevitably, if you're an overthinking worryhound, the impending work week is likely to fill that cerebral void. An empty head will soon be filled with all sorts of nonsense, most of it inconsequential.

That's where the power of distraction comes in. Just another comedy quiz; a few more minutes on Facebook, a final cup of tea. The wind down at the end of the weekend fills me with dread. Knowing there's work undone, the final thoughts of a review to tie down and a chaotic mess of unironed office clothes to address and sort into potential weekday outfits, I'll discover a fascinating article to read or unearth a documentary that's been taking up valuable hard disk space for months.

There's something about a Sunday evening, though, that makes it an impossible part of the week to pick up a book. I can peruse the shelves and scan the blurb on the dust jacket and paperback, but I just can't seem to start a new novel at the end of the weekend.

Saturday morning and the joy of a few hours of uninterrupted reading - now you're talking. Monday, Tuesday, even Wednesday or Thursday are wonderful nights to spend with a book. But give me a Sunday and I'll toss and turn, fret and frown and do anything but sleep a refreshing sleep. Oh, what is it about the approach of the work week that makes me long to but unable to read?

Tragic words?

My English A-level teacher was adamant that there was no such thing as a tragedy. Rather, she made a very good point about tabloid overuse of the term. I sometimes wonder whether I get my pedantry from Mrs Ellis, but when it comes to the term tragedy and the media’s fondness for it, she couldn’t be more right.

A tragedy is, properly, a term with its origins in Greek mythology. A tragedy in the classical sense must be played out over the course of no more than a day and a night and, if we’re being proper about it, relates to the death of a king or other politically or regally important figure.

On this basis, the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, might be termed a tragedy. Many people would concur. But the original meaning of the term ‘tragic’ would not have extended to “tragic Cheryl Cole” being unwell and unhappy due to the break-up of her marriage.

Shakespeare was on the money with Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, in other words; Marley And Me, on the other hand, doesn't count.

The headline announcing the death of a close schoolfriend of mine should not have been ‘Tragedy of death fall student’. Rightfully, it should have referred to the ‘sad loss’, ‘awful accident’ or ‘fatal slip’. Calling it a tragedy does not make it any more serious or give it more gravitas. In fact, it implies a death foretold or premeditated and since we don’t have an author’s insight into what Simon’s state of mind was immediately prior to falling out of the window, we can’t conclude anything of the sort.

Suicides might be classed as tragedies since premeditation is often part of the act, but whether the person intended to go through with the act of finality is also open to conjecture. We have every reason to believe another schoolfriend accidentally hanged himself while showing off in front of his brother, but we can’t and don’t know. We only know that he was among the outwardly happiest and most contented of our clan.

Tragedy can also be collective. Hillsborough, the Haiti earthquake and the Boxing Day tsunami are probably rightly tagged with the term. The latter two were natural disasters, but their effects were magnified to become a tragedy due to the poverty of their geographical location. The tragic aspect is that they were accidents waiting to happen and avoidable deaths due to poor infrastructure and lack of effective warning systems.

On this basis, books such as Frank McCourt’s Angela's Ashes come under the heading 'tragedy', since the poverty of Irish families starving and near-starving was both predictable and avoidable. In fact, while Angela's Ashes has undergone a critical reassessment or two since its original publication in the early 1990s, the heart-rending tale isn’t that far removed from the tales of grinding poverty of some of the best-loved classics. Dickens, Zola, Steinbeck and Hardy all wrote fictional narratives that highlighted the everyday struggle to survive of everyday people.

But how are we to judge other fiction that depicts human suffering but without the apparent aim of bringing to light. Should Marley and Me and About A Boy be measured against Tess Of The D'Urbevilles or Germinal? Granted, the two are divided by the non-true life and fictional distinction. Even so, the term tragedy is bandied about in relation to both.

The snob in me came out when I discovered an entire rack of books in my local WHSmith devoted to tales of misery and despair. Worse, it was the largest non-fiction section in the whole shop. It was closely followed in population by the racks devoted to celebrity biographies. Even serious politicians have fallen foul of the need to expose their serious shortcomings and life-threatening (or career-jeopardising) experiences. Edwina Currie and John Prescott are only the latest examples. But if the only profitable, bankable books for publishers are ones written by or about the ‘tragic’ celebrities that disgrace our daily chip paper, it's little wonder that’s what we're offered.

