Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

That will probably be it for now for the library's boom sector in the last few months, the Samuel Johnson shelf. Any economy would envy growth on that scale but it is now a relatively mature market. The Leopold Classic Library's Selected Letters isn't quite the neat little Penguin Classic I'd expected. Maybe I should have checked but I dare say I'd still have had it. It's one of those 'print-to-order' jobs and not necessarily the worse for that but is effectively a facsimile of an OUP edition from 1925.

The good doctor has put on the afterburners and gone ahead of another favourite, the still very much alive Sean O'Brien whose books are on the shelf above but it is to be hoped there's more to come from him and the O'Brien section doesn't include the anthology he edited, The Firebox, which is quite wide.

They could be in a better organized order but while I'm firstly distracted from Dr. Zhivago by Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry and secondly by celebrating being a racetrack wiseguy, sorting them out is not a priority job. I'd give a copy of Ghost Train away if it weren't for them both being signed and special, to me at least, for different reasons and it being a paragon example of what poetry could still do in 1995 and, almost like Hunky Dory, from 1971, something seminal the like of which has not been seen much since.

 

I don't know what it was about the last few posts here that caused an alarming upswing in readership, according to the 'metrics'. I'd like to think it was the Motown or the Dee Dee Bridgewater but I wonder if it not just 'bots' exploring to see if they can invade. I wouldn't know. Science Fiction never did much for me but now we live in a world in which some bits of it have come true.

I wasn't much for fantasy either but sometimes it can fuse with reality. We also now live in a world in which the free market, for once, is something I can exploit- for fun, for irrelevant gains really - but where once bookmakers had it all their own way and punters were losers, they now compete with each other for the business of those who are 90% losers. But, as Carole King and Gerry Goffin didn't quite say, Oh, No, Not Me, Baby, I'll 'keep on plugging at the four aways' like Mr. Bleaney did, especially if I can do it for free, and keep trying to get seven horses placed. And eventually you do.

Suddenly, with an astonishing burst in the last few yards of the year - my financial year for these purposes goes to about 8th or 9th of January because I do it by bank statements- I produce a personal best, by some way, thank you very much. It's not the money. It's about the sport. The sport is betting. Sport is about trying to win. I don't know if I could get those sentences past my first year University lecturer on Logic as an Inductive Argument but it doesn't matter how you do it as long as you remain, always, your humblest, most abject and appalling,

Racetrack Wiseguy. 

HNY

New Year Spree

I wonder if there's a cure for clickomania, the affliction by which one habitually buys anything one wants on the internet. I justify it by the fact that it's been a good year for the horses but winning £10 can be used to excuse expenditure of 30. I'm not a shopaholic but there are some things one sees that simply must be had.

Although I play pop music discs very rarely, this house can't go on being my house any longer without having The Marvelettes in it. Then, replacing two Dee Dee Bridgewater LPs with a box of 4 discs was the least I could do. Then it was impossible to resist The Sounds Of Detroit, a 5-disc set of early Motown albums by The Supremes, The Miracles, Marvin Gaye, more Marvelettes and the Contours. How could I not have Smokey's Shop Around,

 The supplier of a disc of Barbara Hannigan singing Erik Satie can't fulfil my order so I'll find it elsewhere. That will make 11 new discs, more than 12 hours, to listen to, which will put a stop to the big return to the Well-Tempered Klavier but there is a sense in which I just want those items to be here as much as listen to them.

Dr. Zhivago is living up to all its billing as one of the great Russian novels, in a competitive field. I generally struggle with novels with so many characters but let's concentrate on Lara and we'll get it back to the library before its renewal date. Dr. Johnson's Selected Letters will get in ahead of Rasselas and The Complete English Poems which are likely to have to wait a while. But, also due are two books that may or may not revive my flagging enthusiasm for contemporary poetry. 

I'm especially not enamoured of the subsidiary industry that grows up around saying what poetry is, isn't, should or shouldn't be and advice on how to write it.  Salt provide 50 items of advice, sometimes amusingly, Salt Poetry Advice, but a lot of them are quite good, like,

An aside, if someone talks to you about finding your “voice,” they’re trying to sell you snake oil,

so they're excused and they are only trying to reduce the avalanche of hapless, hopeless manuscripts they get sent, I'm sure.

I've resisted Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry for years because I don't want to hear any more on the subject but he's a good lad, a fine practitioner of an art that does well to avoid excess and so I'll give it a chance now for less than a fiver. But my regular monitoring of the index at Clarissa Aykroyd's The Stone and the Star provided some hope with Josephine Corcoran's End of Year Books in which she features  Kathryn Simmonds who had a new book out in 2022. I'm glad I found out about that because she is a 'voice' ( !!! ) that has been sound and worth hearing before and so it's up to her to restore my faith in the art form as it proceeds. There was a time when the Poetry Society compiled a monthly list of new titles on which one could look out for names one liked but, like Juke Box Jury, Face the Music, the art quiz Gallery and Orpheus Records in Southsea it's a thing of the past that we now have to manage without.

