The Bedside Crow

Dear Ben, we are very sorry

For the past couple of days we have been in search of your copy of In search of Kazakhstan, but we're buggered if we can find it. I know it came in. It was on the desk. I put your name in it. B.E.N

But now it is gone.

So we've ordered you another one.

We realise that in the time you have been waiting you probably could have found Kazakhstan by now, and can only apologise.

PS Piers Morgan will be along shortly.

It's a bloody great life if you don't, etc, etc

So, eldest was last seen disappearing into the far distance bent double with the size of her rucksack full of nail varnish, hair-dryer and high-heeled flip-flops for a weekend of camping with The Duke of Edinburgh. Middle child is spending the day filming an 'educational video' and has been pacing the kitchen with a haughtiness normally associated with Julia Roberts. Meanwhile Fred has raised himself from his sickbed for a football match and if he can't 'skill-up' the opposition he might just throw up on them instead. Let's hope it doesn't go to extra time. Justine is teaching swimming before magically becoming Mrs Crow at the Market, and me, I can hear the call of 17 boxes of unpacked books.

Laters.

There are shoes in our window.

     

  

 

 We are giving the shoe shop on the corner something to get nervous about. Up against their Spring Birkenstocks and fancy plimmies, we have the Horniman School World Book Day 2009 Design a Shoe competition entries proudly positioned in our weathered window amidst the sunned paperbacks (chance would be a fine thing). Thus, for the new season, we find Spaceman Bob's moonboot and a hairy hobbit & ring slip-on (available in small size only); a fine Gruffalo sandal (wide fitting) and the silkiest Despereaux mouse slipper, that is as soft as it sounds (have you ever put your foot in a mouse?). There is a smelly Stig - the Dump one, not the one from the telly - Croc, a pair of sparkly, ruby "Dorothys", an Angelina ballet shoe and an elegant chaussure from the streets of Paris, home of the orphan clock-keeper Hugo Cabret, no less.. The display is a shoe-stopper.. sorry, show-stopper.. that kinda makes us wonder if, after 25 years, we went into the wrong business. 

Cheers Google! Say The Bookselier Crow!

 

I imagine the conversation went something like this: 

First Dude: Woah! Back up dude! BACK UP!

Head Dude: Problem? We have a problem?

First Dude: We do Dude.

Head Dude: What's the problem?

Second Dude: You said south east London.

First Dude: I ain't going to no south east London.

Second Dude: They ain't even got a Mickey D's down there.

First Dude: Or a Pizza Hut. You want us to go where there ain't no Hut. No way man.

Head Dude: Way.

Second Dude: No way.

Head Dude: Way too, Dude. You have a choice?

First Dude: Awww man, not south east London. Don't make us!

Head Dude: OK you've been good so far. I'll tell you what I'll do. Final Offer. You go real early in the am and you drive real fast. Deal?

First Dude: Oh man. Real fast?

Second Dude: Real early?

Head Dude: Real early, real fast.

First Dude/Second Dude: Deal.

Lunch

I am a top Mummy blogger.

No, really, I am. It says so here. And here.

[Insert gratuitous picture of youngest child posing with a piece of plastic shite given away free with the Beano.]

Anyway, and also, I don't think I've, as yet, directed you to this month's Families South East review by a real mummy blogger:

THE KIDS ARE growing up fast - not so, me though. I don't think I'll ever really feel old enough to be in charge of real life people. Which is just as well as the eldest has turned fifteen and when offered the chance to fill the house with teenagers for a mass sleepover to mark the birthday, she looked at me as if I'd told her I was secretly in love with her headteacher. "God no," she shuddered. I was astonished because crossing my fingers behind my back has never worked before.

Read the rest here.

Follow Justine on Twitter here. Go on, do it. Make her tweet!

Spring did sprung.

 

Sunday morning reading.

 

Last night I had a dream that I was in an urbane American bookstore, a room filled with Californian(?) light, where I was much taken by a table featuring the work of a short story writer named David Ooq. He came highly recommended by John Updike. I purchased five of his books and then had a coffee seated at a marble table as I waited for an advertised reading by Jayne Anne Philips. Imagine my disappointment when I woke up in south London to the sound of a dog barking outside.

Never mind, at least I had something to read. Whenever anybody asks me, I always say that my favorite writer is John Cheever. I'd take him to a desert island over Richard Yates any day, and I like Richard Yates a lot and have spent 20 or so years encouraging people to read him. But Cheever is the man. Generally speaking I'm not greatly attracted to biographies of writers, after all, if they were any good then they spent most of their time sitting (or standing) at a desk writing and looking out of the window, and how interesting is that to read about? I will make a happy exception for the Lost Earl of Devereaux though.

If you are very good, I'll sell you a copy here.

You will fall in love with this book and so will your children.

 

Just gorgeous, Around the World with Mouk by Marc Boutavant, a sort of French Richard Scarry.

I'm not wrong, We've only had it out of the box for an hour,two people have already eloped with a copy and a third is terribly smitten.

[and that's the third one gone, and it would have been four, except I didn't have four.]

Here's an idea for an enterprising Literary Ed, get a Myerson to review Ten Storey Love Song by Richard Milward

Oh, I forgot, they've all been laid-off. Well get the intern to do it then, because somebody needs to put a copy of this book in front of them.

I have had a proof copy glowering at me from the corner of the bedroom for a couple of months now. There were plenty of reasons for me to hate it, not least the fact that the author is 24 years old and that it is a 286 page-long single paragraph head-rush that describes a world that is so alien to me - and yes I was an art student in the age of punk - that each attempt at beginning it left me, within the first three or four pages, absolutely exhausted and feeling terribly, terribly fucking old. Do kids today really live like Bobby the Artist and his friends? Do they really eat pills on toast for breakfast and do £30 teddy-bear acid whilst nurturing an ambition for a £1,000-a-day coke habit? Probably. And they have pretty horrible sex, too. And they shit themselves.

I haven't finished reading it yet, but I'm getting there. And I don't hate it. It is definitely 'out of the school of Irvine Welsh' and if it has a fault, it's a certain knowingness on the part of the narrator that is at odds with the books characters, the Lacoste shell-suits and the council shit-hole that they live in - the phrase petit mort used in relation to a duff shag for instance, and I don't buy the same proto-wag, who works on the sweet counter at BHS, dreaming herself at the Chelsea Hotel as Nico. That's the art school author that is - did I mention he's 24, the cunt.

Anyway, his book, so far, is quite charming and the Myersons really ought to read it.