Hospital reading

What works well as hospital reading? I've yet to find anything at all.

I've been spending a lot of time recently in hospitals, both during the day and in the evening - hours upon hours, in fact. And you would have thought, given that amount of empty time, that you might find something useful to do with it. I mean, it's not as if you see the medical staff for more than one minute in every ninety; and there are absolutely no other distractions, apart from a dreary nowhere-view across Leicester, and the odd visit to the toilet. There's not even any television, because you have to pay extra for that (something I never understood about television: shouldn't they be paying you to watch that stuff?).

So, as I say, you would have thought that you would do something useful, instead of staring into nowhereness, drumming fingers, dozing, pacing, yawning, pressing buttons you shouldn't just to see what happens, more pacing, humming the complete works of Mahler, etc. etc. etc. But no: however hard you try, it's just about impossible to read, or do anything constructive, in a hospital environment. You take a book along hopefully, but you never average more than one page per five hours.

I think there are various reasons for this. The first is that, in hospitals, the nothing that happens for hours is always filled with a vague sense that something might happen any moment. You can never predict whether it will be ten hours or ten micr0-seconds till the next visit by a nurse or doctor; and you can never quite predict whether that visit will be to send one home, or to do something much less pleasant. You can never predict when the tests will be ready, when this or that procedure will start or finish, so you are absolutely in Limbo. And Limbo is not a good place to concentrate on reading a book. How can you possibly concentrate when you know that sometime in the next microsecond or hour or day someone may or may not come and do something or tell you something that may or may not be important?

Indeed, another thing that ruins concentration in hospitals on anything but the most desultory of activities is the nature of hospital time. Hospitals are strange, parallel universes in which minutes crawl by, but hours race by. You sit there, waiting and yawning, and the minute hand on the clock seems to tick backwards. Then you look again, and four hours have suddenly ticked by in one tock. Where did they go? Who said they were allowed to leave? What did you do with them? What did the doctors do with them? Are they hiding under the bed?

And: why did you only manage to read four lines of your novel in that time?

I suppose one possible explanation is that, in hospitals, novels don't seem that important any more, and it's hard to concentrate on someone else's (fictional) life when your own, or the lives of loved ones, are so much more pressing.

Another possible explanation is that I shouldn't be thinking about reading anyway.

Books for enemies

Yesterday (Saturday) I was involved in a "Readers' Day" organised by Derbyshire Library Services. I gave two readings from Take Me Home, and (in the middle of the day) was involved in a panel discussion - a bit like BBC's Question Time, but with writers and readers instead of politicians, questions about thrillers instead of questions about Weapons of Mass Destruction. And it was all the better for that.

One of the questions on the agenda (which actually wasn't asked in the end) was "What book would you buy your worst enemy for Christmas?" Gosh, I thought, that's a difficult one. For a start, it'd be difficult to answer the question without being a bit too person-specific. One wouldn't want to be accused of (ahem) defamation. Also, I thought: why on earth would I want to waste a book on someone I don't like? Generally speaking, people I don't like don't like books, so it'd be a bit pointless. And, as far as I'm concerned (and I'm a bit a traditionalist about these things), if you don't like books, that's punishment in itself. It must be a pretty terrible existence, living amongst books (as we all do) and not liking them.

Sometimes, I think it's best just to ignore people one doesn't like. It was always my mother's advice about bullies at school. There's no point giving books, for example, to enemies, whether to "make them a better person" or to annoy them. If someone has irrevocably made a decision about you, what's the point? Best just to keep out of the way - however tempting it is to give them a copy of a H. P. Lovecraft novel ("I saw this and thought of you").

Actually, the ignoring (not ignorance) of contemptible people (or people you find contemptible) is one of the most powerful weapons in the world. It's a Weapon of Mass Destruction that politicians and especially left-wingers don't understand at all. This morning, I was watching one on of those Sunday-morning-type, castrato versions of Question Time, and the politicians on it were all bemoaning "student apathy." The conversation went something like this:

"What a shame," said one of these also-rans, a half-forgotten, ex-Home Secretary who was an also-ran before he even started politics, "What a shame that students don't have the kinds of marches we had when we were young. Students were so radical then, so political. Now they're all so apathetic." "Yes," said another also-ran non-entity from so-called New Labour, "and it reflects on the rest of the society, on voter apathy." I hear this kind of thing all the time at university, when academics bewail the lack of political engagement on the part of modern students.

Of course, when politicians and academics bemoan "voter apathy" or "student apathy," they conveniently forget the notable lack of apathy around the start of the Iraq war. Two million people marching in London doesn't sound like apathy to me. But both politicians and academics have a very narrow view of what political engagement might consist of. For academics, it's often that students aren't neo-Marxist enough, don't flog copies of Socialist Worker on street corners, like they did when they were young. For politicians, political engagement doesn't consist of anything but voting for their particular party.

People like this can't see that there are lots of different kinds of politics, lots of different ways of expressing political inclinations. And one of the most powerful ways is to ignore mainstream politicians - treat them with the contempt they so often deserve, just as one might ignore playground bullies. Apathy is the new radicalism. It might gradually undermine (I hope) the two-party - no, sorry, one-party - politics we've got in this country. To ignore these robots in charge of our country (and their mirror images in the other party) is the one thing that politicians can't stand. I mean, if you look at some of them, most of them went into politics because they couldn't get attention any other way when they were young. Politicians are generally people who couldn't get laid when young. And if people continued to ignore them, they'd eventually spin out of control and blow a fuse.