Bargain Bunting

Yesterday I bought a book in a bookshop. That wouldn't have sounded remarkable years ago but it's extremely rare now. For a long time I've been much more likely to buy a cup of tea in a bookshop than a book. It's my fault when bookshops close and I have no recourse to disappointment. The Letters of Basil Bunting were in among sundry sale items for £1 in Waterstones and I even had to think about it at that but it looked worth a try. The sticker underneath the one that said £1 said £8. Today I looked it up on Amazon and there it's £37.50.

It's possible the letters are a reverse way in to understanding Bunting. I derive about as much from the poems as I do from his mate, Ezra, and that's not much. But the likes of Donald Davie and Thom Gunn held him in high regard and he is a 'major' figure of C20th poetry, if in a tradition that has never done much for me.

Any friend of Ezra's comes with any amount of warning signs and to call Bunting a maverick might be an understatement. But his political imprisonment was not for the same reason's as Pound's. He was a Quaker, pacifist and conscientious objector. I still can't help being suspicious of him, his severity and acerbic attitudes bringing to mind Geoffrey Hill, who he looks a bit like in old age and shares some aesthetic principles with, I'd guess.

So maybe the book will be enlightening. Whether it will lead to a Damascean conversion to Modernism, 'high church' seriousness and the elitism of difficult poetry remains to be seen and seems unlikely but there's a limit to have far one can get reading more and more about a handful of favourites and time spent outside of a comfort zone must be at least occasionally necessary even if it turns out to be unproductive. 

For a long time I've thought of Bunting and his like as generally a bad thing for poetry while not in the least objecting to that minority who write, read and enjoy such esoteric work. I suppose I take an equal if opposite view of those whose writing is too obvious. So maybe I'll report back on any alteration that this bargain buy brings about, either that I've embarked on an in-depth study full of enthusiasm or that my prejudices were only confirmed.    

Craig Greene & Robert Patterson at Lunchtime Live!

Craig Greene & Robert Patterson, Portsmouth Cathedral, Apr 16

Chopin and Debussy provide a nutritious and enjoyable staple diet for the piano repertoire, often heard and fare enough. If it seems we don't get enough Bach perhaps it is unrealistic to expect to live on champagne all the time because then what would one have left for a special treat. Gladly, Craig Greene and Robert Patterson served up Three cantata movements, arranged by Leonard Duck, which were exquisite and long on the palate.

The congestion of four hands over, under and across each other in Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring was like watching a game of Twister, the timing and teamwork required something to behold with it getting mighty crowded in the middle of the keyboard. These Edwardian settings were by no means overly sentimental but works of great artistry in themselves. Sheep May Safely Graze was beautifully done and Wachet Auf completed an idyllic triptych with the melodic line moving from Craig at the higher end of the register to Robert in the engine room.

Three popular classics from Bach's Greatest Hits done differently but gorgeously as if champagne had been successfully re-invented.

Before that, Schubert's Fantasie, op. 103, was imperious in its blaze of activity with no trace of the melancholy that I try to find evidence to the contrary of in his music. As such compulsive composers do, he goes to great lengths to find all that can be found in the thematic material if only because it must be there.

In both that and the Bach, it's hard to say whether Craig or Robert had the best job or starring role, not least because there's really no such thing. But three of Dvořák's Slavonic Dances were a headlong flourish of dazzling tempi with Craig rollicking along among the high notes. I can't remember the last time I was quite so glad of a prime position to see the hands. Any faster would have made it unviable. I asked. They had tried. And it wasn't.

A brilliantly thought-out programme made for a joyful occasion with mostly familiar music re-presented gloriously. Schubert and Dvořák are both great, forever with special places in one's favourite music, but - as regular readers might one day tire of hearing me say- Bach is well beyond that.

Without any more dispensing of enthusiasm, I must get on the internet and see if there is a CD of those cantata movements for four hands on piano. I need to serve my own purposes and it's no longer obvious that what remains of our lives is going to be quite as amenable as it has been so far. We might find ourselves needing such rafts to cling to. The opportunity to hear Craig and Robert play them again might not present itself so four other hands will have to suffice.

Retirement Diary

Anecdotal Evidence today reflects on the realities of retirement. I'll soon be six years in, well aware that when meeting retired people some years ago and asking how long it had been and they said 'xx years', I thought it sounded like forever. Except, of course, it doesn't feel like it to the incumbent of those years, in yet another one of those tricks that time plays on us. 

Maryann Corbett looks like a name worth reading more of.

Meanwhile, mention of seeing a Vermeer from a correspondent coincided with me realizing that not all my art books were shelved together. In among the misplaced batch was the sumptuous catalogue of the Pieter de Hooch exhibition in Dulwich in 1998. And if retirement is about anything it's about reading and gazing at such a thing while proceeding through more of the Complete Bach. Followed by The Hissing of Summer Lawns in an attempt to play a pop record once in a while.

C17th Dutch painting is the choice Golden Age of all Golden Ages. Some might say C18th music with Bach and Handel, maybe Shakespeare is a one man show, 1960's Tamla Motown, please insert your own examples. But Vermeer, de Hooch, Carel Fabritius and their contemporaries up to and including Rembrandt, set a miraculous standard. Quiet, domestic and suburban, Delft was something of a backwater to host a gathering like them, apparently not thriving economically and it's true that many painters went to the more cosmopolitan and more lucrative Amsterdam. 

One thing you need for a Golden Age is outrageous talent and it doesn't take long looking at what we have from Delft to begin to recognize that but then one notices how short-lived those three, at least, were. Fabritius was so cruelly killed by the massive gunpowder explosion aged 32. Vermeer, at 43, apparently by something like a stroke or heart attack in reduced circumstances and de Hooch at 54 after seven years in the asylum about which no more is known. It's no use at all to them that their stories add a patina of sadness to their brilliant lives. There may or may not be a connection between the hard times of Vermeer and de Hooch who could have fared better in Amsterdam but Fabritius is another case entirely.

Look how many ways de Hooch recesses backwards through doors and windows, and into another painting, in this. The gentle foreground scene is extended into other places where perhaps even less is happening. He didn't have to do that but time and again he does it. 

 

And this detail is spectacular. No need for guns and shooting, charging horses or Trump in the role of Jesus Christ for that matter. This is heroic, not only to think that anything so ostensibly mundane was worth representing in art but to do it so magnificently. To contemplate such a thing is what retirement and not having to attend paid employment was surely intended for.

