View from the Boundary - Join Together

When you hear this sound a-comin',
Hear the drummers drumming,
I want you to join together with the band

I was never a big fan of The Who but they provide a stirring enough theme for the Grand National this year with Join Together, which is the tip. I took 16/1 after the way he jumped round the National fences in the Autumn and then put in a spirited finish and, although he is still 16/1, I haven't seen anything else to put me off him since.
It is about time I backed a National winner as my once great record of having been on roughly one in three of the winners since the early 80's, including two dual forecasts, has lost some of its immaculate lustre by not having found the winner since taking an early 25/1 about Comply or Die when it obliged at about 8/1 fav. But here are The Who anyway, with one of the few Top 20 hits to open with jew's harp and harmonica. I don't think even Medicine Head ever did that,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HDMCCLlGl4

But, just one word of warning. The last time I remember a pop song inspired great expectations of financial reward on the turf was in the 80's when a horse called Protection ran at Cheltenham. I played the single by Graham Parker and the Rumour all morning, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3ETAZSFWWs convinced that it would win, and it came nowhere. I should have known then that any horse even vaguely named after an Elvis Costello song would have been much better.

Otherwise, these early months are always slow ones in the poetry world. One is always free to do one's own thing and the Portsmouth Poetry Society have already posted some superb meetings but the publishing season seems to revolve around the Spring and Autumn.
My next booklet, The Perfect Murder, is set up as a 'work in progress', with the usual quota of 14 poems to represent four years of frugal verse writing still ideally requiring one more before it gets taken to the printers and so it would only be an optimist who would expect a publication date before the now customary 17th October.
Why would one rush it. It's a great feeling to be sitting on a set of poems one is pleased with but once you have put them out there, available to the world, there is a brief feeling of achievement that lasts a week or so but then you consider what you have for the next one and the page has never looked blanker or harder to fill.
The T.S. Eliot prize is an event in January that I will one day attend, perhaps, but it is a review of the previous year, like Sports Personality for poetry except it happens in that morbid post-Christmas aftermath rather than place itself as part of the pre-festive glow. And so, as I wait for 2013 to kick off, I'm coming home every night this week hoping that Glyn Maxwell's Pluto has arrived from Amazon but it hasn't done yet.
And so, rather than poetry, I offer you a rare venture into fashion and a 'style' feature. I'm wearing new glasses. They're not a major departure from the previous. In fact, they are as close to the old ones that I could find but amazingly quick service, putting one's new prescription into a website and getting them three days later for less than thirty quid. How the High Street shops survive these days is beyond me. Well, quite clearly, many of them don't. That is a bad thing and it's my fault.
But, finally, no self-respecting book reader will be quite as behind times as me but I've been reading Kate Atkinson's Behind the Scenes at the Museum. What a tremendous writer she is. Laugh out loud, beautifully done and yet another reminder never to try to write a novel. One could never do anything like as good as that.