Reading in tune with 'flu

 'Flu part one I did not read at all, I coughed. My head ached. All the bodily weaknesses I've ever known came through and made themselves heard. 'Flu part two, still coughing, I read voraciously, that same body needing the balance of a reading head. Books that have gathered in recent weeks are re-read, newly porous. Pavese's The Beautiful Summer I read for its title, for any pitch-perfect version, however poignant, of a beautiful summer.  

I asked Annette what her comfort reading was, and she said the Mapp and Lucia books and Nancy Mitford. I read The Pursuit of Love in a day, Love in a Cold Climate the next day. There is little to equal this kind of reading. Especially a long way north of a beautiful summer. Nancy Mitford's pitch is reassuring. She allows you to be where you have never been, in a large house full of children who meet in  warm upstairs cupboard and establish the boundaries, then ignore them, for the rest of their lives.

Why is this so comfortable? In Mitfordland the template is there. The warm upstairs cupboard, the grumpy Fa, the aunts, their husbands, the dogs the horses the rich acquaintance, the useful heir. One of those small groups that, when you need it, can be an entire borrowed world, and just the thing to tide you over. 

For a corrective, apply Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, Penguin number 75. From Mitfordland to Metroland. I read the schooldays first part much too fast. Evelyn Waugh was obnoxious then. After Nancy Mitford this was too much. Later, as I coughed less , I read more slowly. The irritant was in me so I could afford to ignore it. The odyssey of Paul Pennyfeather through public school and Oxford is just the thing to pull you out of 'flu. His fall is more compelling than his decline. He is manipulated by everyone, but works through it in that circular, stupid way we all enact sooner or later, back to our beginnings via the grotesqueries we have been pushed through, a spell in prison the very thing.