ON THE ROAD BY JACK KEROUAC

My daughter has passed her driving test. WOOHOO for her.

This is still a very scary prospect, but not much I can do about that. Watch out on the roads I warn you. She is very, very happy and now, although I have payed a fortune in lessons for her I am now expected to spend even more money celebrating the fact that she is a fully fledged driver who passed first time – which is more than I did. Her driving instructor was very pleased with her – he told me that on average new drivers have about 40 lessons. REALLY? That’s way too many. He said that you generally need about as many lessons as your age – to which my daughter very quietly pointed out that I would need at least 60 then…..how depressing that clearly the older we get the more rubbish we are at learning new things. She keeps saying things like “I can’t believe I can drive on my own now – do you realise that I am now just as qualified to drive as you are – how weird is that?”.

Anyway. This leads me nicely on to the book review I have been meaning to do for some time. “On The Road” by Jack Kerouac. We’ve just read it for book group and I loved it. In manner of very old person who can’t remember anything I do think I’ve possibly read it before – I probably even did it for A level English Literature (that’s if I actually did A level English literature which I think I did). Anyway, it’s BRILLIANT. You should definitely read it. He wrote it in three weeks solid, cellotaping every single A4 piece of paper together so that he didn’t even have to stop to take the paper out of his type writer. A real stream of consciousness. An exciting, racy, descriptive story of the “Beat Generation” in the USA in the 40’s. A joyous rush of events both good and bad and a chaos of personal encounters.

Even from the beginning I was hooked.

“With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my life you could call my life on the road”….”because the only people that interest me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones that never yearn or say a commonplace thing….but burn, burn, burn, burn like roman candles across the night”.