Whether you are playing with a little boat or not, a hot bath is the best place for all of us in the miserable month of January. The excitement of Christmas is long past and school is soon beginning again and there is really nothing to look forward to except the cold weeks ahead. If I had my way I would remove January from the calendar altogether and have an extra July instead.
The book is separated into twelve chapters, one for each month. It commences in January with Dahl recalling being a child in the bathtub when one day his little motorized boat he used to play with developed a leak and started to sink. The diary-like recollection of a year in passing thus begins in the bleak winter with a bleak remembrance of what was normally a happy time gone suddenly bad. This effectively situates the tone and mood of the entire piece which combines happy memories and sad ones, with bright illuminations and dark introspection. The year in question comes at the very end of Dahl’s life with the full recognition that the ending was on its way.
Bumblebees and honeybees have also woken up and are in among the crocuses, looking for pollen. Talking about crocuses, did you know that the most expensive food in the world when sold by weight is saffron? Saffron is a deep-orange powder used for flavoring and coloring rice and cakes, and although the flavor it imparts is subtle and wonderful, few of ever get to taste it.
This entry comes in March and provides a perfect example of the structural looseness of the particular work by the author. Short digressive riffs on unrelated topics characterize practically every page—certainly every monthly entry. This paragraph also gets across the method by which the entire framework of the volume is set down: much like Seinfeld, this is a book ostensibly about nothing as whole that nevertheless becomes quite dense with meaning in specific passages. This chapter starts out being about birds’ eggs, but then once the left turn is made into the realm of saffron, the reader learns a substantial amount it. And then, like that, March ends and April begins.
I wonder where you are going on your summer holidays. France perhaps, or Italy or Spain or Greece or better still to Norway or the west coast of Scotland. The coast of Cornwall is lovely too if only you can find a place that doesn’t have a million people in it. Preparing to go off on your summer holidays is one of the best moments of the entire year when you are young. Have a great time.
The warmth of midsummer has put Dahl into a state of mind ready for travel, but what it really notable about this passage is the direct address to the reader. Consider that the book is titled using a first-person pronoun, but this paragraph is written with extensive use of the second person. His health deteriorating and the recognition that the onset of death was likely coming quickly around the corner, Dahl doesn’t direct his ruminations about travel onto himself even with dreams or fantasies of heading anywhere in Europe from Norway down to Greece. He is instead quite notably projecting those desires onto his readers and in doing so draws them into the book as cohorts or even, one might go so far to suggest, collaborators.
