Very funny - entertaining philosophy. ( )

Lost Worlds tries to capture and hence save for posterity a great many objects, fashions , fads, ,cultural curiosities and lacunae that Bywater considers echoes from the past. This is an odd anthology or miscellany of short essays and comments, arrranged alphabetically of a real rag bag of defunct or disappearing practices . It is likely to mystify or confuse anyone who is not English ie lived in the home counties , between the thirties snd the nineties of the 20th century. Some even go back further. I can't see this book translating well... Don't bother, too much will mystify, forget be lost in translation . The author does not quite pin down his decades , though there is a list of hideously seventies popular games, books, and hobbies. So glad to forget most . In about a hundred years time the book collector will come across this book and quietly chuckle at the quaint expressions and habits of the English and think they have found a key to lost English culture, At present, it is a book which is in turns clever, irritating , amusing and entertaining. Reading it induces many of thos "oh, yes I remember that" and "indeed where did it go" or "how hideous and that was not a survival in our home". Other of his rescued expressions or cultural norms are better left as relics of one's childhood or one's grandmother's hey days . It is clever enough to pass with the port on a cold Christmas afternoon but the fairly flippant and superficial glossing over of these oddities means that the book does not score as a bit of authoritative social history, Too superficial for my liking though there is a further reading list and the index is actually pretty detailed . ( )

From "Finisterre":
It keeps curious, almost liturgical, company, not chanted but almost intoned in an ageless rhythm: Viking, North Utsire, South Utsiire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne. Dogger, Fisher, German Bite . . . Humber, Thames, Dover; Wight, Portland, Plymouth, Biscay, Trafalgar, Sole; Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea. Shannon, Rockall; Malin; Bailey, Fair Isle, Faroes, South-east Iceland.
A litany of imaginary places drawn by the spirit of meteorology moving upon the face of the waters; an occulted prayer for they that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters: These see the works of the LORD and his wonders in the deep. For while it may be Radio Four - zippy, businesslike, numerate, MODERN - the rest of the time, on the Shipping Forecast, it is still the BBC Home Service, and Britain still a great maritime nation.

I had thought that this book would be along the lines of "Schott's Miscellany", but it is more personal than that, full of nostalgia for the small pleasures of yesteryear. I enjoyed it a lot, which was quite unexpected, since I'd been putting off reading it after seeing the negative reviews it received when I sent it on a book ring. I liked how opinionated (and at times downright stroppy, see below) Michael Bywater is about everything! And he seems to be a local too; there are mentions of riding the tram out to Ripley, and going out to Eastwood in search of the real D.H. Lawrence accent after wondering at the strangeness of the dialect in one of his plays that was put on at Nottingham Playhouse.

From "Moleskine":
An Italian company brought back the Moleskine in the 1990s and now not an over-sensitive backpacker leaves the shores of America but has its Moleskine in its rucksack; hence a whole generation of travellers who will leave no trace. You see them, wailing on the Internet: people who, by the cleverest and most specious bit of marketing around, now feel themselves intimidated by their Moleskine notebooks. What can they write (and what can they write it with, unless it's a Mont Blanc Meisterstück pen, just like Bruce used?) that will deserve the Moleskine and its heritage of, not just Chatwin, but (so the manufacturers say) Matisse, van Gogh, Hemingway . . .
Let us get this straight.
1. The Moleskine of Chatwin is lost.
2. The new Moleskin is a different thing, its authenticity fatally compromised by its insistence on its authenticity.
3. The original Moleskine was not a carefully marketed designer brand. 'Moleskine' was just a generic waterproof cover.
4. And anyway, it was just a fucking notebook. Ca va? ( )

Failed the first chapter test...irritating chattering classes book that no doubt enables amusing dinner party conversations...clearly I am too common to appreciate its wit...sigh back to the scullery where I belong ( )

WHAT is it about a really enjoyable book that makes it imperative to share? Unlike the last Rolo, a good read is made much better by sharing it with friends and acquaintances. When the last succulent morsel has been digested and one's fingers, so to speak, thoroughly licked, what better than to pick over the bones of the feast with similarly replete diners who are digesting the same meal?

My first taste of Lost Worlds was courtesy of a colleague, who was roaring with laughter. Being of a rather saturnine disposition, this mirth was out of character, but I did not have to wonder at the cause for long because after a particularly robust chortle, he pressed the book on me with an exhortation to read the passage.

Not knowing quite what to expect, the entry on “Centres, Call” soon had me smiling. I flipped through several more entries before the book was rudely wrested from my eager grasp, and spent the rest of the day listening to belly laughs punctuated by giggles.

Lost Worlds is an annotated alphabetical list of words and concepts that were once part of everyday life, but which have now vanished. Although Michael Bywater is English, much of his sense of loss is shared by many first-generation ex-Colonials brought up in the British tradition by school, Faith or family.

Although Kunzle Cakes and Fry's Five Boys chocolates might be outside our experience, we can come up with our own lists of familiar items which are no more. Does anyone remember Appledorn wafers or Wicky Wacks chewing gum? The London Drapery or Garlicks? Jack and Jill shoes, which always had a balloon in the box? Or even those once ubiquitous loos where one had literally to “pull the chain”?

Although Bywater's list is an interesting and educational walk down memory lane, what transfigures it is the sheer jolly excellence of his writing, his dry wit, mastery of the bon mot, and the impressive scope of his knowledge.

Lost Worlds is a masculine, lower-middle class view of the world in which Mummy is usually accompanied by a light patina of flour, and Father smokes a pipe, exhorting his son not to “play silly buggers, old chap”, as they tackle a fretwork project together while listening to the transistor radio.

There are passages on Hot Water Bottle, LPs, the so-called Wisdom of the Ancients, Mad Dogs (all strange dogs), Brylcreem, Chilblains, the Seven Stone Weakling in his saggy Jantzens, VD, The Shops and — best of all — Enid Blyton's Noddy. Noddy, Big Ears and Mister Golly, once symbols of childhood innocence — except now we know better! “If Mister Golly was a hurtful example for black children, what sort of example did Noddy set for white children? Or, damn it, his very peculiar friend Big Ears for men? Golly had to go," Bywater says.

While one might not always agree with Bywater's opinions, most of us would defend his right to express them with the ineluctable elegance and humour (combined with a slightly scatological schoolboy waggishness) that is the trademark of his prose.

For example, in his opinion, the mechanised pulsing of the drum machine which forms the basis of much pop music is: “An experience, to the discerning ear, a bit like being poked repeatedly in the chest by a bore making the same easily grasped point over and over, while simultaneously being non-consensually sodomised from behind (where else?)."

No matter what your opinion of modern music, it is impossible not to smile indulgently at Bywater’s expressive prose, and then to read it aloud to someone else.

Lost Worlds comes with a prolegomenon, a list of further reading and an index. A book as witty and encompassing as this deserves a decent index, but does not get it.

A discussion on the Barbershop Quartet comes under the entry “Harmony, Close” — yet there is no index heading for Barbershop.

However, an excellent meal is still an excellent meal, even if served with insufficient toothpicks, and Lost Worlds is a banquet for lord and layabout and everyone in between. Beg, borrow or buy it, make friends and influence people by lending it out. ( )