So, along with a return to lunchtime concerts which are likely to begin with the Ivory Duo in Portsmouth Cathedral on Jan 12, that's the agenda for next month if you want to come back and find out what happened.

One in a Million

 

 

I already can't remember why Dee Dee Bridgewater came to mind. It was only within the last hour but I can't retrace the concatenation of thoughts that led me back more than 40 years to when she, and this album in particular, were state of the art, big favourites. Sadly she departed this house on that dreadful day when I let the pop vinyl go for mere cash. 

All I can do is rebuild and, if it wasn't such a discredited quote, 'build back better', and so 4 Dee Dee albums on two discs are on their way here. Stylish, suave and gorgeous, this album was a bit of its time but that's fine since precious little has improved on it since. She fancied herself a bit jazzier than this disco music perhaps but we'll see about that. It's not up to ourselves to decide what we were best at.

But you, if you're reading this, are much more than one in a million. You are one of not very many in a world population of 8 billion so 'thanks for being there'.

It might not yet be quite all over here for 2022. There might still be the shouting. But Happy New Year anyway.

Lives of the Poets

Scanning the shelves of poet's biographies, it is the two of John Donne that catch the eye as among the most memorable so maybe it's best to have a life to write because not many are as vivid as his. Edmund Spenser is the 'biggest' name missing. I might find one one day but have not much interest in the poems. Ezra Pound isn't there, either, but that's because I want as little as possible of him in the house and so read the library's copy. Samuel Johnson is not primarily remembered for his poems, admired though they were. He was an assiduous critic and essayist but mainly a 'writer' and thus had an go at every available genre. If Irene had been more successful he might have been a dramatist but he had to find a more suitable outlet for his energies.

David Nokes's Samuel Johnson, a Life, a bargain in Chichester's excellent Oxfam bookshop, will be filed in the burgeoning Johnson section, not least because the poetry biography shelves are full but it takes high rank in its division not only having such a personality as its subject but for being exemplary in how it is done. Re-reading John Wain's account is some way down the 'to do' list.

Nokes is well-organized. As in Katherine Rundell's Donne, the chapters are themes in themselves rather than simply episodes but the balance achieved between detail, primary sources, narrative and commentary is ideal. He compiles an intimate portrait of Johnson as both the very public man whose movements where reported in the press like those of royalty are, and the private man who might not have wanted his most precious thoughts and feelings to be examined with quite such diligence. It's best not to make oneself of quite such compelling interest if you don't relish such attention, as the likes of Philip Larkin and Rosemary Tonks, as well as J.D. Salinger and R.S. Thomas, might also have reflected but it's not easy to be famous and not famous at the same time. Johnson didn't always want his first appointed biographer, Boswell, to follow him around quite so conscientiously. It might prove better for poets of the e-mail age in which the hard copies of letters won't be kept and available for later scrutiny if they'd rather not have their lives reconstructed pixel by pixel. However, since he is so eminently readable, I will obtain a Selected Letters if not the several volumes extant for those who want every last word. What I find difficult to concieve, as I did with Balzac, for example, is how anybody can have a life when they spend so much of it writing.

It wasn't always easy for Johnson who was by no means an overnight success and tried various options before becoming celebrated in his lifetime. It's a bit of a game in such a life identifying where the tipping point comes between having great potential and realizing it. Hard work was a part of it for Johnson whereas it is a matter of conjecture what apprenticeship Shakespeare served before the first mention of him in London is already Robert Greene's resentful mention of the upstart. But celebrity having been achieved and, on the evidence of his essays, it was to be desired, it doesn't have the deleterious effect it has on some artists's work. It was a serious business for him and he cared about the work more than he cared about the living and the reputation it afforded him.

Christmas Diary

 Dinner with my friends was not such a big affair as I'd thought, and hoped it wouldn't be. Kind of them to ask, I could hardly hope for better neighbours, and they surely needn't have. Not being of Christian lineage, they don't really do Christmas but, then again, I thought, neither do I beyond a few vestigial social observances. I don't know if the card I gave them was the only one they got but I did some internet research and carefully transcribed,

শুভ বড়দিন 

on to the envelope. Carefully enough, at least, for them to be able to read it, the Bengali for Merry Christmas. 

