Happy New Wiseguy

 This time last year the year's profit doubled on the last day thanks to Mr. Coral's placepot game but this year UK racing was all off and so a token interest in Sir Gerhard at Punchestown had to suffice. It's now, of course, easy to say we should have all piled into that.

But one should never regret anything. Stay sensible, stay in front, stay in charge. The job does itself for you as long as you stick to a plan that works.

New Year's Day at Cheltenham is like an album starting with one of its best tracks. It is God's own racecourse. It's Monday tomorrow, is it -nobody knows what day it is anymore- and it's not often you'll get Cheltenham on a Monday.

Stage Star (2.05) is the obvious top of the bill and we can't expect much more than the even money chalked up by William Hill so it's really a matter of how much for, giving away lumps of weight but contiuning to defy his critics on his way to back here in March.

Mr. Henderson's 36% strike rate in the last 14 days makes the expensive purchase, Peaky Boy (12.20), look worth a go but it might not be the 13/8 suggested by the betting forecast.

There are some tempting favourites but we can't realistically expect them all to flood in and I'm not sure Marie's Rock can be relied on against an apparently rejuvenated Bob Olinger (3.15).

Inch House (1.30) doesn't have as many question marks, or as much opposition, as Matata in the 12.55 but we'll stick Ed Keeper (2.40) in the mug punting multiples in the hope of an afternoon's entertainment and swerve the interesting but difficult bumper finale. You just mix them up for cash you wouldn't miss and be glad to be in the same position again this time next year.

More Moore

 One collateral benefit of writing C20th, my overly ambitious attempt to provide my account of the poetry in English of the period, has been the discoveries, and re-discoveries, found along the way. It's actually much harder work than it looks and a perfect illustration of Homer Simpson's maxim that if something's hard to do it's not worth doing. But if the end result doesn't justify the time spent on it then re-engaging with the 'major' names and concocting reassessments of them has been enlightening for me.

Next year will begin with Marianne Moore for me, prompted by putting in a paragraph or so on the relationship- friendship-  Elizabeth Bishop had with her. If poetry really was the competitive sport that competitions and lists of 'greatests' sometimes make it appear to be, then it is the adorable and paragon example of Elizabeth Bishop that wins the C20th for me. I think Auden and Larkin are in a photo-finish for second place. But even if it is only on the strength of two poems, Poetry and The Steeple-Jack, I thought Ms. Moore was the ideal candidate for further enquiry once the last Stevie Smith book is put on the shelf and so I ordered the Complete Poems, the biography and Becoming a Poet: Elizabeth Bishop with Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell by David Kalstone. I checked the shelves to confirm that I don't already have the last of those but it wasn't until out this afternoon that I remembered I do, of course, have the Collected Ms. Moore. I hope my attempt to cancel that order gets noticed in time. I am becoming increasingly vague about what I have and what I don't. If I were to live into old age I'd quite possibly end up with shelves of multiple copies of books I was never sure whether I had them or not. 

The first week or so of a New Year can seem to be like emerging bleary-eyed into some sort of new beginning but it's not. Years could be said to begin on one's birthday, or at Rosh Hashanah, and I see that the Islamic New Year is in July but whether we need one at all is open to question. Reading more Marianne Moore represents no sort of new start, she's just next off the taxi rank for a more detailed look and fits well with this profile of less than gregarious figures, like Stevie, Elizabeth and Larkin, who saw fit to devote themselves to their solitary art at least as much as they did to imposing themselves on others. 

I'm sorry that Stevie didn't get an index label to the postings on here regarding her but, strictly speaking, those labels are for poets and it is her prose fiction I've been concerned with. Thus, we'll set one up for Ms. Moore because poetry was what she did, in the hope that there will be more, much more about Moore, to say.

Some Last Thoughts on Stevie, for now

 There is a law of diminishing returns involved in reading books, listening to music or any such thing as one goes through the outdoor from anything that might have been middle age and in through the indoor into what thus must be old age. I'm not even using my customary inverted commas to denote any of those terms as things that others might call them, they are what I think they are.

How would it be possible to find anything as new and exciting at the age of 64 as it was to hear She Loves You by The Beatles, or Move Over, Darling by Doris Day, for that matter, aged about 4. Or T. Rex, aged 12, Mozart and Beethoven, Tamla Motown, Al Green, all the usual list, up until The Magnetic Fields at the age of about 42. It's not going to happen, is it.

