Another visit to London, this time with the principal purpose of visiting the annual London Book Fair at Earls Court. I didn’t find much of interest at the LBF - same old exhibitors, same old stuff, hundreds of people, but little buzz. I got my first sighting of the new Sony Reader and was very impressed. I also saw the Espresso book machine which Blackwells are installing in their Charing Cross Road and which will print “on demand” books for customers (from a list of around 400,000 titles of which 250,000 are out-of-print) in about five minutes -very eye-catching, but it is a hulking great thing which needs a pretty nifty person at the steering wheel.
Probably the highlight of my visit to the Book Fair was listening to the Italian novelist Umberto Eco who will be eighty next year. He didn’t start writing novels until fairly late in life and was extremely indignant when it was suggested that "The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana" (published in the UK in 2005) might be his final novel. I enjoyed hearing about Eco’s attitude to prioritising his workload. Married to a German art teacher who is extremely methodical and who will only do one job at a time, he claims that having Latin blood makes him quite the opposite. He likes to have multiple projects all on the go simultaneously and, when reminded that a deadline for a newspaper article is imminent, he will stubbornly set down to work on a completely different project, leaving the deadlined task until the very last minute. Absolutely my sort of person.
After leaving Earls Court I was able to savour London at its springtime best. Clear blue skies and a wonderful early evening for a walk in the park. Starting at Marble Arch and finishing at Notting Hill I traversed both Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, checking out the Serpentine (I didn’t realise that it was a totally man-made water feature created for Queen Caroline, wife of George II), the Princess Diana “Fountain” (confusing sort of paddling waterway thingy for children which is apparently a miracle of expensive 3-D computer graphics design and engineering), the Princess Diana Memorial Walk, the Princess Diana Memorial Playground, and good old Peter Pan. The statue of Peter Pan was interestingly gifted to the Park by J M Barrie who arranged for its installation in the dead of night (like Network Rail's removal of the Frinton-on-Sea level-crossing gates) so it would come as a nice surprise to the people.
Rather stupidly the one important monument that I missed in Kensington Gardens was the chestnut tree (or was it an oak tree?) under which I proposed marriage to Mrs Rumbling Nappa all those years ago.
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