I'm with my mother on Merry. I'd prefer Happy but one takes what translations one can find. I'm with my mother because she thought it implied boozing. Merry would be the least of it but there are no cards with which to wish people a Paralytic Christmas which, if anything, might be the 'real meaning' of the pagan festival co-opted by Christianity but either way I have considerable resistance to compulsory jollity.

It's a time when most things seem to stop before we then go round again. R.S. Thomas did it well in Song at the Year's Turning when he still observed rhyme and metre before withdrawing to free verse,

Song at the Year's Turning

 

And that's what it is.

The 'despair' that Thomas refers to might not be that felt when news items announced that the King was likely to pay tribute to his mother in his first 3pm speech. It would have been something of an omission if it had slipped his mind. It is the same sort of despair that, a few years ago, a news item reported some university research that found that men liked watching football whereas women liked shopping. You simply can't tell the difference between news and satire. I'd have thought that would contravene rules about stereotyping, especially in universities where they have time on their hands to consider such issues, and do. I know and have known women with considerable interest in football. I can't immediately think of many people at all that enjoy shopping.

Despair might also be caused by Jeremy Clarkson. It has done for many years. But just when it looked like he could be personable on Millionaire and maybe modified some aspects of his xenophobia, you simply can't tell how many levels of irony are involved in his latest apparently newsworthy pronouncement.

Irony can only really have one level which is that where what is said is not literally meant. Of course, not even I, here, should add to the publicity he does such things for but I wonder why he does it. It only makes some of us more Team Meghan. I'm not anti-Charles, William or Catherine and I'm sure Meghan's not as perfect as she looks but Clarkson, who is by no means stupid, is a blockhead who writes only for money, to adapt Dr. Johnson. He has very convincingly demonstrated why Meghan has a complaint and he's undone any progress he might have made towards making himself look palatable. He's back at Square One. He's not even there. Look what they did to Danny Baker for an innocent, not very good joke. He was exiled to podcasts and touring provincial theatres to recycle all his inventive gabble.

I dare say we always knew Clarkson was still dreadful but now, alongside the economic theories of Liz Truss, the charisma of Boris Johnson and Trump's campaign slogan that Hillary should be 'locked up', it's all imploded many billions of years ahead of the universe is predicted to do when it will become inert, in stasis and devoid of all meaning.

 

Meanwhile, we have another year to see what happens. Dr. Zhivago is first up on the reading list to see if the book is better without Julie Christie providing quite such unnecessary distraction. I thought perhaps I'd treat myself to another recording of The Well-Tempered Klavier to compare with the long-established Bernard Roberts on the shelf but the reviews, on Amazon at least, suggest I have a very good account already. Three essays are ready to go, more or less, to where they are aimed on top of the one already carried forward. The turf account has recorded worthwhile success for the outgoing year but it remains to be seen if it can get any better and how much gets carried forward.

And so, on the precarious, fragile, temporary basis that we inhabit the moment, life's a gas and I hope it's gonna last but not forever, not until the 12th of Never, because that's a long, long time.

I can't bear not still being the owner of all that pop vinyl I was never going to play again that I sold for mere money. I will have some compensation, though, by re-investing some of that meaningless cash in The Marvelettes. This is an amulet against any kind of despair,

Boxing Day with Racetrack Wiseguy

What we lose by having no racing tomorrow is more than compensated for on Monday and many of the big Irish hopes on show before the New Year at Leopardstown and Down Royal.

Envoi Allen comes to Kempton, though, having looked like the horse he was supossed to be last time out and the early 7/1 for the King George has been taken. It's best we bear that in mind and hot go overboard on Bravemansgame (2.30) who I want to be on because this is where he's been aiming for since a long time ago. We will assume that L'Homme Presse is a more likely Gold Cup horse- and there is quite a difference- and that Hitman has to have a go but would come as a surprise winner. At present I'll only be on Bravemansgame if Shan Blue (1.35) has won at Wetherby but we will see. By then we will also know if it's a pay day because McFabulous (Kempton, 1.20, nap) will have run by then, too.

Shan Blue has been pencilled in for a big race ever since tipping up when well clear last October. This is his next to last chance, though. He will have the excuse of not having run since Aintree but we trust the Skeltons to have him fit because, along with Protektorat, he's their hope to get them into the big time. Two lots of 9/4 multiplies up well enough. I'm not ambitious enough to make it a treble with McFab but it will look obvious if they all come in.

Otherwise, we wait for the prices to be chalked up for those races where big stables pick off prize money at the smaller meetings. Wincanton is Nicholls territory really but while he eyes up more significant races elsewhere, Mr. Henderson could make a raid on his patch and bookend the meeting with Tweed Skirt (2.18) and, more confidently, Choccabloc (3.45). Gary Moore has a home penalty kick with Givega (Fontwell, 11.57) and Sao Carlos (Market Rasen, 3.55) is one for the combinations, all of which really are ridden by good jockeys going where they are more likely to have winners than by being on the telly.

