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Time For Lights Out

by Raymond Briggs - £18.99  Vintage Publishing (2019)
hardback    ISBN 13: 9781787331952 | ISBN 10: 1787331954

In his customary pose as the grumpiest of grumpy old men, Raymond Briggs contemplates old age and death... and doesn’t like them much. Illustrated with Briggs’s inimitable pencil drawings, Time for Lights Out is a collection of short pieces, some funny, some melancholy, some remembering his wife who died young, others about the joy of grandchildren, of walking the dog...
 
He looks back at his schooldays and his time as an evacuee during the war, and remembers his parents and the house in which he grew up. But most, like this one, are about his home in Sussex:
 
Looking round this house,
What will they say,
The future ghosts?
 
There must have been
Some barmy old bloke here,
Long-haired, artsy-fartsy type,
Did pictures for kiddy books
Or some such tripe.
 
You should have seen the stuff
He stuck up in that attic!
Snowman this and snowman that,
Tons and tons of tat.

(Price & availability last checked: January 2020)