The Lonely Londoners

What a treat at the end, of an otherwise, pain in the hole of a day, took the small male out book shopping and discovered an author who intrigues me: Sam Selvon’s novel The Lonely Londoners. (Penguin Classic) The Lonely Londoners which I’ve just started is written in it’s own dialect with his up the hill and round the garden grammar. Gone are the fences of how words must sit beside each other dictated by an RP grammar. They sit how they wish and will and make me sit up and repeat them. You can hear vocal chords rubbing as you read. Selvon writes about the 1950’s London and people arriving there from the West Indies on the boat train.

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Today  I experienced some sense of what it must be like to be in the army or to be a bullock and I conclude it’s very unpleasant.

“There are some people who are sent to try us,” my ma would say when I was younger and today I would tell her that yes I had a few of them in my ear this week.

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