Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

I intended to be reporting back from the South Downs Poetry Festival, specifically from the Desert Island Poems show in which some Hampshire poets interviewed some others in the format of the much-loved institution. I took the precaution of checking the train time for Petersfield only to find that the train I wanted was cancelled, the one before was not makeable and the one after wouldn't get me there in time. I realized I could go and make it another way but when I arrived at the bus stop to see a bus I could have taken just leaving, I recalculated my chances and just thought, no, it's a hot day, I'm afraid they'll have to manage without me. Which it looks as if they did.

And perhaps for a while, that will apply to much else.
As I've mentioned before, the TLS arrives usually in Thursday's post, full of its own so-called erudition. I look forward to it, find out a few bits of interest but, especially the letters page increasingly makes me wonder about the line between scholarship and satire. My friend and I were pleased to get the Shakespeare Twins theory into print there in April but reaction to it, a few celebrity names in Shakespeare Studies deriding it on Twitter, was underwhelming. There was no attempt to refute the theory with cogent arguments, it was just summary derision which might be explained by a certain distaste for anything that comes unexpectedly and disconcertingly from outside of the established academic coterie. There is nothing wrong with the theory and it can be no more proved than it can be disproved, apparently, and we do have further words on the subject to offer but, having finally seen it into print, there isn't much more we can do if the world simply refuses to engage with the idea.
The referendum and its fallout continues to look confused and irrational and heaven help us if Donald Trump gets in across the water while other events on the news are beginning to dress atrocity in a grim patina of normality. A certain discomfiture has long been my own minor neurosis but it was almost something I could indulge in while worrying more artificially about the horse racing results. I didn't intend it to become that much more intense and develop into the way we live now. But it is likely to be the way we live now from now on.
So, who really wants to know what I think. I certainly don't and thus, in the same way that I have come to regard poetry readings by me, which is that if I'm not very interested in my own poems then I don't see why anybody else should be, I might spend a bit less time adding to the internet's heavy burden and listen to the Proms while reading Stendhal instead.
It is certainly a malaise but in what it consists is a difficult question. To assume that my own late middle age had coincided quite synchronicitiously (as Leonard Sachs might have put it on The Good Old Days) would be vanity. It might have seemed obvious to many thinkers or writers that the world revolved around them but I'm convinced it doesn't revolve around me. We all have our own scriptures to return to for solace, to explain it all, and here is Thom Gunn, in Fighting Terms, when if not still a Cambridge undergraduate, it wasn't long after,
                       Like the world, I've gone to bad. 
which always sounded tremendous, as if it should be true and now it sounds like it is. But Gunn, of course, was putting on attitudes to see how well they fitted or how good they felt and I expect that's all one can do.
I've seen a number of websites, blogs and suchlike announce from time to time that they are taking a break. I'm not saying that. It's still here, a brooding presence and useful to me if not many others to look up what I wrote about a particular book when I can't quite remember. It is a good thing to put down a note about such things, and make sure one does, at the time rather than just put a book on the shelf in a suitable place because, blimey, it's hard to remember sometimes what it was like.
I know we left the enthralling series, My Life in Sport, at the end of the second of three pieces on cycling and there are still running, pub games, chess and a miscellany of  competitive sports to be covered.
The year's best awards have Judy Brown and Ian Duhig shortlisted for the poetry, Graham Swift's Mothering Sunday looking like a strong favourite for best novel; Errollyn Wallen's disc is a contender for best CD and a wonderful day at Cheltenham races is probably in the lead as best event so far but it is to be hoped that there's more to come. But I've honestly stopped looking back at how many items I'd posted by this time in previous years and worrying that I'm not keeping up. 

Meanwhile, I might be more with Wittgenstein than usual and suggest that of which there is nothing to say, we should say nothing. Or something like that