Giving books away.

I’m not sure how many people attended the launch of World Book Night in Trafalgar Square, on 4th March, but in spite of the cold weather, some sources claim that 10,000 flocked to the event. Swapping books and chatting to each other, explaining why we had chosen our particular books, we all had two things in common: a love of reading and heartfelt support for Alan Bennett’s view on the imminent library cuts.

Jamie Byng who dreamed up this incredible event, opened the evening quoting C.S. Lewis, ‘We read to know that we are not alone.’ In such a large crowd, we certainly weren’t alone and were in for a treat listening to many authors, as well as actors, read aloud. Some read from their own books, while others read work from other well-known writers. Fiction was joined by poems and autobiography. Listening to great authors like Edna O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, John Le Carré, and Phillip Pullman was a delight, but for me, the highlight was Alan Bennett. I’ve never been a huge fan of his, but hearing him read from A Life Like Other People’s, one of the 25 WBN titles, made me want to read it for myself. I was lucky enough to receive a copy in return for one of my own books.

Since the launch, I have been busy giving away my 48 books. Some have been appreciatively received at Homeless Action Barnet, others at Chase Farm Hospital, and some have gone to people I know, many of whom will, in turn, pass the books on. I have registered some copies on BookCrossing and have released them into the wild! Who knows who may capture them?

If my chosen book, A Fine Balance, which I am re-reading, brings its new readers as much pleasure as it brought me, it will be a great job done, and I hope that it will perhaps open up somebody’s world while enabling somebody else to know that they are not alone.

World Book Night update

I have my books. 48 copies of A Fine Balance. I picked them up from Waterstones, and of course, the parking spot just opposite was pinched just before I could get there myself, so I had to stagger with two boxes of books across the road to the car-park! Talk about a fine balance! Next time, I'm picking a thin book.

The launch event is tomorrow night in Trafalgar Square. I'm looking forward to it but hope the temperature improves a bit. It's exciting to be part of this massive event.

World Book Night - 5th March

You read a book, you love it, you tell your friends about it, you lend it to them. You want everyone to read it. But how often do you get the opportunity to give away 48 copies of that book?

On World Book Night, 20,000 book-lovers will be doing just that. Each has selected a book from 25 titles, and will be giving away four dozen of their chosen book - to anybody they please. The aim is to encourage reading, so giving books to people who may not be great readers or have ready access to books is an important aspect of the project. An additional 40,000 books will be delivered by WBN to places such as prisons or hospitals, bringing the total to a million books for distribution.

See: http://www.worldbooknight.org/

I've been selected as a 'giver-away', and will be handing out copies of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance. Set in India of the mid 70s against a turbulent political backdrop, it charts the lives of four people who come together in circumstances none of them could have foreseen. It shows how unlikely bonds and friendships can be formed across cultures. It especially resonates with me as I spent two exciting and stimulating months in India in 1974 as a young overlander (before the word back-packing was invented - before guide books, Internet cafes and texting home on a daily basis).

I'm thinking hard about the possible recipients of my book and will be registering some copies with BookCroosing. Like my 1974 journey, some of my chosen books will be sent on journeys of their own and will, I hope, be caught by people I don't know, read, enjoyed and passed on.

See: http://www.bookcrossing.com/

The King's Speech Therapist

I have just seen the excellent film - The King’s Speech. Colin Firth who plays King George VI, brilliantly demonstrates the agony of a stammer, made worse for George VI as he ascended the throne at a time when broadcasting was a new and vital medium for the Royal Family.

Many people are aware that King George VI stammered and overcame it, but how many realised, until this film, that he had specialist help to do so? In this case it was from Australian, Lionel Logue, wonderfully portrayed by Geoffrey Rush. The film, based on Logue’s diaries and letters, has put speech therapists into the limelight. About time, I say, as very few people know anything about this profession - the one in which I have worked for most of my working life.

‘A four year degree just to teach people to speak properly!’ exclaimed one of my friends. Perhaps I should say former friend, as he never quite recovered from hearing the long list of subjects we studied and the breadth of speech, language, voice and swallowing disorders we now work with. It has been estimated that speech and language therapists deliver £765 million in benefits to the UK tax-payer (but please don’t ask me how this has been assessed) and our work with swallowing problems saves, not only lives, but over £13 million savings to the NHS every year by avoiding other costly treatments and support.

