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The Year of the Jouncer by Simon Gray (view source)
Revision as of 14:09, 10 May 2018
, 14:09, 10 May 2018no edit summary
Experts have proved that many of us need regular doses of the musings of an elderly British playwright. The writer in question must be critically well-regarded, living in London, but with a country retreat, and be mildly, wittily grumpy about modern everyday life. Alan Bennett, of course, amply fulfils this role for many. But there is a more dissolute alternative: Simon Gray.
Gray's first stab at this form was [[''The Smoking Diaries]]''. The Year of The Jouncer is his second published volume of collected daily journals. The year in question is 2004, the Jouncer a family nickname for his childhood self. Jouncing describes the fidgeting in his pram which could propel it along the garden path. It eventually mutated into nocturnal humping and keening which drove his parents in the next bedroom to rage and violence.
We learn a lot about his parents in this book, as it switches between the daily doings of his 68-year old self, and recollections of his childhood. Gray grew up in Hayling Island, later moving to Halifax, Nova Scotia, his middle class existence a far cry from Bennett's Leeds backstreets. Gray's father was a pipe-smoking, philandering doctor; his mother's preferences were for cricket and cigarettes, habits she passed to her son. He portrays his parents oddly impersonally, calling them 'the mother' and 'the father', loving yet distant - as adults maybe were in post-war Britain.