 

Marco Polo on Hormuz

 Towards the end of his vivid accounts of his travels, Marco Polo does what Lyse Doucet does so well and reports on a conflict. The malik of Kalhat 'had a powerful hold over' the sultan of Kerman due to his control over Hormuz and,

commands the gulf and the sea even more effectively. 

If only Donald Trump had read Marco Polo before getting himself embroiled out of his depth.

 

The Travels are full of good stories, whether they're right or wrong. It's very much the sort of thing that can bring me a poem and I've been in search of such a thimng for quite some time. A Million Lies, a couple of weeks ago, isn't really it but Witness is a better effort. It was to be in ten syllable lines and two eight-line stanzas but attemps at form like that can be discarded. Some rhythm can be maintained without them, having used it as a framework to begin with. It could be revised further yet but, grateful for it as I am, it might be allowed to stand as it is.

Witness 

this region is so far north that the Pole Star
is left behind towards the south.
                           Marco Polo, Travels

Except there is no such topography
in which anything is further north than north.
No wonder some weren’t having it
about him seeing unicorns
but not quite as advertised,
ugly brutes wallowing in slime.
Well, yes, that was preposterous
but not for one
who’d not previously come across
such a thing as a rhinoceros. He believed his eyes.

Hyperbole is all that one has left
when one can’t see a limit to such wealth
and strangeness so that it looks infinite
like the universe still does and might be yet.
He didn’t tell the half of it, he said,
recalcitrant and not giving an inch,
for we see what we think we see. It’s true
as far as we know and not for them to say. 

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold, An Eightieth-Birthday tribute to Peter Didsbury, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley (Broken Sleep Books).

 Happy Birthday, Peter Didsbury. An expanded edition of his Scenes from a Long Sleep is published today and this festschrift, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley, is available for pre-order at Broken Sleep ahead of its imminent release date. It features poems by an impressively gathered cast of the great and good with such as Don Paterson, Ian Duhig, Carol Rumens, Rory Waterman, plenty more than that and some good wishes from Douglas Dunn. And me, actually. It's a bit like a non-league player finding themselves in the England squad for a friendly match. 

Peter Didsbury has long been a central figure in the story of how Hull became an unlikely-sounding epicentre of British poetry in recent decades, post-Larkin, post-Stevie Smith and a long time post-Andrew Marvell. If Larkin's provincial hideout in its university library began something there and attracted Andrew Motion, it is perhaps more properly Douglas Dunn who might be regarded as the godfather of its mafiosi although 'movement' might be a gentler term for what could be regarded as a more coherent grouping than The Movement ever was. 

It would surely be improper to submit the sort of poem one might place in the middle of a book to thicken it up, or for the editors to include such things, in a tribute to a respected writer and that hasn't happened. I must look further than I previously have into the work of Carol Rumens on the evidence of The Sense of Vision. If Paterson's Hedgehog appears to begin like Aesop, it becomes more like Einstein. If, as I sometimes suspect, we are not living in a Golden Age of British Poetry then the ongoing parade of talent now assembled here is evidence that it's not so bad after all. And there's little for poetry to fear from AI when O'Brien puts in a signature performance in The Lost Language of Trains that only he could have.

Didsbury is inimitable and I don't think anybody has dared to try. It would have been unwise. What has resulted is a profound tribute to one who has always done it his own way from a litany of admirers doing it theirs.   

 

Desert Island Books

 For a long time now I've had in mind a feature for here called The Best Book in the House. It would have been one of those 'World Cup' sort of games in which titles would qualify for the later stages from groups like Poetry, Fiction, Biography, Music, Sport, Painting, Philosophy and even Science.

There might, very approximately, be 2000 books in the house. That's not loads but, along with the CD's, space for them is becoming an issue but I like them and rarely part with any of them. But it is assumed I have all the best books I want because if I knew about any others, I'd buy them. Signed editions by Larkin, Auden, Eliot, Rosemary Tonks and Elizabeth Bishop being beyond sensible at the prices they are.

So, to cut the game short, I stood in front of the shelves one at a time and noted down likely contenders. It's a brutal way of doing it but I can't sit down and re-read them all like a Booker Prize judge. It's a competitive game and if something isn't conspicuous enough then it probably isn't a potential winner.

What came of that was a list of 20 that didn't even have Elizabeth Bishop on it. That's how cruel the process was. But the answer hasn't been arrived at yet and there is still time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse. In fact, there might not be an answer as such. The closest I might get is a list of Desert Island Books. From the 20, I've put stars against 7 and been left in that awful position of having too many to fit into the standard 8 so the list could well be extended to 10. I lined up the 7 that seemed to have become the essential elements. But I'm not sure.

Not on the team photo are Proust, Camus, Hardy, Hamlet, Rosemary and the copy of Touch signed by Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979 because it is the artefact and its significance that matters, too. As yet there are no music books but music is at its best as music and I don't listen to books, I read them, so we will see about that.

But the 7, here lined up in all their glory, are at least among the best books I've ever read.

Dubliners didn't take much thinking about. Of all prose fiction, the outrageously both most artful and most natural. Not just The Dead but the way the other stories expand towards it. James Joyce would have been as much of a hero if that was all he had written. Possibly even more so given my preference for not over-producing.

Religion doesn't feature much in my life. One has to respect that of others while finding it absurd. Jesus Christ had more impact on the world than anybody since, though, and the CofE Conservative, A.N. Wilson, is the ultimate scholar in explaining who he was, in Jesus.

Another life I've taken some interest in is Shakespeare's and it makes one wonder quite high-powered married life can be when Andrew and Katherine Duncan-Jones were husband and wife for many years. Her Ungentle Shakespeare is readily the choice on Shakespeare biography in a wide but often dubious field.

Naturally, the Collected Larkin, I don't mind which. Poetry made sensible, perhaps more than it ever had been before, and the better for it.

Dr. Johnson's Selected Essays. Why. To tell you that, sir, would be no more necessary than to tell you why you breathe. It brings life to you and sustains it.

Not Donne's poems, spectacular though they are but a choice of books about him and them in which John Carey and others are deeply impressive but I enjoyed John Stubbs the most, as I remember.

That's a similar sort of tight choice as when there can't be room for more than one book about C17th Dutch painting but one is overrun with options. So, it isn't Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer or Laura Cumming's Thunderclap. It's not the Vermeer because there's more to it than that and it's not quite Laura because, like Benjamin Moser, she brings herself, and her father into the story. I was enchanted by all three books, almost as much as by the art they take as their premise but Benjamin nicked it by making me wish I lived in Utrecht and so The Upside-Down World it is.

