The Church Fair

 It could have been worse for the Wiseguy selections yesterday but if Bangor had gone ahead and Fiddlerontheroof had had 50 more yards to get past the winner of the big race at Newbury it would have been a lot better.

Love Unknown by A.N. Wilson was seeming to lose its way after halfway with Wilson apparently stacking up some cheap and easy laughs at the expense of Madge's madness which might not be funny to some people who've had dementia sufferers to deal with in real life. The novel was seemingly becoming diffuse and I was losing faith in it but then he pulls it all together.

In a succession of surprises and characters talking at cross purposes, Simon's adultery hasn't been discovered, it's a case of mistaken identity and it's his useless vicar brother, Bartle, that's being accused, which is hard to believe but then it isn't him that's guilty of the offence in question, either. Simon then wrongly believes he's the cuckold which would have perhaps been his just desserts and it turns out to be a well-made novel, which is the least one would expect. It's not Proust, Joyce or George Eliot but it's good at what it does. Of course, the title contains any amount of layered significance and the hymn takes on some ironic resonance.

 

This coming week should see e-mails from the library announcing the arrival of my next requisitions but until then the hiatus is being filled by yet more English clergy humour, Some Tame Gazelle by Barbara Pym which didn't impress 30-odd years ago but is doing well so far this time round.

I try very hard to avoid delivery charges from Amazon and so I tried out all kinds of tricks to get past £20 when ordering a couple of cheap things. Suddenly I'm very circumspect about buyiong books I might be able to borrow. And a history of the Colony Room Club, Daisy Dunn's novel, another account of Existentialist Paris can all wait their turn. The two discs of Arcangelo's Buxtehude, at £25 the pair, can't be justified as a way of fiddling an order just beyond £20 and so the answer turned out to be the Brahms String Quartets and Quintets that Record Review did a good advertising job on on Saturday morning. Brahms maybe rteminds me of Thomas Hardy by not quite perhaps being in the very top echelon of his type but he's great and he'll never let you down.

 

Meanwhile all this C.of E. humour can be infectious. Books come from other books, writing from other writing, or at least they do for me. I have, over the last 40-odd years, written some poems I'm pleased with. Heaven knows I've tried other genres but the short stories were unremarkable, the novel was irredeemably bad but at least went beyond 50 thousand words and was finished in a horrendous blizzard of first draft typos. There's a few pop songs lyrics at least two or three of which should have made the Top 10 but I've not really tried to write a play.

It's a bit late now but I like to have a 'project' until it inevitably gets abandoned and, as per a few weeks ago, I would like Graham to have a vehicle on which to revive the glory years of his theatrical career. Thus, The Church Fair, with five parts written with friends in mind, most notably Graham as the vicar, myself as Archdeacon Trelawney and Yoko as Miss Protheroe. It ought to write itself for the most part, being All Gas & Gaiters, Barbara Pym, A.N. Wilson and entirely derivative. It will make no apologies for that. It won't be able to. But it might not have to, being at tyhe very least a 25/1 shot that it will get written but this initial tingle of hope and anticipation at the beginning of it still feel good even if there is no end product. To travel, if only the first few yards, might be better than to arrive. It's quite possible it all ends up in something entirely different, like maybe a poem about being so dilettante but as long as it provides amusement in the short term, that'll do.