I'VE JUST BOUGHT A KINDLE

"I've just bought a Kindle".

"A what"?

"A Kindle"!

"What the hell's a Kindle"?

I've always loved reading, books were my friends through a lonely childhood. Didn't need a friend if you had a book. It was always there when needed, you could take it with you anywhere you went. It didn't need feeding or walking.

I can remember being taught to read, the  second-class at Salterforth Primary School. Miss Fawcett, the first love of my life, taught me to read. We had a spelling book that we would take out to her if we came across a word we could not spell, I was the only one in the class that couldn't spell "a", "it", "of".

The years dragged by in the second-class, for, at every opportunity, I would go and stare through the window in the door of the top classroom, for there in full view, was an "enormous glass-fronted bookcase," full from top to bottom with books, unknown books, books that I longed to touch and feel, books, that when I eventually went into the top classroom, I coveted and finally made my own.

Arithmetic, geography, religious knowledge, all these lessons came and went, but all the time my eyes were drawn towards the "enormous glass-fronted bookcase" and finally it arrived "Reading" and, if we had behaved, we were allowed to go and select a book from the bookcase.

PRIMARY SCHOOL REPORT

Salterforth school year ended 7th July 1955

Subject        Marks                                     Remarks on subject

Reading         VG                             Reads well, knows how to use 

                                                           books to good purpose.

No need to ask what I wanted for a birthday or Christmas present(finished by Boxing Day), there was always a book, The Black Arrow, Tale of Two Cities and of course  Biggles.

Whilst watching Antiques Road Show one Sunday tea time, when books like these were being sold for a small fortune, my mother, with eyes downcast, admitted to having thrown all my books away.

Mother was an avid reader and she used to take me to a small library located in the community centre on the estate where we lived, I don't remember there being any books of interest to me but it introduced me to libraries.

Leaving primary school and going to grammar school I found my first "real" library, with "old" books, books that smelled and felt used.

These were the days of growing up, looking for the naughty bits in Lady Chatterley's Lover.

I would go the local library every week and bring home three books.

History and the English language had always been my favorite subjects and there came a time when there were no more books for me to read, novels did not interest me so visits to the library became very rare.

The advent of the Internet brings a whole new dimension to reading, you don't have to walk up to the library in the pouring rain to select a book, you just sit at your computer, click a few buttons and within a couple of days the postman will be knocking on your door with a parcel.

And then: The eBook!

A sleek, tactile electronic gadget, that can hold many hundreds of books, is a pleasure to hold, is easy on the eye and best of all you never lose your page.

It has its drawbacks, you can't read it in the bath. If you dropped your book in the bath you ended up with many dried-up wrinkly pages, which were still readable, but if you drop your eBook in the bath it's gone forever.

The Kindle is a thing of beauty but will never replace the act of deflowering a sensuous virgin book.