 

It might be best to leave it at this 7 that have seemingly selected themselves rather than not be able to decide on one more and so extend it to 10, then why not 20, 50 or 100. The carnage of any selection process is horrific. What I'd like as the next choice, as ever, is a remedy for the compulsion to want to make lists.

Grand National Preview with Racetrack Wiseguy

 It's too soon to say that the Grand National is getting easier but Willie Mullins is making it look so, even if he thus makes it harder for everyone else. He had five of the first seven last year, including the first three and could have as many as eight runners this year. The money has been for I Am Maximus, the 2024 winner and close second last time and those first two can't be left out again while they are obviously kept specially with this date in mind.

It looks like we are in another period of hardy perennials like we used to have with Red Rum, L'Escargot, Corbiere and Tiger Roll turning up time and again with solid credentials. Taking last year's race as a form guide, Nick Rockett and Grangeclare West are given a couple of pounds extra which makes it too close to call and by now none of them can be regarded as handicap good things.

I was in a betting shop not long after West Tip won in 1986 and some geezer was saying how his mate had made it a handicap certainty whereas his interlocutor said he had thought something else had been. Red Rum and Tiger Roll maybe but with 40 runners over more challenging fences in those days where anything can happen, such 'handicap certainties' are only such after the event. 

But it's not easy to look further down the weights to find much with which to take on this politburo of proven heavyweights. I'm happy to put lines through Banbridge, Gerri Colombe and Haiti Couleurs who have all had their moments but don't look to me like having another one here. Spillane's Tower, maybe; Iroko might be thereabouts; Panic Attack wouldn't come as a shock but, even given that it hasn't been quite the all-conquering season for Mullins and his recent strike rate is below par, you'd think he's ready again for this and so one surely has a sensible chance in what used to be regarded as such a hard race to pick. Not for me, it wasn't, though. Horses that I'd seen stay and jump once kept up a steady percentage of successes.

However, while not being able to keep Maximus out of the first four, I can't get away from Jagwar, receiving a stone from the big guns, after the way he finished at Cheltenham over the shorter trip having had to come from too far back. That looks ideal as an indicator since there is clearly still something in his handicap mark with a further win surely waiting to happen.

And since the weight difference between him and Johnnywho, who beat him half a length there, remains the same, the story suddenly writes itself. It could be all yellow and green and an index to the various different caps used to subtly mark out the JP McManus horses from each other and 1-2-3-4 for the likeable owner of an empire of horseflesh.

So,

1. Jagwar

2. I Am Maximus

3. Spillane's Tower

4. Johnnywho     

 

Update. With Spillane's Tower now running on Thursday, make that 3. Johnnywho, 4. Iroko.

Marco Polo on Kubilai Khan

In Marco Polo's Travels, I went straight to the bit about Genghiz Khan but soon found much more follwing that on Kublai Khan, as per the Coleridge poem we learnt at school. It's a remarkable and gripping account. 

As with most history, power is glorified and Marco might not be an objective witness even if he is in some ways reliable. At school the teaching seemed to assume that the likes of Julius Caesar, monarchs, God and their like were to be admired. In the 70's there was still much more residual belief that Britain ruled the waves and that rulers were the great and good like we were. On closer inspection, and in hindsight, it now looks like we too readily accepted the publicity of tyrants and turned blind eyes to their methods.

Marco's in-depth account of Kublai's reign is a tremendous, sustained, overawed account of its immense grandeur. It lacks irony, passes over the methods by which it ruled as if, and because, they were commonplace and to be expected. But now we can see Marco's report as a precursor of President's Trump's chronically ongoing reports on himself, how nobody has ever seen anything like it, it's the most successful presidency ever in the most powerful country ever and all the statistics that can be used to measure it are off the scale. 'Measureless to man', indeed.

Except there is one episode recording an uprising despite the highly organized discipline with which the empire was held in place. The place has maintained the tradition. I hadn't realized that where Kublai ruled from is much where Beijing is now.

But the people eventually had seen enough of how Ahmad, a governor with great influence over Kublai, managed things much more for his own benefit than even any others in such positions did. Having revolted and Ahmad having been assassinated, Kublai turned up to investigate and found out about the 'abominable outrages committed' and, as we might expect, 

caused all the treasure that Ahmad had amassed in the Old City to be brought into the New City; and put it with his own treasure; and it was found to be beyond all reckoning.

But don't all 'great' rulers, or many of them, find the same thing. Piers Gaveston for Edward II, the Duke of Buckingham under James and Charles I, Peter Mandelson, Dominic Cummings, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.

Surely history is cyclic and doesn't make linear progress.

I'll either go back and start at the beginning with Marco or find another sensational bit but I'm sure he'd be glad to know that, 800 years after writing up what he found on his long holiday excursion, it is still providing enthralling entertainment. 

Take Four Books - Romanticism

Radio 4 has a programme called Take Four Books. In it, an author talks about one of their books and then three others that were 'influences' on it. I can't help wanting to have a go at any questionnaire, desert island or suchlike and so, realizing that my level of celebrity is well below that required to get an invitation, do it anyway, here.

I can't think that my trio of such models for Romanticism will bring in any surprises. Least of all, Philip Larkin.

Some of the ways these 'influences'- terrible word redolent of the 60's, drug culture and being 'under the influence' but it's better than 'influencers'- are consciously adopted and some less so. I arrived at my own method of trying to 'avoid bad practice' before I found a very similar phrase used to describe Larkin and The Movement of the 1950's. For me, thus, not wanting to do the wrong thing, it means irony, understatement rather than anything overblown, trying to avoid sentimentality, being readily understandable and doing so within chosen forms and seeing the poem as, hopefully, a piece of music. Mostly that.

But Larkin is also an example for not writing too much, doing what he does carefully and finding something lyrical and worth having rising from his low expectations. Low expectations of this life, not of what might be written about it.

Situation is a bit like This Be The Verse - same number of lines, same rhyme scheme but I have 10 syllables in a line where he has 8. Finding a rhyme on 'the coastal shelf', I was well aware that it's a simile memorably used in the Larkin and wondered if it was too obviously a steal. But his use of it doesn't mean the phrase can't ever be used in poetry again and it stayed in, becoming an echo in a poem about 'going nowhere slowly' which is what the likes of Mr. Bleaney are doing.

