As a child, I had enthusiasms. I’m sure you were the same.
Short and early sidebar: ‘enthusiasms’ should always be said the way Robert de Niro says it here. SPOILER ALERT/TRIGGER WARNING: if you haven’t seen The Untouchables and are in any way sensitive to violence, you might not want to watch all the way through.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zR8zSr3NPvY
Anyway. Enthusiasms. Enthusiasms. Enthusiasms.
Mine were many. In no particular order:
cricket
birds
cricket
cricket
birds
sitting cross-legged on the floor (when I was very young indeed) listening to my father practise the violin
reading the Holy Trinity: Peanuts, Asterix and Tintin
skateboarding very slowly and badly
fiddling around with the wheels on my skateboard because I was too scared to go really fast like the other kids so I pretended there was something wrong with it
building a model railway but never really playing with it because it was the planning and the building that made it fun
leafing through my bird books, in particular the magnificent Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds, wondering what it would be like to see a golden eagle or a ptarmigan or a smew (in the case of the first two, I wonder still.)
Thursday evening telly: Tomorrow’s World then Top of the Pops
Roald Dahl, and especially Danny, The Champion of the World, my signed first edition of which remains among my most prized possessions
hating most foods except for Grape Nuts and hard-boiled eggs for much longer than you would think necessary
but sugar sandwiches actually yes please
also squares of jelly straight from the packet and christmas cake icing obviously
playing imaginary games of cricket by rolling pencils (if you ever did this, you know what I’m talking about; if you didn’t, don’t bother asking – no good will come of it). These games usually involved our local village side against England or Australia or the mighty West Indies, and we invariably won easily, L Parikian scoring 200 not out and taking 8 wickets, from which we can deduce that another enthusiasm was
cheating at imaginary games of cricket
walking around the house commentating under my breath on imaginary games of cricket in which I scored 200 not out and you get the idea
losing at cards to my brother
losing at board games to my brother
crying really quite a lot of the time
wanting to be on Jim’ll Fix it YES I KNOW
Scalextric
correcting people who called it ‘Scalectrix’ – a habit I retain to this day. HOW HARD IS IT, PEOPLE?
the Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf books by Catherine Storr
pretending to see birds that I hadn’t
football, and especially Oxford United, for really quite a long time, and then not so much, because hooliganism and general whatnot
walking around the village and the surrounding lanes clutching my binoculars and looking for birds
all the Laura Ingalls Wilder books but absolutely NOT the TV series thankyouverymuchindeed
being astonishingly bored on Sundays until the Top 40 countdown came on
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mO0-KImtdFE
interrupting my mother while she was working, to tell her how bored I was
writing the first paragraph of books
building implausible Hot Wheels tracks and watching the cars tumble down the stairs
drawing intricate mazes like this one that I’ve just drawn in a soggy fit of nostalgia, and which looks either like a weird balloon or some sort of internal organ (it’s also very easy, because I couldn’t be bothered to block off all the necessary dead ends)
not learning how to swim, but instead flangling around in the shallow end, crying whenever anyone splashed my face
getting explosively angry very quickly indeed
failing, with an élan verging on the heroic, to do my homework
listening to Abba and Beethoven and Victor Borge and the highlights of The Marriage of Figaro and Dvorak’s Eighth Symphony and T-Rex and Queen and Louis Armstrong and Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass and Flanders and Swann, and not realising that I listened to these things because other people liked them, and only very gradually developing a musical taste of my own
cricket
birds
cricket
Time passed, and enthusiasms waned, to be replaced by new ones. Music, girls, astonishing levels of indolence.
My reading habits developed, but not that much. Peanuts, Asterix and Tintin were replaced by P G Wodehouse, Douglas Adams and Dick Francis, all of whose work I read over and over and over again to the exclusion of all else, including my ‘O’ and ‘A’ level set texts (especially Dickens, who as a teenager I found indescribably tedious).
Cricket remained a constant, but birds, the other overriding enthusiasm of my youth, faded away. I’m at a loss to explain why. Maybe I just sort of forgot.
And then back it surged, triggered by I don’t know what exactly. Perhaps it was simply the onset of middle age. Perhaps the reasons are more complex than that, something to do with being comfortable enough in my own skin to rediscover the childlike wonder of my youth.
Or perhaps I’m overthinking it.
But when this enthusiasm returned, my first port of call was the Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds, which I had kept through thick and thin, as if somehow knowing I’d come back to it.
It is an extravagantly beautiful book, its illustrations – astonishingly executed in under a year by Raymond Harris-Ching – worth the cost of the book by themselves. Throw in distribution maps, short and informative articles about each bird, and any number of extra reading, as well as charts and diagrams and little graphics explaining how birds breed and moult and migrate and what their eggs and chicks look like and how to record their song and ooh so much besides, and you have one of the great bird books.
I have a copy of the first edition of The Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds to give away.
Not my childhood copy – you’ll prise that one, heavily marked with my largely mendacious childhood sightings, from my cold dead hands. No, another copy, bought with the sole purpose of passing it on to someone who has yet to experience it.
It’s the least I can do.
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I enjoyed reading this very much as I could identify with many of your passions especially the birds & cricket & your musical choices probably for the same reasons. I won’t enter your giveaway (very generous) as I have my own much-loved copy of the same book. It has been useful this week as being snowed-in for several days quite a few unusual (to us) birds visited our garden & needed to be identified or verified so we could put the correct food out for them. Least we could do but sadly meant I couldn’t bake the fruit cake I planned. C’est la vie 😊
i would have given my eye teeth for the Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds when I was young, but got by with an elderly copy of the Observer Book of British Birds, which inexplicably disappeared somewhere along the way. Which still makes me sad, though it was rarely used in anger. My piece of Oxford suburbia was curiously lacking in exciting birds, though I once saw a bullfinch on the candytuft in the garden, and no one believed me. I never lost the interest in birds but it’s only in the last few years I’ve had the opportunity to start thinking about them again, though my bird-watching is mostly of the ‘found’ variety, whatever turns up, and sometimes very odd. I still have no idea how a water rail turned up in a small stream close to my house, on the outskirts of a small seaside town in SE Kent, but there it was, and I recognised it. Holidays in North Wales in recent years have yielded more things (ospreys, yay! ravens, also yay! choughs, oh my!) though the best was probably my husband saying, one sunny afternoon, ‘that’s a funny-looking robin’, which would be because it was his first bullfinch. 🙂