Childish Things

Always a pleasure, never a chore. I think I read this one too quick though. Normally I wander in and out of an issue, sampling delights here and there over a period of weeks. But I was too up for it this time, I saw on the website it was out – I walked to Foyles, bought a copy, started reading it and ended up going straight from cover to cover in a couple of days of train journeys and bedside perusals. Bugger, six months to the next issue now probably. It really wasn’t very idle of me to read it so quickly, but I’m on a roll with the reading right now and nothing seems able to stop it.

This issue (37) is Childish Things, lots of pieces relating to education and childish experiences. If one thing got to me, I guess it was a hint of settled thirtysomething familydom hanging about the volume. Childless, and now single after the personally traumatic break up of an 8 and a half year relationship, mid thirties - staring down both barrels of the other 50% of my three score years and ten – the warmth of family given off by those more successful professionally, creatively and emotionally than myself was a bit too much. Somebody open a window. Wider. I’m going to throw up.

That was harsh and I didn’t really mean it, I don’t want to confuse my personal foul doomy mood with the actual buzz of the book (magazine? Journal?). Then again, it’s my experience and I can’t have any other…..

Best bits, this time around: Billy Childish’s manifesto; the idling extracts from The Meaning of Tingo, Mark White’s piece on Kenko (no, not the coffee – the Japanese author) and the stuff on Summerhill.

I looked forward to another Graham Burnett piece on permaculture, but it turned out to be the same thing he had published in the last issue of the Permaculture Magazine, which was a bit disappointing.

Oh, the Michael Palin interview was good as well, but you felt only really touched the surface of what could have been a long and revealing chat about what the man thought. Have you see that Palin's just about to film a new travel series? This one's about the 'new Europe', basically the eastern bloc countries about to enter the EU I believe. Not going to be broadcast until Autumn 2007, so do not hold your breath. Doesn't sound as exciting as Himalaya though does it? That one's going to be hard to beat. Maybe Palin's Inferno would be a more ambitious next step, or Palin does the Astral Plane. Well, maybe in the next world heh?