In the beginning…

…was The Word. And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Well, actually in the beginning was a conversation on a train with my friend Marie, who, like me, is a Nurse Consultant in child mental health. She was describing to me a new book club that had been started up by a group of colleagues at work. Marie was excited about the opportunities to chat, discuss books and generally socialise, all of which sounded great. But as she went on to describe the need for privacy, taking it in turns to go to other people’s houses, everyone brings wine or cakes etc I realised that what she was describing was an all-female group, which was doing things in a particularly female (even ‘girlie’) way.

So, as the idea appealed to me I wondered how blokes would do a book club. The essence was the same, a group of like-minded chaps who enjoyed a good conversation about matters of intellectual challenge, but probably wouldn’t think to provide doilies and angel cake. It occurred to me that the sort of people I’d like to have these conversations with all rather liked a drop of beer, but actually getting together for a beer often seemed like a bit of a self-indulgence, what with family commitments and all. In particular I hadn’t seen Paul and Kevin for a little while, at least not out of work time (and then not often, we don’t actually work together, just have our paths cross through mutual interests sometimes), so I proposed we meet up and discuss this concept.

Somewhere along the line Paul invited Dave along, which was fine because I’ve known Dave for years, even shared an office with him a long time ago whilst I was on a temporary secondment to the School of Nursing where he works. Even better was the fact that three or four was not really enough for a book club, so we needed an organic growth of like-minded souls who could stimulate enough difference to get some really good conversations going.

So, allowing for the need to accommodate our geographical spread across the city of Nottingham (and Derby in Paul’s case) we arranged a meet at the Victoria Hotel in Beeston, generally known as ‘The Vic’, a place familiar to us all. Actually when we got there it turned out that Paul hadn’t mentioned the book club idea to Dave at all, so it came as a small surprise to him, but he quickly came onboard with what is a splendid idea.

Now, as the originator of the idea I was surprised by how things turned out on a couple of fronts, but very pleasantly surprised. The first was that Paul had been reading a book about the ‘Lunar Society’ based in Derby which comprised some very enterprising gentlemen. Paul enthused about this group and how they had met and developed ideas in the eighteenth century, pimping carriages and taking daring balloon flights at the dawn of air travel as well as hotbedding ideas and philosophical concepts. It seemed a suitable inspiration for our more modest group…

I have to admit that I haven’t read the book yet, but as Paul is talking about talking an afternoon trip to enjoy the history and cafe society of Lichfield, which features heavily in the book apparently, I guess I’d better have a peek and try and catch up on the history of ideas within it.

The second surprise was that when we started talking about what books we might like to discuss, that the suggestions were not just fiction, but included some fairly heavy philosophical tomes. Well, not tomes as such, because we decided that meeting monthly was about right and we didn’t want anything too long, to avoid it becoming a chore. Nonetheless Camus and Sartre came up, making my initial pick of The Kite Runner seem a bit tame. But I want an excuse to read it, and this seemed as good a reason as any. The theme of an interest in mental health, and by implication the human condition, also seemed to shine through…

So, first pick is from Kevin, a little light reading, which we will meet on the last Wednesday of the month to discuss The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus.