Will Bob lose weight?

December 27. 21.30
As I was surfing through the channels - which is just the sort of thing you do at this time of year, in a room which has just about everything you hate about Christmas- fading decorations, scraps of wrapping paper, piles of unwanted presents, small pieces of styrofoam from the packing of a present that had never previously been un-wrapped, the multicoloured wrapping papers from the selection of Quality Street chocolates from which the best had long been removed leaving only those strange nougat and coconut chocs that nobody likes, and the fire blazing away leaving the room uncomfortably hot and soporific, when I chanced up on a programme about John Buchan, one time Governor General of Canada, but more importantly as far as I am concerned, the author of "The Thirty Nine Steps" and many others that Graham Greene would have called "entertainments".
John Buchan was one of the more prolific authors of adventures that gripped and entertained me in the years when I began to read. At that time , when I chanced upon ( or was perhaps subtly led by my father or possibly the enlightened school I attended) a writer whose works I enjoyed, I tried to get hold of all his books and then move on to someone else when I had devoured them all, much the same as I do today. The programme concluded by stating that next week they would focus on the works of Rider Haggard who was another of my favourites at that time. I don't know if I could now accept the rather obvious racist and colonial overtones of much of this body of fiction, but they really were ripping yarns and fantastic entertainment. I expect you can see where this is all leading- yes another list- this time of the ten writers who entertained me most at that time:-
131. Alexandre Dumas
132. John Buchan
133. G.H.Henty
134. Rider Haggard
135. C.S.Forrester
136. Jules Verne
137. Arthur Ransome
138. R.M.Ballantyne
139. Capt W.E.Johns
140. Charles Dickens
I realise that the appearance of Dickens at number ten in this list may be interpreted by some as a sort of literary criticiism that places David Copperfield below Biggles, but the order isn't meant to suggest any order of merit but more a loose association with the time I discovered these authors. Dickens and posssibly some of the John Buchan might equally appeal to a youthful or a more adult readership but probably most of the others works would only really be enjoyed by the young. I used to think that a really good children's book was always fun for the adult reader at bedtime story time.
I also realise that some readers of this blog might be wondering what this has to do with Bob losing weight and it is of course, for those of you who really care, nothing at all to do do with weight loss, but is , like all the other lists, very much to do with how we spend, sorry, I spend, my life. The weight thing of course may be inseparably connected to the quality and duration of life and sometimes I feel a bit guilty about not giving it enough attention. So next year there will be a more serious approach to weight loss. I was asked today if 2007 would be the year of the book and after a few seconds of intense thought I replied "yes, I think so". Sounds a bit like a resolution.