Books

I had a typical (for my generation) middle class education at a Grammar School after sailing through the old 11 plus exam, by far the easiest exam I ever took, in fact I could never come to terms with my best mate of the time failing the same exam. As a result of this and his going "down the road" literally and metaphorically to the local Secondary Modern, our friendship died a slow but inescapable death as our social circles diverged completely. Stephen Ward wherefore art thou?

Anyway, I digress. The point of this wibble is not as you might imagine from the above a diatribe against the division caused by selective education, no, for once the title of the piece actually directly relates to the content. My Grammar School education combined with my natural affinity for English & English Lit led to my reading list from the ages of 14 to 17 being heavily influenced by our form master and Lit teacher Geoff Dean. You see he was seemingly very much a product of early 70s UK "red brick" university trendy left wing education, and could so easily have been Malcolm Bradbury's "History Man"*, suede jacket, floppy fringe, pipe'n'all.
His tutelage led my devouring Salinger, Kerouac, Bradbury, Sillitoe, Amis M, Kesey, Hunter Thompson, Burgess, all the usual suspects, even Burroughs. Most of those are still represented on my bookshelves. One author he tried to get us all to read was James Joyce, whose Ulysses I've attempted to read four times, and never got past the first chapter. To say it is impenetrable would make a 50s London peasouper look like the height of clarity. After my fourth and final attempt in 2009, my copy went in the charity bag. Last year an attempt was made on Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man, which started off fine but soon descends into a quagmire of repressed sexuality and turns into a stream of consciousness rant on Catholic guilt. I dunno, maybe I'm simply not of the mental capacity to appreciate such self referential bollocks, but that went the way of Oxfam too, 60% unread.

Anybody who says they managed Ulysses at first attempt is either lying or is now a Catholic priest with a predilection for self flagellation.

My next read will be Keith Richards' autobiography Life. You can bet there will be no repression there!

* If any of you out there know where I can find the marvellous BBC TV version of this on DVD, let me know!

Addendum
Since I wrote this yesterday, I found an old picture from 1974 of the whole school, and Mr Dean appears far straighter than I remember, but we were all posing for the school picture, so had to look our best. He's No.27...

Thanks to Geoff Dean for opening my eyes to the world of books!

Here's yours truly. I think this is bravery beyond the call of duty of me to post such a truly awful visage for your entertainment! I'm not going to tell you which one is me, you'll have to guess...the only thing I can offer in defence is that it was 1974 after all!!

Arrrghhh!