IN MY MIND’S EYE

A THOUGHT DIARY

JAN MORRIS Faber, 320pp, £16.99, Oldie price £10.76 inc p&p

‘I have never before in my life kept a diary of my thoughts, and here at the start of my tenth decade… I am having a go at it. Good luck to me,’ wrote the great travel writer and journalist Jan Morris in her 91st year. Here are the results: a daily journal of passing thoughts and fancies from a nonagenarian in blissful semiretirement in her cottage in Wales. ‘It is,’ thought the Evening Standard’s Hermione Eyre, ‘a thing of wonder: a diary of daily musings with zero pretension. It is light yet profound, ecstatic yet melancholy, ethereal yet droll. Which writer could breezily contain so many contradictions, like Tiresias with jokes?’

Morris hates zoos and sheep, loves marmalade and her battered Honda Civic, keeps fit by walking (singing as she goes), hymns the beauty of Portmeirion and Porthmadog, casts a sometimes jaded eye on the outside world, and contemplates her approaching end with equanimity. And if she has no thoughts to record, she says so: ‘That’s odd. I don’t seem to have thought anything today. It does happen.’

‘Today, Morris’s horizons are limited to what she remembers and what she sees at home in north-west Wales,’ said Kate Kellaway in the

Observer. ‘But it is its limitations that makes this book valuable and rare. It reveals so much about how to soldier on in your 90s. Old age is not for sissies and Morris is a trouper, keeping faith with the writing life.’ Its real heart, thought Kellaway, was ‘her sense of the rhythms of domestic life’. Sara Wheeler in Literary Review also liked this ‘splendidly quirky confection that mixes the trivial with the serious, like life’. This ‘kindly collection of acorn-sized essays’, wrote Wynn Wheldon in the

Spectator, ‘is weightier than it seems’.