Thursday extracts: Yorkshire politics

Religion, when we were kids, was all about control. It was about the ruling classes being hand-in-glove with the church to keep ordinary, hard-working people terrified of having a mind of their own.

Sally Wainwright
Last Tango in Halifax
(BBC drama. Delivered by the character Alan, played by Derek Jacobi.)

The Tale of Jobina and Kay

Long ages ago, ere the dawn of Digital, a band of players made their way across the South lands to meet at a place called the White City. They were many and varied and represented all kinds of folk from bard to troubadour.

First they talked at length about the task they had been set. Each must play an arduous role that would require great stamina and adaptability. Far into the night discussions ranged until, at last, they agreed to meet in a dark and hidden cave where they would begin their work. Many hard hours it took until their mission was complete, and they passed their gem on to gnomish smiths to be wrought into 13 silver discs that bore strange sigils in black. And the discs were gathered in a hand-crafted box for safe keeping.

The box passed through many hands and many wondrous places until it came into the possession of a Princess of the East, Jobina, whose name meant ‘Morning’ in the old tongue. She kept the box a long while and played with it often, taking out the discs and cleaning them and passing them one by one through the Gate of Wires, that revealed their true beauty.

All was well until one day she opened her treasure box and found one of the discs was gone. She let out a cry that would waken the dragons of the West: “Argh my disc. My precious disc is gone!” and she continued to wail and weep until at last the pain of her tears reached the Knight Kay in the Middle Lands.

The bold and brave prince rushed at once to Jobina’s aid, and when he beheld her he knew instant love and fell to his knee and said: “Beautiful Princess. Until now I have perceived you only in my dreams, but now I see you are real and as beautiful and wonderful as I had imagined. I will find you a new disc as good as the one you have lost. Perhaps even better, if it is within my power.”

The Princess replied: “Then Sir Kay, if you are as good as your word, you shall be rewarded. You shall have my hand and henceforth your life will be a magical one. Go, find me a new disc, and I promise you happiness forever.”

And so Sir Kay searched through the mystic lands of Webbe; in the Forest of Pixil and the Mire of Bitz until he heard word of where such a disc could be found. There he travelled, and he struggled with the Wizard of Load Down until, after great toil, he wrenched the disc from the magician’s hand and bore it back in triumph to be placed in honour in the Treasure Box in the princess’s palace.

Jobina was overjoyed, and put her arms around Sir Kay and kissed him long, for he was handsome, and clever, and brave, and she knew he would be her champion for life. And the pair lived happy ever after.

*********

Back in 1981 the BBC broadcast a dramatisation of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in 13 episodes and some years later it was released, first on cassette and then on CD, both of which I bought. When I got the CDs I passed on the cassettes because I didn't think I'd ever need it again.  Sadly, I later lost one of the CDs (episode 13, where everything is sorted out at the end) and I've not been able to listen to it since.

Until now. Thanks to my darling K (who really is brave and handsome and clever) I now have a copy of episode 13 again (albeit on a normal CD) and I have been listening to the series this week as I've driven to and from work. It's a measure of my journey times that I'm currently nearing the end of episode nine!

You might ask why I didn't just buy a replacement box set. Well, the version I bought isn't actually available any more and the replacement is retailing at £60 at the moment (that's about $100) with £20 off.  I think I paid about £40 when I bought it back in the early 90s.

How many?

The BBC 'most people have only read six books' thing has reared its ugly head again. I think it's been around for years but it's still an interesting exercise. Apparently, surveys show that most people have read only six of the list below. 
(Bold means I've read it. Italics means I started it and gave up. There are also comments.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling  (I read the first four then she sold out)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (I really should, shouldn't I)
6 The Bible (What? All of it?)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (My O Level book)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (And I know why people -allegedly - go out and kill afterwards. I really wanted to kill Holden Caulfield!)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (It's on my list. It's on my E-reader!)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (lots of times - one of my favourites)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (Yes, all of them)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe  (See no. 33)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (I LOVE Pooh!)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Not his best. Angels and Demons is better)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (And it felt like it!)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (Give him back! One of the best books ever)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (Hated it)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon  (Very clever book)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Because I hated 100 years... see 43)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (It's nonsense!)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (And it is.Never really enjoyed Hardy.)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath  (Oh my gawd.....Was she the depressed one?)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome  (It's on my list but I don't have a copy yet)
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery  (In French!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (This is about the only Ian Banks I've never read. I've even read some Iain M Banks)
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare  (Not sure why they have this separated out. See 14)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo