Credit Crunch Reading

I am doing credit crunch reading, which is when, instead of buying new books, you just read the books that you bought years ago and never got round to reading. So far, I have read a collection of Joseph Brodsky's essays, On Grief and Reason, which has made me want to go back and re-read Auden; Spoken Here (a book about disappearing languages) by Mark Abley, which dovetailed nicely with our recent visit to the Babylon exhibition at the British Museum (I want to learn cuneiform!); and am just starting on Castiglione's The Courtier, which actually I have read, but that was 25 years ago and I did not get the point of it at all. Surely in a quarter of a century I will have gained enough to wisdom to actually see why people go on about it so?

In order to stop the children's brains turning into mush I have commanded them to learn a new poem each week. To hear Curly reciting Blake's:

"The angel who presided o'er my birth,
Said, "Little creature, formed of joy and mirth,
Go love without the help of anything on earth."

is to encounter hitherto unexperienced expanses of cuteness.