In a quaint little vignette of literary life on the boundary, I found three George Eliot books on a stall at St. Mary's May Fayre on Monday. The first three, Scenes from Clerical Life, Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss. Because she is rapidly becoming my favourite novelist and all the books on the stall were 50p, I could hardly leave them there. The stall-holder was short of change and so, with understated largesse, I insisted she kept the change from a two pound coin.
I made my way indoors for the organ recital, the choir's admirable attempt at some Stanford, They that Go Down to the Sea in Ships, Zadok the Priest and the Hallelujah Chorus before the one bit of a sing I have every year in the community singing, which this year was thankfully a better-known selection of four hymns than last year and, quite honestly, gave Jerusalem as much as I could and never mind what anybody near me thinks.
That one of the people near me was the poet, Pauline Hawkesworth's, daughter, was something I could never have imagined but I've waited this long to be recognized in public as the poet, David Green, and I had better stay in from now on.
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But I have a plan to write The Perfect Book, the eventual follow up to The Perfect Murder. In the same way that Roddy Lumsden wrote The Book of Love, presumably so that if anybody asked him,
Did you write The Book of Love,
he could say,
Yes,
I will be able to say I wrote The Perfect Book. Not necessarily the perfect book, I'm sure it won't be that. But all I have to do is write a poem called The Perfect Book and make it the title poem of the next little collection. Which is a few years off yet. But I just want to lay claim to the title. There's nothing on Amazon of that title at the moment.
I have a first draft of a poem called The Perfect Book but it's not good enough to put here with any amount of provisos. I have at least a couple of years to write it.