It was the City of Westminster travelling library, a large removal-like van parked next to the bins outside one of the kitchen doors. This wasn’t a part of the palace she saw much of, and she had certainly never seen the library there before, nor presumably had the dogs, hence the din, so having failed in her attempt to calm them down she went up the little steps of the van in order to apologise.
The driver was sitting with his back to her, sticking a label on a book, the only seeming borrower a thin ginger-haired boy in white overalls crouched in the aisle reading. Neither of them took any notice of the new arrival, so she coughed and said, ‘I’m sorry about this awful racket,’ whereupon the driver got up so suddenly he banged his head on the Reference section and the boy in the aisle scrambled to his feet and upset Photography & Fashion.
She put her head out of the door. ‘Shut up this minute you silly creatures’ – which, as had been the move’s intention, gave the driver/librarian time to compose himself and the boy to pick up the books.
‘One has never seen you here before, Mr . . .’
‘Hutchings, Your Majesty. Every Wednesday, ma’am.’
‘Really? I never knew that. Have you come far?’
‘Only from Westminster, ma’am.’
‘And you are . . . ?’
‘Norman, ma’am. Seakins.’
‘And where do you work?’
‘In the kitchen, ma’am.’
‘Oh. Do you have much time for reading?’
‘Not really, ma’am.’
‘I’m the same. Though now that one is here I suppose one ought to borrow a book.’
Mr Hutchings smiled helpfully.
‘Is there anything you would recommend?’
‘What does Your Majesty like?’
The Queen hesitated, because to tell the truth she wasn’t sure. She’d never taken much interest in reading. She read, of course, as one did, but liking books was something she left to other people. It was a hobby and it was in the nature of her job that she didn’t have hobbies. Jogging, growing roses, chess or rock climbing, cake decoration, model aeroplanes. No. Hobbies involved preferences and preferences had to be avoided; preferences excluded people. One had no preferences. Her job was to take an interest, not to be interested herself. And besides, reading wasn’t doing. She was a doer. So she gazed round the book-lined van and played for time. ‘Is one allowed to borrow a book? One doesn’t have a ticker.’
‘No problem,’ said Mr Hutchings.
‘One is a pensioner,’ said the Queen, not that she was sure that made any difference.
‘Ma’am can borrow up to six books.’
‘Six? Heavens!’

Bennett pokes (what appears to be) gentle fun at establishment figures, but he is relentless about it, and his surface restraint hides a deeper rage against Philistinism and the kind of middle-brow culture which supports the political state to which we are all too easily becoming accustomed.
The novella is, however, slight, showing us a Queen of England who develops a passion for reading, much to the chagrin of her ministers and Palace lackeys. He does get the voice right, though. Anyone who has heard the lady speak will recognise it right off the page.
Bennett writes with a mock paternalistic tone, giving one the feeling of having strayed into a young adult novel. But he has, nevertheless, an infectious sense of humour which sets of an internal rumble making chuckles seem like part of life.
And the story works because he never deviates from the relentless inevitability of Her Majesty’s destiny once she is truly gripped by the Bitch Goddess of reading. Her new passion leads the ageing Queen to a foregone conclusion, which, like myself, you may not fully comprehend until the final paragraph.

This book was given to me by the publicist at Profile Books, but I wouldn’t hold that against it.

‘Well, there’s always one solution . . .’ Graham sat up straighter in his chair. This was what he’d come for. Of course, Jack would know what to do, would know the right answer. That was why he’d come here; he knew he was right to come. ‘. . . You should love her less.’
‘What?’
‘Love her less. May sound a bit old fashioned, but it’d work. You don’t have to hate her or dislike her or anything – don’t go over the edge. Just learn to detatch yourself a little. Be her friend if you like. Love her less.’
Graham hesitated. He didn’t quite know where to begin. Eventually he said,
‘I cry when the houseplants die.’
‘Come again, squire?’
She had these African violets. I mean, I don’t like African violets much, and neither does Ann. I think she was given them. She’s got lots of other plants she likes a lot more. And they got sort of plant chicken pox or something, and they dies. Ann didn’t mind at all. I went up to my study and cried. Not about them – I just found myself thinking about her watering them, and putting that fertilizer stuff on them, and, you know, not her feelings about the sodding plants – she didn’t really have any, as I said – but her time, her being there, her life.. . .
‘I’ll tell you another thing. After she’s gone to work, the first thing I do is take out my diary and write down everything she’s got on. Shoes, tights, dress, bra, knickers, raincoat, hair-grip, rings. What colour. Everything. Often it’s the same, of course, but I still write it down. And then occasionally, throughout the day, I take out my diary and look it up. I don’t try to memorize what she’s looking like – that’d be cheating. I get out my diary – sometimes when I’m teaching and pretend to be thinking about essay titles or something – and I sit there, sort of dressing her. It’s very . . . nice.
‘I’ll tell you another thing. I always clear the table after dinner. I go through to the kitchen, and I scrape my plate off into the kitchen bin, and then I suddenly find myself eating whatever she’s left on hers. Often, you know, it isn’t anything particularly nice – bits of fat and discoloured vegetables and sausage gristle – but I just scoff it. And then I go back and sit down opposite her, and I find myself thinking about our stomachs, about how whatever I’ve just eaten might easily have been inside her, but’s inside me instead. I think, what an odd moment it must have been for that food, when the knife came down and the fork pushed it this way rather than that, and instead of lying inside you it’s lying inside me. And that sort of makes me feel closer to Ann.
‘And I’ll tell you another thing. Sometimes, she gets up in the night and has a pee, and it’s dark and she’s half asleep and she somehow – God knows how she does it, but she does – she misses the bowl with the piece of paper she dries herself with. And I’ll go in there in the morning and find it lying on the floor. And – it’s not knicker-sniffing or anything like that – I sort of look at it and I feel . . . soft. It’s like one of those paper flowers that bad comedians wear in their buttonholes. It seems pretty, and colourful, and decorative. I could almost wear it in my buttonhole: I pick it up and shove it back in the bowl, but I feel sentimental afterwards.’

