Martin Walker
Weekend reading is about treating yourself, marking the difference from the working week. It is lying in bed with the newspapers, swapping sections back and forth with one's partner while refilling the coffee mugs and making fresh toast.
Then it's on to the magazines we didn't have time for during the week, or those articles whose corners we turned down to read later. And then it's time for lunch and a relaxed lead-in to that time defined by one of the loveliest phrases in the language - weekend afternoon.
There's something about the doubled syllables that murmurs comfort and promises long lazy hours stretching out into wide acres of self-indulgence. It's a time for easy chairs and kicked-off shoes, for hammocks and eyeshades and books that nuzzle their way into your affections like furry puppies. It's a safe bet that most peoples' favourite books were first encountered on a weekend afternoon.
Looking back, I suppose that reading on weekend afternoons was a logical development from my childhood with a working mother. Saturday mornings we would take the bus or tram into town to shop, and I would be left at the public library while mum blitzed the market stalls in the square by the town hall. Then she'd pick me up and we'd take the tram home. We would eat lunch, and then I'd start on the new library books.
That was the start of my first love affair, and I became a promiscuous little devil. There were the Just William books and H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, a combination that introduced me to the contrasting charms of hero and anti-hero. There was Rosemary Sutcliff's marvellous adventure of Roman Britain, The Eagle of the Ninth and then the aftermath of Rome with T. H. White's The Once and Future King. If you cannot be introduced to the Arthurian legends and the Knights of the Round Table over mead and wood smoke in some baronial hall with huge hunting dogs snoring amid the rushes and chicken bones at your feet, a weekend afternoon at home is the best alternative.
After childhood, weekend afternoons take on a different magic. In college, after sleeping late, afternoons are the time for reading the stuff that isn't on the curriculum, for plunging into genres that you may never explore again, like the year I devoured science fiction, or the month I sank deep into Jane Austen and emerged only by way of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones.
Weekend afternoons are a time for exploring new authors, sometimes ones I come across at literary festivals, where I like what I hear and so resolved to read their work, or else for sinking back into the comfort of a new book by a familiar pen.
Time stretches out comfortably into evening as the pages turn, and a little imp of glee murmurs somewhere in the back of my mind that there's another weekend afternoon tomorrow, and then there's always next week, and always another book opening the door into another world, another mind, another enchantment.
Martin Walker is the author of Bruno, Chief of Police.