Moab is my Washpot. By Stephen Fry. my review

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Stephen Fry is funny and rude, clever and incredibly knowledgeable. I know who he is, of course I do.  He’s entertained me on the telly for three decades, but did I want to read his autobiography?  Not especially, I don’t really read biographies except of the artists I’m researching.

However when I saw this salmon pink paperback on a bookseller’s shelf, I bought it for the cover.  I might well have bought it even if I was quite unfamiliar with Stephen Fry and despite the obscure title. Who is Moab, why does he/she/they matter? And what in heaven or hell is a Washpot? Yes I guessed the reference was from the Old Testament, but I had no intention of re-reading that tome to find it.

My main reason for the purchase was because the cover was largely filled with the monstrous, wise, preposterously ugly but somehow charming visage of a bull elephant seal, with a proportionately tiny blackbird staring up his bulbous nose. An elephant seal, Lain name Mirounga angustirostris - there's s my one bit of erudition. As a child I had seen one, in Berlin Zoo, as far as I know from this book Mr Fry never visited Berlin in his childhood. So why an elephant seal? Just why?

The autobiography encompasses the first 20 years of Fry’s life and no elephant seals are involved. It’s an intense, highly personal, self-deprecating book.  He writes an eruditely meandering – or maybe I mean meanderingly erudite – and excruciatingly honest story.

He presents us with his family, who he basically loves but, especially as a teenager, refuses to get on with and who love him but find him often hard to comprehend.  We see him in middle-class boarding schools, and how he coped with school life, not always well or honestly, but mostly he coped, by managing to withdraw from the system and outwit authority. And we see his love life as his sexuality begins to emerge. 

I did enjoy Stephen's book, it’s poignant, funny and engrossing, although I skimmed here and there, mostly through the meanderingly erudite sections, I don’t have the advantage of his classical education, I wonder if it is an advantage? The Washpot he mentions  in the afterword, as a metaphorical container for his dirty linen, and I believe Moab was a sinner. But the vast elephant seal, I still have no idea because it looks nothing like him!

Will I read the book again? I might, but probably only after I’ve read what comes in the next volume.  

 

What Do You Know?

 What Do You Know?                     By Susan Gilbert

Lanky Larry crawled up a blade of green grass for the first time and into the sunshine, it was dazzling and he knew he must leap into the air, flapping the strange things that had just sprouted from his back. They were called wings but Lanky Larry didn’t know that. He didn’t know much as he had a very small brain and anyway had spent all his life living underground eating grass roots.

Of course Lanky Larry was a crane fly, some people call them Daddy Long Legs, but Lanky Larry didn’t know that either. He no longer thought about grass roots. Now he could fly he knew just two things, one was that flying seemed tricky, he kept bumping into things.  The other thing Lanky Larry knew was that he absolutely had to meet Lanky Lucy, or Lanky Linda or even, if he was lucky, Lanky Leonora.

Most people know at least two things about crane flies, one is that they bump into everything – lights, windows, people, all the time. The other is that they can live very happily blundering into stuff, even if they have lost a leg, or two, or even three. What most people don’t know about crane flies is that they are all called Lanky.

Another thing Lanky Larry probably needed to know, but didn’t know because he had an extremely small brain, was how to recognise the enemy.

Ruby Robin was the enemy, and as Larry bashed into the branch of the apple tree where Ruby Robin had just landed, Ruby knew Lanky Larry would be tasty and she grabbed his middle-left leg. Larry still only knew that he had to meet Lucy, or Linda or even Leonora, so he kept flying but he didn’t get far because Ruby Robin was sitting on the branch holding onto his middle-left leg.

Something that Ruby Robin didn’t know was that Tabitha Tabby Cat was lurking on another branch, just above her.  Tabitha knew that Ruby Robin would be tasty, she pounced but she missed and fell to the grass as Ruby Robin shot off like a rocket, towing Lanky Larry with her.

Lanky Larry was still flapping his wings, trying to fly and he was still only thinking about Lucy, or Linda or even Leonora. Ruby Robin landed on a smaller twig, higher up in the apple tree, preparing to eat Larry. But at that precise moment, Lanky Larry’s beady eyes spotted Lanky Leonora on the buddleia bush.

He knew it was Lanky Leonora, she was supping nectar so delicately, and she was looking at him with her beautiful beady eyes. Lanky Larry’s wings put in an extra burst of effort to get to her, and that was when his leg fell off.