But we take The New One to Aintree and can feel he has every right to return to the Champion Hurdle next year as favourite even if one can never get paid out as the rightful winner this year.
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A major achievement for me during the week was some sorting out of my untidy house. Not that a tidy person visiting would think much of it but one needed to have seen it beforehand to appreciate any improvement. I don't know if I quite gathered every CD into some sort of order but it was long overdue that some new organising theme was put in place. And so for the time being here there are roughly 160 albums lined up in an approximation of chronological order in the Music category, which in this house is what Amazon mean by Classical. What Amazon mean by Music is called Pop here.
We see the line disappearing back in time from the recent collection of pieces by contemporary composers based on paintings by Munch to the Gregorian Chant albums from Pluscarden Abbey and a disc of Compline that admittedly doesn't get played much. But so few do and I hardly think 160 is excessive. I came to Compact Discs relatively late and have a number of LPs and cassettes as well. But looking over the assembled line-up, without claiming that it represents anything like a sensible overview of nearly 1000 years of Western music, it does look like a genuine reflection of my subjective appreciation of it with the Buxtehude/Bach axis supported by Handel, Vivaldi and a few Spem in Alium's. My list-making project has proceeded irregularly as I have added a few pieces towards my 100 every few days. It might yet get finished one day but the unevenness that lists a four-minute piece alongside a two-hour oratorio is going to make it an odd selection.
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And what a fine thing Middlemarch has been during a week off. George Eliot's prose, of course, leaves no issue unexplored in its 900 pages but is not only wonderfully clear and reasonable but full of acute observations of character and humanity. Some of the idiom and usage looks surprisingly of our time for something written 160 years ago and her use of 'cool' in one place didn't look far away from how we use it now.
It was quite honestly wasted on me aged 18 or 19. I knew it was good then but didn't really have the dedication to engage with it sufficiently. Unfortunately on the Victorian Lit course at Lancaster then I don't remember being given much option but to write an essay on Vanity Fair which was most unfortunate. And if there was a choice and that is what I chose then the other option must have been horrific. I think my other essay on that course was on Matthew Arnold. I just think I could have done better given a bit more leeway on the first subject.
However, I don't want to go back and do it again. All those essays being written in all those universities up and down the country, all over the world. It makes me shudder to think. It wasn't perhaps quite so bad in my day when it seemed the tutor was trusted to assess what they thought and appended a few comments and put '63' and then crossed it out and wrote '62'. A friend of mine met the English Department head at the squash courts once.
He said, 'Oh, I didn't know you played. Perhaps we should have a game sometime.'
'Yes, okay. Are you any good?'
'No, not really. 56, 57.'
After which my mate thought, 'hang on a minute, that's what you gave me for my essay last week'.
But now one gets the impression that it all has to be done in a standardized way with as much value given to the format of footnotes, essay plan and adherence to an ideal of academic commodification as any actual insight or critique. Not that many students are likely to come up with genuine new insights or critique anyway. I'm not sure what it is going to lead to but it looks a bit prescriptive, in line with so much of the way organisations work, the way consultants like things done. I can see that it might help the less able produce something better than they otherwise might but I can also see how it might make the most able want to pack it up and do something else instead.
Education has long seemed a slightly sinister word but it didn't seem the least bit dubious when Linden Huddlestone introduced us to James Joyce circa 1976.
