Curiosity – and cats

To Jan Morris, I am anathema. That goes, too, for David Attenborough. It is a word that this unarguably great writer likes: ‘It rolls well off the tongue.’ Why are your reviewer and the great broadcaster anathema, you ask. Well, we have been to the zoo. In this almost entirely enjoyable book no-one comes in for quite so much disapproval as those of us who have been to the zoo.I mention David because, when I was young, he took me to the zoo. However, despite this sinfulness, I would be surprised if Morris, who is a year older than Attenborough, does not recognise in David a confrère in the war for niceness against nastiness, kindness against cruelty.

This book, apparently written because Morris has ‘nothing much else to write’, is more weighty than it seems. Its 188 very short pieces tell us much about her, and will be a honeypot for her biographer. They are also irresistibly engaging.

Here she is uncorsetted, the great prose stylist conversational (though she has always had a kind of intimacy with her readers), talking to herself as she talks to inanimate objects around her house. Much of the time she is responding to the world beyond Trefan Morys, the house in Lloyd George’s childhood home of Llanystymdwy, on the Llyn peninsula of north Wales, which she shares with her once wife, now civil partner, Elizabeth Tuckniss (they were married in 1949). This great world, the cities, towns and people of which she has so wonderfully recorded, seems to Morris to be descending into chaos. All the news is bad, and things are only going to get worse.

And yet — and here is one of her favourite themes, irony — in her north Wales fastness people are kindly, the garden is bountiful and the mountains are beautiful.