What to read when you���re poorly
I have got a sore throat, a headache and a cough.�� Intermittent sneezing too.�� Brilliant!�� I can loll on the sofa with Beverley Nichols.
Who?
Most people under the age of sixty have never heard of Beverley Nichols.�� In fact many people over sixty haven���t heard of him either, unless they are British and gardeners.
I discovered him over a decade ago in the brilliant bookshop attached to Harrogate���s famous Harlow Carr gardens.�� As a novice gardener, I was feeling a bit intimidated by the big books full of dauntingly expert advice, when I came across something that looked reassuringly smaller.
���Down the Garden Path��� was an old-fashioned, pinky-brown hardback illustrated with some rather sweet drawings by Rex Whistler.
The publisher was Timber Press, a company I���d never heard of.�� I opened it at random, read a few paragraphs and quickly realised that it wasn���t a gardening manual at all but something else altogether.�� It confused me.�� It bemused me.�� And then it made me laugh.
The book I purchased that day was a proper gardening book that tells you how and when and where to plant things so they will grow.�� But I didn���t forget the little brown book.�� Every time I went back to Harlow Carr to buy plants, I would nip into the bookshop and steal a few more minutes with Beverley.�� I never once thought of buying it: it was far too silly for that.�� Any practical gardening tips were so buried in purple prose, sentiment and overblown drama that they were as good as useless.�� On the other hand, I couldn���t quite stay away.�� Any excuse to walk through the woods and up to the gardens for a few minutes loitering between the bookshelves, giggling with Mr Nichols.
So things remained – till I got the flu.
���What can I bring you?��� said a kindly visiting friend.�� She meant paracetamol I expect, or grapes.
���Beverley Nichols,��� I spluttered and she was as good as her word.
I now have all eight Beverley Nichols books reproduced in facsimile by Timber Press.
(Timber Press, I have learnt, is an American publisher that specialises in proper books for real gardeners.�� They have titles like ���Planting in a post-wild world: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes��� so clearly they are serious minded people.�� Yet they too have been won over by Mr Nichols own brand of silliness.)
When we moved a year ago to this little flat and most of my books went into storage, G didn���t understand why Beverley Nichols was in the pile to keep.�� ���We haven���t got a garden,��� he pointed out.
���No,��� I said.�� ���But I���m bound to get a cold.���
Can you think of a better room to feel poorly in than this one?
In the last decade I have coughed through the Merry Hall trilogy and then sneezed through the Allways books.�� The books ��� novels? memoirs? loosely linked anecdotes? – are only superficially about gardening.�� They portray a dottily fanciful mid C20th vision of Englishness, one that includes daggers at dawn dramas provoked by village hall flower displays and far more kittens than most readers can stomach.�� I occasionally lend them to friends, hoping to find a sister soul out there to share my sickbed passion with.�� People return them with expressions of bewilderment or appalled horror.�� ���But Diane!��� they say.�� ���It���s so twee!����� Well, yes.�� And whimsical and frothy and insubstantial and sentimental and melodramatic.�� It has nothing to recommend it to the serious reader, nothing at all. ��But when I am unwell, there���s nobody I would sooner have nursing me than Mr Nichols.�� Even now, when I have coughed so much it hurts to laugh.
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