A View from the Boundary,

which is what these column inches of miscellaneous reflections always used to be called.

County cricket is such a long-standing tradition that nobody involved in it seems to still remember why it happens. It is a venerable ritual that needs to be observed, so that people like the major in Fawlty Towers can look at the scores over breakfast.
Because Nottinghamshire were playing Hampshire, it was necessary for me to attend because I am a fervent supporter of my home town team and can name one or two of their players, although Derek Randall, Reg Simpson, Gary Sobers, Gamani Gooneseena and Basharat Hassan weren't actually playing today.
All the time Hants were struggling to 270 all out, it appeared that Notts were winning but as soon as they batted and were immediately 0 for 1, they weren't. When neither batting side, while batting, think they are winning, it can be slow going and that is what happened on a day when the weather contributed most to the day. There's only one thing worse than the cricket being not very interesting and that's when it stops completely.
Luckily, the wit and wisdom of the assembled group conjured fine entertainment from the newspapers and from the thin air at the back of their minds. So The Times crossword was filled in, possibly correctly- I don't know, followed by the Telegraph. The Call My Bluff  game was followed by an improvised Sausage Sandwich Game, copyright Danny Baker, where the result was Stenhousemuir 2 Patrick Thistle 0. Then, a traditional game of Today's Birthdays, in which contestants guess the age of those famous people whose birthday it is, e.g. Anatoly Karpov, 65; Lady Olga Maitland, 72, was followed by a new game that turned out to be most successful, guess the temperature from yesterday's World Weather which was further improved by guessing the location having been told the temperature and its initial letter. Although I had been first to get anything spot on by guessing the temperature in the Falkland Islands yesterday at 5, I was soon outgunned by Spenno in the reverse game, having guessed Mumbai was specifically as hot as the degrees stated, and it turned out to have been Marrakesh.
So, you can see how the English summer can be survived- not by the vicarious spectating of arcane sport but by doggedly getting all the value you can out of the newspaper while Hants and Notts battle grimly on over there in the sunshine, like, as it were, 'too bald men fighting over a comb'.
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Meanwhile, I know by now it's time to think of which book to read next and order it because I'm nearly halfway through the latest. It is long overdue that I added Yeats to my poet's biographies and Richard Ellman's The Man and the Masks still looks like the best critical biography.
I've never been sure about Yeats, having been introduced to all such things when Eliot was regarded as god in C20th Poetry. I've felt I owed W.B. something ever since I changed my mind during the final exam at University, having intended to write about Eliot, saw the questions, liked the one on Yeats best and somehow, from somewhere, scribbled out a masterpiece.
I still haven't decided, his formative years having been difficult, the fashions of the fin de siecle for Madam Blavatsky and all kinds of baggy mysticism not having done him any favours - it's a good job he hadn't been a teenager in the 1960's- and one needs to give him more time. For a moment Ellman seems to make a good case for his dual personalities alongside Jekyll and Hyde and Dorian Gray and the difference between character and personality, which seems to prefigure the Ego and Id, but then Yeats reverts to type and involves himself in all the wrong things. But perhaps wrong things is all there were. I can't say that books on Eliot or Pound made them attractive figures either so there's plenty of time for Yeats to make a case for himself. It's not as if he doesn't have a great oeuvre to back him up and whenever was it that we had to like the poet anyway. Even though the fashion has by now swung decisively back to literary biography and away from the text and text alone as the object of appreciation, it is still very important to have written some great poems.