View from the Boundary

I don't know if Guinness will want to use this picture in their next advertising campaign but I'm open to offers in the age of product placement and celebrity endorsements. (Thanks to Laura Chadwick for the picture).

The celebrity isn't me, of course. It's much more subtle than that. The red pen in my pocket there rightly belongs to the novelist Heather Richardson. She lent it to me at Martin Mooney's reading in Marylebone last summer so that he could sign his book for me and then somehow she never got it back. Well, I've treasured it ever since and often show it to people as a 'real novelist's pen'.

The occasion is my dad's 75th birthday evening in The Plough at Fairford. Having shown Heather's pen to my Aunty Chris, she asked if it helped but, no, it doesn't. The words don't appear to come from inside the pen. But it was a fine evening of beer and skittles and trading jokes with Uncle John.

It's apparently been a slow year for poetry so far but it is a slow time of year anyway. Nonetheless, I can find no trace of big titles due that might be contenders for my annual website awards which, after last season's tremendous selection, is looking underwhelming. In the meantime, the best entertainment I can find is the slow release of Todd Swift's Top 100 British Poets on Eyewear, http://toddswift.blogspot.com/2012_01_01_archive.html. Some of the photos are interesting. I can vouch for the fact that Geoffrey Hill doesn't look like that any more but there's a great one of a young Carol Ann with Adrian Henri.

Meanwhile, I've plotted my crafty way to a rating of 1400 on Internet Chess Server, 46.2% of the way down their ratings. I only broke through my career highpoint of 1364 a few weeks ago but have gone well beyond that after stumbling across some real chess wisdom.

Take care. Concentrate. And don't pick a match against anybody who might be any good.

We went and did a charity-raiser quiz in Winchester last Thursday. Won it, needless to say. But you still wonder how you missed some of the answers, like who duetted with Enrique on this, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCcthtVbMJM.

'I used to play it over and over again. Brilliant. One of my favourite records at the time. She was really famous. Not quite such a big name these days.'

Didn't get it. Sorry, my dear.