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Telegraph
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
What Gove got right: learn a poem by heart and make a friend for life
The Formula One driver Jochen Mass pursued a career of extreme jeopardy. But the detail that caught my eye in his Telegraph obituary was his ability to quote poetry from memory: 'a trick he had acquired to sharpen the mind before races'. To learn a poem by heart is, as Michael Gove put it when he was education secretary, 'To own a great work of art forever'. The young Patrick Leigh Fermor, walking across Europe, recited poetry aloud. His prodigious memory famously enabled him to cap the lines from Horace with which the German general, Heinrich Kreipe, greeted his wartime kidnapping by Leigh Fermor and the Cretan resistance. But on the whole, poetry is easiest to commit to memory when it has a good thumping metre and rhyme scheme. The poems I know by heart are the ones I relished as a child and later read to my son. Repetition meant that we memorised effortlessly the fates of small children described with grim relish in Hilaire Belloc's poetry collection Cautionary Tales for Children ('For every time she shouted 'Fire!'/They only answered, 'Little Liar!' '), and the well deserved end of Robert Southey's poem Sir Ralph the Rover: ('Sir Ralph the Rover tore his hair/He curst himself in his despair'). The grim relish was, of course, a large part of the charm: but where sensitivity readers stalk, it is largely off the curriculum. A pity, for there's nothing like it to sharpen the mind (and even, perhaps, to strengthen the spirit against jeopardy). Learning is too good to be reserved for the young If adolescence is the original awkward age, it finds its mirror image in the turbulence of the middle years. Like love (but less welcome) middle age comes without warning. One moment you're congratulating yourself on having negotiated the hurdles of early adulthood without major incident. The next, along come intimations of mortality and a vague sense that you no longer know who you are. 'Faces look familiar, but they don't have names… Everything has changed,' sang Lucinda Williams. And so it has. From college reunions where you wonder, 'Who are all these ancient monuments?' before realising that they are your contemporaries, and they are wondering the same thing about you, to dinner parties where the talk is exclusively of acid reflux and dodgy tickers – everything has changed. Then come the antidotes: more-or-less dramatic lifestyle changes, from fitness regimes and cosmetic interventions to short (or long) rides in fast machines and messy relationship break-ups. Less drastic are the hobbies of self-reinvention. Taking up a new pursuit: golf, gardening, or painting – offers a glimpse of a life that might have been, and occasionally a route into an entirely new career. But last week, Radio 4's Today programme explored a different approach: the midlife return to a childhood hobby. The actor and comedian Alistair McGowan passed Grade 2 piano when he was nine, then gave up and didn't start again until he was 50. The ceramicist Emma Bridgewater was taught to crochet by her grandmother when she was eight, and recently re-learnt the craft with the help of a Ladybird book. Both described the joy of rediscovering something begun in childhood. 'It's changed my life,' said McGowan. Bridgewater found that 'you cannot stress when you're involved in anything creative, and that's a superpower.' For her, crochet was also a way to reconnect with her beloved grandmother. McGowan released an album of piano music in 2017, but they both insisted that going back to a childhood hobby wasn't intended as a side hustle. The de-stressing superpower only works, said Bridgewater, as long as money its not involved. McGowan emphasised the need to understand that you'll never reach the level you would have done if you'd put in the hours when you were young: the delight lies as much in learning how to learn as in the performance. All this sounds like sage advice as I sidle back to the piano after decades of absence. As a teenager I developed a flash line in approximate sight-reading of pieces far too advanced for me. Now, with McGowan's advice about learning how to learn ringing in my ears, I've begun to explore the charm of scales. Sometimes, you really can go back and do things better.
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- General
- Telegraph
If we don't read to boys, no wonder men don't love books
A new independent publisher is to champion books written by men, and I have nothing snarky to say about that. It is undeniably true that literary fiction is now dominated by women, both on the bookshelves and behind the scenes (78 per cent of editorial roles in publishing are held by women). Jude Cook, the writer and critic who is launching Conduit Books, says he wants to give a platform to 'overlooked narratives' by and about men. Amid all the talk of toxic masculinity, he points out, 'the subject of what young men read has become critically important'. That does assume, of course, that young men read at all. Which they won't, if nobody teaches them. A new survey of childhood reading habits has found that Gen Z parents (aged 28 or younger) can't be bothered to read to their sons. Only 29 per cent of boys aged two or under get a daily bedtime story, compared with 44 per cent of girls. Either way, the figures are dismal – but the boys! Those poor little future men, barely old enough to hold a spoon and already judged inferior to their sisters. In a near-perfect inversion of the old chauvinism, it is now boys who are presumed – even by their own parents – to be too empty-headed to be interested in books. We surely don't need to rehearse here all the reasons why reading is good for young minds: the intellectual exercise, the exposure to new cultures and viewpoints, the practise of empathy. Boys, who now underperform all the way from primary school to the workplace, need more of all that. But depriving them of bedtime stories isn't just bad for their brains. Even worse, I fear, will be the effect on their hearts. The bedtime story is a deliberate, routine, slightly tiresome act of parental love. It is the moment when, at the end of another interminable and probably quite fractious day, you choose to stay with your child a little longer. Just the two of you, squashed up, with no distractions except whichever book they insist on hearing for the thirty thousandth time. Children feel that extra dollop of love keenly: often, it becomes their defining memory of early childhood. I think my first conscious memory of laughter comes from learning to read with my father, who substituted his own favourite words for the innocent ducks and apples in my alphabet book. 'B is for Bottyhole; C is for Coronary'. Although a soft-hearted man, he was something of a despot when it came to books. Winnie the Pooh was dismissed as 'absolute drivel', and instead he insisted on reading me those 19th century cautionary verses in which nightmarish punishments rain down upon children who slam doors or refuse to eat soup. At the hands of Hilaire Belloc and Heinrich Hoffmann (the German moralist who wrote Struwwelpeter) young miscreants were variously burned alive, eaten by lions, starved to death or, for the crime of thumb-sucking, parted forever from their offending digits. 'The door flew open, in he ran, the great, long, red-legged scissorman,' Dad would declaim, as I, tucked safely into his armpit, shuddered with delicious dread. Those bedtime stories started me off on a lifetime of reading. But they also taught me deeper lessons, about who I was in my father's eyes. Not 'just a girl', but someone whose intelligence he had faith in, and whose company was worthwhile. Exactly the sort of lessons our boys need now.