I'll put Lossiemouth (Leopardstown, 1.10) in with them although aware that Joseph O'Brien's Nusret was entered at the Cheltenham meeting that was frozen off. 

I'm not always successful at putting a list like this into the most profitable combinations. One can have 4 winners out of 7 and come out empty-handed but one day it might come out right.

McFab is the flagship horse with which I'll take on anything until it gets beat. Any odds against it on Monday looks very fair because I simply can't see why not. The rest ought to find us some sort of return between them but you mix them up however you see fit and hope the permutations find a winning line, or two.

But,

It's been a good year for the horses
Many blooms still linger there
The lawn could stand another mowin'
Funny I don't even care
As you turn to walk away
As the door behind you closes
The only thing I have to say
It's been a good year for the horses,

 

as Elvis Costello might have put it if he'd done okay like I have.

Christmas with Racetrack Wiseguy

 In recent years, the Christmas jamboree of horse racing has not been an adventure park for me. It comes at the wrong time of year when I've got more than half an eye on what the year's final balance is going to be. I've either recovered from a parlous position or have been defending a diminishing profit and so have preferred to stick rather than twist.

That's not so this year, though. It's been a good Autumn on top of having done okay anyway so we can take part without worrying too much. Always remembering that success came from sticking to the plan and that on the few occasions when it felt like time to be more expansive and play some more ambitious shots was when such a profligate policy resulted in a setback, if not of Truss/Kwarteng proportions then certainly nothing that I want to happen again.

 

One isn't short of choice on Boxing Day, one Bank Holiday that still looks a bit like Bank Holidays did in olden days when there were hardly enough jockeys to accommodate how many meetings there were.

 

I'll have McFabulous (Kempton, 1.20, nap) all day long and would be taking the 6/5 now if I could find it on the Corals website. We've waited longer than we thought we'd have to to see him jump fences and he's been every bit as good at it as we hoped and so he gets backed with confidence every time he runs until he gets beaten and we get told why.

Constitution Hill in the Christmas Hurdle has quickly become a horse it's never going to be possible to back, only enjoy. From now on it can only go wrong because he could easily be Arkle and one can see why Mr. Henderson would be nervous each and every time he runs. The only bet you can have on him is the Cheltenham Gold Cup, maybe 2025, and if I was a bookie you'd not be offered any more than 7/4 about that.

Bravemansgame in the King George at 2.30 arrives at his date with destiny shading favouritism against L'Homme Presse, who gave away weight impressively last time and we will see, more or less thinking that if Hitman is 9/2 third favourite one is happy enough to oppose him. And we've been astonished by Frodon more times than we can remember by now.

The long distance hurdle is a riddle set by a sphinx lurking in a labyrinthine maze. I'd guess Not So Sleepy won't win it so he might be the most logical answer but betting on that race is almost as much of an act of faith as voting Leave was.

There will be chances worth taking, for the looking out of them, at Wincanton, Rasen, Wetherby and Huntingdon. Maybe even at Fontwell but we'll have to wait and see where Mr. Henderson's horses, and those of Paul Nicholls, Joe Tizzard, Gary Moore, Olly Murphy, Venetia Williams et al go because they will all be looking for a pay day. We want to follow them in and make it ours, too.

There's a 'personal best' in sight, as regards Best Ever Year. We'll have a go, knowing that we're playing with what was once the bookie's money. I readily concede that there's not many 10/1 shots recommended here. The wiseguy option, whether in horse racing or any other sort if investment, is the reliable blue chip, sound idea. Not exciting but more likely to win. The bookmakers have their pay days when well-backed favourites get beat and we win when they don't. All we have to do is avoid the dubious ones and make sure we're on the good things. That's how easy it is.

Just fancy

As a PS to below.

Radio 3 usually seriously know what they're doing and are worth the licence fee on their own. Except on very particular matters.  

Miss M. Mayhew and Irving Gillette are the recording of choice of Oh, What Very Charming Weather and when I'm invited on to Building a Library on a Saturday morning to consider the various recordings of it, I'll be able to say so.

They simply don't make them like that any more.

Oh, What Very Charming Weather

 Essential Classics R3 19/12/22

Tony Blackburn's not been sympathetic to a couple of Northern Soul suggestions for his R2 60's Show but this morning on R3 was an opportunity too good to miss.

There isn't much horse racing on R3 but today's playlist item was Jockey's Dance from Eleanor Alberga's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Listeners are invited to suggest pieces with any sort of connection to it and so I immediately thought of Oh, What Very Charming Weather, or anything else from The Arcadians by Lionel Monckton and Howard Talbot, a sort of Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that I was convinced by when hearing James Bowman and Catherine Bott do it in Portsmouth Cathedral several years ago.

