Skidmore's Island: “Pick Me Up, Tie Me To My Chair And Fill Up My Glass.”
Ian Skidmore declares his allegiance to books - then, now and for ever.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young in World War 2 was very heaven. Living like Mr Mole in underground air raid shelters, bombed every night like little Ernest Hemingways. Best of all, a Huckleberry Finn life of no school, which meant I could devote more time to books.
By the time I was four I had learned to read and could see no other point in education. At 82, I am still reading and it is the nearest I have ever come to spirited activity. I read as a schoolboy, as a printer's devil, as a soldier, in an army prison, through half a century as a reporter and a broadcaster. I read my way through two marriages, richer and poorer, and through cancer. I have sold books, bought books, stolen books, been a book critic and written twenty-seven of my own. I grew a Jimmy Edwards moustache to thank him for introducing me to Mr Jorrocks and his noble sentiment: “Pick me up, tie me to my chair and fill up my glass.”
Like Jorrocks, I took up marathon wine drinking. It didn't matter that my stories ended up wrapping fish and chips. It gave me something to read as I ate my suppers. When my father banished books from the dining room, I read the labels on sauce bottles. Broadcasting was to give a third dimension to the printed word.
Ah, the printed word! When the bubonic plague knocked the bottom out of his business making mirrors for pilgrims, Gutenberg invented the book by turning a borrowed wine press into a printing flatbed. Learning that moveable type was invented by a Chinese blacksmith sent me scurrying to Su Tung-po, the bibulous poet of the 11th century.
My family clubbed together to buy me an E Book-reader for my eightieth birthday and I was able to carry a library in my pocket. It was the first major change in the history of book-making and I couldn't wait to be part of it.
Now I am part of the automatic text-to-speak computer world. My autobiography “Forgive Us Our Press Passes” is winging out of cyberspace, never to yellow or disappear. I'm among the first to latch onto high tech communication, even though I started the job hardly able to change my own typewriter ribbons. I am a journalist from the hot metal Golden Age. Speaking with a new breed of Evian-drinking, brown-bagging desk-huggers who feel nothing farther than a screen away is a waste of time.
Oh brave new world that has such wonders in it.
