A book from my past - Sue Purkiss

If you're on Facebook, you may well have seen recently a thing going round where you're asked to post pictures of the covers of ten books that have been important to you. You post one each day, you're not supposed to say anything about your choices, and you're supposed to nominate someone else each day to carry it on.

I'm not really all that good at following rules, and I didn't follow all of these. It didn't make sense to me not to say anything about the books - I'd been intrigued or baffled by other people's choices, and had wanted to know more about them. So I broke that one. Then the first two people I nominated turned me down, so after that I just said anyone could take it on who wanted to. The challenge had already been going for quite a while by then, and I expect everyone who wanted to do it already had done so.

I roved around our bookshelves, and this was the first book that caught my eye. I hadn't looked at it for ages, and it drew me in. It's in French, as you can see, and it's a book of a hundred famous paintings. My sister brought it back from France for me; she did French and European Literature at Warwick, and spent quite a bit of time over there.

I loved art. I don't remember how it started, but I had a collection of little books about artists - I have them still - and I remember sending a letter to the National Gallery and asking if they would send me some postcards, and rabitting on about who my favorite artists were. We didn't strike up a friendship, but they did send me a list of postcards, and I ordered some. I lived near Derby, in a town that D H Lawrence didn't like very much, and I don't think I'd ever been to an art gallery till I went on a school exchange visit to Paris and saw the Mona Lisa. (I didn't like to say, but I was very disappointed. It was so small, and so green.) I drew a lot, but I didn't much like painting, so my ambition to be an artist of some kind died almost at birth.

Anyway, Maggie knew of my pretensions to art, so it was very nice of her to give me this book, and I loved it. It was a sort of symbol of the big world out there, of all there was to see and to experience. For each painting, there was a section about the particular picture and a contextual piece about the artist, and I spent ages leafing through it.

I found it really interesting to be reminded how much I've always liked looking at paintings. I use them a lot as prompts for writing with the group that I teach (for instance, see here) and I've written on ABBA before about how I like to write very short stories on the back of post cards, prompted by the picture on the front.

And there's a sort of postscript. At the back of the book I wrote this:

I sit at the open window and the softness of the sweet hay-scented air touches my face. The curtain moves gently. Over the black woods hangs a white brilliant half-moon; thin threads of cloud are in the sky, and the sparkling light of stars that might by now be exploded into fragments. And round the moon two spidery bits of earth-metal are trying to meet, and one contains men who have trodden the bare whiteness of the moon. The wind moves in the tree, bunches of silhouetted leaves stir. A bird cheeps somewhere.

July 21st, 1969

I have no idea where I was when I wrote it, or why I wrote it in this book. It refers to the Apollo 11 space flight, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. I liked astronomy too. Nowadays I watch Brian Cox, and try to kid myself that I understand what he's talking about.

Plus ҫa change, plus c'est la même chose...