It's at 1.48 in the above link which will last 28 days.

--

Robert Graves in Goodbye to All That is much more phlegmatic, or even funny, than one might expect from time spent in trench warfare but maybe one has to be. Perhaps the most shocking thing, if only because we have heard about the unspeakable atrocities of WW1, is how the British Army wasn't all on the same side with any amount of rivalry, brutality and horror perpetrated in its own ranks nerver mind in exchanges with the enemy. By all means institutions like the public school and the army, being all male then, are likely to bring out the lowest common denominator of masculinity but, really, it makes one wonder how they ever won.

I take it that all bullying, cruelty and gratuitous violence is a disguise for insecurities and fear, to cover inadequacies, protect against 'loss of face' and such like and it is illustrated in all tyrants. Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown but, before even that, we should beware any who want to.

 

I had found nothing in common between two famous Johnsons that have been in the forefront of my thoughts this year. Gladly we hear less about Boris now but it has been my year of Samuel and it carries over to next year.

Both Johnsons were Tories but where the good one worried away at investigating the world, defining it and, sir, seeking clarity, the bad one sought obfuscation, bluster and blather and his instinct was to trade, and live, in untruth. Both presented preposterous figures but one did it through no fault of his own and could be found underneath that surface to be a good man of endless interest whereas the other did it deliberately and any further enquiry into his character only revealed worse and worse.

However, beginning David Nokes's Samuel Johnson, a Life, we find that at Oxford, he neglected to learn the set exercises and,

was obliged to begin by chance and continue on how he would,

which sounds familiar. Indeed,

these stories, and many like them, present the picture of a young man who, rather than accept the college or university authorities, went out of his way to defy them

which is the story of how Boris treated the office of Prime Minister in his mid-fifties. Samuel did it for better reasons and grew out of it, though, which might be why he is revered in Eng Lit whereas his bumptious later namesake is a paragon example of all that stands for unmitigated self-serving and cheap tat.

--

Yes, that was The Great Game, that World Cup Final, despite the fact that France only started to play after 75 minutes. I could appreciate the football and the drama but as my interest in sport is more often focussed on gradually increasing the bank balance rather then the sublime, I mainly noticed that I could have made more out of the World Cup than I did but, sticking to the plan, I'd cashed in bets for paltry amounts to ensure I made a profit when, with any sense of adventure, I could have let them ride.

I would have been ashamed of myself if Messi had been top scorer which, coupled with Argentina winning, I'd had at 33/1. But mid-stream, I burnt those boats and sided with the Brazil-France final.

The original selections included Argentina winning, Mbappe as top scorer and a Brazil-France final so two and a half out of three ain't bad but the opportunity to 'cash in' is a bookie's trick and I fell for it this time.

I'm not saying don't do it, I'm just saying think twice or three times. For small money you might as well chance it.

 

I'm sure we'll be back here in the New Year if not before but, in the meantime, thanks for being there, I'm not dreaming of a White Christmas and,

   

Hello to All This

I'm not really one for war books of any kind. Like the holocaust and all the other horrors that humankind inflicts on itself, one has to know but I'd rather not make a study of it.

I can't now remember why I bought Goodbye to All That earlier this year. It has waited patiently on the top shelf for its turn and so deserved its chance before the library service deliver Dr. Zhivago. I thought the book of that might be better than the film because Julie Christie is too much of a distraction, among a starry, starry cast, and one's attention isn't always on the point of the story.

Robert Graves has possibly been a bit 'under the radar' of surveys of C20th poetry and certainly under mine. He's better known for other things he did, one of which is Goodbye to All That. He is a reader-friendly writer, the pleasure of reading his prose somehow disguising the horrors it describes. At halfway through, one is tempted to think his theme is simply the nightmare downside of human nature with exclusive reference to the masculine. If the inherent cruelty of the English public, or 'private', school wasn't bad enough, trench warfare in WW1 multiplies the insight into what is possible exponentially but something of the way that those involved were conditioned into it comes through in an account that almost makes light work of it compared to, say, Solzhenitsyn.

That's not a criticism. I don't want to hide away in poems about downbeat rented rooms, like Mr. Bleaney, all the time. Some people had more to complain about. I've run into what is mainly a war book by accident, though. Maybe I bought it because he meets Thomas Hardy (and Seigfried Sassonn). I haven't got to those bits yet. Other reports of meeting Hardy, which will be mentioned here early next year but are available in Claire Tomalin's tremendous biography, are underwhelming rather than horrific but I'd mostly prefer to be underwhelmed than horrified.

