Une Libre

Booking Through Thursday has swept in again this week, to save me having to think for myself, with another query intended to send you all scurrying away to the literary part of your brain. I’m not entirely sure my brain has any other part – which is all to the good here.

This week’s question is: do you have any foreign language books, and if so, can you (still) read them?

Well, I’m afraid my non-cosmopolitan mind can only proffer a simple negative to the latter – I am about as bilingual as the National Anthem – but I do have a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in French, which I bought in an attempt to make French GCSE ‘fun’. Also Winnie the Pooh in Latin, I believe. Can we count Old English as a foreign language? Well, I’m not sure I could comprehend ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘Dream of the Rood’ any more, but once I memorised what they meant. Not really reading a foreign language, is it?

All this reminds me of a man who lived near us in my Merseyside days (those days being up until the age of 7ish). He liked the look of the books in Ikea, the ones used to decorate bookshelves and show how wonderfully functional they are. Indeed, he liked the look of them so much that he asked, and was allowed, to buy them by the yard. Despite not speaking of word of Swedish, the language all these books were written in. Marvellous.