On Trying To Keep Still

''I was so absorbed by her writing it was unreal . . . I find myself hungry to find the next morsel of who Jenny was and what her life was like'' EMILIA CLARKE (on Why Didn''t You Just Do What You Were Told?)

Jenny Diski''s attempt to keep still and mentally idle resulted in a year in which she travelled to New Zealand, spent two months almost alone in a cottage in the country and visited the S- people of Lapland. Diski fails to keep still and, like the philosopher Montaigne, keeps a record of her ramblings both mental and physical hoping as he did in time to make her mind ashamed of itself. Interspersed with ill-tempered descriptions of these trips are digressions on the subject of her sore foot; her childhood desire for ''a condition'', thoughts about growing older, spiders, fundamentalism and the problems of keeping warm.