Bookworm by Lucy Mangan

[TheOnlyLivingBoyInNewCross]

I’m reading this and have just got to the moment which mentions the need for a Ladybird book on Maintaining Your Sanity on Mumsnet Given the Impossibility of Staying Away from Mumsnet.

Lucy: If you are on here, your book is JOYOUS. We have a LOT of childhood reading in common!

All the creatures talked didn't they? The beavers certainly did.

Talking creatures of all sorts were a feature of Narnia, but my postulated clever clogs editor might not have known that. Or anything really.

It’s how completely differently he’s written over the novels in which he appears that amuses me when I reread them now.

He’s originally a sort of Bertie Wooster about town, all amiable parrot profile and exaggerated aristo manner (which novel is it where his face is compared to maggots emerging from ripe cheese???) in the early novels. and even in Have His Carcase, Harriet says dispassionately that he ‘strips better than I expected’ when they go swimming, having clearly imagined him to be skinny and unappealing naked.

But by Murder Must Advertise he’s suddenly a natural athlete, half the women in the novel fall for him, and even a sexually experienced party girl thinks he has a lovely body. And by Gaudy Night, he’s turned into a gorgeous, sexy blonde alpha male who is also a scholar, expert cricketer, musician, linguist, punter, all-round polymath, detective. diplomat etc who has the entire senior common room eating out of his hand and whose clothes Harriet wants to rip off. By Busman’s Honeymoon, he’s so powerfully sexy that Sayers has to quell him on his wedding night by having Bunter scrub him under the pump!

Some of that might have been because DLS needed to up the quality of her daydream material in the face of tedious work and pretty miserable love affairs!

And by Gaudy Night, he’s turned into a gorgeous, sexy blonde alpha male who is also a scholar, expert cricketer, musician, linguist, punter, all-round polymath, detective. diplomat etc who has the entire senior common room eating out of his hand and whose clothes Harriet wants to rip off.

Though to be fair, even after the heated moment in the punt, H rapidly reverts to seeing him as the intelligence that lurks under "an oddly amusing set of features", or something like that, so I think it's the mind rather than the muscles (and the familiar parrot profile) that do it for DLS.

This is Roy Ridley-apparently DLS modelled Lord Peter on him…

Ah- the Invisible Man-give me a moment….

Try again. Roy Ridley

which novel is it where his face is compared to maggots emerging from ripe cheese???

Whose Body? - the first novel.

I think Harriet’s change attraction is understandable, I am sure we’ve all started to fancy someone whose skill/kindness/understanding/jokes or whatever grew on us over time.

(See also: Amy and Rory in Doctor Who)

Ah, "spontaneously generated from his top hat"?

That’s the one.