Mr Alan Bennett..? 2019 04 08 (7) 25 2 3

An open letter to Mr Alan Bennett..? 2019 04 01

...from one of the least prolific writers to one of The most prolific

Which is to say I have just finished reading his Untold Stories which for anyone wishing to have a good read all 600+ pages I would recommend almost whole-heartedly, for before getting half way through it, I discarded it briefly for containing what he and I would describe as “too much tittle tattle”, when I came to the chapters dealing with excerpts from his diaries... That I soldiered on was because by that time the hook had sunk well and truly in and I had to read more to fill in the man.

One of the reasons I started reading one of his more substantial tomes at all was because in the obituaries following another great British author, Diana Athill, who died January 23rd 2019 aged 102, suggested in her best seller Somewhere Towards the End that in order to escape the dreariness of old age we should seek out people who are completely different so that we may peek different perspectives... One of my reasons for reading Athill, who talked of the smugness attached to being upper middle-class English, was as a counterbalance to earlier reading pretty much everything of George Orwell's total book catalogue, who was the guy who first made me aware, and take on board what it meant to be "happy working class" from his Road to Wigan Pier, when to delight more in AB, was to see identifiable traits to his own working class roots which he is not shy to reveal.

Unlike AB, in all probability, I only read my first work of fiction in my late teens being subject more to a technical education rather than one of letters like him, when until that point I can claim to have dipped only into text books wherein my best subjects were mathematics, metalwork, physics and chemistry. But as a late developer, also to an extent like AB, once having discovered literature it wasn’t long before I had read many of the notable classics from the English, Russian and French cultures, but only in their translated versions. And this from a slow beginning which wasn’t enhanced by our headmistress taking me out of class and literally rapping me across my knuckles on numerous occasions, together with the boy I shared a desk with, my classmate Brian, because neither of us was learning to read as quickly as she considered fitting in the manner of the rest of our colleagues.

But like AB as a late developer, and in my case being brought up by a war-widowed mother together my older brother and younger sister, once finding my stride I became in turns a Fellow of my learned society, and had successes in the Court of International Trade in New York, the most important Patent Offices around the world, where I got to defend my Intellectual Property I assigned to my various employers, and in my retirement continued to represent my former employer in an International Committee of Manufacturers whilst being commissioned by the rest of the group to write the Guide to Good Manufacturing for the Industry…

One further point of similarity with AB is that we both appear to share

the fact of being related to the two most famous sons of the Northern English town of Bury: in his case the celebrated Robert Peel who amongst other things was noted for giving his name to “Bobbies” or “Peelers”, that is founding the idea of having Policemen patrol the streets, but who also was responsible for the repeal of the Corn Laws in the mid-19^th century, whilst in my case I was related to John Kay who invented the Flying Shuttle in 1733, a crucial development during the Industrial Revolution which was to automate the textile and weaving industry and make Britain the foremost industrial country which was getting under way at that time…

And since I retired in 2008 I took to writing for pleasure with an almost daily blog which still enjoys a modicum of patronage or do I matronage, have a good day everyone and if you’d like a good read…