Self-Winding · A Sort of Progression

MY FIVE

1. The Reader's Digest Encyclopaedia of Plants & Flowers; an outdated edition now, very dog-eared indeed. One of the best tools for identifying varieties, I prefer it to the RHS encyclopaedia. It was a surprising gift from the cleaners at a library I left years ago. One of them wrote in it "So now you can grow up."

2.The Dairy Book of Home Cookery in the 1978 edition. I see at Amazon that it's now £32. Lots of gravy stains on this one, since it is a cookbook for beginners yet lasts for life. It's a gem with its recipes that always work, every sauce on the planet, clear methodology. Only my copy of Delia Smith's Evening Standard Cookbook matches its decrepitude while beating it in the popularity stakes.

3. Philip Larkin's Collected Poems. Getting tatty because Faber chose to print this important piece of publishing on paper of Andrex quality. My copy is interleaved with odd bits of printed Larkinalia marking special places.

4. Complete Works of William Shakespeare. Oxford ed', Christmas 1957 in my writing on the flyleaf. Spine off, heaviest wear on the sonnets and the 'syllabus plays' - Hamlet, Macbeth, Merchant, Tempest which are much annotated. An odd sort of bookmark fell out just now - a rather raunchily thrusting picture of Robert Helpmann in lipstick and tights, can't imagine that he quickened the teenage pulse. Who on earth would remember him now?

5. Nancy Mitford's novels - five ancient paperbacks, brown and brittle, that are read each year in the winter. I join my old friends Davy & Fanny, Linda and Uncle Matthew, The Bolter and Fabrice for a lovely comic read-in. She writes so deftly and her teasing observation of eccentric upper class life amuses me no end.

A dodgy old week this has been. First thing to go was my digital camera which I must have dropped or left behind on a visit to an aquarium centre. We were there with the three children down yonder, I expected to get some good shots of astonishment at the giant catfish and some tidy old snakes that live there. But we got too absorbed in watching brilliant little fishes and when I got home the camera was gorn and I forlorn. Insurance job, I suppose, but after the excess is applied, it is hardly worth it. G had only just got over the day I fell over with it in my hand in Norwich & scraped the casing - his present, of course.

I came in from the garden with frozen hands and reached up in the cupboard to get down the big food processor; bang, crash, wallop, it fell through them onto the ceramic floor and split into a thousand pieces. Another ten Pavarottis and a nifty down the drain.

We won't speak of me putting my elbow in a tray of emulsion, nor sitting waiting all afternoon for two lots of prospective tenants who didn't show, having broken my back to get the garden shipshape in time. Nor of the Kleenex tissue in with a dark wash. Forget the enigmatic under-timber-floor damp patch and consequent mildew that has appeared again in the lavatory, the forgotten library book with an eighty pence fine and the loss of a temporary tooth crown. Minor matters, but life gets tedious sometimes, don't it?