Tuesday 10^th July

Dad handed me a shabby file of papers, typed on an old-fashioned typewriter in the days long before word processors or computers.  At some stage I must have had some spare time, during which I transcribed excerpts from my diaries in 1967.  It is more than a bit confronting, to read messages from a seventeen year old self… A lot of blogsites and magazines are doing a theme of What advice would you give to your sixteen year old self.  I feel as if I am getting the opposite; a clear world view from Miss Smartypants Seventeen. 

In 1967 I had a wonderful opportunity to travel in Europe (Germany, Holland, Belgium, France, Greece, Italy.)  No this was not wasted on me; I revelled in every minute and spent a lot of time absorbing culture, going to galleries, trying new food – Galettes!  Pizza!  Brioches!  Pain au chocolat!  (And in fact it is noted, in my clear diary entries, that I expanded rapidly from eating such delicacies… After a month in Holland with kind elderly relatives feeding me vegetables tenderly mashed in butter and cream for my main meals and chocolate every time I might be getting just a teensy bit peckish, I could no longer do up my skirt and had to enlarge the waist band with a large nappy pin.  I am glad to say this all improved after living in Greece and spending as much time as possible in the Mediterranean with my new BFFs, Snork and Flip.)

But what amazed me most, from re-reading these messages from the past, was how much I read!  Smartypants indeed!  Orwell, Kafka, the Russians (Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov,) Dickens, Camus, Colette, whatever science fiction I could get my hands on, Dickens and…Tolkien.  (The Hobbit had just been released and oh how I loved it.)  I must have read at least five books per week; how things have changed… I still read, of course, but nowhere near as voraciously.  Time just whizzes past, and my days, like those of Calvin and Hobbes, are just packed.  At seventeen I must have been able to spend many hours every week just curled up, lost in a world of fiction.  And do I now pick up Kafka, the Russians, George Orwell, for a bit of light reading?? Well…no…my smartypants days are over…