Although now known as ‘speech and language therapists’ the early therapists evolved from working in the speech and drama field, and they worked mostly with people who stammered and had articulation difficulties. The work was, as the film portrays Logue explaining, an experimental approach with no set working methods. ‘Evidence base’ wasn’t a term in common use then!

The first official clinics for speech difficulties was established exactly 100 hundred years ago in 1911 at Bart’s Hospital. A couple of years later the indomitable Elsie Fogarty, Principal of the Central School of Speech Training and Dramatic Art, based at The Albert Hall, established specialized training courses and clinics for people with speech difficulties. The First World War saw these new speech therapists pioneering work with ‘shell shocked’ soldiers and those with acquired speech and language disorders from head injury.

In 1925, the same year that the then Duke of York gave his first broadcast public speech, a new department was established in the Central School of Speech and Drama with a three year course for speech therapy. Fifty years later, I became a student there! 1926 saw courses set up at West End Hospital, and the National Nose Throat and Ear Hospital.

The Association of Speech Therapists was instigated in 1930, with members mostly having trained in the remedial section of speech and drama training. Those who had received specialist and hospital based training formed the British Society of Speech Therapists.

Eventually these two associations came together as the College of Speech Therapists, founded in 1945, with Lionel Logue, the King’s speech therapist, as one of the fellows enrolled on foundation. King George VI became patron in 1948 at the request of Logue, for its 350 members. After his death, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother became patron until her death in 2002, since when HRH The Countess of Wessex has taken the role. At the College’s Golden Jubilee in 1995, it became the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

Sixty five years on the speech therapy diploma is now a four-year undergraduate degree and over 14,000 College members work with a huge range of communication and swallowing problems in a variety of settings, including hospitals and rehabilitation units, clinics and schools, centres for adult with learning difficulties and with young offenders.

The College has just launched its Giving Voice Campaign, attended by Lionel Logue’s grandson along with another of Logue‘s clients from the 1940s. Perhaps, with this publicity I won’t have to explain what I do for a living, and I won’t hear yet another person quipping ‘Oh. I’d better talk proper then!' Perhaps.

Twelve Days to Christmas

Twelve days to Christmas and here's a Parakeet in a Pear Tree!

Green parakeets arrived in my area during the year and have made themselves at home.

Happy Christmas!

Reading to help recovery.

If you’re reading this, it’s a fair guess that you are a reader who actively seeks out things to read. You enjoy reading, you learn from your reading, you develop your world views through reading. But what would you do if you could no longer read? Perhaps you would listen instead. We are fortunate to have a wide variety of books now on CD - often beautifully read by actors, sometimes by the author. But what would you do if you now found it difficult to understand language - that the reading was too fast, or that you recognised words but couldn’t make sense of them?

People who have aphasia - also known as dysphasia - are in that position. Aphasia is an acquired language disorder associated with strokes. The degree of aphasia can be extremely variable, from very mild to so severe that it makes language utterly incomprehensible. Imagine yourself in a country where you know not one word of the language and no-one there knows one word of yours. You might mange a little basic communication through gesture and facial expression; you might manage to obtain a cup of coffee, a meal, a bed for the night, but would you be able to explain what you thought about life, what you believed in, could you tell someone your story? Could you correct them when they misunderstood you?

You would still have your thoughts, feelings, your knowledge of the world and your history but you wouldn’t be able to express them. You would still have a love for the written word, you just couldn’t access it. But as soon as you came home, you would once again understand the language around you.

So imagine if you were aphasic. This loss of communication would have a devastating effect on you. It wouldn’t automatically get better when you came home. You would still be you, but your difficulty in expressing opinions and decisions and following what someone else was saying, would sadly lead to some people no longer seeing you as a thinking, feeling person.

Even when verbal language is not too badly affected, aphasic people are often unable to read or write and this interaction with the written word is yet another loss, but perhaps if someone were to read to them it would help. As children we were read to - we could understand narratives that we could not have read for ourselves. It opened up our world, it gave reign to our imagination. It was stimulating, soothing. It was magic.

