Booking through Thursday: Flavour

Think about your favourite authors, your favourite books . . . what is it about them that makes you love them above all the other authors you’ve read? The stories? The characters? The way they appear to relish the taste of words on the tongue? The way they’re unafraid to show the nitty-gritty of life? How they sweep you off to a new, distant place? What is it about those books and authors that makes them resonate with you in ways that other, perfectly good books and authors do not?

Well, I bumped into my favourite books in 1979, when Labour started its 18 years in the political wilderness, Three Mile Island went meltdown and Iran turned into an Islamic Republic. But my 1979 high spot was breaking into the basement of a dilapidated Victorian house with my friend Kath, the lesbian green goddess. I kept an eye out for the police looking inconspicuous with hennaed hair and matching straggly beard, lime green dungarees and homemade recycled tyre-soled shoes. It was blow for the Poor, meaning us university students against the local capitalist-fascist Quaker Meeting House-and no we didn’t see the irony. Eventually, we got to stay as licensed squatters until the upstairs sitting tenant died. She was a frail sparrow of an 80-year-old woman into veganism, homeopathy, Rudolf Steiner, fairies and combating the evils of radio and TV waves rotting your brain.

Have you guessed yet what books and authors from this period resonate with me in ways that other, perfectly good books and authors do not? Well it wasn’t Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered by British economist E. F. Schumacher. And no its not the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams which was crashing into students life’s then. Well not this student-I was sucked in by the TV production in the early 1980’s and now only like the original radio show. I also dislike the man after reading his biography-one trick pony when the trick was collaborative…

No this author and books were comfort food for over 20 years before I finally sent them to the great bookstore in the sky. Whenever the latest girlfriend decided she was gay (three, yes three did this to me) or the best friend came out (still the best friend but no longer gay- it’s a 70’s thing) or the job stank, I dived into these six books with their semi-autobiographical short stories of a vanishing Yorkshire farming community.

James Herriot’s veterinary novels, published in the USA and the UK as

• All Creatures Great and Small (1972) (incorporating If Only They Could Talk and It Shouldn't Happen to a Vet)

• All Things Bright and Beautiful (1974) (incorporating Let Sleeping Vets Lie and Vet in Harness)

• All Things Wise and Wonderful (1977) (incorporating Vets Might Fly and Vet in a Spin)

were pure heart warming, poignant and optimistic escapism. They were clever inspired stories written with clear and simple prose based on astute observation.

The joy for me as a UK reader is that I could always read a novel within the time span of the low mood curled in bed with a mug of tea and a bacon sandwich. They resonated because they were about a world so different from mine based on a sense of decency and humour that is English so my inheritance if not my experience. I let them go in the end, as I needed the space to read other books but in writing this, I have had a wave of nostalgia and want to read them again. I have now become more aware of the craft in the stories as I have read the biographies of Alf Wright (his real name) that show how he constructed stories inspired by real events. So they are ordered, ready for the next weekend of man-flu and for me to remember my vanished past as I read his.