Diary

Back to Balzac, then, and Lost Illusions. My memory being what it is these days, all the Balzacs I've read merge into one generic story of money, usually lost, social hierarchies and eventual ruin. They would hardly be stories otherwise. You might think that if you've read one you've read all 90-odd of them but he's a reliable source of good reading and never less than enjoyable, making Proust look like a minimalist in comparison.

What one forgets until getting back to him is that the Comedie Humaine is funny as well as usually tragic and it is his observation of character that often makes him so readable,

This noble gentleman [Monsieur de Bargeton] had a small mind comfortably poised between an inoffensive vanity which has some glimmer of comprehension and an arrogant stupidity which refuses either to give or take.

And poetry is always fertile material for humour, with Lucien fancying himself as a young talent. We'll have to wait and see how his career develops. Meanwhile,

'I hope Nais won't often give us poetry recitals in the evening', said Francis. 'When I listen to reading after dinner, the attention I have to pay to it upsets my indigestion'.

I've arrived at page 100 out of 671 in no time. I'm not sure how much longer it will take in the temporary domestic upheval. After all this time I've submitted to the bourgeois horrors of some home improvements, not that it doesn't take improving. The house very much has the look about it of being owned by one whose mind is on other things. And so I'm writing this from the unfamilar surroundings of the kitchen. That has its advantages, one of which is being nearer to the fridge.

A bigger and better unforeseen bonus, though, came with a very slight delay to the delivery of the materials which has freed up tomorrow and, luckily, tickets are still available for the return of Chichester lunchtime concerts. So, come back soon for that long-anticipated resumption of the old normal and some thoughts on the recital by Ben Socrates.

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I was even more taken aback by a recent quote from Donald Trump that Joe Biden had 'looked a fool' than I had been when Boris dismissed his rivals' bids for the Conservative Party leadership as 'vanity projects'. Good Grief. Has any sort of self-awareness ever occured to these strangest of creatures. Apparently not. Trump has never looked anything other than the morbid exaggeration of what a fool is and all Biden was doing was following through on Trump's initiative.

As previously, even I have in time tired of even noticing the Johnsonian penchant for vanity and chaos and, given the number of broken promises, ad hoc policy and outright subterfuge that constitutes his very successful political acumen, he was statistically bound to say something right eventually, such as the pandemic not having been in the manifesto. We are naive if we think manifesto promises will be kept and by now we must be wilfully in denial if we ever give any credence to anything he ever says.

However, having blundered his way through what might have been the worst (with still numbers in the hundreds dying every day of the virus he didn't want to engage with as a threat which very soon then nearly killed him), he is now reportedly seeing the same sort of mirages that Thatcher and Blair did, of three terms, a decade and being majorly significant with a legacy. And, with the electoral system such as it is, the opposition not amounting to much and enough ongoing gullibility in the electorate that can't see him for the rudderless navigator that he is, it is looking more ominous that it was when Dominic, having put him in place, immediately started to try to remove him.

As Dominic said, a system that offers a binary choice between Johnson and Corbyn is a broken one.

Given the uber-cool skill, clarity of vision and tactical nous displayed by a Romanian-Chinese-Canadian 18 year old girl from Bromley in America on Sunday night, it should surely be her. Emma Raducanu looks for all the world like someone who'd get at least a 98% approval rating and be good at whatever she put her mind to so she should be Prime Minister. Sadly, the millions she can earn from a couple of weeks work by very expertly knocking a ball back over a net make it not worth her while but so far she is one of the precious very few whose only flaw is to be ostensibly flawless.

I haven't watched much tennis since the school holidays when Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert were on but I can appreciate how good that was and Channel4 were rewarded with 9 million viewers. I had pencilled in Mark Cavendish as my Sports Personality of the Year but now odds of 1/10 make Emma look like the soundest investment of all the collateral you can raise, beg, steal or borrow that the financial pages could advise.

If money is what you like. Indian cricketers certainly do. Covid came in very useful as a flimsy reason to pull out of the fifth test match so that, none of the players having tested positive before a proper match, they still decided not to play in case it endangered their chances of cashing in on some meaningless baseball hybrid back on the sub continent. It was a dark day for cricket, it seemed to those of us brought up thinking that something else was more important. But things move on, all things must pass, and one lives long enough to see the world as you were told it was become obsolete.

The irony for me is that, in the low grade of cricket I played, I was a T20 all-rounder, slogging anything I could and learning to become an economical bowler.

Yet each man kills the thing he loves is one of Oscar's.

I was complicit. In the same way that I buy lots of books but hardly ever buy them from bookshops and then wonder why there are so few bookshops, largely disregarded on some provincial sports ground in the south of England 20-30 years ago, I was hinting at a future for cricket and then didn't reckon much to it when it arrived.

Sorry.