Dear LPG,

I am no chaser or egghead, but it is good to know that I am knowledgeable enough to be able to converse with others on any subject or topic.

My father instilled the virtue of reading books into all of his children when we were young, and I think that that practice helped all the children of my era to retain at least some of what we read, and I think that, in this way, knowledge can be yours. I also used to be an ardent comic book reader until one day he took away the comic I was reading at the shop, telling me that I should start reading educational books.  My dad had, in abundance, all kinds of books of different sizes and thicknesses.  There were also many magazines at home.   I remember reading editions of ‘Ebony’ magazine.  It was the size of a tabloid newspaper, but with more pages.  I also browsed through copies of ‘Playboy’, ‘True Story’, ‘True romance’ and ‘Photo play’ where there would be many articles where movie stars would tell their stories.   I remember Rock Hudson telling his and pictures of Frank Sinatra posing with his wife Ava Gardner.

Over the years, youngsters have always had their favourite movie stars, both male and female.  I remember choosing a seriously big book to read.  It was so thick and heavy that it must have been a volume. 

That book told of all the crimes that humans have committed, all the ‘cides’, Homicide, Patricide, Parricide, Matricide plus other crimes; too many to remember. According to the book, it listed all that happened between 1949 and 1955, and I remember returning to that book quite a few times while I was growing up in Kingston, Jamaica.

I have gone through my life without aspiring to be like anyone, but I suppose that my ambition now is to be a bit more like televisions ‘Eggheads’ or ‘Chasers’. I think that it would be a great feeling and I can imagine them as youngsters spending hours reading books while their peers were outside playing or doing other pass-time things while they thought of the bookworms as weird for spending so much time indoors reading.  Now they are having the last laugh while they earn fame and finances from their knowledge of things.  That is cool.

Rudy Morgan…