The End

I bought this record for my mother as a birthday present. It is the soundtrack to the David Lean movie A Passage to India. David Lean made those big epics Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, and earlier a very good Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. By the time he did A Passage to India he was out of fashion. In fact, it was fashionable to sneer at him. Which once again illustrates the perils of being cool, because it is a very good film but if you were being fashionable you would have to say it isn't.

A Passage to India is a very, very good book. It might be one of the wisest books I have ever read. My mother has always highly prized it. When I was doing my first full year of university A Passage to India was one of the novels we were supposed to read, but most people didn't. I tried to read it and gave up. Then David Norton did his first lecture on it focussing entirely on the first chapter. He did exactly what a good lecturer should; he illuminated the text and made me understand why it was so brilliant.

He began by reading the first sentence:

Except for the Marabar Caves - and they are twenty miles off - the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.

Then he stopped reading and said:

"So we know immediately that the Marabar caves are extraordinary, that they are in fact an exception."

I realised that I hadn't really read the first chapter of this novel, and that we were in the hands of a very subtle, exceptional writer.

And so we come to the end of my Mother's record collection.

I'm going on holiday.

Wife, child, red jacket and hat.

We're going to Auckland.