Thomas Penn, The Winter King: The Dawn of Tudor England

'He were a dark prince, and infinitely suspicious, and his times full of secret conspiracies and troubles', Sir Francis Bacon

A biography of Henry VII, what an awful money-grabbing man. I was trying to think of an English monarch I liked this morning when I finished reading it, as they’ve nearly all been vicious or venal or lazy or murderous or tyrannical or diseased or debauched, or any combination of the above. The best I could come up with was George III, an awful king who lost America and trampled all over civil liberties, but was a family man at least. Maybe I’m just naïve and missing the point, and you need to be a bastard to be an effective monarch for the Greater Good. It just too often seems to be about the Greater Glory of the monarch for that to be true, though. It is interesting that medieval monarchs managed to combine slaughter and despotism with an intense spirituality and dedication to God. God and Kings, eh? What a recipe for disaster. No wonder no one sings the national anthem other than the swivel-eyed.

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, The Man On The Balcony

Martin Beck was an inspiration for Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbø, and as it’s all about Scandinavian noir at the moment I had to read it. It’s set in the same social democratic Scandinavia with a seedy underbelly and a guilt that the prosperity and liberal policies of the majority haven’t benefited one part of the population at all. It’s nowhere near as bleak or gory as Wallander or Harry Hole, and concentrates on police procedural. I’m gonna have to read more though.

Fred pronounced last night that he was going to dream about horses doing a poo. I’ taking him to the cinema on Saturday for the first time. The new Spielberg Tintin film is showing, and as that’s his choice of reading at the moment, it should keep him entertained. No doubt I’ll be bristling with rage with the liberties taken, the uncanonical nature of the work and why Belgians have American accents, but that’s because I’m an arse.

Harry Thompson, Tintin: Hergé and His Creation

I’m sure I’ve read this before, but maybe it’s just going over familiar ground. Freddie likes to have a Tintin or Asterix story at bedtime, and his cousin Ciara is a fan at the moment, so I lugged all the books down from the loft last week. It’s tough going reading the stories to Fred, as you can’t really just do the dialogue to explain what’s happening, so I have to try and summarise each part. A lack of imagination on my part means this often becomes ‘Tintin is chasing the bad men, but then Captain Haddock falls over and goes bash! And then Thompson and Thomson bash into each other!’ Roll on the day when he can read them for himself. Apparently T & T can be told apart, as Thomson’s moustache flares out a little bit at the bottom

George R. R. Martin, A Game of Thrones, Book One of A Song of Ice and Fire

Kev bought this for me as a Christmas present, as he and Steve have read the whole series and loved them. This was surprising, as this is the same Kev who gave up Sawyer Family Book Club, the highlight of my monthly social calendar, because he didn’t have time to read. HBO made a TV version recently, but it’s been shown on Sky, so it’s off-limits given my boycott of all things Murdoch. The DVD is out in the Spring, so I’ll get it then. This does appear to be a bit of a golden age for TV drama – we’ve just finished the second series of The Killing, which has mildly obsessed every Guardian reader, all of whom are now convinced they can speak Danish. We went to see Gaby and Pete a few weeks ago for a Nordic-themed evening, and Pete had a Birk Larsen removals t-shirt which I coveted greatly.

Libby’s walking hasn’t advanced much since the café at the swimming pool, but the poor love has a cold at the moment and is just a big ball of snot and porridge. Freddie is learning French at Nursery, but tends to get exasperated when we try and encourage it. Yesterday when I tried to converse with him in French, he just sighed and said ‘But Daddy, we’re not French!’ Looks like we’ll be raising a monoglot.

Miklós Bánffy, The Phoenix Land

I bought this book because I liked the front cover, which features that map of the old Kingdom of Hungary, incorporating Croatia, Slovakia, Transylvania and all the other bits of neighbouring countries which some Hungarians still apparently consider to be Hungarian. It always chills me a little bit, and acts as a reminder that there is unfinished business in that part of the world. It's the memoirs of a Hungarian Count who was a bitpart player in European diplomacy in the aftermath of the First World War, and saw the Habsburg world he knew collapse. He's well-known as the author of a trilogy set in the same period, although in my ignorance I'd never heard of them. I've asked Cathy if they are worth reading.
It's been a long time since I last wrote, and I'm conscious that I've recorded very little of Libby's first year in comparison to Fred's, so hopefully I'll be able to keep it up this time. Libby stood up unaided and took her first steps on Saturday, in the glamorous surroundings of the Café at Woking Leisure Centre. She's giving Helen a hard time at the moment, often waking up in the night and taking hours to settle. Helen isn't ready to let Libby learn to get herself to sleep yet, so she has to hold her. I look after Freddie's bedtime, which now consists of a story and a lullaby. The lullaby comes from a lyric sheet I put together which contains Lloyd Cole, Belle & Sebastian, Madness, Simon & Garfunkel, the Kinks, Emily Barker. Right now my favourite is Bright Phoebus, which Fred joins in on, 'For the very first time'. Up until recently, Fred had a choice of two lullabies, as there are so few songs I both know the words to and can reach the required notes! The choice was either The Bony King of Nowhere from Bagpuss or the wonderful One Spring Morning. Fred now knows the words to both, and after so much practice I'm very nearly in tune. My version of 'The Only Living Boy in New York' however, is hideous

