Homeward Bound.

I first created this wish list of things I might like to do when we returned to the UK in 2010, after having been in Brazil for just over a year. I then updated it from time to time for the next year or so until I lost interest. Now, six years, two children and a minor explosion of crow’s feet and grey hairs later (plus barely more than a fortnight until we fly back), I've dug it out to see how it stands the test of time. Funnily enough, quite a lot of these ideas remain things I’d still quite like to do. Others appear to have been written by someone I’ve never met. I still want all the books, though (except the ones I’ve already got and loved, e.g. le Carré, Orwell, Penelope Fitzgerald, or already got and discreetly moved to far end of the bookshelf so my conscience won’t see them – yes, I'm talking about you, Nabokov, Barbara Pym and Dick Francis). Anyway, here's the list in its entirey, unsullied by hindsight or the very sensible urge to rewrite embarrassing bits (of which there are many).

When I’m back in the UK I want to:

Drink Earl Grey in the morning and Darjeeling in the afternoon
Read the biographies of PG Wodehouse, Graham Greene and Samuel Beckett
Read James Shapiro’s Contested Will
Sell a few non-essential body parts so I can afford an iPhone [very 2010]
Eat my body weight in muesli. And fish fingers, cheddar, bacon, sausages, scones, curry, Percy Pigs, apples and field mushrooms
Join the National Trust and English Heritage so I can explore England
Buy Julian Cope’s The Modern Antiquarian so I can explore Neolithic England
Drink too much beer, preferably Adnam’s
Have a cream tea at The Orchard
Cycle everywhere
Start saving up for a narrow boat
Plan a garden full of wind and water
Use abebooks to buy old paperbacks by Simon Gray, Somerset Maugham, TH White, EM Forster, original editions of The Whitsun Weddings and High Windows, Robert Graves’ Goodbye to all that, Anthony Thwaite, perhaps, and the entire Everyman Wodehouse collection
Settle either in the countryside or a garden suburb like Richmond
Retire to Cambridge

OTHER BOOKS I NEED:

Kevin Jackson, Constellation of Genius, 1922: Modernism Year One
Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo
Nabokov, Pale Fire
Mann, Magic Mountain plus Dr Faustus/syphilis paper
Samuel Butler, The Way of all Flesh
Madox Ford, Parade’s End
Balzac, Père Goriot
Orwell, Essays
John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In From The Cold
Aristotle’s Rhetoric, Horace’s Ars Poetica and Cicero’s De oratore, all for reference purposes
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo, A Biography
Marx, Das Kapital
Wheatley, The Devil Rides Out
Paul Murray, Skippy Dies
Jean-Claude Forest & Jacques Tardi, You Are There
Gregory McDonald, the Fletch novels
Francis Spufford, Red Plenty
John Lanchester, Whoops (Why Everyone Owes and No One Can Pay)
Margaret Macmillan, The Uses and Abuses of History
Sebastian Faulks, A Week In December
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary
Angus Wilson, The Wrong Set and Hemlock and After
Henry Green, Loving
Dick Francis (one of L’s favs)
Gladys Mitchell, prolific detective writer, L’s ‘the great Gladys,’ author of When Last I Died, etc.
Michael Innes, another crime writer appreciated by L.
Barbara Pym, A Glass of Blessings
Paul Scott, Staying On (Booker Prize winner 77)
Poets: Motion, Thwaite, Gavin Ewart, Douglas Dunn (Elegies), Jonathan Price (Everything Must Go, esp. ‘Natural Causes’, first poem and ‘Visit to the Burnt Castle’), Martin Bell, JC Hall (less so – esp. ‘Twelve Minutes’, ‘The Scyther’)
Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore