Autobiography

Easter approaches with speed, and I welcome her with open arms. Not for religious reasons, nor indeed for chocolate. Simply for the chance to have a rest.

I am pretty tired at the moment. Pretty much everyone at work has been ill, so I've been waiting for the morning when my throat was thick and my head heavy. But I think the germs have been fighting each other off until today when I have started feeling very tired and run down.

I have been reading Tracey Thorn's wonderful autobiography, which I recommend to anyone - though particularly those who liked their post-punk pop like me. She has an engaging writing style, completely without pretension, and with a matter-of-factness which is I suspect, entirely genuine.

this is the third biog I have read in the last year, ad also the third I have read in the last ten years. Andy Kershaw and Danny Baker are the other two, since you ask. All great reads, and all people I tremendously admire.

The Boy Kershaw introduced me to world music. Danny B has a love of trivia and music that humbles me in its amazing depth. In fact looking on my shelves, I think (only think because books in this house are ordered chaotically, stacked on to of each other, and one behind the other) the only other biography I can find is X-Ray, the oddly told story of musician extraordinaire and Muswell Hillbilly Raymond Douglas Davies. I'm sure I have a couple of vols of Tony Benn's diaries somewhere, and a copy of Morrissey and Marr: A severed Alliance - maybe behind some Victorian ghost stories or something.

I suspect that anyone lower down my list of heroes simply isn't someone I want to read about. They won't grow with the telling and life is too short.

I remember at my high school we had something called English Enrichment. This was an extension group in today's parlance. A rebellion by ancient and old-fashioned English teachers who believed in stuff like grammar (and whose hatred of my use of the word 'stuff' even then, I now commemorate in the title of this blog). But who also believed in setting of pupils in a school where it was anathema (I am using big words today in case they are reading this).

One of the assignments was "write your autobiography". As a painfully shy (about) 13 year old boy in a class 90% female, who felt he hadn't done anything yet in his life (with I think some justification), that one was never going to go well. I wrote a poem. And since then I have been suspicious of people who write about themselves. There is the fish-in-a-barrel joke about today's latest sleb singer nobody "writing" a book, but they are just to laugh at.

Either someone is good at what they do or they are not, I don't want to know what they had for breakfast. In that way most modern biogs are very slightly less ephemeral and very slightly more monomaniacal versions of Heat magazine. Yes a biog of say Churchill would be different, but I'd read that to understand the history better.

So, when I do have enough shelves to do it there will be a choice one for the few people I think are important enough to read about. Not the Tracey Thorn one though, cos that's on Kindle!