I NEED MORE TIME TO READ

Tidying the bedroom this morning and mournfully discarding to the waste bin those beguiling but unaffordable catalogues from the likes of the White Company, I hesitated at a growing pile of unread magazines by my bedside and, next to it, another pile of books, most similarly unread or only dipped into. “I must devote more time to reading,” I concluded. But how?

I have a friend, more erudite than I, who kindly passes me copies of the London Review of Books, a most marvellous publication with all sorts and manners of articles and the best line in ‘personal’ ads of the ‘man seeking bisexual woman for interactive seminars in the library’ type. Several copies of the LRB nestle in my unread pile.

Extracting one at random my eye falls on Hilary Mantel (whose ‘Experiment with Love’ is one of the books in the bedside pile that I have actually finished. A dark-ish sort of a novel, for those interested, about growing up and rites of passage and two girls from very different backgrounds who end up in the same hall of residence in a London college. There’s ample comedy, too, among the sombre tones while little hammers of Mantel's prose trigger intriguing resonances from the bells of one’s own forgotten adolescence).

In the LRB Hilary Mantel is expounding not about growing-up but about hypochondria. This in the course of reviewing a book compellingly entitled ‘Nine Hypochondriac Lives,’ including, apparently, not only the ancient Boswell and Darwin but also modern figures like Warhol. Which is as interesting a piece of trivia, I warrant, as any you will find today.

When we lived in Essex and I worked in London I could count on the best part of two hours a day sitting on a train or a bus and looking to be occupied. It was prime reading time and I used to read a lot then. In fact I rather took this reading window for granted so that when these commuting journeys ended my reading shut down too, something that I never took much into account at the time, busy as I was with the preoccupation of a new domestic establishment about as far from Essex, spiritually and geographically as you can get. My reading has never really caught up since.

And yet each day I hear of a book I'd like to read I thought as I dutifully cleared away the debris of a week's untidiness and returned one or two books to the shelves and added more magazines to the pile. ‘Archeology Today’ - whatever persuaded me to subscribe to that, I wondered? - and the Spectator which for some reason I love despite its tacky political articles - to which I never find quite adequate time to do justice.

So how to find a new hour a day for reading? Or, to put it another way: what can I spend an hour less on when everything I do demands more time rather than less?

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The fabulous Rain Or Shine Theatre company who concluded their winter tour at our little theatre with a spectacular production of ‘A Christmas Carol’ will be performing ‘The Importance of Being Earnest,’ outdoors, in the summer.

Now we have here in the town a walled garden that would make a fine venue for one of the dates they have free and so Rain or Shine wrote to the Council - without reply apparently. So they asked me for help. I telephoned the Vale of Glamorgan County Council who manage the gardens only to be told by someone who sounded about 16 and on work experience to speak to our own local Community Council. Which I duly did and in an exchange of answerphone messages it emerged that the gardens were, after all the Vale’s responsibility. So I go back to the Vale.

There followed a Kafka-esque exchange: I ask to speak to the person who is in charge of the gardens but am told (again by the work-experience 16 year old) that she isn’t allowed to put me through but that she will take details of my ‘concern’ and relay them to the man in question.

I ask for an email address but she tells me that if I tell her what it is that I want she will herself send an email to this person and he will then reply to me within 5 days!

So I explain - who I am and ask whether the gardens will be free and whether the Vale would permit a performance by a visiting theatre company - but it is clear that what I am trying to get across is too long and complicated. She doesn't really understand, but I have no alternative but to leave my little request with her. Needless to say I haven’t heard anything either.

John Townsend who in the seventies wrote an excellent book on management advice called ‘Up the Organisation’ suggested that managers of organisations should telephone themselves pseudonymously from time to time to get an idea of how the organisation responds to members of the public. You can see why.

What really irks me though is the missed opportunity to stage an event that will bring a hundred or more visitors to the town. It feels like the dead and unfeeling hand of public bureaucracy. It's perhaps why I read the Spectator (when I have time!).