Oh Babe, What Would You Say

Penglai Pavilion at Cheltenham today

Apologies to anybody tuning in for the Saturday Nap but it ran today. I delayed my luncheon break until two o'clock so that I could go and watch the 2.10 on Mr. Betfred's telly and was rewarded not only with a classy performance, Coleman only having to push a bit before going comfortably clear, but also a remarkable return of 11/4 after last night's snapping up of 2/1 saw it as short as 6/4. Some Irish raiders are going home the poorer for that.
The performance only made Paddy shorten Penglai to 20/1, from double carpet, to win the equivalent race in March and that's an optimistic call but one might as well have a share in the hope and the hype, some of which has been generated by me here, I'd like to think.
It will be worth sticking with the Ferguson/Coleman horses tomorrow because the advent of some proper races has not found them out. Qewy might have been last of three today but not by much. So, Devilment, High Bridge, etc. Have a look.
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It will be a week or two before I can say a few words about the new Ted Hughes biography but 600-plus pages will fly by, one week seeing me a third of the way through. But, congratulations to Jonathan Bate on the knighthood I only found out about by reading the blurb inside the dustjacket. If you like knighthoods, that is. It's unlikely I'll be offered one, or even the British Empire Medal that I might just qualify for, but I would be in a better position to disdain such honours if I were thought worthy. I would say that I have a first name and a second name and no use for my middle name or the commonplace letters I can put after them (as a joke, if I wanted to) so why do I want to clutter it up with an ersatz medieval prefix.
Literary biography is a dubious industry, though, forever delving into the dark side, and the Hughes dark side was as dark as most. In the 35 years since I was doing just enough as a deshabille student, the fashion has turned about completely from the text being the object of attention in literary studies to the text being treated as evidence for investigation and the prosecution of the author. I wonder how many life stories do not reveal difficulty, darkness and tragedy. Perhaps it is not only artists whose lives are like that, it might be the same if you read the life of your local greengrocer. But those lives don't get written,
Arthur had a particularly bad year the price of carrots went up, his customers all complained and then his wife left him.
But it's possible that eventually we won't want to know, we might start to feel more guilt than curiosity reading the private parts, as it were, of a life, and English departments all over the world might go back to the literature. Meanwhile, Prof. Bate brings some of that customary speculation across from his work on Shakespeare with an anecdote about Hughes forgetting his scarf when leaving a reception at Faber where he had met T.S. Eliot,
Either the newly famous poet was still nervous at the end of the evening with the world's most famous poet or he and Sylvia were rushing because the babyminder's time was almost up.
Blimey. Yes, that is what life is like sometimes but until somebody finds an oblique reference to forgotten scarves or the hourly rate for a babysitter at the time in Lupercal, we may never know.
I sometimes don't wonder why I found horse racing more captivating than academia.