Dancing Fish and Ammonites: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

been found to display a more sprightly outlook when it arrives. Well, I dare say, and that is really just a matter of diversity; some of us are like that, others are not. You are exhorted to be positive when you have cancer, with the underlying suggestion that if you don’t your chances will be that much worse. Hmmm. A positive view may well do much for the state of mind, but I doubt if it affects the disease.
    Something of the same applies to old age – condition not disease. A positive attitude is not going to cure the arthritis or the macular degeneration or whatever but a bit of bravado makes endurance more possible. Not everyone can manage this – diversity again. And bravado comes a great deal easier to those cushioned by financial security; I am intensely aware of this. There’s something else, though, and that is not so much state of mind as what the mind in question is up to, indeed, whether it is up to anything at all. Friends in my age group who are successfully facing down old age are busy; several are hampered by hips, knees, etc. but still pursue their interests and activities. I know I have a fairly left-field range of friends, nearly all of whom have earned their bread through brain work, and nobody forces a writer into retirement (except incompliant publishers), but there does seem to be some staying power bestowed by . . . what? Curiosity? Mental energy? Perseverance? A surviving drive to seize the day? Any, I think – and all.
    Can’t garden. Don’t want to travel. But can read, must read. For me, reading is the essential palliative, the daily fix. Old reading, revisiting, but new reading too, lots of it, reading in all directions, plenty of fiction, history, and archaeology always, reading to satisfy perennial tastes, reading sideways too – try her, try him, try that, Amazon and AbeBooks would founder without me; my house is a book depository – books in, books out (to family and friends, to my daughter’s Somerset cottage where there is still some shelf space, to wonderful Book Aid which sends English-language books to places where they are needed). I buy; I am sent. Publishers send what my husband used to call “bread upon the waters” books to people like me: “We’d love to know if you enjoy this book as much as we have . . .” I can’t read each one, but I always have a good look. Any book represents effort, struggle, work – I know, I write them myself – every book deserves attention, even if that ends with dismissal. And occasionally there is gold: today the postman hands over Robert Macfarlane’s latest,
The Old Ways
. Ah, discerning editor! I have devoured and reread Macfarlane’s earlier books.
    Reading in old age is doing for me what it has always done – it frees me from the closet of my own mind. Reading fiction, I see through the prism of another person’s understanding; reading everything else, I am traveling – I am traveling in the way that I still can: new sights, new experiences. I am reminded sometimes of the intensity of childhood reading, that absolute absorption when the very ability to read was a heady new gain, the gateway to a different place, to a parallel universe you hadn’t known was there. The one entirely benign mind-altering drug. Except of course for those who ban or burn books, in which case benign doesn’t come into it, but the power of books is all the more acknowledged.
    So I have my drug, perfectly legal and I don’t need a prescription. Over the last few years, I have considered nature and nurture with Matt Ridley, explored Hengeworld with Mike Pitts, enjoyed centuries of British landscape with Francis Pryor, discovered France with Graham Robb. Plus a raft of novels and an expedient injection of poetry. More later on a lifetime of reading and the way in which reading has powered writing. My point here is to do with the needs of old age; there is what you can’t do, there is what you no longer want to do, and there is what has become