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Bywater, Michael "Lost Worlds. What Have We Lost & Where Did it Go?" Granta, London, 2004. Hbk. 296pp. Bibliography, index. ISBN 1-86207-701-0. £12.99

Firstly the title. Anyone wanting another discourse on Atlantis and such like will find very little here - although they do get a mention. Rather Bywater, in this alphabetically arranged compendium, is generally after more elusive and often more personal lost worlds.

Much here relates to the lost world of childhood: of holidays, of toys and sweets, of family members and school days. In particular (and could it be otherwise?) Bywater's own. Now this makes for very entertaining and evocative vignettes but it also points up how personal much of this loss is. Some I can relate to - anyone who was a small boy in the 1950's may well have spent many a pleasant hour constructing a bijou suburban villa using Bayko - but who born more recently has heard of it? Canford Cliffs is evidently where his family holidays were undertaken - but I've never been there (but much of it sounds painfully familiar.)

There is an attempt at a more general historical reckoning of loss here as well - we read of London Fogs, of disappeared diseases and illnesses, words and places and the like. Even God and sundry other gods get a look in, the alphabetical arrangement renders everything of equal value in this regard (despite Bywater's continual pops at relativism).

However, I suspect that there is a much deeper sense of loss that underlies this book, the text of which is bracketed by a quote from and an anecdote about Douglas Adams, with whom Michael Bywater was evidently great friends, and whose unexpected and early passing has obviously brought Bywater face to face with the greatest loss of all - one's own life. So one could see this collection of mini-essays as a roundabout way of the author both acknowledging his own mortality and maybe, by recording so much apparently trivial information about himself, attempting to ensure that something of himself remains after his mortal body has long passed away.

So, is it worth spending the money on this particular book? It will make an excellent present for the demographic currently labelled "Grumpy Old Men", and for others it will provide a gateway into a world they never knew (and therefore can never have properly "lost"?).

Enjoyable but not essential.

6/10

Richard Alexander