O, Babe, What Would You Say

Confidence is an unreliable thing, isn't it.
(This is me Live at the Apollo, marching up and down the stage like Michael MacIntyre, making fairly mundane observations but the audience is ready to laugh their heads off anyway. Comedy was once Laurel & Hardy doing, Is that the money that I gave to you to give to her that she gave to him. But now it's just patently obvious things recounted as if they were hilarious. Get well soon, Doddy.)

After last weekend, with an all but unerring eye for a winner on the turf, I set myself up for a good time, thinking the 72-disc set of Complete Bach Cantatas was an absurd luxury on the verge of being ordered. And after today, it would have been, if it hadn't been for confidence. Because, 'not fluent at the last, beaten half a length' is a concise, if sorrowful, short story. One lives to fight another day and that day is one of the more interesting days in the racing calendar, Cheltenham Trials Day, where Wholestone is all but a tip. It would be a tip if I was still confident.
Confidence is good or bad in different situations. In horse racing it's bad because you persuade yourself you know when actually you don't really know. It is a short cut to the poor house. The same was true in cricket, whether batting or bowling. Feeling good, gonna score some runs today. This one can go. And then one hears the dreaded clunk of the stumps being re-arranged and that's that.
Football was different. There's no point in not feeling confident when a half chance presents itself. Back of the net, or if not, never mind, I was only Andy Cole ahead of his time if I missed.
But, at work. What about at work. You need some or you'd never turn up. You'd just get steamrollered time and again by the misplaced confidence of others, so, sadly, one does need to stand one's ground (and it helps if you're right). But what must it be like for them, chronically confident but lacking judgement, knowledge and foresight. Thus forever apologizing, back-tracking, looking daft or, more likely, making up some abstruse, convoluted, circumlocutory explanation to explain why they came up with their nutcase idea in the first place.
That's why I'm so excited about having you people on board, the nice lady said today, because you're not stupid.
It's nice of you to say that about me, I said, but I don't know how much further it can be applied.
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But one thing I'm confident of is that the new Julian Barnes will be a masterpiece. I'm glad to see it published so early in the year, at a time when major highlights are fewer and further between.
Meanwhile, Muriel Rukeyser's Savage Coast, her semi-autobiographical novel on the Spanish Civil War looks like being worthwhile interim reading and at bedtime I take in a few more pages of A.N. Wilson's Jesus.
While it is enthralling and scholarly stuff, it is inevitably less forensic than one would have preferred but what can you do. Wilson is nothing if not urbane but his case is based on entirely plausible assertions that this or that wouldn't have been the case.
But that is the point. Virgin births, miracles and God are unlikely to have been the case. When you are up against faith, scepticism is all you have. But so far, it seems it is not so much Jesus Christ, whose name means 'Saviour Messiah', which seems very prescient of his parents, that we are up against but his main propagandist, his Alistair Campbell, Paul.
That lad, it seems, has a lot to answer for.
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And the latest news on The Perfect Book is that it's unlikely to get to the printers in March.
This is not a delaying tactic to build up expectation in a poetry world agog for news of its publication, it is just that two more poems required haven't quite materialized yet and I doubt if I'll get to the printers in March. But I'm confident about it. Not confident that it will put me up alongside Seamus Heaney and Elizabeth Bishop as a wondrous poet but that I'm going to like it, be very happy to have written it and I don't expect any more than that of it.