A similar arrrangement applies to the Magnetic Fields, playing the 50 Song Memoir album over two nights next month at selected venues. So that's London, impose myself on the kindness of old mates for hospitality and pay for two gigs when really they could do the best bits on one night.
It makes you reconsider how much you need to see these performances and while I'm sure Stephin and Friends will fill their dates out with cosmoploitan types in London, Brighton, Liverpool and such places, I am not so confident that English Touring Opera will be so lucrative in their attempt with Handel opera in Portsmouth. But best of luck to them and apologies for absence.
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Meanwhile Carson McCullers went down very well, with a little help from a useful introduction that explained it all very well in time-honoured student fashion of making sure you'd assimilated the salient points and not trusting your own reading.
With £30 waiting to be spent on Amazon, it has some reverse psychology effect of making one want to spend such a windfall wisely and not just order Mozart operas for the sake of stacking the shelves or things like DVD's of The Monkees. Thus I looked at various things, like Clarissa Aykroyd's recent recommendation, Benjamin Fondane. Maybe one day but I do have some books stored up, like Ben Pimlott's doorstopper biography of Harold Wilson, which is so far so much fun, described by others at Oxford as 'a trifle pompous', a show-off and a prig alongside several more charitable verdicts but Guess who he used to go and listen to playing the organ in Balliol chapel - Ted Heath.
But however good it is thus far, we haven't met Lorrd Georrge Brown yet so I'm expecting it to go through the gears when we get to him.
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Today would be a fine diary entry if I kept such a thing. Ruby made sure of the dead cert at Cork,
asserted between last 2, stayed on well, easily
and the Portsmouth Acrostic went up on the wall of Conference Room 1 in the office so tomorrow I will wear my best frock and poet hat to have my picture taken next to it so it can go at the top of the page here. It is a moment of minor celebrity, maybe a bit like Shergar turning up at Fontwell Park, but it's fine and much preferable to wider celebrity. I've already impressed a few of the choicest young ladies of the office with it and if poetry can't do that for you, there's some doubt as to why one would do it at all.
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The DVD referred to a while back was The Gospel according to Al Green. Perhaps there was a clue in the title but the blurb did say it was a mixture of his classic 70's soul hits and the gospel hysteria that later took him over. Well, the interview early doors is invaluable about his career in the formative years and, boy, can he play guitar if he feels like it but once we've been treated to Let's Stay Together, he's off on one big Lordy, Lordy excursion, or I expect he is. I've left it there to be returned to until I need a prayer to land me a major gamble.
But let that not diminish the fact that he was the greatest singer to adorn the hit parade and, circa 1975, when I realized that my immediate circle of friends were disappearing a bit too readily into allegiance with long-haired electric guitarists, decibels and posturing machismo, I could see it was the other gang who were buying Tamla Motown records had got it right. It wasn't too late and I adopted Al Green as my saviour as he, in his turn, adopted an earlier, widely admired figure as his. And I've not looked back.
