Recent good reads . . .

I really enjoy reading! My favourite type of books are those which fall into what I refer to as 'Country Books', and they can be fact or fiction. I enjoy reading about the people who shaped the land and their farming traditions just as much as I enjoy reading books of fiction such as R.F.Delderfield's trilogy, God is an Englishman, or his book A Horseman Riding By. I like the way that the people in his books are brought to life in such a realistic manner that you end up feeling that you actually know them. I guess that I would recommend virtually all of his books as being a cracking good read.

Recently I finished a book called A Half-Baked Life : My Story So Far, which is attributed to Claude Jenks, but the real author is Brian Thompson. It's very different!

The extraordinary Claude Jenks has been blessed with a most unusual gift, an unerring ability to single out from among the faces in the crowd the celebrated, the great and the good.

Who else but Jenks would have spotted W.H. Auden at Skipton cattle market, or Kenneth Kaunda in a Stourbridge stamp shop? Who but Jenks, while wrestling a grandfather clock on to the tube at Oxford Circus, would have fallen in with a roistering crowd that included C. Day Lewis and Robert Helpmann?

This is an autobiography to shame the pallid memoirs of the times. Jenks, whose very raincoat is secured with orange plastic twine given to him by an obliging Simon Rattle, has met them all.

Another recent 'Good Read' has been The Steps of The Sun by Joanna Trollope, writing under the name 'Carolin Harvey'. Set in 1899 in South Africa against the backdrop of the Boer War, the story follows the lives of three young men, Matthew Paget, Will Marriott, and Hendon Bashford, whose lives were drawn together by the Boer War. As it unfolded so the lives of these men, and the women they loved, moved towards a tumultuous climax.

I'm currently reading a farming memoir called Muck on My Boots written by Alec Bull, which traces his family from his grandfather Sam Bull, forward, relating the farming methods, ups and downs, elations and tragedies, covering the period which Alec Bull remembers from his own boyhood. All good stuff to me!