Some brief recommendations and thoughts, pals, as we tip more noticeably into the end of summer, post-Lammas.

1. This Rosamond Lehmann book — unfortunately I had the previous Virago edition which was all mushy pinks and oranges and embracing couples, and at first glance at cover and blurb it does seem to be a rather mushy book: women and babies and love, yawn etc. But as with very many of those early twentieth-century women authors, the writing is knife-sharp, aware of everything, and covers not only women and babies and love but also Art, and grief, and friendships, and the deals we make with ourselves and the way we deal with ageing and dying parents. It really is astonishingly — and I say this like it’s a compliment, as if to exist in our own time is the greatest honour of all — but it is staggeringly modern in the depiction of the protagonist, Olivia. By which I suppose I just mean that she is an entirely three-dimensional person.

2. Speaking of blurbs, may I shill a beloved former colleague’s book? I was extremely lucky to read this a few months ago, and beset with that strange mixture of delight and acidic envy that creeps over when reading something brilliant by someone you know. It’s so intelligent, so funny, such an excellent, thoughtful and hilarious window into blurbs and bookselling and publishing, and I know that might not sound like a marvellous pitch but if anyone you know likes reading or words or books, I promise you this is the Christmas present for them. It deserves to do horribly well, at which point I shall have to stop talking to Louise. (Also, all of us blurb-writers wrote blurbs in the back! And we have our names on them! That never happens!)

3. I am almost always thinking about Mad Men at any given hour of the day. Today I am thinking about how many times Bobby Draper was recast, and how that in itself is possibly a comment about the instability of men in Matthew Weiner’s world, and how interchangeable and same-old-same-old they are, in comparison to Betty and Peggy, Joan and Sally.

4. Some good podcast episodes recently, now that I’ve finally been able to stop obsessively listening to the same programme after seven whole months. This Adam Buxton episode with John Higgs is very good — I particularly like the idea that if you take a month-old newspaper, you can suddenly see how meaningless and irrelevant most of the stories are; of course that’s essentially the old chip-wrapper maxim, but I was interested to hear someone so erudite able to verbalise my own instinct to turn away from the news. Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart’s podcast is better than I expected, and Campbell has similar advice to young people wanting to engage with the world: Read books, not newspapers, and listen to music, not the radio. If ever there was proof of that theory it’s right now, with the wall-to-wall coverage of our Prime Minister’s election in which only a handful of people can cast a vote. There’s also something somewhere in those episodes, or others I’ve been listening to, about how social media feeds populism, even for us nice folks who will always be on the right side of history!, but I need to chew on it more. A lack of clear external moral codes? Rewards in our brain for when we focus on self over service? The paralysing of choice with all the potential moral potholes? Cynicism rendering democratic engagement seem futile? Not sure. More thought required. 

Two Decoder Ring episodes I enjoyed too: one on Rod McKuen, an American poet I’d never heard of, in which the presenter says, ‘I find [the poems] actively embarrassing… There is something about bad poetry that’s maybe more painful than any other bad art. It’s so open, so deeply sincere and yet so empty. It reveals the yawning banality at the centre of all our souls.’ God, yes. And yet! There is also something there about the surprise of discovering unexpected authenticity and quality at the heart of someone’s work, and also the joys of the unexpected that only hard copies of things — CDs, records, books — allow us to find. The other episode is on the Laff Box, the canned studio laughter that rarely pops on on TV comedies now. They play a YouTube clip where someone had removed the laughter from Friends episodes, and the strange stagey, humourless air it left reminded me so much of a few films I’ve watched recently that came with high praise yet felt as if they’d been made by filmmakers who hadn’t yet experienced human interaction. 

5. I am sorry I’ve only just discovered this Larkin poem, I like it very much; I find myself thinking of my father quite a lot recently, and wonder if most people feel that they don’t truly know anything of their father; back to these medium-difficulty cryptic crosswords for the summer holidays — can I recommend these? There is so little as satisfying as feeling one’s comprehension around them gradually improve.

6. In Waterstone’s behind a customer the other day, listening in only fully when they say they are a local author and the bookseller whoops with delight and tells them how much they love their book and they must come and do an event. I meet the eyes of my housemate and remember my own approaches to the same bookseller last summer, and I am so grateful my housemate has the exact same face on that I am pulling in my head. How we laughed.

7. Two more things, quickly: Boys State is great. Crushing and blackly comic and bro-ishly romantic, and don’t read this until you’ve watched it, but also hope. Lastly, rewatching the Juice Box episode of Mythic Quest with another housemate, who piped up at the rendition of The Rainbow Connection, ‘Isn’t that that song from La La Land?’ YES IT IS, my friend. Good lord.