I wonder if nostalgia may be the memory of something that never happened, a glimpsed world that never was. Or the lost and now inaccessible memories of fleeting moments? A desire and affinity for a world that never really was, but that you’d give your eye teeth to have known, or at least to have existed.
 
Laurie Lee ‘s semi-autobiography of growing up in the company of a sweet mother and fussing sisters in a bucolic, post-WWI England is all evoked with a poetry that comes naturally to him. To write like this, it had to have been real in its essence, flowering years later in the rich soil laid down by formative years of loving upbringing in a dependable, hopeful world.
 
It’s not all sweetness and light and, like all good things, Lee’s English idyll comes to an end with the passing of a particular generation and the arrival of motor vehicles––but there’s never any real trauma or disturbing ugliness, and the predominating atmosphere that we are invited to revel in is a childhood in timelessness countryside and the reassurance of family and home.

I’m sure that you will have your favourite book of this kind.  For me, more than Gerald Durrell’s light-hearted “My Family and Other Animals,” this one tugs at the heartstrings. You can, I found, enjoy and share someone else’s nostalgia as if it were your own.

I don’t know about you, but formal education instructed me to consider the proper subject of poetry to be elevated ideas and lofty sentiments, self-reflecting melancholy, metaphysical exposition, even, often constructed with abstruse cleverness. But what is grander than life’s earthiness? That you can grab in handfuls, throw into the air and watch fall?
 
Give me poetry that leaves the intellect for dust and sings another song: Dylan Thomas’s kind of truth, for example, down-to-earth and unaffected, able to conjure private worlds out of the communal dreaming dark in bold metaphor and be life’s very music.
 
Under Milk Wood gives you this in spades. Sonorous, lyrical poetry of the everyday, clothed in tragic-comic rags, a celebration of small-town folk, their dreamworlds, hopes, fears, desires, nostalgia and sad humour. Thomas’s drama for voices is a single poetic whole making, like Baudelaire, gold out of the mud. It is a play of passions, a paean of love for a town and its people that does and does not, of course, exist.
 
Richard Burton’s rendition is one of Wales’s glories. Less dramatic yet even more evocative to my ear are the opening lines in Michael Sheen’s penetratingly mellow delivery in the BBC Wales production, which is enacted by a wondrous array of actors. You can hear and see the whole piece on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osOLGHlvzW8

Better than a breath of fresh air in the anodyne stuffiness of Literature is a lungful of lusty pungence. The author is one big, erect I, out to enjoy life and immensely so. More abundant life, in all its carnal honesty. He shows up hypocrisy in human dealings without compunction. Of course: why should he have compunction?
 
I picked this book up in Boston before a road trip from coast to coast, dipping one hand in Boston harbour and the other in the Pacific on arrival in San Francisco. The journey and the book would have wrought some change in me, you might think, but I was too goddamn obdurate to let it at the time.
 
That doesn’t mean I didn’t get a vicarious kick from the sexual abandon that Miller delights in. I was a young man, after all. But I’d have to wait for Spain to find the kind of affirmative sexuality that underpins healthy life. That I had largely missed out on and didn’t want to anymore.
 
Miller’s uninterest in work in corporate America made me laugh because it matched my own in England. His outright indifference to making money struck me as a basis for a cheerful, freewheeling way of life. “Why should I give a fuck about what anything costs? I’m here to live, not to calculate.”
 
It was this carefreeness that I envied and had always aimed for myself.  “It was a beautiful Sunday and as usual I had about a quarter in my pocket.”

This way of life wasn’t a freedom, or even authentic, and certainly not in my best interests, leaving me time and again to start again from scratch, but hey-ho. In 1980s London, you could still get away with it, if you didn’t mind living squalidly a while.
 
It’s not a creed to live by: but I will always admire Miller for that vigorous, humorous style of his and utter candour.

This slim volume is distilled Vonnegut––and there is no one else quite like him. I have always thought of Kurt as a people’s champion: for having the wit to clear away the damage of lies, for deep, dark humour, for kindness.
 
He points out how humanity is racing to its own extinction and shrugs, knowing we are too foolish to halt our self-destruction. The best hope, he seems to say, is that we have some fun along the way, in which case we might just forget what we were doing and leave off the madness. And if not, well, “so it goes.”

Once school had put me off Shakespeare, it was years before I read King Lear and realized what all the fuss was about.
 
I became properly reconciled with Will (it wasn’t his fault, after all) on going to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a production that gave a hint of how it might have been staged by the man himself.

In the early nineties, a troupe of travelling players pitched a high marquee in Madrid and acted it out there, with plenty of gusto and their kids running up and down the aisles. I’ve still got their magical poster.
 
Thirty years on, I see that the Footsbarn Theatre is still up and running and touring: good on them!