Success implicitly acknowledges a debt to Posterity. One could find further, if vaguer, echoes of Larkin elsewhere but since I'm sometimes unsure whether I'm listening to Beethoven or Mozart, for example, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

 

Sean O'Brien has more than once been credited as a master of iambic pentameter. He undoubtedly makes good use of it and I've seen manuscripts with stresses on where he's been checking he's got it right. I'm less concerned with precise adherence to classical standards and count syllables more than metrical beats but, more than that, only really want the rhythm to flow and find that fitting the stresses over lines of defined length are a great help, not a hindrance.

The 'rainy Wednesdays/ In suburbs where the library's always closed then' could perhaps have come from O'Brien with its rain, library and the sense of ennui on long afternoons. It doesn't, though. It comes out of real life as part of an objective correlative for a kindly relationship that doesn't aspire to love. That's Larkinesque, too, in a way but I'd much prefer to define the gradations of acceptable equilibrium than aspire to some hyperbole of high passion and be found wanting. Which is what Romanticism, the poem, is about. Keats and his accomplices found themselves entranced by anything transcendent but, actually, were at least as much in love with the ruins of it.

 

So I needed a third influence. A poet who moves between rhyme, unrhymed lines, metrical lines and 'free verse' if need be. That would be Thom Gunn, for a very long time a great hero of mine, but this book isn't as Gunn as I've sometimes thought I've been before. And I'm never going to be as Rosemary Tonks as my liking for her might make me want to be because I'm not the world's most passionate guy and her trademark exclamation marks are dramatically intended whereas I'd never do such a thing unless, as in Escape Artist, as pastiche or with other second-hand inferences.

But her dissatisfaction with this life, or the world as she finds it, is somehow akin to mine, as it is in their own ways for Larkin and O'Brien and I wouldn't want to pass her over even if, as pastiche often remains, Escape Artist can't help being still more Green than Tonks.

So,

Philip Larkin, Collected Poems 

Sean O'Brien, Ghost Train 

Rosemary Tonks, Bedouin of the London Evening

 

but, having just done that, I'd no more go on Take Four Books than I'd take up any other quite so public exposure. Larkin was ambivalently equivocal about such exposure and Rosemary went to extraordinary lengths to try to extricate herself from it. Talking about oneself could be a stage further on towards madness from talking to oneself. One is better leaving such work as one sees fit for whatever attention readers want to apply to it. It's for commentators to do the commentating.   

The Rest of West and other stories

Moving on to the two lesser known of Nathanael West's novellas, proved to be more of an excursion into the exotic than Had been expected. The Dream Life of Balso Snell and A Cool Million are both picaresque, a bit like Don Quixote and Candide, but also grotesque.

The introduction to the Wordsworth Classics edition says of Balso Snell that,

To call this a work of precocious undergraduate humour might seem ungenerous to both undergraduates and their literary efforts. One critic, Daniel Aaron, reviewing it in 1947, called it 'scatalogical and pretentiously wise' and this is such an exact judgement that it demands little elaboration. 

Snell's adventures having entered the Trojan horse via its posterior aperture result in encounters with literature and ideas that are ingenious in parts, taken to extremes and sometimes cleverly funny. That doesn't add up to a satisfactory work but it's only 20000 words and so one can stay with it. If it's a critique of literary endeavours then its gaucheness can be explained away as an element of its methods. If it is deliberately appalling some might count such appallingness as part of its success. The thing about 'experimental' writing is that there is no need for it to see print unless the experiment came off. As such, it's hard to like but of interest in its strangeness.

All of West's stories end in violence, as if some terrible end is inevitable. In A Cool Million, Lem Pitkin sets off to New York to make his fortune, as promised by the American Dream. Through a terrible series of misadventures he loses an eye, half a leg, his teeth, is scalped but remains undaunted as his ongoing disfigurement proceeds. It is a cartoon-like inversion of the myth that anybody can make it in New York. His death is not the end of his debasement, though, as he is taken up as a symbolic hero by the National Revolutionary Party, the vehicle for an ex-President that has loud echoes in the USA today, who proclaim that,

'He did not die in vain. Through his martyrdom, the National Revolutionary Party triumphed, and by that triumph this country was delivered from sophistication, Marxism and International Capitalism. Through the National Revolution its people were purged of alien diseases and America became again America.'

That sounds familiar and if the current incumbent was thought to have read any literary fiction, you'd think he'd read that. Thus, while The Day of the Locust is a fine book and Miss Lonelyhearts a success, it's almost in West's more dubious books that he's more interesting. Neither Balso Snell or Cool Million add much to his literary reputation but the former adds the dimension of surrealism and a genuine shock value and the latter by now looks prescient about MAGA and all the unhinged mania that comes with it.

I don't need to make room for West in the top echelon of my favourite prose fiction writers. It's by no means as fixed a list as its poetry equivalent anyway. But there was enjoyment to be had in reading him and I'm glad I did.

-

Next up, seized upon in the Chichester Oxfam shop because I was in the market for it anyway, Marco Polo's Travels. I'm expecting something picaresque and unlikely-sounding from him, too.

--

But last night. well on the way to justifying the licence fee on its own, the Radio 3 concert was Tenebrae with the Britten Sinfonia doing James MacMillan's Seven Last Words from the Cross, the Allegri Miserere and other almost as compelling pieces. 

It must be approaching thirty years since the MacMillan was broadcast late one night and the first disc of it subsequently appeared. It comes now with the big advantage of being familiar but that brings with it no trace of contempt, only a deeper thrill, if anything. A colossal piece that is both austere and shines forth. There is The Protecting Veil, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, Errollyn Wallen, the Philip Glass Violin Concerto but MacMillan, with Veni, Veni and Isobel Gowdie to be taken into consideration, has provided music as memorable and powerful as any living composer.

Worth looking up. 

Southampton

 The daylight needs to be disposed of, the bus pass can take you anywhere. At the pace of its own choosing, admittedly. I lived and worked in Southampton for a time circa 1983 or 84 and then more happily worked there 1987-91. While I go through it on trains from time to time I've not got off much in the last ten years. Eight years ago for the Jess Davies Band on the release of the one and only record I had a hand in writing and then to see/hear Isata Kanneh-Mason play Clara Schumann. I'd have to check older diaries to see when it was we went to see Bowling for Soup. A free bus ride to see it again, then.

