There are hundreds of TV channels to choose from but most of the time I watch old QI, old Not Going Out, old The Chase, and not much new. I saw Fern Britton heroically nominate Science Fiction for Room 101 the other night only to be howled down by a nerd called Robert Webb and then Danny Baker made a convincing but unsuccessful case for punk rock.
And then it comes to Sunday night and the BBC put the Prom of the St. John Passion up against Far from the Madding Crowd. I ask you. But never mind how many league tables put Bach top of the greatest creative artist of all time, the intention to flick between channels in an effort to do both, Thomas Hardy won. Although I might have to go back to the book to see if that is really how it ends because I don't think it does.
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Meanwhile, back on the page, Ben Pimlott's Harold Wilson hasn't taken long to answer the questions asked of it. Like were politicians always quite as shifty, manipulative and self-seeking as they onviously are now. Post-Blair, post-Cameron, and not yet safely post-Boris and with the cartoon swot, Jacob, now being posited as a contender, were past generations quite as conniving, ambitious and unworthy as them.
Well, in the example of Harold Wilson, yes, they were. It is a heavy book and probably far too dangerous tothrow at cats but it needs to be to unravel the complexities of Wilson's tactical genius. Pimlott is good, never less than thorough and comes up with regular fine turns of phrase, like, when Harold is deftly positioning himself to appeal to the centre and left of the Labour party while not really being of their ilk,
Wilson's actual distance from Gaitskell was so small as to be scholastic.
Lord George Brown is in there but deserves a book to himself and Marcia has already taken control of the project. If there isn't much good satire or comedy on the small screen - and how can there be with the news consistently weirder than any joking can make it look- one is grateful for that time before one can remember it for onself and, no, not much has changed. We've just got less respect for it now.
And, in praise of olden days, and in line with Danny's railing against the over-rating of 1976/77 in pop music, the debonair Jack Buchanan is one place we can go for balm in these nutcase times.
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But we must do what we do and carry on doing it, regardless.
The Perfect Book was set for October 2019 as I collected more poems for a bigger book than the customary dose of 14 poems every four years. But I'm looking at the twenty I have, and have made some judicious amendments, and I feel an itch.
It's not a book the world needs and I'll give it away to anybody unguarded enough to express the slightest of interest but I want to see it. And so I stare at the poems from time to time, in between a novice hurdle from Roscommon and a beginners chase at Southwell on a Sunday afternoon, and wonder if they are any good. Or, rather, whether I like them enough because that's all that matters. And I think I do, possibly too much to subject the innocent darlings to a pamphlet competition in the hope of getting somebody else to do the donkey work of putting them through the presses. I can do that and save them from being bullied by poems by people with creative writing degrees or the horrors of being typeset and edited by a foster parent. Never mind if you're not short-listed for Forward prizes, reviewed in Poetry Review or read out at the Ledbury Festival, you were mine and I loved you for all your shortcomings and lack of competitive edge.
On the other hand, of course, word might spread like wildfire through the disparate poetry communities about this wonderful little book that has made poetry by avoiding all the usual pitfalls that give poetry such a bad name for preciousness, virtue signalling, excess erudition or just trying too hard to be poetry and I'll be turning down contracts, invitations and professorships on a semi-full-time basis.
We'll see.