Gerald Durrell

Yesterday, I got back home at around 6 and decided to visit Landmark . Its one my favorite places in Bangalore .Rather like a temple for books. Just as you enter , you get a whiff of the Cookie Man’s cookies , Kalmane’s coffee and that weird soap place’s smell (They sell soaps that cost 80 bucks a gram!) all at once . Very typical Forum feeling.

A vacant eyed help at Landmark(they were REALLY vacant ! Mix of brown and grey and expressionless) told me Khaled Hosseini’s latest would take a couple of days. Picked up a Bill Bryson for Mom(She’s visting Altoid for a month and she needs something else to think about other than thoughts in which the pilot highjacks the flight , she boards the flight to Tokyo instead of DC, the customs mistake her rasam powders for drugs .. you know all this could fill up into a new post entirely)

Anyway , I picked up Mitch Alboms’s latest “For one more day” and then my old favorite Gerald Durrell’s “The picnic and suchlike pandemonium”. A collection of short stories, this. The entire Durrell family decide to go off on a picnic one hot summer morning , take food that could feed an army , mistake a dead decaying horse for a rock and a resting point , for more of the painfully funny details , do read the book.

Some hilarious excerpts ,

“Do you think there’ll be enough food?” asked mother worriedly.

“I thought we were only going to Lulworth for the afternoon” said Leslie . I didn’t realize we were emigrating.

…

“Larry dear !” cried mother. “What a lovely surprise!”

Larry made his first verbal commitment to his family in ten years.

“Have any of you got colds?” he rasped irritably.

“If so, I’ll go to a hotel”

…

“Well I didn’t hear any tickety” said Leslie.

“Now –now dear don’t quarrel “ said mother peaceably.”After all , Jack is the engineer in the family”

“If he’s an engineer , it’s a curious sort of technical language they’re teaching him now “ commented Leslie.

“Engineers in my day didn’t discuss their tickety pings in public”

...

Am already well into the second story now ,I plan to finish it up in a couple of days and then lay my hands on this book.