More Fool Me Read Free

chance that you might have come across the two predecessors of the memoir you are now holding in your hands, in which case I can imagine you tapping your foot with impatience when it comes to my ushering the uninitiated down old and well-trodden pathways. ‘Yes, yes, we know all that, get on with it, man,’ I seem to hear you mutter from far away. ‘Let’s come to the new stuff. The juicy bits. Scandal. Showbiz. Drugs. Suicide. Gossip.’
    On several occasions, as I meet someone in that embarrassed wine-sipping huddle that always occurs before a dinner party, for example, they might tell me how much they thoroughly enjoyed such and such a book of mine. All fine and charming, if a little embarrassing: ‘One never knows what to say ,’ as Agatha Christie’s alter ego, the popular author Ariadne Oliver (so splendidly played by Zoë Wanamaker in the television adaptations), often remarks. Anyway, an hour or so in, internally warmed by vinous glassfuls, I might tell, as one does around the dinner table, a story of some kind. I will notice the very person who confessed to admiring my book laughing heartily and whooping in surprise at the punchline. As they wipe the tears of infatuated merriment from their eyes, I will think to myself, ‘ Hang on! That exact story is told, word for word, in the book they just assured me they liked so much!’ Either, therefore, they were lying about having read the book in the first place, which, let’s face it, we’ve all done – so much easier not to read books, especially the books of one’s friends – or , which is in fact quite as likely if not more so, they have read it and simply forgotten just about every detail.
    What remains, as one ages, of a book, is a smell, a flavour, a fleeting parade of sense-images and characters, pleasing or otherwise. So I have learned not to be offended. One does not write expecting every sentence to be permanently branded into the memory of the reader.
    Far from being a curse, such memory leakages are actually rather a blessing. We all become, as readers, a little like the Guy Pearce character in the film Memento , only without the attendant physical jeopardies. Every day a new adventure. Every rereading a first reading. That is true at least of recently read books. I can recount almost word for word the Sherlock Holmes, Wodehouse, Wilde and Waugh that were the infatuations of my childhood (not to mention the Biggles, Enid Blyton and Georgette Heyer), but don’t ask me to repeat the plot of the last novel I read. And it was a really good one too, The Finkler Question , by Howard Jacobson, which won a Booker Prize. I should have read it two or three years ago when it came out, but I am hopelessly behind with contemporary fiction. Almost everything I read these days is history, biography or popular science. I laid The Finkler Question down, finished from end to end about three months ago, thoroughly satisfied. I remember laughing a lot, there was a (racist?) mugging and a lot of very clever and compelling writing about anti-Semitism and all kinds of other delicious and wildly intelligent prose. But apart from the name Finkler and that incident I honestly don’t think I could tell you what happened in the book, only that I loved it. I am way past the age when stories and even exact phrases and speeches stick.
    There are seventeen steps up from pavement level to Holmes and Watson’s 221b Baker Street rooms; the Edict of Nantes was revoked in 1685; and the Battle of Crécy was fought on 26 August 1346 (the precise day isn’t that hard to fix in my brain as it is my father’s birthday). These and all kinds of irrelevant nonsenses I can reel off without recourse to Wikipedia. Exact phrases from Holmes, Jeeves, Mr Micawber and Gimlet (Biggles’s commando equivalent) come pouring back to me, especially French Canadian Private ‘Trapper’ Troublay’s habit of hissing sapristi! whenever he was perturbed.
    I actually have a collection at home still of