So perhaps for adults who have become dysphasic someone reading to them could do the same. If the reader read slowly, with plenty of expression and gesture, and if they read paragraphs, poems or short stories it could help rebuild their listener’s relationship to the written word. Hearing familiar passages can help foster confidence to understand something that once required no effort, but now requires more effort than climbing Everest.

Having a stroke is a frightening, bewildering event, no matter how kind and efficient the medical staff, however effective the treatment and therapy, and however supportive one’s family and friends. The relaxation through reading, which so many of us turn to in times of stress is denied. But for some people in this situation fortunately there are readers. The InterAct Reading Service is a charity that employs and trains actors to go into hospitals, day centres and clubs for those who have had stokes to read to people who cannot read for themselves. It brings their world alive and provides a valuable link from their familiar old life to a new frightening one. It stimulates and soothes. It enables them to once again to enjoy the written word. It helps them to get better. It is magic.

For more information please see http://www.interactreading.org/

(For Annabel an InterAct reader)

Literary Pudding - in praise of books that don't win prizes.

It’s often said that writers must be readers. If the amount of reading one manages equals the quality of writing one produces then I should be a pretty good writer…

I’ve been a reader ever since I could get past sentences more adventurous than those about obese felines perched on a small floor covering. For me reading is as essential as eating, and like eating it should be varied. Just as I wouldn’t choose the same meals every day, I don’t always choose the same kinds of books.

Good reading is rather like a good meal: something light but interesting to stimulate the reading appetite as a starter; a substantial main course with plenty of bite, and then something frothy, and even a bit bad for you, for pudding.

I’m wary of readers who read only the main courses; books that have at least been short-listed for the Man Booker or have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. While such readers occasionally deign to read a starter, they dismiss dessert as beneath contempt. (Or do they secretly read racy thrillers tucked inside the latest prize winning tome?)

I’ve read a number of those prize winning main courses and have thoroughly enjoyed some and appreciated their contribution to the literary canon, but others have left me wondering ‘Why this one?’ Was the panel made up of the winning author’s friends? Did nobody actually bother to read the entries and the panel drew lots? Or were the panel members trying to out-do each other in showing off their mental supremacy and so voted for the most pointless contender. Do they think ‘no-one will get why this book won so they will think we understood something that they are too dim to appreciate?’ I am obviously one of the ‘too dim to appreciate it’ group - a reader of very little brain, (but one who read Winnie the Pooh in her early years.)

It’s like going to a restaurant that has a triple Michelin star and being served a meal of rare ingredients artfully arranged on the plate only to find it has no taste and gives you indigestion.

Once a book has won that prestigious Man Booker, the heavy brigade will delight in reading it in order to air their views on it (often with a copy of the Guardian review close to hand in case they missed some meaningful insight.) Many thousand more copies will grace book-shelves of people who like to think they are reading the right books, but I can guarantee that a number of these will bear evidence of reading on only the first few pages while the rest remain pristine. Yet there they will linger in the book-shelf that visitors can see rather than the one in the bedroom where the murder mysteries, the thrillers and the chick-lit live, the copies bent and thumbed from having been read, re-read, and lent to friends.

I like good literature, I like books to open up my world, telling me about places and times I know little about, I like books to challenge my thinking, and I’m quite happy to learn new words from sesquipedalian writers and even keep a dictionary by my bedside for that eventuality but sometimes dessert, a formulaic romantic comedy or a thrilling page-turner is balm to the soul.

Sometimes reading needs just to be fun, an escape, a soothing emotional massage in a hectic, troubled world. There are plenty of excellent writers whose work fulfils this role, giving millions of people pleasure and reassurance in difficult times, and perhaps opening up a reading world to those who are not greatly experienced readers, yet the literary snobs tear their offerings to shreds - figuratively if not literally. Just as I never warm to anyone who constantly refuses pudding, I cannot warm to those who shudder at literary dessert.

If I ever get one of my novels published, I’d love it to win a prize. I’d be thrilled. I’ll never be the kind of writer who wins a Nobel prize, but if it was a choice between a prize for the sort of book people bought to look good on the living room shelf, but didn’t actually read, or a Thumping Good Read Award, I’d prefer the latter. I’d want people to like my book, to enjoy it, to re-read it, to lend it to friends, (or better still, to buy each of their friends a new copy every year). I’d be very happy for my book to live on the bedroom bookshelf, to be literary dessert with extra whipped cream.