Arthur H Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty, Laurie Lee, Cider With Rosie

Well I never. A very different portrait of John Wilkes than the one I'm used to; a noble man of principle heroically opposing tyranny rather than an unprincipled irresponsible rake only concerned with self-advancement. I'm not convinced, but it was interesting to get a different perspective. Cash is an American Historian, and treats Wilkes with a reverence usually reserved for the founding fathers.

Shamefully, this was the first time I had read Cider With Rosie, although we did study some extracts in school. It was lovely, an ode to a lost, enclosed world where little had changed since christianity arrived in the valley - and even before then.

My latest Hobby That Will Soon Be Abandoned is apples. We've had a glut this year, and I picked a load at the weekend. Then went out and spent a fortune on a juicer, bottles, funnels and so on. This weekend I'll get juicing- no doubt the crates of apples will equate to one coke can's worth of juice, working out at a cost to me of £200 a litre. . . . 

Anthony Beevor, Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble, Agatha Christie, Murder On the Links, John Julius Norwich, Sicily: A Short History, from the Greeks to Cosa Nostra, Richard Ayoade, Ayoade on Ayoade:A Cinematic Odyssey, Martin Amis, London Fields, Gerard Russell, Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms, Neil Gaimain & Terry Practchett, Good Omens

This started as a record of holiday reading down in Pembrokeshire, with me having the best intentions to note down pleasant memories of the holiday, but  I just never got around to it. In the same period, Libby has started school, autumn has begun, the Rugby Word Cup has begun, so it's not as if I've lacked for source material.

The sharp increase in productivity in reading is down to one major factor; just over three weeks ago I fell out of a tree and haven't been able to run since. It wasn't even a big tree; I was mucking about in the rhododendron bushes in Virginia Water with Freddie. It had been raining and was a bit slippy, and as I descended down (walking rather than climbing), I slipped and whacked my knee against a lower branch. Freddie had even warned me to be careful! Still I'd rather be the sort of person who can answer, 'yes, of course' rather than 'no' to the questions 'Have you ever fallen out of a tree?'

I'm hoping to try a trial run tonight and see how I get on, and then hopefully park run on Saturday. A junior park run has now started in Guildford, so Freddie is doing that rather than park run, which was proving a bit much. For the second year running, we booked into the '4 minute mile' at Guildford Athletics track last weekend, but I couldn’t take part. Fred did, with a target of a ten minute mile; he managed an 8m40s mile bless him, but was in with older children so was the last to finish in his heat.

Holiday memories:

Bibs joyously running around the courtyard of Manorbier Castle exactly like his big brother did 6 years ago

Libby and Freddie embracing the lifestyle of an iron age warrior at Castell Henlys

The storytelling on Lydstep Head, where only me, Freddie and Libs showed up and the lovely man told us super stories from Welsh mythology

Running along the coastal path - a bit scary in places, but v exhilarating

Bumping into the Loxtons (Freddie is at school with Lily) frequently - Tredegar House on the way down, Pembroke Castle, Folly Farm. .  .

Jennie Uglow, In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon's Wars, 1793-1815, Maurice Druon, The Iron King

The big news is that Bibs is walking! The 6 or 7 tentative steps that resulted in a round of applause a week ago is long gone, to be replaced by a very confident toddler striding around the place. We went into town on Friday for a family day at Nomura and he was in his element charging around Helen's work.

Really enjoyed both these books. The first was a social history of Britain at a very strange time: invasion loomed from across the channel, industrialisation was transforming Britain and the responses to the changes in circumstances varied so much; from those who chose to ignore it all and live in a splendidly isolated bubble of balls and gossip to millenialists, rioters and many more. 'The Iron King' was recommended as 'the original Game of Thrones' by George R R  Martin, and concerns the Capetians and Plantagenets competing claims over the throne of medieval France. I'm so used to seeing this period from the 'english' perspective it was good to get a different view over the power struggles and jockeying for position and territory. It's the first of a long series, but could make for good holiday reading, as well as providing a history lesson!

