On Trying To Keep Still

<p><b>''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 </b>(on <i>Why Didn''t You Just Do What You Were Told?</i>)<br><br>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 Sámi 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.</p>