Books Do Furnish A Room

It was typewriters that began this one. I am of an age when going to museums and stately homes etc. tells me not only of other pasts but reminds me of my own. So when I was at Bateman's by Burwash and the guide wafted a hand around Rudyard Kipling's study he told us that this was the typewriter used by the author to write his great works.

But I told him it wasn't. First of all, the Imperial Typewriter Company was not founded until 1908 and second the model in question was not produced until the 1930's when Kipling was writing very little. I was reminded of this by another museum again with an Imperial model.

This was a writer of the Left who began his work in the late 1950's and with whom we are all familiar from his work for TV, I spare you his name. I felt obliged to tell the museum that the model was not produced until 1969 and in 1965 the Imperial had been taken over by Litton Industries .becoming just another brand name.

This company was one of the most ruthless asset stripping and destructive financial organisations of its time; capitalism that might explain a lot of the drift to the Left, especially in out sourcing production and closing down British manufacturing, including the old Imperial firm, the wreck of a once great company.

I could write a book about this and perhaps about some other things, despite being, as Noel Coward might have said, of excessively humble origins. Enter stage an interesting collection of people that the accidents of personal history entailed. It might be Liverpool before The Beatles and during wartime, Yorkshire in the 70's and 80's, London in the '50's, scope for fiction, fact or the more usual faction.

It might be printed, but apparently there is no hope of it entering the lists of books to be read or even publicised in the media. I do not meet the criteria of colour. All those brown blobs and scars do not count, or diversity, despite having Scots, Irish, Welsh, English, French, German, Dutch, Scandinavian, Mulatto and sundry other ancestry, even Yorkshire.

All I can ask is "what about the workers", to which the answer will be "get lost".