Fred and I went to Wales on Saturday to see the game against Ireland. It was a beautiful weekend, and we met Clayton for lunch in the Bay, which meant we could get a boat  from there all the way to the stadium; will definitely employ that tactic for future games . Fred was a little bit awestruck at first when we went in, but the noise soon got a bit much for him. At half time he complained 'It's too noisy and I don't know what's going on'. He perked up for the second half when Wales started to perform, and his highlight was the animated dragon scoring a try on the jumbotron when Wales got the ball over the line. . .

He hasn’t taken his Wales shirt off since, although that might be because it looks like it's made from dragon skin. . .   

Susan Cooper, Ghost Hawk

I loved it. I've not read anything by Susan Cooper except The Dark is Rising books, although she doesn't seem to have written much else. She lives in Massachusetts now, apparently, which is where the book is set, at the time of the first English settlers. I'm 30 years older than the target audience of course, so my enjoyment probably says more about my stunted intellectual growth than anything else. I've recommended it to Ella, hopefully she'll enjoy it as much as me.

Libby is now riding a bike with aplomb. She was really put off when we came back from holiday, and still won’t go near the blue bike, but she whizzes up and down on her pink bike now, despite it being a rickety little cheap thing. She's made it to school and back without complaint, which bodes well for next year. If she and Freddie can cycle to school it makes the logistics so much easier, and I hate having to drive them short distances in the car. At the moment we have no choice, as with Bibs & Libs both at nursery at the bottom of the hill, I can’t pick them up and get to Fred's school in time without using the car. I've been toying with the idea of a trailer or even a triporteur, but it's only for another month so doesn't seem economically viable; also we want to encourage Lib to cycle herself of course. She's such a confident little girl. There was an open day at school last week, and despite not starting there until September, she was strutting around like she owned the place, showing me and Freddie around and telling us where to go. She doesn't yet understand that not ALL teachers are called 'Mrs Taylor' like her teacher, so was wandering around classrooms interrupting conversations to should 'Mrs Turner! Mrs Turner! Why you got this in your classroom?' to startled, random teachers while pointing at a papier-mache dinosaur or a rock collection.

Freddie has now broken up for the year, and we received his school report last week. I don’t want to be a gushing parent, but we're so proud. He's a good kid, kind and thoughtful and takes responsibility looking after new children. What more can you ask for? I am a bit concerned that he's not yet reading for pleasure, but conscious that you mustn't force it as it'll put him off reading.

We still have a bedtime song from the list at the moment, and Libby's favourite is Emily Barker's 'Blackbird'. She sings the chorus and it's so sweet

'I need you to love me

And help when I'm losing

And in return I will love you

And help when you don't win'

I've recorded it and set it as my ringtone. Fred, by contrast, is going through a Chas & Dave phase, although contemporary pop is popular too, as you’d expect for a 7 year old! Bob Dylan and Camera Obscura are always going to lose out to Mark Ronson and Little Mix there. . . 

07:55 TH White, The Once and Future King, Tracy Borman, Thomas Cromwell: The untold story of Henry VIII's most faithful servant

'The Once & Future King' was a real slog, and not the book I was expecting at all. The remaining books were very different in tone to 'The Sword in The Stone', and were more musings on power politics ; in the last section, written in the dark days of the late 1930s, the character Mordred is recognisably influenced by contemporary events, parading round like a fascist with his followers in blackshirts.  I rather preferred the light-hearted jocular nature of the first book.

It took a long time to read, in part because my main reading time seems to be on the exercise bike at work, and when the weather is good I'm outside running. With Borman's Cromwell, I was more engaged and read a few chapters whenever I could. It comes closely after the TV adaptation of the wonderful Wolf Hall, and it would appear that Mark Rylance has finally replaced Kenneth Williams as Cromwell in my mind.  Neither of them physically approximate Cromwell, if Holbein's portrait is anything to go by; such a shame James Gandolfini isn’t around anymore - physically he would have been spot on for the role.

