I'm currently reading Derren Brown's 'Confessions of a Conjuror' and recommend it to anybody who professes to be a fan of whimsical ramblings (readers of this blog, then; assuming there are any!) It's supposed to be a biography, which it loosely is, but it's also full of mad little gems such as a detailed description of the songs Derren hums while he's brushing his teeth, his thoughts on the 'life's preconceptions that have been abandoned' and some cracking anecdotes, including one about a friend of his on a train that had me laughing so hard I had to put the book down for a few minutes. It's totally bonkers, but so far it's one of the best and funniest books I've ever read.
But I digress. I wanted to discuss my bookmarks (who says blogs can't be serious and informative when they need to be?) - of which I have two. One is a slightly dogeared magnetic one featuring a picture of 'Little Miss Sunshine' walking along the road with headphones on and whistling. I bought this one myself; to be honest it was a toss-up between her and 'Mr. Clever' and seeing as I'm not a Mr. (I'm not technically a Miss either, but it's definitely closer) I bought that one. The reason I bought it is because the one I'd been using previously had been an old-fashioned flowered one, which had done the job but could be embarrassing in social situations, being as it looked like one that might have been used by an elderly lady, placed very precisely inside a copy of 'Crocheting Circle' (a magazine title I just made up, or at least as far as I know it is). Anyway, I once dropped said 'flowery embarrassment bookmark' by accident on the train, and a rather dashing man picked it up and handed it back to me. On his face, I imagined, was an expression of bemusement at my choice of page-holder; his bewildered thoughts spreading to what on Earth I must have been reading. Like I say, these were my imagined thoughts of his, but they were toe-curling enough for me to want to rush out and buy a new bookmark almost immediately.
The second bookmark was bought, coincidentally, at around the same time as Little Miss Sunshine, and is an ornate silver butterfly one, given to me by my best friend. This bookmark is currently the owner of the title of 'Best Birthday Gift I Have Ever Received', because it's something beautiful and useful, and anyone who buys me a good bookmark quite obviously knows me and my likes very well indeed.
And so...these days, whenever I open a new book, I'm faced with the decision as to which bookmark I'm going to use throughout its duration. I need to consider the book's general tone, themes and author...when I was reading 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' for example, Little Miss Sunshine looked supremely out of place. But she was perfect for Caitlin Moran's 'How to be a Woman', in which my ornate silver butterfly looked...well, just that little bit too much (though in 'War and Peace' it was at its best...a supreme ornament). Sometimes it's fun to be a bit subversive, for example by placing Little Miss Sunshine in a copy of Bertrand Russell's 'Why I Am Not a Christian'; an act which instantly cheers up the whole book and makes me think that you can be an atheist AND be a little bit cheery at the same time. They're not binary, much as people like Richard Dawkins would have us all believe otherwise.
So there you go...a stream-of-consciousness piece about bookmarks, inspired by my reading of Derren Brown, into whose book Little Miss Sunshine just HAD to go. Read it if you like pointless overly-long rambles just like this!
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