Oh Babe, What Would You Say

No, no, please. I don't have to go back to reading Jane Austen, do I. I was a hundred pages into Mansfield Park, just filling in time until the Juilian Barnes book arrived, but then that only lasted 24 hours and so now I backed faced with the prospect of returning to it.
I don't mean it's bad but the point of it is somewhat lost on me. I remember circa 1979 making Vanity Fair the worst novel I'd read and I don't doubt that Thackeray and Jane Austen are very good at what they do, I just don't want them to do it to me.
So I was looking through Amazon for ideas on where to go next, maybe David Mitchell's Slade House, and saw some of the reviews of other Barnes books. Someone said his style was 'preening', self-regardingly clever and that was a fault, of Flaubert's Parrot in particular.Which just goes to show that you can't please everyone so you might as well please yourself. There are those that genuinely don't like Shakespeare, possibly even some not impressed by the Beatles and I've heard objections to Mozart and Sibelius. So it's not impossible that there are some who don't like Beethoven or Bach and if giants from history like those can't be universal paragons of artistic achievement then nobody else is going to manage it now.
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But it could be a genuinely interesting year in politics.
I tried to estimate the odds for the next President of the United States and at least got the favourite right, only slightly overestimating her price, thus underestimating her chances.
Paddy goes 10/11 Hilary Clinton, 2/1 Marco Rubio, 7/1 Sanders, 15/2 Trump, 12/1 Cruz, which is about as reassuring as one could hope.

For all the bluster and apparently unstoppable momentum of Donald Trump, you can now get 15/2 after his defeat in Iowa. He turns up in an aeroplane with his name on the side like Led Zeppelin used to do. But even they weren't quite as bombastic.

Perhaps we should be more concerned with Europe than America. I've always been very pro-European and it doesn't take much of a look at the cast of anti-Europeans to know that I'm In. Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, the usual suspects from the right but no longer the left, it would appear. Whereas Tony Benn and other assorted left were predominantly anti-Common Market, as it was then, we now have the Green Party, the SNP and Jeremy Corbyn lined up in favour.
But what does Boris think. Is it really true, as suggested by a BBC journalist this week, that he is still deciding on his position because it needs calculating to have the best chance of enhancing his leadership prospects. Can such a fundamental part of a politician's policies, manifesto and 'beliefs' really be quite so malleable as to depend on how it might affect their career prospects.
Well, sadly, it does and they will say and do almost anything if they think it will help to realize their ambitions.
In the 1990's (probably), roughly around the time that the Conservative party had a group photo taken of themselves with their ties taken off, to make them look casual (but only made it look as if they'd all just taken their ties off), I remember Michael Portillo explaining to conference that they needed to make it look as if they cared about the disadvantaged because otherwise the disadvantaged wouldn't vote for them. Not because they cared but because they needed the votes. It was very honest of him to admit it but it didn't sound quite how he meant it to once you'd heard what he said.
I sometimes enjoy making up those amusing book titles that used to be in comics, like What the Moon Does by Wayne Waxenrise, Is Your Pet a Dog by Noah Catt, Three Types of Soil by Pete Lomanclay, Two and Two Make Five  by Stu Pidboy or It's Raining Again by Thor Titwood.
I could go on like this for hours. But now there's I Don't Care About Anything Apart from My Career by Polly Titian.
It is remarkable that David Cameron might be able to pass himself off as a great European in the tradition of Ted Heath and Jeremy Thorpe but he might.
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And finally, Portsmouth's thriving and lively poetry community looks like continuing in fine form in 2016 with a number of events planned that should make it another good year.
Some of the following things are more established than others but all of them are more than rumours.
Pauline Hawkesworth and Denise Bennett have new pamphlets due out, published by Indigo Dreams as a result of success in their competition, and likely to be launched with readings, Pauline's probably in Hilsea with readings by members of Portsmouth Poetry Society. The South Downs Poetry Festival in July will be this year's event under the auspices of the Havant Literary Festival. And the Autumn edition of the magazine South may or may not be edited/selected and thus the launch reading held, in Portsmouth, which would most likely be in October but I couldn't possibly say.
It's odds against all those events happening without me showing up to read a poem or two at at least one of them. Whether or not I'll set a new personal best of reading poems in public more than twice in a calendar year remains to be seen.