Libby has had a couple of settling-in sessions at school in recent weeks, and cannot wait for September. When we dropped Freddie of yesterday, she didn’t want to leave for nursery; she was clinging to the railings and screaming to be let into Mice. . . 

Peter Heather, The Restoration of Rome: Barbarian Popes & Imperial Pretenders, Eric Ambler, The Mask of Dimitrios, Mike Parker, Map Addict: A Tale of Obsession, Fudge & the Ordnance Survey, TH White, The Sword In the Stone, John Keegan, The American Civil War

Listing TH White is a bit of a cheat: it's the first book of the Once And Future King, but I fancied a change after reading it. It's much more irreverent than I was expecting - far more in the Neil Gaiman vein than Walter Scott or the historical realism school. The book before contained not a single mention of fudge, but was an indulgent chat about maps and map-related ephemera. Loved it.  Both were read on holiday in the Vendee. A while ago I came across a list of memories from our honeymoon and many of them would have been forgotten if they hadn’t been recorded. Not the hideous pizza at Milan Railway Station, that will stay with me forever.

In the same spirit, here's my attempt at memories from the Vendee. . .

On the last day, we had a family discussion about everyone's top 3 highlights. My three were (in no particular order); Libby learning to ride a bike, Libby learning to ride a bike, Libby learning to ride a bike. It took some doing and there were lots of tears and stomping, and she's still not happy starting off on her own, but she rode a bike! Hopefully we'll be able to get out this weekend and practise.

. . .[update after the weekend}. Lib appears to have gone backwards sadly - she's not happy riding her pink bike or the blue bike which is a bit big for her, so it hasn’t gone well. It's frustrating as she's shown she can do it.

Back to the holiday.  The best day out was to Puy du Fou, a bonkers historical re-enactment theme park. It's France's second biggest attraction after Eurodisney, and the scale is incredible. Helen wasn't keen to go, expecting a cross between the Chiltern Open Air Museum and the Sealed Knot, but it was a fantastic spectacle, with no attempt at all at historical authenticity. It started with Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, with the Round Table (complete witj knights with an incredible ability to hold their  breath, apparently) appearing when Merlin made a lake disappear, then onto the Vikings invading a village in France where a fullscale longboat complete with vikings emerged from the river, while mahoosive sea eagles swooped around. Couldn’t see how that would be topped, but then in the Joan of Arc story the entire castle walls began to sink below the ground and the keep started moving around the stage. You don't get that with English Heritage. None of this compared to the gladiator show in the Coliseum which took the bonkersness to new heights. First a parade featuring geese, a cart of ostriches and a leopard, and then a full chariot race. The biggest surprise came when the christians were in the arena waiting to be eaten by lions, and they actually released lions into the arena. Whatever they are paying the actors playing the christians isn't enough to be dealing with that every day, twice at weekends. Finally there was the indoors Musketeers show, where they gradually flooded a stage the size of a polo field as horses performed a flamenco. What a day out.