George Tomkyns Chesney, The Battle of Dorking

A fabulous Victorian scaremonger over-reacting to the German victory in the Franco-Prussian War. It’s an alternative history in which Bismarck’s troops were not sated by occupying Paris, but annexed France, torpedoed our fleet in the channel and then the dreaded Hun invaded Sussex. Just like in War of the Worlds, if you capture the Surrey Hills and Putney, then apparently the whole British Empire crumbles. It’s incredible to think what an influence these armchair generals and their scare stories had on British public opinion and Foreign Policy, leading Britain to think of Germany as an enemy when there was so little geopolitical conflict between Britain and Germany; one a naval power, one a land power, one a global power, one a Central European power. Erskine Childers has a lot to answer for. There’s a moral in there somewhere. Don’t let idle young men pootle round Frisian sandbanks in a skiff without having a good book to occupy them, maybe. Apparently it leads to global conflict and the accelerated decline of the British Empire.

David Mattingly, An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire 54BC – AD409 (The Penguin History of Britain)

As always, the Penguin History of Britain lets itself down by hardly mentioning penguins. I will never, ever tire of that joke. A history of Britain at the time of the Romans, rather than Britain, so great effort is made to write about those parts of the isles outside the empire, or the experiences of the colonised within the empire, but there’s just such a lack of sources. A very post-colonial 21^st century perspective on the empire, and makes an interesting point that those parts of Britain in which Christianity and relative order and stability remained after the Romans left were those parts that were not part of the empire or on the fringes: Ireland, the West of Scotland, and Gwynedd. Maybe the origin of the soft southerner sterotype.

Over the past few weeks I appear to have become alarmingly obsessed with Thomas & Friends Wooden Railway engines. Not the Hornby 00 ones, not the diecast ones, not the Take ‘n’ Play ones, just the Wooden Railway ones. Not the wooden railway tracks, not the buildings, just the engines. It’s like collecting Panini stickers, I just lose all self control. I’ve won 33 auctions on eBay, with another 8 winning bids at the moment. It’s just idiotic.

A few nights ago, Freddie wanted to read the story of Diesel, a whiny, sneery engine, not like the noble steamies. Diesel is one of the 33 engines in my stash, so it seemed a good idea for Diesel to come and listen to the story too, as a special guest star, as a treat for him and Fred. Fred seemed thrilled by the idea, and cuddled and looked after Diesel while I read the story. At the end of the story, Diesel, having seen the errors of his snide ways, returns to The Other Railway as a Really Useful Engine, despite the inherent disadvantage of being a dirty diesel engine. As the storybook was closed, I attempted to retrieve Diesel so he could go back to The Other Railway. Freddie wailed like a banshee. I couldn’t give in to the crying, so it took a few minutes to calm him down. When I came downstairs, Helen asked what all the crying was about. Because I’m a coward and didn’t want a confrontation, I told her Fred was just tired (which, to be fair, was true). But the next day, when Freddie woke up and Helen went into see him, his first question concerned the whereabouts of Diesel, who apparently was now Freddie’s best friend and most beloved of all engines. I had a text not long after enquiring into the mystery of Diesel and why Fred was so distraught at the loss of his beloved friend Diesel. So I had to call in at home to get Diesel out of my stash, and take him down to nursery when I went to pick Freddie up. Since then I’ve been checking with Freddie each evening as we read his choice of Thomas book; ‘Freddie, if Cranky/Daisy/Emily/Murdoch was to come over as a special guest from The Other Railway to listen to the story of Cranky/Daisy/Emily/Murdoch, and then went back to The Other Railway afterwards, how would you feel?’

‘Sad.’

‘Sad? Why sad, Fred?’

‘I want to cuddle Cranky/Daisy/Emily/Murdoch’

‘Hmm, ok. Probably best they don’t come then.’

In the meantime the stash is growing. Since I started writing this there’s been a few more eBay auctions won.