The Inventory
In the opening chapter, Dahl presents an inventory of things which he can view from his position his seated in his chair as he prepares to write. Similes populate the imagery:
“A steel hip…once embedded in my body…and had to be replaced…looks like a Turkish dagger, and it has a little ball on one end.”
“A rough stone ball as big as a melon which has been cut in half to reveal very beautiful blue-veined agate inside.”
Season’s Greetings
Fast-forward through the year and the final chapter begins with a riff on Christmas cards. Dahl notes that he has a preference homemade type. At the other end of the preference aisle are the kind that inspired metaphor:
“The cards I hate getting are the ones that have on them a color photograph of the senders…surrounded by their offspring. You can be half-blinded by the self-satisfaction shining out of their faces as they stare back at you from the card.”
February
The book is separated by chapters devoted to each month. Not that each chapter is necessarily devoted subjects or topics obviously related to that month. The opening to the second chapter is, however, definitely concerned with the peculiarities of the month linking the winding down of winter and the churning up of spring:
“I treat February like a school term and keep counting how many days there are left until it is over.”
May and August
Both May and August are months to which Dahl assigns an existential status through metaphor. Because so much of the text is devoted to his observations of the natural world, it should not be surprising that this status has do with wildlife, in this case specifically nature in the form of flying creatures:
“May is the month of the cuckoo.”
“I find August in England a rather torpid month…But if nothing else, is I the month of the butterfly.”
The Train Trip
The opening to the chapter on August is an account of a taking a train from Paris to Marseilles. Not first class, but third, which included wooden seats. But that was hardly the only discomforting aspect:
“I sat awake all night long with the fumes of garlic from my fellow passengers drifting around me like poisonous gas.”
