A Miscellany led by more marginalia …

Having dipped into this book often and read all the interviews I wanted to, this tome which I’d got from the charity shop was destined to go back there.

Brief Encounters, subtitled ‘meetings with remarkable people’ is a collection of Gyles Brandreth’s interviews carried out for the Sunday Telegraph – he’s an engaging interviewer and good at getting his subjects to spout forth – viz Edwina Currie (currently in I’m a Celebrity…), this from 2002, just after the news of her affair with PM John Major had broken…

Edwina Currie is giving me a master-class in the art of adultery. ‘Only meet your lover every two weeks,’ she counsels. ‘If you leave it much longer between encounters, it’s harder to recover the feeling. If you meet too frequently, you get completely overwhelmed. You can get addicted to this sort of thing, you know, so it’s unwise to be doing it every week of every night. Once a fortnight is about right.’

Anyway, before putting it in the charity shop bag, I flicked through one last time, and on the title page no less which I’d somehow missed before discovered this wonderful piece of marginalia in which someone has used the book as a jotter…

This is a family that likes to holiday it seems, rather than spend money on the house. We have visiting Claire in Paris, family hols in Italy, hiking for Nina in lakes, something I can’t read and peaks, plus Skiing ‘en famille’ and Save for big trip!

Superfit?  – just fit(ter) would do. Presumably to emulate the daughter (?) Nina who already does hiking, riding and cycling.

£80k in 2004 was a very good salary indeed, so £300 to finish a bathroom sounds a bit mingy… but if you’re trying to ‘Rid Debt(?)’ maybe a good thing.

What were your goals for 2004?

My daughter had started in Pre-School – so my only aim was to find a part-time job for the autumn, when she’d be at Nursery full-time. And holidays? We went to Boston and Cape Cod for a fortnight – and there was blueberry cheesecake ice cream on Martha’s Vineyard…

 

6 thoughts on “A Miscellany led by more marginalia …

  1. sharkell says:

    In 2004, I had a 4 year old and a 2 year old. My goal was to have a full night sleep, which I managed to get to in 2006!!!

  2. MarinaSofia says:

    Yep, a full night’s sleep sounds about right to me for 2004 – although I only had one child at the time. He was under one, though, so I was trying to find a job where I didn’t have to be away from him all the time and could start thinking about having a second one.

  3. litlove says:

    Lovely pic! I was in the midst of my lecturing job, my son was 10, and I was very chronic fatigued. Not the greatest year ever! But I did enjoy teaching and my son was extremely cute then.

Leave a Reply