Not So Fast...

I’ve not had much luck trawling book fairs, and things were looking typically bleak the other day when a visit to the annual fair in a nearby village hall looked like drawing another blank. Someone did have a first edition Nineteen Eighty-Four on offer, but I was put off by the tatty dust jacket – not to mention the £350 price tag. Finding nothing affordable at eye level, I resorted to rummaging in the ‘bargain boxes’ on the floor, where finally I found this tatty Scholastic Book Services, New York offering for the princely sum of a pound:

A children's book published in 1970, it celebrates the Apollo 11 moon landing, and gushes with enthusiasm about the immediate future of space exploration. ‘For space explorers,’ it says, ‘anything is possible.’ It shows the proposed landing sites of future Apollo missions, up to and including Apollo 20 – Apollo 17, in 1972, would actually be the last – and speculates that permanent moon colonies could be established, and the first manned landings made on Mars, by the early 1980s…

Old at Heart

I’ve loved ‘Brother Blair’ – aka George Orwell – since I was in short trousers, but there’s no denying he was a bit of a doom merchant; as he himself wrote of T. S. Eliot – in Inside the Whale (1940) – he achieves ‘the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it is.’ My favourite Orwell – one of my all-time favourite books, indeed – is Coming Up For Air (1939), from which I briefly quoted in a previous post ('Gold from the Forties'). I must re-read it on average every couple of years, and I’ve owned the same copy since 1977:

Orwell wrote it while convalescing in Morocco, and in essence it is a lament for a lost England, his childhood England of 1913. If you’ve read it you’ll know it’s full of lovingly detailed descriptions of fishing on the Thames and in farm ponds. But here’s the thing. Orwell decries the state of the country’s rivers and streams, wondering if there are any fish in them anymore, and bemoans the filling in and building over of farm ponds. And yet every generation utters the same cry. In the 1970s, in his column in Angling Times, Dick Walker regularly harked back to the 1930s as a time when England’s rivers and streams were full of thumping great roach and dace and chub and there was a rudd-packed pond on every farm. I guess that at a certain age we all look back on the past with misty eyes. It’s just that it seems Orwell reached that age rather earlier than most.

Fossil-Hunting Seventies-Style

A couple of posts back (‘Wish I’d Written That’) I made gentle fun of an overly optimistic guide to beachcombing from the 1970s. Here is an altogether more realistic practical guide from the same era, one published by Kestrel Books, a Penguin imprint, in 1977:

The authors tell you EXACTLY where to find what at various sites around the English coast. One such site is Warden Point on the Isle of Sheppey, where the road plunges straight into the sea due to the rapidly eroding clay cliffs – cliffs, note the authors, that can be extremely dangerous after heavy rain. Forewarned is forearmed, so I made sure my two eldest, Jessie and Jimmy, together with their friends Josh and Majella, all wore wellies when I took them fossil-hunting there one rainy day back when they were little. Striding down the steep slope, bucket in one hand, trowel in the other, Majella plunged straight into a mass of waist-deep gloop. After much heaving and hauling we finally managed to extract her not only from the mud but from her boots, which remain buried there to this day, fossils of the far future, and undeterred we all carried on down to the beach, where we became so absorbed in our fossil-hunting that we were almost cut off by the flooding tide (something else, to be fair, that the authors warn about). It was but the first of many happy expeditions to sites recommended in this marvellous little book – a book the like of which, I’m sure, would never be published now, not least for reasons of health and safety!