The Likely Lads Get Vaccinated

The Likely Lads Get Vaccinated

We never thought that it would come to this,
Exchanging repartee in our old job
Where I addressed the managers as ‘Miss’

And if you were Terry, I must be Bob.

We’d also quote Jim Royle and both Steptoes

And left poetry readings at half-time, 

Back to the pub being the place one goes 

When it’s too hot indoors to enjoy rhyme.

But now we qualify for our first jab 

On what some think is the first day of Spring.

I’ll see you in the usual place, Soft Lad, 

And hope we can still remember to bring 

Proof of our dates of birth and all such stuff 

Though one look at us ought to be enough.

Out of My Head and other stories

 It's not often we have a TV review here and this is officially the very first time for an i-player review. Good Lord, what will they think of next but I'm told than one day all television will be like that and seeing the second half of Tomorrow's World because you switched on in plenty of time for Top of the Pops at 7.25 on Thursday is a thing of the past.

But I am indebted to my Liverpool correspondent for the tip about Can't Get You Out of My Head by Adam Curtis, a wide-ranging survey of what was really going on in the C20th. Through the stories of various significant figures, his main point might be to refute all the mad-cap conspiracy theories which is timely given that for the last four years they formed the basis of government policy in the USA. It tells the stories of the likes of Madame Mao and the inglorious history of C20th China. One conclusion one might deduce from it is how revolutions often land you back where you started, if not further behind. The result of that is to leave people so bereft of anything to believe in that they believe in nothing. If the overall object of the exercise is to provide happiness and it proves not possible then one can at least make people think they're happy because they can't tell the difference. Perhaps that's where consumerism and football come in useful. It reminds me of something Simon Schama said in his History of the Jews, that they prefer to wait forever for the messiah rather than have him arrive because 2000 years ago the one that promised redemption and that he was the saviour didn't work. But although 'happiness' is surely unarguably a reasonable aim, there are some of us who might not be happy being happy. We don't quite trust it and know that we only 'feel happy' and so feeling happy enough that we don't trust ourselves to feel happy might by now be the best we can hope for.

I wouldn't want to challenge Adam Curtis or misrepresent him because there's a lot in these six programmes of 74  minutes each and I've only seen three of them so far but he credits Alexander Solzhenitsyn as being one of those that decided there was nothing to believe in after the failure of the revolution. That's not what I understood of Solzhenitsyn who I remember in the 1970's describing Democratic Socialism as an oxymoron like 'boiling ice'. I had understood that Solzhenitsyn became a patriot for old Mother Russia if not even for the Tsarist old days but don't quote me on any of that, see if you can find time for Can't Get You Out of My Head and I hope you won't regret it. The soundtrack includes some things one might like. I went to some lengths to find out what one track was and briefly found myself a new favourite band. I'm not sure how long that will last.

--

But once in a while one can see how the world has moved on since, in the Stan & Ollie film, Oliver Hardy buys a newspaper from a newsboy to find a horse racing result (in the days before the At the Races website). It is well beyond our comprehension now. Strange e-mails one gets sometimes. But today, the unrecognized names in the inbox weren't made up ones trying to lure me into some scam. An American poet I briefly exchanged e-mails with some time ago included me in a mailshot advertising a lecture. It's Mon 8th March with Andres Rojas if you really want to know. But I've been made to feel included by since receiving replies to it from two other recipients., one of them from Santa Monica.

That's a bit of a test for my downbeat, provincial attitude. My idea of poetry and theirs could be more of a division than anything we have in common, like Larkin meeting Gary Snyder but you never know.

-

This was the remarkable leader board in a tournament at LiChess yesterday after three games playing 3 minutes plus 2 seconds per move.

 

Joint top out of 604 players, really, since the order is decided by current rating when on equal points. I'm BorderIncident, named after a horse from the 1970's that would have won the Cheltenham Gold Cup but for injury. And I'm officially on fire which means if you've won your last two games you'll keep getting double points until you haven't. Sadly, that's as far as it went and I completely bombed after that and only won one more. I finished 85th, top 9%. I thought I'd slipped the surly bonds of Earth to touch the face of God. But it's not easy keeping it going for a solid hour. You don't know how hard it can be. But I thought I'd take a picture of it while I was there.

