Joanne Parker Britannia Obscura: Mapping Britain's Hidden Landscapes

This was a strange one. Read it in 24 hours, a collection of chapters about different landscapes in Britain - caves, ley lines, canals and so on. It didn't really flow, I didn't understand the thread holding them together and so it felt  disjointed to me. I had my interview to be a cub leader last night, I'm getting sucked in. . . 

PG Wodehouse, The Drones Omnibus

Should be dipped into occasionally, not read cover to cover, as what should be a delightful  little slice of humour becomes a heavy meal of fat uncles, bets gone wrong and failed pursuits of eligible young gels.  I didn't do that though, I slogged on and on. Not sure it was Wodehouse's best efforts, I certainly didn’t get the same delight as Wooster or Blandings; I remember how much I loved Mr Mulliner as a teenager, maybe I should try them again. They were more like Psmith, which left me cold.

I had to stop and think at one point, when a passing reference to events in the '50s made me realise that the events were supposedly set in post-war England, despite the ambience and references being of Wodehouse's mixture of Edwardian England in the long summertime and an England of the '20s and '30s where the First World War hadn't happened.

Frits Barend & Henk Van Dorp, Ajax, Barcelona, Cruyff: The ABC of an Obstinate Maestro

This is a collection of interviews over the decades with Cruyff by two Dutch pundits, and has been sat on the shelf for years. Finally reading it was prompted by two factors: his recent death, and Freddie's burgeoning interest in football superstars. He's been watching the 'Football's Greatest' series n You Tube about great footballers and really enjoying it, particularly the showboating personified by the 'Cruyff Turn' or his audacious penalties. He's supporting Barcelona at the moment too (during Tottenham's best ever league season in MY lifetime too, let alone his! Does he not realise??), so that adds to the attraction of Cruyff. He even read a very short chapter about how JC started hanging around at Ajax's De Meer stadium aged 6 helping his uncle, the groundsman

At the moment we've busy collecting the panini stickers for Euro 2016. How strange to see glossy pages about Albania, Wales and Northern Ireland. Not sure whether this expanded European championship will be a good idea or whether it will mean some RWC style tonkings. Maybe someone will do a Japan though. .  . .

Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, Stephen Biddulph, Raising Girls, Mark Haddon, The Red House

'The Power Broker' lived up to the hype as one of the great political biographies. Moses is practically unknown over here, I'd be interested to find out what level of awareness there is about him in the US these days. 1000 pages of how to attain power, how to use it, how it corrupts and the hubristic fall of an imperial court.

'The Loved One' slipped by, made me smile a few times, but nothing to justfy its billing as one of the great 20th century comic novels. Not a patch on Scoop.

I should have read 'Raising Girls' a long time ago. Being a self-help manual, there's plenty of truisms, common-sense and anecdotes to support an argument, but there's enough in there to make you stop and think about how you behave towards young girls. I don't always deal well with Libby when she is refusing to comply with requests, and it's a good reminder that she responds well to love and encouragement rather than being summarily dismissed to her room.