POST 367. STILL READING.

KINDLE BOOKS.

THUS NO ADDITION to my bookshelf of thrillers (pictured).

Literary critics (for want of a better description), publishers, and librarians (a dying race), have chosen over the years to pigeonhole authors into convenient categories, rather like the talent-blind blockheads in Hollywood past who lazily typecast many consummate actors with the assurance: 'This is how the public likes to see you,' which was a creeping alternative to the outspoken: 'You stick to what you're good at: it sells.”

So what brought this on?

The two books I have just read on kindle are The Enemy, a Jack Reacher story by Lee Child and In a House of Lies. a John Rebus yarn by Ian Rankin. The crime story label attached to both writers obscures literary talent far beyond that of the whodunnit-cum-whydusanybodyreadit mishmash churned out by purveyors of crime when I was a boy. Both writers depict a world far removed from“There's a body in the library,” or “Leave it to: A.S.P./The Baron/Bulldog Drummond/The Saint/The Toff/1066” etc.etc. There is a chapter In The Enemy where Reacher and his brother go, with some trepidation as to her health, to see their mother in Paris: Lee Child's description of the meeting left me unusually misty eyed. Tight, sensitive prose. Similarly, In a House of Lies shows Rebus (who doesn't see Ken Stott?) as battling, with characteristic stoicism, the indignities of age and of no longer being a recognised police presence. Ian Rankin's tough but empathetic stance on an ageing guy's fight with slower reflexes and enforced retirement is fine novel writing.

TIED TO THE TELEVISION.

LIKE IT OR NOT. And mostly I don't. Be it bombastic presenters or their banal programme producers I have become fed up with television people as a race. Never did cotton to them much.

In the nineteen seventies a tribe of them frequented one of our local pubs. My wife worked there at the time (no way we were ever going to bring up three kids on my NHS E.O.'s salary alone), and those lads regularly crowded the bar, shouting to each other about their programmes and earnings, and roundly dissing absent competitors. “Oh, he can't be picking up any more than 60k a year,” was a typically dismissive jeer that lingers in the mind. My thought then was: So now we all know you're picking up more than that, don't we, you loudmouthed little prick.

Truth to tell, I was not envious. I was bewildered. The majority of them were such conceited dickheads.

Sadly, I don't think that has changed much.

There's a handful of television personalities for whom I have the utmost respect. The rest are of the sort who clearly do not come alive until the camera is on them. They dismiss any competitor's viewing figures less than theirs as: “Only friends and family then.” And they mistakenly see themselves as the most beautiful, handsome, watchable creatures on earth. Of course they aren't. In this house the dog Buddy and the cats Angel and Spike are the most beautiful, handsome, watchable creatures on earth. Most tele presenters are tedious twits who make the gogglebox a lockdown drag. Just thank the gods if you are one of the fortunates able to see Netflix, YouTube and the like, on your viewing machine. You can at least be discriminating about what, or who, you watch.

He is.