It will be worth looking again at the poems of Robert Graves in the light of this 'biography', written at the age of 33 to which he never provided a sequel. It's too soon for me to say but although it probably did give him reason to say Goodbye to All That, he could have emerged from it much more damaged than his writing seems to indicate he wasn't.

The Playlist at Christmas

Mud - Lonely This Christmas

Leona Lewis – One More Sleep

 

 

 

The race to be no.1 at Christmas used to be an event before Simon Cowell made it his own personal fiefdom by firstly getting the public to vote for which artist they liked best just in time for him to release a  record by them and sell them back their own product all over again. It worked for him but it ruined the sport. The charts don't count for much any more since one artist, like Ed Sheeran, can occupy the whole top 10.

I have all the time in the world for Slade and Wizzard but a Christmas without them wouldn't be unwelcome; I remain entirely unconvinced by those who make The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl the 'cool' choice on account of them making their name by being dissolute and Irish, or Greg Lake's shamelessly meaningful effort. I'd rather have that peacenik, John Lennon, than him. I would be with George Michael but he has records to be included elsewhere, as has Michael Jackson whose Little Drummer Boy is an under-rated, under-played masterpiece.

Also under-rated, although hugely successful in their day were Mud who grasped that pop music didn't have to take itself so seriously. Among the legions of Elvis impersonators, Les Gray was not at all bad and the kitsch of Lonely This Christmas gets it exactly right ahead of Gilbert O'Sullivan's I'm Not Dreaming of a White Christmas, Dana's winsome It's Gonna be a Cold, Cold Christmas without You and, worth looking up, Joseph Spence's Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

Leona Lewis is, by rights, out of my comfort zone, being an X Factor winner and her One More Sleep being from 2013. It came as a rare bit of heartwarming reassurance that the pop industry could still come up with something convincing and with no downside. It's a joyful thing and officially my favourite Christmas record.

Jobs as Leisure

 Well, that's enough for one afternoon. The difference between having a job and doing a 'job' as leisure is that you can finish whenever you like. For some people writing poems, or about poetry, is their job and that must be hard. For most of them, though, it's not the job that pays the bills, it's the one that sustains their reputation. They have other roles that pay money they can live on.

A lot of us do other people's jobs for pleasure, though. For me, writing about poems takes a lot longer than writing poems. Some of a Sunday afternoon spent counting punctuation marks in poems in order to make some esoteric point was enjoyable in its way. It turns out I'm going to have to modify the point I was hoping to make in the light of my findings. Then, knowing a quotation I want to cite but having to find exactly where it occurs for the sake of the footnote is sometimes more painstaking than it ought to be (see footnote) but I feel as if I'm having a go at being a university academic working on an erudite treatise in much the same way as in 1970 I was having a go at being George Best, in the 1980's-2000's, Alex Higgins, and in the 1990's a long-distance bike rider, amongst other such things.

For those that really do perform sport, or creative art, for a living- and are mostly well rewarded for doing so- there must be some pressure involved unless they are sublimely brilliant at it but I suffer less if my poem or my review of a local piano recital isn't very good. But I still have to be satisfied it was worth the effort or else I'm aware I've wasted my time.

But there's much to be said for being amateur, doing it for the love of it. 'Professional' can be a mis-interpreted word, taken to mean 'expert' when it only means 'doing it for money'. Since giving up the day job, which was a job that asked for no outrageous talent (although you'd be surprised), horse racing has provided more income than writing but that is the plan. I don't even want any money for writing. That's not the point of it.

I'll get back to adding footnotes, amending words, phrases and probably even paragraphs, another time. There's no rush. Whether or not this latest effort sees print remains to be seen. If I didn't have to try, in the hope that it might, there would be a bit less point to it.

Footnote - Painstaking, that's the taking of pains and not the staking of pain, do you think?

The Year in Review

 I notice that this is the 215th piece posted here this year and it won't be the last. That is by some way a record, well ahead of 171 in 2016. Have I got nothing better to do.

I should have. I'd much rather be working steadily to one, more substantial thing. The short but somehow definitive novel, perhaps, or the commentary that brings together my favourite poets without being a manifesto. But that's not how the days work. No longer contracted to do office hours or 37 hours a week, a sustained effort is beyond me, thus I accumulate bit by bit.

The reason for the increase in pieces here is partly the number of local concerts I've been to and also the little efforts towards Playlist, Wake Up, Maggie or whatever the pop music book would be called if ever it were finished except it will always remain ongoing, I'm sure. There was the longer essay in print in the Larkin Society journal and there's another due next year but even if I poured out such things they would need to find an outlet and it's not obvious where that would be. No, let me be grateful for the internet and somewhere to put these exercises. How we live measures our own nature and big ambitions were never really me.