It was never an unpleasant place but it's always lacked charisma. Two 'careers' that I only ever regarded as jobs sent me there but I never wanted to stay. I arrived just in time to find a Corals and see Planters Punch, the only runner for Mr. Henderson at Bangor, steered home by Nico. Then it was lucky I went to the Art Gallery first because it closes at 3pm, somewhat weirdly. They have an early Hambling, an Auerbach, Van Dyck, Renoir, Gainsborough. There was an exhibiton by Emma Richardson but sadly the painting about ghosts isn't available on the internet to put here. It was far and away the most captivating. 

But, all these years on, the places where I lived and were employed are all gone. The dive where I lived has been replaced, or maybe only remodelled into an updated building of similarly compact living spaces. I followed the walk into Above Bar and wasn't sure of the precise premises where I'd suffered the indignities of junior retail management in an unsuitable job with wildly incompatible colleagues. While they seemed to think salesmanship was an honourable profession, it was clearly pathologically absurd to me. 

And the office block I worked in later in the first glory days of a life in the civil service has been replaced, as have so many buildings, with apartments. And yet there is still a housing crisis.

At first I thought it was The Dolphin we sometimes had our liquid lunches in and it seemed like the ultimate degradation that it is now a gym but on the way back The Red Lion was still there. But all trace of the imposing administrative centre overlooking the park has vanished, as by now have several of the friends I had in there 35 years ago. At least in Nottingham the houses, school and church I knew were still intact along with Trent Bridge, Meadow Lane and the City Ground.

But, notwithstanding those golden years of introduction to the civil service culture to which I owe so much, Southampton never had it for me. I'm not saying I feel at home in Portsmouth but one loses such affiliations by moving about too much and instead become a ready-made outsider, especially if one's temperament suits it so well anyway.

So, no, in spite of the several good people I ever knew who had Southampton allegiances, I'll know to keep on passing through and not go back. It featured on my university applications as first choice in 1978 for reasons that are hard to think of by now. I'm not convinced I missed much, or that Southampton University did, when nothing came of that.  

Nathanael West

 Forty-five years ago, my forage into the C20th American novel for the sake of unit 305 included some Fitzgerald, Catcher in the Rye, Saul Bellow, The Bell Jar and The Sound and the Fury. A despairing look at Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas. Not much else. My essays were on Eugene O'Neill/Tennessee Williams and Sylvia. I wish I'd read Nathanael West but I think I imagined The Day of the Locust was science fiction, as per that of the triffids, and even then that was a genre I disparaged with the utmost gusto.

One great reason for reading West would be that his books can be read in a day. Four of them fit into a neat little paperback. A better one is that he's tremendous.

Miss Lonelyhearts is almost shockingly cruel in places. I'd say 'cynical' by way of praise, where it is a good thing when understood properly, but most seem to take it as a negative the way it's come to be used. Since the whole theme of C20th American Lit seemed to be the 'American Dream' and its casualties, heaven knows where we are by 2026 when this tawdry view of it was available in the 1930's. The broken lives, the commodification of misery, maybe it's a shame it ends so dramatically but, as with Gatsby, it's as if it's not tragic enough unless it does.

The Day of the Locust is possibly more substantial although both belie their low word counts with big themes and quality writing. Here is the first famous fictional Homer Simpson and one wonders at the reference point because surely Matt Groening would have rest West. 

He is an awkward, downbeat character finding himself among the community of Hollywood extras who live with more hope for their film careers than their talents justify,

Faye's affectations, however, were so completely artificial that he found them charming. 

....

He believed that while she often recognized the falseness of an attitude, she persisted in it because she didn't know how to be simpler or more honest. She was an actress who had learned from bad models in a bad school.

 

There is a great deal to like about West and I'll pile straight into his other two novellas, grateful to have caught up with this element of a reading list from all those years ago. I did once add Sherwood Anderson, and Carson McCullers. I'd read some Hemingway before I got to university, and Ken Kesey. I don't remember Edith Wharton being on the list. The C20th was only 80% through. 

I'd like to think that eventually I will have read enough, and maybe even 'got it' enough, to be worthy of the B.A. (Hons) that, quite honestly, seemed like an underwhelming achievement but that might not be my fault. They seemed happy enough to present me with a certificate. I suspect that the conferring of degrees is not quite the great thing that those who don't have them imagine. Not in 1981 and maybe not in 2026 either.

But I'm here to celebrate Nathanael West, not denigrate educational qualifications. It's another victory for following one clue after another. I arrived at him via Weldon Kees and, yes, one can make the connection.

Audio

The Studio Album.

Piece of cake with this simple, home use technology. I'll knock up some sort of document to go with it, whether or not it amounts to sleeve notes, see if I can think of a better title than Audio and a picture for the cover and there it will be.

It looks like it e-mails okay, the file size not being too big to go, so it could be made freely available. It remains to be seen if I'll re-record it before doing that. It comes in two parts because, as recording engineer, I accidentally began a new file before track 3.

George Martin put Cilla through numerous takes for Anyone Who Had a Heart and Burt Bacharach wanted even more for Alfie before they were happy. I maybe ought to be slightly fussier than using my first takes without being quite so perfectionist but I'm not trying to make a million-seller.

The track listing is,

Twilight
Piccadilly Dusk
The Cathedrals of Liverpool
Starý židovský Hřbitov
Fiction
Move Over, Darling
Herbstregen
Situation
Rainyday Woman
Windy Miller
Romanticism
Success 

 

Twelve poems approximating to the greatest hits without that being a suitable title because I'm not claiming greatness for them, or even that they were hits. There is always a borderline area where one or two look lucky to get in ahead of one or two others.

But it's an enjoyable thing to do while also making one feel as if one is attempting to be a 'heritage' artist, re-packaging the back catalogue or, as the Sex Pistols more forthrightly put it, Floggin' a Dead Horse. But it might have the effect of initiating some rekindling of the motivation to try to produce more of such things. If the right idea shows up, I'd be glad to. Whether it does anything to encourage 'live' performances is another matter.

However, with a few weeks without musical events to report on, at least DGBooks is back to talking about books and even that which the original idea was to do, my poems. 

The Studio Album

     The new laptop promises to be quite a success. Already I've taken it upstairs and looked at a book on it from the safety of my remote eyrie away from the possibility of kids playing outside. I then went on to watch some greyhound racing and landed a modest gamble on the fav in the long distance open race, which always seems the sensible option in dog racing. Thus, while there is still money in the account, I availed myself of 10/1 about Jagwar for the National although if I were you I'd wait until the day when the advertised prices might be better.