Good and Bad Timing and other stories

 The Letters of Thom Gunn is due on Mar 18th, right in the middle of Cheltenham races. That's bad timing but what can you do. Spring promises a major book each month with the biography of Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus due in April and the Oxford lectures of Prof. Armitage in May. So, before that jamboree, I have world enough and time, I think, to finish Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Benjamin Britten and read The Edwardians by Vita Sackville-West and then, I think finally, become a Graham Swift completist by reading Out of This World. And that is good timing. Because it was planned by me. It almost reminds me of being in work. Whichever projects went well seemed to be the ones I was involved in. Only joking.

Carpenter's biography of Auden is a fine thing and so it's no surprise to find that he does a good job, so far at least, on Britten. Britten doesn't belong in my top echelon of favourite composers but I've long been aware of this heavy volume and fancied it. There is some sort of aesthetic similarity, it always seems to me, between Britten and the greatest composer of the C20th, Shostakovich. The trouble, or the main issue, with Britten's story is probably also the reason why one wants to read it, which is not a good reason.

Whereas the biography of Malcolm Sargent from 1970, currently with my parents, doesn't investigate at all the dapper party animal's extra curricular activity, that which is legally only the concern of consenting adults in private seems to be the big issue in who Britten really was. If it wasn't for discussion of that, the book would be much shorter. On the one hand, it is who he was; on the other hand, it's none of our business. But if W.H. Auden is involved, and he was when sharing accommodation in New York with a Bohemian coterie that included Gypsy Rose Lee described by Peter Pears as 'sordid beyond belief', one can be sure he'd make it his business and sort it all out. Matching the accompanying music to one's reading should mean that I become familiar with the Britten discs I have during 600+ pages. I might even make it to disc 2 of the War Requiem.

 

Good poem in The Times today by Prof. Armitage, an unrhymed 15-line sonnet in worthy tribute to Keats as part of that particular anniversary. I have slightly ambivalent attitudes to both of them but much prefer to credit people with their best work rather than hold the other stuff against them.

 

Maybe more later.  I'd put today's Times crossword solution here like I used to except I've recently taken to e-mailing it in on the off-chance of a £20 Waterstone's voucher. There's no percentage in telling everybody the answers so that they can reduce my chances of winning so I'm not doing that anymore.

County

 This isn't going to improve much for any more fiddling about. It is preferable if poems can arrive fully formed because the more one has to 'work' on them the more they look 'worked on' and possibly lose some of their immediacy so it's best to wait until they feel nearly ready before putting biro to the back of old envelope. Which is not to say one doesn't end up with something more than one thought one had, hopefully for the better.

What I did have to do was mangle it round to introduce one more full stop. While I've developed this way of extending sentences with any number of conjunctions, which sounds to me like some ongoing, inclusive grammatical trope, it can't be allowed to go on for too long. A full stop once in a while slows it down and is at least one amendment worth making.

But whereas in olden days there was not much else to do with such things than send them to a print magazine in the hope of a sympathetic hearing, that all seems a bit of a drag these days.

It is a generic English county of the type seen out of train windows and I hope to be able to see the same old ones again sometime later this year. But I imagine the village as an 'objective correlative' of the condition of retirement such as I've found it.

County

A village from The Domesday Book

that gave its name to a rare breed

of cattle that you don’t see now 

lies among fields that stretch towards 

undemanding horizon hills. 

It has no postcards of itself 

like places not too far away 

and has retired from what it used 

to do. In those days farmhands drank 

the local brew they made there from 

orchard fruit or crops harvested 

from the land they harried and carved 

themselves out of. 

                              The time of day 

or time of year bother it less 

than they matter to express trains 

that glide across the shiny tracks 

towards the medium-sized town 

with a mid-table football club 

and salespeople on telephones 

whose job it is to export things. 

But leisure comes to those who wait, 

whether they wanted it or not, 

filling a gap where there’d be none 

if there were nothing filling it.  

Stoned Love

 

I don't imagine for one minute that the passing of Bob Dylan, Robert Plant or maybe not even Paul McCartney will qualify them for a memorial here but Mary Wilson's does.

It's not that they weren't any good but I don't play their records much, if at all, and so they weren't as good for me.

