A
Book at Lunchtime
By
Dominic Horton
I
haven't read aloud in front of a others since I was a schoolboy
(except that is for reading bedtime stories to my dear son Kenteke,
the occasional speech at a wedding or funeral and a brief
poem at the recent Flagon & Gorses' First World War night)
but I found myself doing exactly that this week at a shared reading
group run by The Shared Reading Company
(http://thesharedreadingcompany.org.uk/).
It was all a bit last minute as I had intended spending the whole day
at my desk working on a non-Lowlife writing
project but cabin fever got the better of me at lunchtime and I knew
that I needed to get out otherwise I would start to talk to myself.
Again. And it always ends in an argument.
 |
| Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry. |
I
remember Auntie Bernie telling me about The Shared Reading Company's
groups a few weeks ago and I discovered that they were meeting that
very afternoon at Quinborne Community Centre, a couple of miles up
the road, so I revved up Helen (my diminutive car) and off I
went. It wasn't until I parked up that I started to feel nervous
about the thought of reading in front of others and I was a little
worried that I would make a t*t of myself. The community
centre was a veritable hive of activity and it housed a Café so
I thought that I had better buy myself a bottle of water in case my
throat dried up whilst reading. But my growing nervousness had
already made my throat a little dusty and as a consequence I
struggled to get the words, “a bottle of water please” out when I
was asked what I wanted by the assistant. Not a great start to
proceedings.
I entered the
room where the group was meeting but found only one other there, who
turned out to be Nuala, the person who runs the group (otherwise
known as a shared reading facilitator.) I feared that if there was to
be only the two of us that I would have to do an awful lot of reading
aloud and that I should have bought two bottles of water. But others
soon joined us and there was six of us in all and after introductions
we started to read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time by Mark Haddon, a book which won the Whitbread
prize for fiction a few years ago.
Nuala
read the first couple of chapters, and as you would expect she is a
skilled, experienced reader and charmingly her Birmingham accent was
pronounced on occasion. Once Nuala had finished she asked if anyone
else would like to continue the reading and I immediately volunteered
so as to get my turn out of the way. Years of reading Roald Dahl and
Dr. Seuss and the like to Kenteke transpired to be good preparation
and I read well enough, despite my thoughts drifting off on a couple
of occasions deciding whether to have tarka dal or beef
broth for tea. For the record the beef broth won the day.
 |
| The Pirate, doing what he does best. |
I
cooked the tarka dal last Friday after having a nightmare the night
before in which a sinister voice had insistently told me that if I do
not cook the dish first thing the following day something seriously
bad was going to happen. I attended the Birmingham Beer Festival on
Friday afternoon and I feared that if I didn't make the tarka dal and
they ran out of beer the blame would be put squarely on me and that I
would be hounded out of the city. Charlie Chaplin once said “a day
without laughter is a day wasted” but in the case of my co-drinker
the Pirate you can substitute the word “laughter” for “beer”.
So if the festival had run dry it would have been an immensely grave
matter.
So
in the limited time that I had on Friday morning I cooked the tarka
dal in a Challenge
Anneka style
frenzy
and if only Roy Castle and Norris McWhirter were still alive by now I
would have an entry in the Guinness
Book of Records.
I put the tarka dal in my slow cooker smug in the knowledge that it
would be perfectly cooked and ready to eat on my return from the beer
festival. When I opened the front door to Codger Mansions in the
evening in a starving and merry state I expected to be greeted by the
agreeable aroma of the Punjab but instead I got a caustic whiff of
charred food. I had made the schoolboy error of not remembering that
lentils need a great deal of hydration and I had underestimated the
amount of water required in the dish, resulting in the dall being
incinerated.
Although
I assessed the tarka dal and decided that it could be rescued I
didn't have the enthusiasm to do it at the time so I decided to order
a pizza off just-eat.co.uk from Antonios, which permanently has a buy
one get one free offer on all pizzas. I must have been more trigger
happy than Dirty Harry because when the delivery driver turned up he
had four pizzas for me. I must have erroneously double clicked on my
order. Resultantly my diet last weekend consisted almost
entirely of pizza, which I ploughed through stoically as I hate
to waste food. This did nothing for my waist line and so this week I
have been on a soup and banana diet in an effort to again make the
wearing of trousers a comfortable experience. I did
eventually resurrect the tarka dal and when I ate it on
Wednesday it represented a refreshing change from soup
and bananas.
 |
| Charlie Chaplin, by request of Toby In-Tents. |
The
foodstuff at break time at the reading group was chocolate digestive
biscuits and everyone deserved a little treat with their cuppa after
reading admirably. John read with a rich and deep Irish accent,
Heather with a more received pronunciation; Neville orated with
an appealing Caribbean lilt. Farah is from Iran and part of
her motivation to attend the group is to improve her grasp of English
and at times she admitted to struggling to follow the text when
others read. But when it was Farah's turn she read wonderfully well
in a beguiling Arabic voice.
Overall
I had a very enjoyable experience with the reading group and I later
reflected on why that was. It was good to read aloud and listen to
others reading as it seemed to focus one's attention more on the
words and it had a calming effect. The periodic informal discussions
that we had about the story seem to bring the book to life and it was
interesting to hear others interpretations of what the text meant. It
highlighted the point that books leave a lot to the imagination,
which is why reading is so much more enriching than watching a film,
for example. The variety of styles and accents of the readers also
celebrated difference and therefore it breeds an acceptance of
others, a tolerance. Finally, and importantly, there was free tea and
biscuits.
Talking
of biscuits I think that I will stick to buying them from Sainsburys
after an unsatisfying trip to one of their rivals last week. I had
long read about and listened to shoppers championing smaller budget
supermarkets, so I decided to give one a go. My shopping list
consisted of a leak, some shallots, wholemeal bread, bananas,
margarine and some cheap yogurts. The shop was busy and I
struggled to find a space on the car park despite it being midweek
and it was a little bit too chaotic for me in the fruit and veg
aisle.
 |
| Norris McWhirter. |
I
was disappointed to find that they only sold leeks in packets of
four, which is three more than I needed. There were no shallots to be
seen and a surly assistant confirmed that they had run out. The bread
turned out to be like cardboard, even after being hydrated by
margarine, which was a task in itself as despite me not storing the
marg in the fridge it was so hard that it was virtually unspreadable.
I ended up giving the bread to the ducks down Leasowes park but even
they turned their beaks up at it citing, “If you think I am
lowering myself to eat that cheap bread then you are quackers.” The
bananas has an acidic aftertaste and I condemned them to be inedible.
The yogurts were fine.
The
woman at the checkout scanned the goods and slid them down the
counter with terrifying speed and had her hand held out to receive my
cash before I was even a quarter of the way through packing. I was
left in no doubt that it was unacceptable to remain at the till
beyond a couple of seconds after your purchases were scanned. It was
almost as if you were being told that a contractual stipulation of
you buying cheap food in the store is that you have to pack up and
f*ck off immediately so that the cashier can attend to antagonising
the next customer.
A
more disturbing thought than a return trip to the budget supermarket
is that of a reading group using this column as material. Half the
group would be asleep and the other half would walk out in disgust,
leaving the shared reading facilitator thinking, “If I
see that Horton in the Flagon & Gorses I will be sure to buy him
a pint as even though Lowlife turned out to not
be a popular choice at least I can go home now.” Toodle pip.
©
Dominic Horton, November 2014.
*
Email: lordhofr@gmail.com
*
Lowlife is dedicated to the memory of the late Jonathan Rendall
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