A book about a man who is jealous of the relationships his wife had before she met him is not normal fodder for me. In fact, had I known beforehand that this was the subject of Julian Barnes’ 1982 novel, I may well have left it untouched. And that would have been a pity.
But are there men as dumb as Graham? Well, yes, I suppose there are, it’s just that they’re difficult to meet as they don’t get out too much. Let us be thankful for small mercies.
At around the age of 40 Graham Hendrick, a British historian leaves his wife and daughter and marries a younger woman, Ann, who has been an actor in the movies. Although he loves her deeply and appreciates that she has brought more affection and emotion into his life than he ever expected or deserved, Graham slowly allows himself to be consumed by jealousy. But his jealousy is not about anything that happens between them in the present, rather about any affairs she may have had in the past, both in the real world and in the fictional world of her screen roles.
Blurring the lines between past and present and between fiction and reality are not exactly new territory for the novel, but in the hands of Julian Barnes they take on a freshness which involve humour and terror in close proximity and which lead inexorably to a frightening and highly dramatic conclusion.
Barnes has the ability to look at the everyday and transform it into something special, and in this novel it is his ability to transcend the normal which keeps us reading. We don’t necessarily believe what is depicted on the page, but each page is so studded with delights that we turn over hoping for more and are rarely disappointed.
Before She Met Me is a short novel, coming in at 174 pages, so it is a quick read. The conclusion is, ultimately, a disappointment, but everything leading up to it is time well spent.

Well, yes, usually.

But it’s sometimes funny as well.

Yesterday’s article in The Times by Tim Reid and Tom Baldwin from New Hampshire, reported on a Democratic debate on Saturday where the rivals fell into arguing which one of them represented real change. John Edwards joined forces with Barack Obama, asserting that, unlike the former First Lady, both he and Obama were “agents of change”.

Hillary Clinton responded angrily, in the most heated moment of the night. “I want to make change, but I’ve already made change. I will continue to make change. I’m not just running on a promise of change. I’m running on 35 years of change.”

Earlier in the day, Bill Clinton, working non-stop to save his wife’s campaign, told a crowd in a school gymnasium in Amherst: “She’s a change-maker, the best I ever saw.”

Hey, you got to smile.

Once you’ve read the poem you’ll want to hear what the author and editor have to say about it.

When Daddy died, his papers consisted of two passports, one issued in 1930, just after his own father died, when he was emigrating to America, the other issued in 1996, when he returned to Spain – his first time out of the country for over half a century – to revisit Jarama, the scene of his capture almost sixty years earlier. The rest was photographs and a photographic memory. Books were to be borrowed and loaned, read and retained in the mind, not the home. When we were young, he’d bring a pile of paperbacks from Gilmorehill Book Exchange and give us a week to read them before they went back to the store. A few weeks before he died, I took him a printout of the latest Beijing Review, now online. He liked that.

“When you think about the history of education, going back to Socrates, it’s all been about asking questions, arguing over ideas, raising objections and then coming to some kind of resolution. That takes time, effort and hard work. It’s much easier to say ‘I don’t like this book.’”

*

Bowen T Hunter over at Bookarazzi is worried that reading is becoming a dying art; describing an illiterate child, he says:

The school she was at was very poor. She is 11, and knows only her 2 and 5 times multiplication tables. The new school expects rather more, and so I have been badgered into trying to raise her educational level. Where to start? Oh my. She cannot add or subtract single digits without using her fingers. If I ask her “What is twenty minus one?” she has to sit and think, then out come the hands…”Twenty…um…….EIGHTEEN!” It is scary to think that in her old school she was one of the brighter pupils!

*

Confessions of a Psychotherapist:
Ms Melancholy’s was the funniest post I read this week:

So….

I take a teeny weeny blogging break during which I explore my long-standing confusion about my sexuality, decide to split from my husband, take a lesbian lover, tell my adolescent son that his mother is gay and move house. And what happens? I watch my technorati rating plummet to barrel scraping levels.

You really are a fickle lot

If you click on your chosen category in the sidebar, say, art, for example, you will immediately be whisked off to the latest posts from A Welsh View (Egg City – An amazing piece of artwork created entirely from stacked eggs); or from The Daily (Maybe) (Louise Whittle’s excellent guest post on the place of women in the art world. There are currently thirty-six entries from a wide variety of blogs under the art category.

If art isn’t your scene, try books instead. Here you’ll currently find pieces from Harry’s Place on the life and death of Norman Mailer; from The ThunderDragon on Harry Potter’s politics – Is he really a Left-Winger? Or Baggage Reclaim’s cogitations on a Doris Lessing interview.

You may, of course, prefer to wander through the categories on current affairs, Wales, Scotland, Lib Dems, the environment, software, television or public relations.

You can spend a lot of time British Blogs.

There is a fully functioning search facility together with a constantly updated list of the most popular searches. And the site also lists top posts and the most popular links.

I don’t know how many sites British Blogs are currently aggregating, but the categories covered are numerous and at busy times of the day the site is updated every couple of minutes.

But go visit yourself, I’ll be very surprised if you don’t find something to capture your attention and imagination.