IT'S very hard to admit that you don't read. It's a bit like saying you don't like children or fresh air. Books are good for you, they are like vitamins - only a mad person would say that they could never get interested in Vitamin C. So it was unusual to meet a man the other night who said he hardly reads at all.
He didn't say it with any pride or bravado, but neither did he show any great regret. He didn't seem sufficiently apologetic for his non-contribution to the industry from which I earn my living.
The newspapers were too detailed, he said - you'd be grounded for the week if you were to take them all. There were too many books on too many subjects. The racks of magazines were only all regurgitating the same thing in slightly different formats to attract advertisements.
That's the way things were.
His lack of shame or self-consciousness was refreshing in a world where people pretend to have read far more than they have and where we all make great fun of a personality who begins every sentence I was re-reading ... Proust or Swinburne or Ibsen" when we know that person never read them in the first place.
But I suppose I was also made a little uneasy by the way the non-reader was able to eliminate all books, papers, the printed word so easily from his life. I mean, he was in the motoring trade, and I asked him how he would feel if I said I had no time for vehicles, that I didn't see any place in my life for things with wheels and engines?
He said he would just assume that I was an eccentric. People needed transport. I would have to have taken some kind of Green stance against it to make any sense at all; while in his own case he had no stance against reading, it was just that he didn't do any.
He didn't apologise and say it was lack of time, like I do.
When I haven't read some book I bleat on about those great days I used to spend commuting, taking the bus from Hammersmith to Fleet Street, 40 minutes each way, when I got five books read in a week. I even go through mental torment trying to work out why I can't find the time to read more nowadays when I only have a 30-second journey to work, and a houseful of books on the shelves. But this man was unrepentant and unworried by it.
I wondered for a wild moment if he might be illiterate. I know someone in London who hid this fact for years and only came out as unable to read and write when her daughter went to school. But that was not the case here, nor was he dyslexic. He just managed fine without reading, he said, like people who had never played poker or eaten candy floss.
So I wondered was it all a matter of never being brought up to read, and he said that was part of it. There had been little time for reading at home, he didn't remember either of his parents reading stories, only telling the children about Red Riding Hood. And then it was the pictures, and he was quite young when television came, so that was the relaxation after school work was finished. And no, he had never been one for going to the library; they didn't encourage that so much when he was a kid. Children were a bit frowned on in his day, or tat was his memory of it anyway. But to be fair, his brother, who had the same upbringing and was in the same business, was a great reader. He took an Irish daily paper, an English one and an evening paper every single day, enough to stock a corner shop at weekends. And there were shelves of books in his house, so it couldn't just have been the parents' fault could it?
TRYING desperately not to sound like his form mistre asked him what was the problem. And that seemed to be it. He found his mind wandering and then when he went back to the book he couldn't remember who this one or that one was and he had to start again when he got bored because he seemed to have been reading the same thing over and over.
Maybe if he heard it spoken I wonderered? I saw a huge future for audio books here, the pleasant tones of an actor or actress reading it, the whole thing much abridged with all the flowery bits left out - they were hugely popular.
But no he had tried those, too, in the car and funnily they drove him mad: he kept having other thoughts coming into his head.
What kind of thoughts? (Maybe he chose terminally dull books to listen to. If I were listening to a good story no thought in the world would, get near me.)
But no, the books he had tried where he had failed to get to chapter three were fine stories that you'd think would keep thoughts at a distance.
These must be particular pressing thoughts?
Not at all, any old thoughts he said, like - would it be quicker to go this way or that, should he listen to the radio for a traffic update, how much mileage was there on that green Rover in front, how many times would you need to rent a dinner jacket before it became uneconomical and you should buy one?
Those kind of things.
Now, I don't think anything loftier than that when I'm stuck into the latest David Baldacci novel, but my mind is so full of wondering will the guy get to make the emergency call on the mobile phone before the Enemy spots what he's up to ... to notice if the green Rover had driven over my car six times displaying its mileage in flashing lights.
He was admirably unfazed in a city which has gone book-mad this weekend to be a person who doesn't read them. It was like being a person who doesn't ski or smoke or drink pints. He says there seem to be enough readers around to keep those of us depending on them in shoe leather; he thinks it's good rather than bad to be able to get absorbed in a book, but it's not a character flaw if you can't do it.
He has a son who doesn't read, but the boy doesn't know one end of a car from the other and he couldn't name anyone who plays for Manchester United. The boy is, however, interested in gardening and plants and growing flowers from seed in plastic bags - he's even building a rockery for a neighbour.
So suppose this lad becomes a great garden designer or a TV gardener or runs a nursery, who's ever going to say that his life was wasted because he didn't read about Russians celebrating" their name days in the last century or Leopold Bloom taking a trip around Dublin at the start of this one?
He thinks that for a race which writes and reads as many books as the Irish are meant to do, we, have a rare streak of snobbery in us which makes us think many books in a house good, Jew books in a house bad - whether anyone reads them or understands them or not. Answer that, he says, knowing, of course, that only a fool would try.