Yet another quiet group ....

I thought I'd found a gem of an area but it seems everyone has moved away.

I guess we're all too busy either reading or adding books to LibraryThing? (And haven't thought of a topic which needs discussing in the absence of *hem* foreigners?)

True, I was just excited to have found this group and then realised a lot of the posts were from months and months back.

I'm here now...

What are we supposed to be doing here?

I'm here too. What shall we talk about?

Cool more and more people coming on!

I haven't got a particular topic to start I just was hoping that people were still checking this part of the site.

As it is a British group, shouldn't we be talking about the weather? It has been a fairly pleasant day down south apart from a brief shower in the early afternoon.

If not the weather, how disasterous the rail network is would be another typically British topic.

And driving directions are always a good old British standard.

The rail network worked well for me this weekend. Cambridge to Havant in just over 2.5 hours on a sunday evening is amazing. A pity I had to wait at cambridge for 45 minutes before starting. The other way on staturday morning was good as well.

Rain on sunday lunchtime was a little disappointing.

Unintended duplicate message removed

Oh yes, sorry I forgot the weather. It is lovely here this afternoon. Temp is around 20. It was a bit rainy this morning though.

We had a fairly nice morning, but got rather wet this afternoon. At least I won't have to do much in the way of watering the garden.

We inadvertently seem to have found the answer as to why this group is so quiet. After making small talk about the weather everyone is too polite to say anything else.
We could talk football. I'm gutted after yesterday's Champion's League Semifinal.

Scouser, eh? I'm not a big football fan, but you chaps have had it your own way for too long.

Am I the only person who has noticed the cricket season is underway? If we start talking about the smack of leather on willow I reckon it'll really alienate any browsing septic tanks, although it may attract smug Aussies, and we can't be having that.

Actually, if you want a really quite LT group, go to the cricket one. There's more excitement to be had on a wet Tuesday watching a county championship match.

alienate any browsing septic tanks

This Yank likes cricket.

I'm a bit of a nomad actually, lived the longest in Bolton, but both my parents are scousers so being a Liverpool fan is inbred.

Wow, nice one, fleela. I found the Yank that likes cricket.

Actually, useless cricket trivia: the oldest regular rivalry in international cricket is not the Ashes, but between the USA and Canada, which has been played since the 1840s. More at http://content-www.cricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/141170.html

All literate Brits who have had enough of Facebook please come and join us. I'm feeling lonely on here by myself.

#17

Oldest international fixture I grant - but would you call it a regular rivalry?

The fixture has been played fairly sporadically since 1845 so I wouldn't say regular.
Also for there to be a rivalry it involves, at least to me, more than just two sides playing each other. It requires intense competition and desire to win between the teams which extends to the fans and the result will have some social resonance in the towns, regions or countries that are playing.

Apologies for the pedantry.

I've seen one active thread. I think we deserve to develop groups here.

I would like to compare and contrast books we are reading but I suppose that is done elsewhere. Also, those people who want to meet up seem to be managing to find ways of doing that. I didn't go to the London Book Fair or Winchester this year so feel quite cut off from other book people. If we don't have any books in common perhaps we don't have any similar interests? I could start a thread about rereading books we enjoyed as children as that is what I have been doing recently. Does this ruin or enhance the experience? What about political correctness? Should we allow books to be updated? There's a start!

I was just contemplating the question of updating yesterday. In the days of print, new editions would sometimes be released with significant updates, so why not in digital which is easier?

Oh good topic! I've reread a number of books from my childhood in the last few years. Some of them stood up really well despite being dated - Swallows and Amazons, Pigeon Post - and some didn't hold up so well - Enid Blyton. Nevil Shute's A Town Like Alice, which I first read as a teenager and which is one of my favourite books, would definitely not be considered politically correct today with its talk of serving Aboriginies in the back. However, I don't believe we should be messing around trying to update books. They are products of the era in which they were written and reflect the views and norms of those times. History isn't always pretty and I think that we shouldn't try to whitewash that. It's important for kids to see that people had different ideas and attitudes and that people weren't always treated as they should have been.
I can still happily reread The Secret Garden, Heidi and, Anne of Green Gables, which was 70+ years old when I first read it, is still as enchanting to me today (One of these days I WILL make it to Prince Edward Island).
And some of the books from my childhood have been big hits with my kids. My younger son loved The Machine Gunners, Stig of The Dump, A Hundred Million Francs, and the Silver Sword as well as the Arthur Ransome books and my daughter ate up Milly Molly Mandy, which was dated but still delightful, and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books.