Johnnie Walker's 70's Show was respectful enough to give Mary some space this afternoon on Radio 2, among his preference for West Coast American white boys doing their dreary turns and one was grateful for that. One of Tony Blackburn's dubious regular claims, week after week, on the 60's show, is how he remembers dashing out to the record shop to buy some early 60's 7-inch single. Well, I'm with him now, at least. I remember buying Stoned Love and it doesn't sound any less wonderful now.  

The Guess the Next Word Game and other stories

 The main reason I don't watch films very often is that there's not enough to do. For sure, last night's showing of The Little Stranger, from the book by Sarah Waters was fine and I'm okay with Depardieu, Emmanuelle Beart and Hitchcock but mainly, to the detriment of my quiz ability, I don't know about films.

This week, as part of my casual survey, I noted pictures of people with guns on three out of the seven days in the week's TV Guide in Saturday's Times. Sometimes it can be a science fiction character aiming a laser gun at some enemy from another galaxy, threatening to blow them into the nineteenth dimension. Sometimes it's James Bond or a gangster with a revolver. Or it can be a cowboy with a rifle. While I realize that someone pointing a gun can be a moment of some drama or tension, surely it must lose some of its shock value when it happens in every bloody film one sees. I much prefer a character gazing out of a window on a wintry scene contemplating the futility of it all.

But my mind wanders in films because it's too passive an activity. In reading, one is more involved in some kind of transaction with the writer. But even then, unless it is truly gripping, I can find myself wondering how many pages it is to the end of the chapter, if it's time to stop soon or if something in the writing triggers a poem, as Vita Sackville-West did today. Another diversion is a game I've long played which is to try to guess the next word when turning a page. It adds that extra bit of interest but also shows that I'm concentrating and am in tune with what is going on. During Graham Swift's Shuttlecock last week, I set a personal best by accurately enough getting the rest of the sentence and the next one to a high level of accuracy - six out of the eight words.

Shuttlecock is another fine novel by Swift but still doesn't make me a completist because, checking off the Swift section of the library against the list of his novels in the front of the last one, I find I'm still short of Out of This World. So that's now on its way as I pile through books most enjoyably at a space-filling rate.

-

In Family History, Vita Sackville-West attempted a linguistic innovation of her own that might seem ambitious and eccentric but one can see the point of. Sadly, one novel can't effect such a change in the laanguage as a whole.

She differentiated between two different thats and stuck with the conventional 'that' for the conjunction while introducing 'thatt' for the pronoun. Or, as she puts it, 'the demonstrative adjective and demonstrative or relative pronoun'. As with my lack of attention during reading, I couldn't have been quite as forensically specific as that which is probably why I was only ever a 2:1 student and adopt an irreverent, devil-may-care attitude to reviewing sometimes rather than do it with proper professionalism. But I admire Vita's brave effort even if she's right that the unfamilar irritates until it becomes familar. And it never did.

She is a wonderful writer, though, in a way that contrasts rather than compares with Virginia. She and Graham Swift have filled recent weeks with the sort of pleasures that winter, lockdown and retirement are entirely made for.

-

23 or 24 lines of a poem came fairly readily having got off to some sort of start while dutifully doing some Sunday walking and being able to remember it when I got home. The solitary walk can lend itself to the process once Vita has very tengentially provoked the possibility. There are a few blanks of one or two syllables left in it for later filling in if, on returning to it, it seems worth pursuing, typing up, putting in the file and possibly even printing off. Only then does it become any sort of candidate for 'being a poem' but it might see the light of day here at some stage anyway, with all the qualifying caveats to explain it away. Only then is it possible to say that thatt is thatt.

Missing Bits Out and other stories

I don't know how much of a book one can miss out and still claim to have read it.

Some years ago I found some reaction to my review of a book on Shakespeare from an authorship sceptic who noted that I'd read it all. Also, in the sixth form, in one of my very rare absences, the French teacher returned essays on Gide's tremendous Symphonie Pastorale and told everybody that I'd obviously read it (whereas most of them hadn't). I fondly assumed that that was what you were supposed to do with books. Notwithstanding that I seemed to be the first to spot a typo in some recent translations of Catullus. I thought it was me that could be a bit devil-may-care with some highbrow literary issues but at least the point of the words for me is to read them.

