Biographies of Neil Kinnock
I've been staying with my parents over the weekend, 'sorting out' my books. Damn them. They painted my bedroom white (this is the parents not the books I'm talking about here), they took my chair out from besides the fireplace, they took all the books off of my shelves and put them on the floor, and now they tell me to look through and see which ones I want to get rid of.
I didn't mind it too much, actually, although it was mildly disorientating. There were easy choices; George Orwell's essays stay, detective stories I've already read go. But some of them were more difficult, I must admit. The abridged edition of Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' was tricky, for example. Do I keep it and use it as an offensive weapon against possible rapists? Do I chuck it, and with it my pretensions to intellectuality? And am I ever going to get round to reading 'Perestroika'? 'Kosovo: a short history'? It didn't feel that short when I read it, but I was 16. Might I want to read it again, even though I only bought it because Michael Foot recommended it in the Observer? And I must have spent fifty quid on all those Private Eye books, and now they just annoy me. How many biographies of Neil Kinnock do I actually need? I'll keep the one with the red cover and throw out the black-and-white one. Same for German dictionaries; and English dictionaries, come to that. Why the fuck did I buy Norman Tebbit's autobiography? And what made me think I'd ever need 'Irish Politics in the 1980s'? Half an hour later I'm standing in the middle of my bedroom looking mournfully at what my mother calls the Keeps and Not Keeps piles of books and thinking about the person who used to live in the room who was and wasn't me; different hair, different handwriting, different vocabulary, different ambitions. I was going to Be Someone. By this point (if you'd asked the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old me) I should have been a PPC, writing pamphlets which would revolutionise the Socialist Vision and the way the Labour Party was run and novels and short stories which would make people compare me to Disraeli; I'd have had at least one profile in the Guardian, a husband, probably a child or so... and I'm just a depressed diseased underachiever with no job and a cat to support, and I still haven't read Capital. It's funny how things turn out.
I didn't mind it too much, actually, although it was mildly disorientating. There were easy choices; George Orwell's essays stay, detective stories I've already read go. But some of them were more difficult, I must admit. The abridged edition of Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall' was tricky, for example. Do I keep it and use it as an offensive weapon against possible rapists? Do I chuck it, and with it my pretensions to intellectuality? And am I ever going to get round to reading 'Perestroika'? 'Kosovo: a short history'? It didn't feel that short when I read it, but I was 16. Might I want to read it again, even though I only bought it because Michael Foot recommended it in the Observer? And I must have spent fifty quid on all those Private Eye books, and now they just annoy me. How many biographies of Neil Kinnock do I actually need? I'll keep the one with the red cover and throw out the black-and-white one. Same for German dictionaries; and English dictionaries, come to that. Why the fuck did I buy Norman Tebbit's autobiography? And what made me think I'd ever need 'Irish Politics in the 1980s'? Half an hour later I'm standing in the middle of my bedroom looking mournfully at what my mother calls the Keeps and Not Keeps piles of books and thinking about the person who used to live in the room who was and wasn't me; different hair, different handwriting, different vocabulary, different ambitions. I was going to Be Someone. By this point (if you'd asked the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old me) I should have been a PPC, writing pamphlets which would revolutionise the Socialist Vision and the way the Labour Party was run and novels and short stories which would make people compare me to Disraeli; I'd have had at least one profile in the Guardian, a husband, probably a child or so... and I'm just a depressed diseased underachiever with no job and a cat to support, and I still haven't read Capital. It's funny how things turn out.
posted by helen @ 8:37 PM
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