I Wish I’d Thought of That – 24 October 2025

Sometimes one is reading a book so good that finishing it is followed by a period of mourning. A version of the five stages of grief must be endured before even considering reading anything else.

Denial that the story is over is followed by anger that one didn’t come up with the idea oneself. Then comes a period of bargaining in the form of begging everyone else to read it and to love it as much. The depression phase is sometimes closer to repression, for example if you have just read That Broke into Shining Crystals by Richard Scott, or expression if you have just read Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa and need to walk around exclaiming ‘What the __?’, or impression if you’ve just read Patchwork by Kate Evans, a graphic biography of Jane Austen, and decided also to dress, speak and act as though this were Regency England.

Finally, acceptance. Acceptance that, though one can never again experience the book for the first time, one can experience it for a second, third and fourth time and fully intends to.

So, four books I admire hugely, which I never wanted to end, which I wish I had thought of and which I just have to share.

Cabin Head and Tree Head by Scott Campbell
Cabin Head and Tree Head are great friends. Together they dig for treasure, play hide and seek and eat tacos. When they say goodbye to each other neither will turn around first, instead walking backwards, still waving, around the entire earth. This leads to the odd accident.

They are good at hellos too. Though they should be more careful around Volcano Head – an enthusiastic hello near him can be eruptive. Fortunately, Boulder Head and Catapult Head can be employed to stop Volcano Head from blowing his top.

Cabin Head, in case you haven’t caught up yet, has a cabin on his head. Tree Head has a tree on his head. In one story, Garden Head gives Tree Head a new leafcut. Tree Head hates it. In another, Cabin Head paints a picture of a taco so convincing that Tree Head eats it. They have to rush to Hospital Head. It could happen to any of us.

Heart the Lover by Lily King
Heart the Lover is a love story. A little epic. A swirling romance with an edge. The narrator is in love with a boy and then a different boy, the best friend of the first one, and with her friends and her books and silly games like Sir Hincomb Funnibuster. Heart the Lover is the name of one of the playing cards important when playing Sir Hincomb Funnibuster. Heart the Lover is how the first boy signs a letter to her in order to win her back after a mistake.

Heart the Lover is simply beautiful. And, it does that magic trick of appearing a simple story, easy to read and hard to put down, while doing several more subtle things, much like those who excel at masking which suit they seek in a card game. I fell for it hard. In trying to write about it for the newsletter, I ended up reading the whole thing again. On the third read, I will take more time to glory in all the references to Elizabeth Bowen, Halldór Laxness and Talking Heads.

The Banquet by Stav Poleg
The Banquet is a collection of poems full of heart. An umbrella turned inside out is like, ‘The unstable heart of an open-air thought’, bridges are ‘full-hearted’, there is ‘so much autumn in this shattered-heart evening’, the reader is a ‘holder of hearts’ and the poet studies ‘all the ways to say heart without meaning mind.’

With heart and mind come Fellini, Rimbaud, Wittgenstein and Dante’s Convivio, hence the title, but also physics, philosophy and Newtonian time – ‘The poet studies time like a theatre scene,’ she writes. And so, Tom Stoppard cannot be far off. The stage is set for audience/reader participation with Arcadia and The Hard Problem.

The collection is like a film, like a play, an art installation and a letter in the process of being crafted. It is full of motion and colour. Blues and yellows stand out from the first poem, putting me in mind of my first visit to Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. I was there with a friend who pointed out a single pale lemon placed beneath a painting with the same yellow. She is an artist now (I suppose she was then) and I always remember the immediate hit of pleasure for her on seeing the two together.

Kettle’s Yard is not a museum but a place where art comes alive, where a painting communicates with a piece of fruit, where the shadows dance around the sculpture of a dancer and where a pebble becomes perfect in its rightful place.

I have since found out that Stav Poleg’s work has been read at Kettle’s Yard and that she lives in Cambridge, so thoughts of lemon-yellow are perhaps not totally fanciful. Her full-hearted bridges and time as a ‘yellow leaf caught in blue-bicycle weather’ gained another life in those surroundings in my head.  

All good reasons to read Ways of Life: Jim Ede and the Kettle’s Yard Artists by Laura Freeman.

Harold Stanley Ede, known as Jim – that’s life, I guess – was the man who created Kettle’s Yard, a home full of beauty to which he welcomed visitors, offering them tours, tea and marmalade. Essentially it is heaven. Laura Freeman’s book about him tells the magnificent story not only of the founder of heaven but also of Jim the son of strict methodists, Jim the art student, Jim the soldier in the First World War, the accidental bookkeeper at the Tate, the husband, father, friend and collector. The book and its character are so full of enthusiasm that it is quite infectious. Look, both implore, and one wants to. My heart was in my mouth when I first began reading the chapter on William Staite Murray’s Heron. You will see why.   

In her poem, ‘A Wandering,’ Stav Poleg writes, ‘Maybe some books are not meant / to be put aside, maybe once opened—they’ve broken / something within the reader—the one holding / the words close in her palms.’ 

May your weekend find you holding words close in your palms,
Lizzie