However, I found the microphone and sound recording features, too.  

I find this visual representation of my first go at reading a poem a thing of rare beauty. The title and each of the fourteen lines come in similar, but all different, shapes of sound suggesting variety within discipline which is what I like to think it is - like something by Haydn, perhaps. It has immediately given rise to ideas of recording a little album of poems. I've never doubted that poems are to be read aloud, it's just I don't like doing it in public for a number of reasons. But recorded in private without all the protocols of the 'live' reading, much of that is avoided.

So, something to think about. 8 poems, maybe 10, all done on one file hoping it would be of e-mailable size although I have my doubts.                        

Schubert and Melancholy

I remain haunted by having said a couple of months ago that I 'never found Schubert down-hearted'. Not the only daft thing I ever said and for the most part I meant it but the disbelief it was met with makes it one of the more questionable of recent times. I've not seen Lilac Time, the 1934 film with Richard Tauber, so I can't blame it on that.

I spent much of a day playing discs of Schubert and still found much more 'lightness of touch' than depression. I don't find the Unfinished Symphony at all pessimistic.

I wondered if melancholy was a temporary condition or a character trait and found it can be both. Sadly, as it were, Robert Burton's Anatomy was rather longer that what I wanted to read 45 years ago in C17th Lit. I expect both Montaigne and Dr. Johnson are good on the subject, and more succinct.

So I ordered a Schubert biography from the library. He's about the most important composer whose life I've not read yet anyway. Elizabeth Norman McKay's book is excellent, balancing the demands of the life, the music, contemporary ideas and events very well and covering the 31 years in 340 pages in plenty but not too much detail.

But if ignorance is no defence, it looks like I'm guilty as charged. It says the Piano Sonata, D. 784, is,

one of the darkest of all his compositions, autobiographical in the emotions it expressed of pain, distress, anger, and ill temper,

and, yes, I was familiar with it. 

Perhaps the best short answer to a complicated question is summarized in a chaper on Two Natures in which Schubert could be a sociable, attractive and popular personality but increasingly refusing to be bound by social convention. The latter part led one witness to note,

how powerfully the craving for pleasure dragged his soul down to the slough of moral degradation.

It seems likely that debauchery, of which the book is short of lurid detail, was a factor in his death just short of 32. There is a suggestion that his friend Schober was a bad influence.     Quite how he found the time for such indulgence as well as reaching well over 900 opus numbers in so brief a life is hard to say, especially as there were fallow periods and illness.

It's a remarkable life, as were those of Mozart and Beethoven, to name only two. So is there some law that genius is bound to live an extraordinary life. Not necessarily, despite the prodigious output of music and children, Bach doesn't appear to have been outrageous.

But I'd better be more careful about my pronouncements. No, I don't generally find Schubert's music down-hearted but he was clearly 'bi-polar'. For me, though, it is the 'sincere, incapable of malice, friendly, grateful, modest, sociable, communicative of joy' character that comes most through the music. The world's not an easy place to negotiate for some and his talent and commitment was to his art rather than applied to the world. He comes across as a sort of ruined saint, somehow not quite on a par with Beethoven but not very far behind him at all.  

Leora Cohen & David Gray in Chichester

 Leora Cohen & David Gray, Chichester Cathedral, Mar 24

There might come a time when, due to climate change, thousands of years of literature and music will need to be annotated with footnotes explaining the characteristics of the seasons described in such things as Chaucer, Vivaldi and Keats's Ode to Autumn. For the time being, though, they are still more or less recognizable and this year in the UK, Spring arrived exactly on time and with it some musical programmes to mark the event.

As with several of his pieces, it wasn't Beethoven that gave the Spring Sonata its name and he might not have had it specifically in mind in the abundance of the Allegro. The sharing and coherence of Leora and David together belied the fact that he was a late stand-in for the advertised pianist. The Adagio was indeed molto expressivo, captivating as I think (did it?) shift into the minor key and it might most credibly have been a nocturne. After a capricious Scherzo, it turned out to be the cheery, classical Rondo that I, for one, went home with playing on repeat in the memory.

It is a measure of Beethoven's colossal status that such a piece would count as a major item in the oeuvre of many lesser names but would take some time to arrive at when listing his. I'm glad to find that the Violin Sonatas are on my shelves - these days I can never remember- and so I'm grateful for this reminder to go back to them.

Grieg's To Spring was sonorous and song-like, Leora's violin rich over David's finely modulated piano but one imagines Lili Boulanger's D'un matin de printemps was where their technique was more thoroughly tested. Mercurial and flighty but with spaciousness in its more extended lines, it was possibly the most Spring-like piece, being 'changeable' as the day's sudden turn back to cool and overcast reminded us that it can be.

 

Angelina Kopyrina's Rachmaninov in the Menuhin Room

Angelina Kopyrina, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, Mar 20

Sometimes everyone's a winner. In a special Friday event in the Menuhin Room, Angelina Kopyrina was provided with a dress rehearsal before she takes her Rach to Paris, the piano benefitted from the box office proceeds going towards its maintenance but, most of all, the audience witnessed a grandstand of a performance that possibly, if possible, went beyond what we've had from either Angelina or the piano before.

Having completed her Ph. D. with the catchy title, Rachmaninov’s piano sonatas: Issues of performance interpretation considered through the historical background, artistic influences, the scores, and performance practice, the two sonatas are central to the things she does. By way of preparation for this event, I did some homework, too, and played a standard-issue sort of recording- if there is such a thing- over and again in the hope of finding comparisons.

Much of that is inevitably down to the difference between a disc played on a machine made by Sony and a piano played in real time right in front of you but there was more to it than that. There was more definition and contrast in Angelina, slower when slow at the beginning of no. 1, more fff when necessary and certainly quicker when quick. I understood that where the disc does 41.04 for no. 1, Angelina takes a few minutes off that. 

The first movement evokes Faust, so beloved of those diabolic Romantic types, and comes as a downpour of extravagance and anguish but where I'd anticipated something much calmer regarding Gretchen in the second it still came with intensity and fire. The third marched towards its fateful climax in a mesmeric, torrential struggle.

During the Q&A afterwards I felt it a point worth making that some of us, if not her, might have benefitted from an interval in order to recover a little bit from the experience but within a couple of minutes, we were into no.2.     

