"Qwerty" wrote:

There must be many of my generation (don't ask) who's first stirrings of
wanting to sail and go to sea were stimulated, even initiated by Arthur
Ransome and those books; I know I was. I introduced my children to them but
somehow, it didn't work with them - a bit dated perhaps if the original urge
isn't there, and a character called 'Titty' didn't help. They are based on
the east coast of England and the north west lake district where he
eventually retired to.

Wow, Coniston. I didn't know until now. Once, ages and ages ago I
hitchiled get up there, from my Aunt's house off the North Circular.
And as a kid I played "explorer" in a forest from which we could see
the *real* Kanchenjunga... Reading dated books, some as much as
20-years out of date, was sort of normal over there. It was hard to
find recent english-langauage material - I read Biggles and all that.

He led an interesting life, was in Russia as a correspondent for the
Manchester Guardian at the time of the Bolshevik revolution; interviewed
Lenin; married Trotsky's secretary. After he died she went back to Russia, a
very old lady, and found, after a lifetime of living in England and only
speaking English that she could no longer remember how to speak Russian.

Maybe the spoken, colloquial, Russian had changed. Among other things
a lot of "Comarad" this-and-that back then, with a lot of whispering
and suspicion. Trotsky had been assassinated and maybe it wasn't safe
to be a former secretary, no matter how old...

Q.

-keith
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