Apr 19 2009
Booking and boozing and many-vegetable nosh
We just got back from Bex’s flat. She had a Potluck and Prose evening, which is like a book group except you don’t have to talk knowledgably about a book. You take a dish and a book, everyone gets drunk to some degree, and you swap the book. I gave Richard Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn (worth it for the shortest-short-story ‘The Scarlatti Tilt’ alone) and received from another guest Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons.
I haven’t finished the book I’m reading at the moment, but I’m looking forward to this new one because many people have said how much they enjoyed it. (Indeed, several other people were inspired to read it again after it appeared this evening).
We have volunteered to take the next group in a month’s time. Which gives us some motivation to get our living room in order and our bookshelves attached to the wall.
I watched the telly adaptation but didn’t actually read it till I was a grown up and then the main thing that struck me was how much tea these children drank while my offspring drank squash and coca-cola
diet coke, surely. I don’t think i had fat coke till i was a teenager, parties aside. Also, I was in high school before i could drink a full 330ml of coke in one sitting. I was so used to half a can, in a glass (which lets the gas out faster) that I couldn’t do a whole tin!
and now i drink tea like the best of the Swallows!
I read it - and a number of others by the same author- as a child. I can’t say whether an adult would like it.