So, when deciding to fast forward a few pages in the Shelley biography, I wondered if I could really say I'd read it. The point was that several pages of exegesis of Prometheus Unbound didn't look promising. I wouldn't have remembered much of it by the next day. I looked to see if there was a more succinct synopsis on the internet but soon gave up on that, made sure nobody was looking, and missed out half a dozen pages. It won't matter.

One can find things to like about Shelley, not much of which is in his poems or his relationships with women and money. It might be instructive to note that some time ago I reviewed Alexander Larman's Byron's Women and said it was just as much about money. It seems odd that the two are somehow linked. 

One differentiates the Romantic poets by the various calibrations of their worthy idealism, their failings in real-life, whether they wrote any sensible poems or not and their self-regard. And one finds that one much prefers Elizabeth Bishop. 

Robert Southey might not have had Shelley's visionary fire but they had their differences and Southey let him know what he thought. He had the advantage over us of having known him.

The book is impressively detailed and still a good read but after being with it for a couple of weeks I will be ready to read something else soon.

-

It's nearly a week since I saw the pop vinyl carted off to see if some dealers could make themselves a few quid out of the artefacts of a big part of my heritage. Some of the earliest items among them were all but 50 years old and had been very important to me. There weren't any New Seekers records among them but that's not to say there couldn't have been,

But when I'm here without you by the soft fire glow
I hear the golden oldies on the radio
Well I can't hide the moment when
The mood inside me changes
Then I get a little sentimental when they play
That old love song we sang back then
I hold back the tears until the music's through
Then I get a little sentimental over you

  

It was just a lot of old plastic, wasn't it, and now it won't be me that's guilty of disposing of them in environmentally unsound ways when they eventually are.

Part of the recovery, or grieving, process was to pick up some CD bargains in the same way that people get over the loss of a much-loved, old dog by getting a new puppy. I haven't actually played The Seekers or Hot Chocolate yet. I hardly need to play any favourite records because I know them inside out and Mott the Hoople hasn't arrived yet but I did want to hear Petula Clark at full blast through the headphones. It is a complete and utter joy. If she wasn't quite Dusty then it wasn't by much and if Tony Hatch wasn't quite Burt Bacharach then that was by less than you might think, too. But however much one might indulge oneself in a luxury like grief, which I'm well aware is not always possible on more serious occasions, the new puppy becomes such a joy that the old dog becomes an iconic memory.

We should here also be paying tribute to Mary Wilson, from the sensational days of Stop! in the Name of Love, and recognize a shift towards the genuinely exciting days of 60's pop ahead of the more knowing 70's that might have been more my period. I went into W.H. Smith's in Southsea this afternoon and declined a magazine that claimed to be a comprehensive guide to T. Rex at £8.99. No, thanks, for that much I'll write my own.

But you can't know how good this is until you've heard it at volume 45 and it doesn't depend on being loud, it depends on being tremendous. Surely they didn't need to be that good. They just did it because that's what they thought.

Racetrack Wiseguy

 It is unlikely that we reconvene here for turf matters before the Cheltenham Preview next month when Spenno and the Professor are due to add their thoughts to mine as the other two wise men.

There were some enormously convincing performances at Leopardstown over the weekend that it will be difficult to forget when compiling any shortlist for Cheltenham. Although one thinks, thinks again and then usually declines any special offer from a bookmaker because they are clearly just trying to tempt you in, I haven't taken up Corals's offer of 3/1 about Honeysuckle for the Champion Hurdle because I would be backing it anyway, it is a very fair price and it comes with non-runner money back, best odds guaranteed and fail to finish money back as a free bet. It is daft not to accept an offer like that.

Or their very sporting gesture of putting up £25k each week, plus £1 for every entrant they get over 25000, for their Racing Super Series. It is effectively a placepot in which one needs to get a horse placed in each of the seven races of their choosing which on Sunday was the Irish Gold Cup meeting at Leopardstown and three races at Musselburgh. One might as well have a go, for nothing, and three or four red hot favourites duly went in, which doesn't make for a big pay out but then the favourite got beat in the Gold Cup and, being one of the 900-odd that ticked all the boxes, I shared the £45k with them and was glad of the £45.58 which might not change my life but does change my minus position for 2021 into a plus.

Unfortunately, showing off my Racetrack Wiseguy prowess is easier than establishing any website editor credentials.