WORDSMITH O


Kev Reynolds, the Man with the World’s Best Job


n a warm spring afternoon in 2008 I was sitting on the steps of an old Buddhist gompa when I was approached by a Nepali lad of about fourteen, who told me he was having trouble


with his school work. Having asked if I could help, he ran down the slope to


a group of simple, stone-built houses, and returned a few minutes later clutching a well-thumbed textbook opened at a page on which was printed a poem by Ted Hughes. ‘I do not understand what this means,’ he said. I read the poem, then read it again, and tried to explain that the writer was describing a wind raging through heavy-leaved trees in such a way that it recalled the sound of the sea. But living at almost 4,000 metres among some of the world’s highest mountains, the boy had no experience of deciduous trees, nor had he ever seen nor heard the sea, so understanding the poem was an uphill struggle. T en he turned to another


poem; this one by Seamus Heaney. ‘I like this,’ he enthused. ‘I’m confused, but I like the music.’ T e music, yes! Heaney’s verse fl owed with a rhythm as


introduce me to people I’d otherwise never meet. I like words that entertain and educate and make me think. At home I’m never far from books, and at any time –


day or night – I can reach out, grab a volume and become absorbed by its contents. It may be a collection of poems, or a biography; a travel book perhaps, or a novel written by a friend who lives far away. It could be a collection of short stories, or of ideas. It doesn’t really matter, for I’ll simply let the pages fall open and be seduced by language; by words that roll around the brain like a child’s lullaby. T ere are favourites, of course. Any one of John Stewart


I could live happily without television, but not without books...


musical as any written in crotchets and quavers. As for its meaning, that again was outside the boy’s experience, but he was eager to learn. I was impressed by that bright-eyed lad, and by the demands of his school work. Not only was he studying a diff erent language, he was trying to unravel meaning from what must have seemed at fi rst a jumble of letters in awkward shapes on uneven lines. On top of that, woven into the texture of each poem was a culture of which the boy had no fi rst-hand knowledge. It led me to consider the power of language and the


beauty of words. Once a year the BBC celebrates the English language with a season of poetry. In addition, there’s a weekly slot devoted to books on Radio 4, and a regular Sunday programme of poetry. Yet when we glance at the television schedules it’s hard to believe that programmes given over to the written word - other than books to accompany a popular tv series – could have a place in our lives. Reading aloud (or to oneself) would appear far too highbrow and elitist for a nation embedded in ‘reality tv’ and the cult of celebrity. But it’s not. Books matter; they’re full of words. Now I like words; the sound of words fl owing in


streams across the page; words that draw landscape, faces, emotions; words that carry echoes of the past, that evoke smells and tastes, that transport me to other lands,


3


Collis’s brilliantly constructed works will do. He has a way of making comprehensible what would otherwise be incomprehensible to me; be that the creation of life through a potato or a treatise on the human body. Or it could be something by Morris. Whether writing


Jan


about the fi rst ascent of Everest or the wonders of Venice, she holds her reader in a spell. Here she is writing of Kurdish nomads on the move: …the eff ect of the procession, glimpsed in so wide and


airy a setting, was that of a community of unusually cheerful brigands crossing a steppe to commit an atrocity. T ere’s Patrick Leigh Fermor - one of the most


perceptive of travel writers - who describes sleeping on the roof of a Greek house: One sleeps in the sky surrounded by stars and with the moon almost within arm’s reach. Peter


Matthiessen, whose masterpiece T e Snow


Leopard transports me to a land I’ve travelled in and long to return to: I feel at peace among these looming rocks, the cloud swirl and wind-whirled snow, as if the earth had opened up to take me in. T ere are poems by Dylan T omas, whose unmistakable


voice emerges from the page, its mellifl uous tones licking their way along and around phrases that simply have to be said out loud - and the verse of Robert Service (still bearing the stains of Morocco where I carried his collected works into the High Atlas Mountains on my fi rst expedition more than fi fty years ago): Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on? Yes, the riches of language are a blessing. I could live


happily without television, but not without books. For the written word can deliver freedom, produce a sense of elation, hold history to account, and resonate with a special kind of music – just as the Nepali lad had discovered. In our own small way, you and I have a responsibility to ensure that music plays on.


www.kevreynolds.co.uk


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