NoJo
Happily Marred
- Joined
- May 19, 2002
- Posts
- 15,398
I've just discovered that my well-thumbed paperback "The Compleat Molesworth", which I bought less than 20 years ago, and currently lives in my toilet, is now a collectible item, worth about $250.
In spite of my current cashflow problems, I have no intention of ever selling it, as the tome is as important to me as Russell's History of Western Philosphy, a soothing balm on my troubled foreskin, not to mention a failsafe remedy against constipation, both physical and emotional.
I'm amazed and proud that this fantastic kid's book has become a collectible and a classic.
Although I never went to a public school (that's "private school" for you Americans), not even one for those children of the failed members of the dwindling British middle classes of the 1950's like Nigel's Pater, I identified immediately with him, as did a number of my alientated and existentialist 13-year old friends in the early 1970s. For us, it was Jimi Hendrix and Keith Moon who were dead; for him, it was the greatest Empire in the history of the world which he mourned.
We shared his misanthropy, his optimistic cynicism, his gaucheness with Gurls, not to mention his atrocious spelling.
Even in his daydreams of punting on the river with the delicious Ermintrude, he was incapable of preventing his inquiring scientific mind from spoiling things: He grows suddenly serious, suddenly intense.
"I've been thinking about something, " he tells her.
Their eyes meet. Her lips part expectently and she brushes away the midges and the remnants of a jam sandwich from her pink cheeks. He trawls his poetic mind for the pussy-swelling line.
"On the whole, I think measles are better than mumps."
The daydream ends abruptly , with an exquisitely painful side-hair tweak from Sigismund the Mad Maths Master, and Nigel is once more in the dusty classroom surrounded by the smell of chalk and carbolic soap, and by his unwashed and uncouth fellow inmates. Some of them, namely the cads and sneaks, snigger sycophantically. He diskards them.
In spite of my current cashflow problems, I have no intention of ever selling it, as the tome is as important to me as Russell's History of Western Philosphy, a soothing balm on my troubled foreskin, not to mention a failsafe remedy against constipation, both physical and emotional.
I'm amazed and proud that this fantastic kid's book has become a collectible and a classic.
Although I never went to a public school (that's "private school" for you Americans), not even one for those children of the failed members of the dwindling British middle classes of the 1950's like Nigel's Pater, I identified immediately with him, as did a number of my alientated and existentialist 13-year old friends in the early 1970s. For us, it was Jimi Hendrix and Keith Moon who were dead; for him, it was the greatest Empire in the history of the world which he mourned.
We shared his misanthropy, his optimistic cynicism, his gaucheness with Gurls, not to mention his atrocious spelling.
Even in his daydreams of punting on the river with the delicious Ermintrude, he was incapable of preventing his inquiring scientific mind from spoiling things: He grows suddenly serious, suddenly intense.
"I've been thinking about something, " he tells her.
Their eyes meet. Her lips part expectently and she brushes away the midges and the remnants of a jam sandwich from her pink cheeks. He trawls his poetic mind for the pussy-swelling line.
"On the whole, I think measles are better than mumps."
The daydream ends abruptly , with an exquisitely painful side-hair tweak from Sigismund the Mad Maths Master, and Nigel is once more in the dusty classroom surrounded by the smell of chalk and carbolic soap, and by his unwashed and uncouth fellow inmates. Some of them, namely the cads and sneaks, snigger sycophantically. He diskards them.