One can still be impressed, one can still enjoy both old things and more recent things, perhaps even more profoundly, but there simply isn't going to be another such moment as when one first heard Changes by David Bowie before one went to school when it was Tony Blackburn's 'Record of the Week' on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show.

However, Stevie Smith's novel, Over the Frontier, gets closer than anything else has done for a long time. It is 'extra-ordinary' in all that that word, on examination, is intended to mean but it's not weird. It's just not like anything else of its genre. One could call it 'contrary' but only succeeed in saying why it is like other things that go beyond the remits of their genres.

It's been a long time since I was as thrilled by prose fiction as I was by Stevie Smith's. I'm glad there are some more much shorter stories in Me, Again because, in the absence of any more compelling demands on my reading time, I might decide to do it all over again with all three novels.

Because such reading time is a necessary anchor in the increasingly motiveless process of being alive. It was once implicit than one needed to get from one stage of one's life to the next but, that all done all paid for, it's easy to lack specific purpose. Being in a good book, if not in the process of writing any such thing oneself, is as good as it gets. I finished Over the Frontier before today's tracing began and then watched my makeshift attempts to conjure meaningless cash out of sport come to nothing for bthe second day running but it didn't matter much. The investment job has been in the bag for some time now and it's only money. What I really want to do is know all about Stevie Smith's prose fiction and why, on earth, is she remembered for her coy, faux-naive poems when her prose fiction was so much better.

Nativity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nativity 

Nottingham, 1965

There were three shepherds. Everyone knows that.

But one of them was lame and that was me,

They said. I didn’t like the sound of it.

White sheets were what shepherds wore in those days

And, what was more, tea towels wrapped round their heads

But one had a bad foot and had to limp

Or, at the very least, pretend they did. 

 

It was a chance to ‘method act’, immerse 

Oneself in such a part, become someone 

That one was not. Instead I made a scene 

Off stage, not wanting to be handicapped, 

Just like the spoilt diva or - Jesus Christ -

The superstar I didn’t want to be.

 

--

They come not single spies but in battalions. Well, three anyway. Having picked up a useful saying yesterday and turned it into a poem that might prove passable, maybe I should spare one for here that was once, a long time ago, intended to be about my poems.

It's been for decades that I've thought I hardly wrote poems but on and off they have continued to arrive and this year now safely reaches the long-established average output of four a year. I think this passes the test of adequacy - by my own standards and in my own judgement- but quite how many of the folder of about twenty pieces since The Perfect Book really justify print and being included in an ISBN number, thus to be kept until kingdom come in a copyright library, is less clear. Even the three or four masterpieces (by my standards) aren't necessarily on course for the Oxford Book of All-Time Greatest English Verse.

Nonetheless, I'm glad to still be a 'poet' if I can be such on my own somewhat begrudging terms.

Portsmouth Poetry Society's December meeting featured 'Contemporary Christmas Poems' but those such that I'm aware of or found were a bit too 'Christmassy' for me and if one wants a job doing properly one had better do it oneself. Being three days old by the day of the meeting, it was at least contemporary.

--

The stockpile of books of corse still had Stevie Smith's Over the Frontier which looks to be as idiosyncratic as her other two novels and thus more impressive than her poems and very welcome. Like something that you acquire a taste for just before it runs out, I'll miss her when they are gone. She defies categories as a novelist and does it her own way which is entirely a good thing although if she does so as a poet it's not quite such a good thing then.  

Christina

Christina Rossetti wasn't an obvious choice to be added to my shelves of poetry biographies but one does well to occasionally step outside of one's 'comfort zone'. The austerity - misery, even- and Victorian piety are at odds with the hedonistic ethic of Thom Gunn but he's no longer the same object of reverence for me as he once was. It was some tangential correspondance with Larkin that encouraged me to read this, and some of the 880 pages of her poems, and proved to contain something admirable which might be summarized as self-denial.

