The Gnome King reviewed You Made Me Late Again! by Pam Ayres
Review of 'You Made Me Late Again!' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
When I was a kid my Grandad had a load of old records, mostly rubbish country music but he had one which was Pam Ayres reading some of her poetry and doing a few of her sketches. Being young and stuck at yer grandparents with not much else to do I listened to Pam Ayres loads of times, I never seemed to get bored with it and still managed to laugh during each listening. Fast forward 10000 years and my daughter has to do a reading challenge for school, one of the books has to be poems, she wasn't looking forward to that so I got her to give this book a go when I came across it. That was a mistake, she hated it, so I thought I'd give it a go and see how bad it was. I can see it isn't her type of humour, I must …
When I was a kid my Grandad had a load of old records, mostly rubbish country music but he had one which was Pam Ayres reading some of her poetry and doing a few of her sketches. Being young and stuck at yer grandparents with not much else to do I listened to Pam Ayres loads of times, I never seemed to get bored with it and still managed to laugh during each listening. Fast forward 10000 years and my daughter has to do a reading challenge for school, one of the books has to be poems, she wasn't looking forward to that so I got her to give this book a go when I came across it. That was a mistake, she hated it, so I thought I'd give it a go and see how bad it was. I can see it isn't her type of humour, I must have been an odd child to like this stuff.
Her poems are mainly about getting old, your kids moving on with their lives, crazy pets and no longer being able to hold your drink anymore. I chuckled a few times at those poems, especially the crazy pets ones. One of the stand out poems was "Tippy Tappy Feet" incredibly moving poem about returning from the vet after having your dog put down, not hearing the excited tap of feet on the floor as the dog races to meet you and not having the heart to put the dogs things away.
At the beginning of each group of poems there were some funny little anecdotes, I found them a lot more interesting than a lot of the poems.
I have noticed that the start of the world seems to have broken Pam slightly, a few of her new poems are not as upbeat. "Count me out" covers how dangerous it is to do anything these days, Pam says "Now I daren't make eye contact with people I meet". And in "All aboard the Ark or the Bigot's Ballad" you can see how angry the bigots in the UK have made her.
An interesting collection and a nice trip down memory lane.