--

2022 was the year of reading Dr. Johnson for me, like several years ago was that of George Eliot. It does make one wonder how many other writers there are that one would immediately put into one's top echelon if only one knew to read them but I will still stick with the writers, musicians and artists that I know about rather than twist and swap them for all those that I don't. Johnson will carry over to 2023 and, I hope, indefinitely. When one is tired of Dr. Johnson, sir, one is tired of reading.

I'm not entirely sure how any writer of large scale work can also find the time to read much and have a life. Three into two doesn't go. But maybe they don't habitually keep abreast of the horse racing, which happens every day. It would surely interrupt the flow of one's thousand or more words a day to watch the markets for and then stop to tune into the 2.30 from Uttoxeter but, as an interest that contiunes to pay for itself, it is vicarious involvement in which you are literally responsible for paying your money and making your choice.

2022 could still yet be the best year ever for the Racetrack Wiseguy. Surely nothing can possibly go wrong now in pursuit of the eighth year out of the last ten to show a profit, with 2020 having seen the great fightback to get back level. I'm not going to abandon the plan that has steadily achieved such a position in all-or-bust attempt on a personal best, though. That would be madness. But with further returns from the World Cup maybe helping towards the final score, I'll keep on doing what I'm doing and enjoy it.

Some quick bright talents can dispense with coals

And burn their boats continually

but,

                         Better still to burn

Upon that gloom where all have felt a chill.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The main point of the end of year summary here used to be the shortlists and decisions in as many categories as Best Poem, Best Poetry Collection, Best Novel, Best Book, Best CD and Best Event, however much one wishes that the 'arts' weren't treated as a competitive sport and that awards and prizes weren't the point. We even held imaginary gala nights with celebrities like Trevelyan Scroop, author of 24 Nightmares on a Canal Boat, and Audrey Majesty, the fine art editor of The Lady Margaret

Quarterly on hand to provide expert analysis, much like Roy Keane does on the World Cup, like an ayatollah. We can't do that any more, though, because I simply don't see enough candidates to make short lists from. So this year we'll have a shortlist for Event of the Year, which includes everything that happened, with no necessity of  nominating an overall winner. They appear in the diary, as I go through it, in this order-

(I can't believe I was reading Sartre's Roads to Freedom trilogy last New Year. I remember nothing about it but it had to be done. It is astonishing how long ago some of those entries for Jan and Feb now seem).

17/3, if ever you see an Angelina Kopyrina piano recital you're going to need to see a lot of wonderful things to keep her off any shortlist like this. She played the Beethoven 'Pathétique' Sonata and found all the storm and passion in it before the very impressed friends I had invited came over the road for a few drinks and a couple of races from Cheltenham. It's not often such essential highlights can be brought together so conveniently.

Only six days later, it was Peter Doherty and Frédéric Lo at Tonic, Southsea, playing the now 43 year old insouciant miscreant's lockdown album to an audience of 110 in a community centre which was the other brilliant thing about it apart from it being brilliant. It could never be the Event of the Year in the face of the opposition here but it ought to be on the playlist for his songwriting, nonchalance and for turning up and doing it.

I read Finnegans Wake in June, alongside a guide that made some sense of it. That doesn't make the shortlist.

On 1/8 I went and had a look at the paintings by The Portsmouth & Hampshire Art Society in the Anglican cathedral and, impressed by two items, think I chose right by buying Winchester 2 by Frank Clarke which has been in my eye line in the front room since I got it home and would be a potential overall winner for the lasting pleasure that a painting gives, the way in which it surpasses any initial impression that it's 'chocolate box', easy listening with its colours, composition and definition. I absolutely adore it and am glad I inevitably persuaded myself I could afford such luxury. It was cheap for how much it continues to repay.

A liitle local day out to Netley Abbey on 1/9 was memorable for providing me with a rare poem but it's never going to be the Event of the Year that somebody who's supposed to be a 'poet' goes on a train to see ///a ruin and gets a poem published. That would happen all the time for a 'poet'.

On 8/10, a genuine contender, the Steinway Concert, in the third floor space of Portsmouth's Central Library with its stellar cast of not only pianists was an extraordinary event and an occasion that left a thrill something beyond its music, as was also the Rachmanninov Vespers by the Renaissance Choir and the Portsmouth Choral Union, conducted by Peter Gambie, where, if we were to decide which was the Best Event entirely on spine-tingling, that was it.

Such riches, augmented by a mention of the Anon Variations on La Folia played by Duo Dorada in Chichester Cathedral on 15/11 that I'm very interested in not hearing one more time but having on a disc, make for some tersting arbitration. It could be the painting, I'm taking a good, long look, like a Cruft's judge, at the immensity of the Vespers, which was sensational, but I don't know if the Steinway Concert in some way doesn't outpoint it if only for its range and ambition.