I don't know that Christina and Larkin's versions of self-denial were much the same or even so willingly undertaken. Perhaps one can in some way take satisfaction in such a thing but it is for the most part enforced by character and/or circumstances. Both of them clearly had romantic feelings but in their contrasting ways tried to deny them. With our, or at least my, more ironic mindset by now, Christina's poems are not so easy to appreciate but in their disciplined, uncomplicated music and their embrace of something bleak in this life the best of them are to be admired.

One of the great things about biographies is the view they offer of the strange old worlds they took place in, like the dour, god-fearing atmosphere of Victorian England. The Rossetti's grandmother, we are told, 'was a permanent invalid' and the family was looked after by the youngest daughter, Eliza, who was,

an outspoken and unconventional woman who wore coal-scuttle bonnets twenty years after they had gone out of fashion and whose greatest comfort was that a day only lasted twenty-four hours.

Christina genuinely seems to have believed in a better world beyond whereas Dante Gabriel was the same old, self-styled high priest of making the most of being in the vanguard of a fashionable art movement indulging himself to the limit. Like Clara Schumann compared to Robert, Fanny Mendelssohn compared to Felix and even, who's to say, Nannerl compared to Wolfgang Mozart, there is a bit of evening up to do in the reputations of male and female artists from the same families.

One might not envy Christina the life she had but it's not for us to say. There is fulfilment to be had in a desolate attic and art can be its own reward. Christina Rossetti is not going to crash into any list of my most favourite poets but I'm glad to have made her acquaintance, as encouraged to by 'Anecdotal Evidence', the greatest literary website on the internet.

 

And now, with Christmas approaching and it being too late to order in anything new to read, I fall back on the stockpile or perhaps the library for sustenance between horse races. It's likely it will be the last of the Kundera's re-read to complete that cycle. It might be a bit more of Vasari reporting on the endless genius of Renaissance painters. I think I'd better finish proof-reading what there is of C20th, the 23000 words of it that don't look too bad, before deciding that that is as good as it's going to get. 

And then what. A wide open field can either be seen as full of opportunity or a daunting prospect. 

A Wiseguy Christmas

 It's job done for another year here at Wiseguy HQ. It's like taking candy from a baby but it isn't going to get any easier with the withdrawal of much of the Best Odds Guaranteed inducement as the bookies find it unsustainable. That helped a lot in recent years as they fell over each other to get our business but the good times couldn't go on getting better forever.

Boxing Day racing is one Christmas thing that retains its old-fashioned attraction although the entirely understandable decision to vacuum up all the big hurdle prize money with Constitution Hill while he remains a flawless racing machine takes any betting potential out of the likes of the Christmas Hurdle. Before then, Famous Bridge who won entirely as expected last time out looks worth keeping onside at Haydock on Saturday where 7/2 is a very fair price. The Long Walk Hurdle at Ascot is full of question marks and West Balboa is favourite because it has less obvious questions to answer. The biggest one is the Skelton stable's not entirely convincing strike rate this autumn and so it's not obvious.

One might say the same about Allaho being fav for the King George with Bravemansgame already beaten twice this season when he shouldn't have been and Shishkin becoming quirky. 7/4 about Allaho up against those two at their best wouldn't be any sort of bet and I'd still rather have 3/1 but, if he's genuinely back as good as he was when helping himself to the Ryanair, he might not have much to worry about anyway. 

At Leopardstown, Facile Vega will be confidently expected to land the odds on as he makes his way to all the top novice chase prizes in the New Year.

I'm afraid there are no spectacular attempts to land big odds among those suggestions. I'll let the bookmakers play me at my game, not try to play them at theirs. There is no reason to give back another carefully compiled year's profit. I will take sufficient ammunition into 2024 to do it all over again, not very excitingly but, I'd like to think, reliably.

The 'Messiah' Inheritance

 I began, but soon abandoned, a piece on my apalling journey last Friday as the victim of not only GWR - the Ghastly, Wretched Railway - but also First Bus whose combined efforts to delay my progress from Portsmouth to Swindon for as long as they could succeeded in setting a new door-to-door record of 6 hrs and 45 minutes. That compares with my best 1990's effort by bicycle of 4.11 although I must admit that one gruelling ride into a force 6 headwind for much of the way took me 5.30.

