Radish Readers Group*

Last night, friend and I joined a book club. This was part of our New Year's resolution to try new things and meet new people. I know most people have already joined the gym, gone a few times and then returned to pre January sloth, but we don't like to rush things. Better late than never as they say.
It is held at the Inkwell Arts Centre in Chapel Allerton http://www.inkwellarts.org.uk/about-us/ which is in a building, I used to frequent twenty five years ago, when it was the Shoulder of Mutton pub. I could see absolutely no trace of the rather dingy pub I remembered, in the clean white interior, although they do still have the big pub garden which must be nice in summer.
I hope the members of the book club don't mind me saying it, but they were overwhelmingly white, middle class, middle aged and female but then so am I, so I should fit in well. It was a refuge of Radio 4 listeners.

Last night was the annual meeting, where they chose what books they would be reading for the forthcoming year. Members put forward nominations and described them a little, generally said why they liked them and we voted on them at the end. One woman put forward a book and described why she didn't like it although thought it might be a good one to discuss. Unsurprisingly it didn't get any votes, she had been too eloquent in her dislike. The chair (I can't remember any names) said that she would accept suggestions on the night so I was toying with the idea of suggesting A Daughter of Time, given its topicality but was then surprised to find that someone else had nominated it. The person who had nominated it had either forgotten or wasn't listening as there was a dead silence when the time came to describe it so I leapt in and started talking about it. It turned out that maybe 6 people had read it and a few others had heard it discussed on the radio, and interested in knowing more about Richard III, nearly all the group were open to it. So that is the first book I will be discussing with the book group next month, which is very convenient, as I am already halfway through re-reading it.

* I have absolutely no idea why they are called the Radish Readers Group, that will be a question for next month. It makes me think of Peter Rabbit.

A Daughter of Time

The second daughter rang me today to ask who Richard III was and why they were excited about finding his bones. This is unlike her as she is normally a pretty regular reader of the BBC news site so I had expected her to have followed the story.

I have had a soft spot for Richard III since reading A Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. Josephine Tey was a writer of detective fiction in the 40's (died 1952) and in this book her detective hero is laid up in a hospital bed and bored and starts trying to find out whether Richard III did murder the princes in the tower by going back to contemporary sources. It makes for a fascinating story presenting the point that history is written by the victors.