The Subliminal Mr Dunn Comes Clean

 I don't think it's possible to keep a blog for any length of time without revealing quite a bit about yourself. I mean if that were not the case you probably wouldn't be interested in keeping one in the first place. After all, the main point of a blog is to share it with other people, unlike a diary where this is not necessarily the case. I therefore have no illusions about the picture that emerges of myself over the sixteen years I have been writing The Subliminal Mr Dunn - a picture of a preemptive, self-deprecating cast of mind that drives my family to distraction.

But here I run into a problem.  On the one hand, I do not want to be too revealing, to push the bounds of intimacy too far. On the other hand, there are times, especially now than I am entering the home stretch, when I feel the urge to provide a fuller insight into the sort of person I really am.

How to resolve this problem? I can go quite a long way down this road by referring to books, films, music, etc. But today I want to go much further and include a short story by a published writer that haunts me to this very day. I read it some forty years ago and have never forgotten it. It is, for me at any rate, quite beautiful and heartbreaking. 

It's quite a long short story so, first of all from a practical point of view, this is how you can quite legally go about downloading it free of charge. If you have ever had occasion to read a book online using the Amazon Kindle or Google Play Books app, you may have noticed that you can get an "extract" or "sample" of the book without having to buy the wretched thing. This is particularly useful in the case of a collection of short stories, as the sample is bound to include one or two complete stories! You simply go to the Google Books or Kindle site and do a search for the book in question.

The book in question is called Pack of Cards, an early collection of short stories by that wonderful writer and Booker Prize winner, Penelope Lively. This extraordinary woman could not write a dull sentence even if she tried, and is equally at home when dealing with comic, acerbic, compassionate and elegiac themes. The story I have chosen is the first one in the collection and therefore guaranteed to be included in the sample. It is called Nothing Missing but the Samovar. 

I hope you like it but can well understand if you don't!