Well hola my friends, I am back from the sun-kissed shores of Espagne feeling fighting fit and refreshed (if a bit woozy from all the sangria and cheap Spanish plonk) and, due to popular demand, have returned to the blogosphere.

While away I read a column by one of my blogging idols, Charlie Brooker, which almost made me choke on my paella (though that may have been a prawn it’s hard to tell sometimes!) in which he defended the idea of E-Reading. Now for those of you who perhaps live in a cave or, like me, are a bit dessicated and don’t follow the technological news an E-Reader is essentially a device that allows you to store up to 1,500 books on a single electronic thingy (look at me getting all technical), it’s sort of like having an MP3 player rather than a discman. Now to be honest that’s a pretty good argument in itself which is often used by the pro-E-Reader brigade, after all I’d estimate that almost all of us now have an MP3 player of some sort that we can use whilst commuting and undeniably it’s a lot easier to store all your music on little box rather than a device the size of a dinner plate and a small stack of CD’s to go with it. However I think this fundamentally misses the point of a book for several reasons:

Firstly, and I may be alone in this, I don’t tend to carry around an entire library around with me and nor would I desire to. Generally I will choose a book, read it and then read another. I don’t as a rule choose a book, read a chapter and then select another chapter from an entirely separate book to read – and if you do I suggest you seek medical attention at the earliest possible opportunity!
The obvious counter to this would be a holiday or long trip, on many occasions during a holiday you will take several books along with you, I, for example, took five books with me on holiday but I still only read one at a time. It seems to me the main advantage of an E-Reader in this situation would be simply to either limit that incredibly annoying two minute walk from the beach to your hotel room when you finish your book to change it for another and to leave more room in your case for cheap wine……. Actually that’s suddenly become rather a compelling argument!

Another joy of a book, for me anyway, is to read whilst having a bath, now if I’m, for example as I am at present, reading a nice Thomas Hardy novel while having a soak and I reach to change the radio station (maybe some cretin has in a moment of piquancy changed the channel to radio 1 to vex me!) and inadvertently knock “Far from the madding crowd” into the water the worst I’ve done is ruined a £2 book and may never find out what happens to Bathsheba Everdene.
If, however, I am using my E-Reader in the bath and knock it accidentally into the water I have not only destroyed a piece of valuable equipment, I have destroyed 1,500 books (more than my local library has these days!) and more to the point I have run a significant risk of electrocuting my genitals!

The final point to make is the undoubted romance of a book. I am still waiting for the day that the lovely young lady on the train each day will come over to me and say “Ah I see you’re reading Dostoyevsky’s “The Gambler” what a searing vision of addiction and corruption that is, would you maybe like to split a bottle of expensive wine sometime?” (Hey I can dream can’t I?), okay that’s unlikely to happen but I do get a bit of a frison of excitement every time I see an attractive young arty type reading, okay it’s usually a bit of Sophie Kinsella or one of those books from the ASDA cheap range with titles like “Daddy please no!” or whatever but even so it shows a modicum of intelligence – unless of course it’s Harry Potter or a Dan Brown when I just feel an urge to throw things at them!
However I suppose the argument could be cancelled out by the fact that if, as I was, on holiday, you’re reading a trashy novel – in my case it was “Sphinx” by T.S.Learner (Think Dan Brown in Egypt but competently researched rather than just making it all up, basically poorly written thriller but at least you’re not spending every page going “well that’s a lie for a start!”) – your E-Reader conceals what you’re reading so for all that sun worshipping Iberian beauty across the beach knows you’re reading something mind-blowingly romantic instead of just reading about sexy archaeologists (surely a typo!) and ancient Egyptian cults!

I, however, believe that a compromise can be reached could we not develop covers for E-Readers rather like the sleeves for passports so that you can be reading your trashy Egyptian adventure novel but the sleeve around it makes it look like you’re reading something more worldly like Alexandre Dumas’ wonderfully romantic “The black tulip”. Of course you’d have to be careful that you made a careful note of what the cover was, after all what could be more embarrassing than your longed for beach beauty collapsing on the sand next to you and asking how the book is going and you mistakenly think that your cover is Anna Karenina or something and say how sad it is that she’s about to be mowed down by a train only to realise that the cover you actually have is Pride and Prejudice or something!

This week Matt:

Invested in the stock market for the first time – I feel the need to buy some spats and braces!

Flew home from Spain with a hangover, not recommended!

Spent two hours with Tim watching an Eastenders “Duff duff” countdown, gloriously trashy!