You don't want to hear about that, about how GWR are brilliant, absolutely brilliant, at apologies and announcements but nowhere near as good at putting on trains. It's a shame, really. It's like they have their priorities wrong. It's like me claiming to be a 'poet', if I ever do, and then producing so few poems but at least I don't expect to be paid. 

We will see about all of that.

 

The rewards for battling through to Swindon were richly rewarded and one of several gorgeous highlights, entirely unexpected, was being presented by my mother with my grandmother's Messiah score, as sung by her, as signed in her immaculate hand in Nottingham maybe 100 years ago, it's hard to say. Such editions weren't dated then like they would be now. 

It is entirely in keeping with family tradition that this falling-apart, much-used and much-loved edition comes to me who has, in such unlikely fashion, carved out some sort of role as a 'music writer' ( !!! ), and being as thrilled by Georg Freidrich Haendel's music, in whichever spelling of his name you prefer, as the generations of my family that went before me were.

That, I'd like to propose, is an inheritance worth having. It will be preserved more carefully and more lovingly than any other artefact in this library or archive that I live among because, yes, of course, there's any amount of poetry books signed by their authors and precious things laid all about but they're not my grandmother's Messiah, are they.  

  

Rwanda

 Rwanda, really?

You might have dreams just as weird as I do. I doubt it and I hope you don't but none of us could have dreamed of Rwanda even in our wildest. It's as if this fag-end of a government has put all their money on Sheffield United to win the league title. It can't possibly happen, not least because it can't both be a deterrent to make migrants think they might be sent there while also having to pass a law that says it wouldn't be a bad place to be sent to, not that many would be even if the plan, or one single aeroplane, could get off the ground.

It is a shame that Rishi, who is at least a more serious and honourable Prime Minister than his two predecessors, has to struggle on in such a fashion, more humiliated and far more hopeless than such previous inheritors of busted flushes like Gordon Brown or John Major had to. It's cruel. By all means give the Conservative Party back to Boris with Nigel Farage as his Muttley and then we might see some realignment of the political parties come about because Workington and Bolsover aren't going to be fooled again by the same pack of lies they fell for last time out.

 

The series of Conservative governments we've been presented with in recent years would be genuinely hilarious if it had only been a satirical TV drama but it's been true. The review of the Covid pandemic that Boris kicked down the road has finally come around to reveal him as just as vague, grandstanding, vacuous and forgetful as he always was. It's not clear when we should have locked down and when we shouldn't have, I'll give him that, but it is ostensibly much better to be in debt than to be dead and the government were far too keen to save the economy, such as it was, than save lives.

It's not just the boats. The thing to do about that is get in amongst the gangs organizing them and take them out.

Brexit wasn't an achievement. No deal of Boris's was ever 'oven ready', it was barely half-baked and he left his usual mess behind him for others to patch up as best they could.

Inflation wasn't going to stay in double figures. Halving that was no more of a government target being met than when Boris was credited with the vaccine.

My MP, Penny Mordaunt, put a leaflet through the door a couple of months ago saying she was sorry she'd missed me and would like to hear my views. Well, Penny, it's a secret ballot, isn't it, so, No, I can't tell you if I'll be voting for you but having opposed Rishi last time and sided with Liz Truss and Boris once your own chance had gone the two times before that, none out of three is definitely bad so I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

 

I don't imagine everything will suddenly be fine on the morning that Keir Starmer, let us hope, forms his first government. I remember staying up all night when Blair got in and genuinely thought the world would be a better place. It won't be but maybe the rate at which it is declining might decelerate in the same way that the Daily Express seemed to interpret a fall in the rate of inflation as making things cheaper and us all better off.

My favourite Prime Minister in my lifetime was Harold Wilson, as is Keir's, and of all-time, surely it must be Attlee. I'm not as good at poetry as my favourite poets (Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, Auden, Donne); I wasn't as good at football as George Best, at cricket as Derek Randall and it was an achievement that I even became a good enough cyclist to even take part. Keir will have a job on, and no mistake, with his left wing no doubt intent on making as much trouble for him as Boris did for Theresa or anybody else who had a job he wanted, but he will be a massive improvement on what went before him whatever he does and I'll trust him to do his best for the country rather than for himself. I've never voted for the winning side in any General Election or referendum and I'm 64. I hope I get one chance to be on the winning side and, if I do, I won't have got it wrong.