My modest list of minor poetry prizes is unlikely to be augmented by any for sports photography but this picture is as much a momento of how nice it turned out at Wincanton on Thursday, despite the weather forecast and early drenchings, for the magnificently realized Plan A of what to do for my 60th birthday.
With the bar people kept up to the mark with an order for six completely different drinks - we aren't the sort to be happy with six pints of lager, please- it was a choice gathering and my own This is Your Life in miniature. Almost as gratifying as that fine body of characters from the autobiography was the impressive win by Sebastopol, as advised by all three expert analysts in the Preview Night below.
Birthday events are gradually coming to an end now after two weeks, not least with the review above of a book received, reviewed while enjoying a very acceptable bottle of Chilean Pinot Noir, equally well received. I am not worthy. No, I'm really not. I'm not just saying that.
I had ordered the Clive James on Larkin book already but was able to cancel the order. That is how good one's mates can be at knowing what you want. In fact it's the third time that, or something similar, has happened.
And maybe that will have to be it for parties. It won't get any better than that. It's the same policy as that I adopted with regard to writing poems.
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But the long-running motif of the TLS subscription is finally over. I've stopped the direct debit. Actually, it was stopped already, I was told. They stopped it.
It seems a weird way of doing business. Am I really so persona non grata that they don't want me as a subscriber.
Three and a half years ago I took it out on an offer to follow any response to the letter we had published on the letters page but by the time they had it sorted and began to send me them, the moment had passed.
I wasn't always sure I wanted it, with its self-regard and sometimes more esoteric subject matter than I required but its sympathies were in the right place and I was glad a couple of times when the internet could finish the crossword for me. But then I had an e-mail regretting that I'd cancelled when I hadn't even though it still arrived every Thursday.
Two weeks ago it didn't come so I rang them up on the Monday and they apologized and said they'd send it. But it didn't turn up last week either.
Okay. Enough's enough. Maybe we'll try LRB, The People's Friend or The Pig Breeder's Gazette. I rang the bank but found it had been stopped at the other end. Have they found out I cheated on the crossword.
I'll miss Sean O'Brien when he does the Freelance column and I owed it to the TLS that I saw Helen Farish's poem, Pastoral, but my pile of back copies can be re-read if ever I miss it too much because I will have forgotten most of what's in them.
It seems to me no way to run a paper but what can you do.
