The Good, the Bad & the Dumped is out today, hurrah! And here it is: http://tinyurl.com/27gqnt9 – I do hope you like it. xx

The other book I tracked down (oh, the glories of Abe Books) I had actually misremembered. I went to a Catholic school and emptied the library there, which inevitably meant reading a large amount of christian inspirational literature, most of which is total gubbins- stories about how happy people are that Jesus put them in a wheelchair, or how they climbed Everest thanks to God (Bear Gryll’s otherwise excellent book is full of that kind of stuff).

I don’t want to offend, but the idea that God is busy helping posh blokes to the top of Everest, or helping Jennifer Lopez have hit records, whilst simultaneously killing 20,000 Liberian children a year from diarrhoea I find completely and utterly abhorrent in every way. Same as everyone who ever says, ‘well, everything happens for a reason’.

Anyway, rant over. I wanted to revisit one book that I thought was amazing at the time, about a woman and her sister who’d ended up in the concentration camps and had been saved by the power of prayer. In retrospect, assuming they were converted Jews, I was quite insulted by the idea that if you’d only accepted Jesus you’d have survived the holocaust.

Well, I was totally wrong. The Hiding Place, by Corrie Ten Boom, is a sadly under-read these days classic. Corrie and her family were protestant watchmakers in Haarlem, and when the Nazi invasion came they never blinked, hesitated or considered for a second closing their doors or turning away their jewish friends and colleagues. Corrie, an unmarried middle aged woman who lived in the house in which she had been born and by her own admission, had never done anything unusual or spectacular in her whole life, became the centre of a network of nazi resistance, funnelling jews to safe locations, and at one stage hiding 13 in their own tiny home. She was the one who stood up and said ‘no’. It’s an utterly astonishing, entirely humbling read. When she meets one of her guards at the very end, you want to shout and scream on her behalf. I’m so glad it was in my school library; it should be in every school library on earth.

ps quick update on reading Wallace ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’- when we got to the bit where Charlie gets the bar for his birthday, and it DOESN’T contain a golden ticket, Wallace’s eyes went wide as saucers. He Simply. Could. Not. Believe. It. He had literally been hanging over the book in joyous anticipation whilst Charlie opens the bar, a huge preparatory smile on his face, when Dahl pulls the rug out.  The second time Dahl pulls the same thing, he was much cannier to it. Then the chapter where he finally DOES find the ticket- which comes to quite an abrupt end- Wall, normally a very amenable child, simply grabbed my hand and refused to let me close the book until I’d read on. He couldn’t wait. As Mr B pointed out, I’m having as much fun with this is as he is.

I recently went for two books I adored when I was younger to see how they stood up now. I’m always amazed. the Narnia books, for example, which I thought were as wide as a whole world, are short, with much less description than you can see in those vast snowy vistas in your head. Anne of Green Gables is not, in fact, a hilarious comedy about a girl getting into scrapes as I firmly believed at 9, but a completely heartbreaking story about unusual families feeling their way to love, and the real sniveller is not Matthew dying (though that never gets any easier), but Marilla, so slow to take to Anne with an ‘e’, but so adoring when she finally does.

Anyway, the first was Little Lord Fauntelroy, as I remembered loving it and it’s what my mum calls Wallace, from when he had a full head of glorious golden curls as a toddler (now a thick mop of unruly brown). This story, of an angelic poor American child taming a crusty English Earl was a huge hit in its day. Now it might be seen as the absolute height of emetic high Victorianism and their cult of the perfect innocent child. Fauntelroy is SO perfect, So loveable, SO amazingly well-behaved at all times that it staggers the senses and completely belies any real children in existence. It’s fallen out of fashion recently, and it’s very easy to see why; I don’t think I’ll be reading it to Wallace- to whom, anyway, I am reading something I always dreamt of being able to do as a parent. I think you can probably guess it from this line alone: Wallace sat completely still on the bed, eyes wide, not even daring to breathe, as I read, very quietly,

“Nobody ever goes in… and nobody ever comes out.”

“But… but WHY?” said Charlie Bucket and Wallace, simultaneously.

“That will have to wait till tomorrow” said I and Mrs Bucket simultaneously. Dahl really was, in the end, the best.

And the second I shall do tomorrow.

Gosh Nicci Gerrard is a wonderful writer. She used to write for the Observer, and her pieces were always like tiny jewels, they seemed wasted on something as ephemeral as a newspaper. Then she joined up with her husband, Sean French- who once wrote a novel on his own, something with monkeys in. It was in the drawer in the old spare room in the house I grew up in on the sea. I can’t remember a thing about the novel except that I liked it, and monkeys were involved- but I remember the feel of the paper that lined the drawer, and the faded floral sprig wallpaper that was dated than, but in vogue again these days. Anyway, Nicci and Sean joined forces and called themselves Nicci French, to write a series of crime novels which are pretty good, like Minette Walters, but I just came across a solo novel by Gerrard called Solace which I thought was new but turns out to be about five years old.

Anyway, it was splendid, about the ending of a marriage; beautifully written, dreamy, accurate and painful. It pulls a mean trick about 4/5ths of the way through which is unnecessary and should have been taken out; the quotidian truths the novel contains are diminished by a tragedy which feels out of place and a little unfair, but the rest of it is absolutely great. It went well with my new Lisa Jewell proof, After the Party, which is about a bad year in a marriage and is similarly elegaic, delicate and true with feelings. One can’t help but feel if men were writing these extraordinary contemporary accounts of everyday lives, people would be throwing them ticker tape parades. Tant pis!

Spring did spring here in France, but is beating a temporary retreat today. Michael-Francis and Delphie are having a snooze and Wallace is wearing his father’s motorcycle kit and hanging around the door saying ‘WHEN ARE THEY COMING? SOON??’. Waiting twenty minutes for your friends to turn up is quite a long time when you’re only JUST five.