{"id":1406,"date":"2011-01-14T18:00:59","date_gmt":"2011-01-14T18:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/?p=1406"},"modified":"2011-01-15T00:12:14","modified_gmt":"2011-01-15T00:12:14","slug":"reading-and-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/?p=1406","title":{"rendered":"Reading and me"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>No not the place, but the activity.  If you know me, you know I don&#8217;t read.  I can read, but I don&#8217;t read for leisure.  Sure in my life I have sifted through many many technical manuals, but as for just reading a book it didn&#8217;t happen (though there was a Novella included with the game &#8216;StarGlider&#8217; which I read though it was very short).  <\/p>\n<p>Why?  Well I did get thinking about it a few years back and put it down to my old school trying to help.   You see, back in the 80&#8217;s when Amazon was a river and Kindle was something you used to start a fire when you wanted a book what did you do?  Just in case you&#8217;ve forgotten you actually left your house and bought one.  As I was around 9-10 at this time this really wasn&#8217;t an option, so for children everywhere schools had a book leaflet for you to select a book from &#8211; then get your parents to pay for it &#8211; then you wait a week or so and it would turn up.<\/p>\n<p>So I chose the title that appealed to me the most.  It was The Hitchhiker&#8217;s Guide to the Galaxy (I won&#8217;t insult you the reader because you know who wrote it),  the reason &#8211; well mainly cos it had just recently been on the TV and I liked it.  Being my first educational purchase I rightly pleased.  Then came the thing that I think pretty much messed it all up for me.<\/p>\n<p>The teachers didn&#8217;t think it was appropriate for me as it was too adult in content.  After being allow to watch said TV adaptation of it I was disappointed.  Still being young I moved on from this trauma only being psychologically scarred.   <\/p>\n<p>The next literary encounter was probably one of the best presents a friend ever bought me.  It was book called &#8216;Shuttle&#8217; based on a fictional space shuttle type aircraft which seemed to drag it&#8217;s launch vehicle in to outer space with it.   A thoughtful present as Bod (Trevor) knew I liked the space shuttle and associated gubbins that went with it.   I started to read, but really couldn&#8217;t into it, not sure if it was the book or just what I suspect the lack of reading from earlier in my life meant I couldn&#8217;t concentrate.  At 40 I still find it difficult to lock out all the sounds around me and get into a book.   The get around my concentration levels I did find playing classic music helped me get through a Citrix Metaframe book (prior to taking and passing a CCA exam &#8211; go me!), but never followed it up with a non-manual book (if that makes sense).<\/p>\n<p>Anyway I&#8217;ve jumped forward a few decades so need to jump back around 27ish years.   Around my 3rd year of senior school I was very surprised to receive a merit award &#8211; to this day I&#8217;m still not overly sure as to why I got one, still like noticing a \u00a35 note on the floor I wasn&#8217;t going to ignore it.  The prize consisted of a book up to the value of \u00a310.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;d have thought this might have spurred me to buy a real book, but no the plane spotter in me meant I selected an aircraft reference book.  I still have the book, with merit prize glued inside. <\/p>\n<p>So forward to now why post this? well since I have an iPad it means I also have a e-reader and I have decided to turn back the years and buy Hitchhiker&#8217;s Guide to the Galaxy.  Which after a week or so I&#8217;ve managed to read, and yes I enjoyed it.  Partially as it bought back memories from the TV show, but mainly cos it was a funny book.  So where from here, well, just getting over bloke flu so once I recover from brain mush I shall read episode 2 (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe).   Then if all goes well then perhaps the other 3.<\/p>\n<p>As for the teachers, they aren&#8217;t the villains of this piece, just doing what they thought was best.  After all I did count a few shit&#8217;s and couple of Bastard&#8217;s.  Though considering it was the 80&#8217;s I probably heard worse on the Sweeney. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>No not the place, but the activity. If you know me, you know I don&#8217;t read. I can read, but I don&#8217;t read for leisure. Sure in my life I have sifted through many many technical manuals, but as for just reading a book it didn&#8217;t happen (though there was a Novella included with the &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/?p=1406\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Reading and me&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[219,216,217,218],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1406"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1417,"href":"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406\/revisions\/1417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kebablog.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}