The quality of the Steinway no doubt helps in such an avalanche but after ten minutes it was already undoubtedly a standing ovation performance and I'm not sure I've ever seen such after the first piece in a programme but, as Andrew said, it's the first time it's happened in the Menuhin Room. 

I often thought, when training towards long distance cycling events, that it was the effort one put in after one felt one had reached one's limit that built fitness, stamina and resilience and maybe rest is bad for you. Thus there was no time to reflect or discuss what we had been through so far. Perhaps it is character-building to continue onwards but, yes, there would usually be an interval for the benefit of the faint-hearted.

The Sonata no. 2, op. 36, is about bells more than anything else while being half the length of no. 1 but still achieving similar giddy heights. The Lento second movement finally put some ethereal beauty in among the blitz, poignant and with great emotional depth. For once not sitting on the far left, I was in front of Russell in his accustomed position on the right and so saw nothing of the keyboard, only Angelina wrapped in her rapt attention like everybody else was. But, of course, it can't end like that and with the most impulsive of gestures, we were left thrilled if also battered but safe in the knowledge that there was no other Friday lunchtime like it available anywhere else.

Up to now my favourite Angelina repertoire has been the Bach-Busoni Chaconne and the Prokofiev Sonata, the Beethoven almost being taken as a given thing but, as a performance, this probably tops the lot. I'd still prefer Tatiana Nikolayeva and her Well-Tempered Klavier for the long-term relationship of the years on the desert island. But, having thought that the best thing I'd go to all year happened in Wigmore Hall in January and that question was a one-horse race closed there and then, I'm glad now to have a shortlist of two. 

Georgina Duncan at Lunchtime Live!

 Georgina Duncan, Portsmouth Cathedral, Mar 19

English Literature graduates can make fine pianists. There's Andrew McVittie. There's Georgina Duncan. There isn't me but two out of three ain't bad.

Georgina began with her favourite composer, Grieg and To Spring, suitably sunlit. Her repertoire is Romantic and Impressionist with Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen next moving from innocence, through some hasty keyboard work and a bit of a sing-song to some lingeringly phrased Traumerei. 

Of particular interest was John Field, only a generation younger than Mozart, and two Nocturnes in which perhaps the right hand might have been playing a Mozart sonata over a lush left hand by Chopin.

Grieg's Gade was a country walk en plein air and Hjernad (Homeward) an invigorating striding out before running up the steps to the front door. A highlight for me, though, was the 'uncharacteristically showy' Impromptu, op. 90 No. 2, performed like the Minute Waltz with deft fingerwork and exuberance unleashed.

The Impressionist parts were provided by Debussy's prelude Bruyeres which could have been shadows in the clair de lune except I find it means 'heather'. Ravel's Sonatine, M.40, second movement, offered wide panoramas, before more Debussy, Cakewalk from Children's Corner, was a boisterous finale, almost ragtime, maybe verging on Erik Satie's quirkiness.

All of which made for a happy programme confidently presented by a young pianist with verve and enthusiasm and, it is to be hoped, a bright future. 

Dominika Mak in Chichester

Dominika Mak, Chichester Cathedral, Mar 17 

Some composers have onomatopoeiac names that pre-figure the sound of their music. By no means all of them but a few. The zest imparted into Stravinsky in that second syllable goes into The Rite of Spring, Liszt is a bolt of lightning and Corelli very decorative. Thus, the one syllable of Brahms stretches out like a semi-breve, like his extended melodic lines full of longing. Except in the early Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5, he is moody and impassioned, ready to be in thrall to Clara Schumann and apparently not yet settled into the lush unfolding of the fourth symphony.

First up, though, by way of contrast was a Scarlatti Sonata, in C# minor - one of the 555, you can't miss it. Dominika Mak brought out all its crystalline qualities in the luminous fluency she brought out of the Chichester Yamaha.

The Brahms, though, begins with grand gestures apparently coming out of dark places. Only 20 when he wrote this third and last of his piano sonatas and he comes to it with the vigour of youth. The second movement is an Andante that takes as its text,

Through evening's shade, the pale moon gleams

While rapt in love's ecstatic dreams

Two hearts are fondly beating.  

Dominika's sensitive playing made this perhaps the most memorable section, the reflectiveness becoming climactic before what sounded like ecstacies in the Scherzo.

If Brahms admired Clara, Beethoven was a similarly huge presence in his imagination and the Intermezzo insistently plays on the 'fate' motif from the Fifth Symphony as if possessed by its spirit. But the Allegro finale elaborates its theme into an affirmative statement of hope. If it's true that it requires great virtuosity without being overly spectacular or showing off that is very much what Dominika Mak achieved.

It's a week of piano sonatas for me. It took me a long time to realize that 'size' in music isn't dependent on the number of musicians involved. A Haydn symphony is generally neat and tidy whereas sonatas can be enormous. The Scarlatti was so short that the audience didn't realize that that was all there was and it went unapplauded, there was no doubt that the Brahms had reached the end, though.

Weldon Kees - Fall Quarter

I don't think I've ever been too concerned to know the 'canon'. Not all the great books are my favourites. I don't mean there is no canon, as has been posited in recent decades, but I do mean that we all make our own for ourselves.

Weldon Kees wouldn't make it into the generally recognized canon but I like him and lots of things about him. I dare say he is minor compared to Tolstoy as a fiction writer or Milton as a poet but that doesn't impinge on one's enjoyment of reading him.

Not all the poems are masterpieces but there is a handful worth having and I prefer to judge people by their best work rather than take away points for their less good. Similarly with the stories which are fine if not crucial. There are a number of reasons why Fall Quarter, his only surviving novel, went unpublished and not all of them are that it wasn't any good.

 

It's not often that I LOL, laugh out loud, while reading, but have done twice in this. William Clay has taken up a post teaching in a downbeat provincial college in Nebraska. He looks up Janet Eliot whose name he's been given. As with Mrs. Oatley who he meets in a bar next up, she's brilliantly conceived,

"Can't you drive faster?", she said. "I scarcely feel I'm moving when I'm doing less than sixty." 

"I don't want to smash us up."

"Oh, don't worry about that ! I've been in hundreds of accidents and never got scratched. Once I was with a boy and we ran right into a train and I wasn't hurt a bit."

"What happened to him?"

"He died."