Such tales may keep you awake at night, but for their lurid content rather than crafted prose.

Digital editions or dusty bookshelves?

My husband and I have lots in common, a love of reading, a fondness for technology and an unhealthy loyalty to the music of the 1980s among them. But while we both love music and are both obsessive bookworms, we have opposing takes on their place in our home.

Partly, I'm sure, our differing attitudes to the media we consume stems from necessity. I began acquiring a sizable book collection when I came to London to university and I've really not been home since. Actually, the family home moved at the same time I flew the coop, so there weren't really roots to return to or an attic in which my academic arsenal would fit.

Naturally, I could have bagged up my literary swag and taken it to the new family home in lieu of washing; but as part of my adult identity, the books came with me. Furniture, clothes, plants, gadgets, pictures and more have been dicarded along the way, but my book collection has always been heavily guarded and steadily grown. Some long-cherished titles have seen the insides of 15 different abodes. There are a lot of boxes of books, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

It's a similar story with my CDs and records. Most people understand the idea of music as being the soundtrack to your youth and young adulthood. I've kept all but the most disastrously scratched or obviously ill-advised.

Mark, by contrast, got rid of his CDs and went digital a year or two before we met. He moved around a lot and travelled light enough that each change of address involved a full car boot and backseat, rather than the van I needed to hire each time.

When we moved in together he had an iPod or three and a couple of shiny Macs which he used to house his entire musical history. As far as I can tell, this sort of suits him - and means it's my musical idols that end up getting played on the in-car CD player on long car journeys.

He had - and still has - hundreds of books. But I worry about the digitising effect.

The one big, expensive-but-worth-it plan for the home we've managed to buy ourselves is a wall of books. An expandable shelving setup that fulfills and - at first at least - exceeds our needs. If it grows from a wall of books to become a fully-fledged library, we've even discussed getting a scoot-along ladder for the tomes we couldn't otherwise reach.

The e-book seduction has set in though. As a gadget journalist like me, Mark has had his paws on Sony Readers of every type, BeBook Readers and Cool-ERs and the highly covetable Amazon Kindle. He still drools over the Plastic Logic Que prototype we had a very early peek at more than a year ago. An Apple iPad has already been preordered.

None of this bothered me in the least. His side of the bed is still a jealously guarded assortment of 'boy things' and a teetering tower of on-the-go novels and graphic novels, science and programming books. He's not digitised it all yet. But a recent chat with colleagues suggested a change was in the air: did I detect a wishful sigh in response to the idea that we forget the idea of bookcases as they will soon all be digital anyway? Am I right to panic?

A year ago I ruthlessly threw out my old cassette tapes. Not just the bargain compilations I picked up from Our Price and Woolies, but the ones I played over and over and the ones I made myself. I'm still kicking myself for doing so. Logic - and my friends - said I should get rid of them as I still hadn't got round to taping them to MP3. I would have done eventually. Probably.

It's simple: I'll just have to make sure we never move house again.

A beginning, a middle and an end

It was neither the best of times nor the worst of times. In fact, it was simply about time I got round to doing what I said I'd be doing and get a blog underway.

I'm starting this endeavour in the knowledge that the vast majority of blogs aren't read. I'm also starting it with a certain amount of guilt at having set up a blog almost a year ago and done nothing except unpublish its three or four entries.

One useful thing I did do a year ago, however, was to have a much-needed rummage through my too large book collection and box up 100 or so no longer loved titles to rehome. For years I had not been able to bear the idea of throwing away books on which I'd spent good money and invaluable time reading, but an imminent move made me reappraise their worth. Two years since their arrival at my abode, they had either yet to be unpacked or were simply making work for a none-too-enthusiastic dust maid.

So I catalogued the books, gave each a star rating or brief comment and had a last thumb-through to check I really could bear to see their departure. After all, someone went to the trouble of writing each of those books in the first place. A acknowledgement seemed only fair.

Thanks to a few tweets, some novels found a new home; most were destined for a charity shop shelf, abandoned by me and probably yet to be stumbled upon by others. My hope is that this blog won't meet the same fate. Rather than becoming yet another dusty corner of the web and conveniently forgotten and out of sight of she who ought to be cherishing it, perhaps the idly curious will pick up it, turn it over, offer some sage words about its subject matter and linger for a while.

Let's see, shall we.

Rosie Hattersley

BooksInBed

March 20101