It was bound to happen. This was my first recorded defeat in competitive (non-handicap) Boggling but was on the cards. I had scored 12 consecutive hits in practice but it is in the red hot crucible of world class tournament play that one has to show it and Chris looked sharp throughout the early evening's play. He had slipped to a handicap mark of 3 and was always like a Luca Cumani horse, not quite delivering on a few occasions before taking full advantage of a rating that allowed him to take the handicap event with something to spare. But he then progressed to take the championship with similar panache and the champion was behind from the moment he lost the toss.
So, congratulations to Chris and it sets up a massive 2015 renewal.
And, while handing out tributes to people for things I'm supposed to be good at, Huge Congratulations to my songwriting partner, Tim Curtis, for not only finishing the Times crossword but being picked out of their hat as a prizewinner, too. The website simply isn't all about me at the moment.
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Another feature of the time away was finishing Thomas Hardy's A Laodicean. As beautifully written as all of Hardy, of course, but surely this one takes his plotting device of coincidence meetings a little bit further than even the most suspended of disbelief can be expected to swallow.
By all means, he sets up the ardent lover, the coquettish object of his admiration, the flawed rival and the dastardly baddie. But, as a whole, the novel suffers from an overlong middle section in which the besotted architect, Somerset, traipses all over Europe in pursuit of a girl who, however entrancing she might be, just isn't worth it. I'm not a particularly violent man, I like to think, but I certainly wanted to punch most of the main characters in this story and only poor Charlotte deserved any sympathy in her role as prototype for Marty South in The Woodlanders.
And then I moved on to the holiday reading, which is Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro. These are fine stories, and Free Radicals that I read on the train home this afternoon was especially well done.
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The Portsmouth Poetry Society booklet, Calliope, is at the printers now and so it is actually too late to pray for it. If there are errors in it now then there will be errors in every copy. I'd like to say it won't be my fault if there are but as editor- I'd prefer to say 'producer', it will be.
It was not all easy but it will be a booklet to take some pleasure in, I sincerely hope, and if you can make it on National Poetry Day, Oct 2nd, to the reading and launch of it then we will all be glad to see you and take roughly the price of a drink off you for a copy.
