Protests and reading matter - food for thought!

It would seem that even as I write this, 11.45 am Portuguese time, a big anti-independence rally is going on in Barcelona. Carles Puigdemont is reported to be pretending that nothing is happening apart from lunch with family and friends in Girona. Goodness knows where it will all end.

I also read that a small part of Catalonia is talking about bidding for independence from Catalonia. We should perhaps revert to city states everywhere. Maybe we could even declare our house an independent state!

The reading group I attend when in the UK meets on Monday or Tuesday of this week. It does not matter which evening as I shall not be there, being happily ensconced in Portugal, which continues to be fine and sunny.

The book chosen for discussion is Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird”, set in the American south and dealing with questions of racism. Curiously enough, I read yesterday that a junior high school in Biloxi, Mississippi, removed the book from an eighth-grade lesson plan recently because the language in the book “makes people uncomfortable”.

Eighth-grade is for 12-13 year olds, I think. Our 12-13 year old grandson can hold quite sensible conversations about topics like racism, gender equality and fairness in general. Of course, it is possible that he is a genius but mostly he seems like a reasonably normal child of that age.

If youngsters are “protected” from controversial topics than they will never learn to think about them rationally at all. Well, that’s what I think anyway.

In the end it was decided that junior high school students will be allowed to study “To Kill a Mockingbird” after all, but their parents need to give permission. I wonder if anyone has considered asking for parental permission for Hallowe’en parties!

I have been reading David Nobbs’ autobiography. Interesting stuff. At various points he talks about who he considered to be the best writer in the world at various stages of his childhood and youth. The “Biggles” books were firm favourites for a good while, only to be replaced by “Swallows and Amazons”, supplanted in his late teens by the works of Thomas Hardy.

I too read lots of Hardy in the sixth form: not a writer to read of you are at all depressed as fate will always get you in the end.

In his childhood, our son was a great reader of the “Swallows and Amazons” books. Do smallish boys still read books about fairly privileged children messing about in boats in the summer? I wonder. Or is there too much description and not enough modern technology in them.  

Maybe they should be set texts, studied to remind today’s youngsters that there was a time when mobile phones and their apps did not exist.