 

Bits of it might be a fraction overdone but it's art and art emphasizes certain elements at the possible expense of credulity to make its point. At university 45 years ago Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas was on the reading list. One of the worst books I've ever read, alongside A Card for the Clubs by Les Dawson. I've not read Kerouac. One doesn't shock by setting out to shock. You create something like a cartoon if you do that, more like Tom & Jerry. Deadpan is better.

Fall Quarter has a great facility, something that those who like Salinger would enjoy and, at halfway through, I'd take it as it is rather than 'improve' it further. It is possibly the best of Weldon Kees. I'm glad it saw print eventually and that I got a nice copy of it. 

--

In the second half, the hapless William Clay meets Dorothy Bruce, a little town flirt and radio singer with who he, of course, becomes hopelessly devoted to in the face of all the evidence that she is treating him like a doormat. It's a plot used more than once in London and Brighton settings at roughly the same time by Patrick Hamilton,

Yet he knew, following her with his eyes, that she could treat him any way she pleased, that she could do anything she wanted, and he would still be hanging around, unprotesting. 

 

It's an episode rather than a broad, sweeping canvas of a story and thus likely to be considered 'minor' because it's not Anna Karenina but that's no way to assess the worth of anything. I thought it was great because I enjoyed it in all its downbeat ingloriousness. What a great pity it is that the other attempts Kees had at novel writing are lost.

Between the Stops

 Between the Stops is a project in which Portsmouth busses have poems by local poets in them. There is photography involved, too. I don't know what the measurable benefits of such community feelgood initiatives are but I'm not against them trying.

Today some of the featured poets read their poems at the Hard Interchange and it was a most worthy effort. I went to see Kev do his and took a picture that, once cropped, comes out in the pointillist style of Seurat.

The bus home happened to feature a poem by somebody else I know, Maggie Sawkins, so I took a picture of that, too.  

The Monolulu Cup Result

Well, what can you do.

I let in a late entrant who looked harmless enough and he goes and wins it. My father hasn't ever backed a horse in his 89 years and then he turns up, picks three horses that all get placed and he scores a tidy +7.71 and nobody else got to him. It was a week with some surprises but not many as big as that.

The Professor showed a profit having either benefitted from or suffered a non-runner. Perhaps next time everyone can nominate a reserve, just in case, but had the replacement run and lost he'd have been -2.27, not +2.27 so who's to say.

The Monolulu Cup double was landed with, actually, the only two winners being those selected by two participants and for the most part the punditry was not of the highest standard but it made for a compelling game with Jagwar, Salver and Kabral du Mathan all looking in one way or another like near misses.

It could have been so different but it wasn't, so Congratulations to the Magpie and the first thing Notts County have won since the 1894 FA Cup. 

I don't think we need list the full result, the rest 'also ran'.  

--

In several ways it wasn't a great week. I'd not be saying that if I'd landed the £250k ITV7. Little local difficulties wouldn't have ruined that for me. But I couldn't see it being a classic Cheltenham, one of the best for years, as A.P. tried to talk it up. A lot of the big races were wide open and it felt even more so as some short-priced favourites failed. But the ongoing problems at the start, resulting in the serious falling out of two jockeys, wasn't pretty. And neither did Willie Mullins's comments on the ground help much when it didn't quite suit his horse in one race. It seemed to suit plenty of the others of his.

Several big name horses weren't there for their different reasons and while Lossiemouth is a worthy champion hurdler there were three horses she really needed to beat who she didn't get the opportunity to. 

Perhaps we will have to have starting stalls and, by all means, if Willie wants to stay away that's entirely his decision if Good to Soft isn't what he wants. Other trainers will be glad of the chance of his prize money.

The Monolulu Cup

This year, if Cheltenham wasn't exciting enough, DGBooks is thrilled to be introducing the Monolulu Cup, a tipster competition named after Prince Monolulu who in his day made John McCririck look like a shrinking violet.

I asked for three horses for Cheltenham, with each way as an option, and decided that a Patent-  the three singles, three doubles and the treble- would be the scoring system in the event of anybody having a winner. It rewards imaginative selections, if and when they are successful.

Cilla

each way 

Golden Ace (Tues 4.00) 

Jeriko du Reponet (Thurs 5.20)

Haiti Couleurs (Fri 4.00)

 

Kevin 'Cayton' Rogers 

 

each way 

 

Poniros (Tues 4.00)

No Drama This End (Weds 1.20/Fri 3.20)  

Salver (Weds 2.00)

Lord Stubbsy

Backmersackme (Tues 5.20)

Selma De Vary (Thurs/Fri 1.20)

Supremely West (Thurs 4.40)

 

The Magpie 

 

each way 

 

Mydaddypaddy (Tues 1.20)

Winston Junior (Tues 2.40)  

Brighterdaysahead (Tues 4.00) 

Pop Songs

I Started a Joke (Weds 2.40, or wherever it runs) - the Bee Gees

Ace of Spades (Thurs 4.40) - Motorhead

Wonderwall (Fri 4.40) - Oasis 

if any of the above are non-runners, then,

Macho Man (Tues 1.20)  - The Village People

The Professor

L'Eau Du Sud (Weds 4.00)

Supremely West (Thurs 4.40)

A Pai De Nom (Fri 5.20)

 

Racetrack Wiseguy

 

Old Park Star (Tues 1.20)  

Lulamba (Tues 2.00)

Kabral du Mathan (Thurs 3.20) 

 

Spenno 

 

Old Park Star (Tues 1.20)

Jagwar (Tues 3.20)

The New Lion (Tues 4.00)

--

It's as fascinating as any of the races with a variety of strategies involved. One entrant suggested an allowance because they were up against 'professionals'. Not quite that perhaps but it is Spenno, the Prof and Wiseguy that go for what might be regarded as safer options with the Prof brand-loyal but nowadays to the Skeltons and not Mr. Henderson. 

Two horses are nominated twice so there's a Monolulu Cup double in Old Park Star and Supremely West. But there have been shifts in the markets of a few races as money arrives from Ireland to gainsay the UK optimism that they might make a game of it this year. Old Park Star is a bigger price than that I gormlessly took, ignoring my own advice that ante post is a bad idea. But the improved odds might help in this game and Henderson horses are known to be able to drift and still win.

It will be refreshing and well deserved if one of those having an old-fashioned punt were to win. We might as well all abandon hope if it proves that picking pop song titles was the right answer. Batting like Boycott has its disadvantages when the bowling is like that of Michael Holding. Wiseguy and Spenno could be back in the pavilion early doors.

We will see. Game on.