There is no need to have winners, is there, if only we could re-adjust from the World Cup and all the rest of lifethat insists on having them.

I'm no royalist but the passing of the second Elizabethan Age in 2022 might have been more significant, when a long time in which at least the nominal Head of State could pass her despairing eye over one Prime Minister after another and notice their declining quality and, having seen off Boris Johnson and met Liz Truss, decided to die quietly.

We won't see the likes of her again. We lost something, which might have been something to do with common sense or dignity or decorum ahead of the sordid ambitions of personality, when we finally lost her. For all the outrageous piano playing, violin and choirs, etc, the Event of the Year must have been the passing of Queen Elizabeth II.

Chicken Shack - I'd Rather Go Blind

 We might all be forgiven for thinking that Christine Perfect was a stage name but if you believe everything you read on Wikipedia, that was the real name of one of Fleetwood Mac's singers before she married John who provided the Mac to go with Mick Fleetwood's name to make that of the hugely successful mainstream, but none the worse for that, brand.

Fleetwood Mac changed themselves much in the interests of staying fashionable over the years but we can mention that elsewhere in the Rock Show, under Dreams. But as Christine has now reached the end of the 79 years she was allowed, we can remember her and where she and Fleetwood Mac and so many others who were due to do well in more 'commercial' (because that's what we always used to call it) genres, like Rod Stewart mainly, started. Artists are ever likely to abandon integrity, if that's what it is, in favour of two Lamborghinis and life in Los Angeles but maybe in the later 1960's being a blues band didn't look like the attempt at authenticity that it looks like now. It was probably what they thought was their best bet.

Rod was one of several that covered I'd Rather Go Blind when also finding the likes of How Long, This Old Heart of Mine and Tom Traubert's Blues to suit him but if Etta James had the writing credit and was first to record it and Ruby Turner did well before also, it says there, Elkie Brooks, Paul Weller (!!!) and Beyonce, it is Christine with Stan Webb's Chicken Shack that pares it down, is most convincing and takes a step out of its time to become the classic interpretation for those of us who knew this one first. It's entirely possible that some who believe in 'authenticity' will say it will always be Etta James's song and well they might. It's the same story as Oh, No, Not My Baby, Stop ! in the Name of Love and Best Friend's Girl but more heartfelt than any of them.  

Fleetwood Mac was another story but a lot of people do their best, definitive work early on and if Christine is to be remembered for one great performance, I think it should be this. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 While I generally think it better to be reading good books than writing bad things, I'll make an exception this week. I honestly thought I had a draft of an essay comparing but mainly contrasting two favourite poets, Rosemary Tonks and Philip Larkin, but when I checked I found it was only notes. That's what happens when you write things in your head - you think you've already done the hack work of typing it out. Still, I've now made a start and it was most enjoyable, flicking across to the internet or a book for the detail, leaving it to be filled in later if it's too difficult and framing sentences that sound neat to me whether they will to anybody else or not. It's nice work if you can get it. No, it's not work and one can have as much of it as one can think worth doing.

It is far more enjoyable than reading about Lord George-Brown, about who the story of him asking the Archbishop of Lima for a dance was eventually there in all its glory except it might have happened in Vienna with the Austrian equivalent. It is mystifying how 'populist' politicians become popular but much more so how they can remain so in the wake of their ongoing disasters and obvious unsuitability for high office. It would have been interesting to see how George Brown and Boris Johnson would have got on, being similar characters in many ways. One policy of Johnson's would have been endorsed passionately by Brown - that of sending some junior out to the off licence with a suitcase during a lockdown party with orders to bring it back full of booze.

Not even the sadness and reflection that can often come in the last chapter of a biography saves George. He summons a priest, concerts to Catholicism and, the book says, considers himself absolved. There's something about these 'characters', these rabble-rousers, that makes them entirely about themselves. By all means, Harold Wilson doesn't come out of this book with his reputation enhanced but, for whatever reason, he had to suffer George Brown as a major influence in government when he was trying to run the country. It says Brown threatened to resign 17 times before finally being taken at his word. It might have been a better idea to have accepted it the first time.

I realize that Rishi Sunak isn't the ideal Prime Minister and he has some odd people in his cabinet - his options are limited- but, Goodness Gracious- but he's not noisy, bumptious and on telly everyday and that might mean he's 'getting on with the job' like Boris always said he was going to but never did.  

--

I'm afraid the Fleetwood Mac record on the Playlist is Dreams, which is Stevie Nicks, but there's also I'd Rather Go Blind by Chicken Shack so, in memoriam Christine McVie, let's do that.