8. Where would you rather be than taking this exam?

A. Outside      B. At home      C. Elsewhere      D. In bed

Today was History. Having lived through an increasing amount of it, I felt a momentary wave of optimism that this time I might be of some genuine use to Dylan. I’d been hoping for a little bit of Tudors (I have read the first 120 pages of Wolf Hall and so consider myself something of an expert on the topic) or the origins of the First World War but then he started to get out his books on mid-nineteenth-century European diplomacy and my heart – like the ocean liner RMS Lusitania on 7th May 1915 – sank . . .

The Schleswig-Holstein Question.

I’d failed to understand this topic back in the 80s – and those were simpler times – so what chance did I have now? Stuart had already made him a full-colour timeline of key events so that just deepened my feelings of ignorance and inadequacy.

Fair play to Dylan, though, who did his best to keep me motivated throughout. When we were done, he took me and my hangover to the park for an ice-cream.

Sunday June 3rd

Here begins a new approach to book group. My performance last week was poor, even by my own shabby standards, and I’d been reflecting on this for a while. What has been lacking is motivation; it’s simply been too easy not to read the book, particularly when there’ve been so many other things clamouring for my attention. What I needed was an incentive.

I headed off into town to Bloomer’s Antiquarian Books to see if I could pick up a copy of this month’s choice, Robinson Crusoe. A collectable antique edition would surely provide the much-needed impetus for me to take it off the shelf and get the thing read.

Mr Bloomer is more antiquarian than most of his stock, and most of his stock is very old indeed. There is a particularly attractive nineteenth-century edition, he informed me, illustrated with engravings by Cruikshank, which he was hopeful of getting his liver-spotted, antiquarian hands on over the next few days. While there, I picked up a few other titles, including a first edition of Brideshead Revisited, a signed copy of Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings and a six-volume set of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, all of which I thought might lend a certain air of erudition to my writer’s shed when it arrives next weekend.

I paid for these and put down a deposit for Robinson Crusoe, rather ashen-faced. Who’d have thought that old books covered in dust could be so expensive?

Monday June 4th