I Revisit the Castle

Incidentally, for those of you who were wondering, the actual first lines of I Capture The Castle are:

"I write this sitting in the kitchen sink. That is, my feet are in it; the rest of me is on the draining-board, which I have padded with our dog's blanket and a tea-cosy. I can't say that I am really comfortable, and there is a depressing smell of carbolic soap, but this is the only part of the kitchen where there is any daylight left."

Lovely.

I Capture the Castle - and hopefully, an audience

So, I was considering how one started a vaguely-literary but generally aimless blog (none of this niche rubbish), when my favourite opening line from any book ever popped into my head. Or rather, a paraphrase of it did, and the paraphrase was this:

I write this sitting in the kitchen sink, to catch the last of the light.

Of course, it isn't true, I'm sitting in my chair in my little room in Cambridge (nar). But that is no way to start a book, or even a blog. With that line, though, Dodie nailed it. Funny, she is one of many writers whose books have become independently famous; I wonder how many people would know that she wrote One Hundred and One Dalmatians, for instance, or that Joseph Heller wrote Catch-22. Whereas you will have heard of Dickens or Shakespeare or Jane Austen even if you could not name one of their books/plays.



I have a horrible feeling this is already overbearingly pretentious. NEVER MIND, onwards and upwards etc etc. I am off to the library to return my habitually late books and get some new ones out for this week's essay (‘The Partition of India created more minority problems than it solved’. Discuss this view of the post-colonial states in South Asia.) And then to Waterstones, to find out what the opening lines to I Capture the Castle actually are.