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.

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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.