Other memories

• The excitement of Fred and Lib at encountering the inexplicable statue of a Beefeater in a café in St Hilaire. He was surrounded by croquet ephemera
• F&L both won awards at Kid's Club, Fred for being the coolest kid in the club, Lib for being the fastest pizza eater. We're so proud.
• Fred went on a min-quad bike for the first time. He was obviously scared, and had trouble controlling it, and finished early. Afterwards he couldn’t talk about anything else though and listed it as a highlight of his holiday. Maybe we should try karting. . .
• Fred was game to try a few new things. He ate some of my sardines and fish, but couldn't be persuaded to try a mussel. He also went into one of those parlours with the little fish that nibble the dead skin off your feet. 10  euros it cost me for his feet to be tickled by whitebait.
• Bibs is managing to stand by himself for a few seconds and take a few steps, but he doesn’t seem happy about it - it's a bit soon yet though.
• The kids were very good at making new friends, which Helen struggles to get her head round as when she was a kid they would never play with other kids on holiday. Fred had new best friends within thirty seconds of jumping into the pool, and got on with a kid called Finlay in particular. He was properly  distraught when Fin left halfway through our holiday. It only lasted one night though, and the next day he was out playing football with the new kids who had moved in. Lib latched on to some poor 3 year old from Dublin called Aaron, and insisted on showing him round the caravan and the camp. He was so lovely and polite, just responding 'dat's cool' to everything Lib showed him.
• We hired a Rosalie bike, which was apparently invented to torture tall fathers, who bang their knees against the steering wheel with every pedal rotation. Every downhill section where pedalling wasn’t required was bliss.
• In the tiny sliver of downtime Helen and I get between putting the kids to bed, doing the housework and collapsing exhausted into bed, we often watch boxsets. This was the holiday when we completed Breaking Bad (begun nearly 2 years ago when we were on holiday on the IoW), and began Game of Thrones Series 4.
• A Treasure Hunt in the rain that the couriers were making up as they went along. As part of it we had to get a photo of Fred hugging a stranger (some drunken fella in the camp bar) and a video of us all doing the Macarena. Evidence has been deleted.
• On the way back home, we called into Nantes for the day, where they old docks have been converted into a steampunk workshop designing and making gigantic beasts. The 4xlifesize African elephant and howdah was crazy. It was actually better watching it as a spectator than being on board, where you can’t appreciate all the moving parts, trumpets and squirts of water. It was like some mammoth  from Mance Rayder's army of wildlings (obscure GoT reference that will mean nothing to me in a few years).
• Finally, the magic of a beach. The kids seem to be able to stay on a beach forever. It doesn’t seem to matter whether or not they have spades, buckets, kites, balls or whatever, they are just happy to be on a beach and will always find something interesting or exciting. May it stay that way forever.

. . . Fred's wriiten down his own memories on a scrap of paper. We'll put it away and hopefully come across it in a few years/decades and remember a wonderful holiday.

Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts, Various, Politico's Guide to the 2015 Election, Lionel Davidson, Kolymsky Heights

I risked the wrath of the gods of fate and read two non-fiction books in a row, and what a mistake that was - a likely Labour coalition government (according to the polls) evaporated with the first exit poll on Thursday to be replaced by a predicted Conservative coalition. As if that wasn't shocking enough, canny pundits pointed out that with the Shy Tory tendency who mendaciously lie to pollsters about their voting habits, a Conservative majority was likely - which is what we ended up with.

I went to Wales to watch it (reading the excellent Kolymsky Heights on the train there and back), and thoroughly depressing it was too. The Labour Party appears to be in an intractable situation now - losing out in Scotland because they weren't left-wing enough, losing out to UKIP in the north as they weren't addressing concerns about immigration, and losing out to the Cons in the south as they were too left wing.  How can you triangulate that? Ed tried, but ended up pleasing no-one. Can't see a way back from this, and two of the best prospects for leader (Alan Johnson and Dan Jarvis) have ruled themselves out already. . .

The unpalatable answer seems to be to move to the centre; Scotland is lost, and in the North we still have the seats. It turns out I'm exactly the sort of person Labour want to win over - southern, prosperous, shops at Waitrose and John Lewis. That's nice, but none of the things that apparently should appeal to me - the 'aspirational' rhetoric which seems to boil down to not taxing or scaring rich people or big business  actually does. If they want my loyalty then start talking about how no-one 'creates' wealth without a support network of education, health, transport, law and order and that needs to be paid for - and those who benefit the most should pay the lion's share - and be proud of it!

In other sad news, Fred really doesn’t seem to be enjoying the park run any more. He managed two miles last week before pulling up and only 1 mile last week. He's not 100%, and I don’t want to push him, so we may have to stop.