Well it's been deceptively nice here in the mornings, then raining in the afternoon, just in time to soak me on the run to the car.
I feel I've established my british credentials there.

I think that some books stand up to being re-read, and others you change your opinion on. That can be simply due to maturity and experience, or maybe some perspective and empathy that comes with age. I read several books as a teen that i hated. Pride and prejudice for example had me wanting to hurl the book across the room. With age I have come to understand Lizzie and Jane a bit better, although i'm never going to count it as one of my favourites. Similarly, I did Under Greenwood Tree by Hardy for GCSE and have never been near Hardy since. I feel I ought to, but can't quite pluck up the courage.

I did Pride and Prejudice for O level and loved it. Still love it. It's probably my favourite book. But I put that down to an excellent English teacher who really gave us the background to understand it, who showed us the wit running through it and the relevance it had to our lives.

That can make a difference too. My English teacher was a sour faced, hypocritical, hip & trendy, loon. Almost succeeded in making Shakespeare as dull as ditch water. That would have taken some effort.

I find it interesting to read children's books that I didn't read as a child, though Mrs Bookworm did. (Sometimes I wonder what planet my parents were on, that I missed out on such stuff.) Some are better than others: I don't think A Stranger at Green Knowe suffered from being encountered only as an adult, though I would have enjoyed it at 11 or so, and at that age I would have been more uncritical in my appreciation of the melodrama in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. On the other hand, Skylark of Space was a great read at 11, but I found it almost ridiculous on re-reading it.

Oh I vaguely remember reading one (or maybe more) of the Green Knowe books - the one with the flood? Did you read Five Children and It? I seem to remember them being in a similar vein.

How about 'The Family from One End Street? and, now you have reminded me, I must try Swallow and Amazons again.

I don't think I ever read that. I might have to get on ABE now and have a bit of a shopping spree.

Yes, I read Five Children and It at secondary school. We have at least two more of E. Nesbit's stories somewhere too.

You know I don't know if I ever actually read the Railway Children or if I just saw it on TV every Christmas.

32 I have that problem with books adapted on TV: I think I probably never actually read Tom's Midnight Garden.

For many of us there are two peaks for reading children's literature, once for ourselves and again reading aloud for our own children. I enjoyed the second peak every bit as much as the first, and, of course, found good stuff that had been written in the interim. The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban comes to mind. Certainly the Swallows and Amazons books are worth another look.

Fortunate folk will get to read bedtime stories to their grandkids but my only one (so far) is half a world away in LA. Maybe I'll get to read to her on FaceTime, but it's not the same.

My favourite new discoveries at the kids' bedtime have been A Visitor for Bear, Room on the Broom, and Mrs Armitage, Queen of the Road.

Haven't heard of any of them but suspect that's because my kids are all too old for them now (They're 16, 11, & 9). When they were younger, I particularly enjoyed The Hairy Maclary books by Lynley Dodd and pretty much anything by Mick Inkpen. My eldest, having grown up as part of the Harry Potter generation, has always leaned towards fantasy which was never really my genre but I did enjoy Artemis Fowl, the Percy Jackson books, Peter and the Starcatchers and Holes (Both my boys really enjoyed Louis Sachar's Sideways School series as well.

Oh yes, we are Hairy Maclary (and Slinky Malinki) fans.

And don't forget SCARFACE CLAW!

"EEEEEOWWWFFTZ!"

I've discovered a wonderful new invention for cutting out waiting time at the doctor or dentist. It's called a Kindle.

You go into the place, give your name at reception, sit down and make yourself comfortable, fish out and put on the reading glasses, kindle your Kindle, find the piece you want to read - and they call your name. Works every time.

Don't take the Kindle and I wait twenty minutes, at least - forget the reading glasses and I'm lucky to be called inside three-quarters of an hour.

Is there any practical use to the Met Office?

9:45am: returned from my appointment (see #40), dumped Kindle and checked the Met Office website for my local forecast - forecast for a dry morning with rain coming in at lunchtime. So I went for a walk wearing a fleece (stiff northerly breeze - yey for British summers!}.

Got about twenty minutes from home and it started to rain. Plodded on for a hundred yards or so, no sign of a brightening in the sky upwind, so I decided I might as well plod homeward - at least I'd have the driving rain at my back. It was probably only the drying effect of the north wind that stopped me getting thoroughly soaked. Got to my front door and it stopped raining and the sky brightened.

10:30am: checked Met Office website for local forecast - it now says rain coming in at 10:00am!

And now it's dry and really bright outside; so do I have another attempt at a walk or sit here composing daft posts to LibraryThing in a desperate attempt to put off doing some housework?