Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

How very remiss of me. Nothing added here for over a week. I'm disappointed it hasn't caused an inbox overflowing with complaints.
The hottest news, as we follow the progress of The Perfect Book, is that the sample copy is ready to collect so I must get down there so that I can scrutinize it all over for errata. There really shouldn't be any by now but it's likely I won't notice the last gremlin until three weeks after dishing out copies.
As soon as it's in print, the poems caan suddenly lose all the lustre one thought they had, knowing that now other people can see them and they are no longer your own private world. I'm sure some might look wooden or clumsy in places and I'm already fretting over use of the word 'lousy'. It is meant to refer to the fictional character rather than any real-life equivalent but that isn't made clear enough.
Or perhaps one can worry too much. Anyway, it will be a good job to involve myself in over Easter if the latest batch of old Barnesy novels don't staart to arrive. Needless to say, Talking It Over is another masterpiece.
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I'm a bit taken aback by the fuss caused about the ball-tampering in the cricket. It has gone far beyond the reaction to what Mike Atherton was seen doing and it is professional sport. It's not cricket in the spirit of the original maxim any more but, given England's performance in the first test against New Zealand, I didn't realize anybody still cared or tried. I thought it was just a matter of fulfilling fixtures.
I always polished one side of the ball when bowling. There were three reasons for that. In the vague hope it might make the ball swing, although I often tried to spin it as well; because it was what proper cricketers did on telly and much of what we were doing was pretending to be them and in order to leave an indelible mark on one's white trousers (which is still  there), as a badge of credibility as if one knew what one was doing. But why was that not ball-tampering. We only preserved the shine on one side, that was the point. It's like eating bananas or taking water on a long-distance bike race. They were performance-enhancing.
Professional sport has gone beyond my comprehension by now. Supporting a football team seems to require more of an interest in accountancy or high finance than any instinct for sticking it in the back of the onion bag, which is what I liked doing. 
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And I wonder why I keep getting special offers from the London Review of Books. Do you think they buy lists of subscribers from the TLS. That would surely be a retrograde move by the TLS because one day I might decide to change allegiance. Having both might be too much of a luxury. Does the LRB have a crossword, I wonder. It has Alan Bennett and, once in a while, August Kleinzahler but the TLS has Sean O'Brien as well as an occasionally irritating sense of its own erudition that sometimes makes it look silly.
We'll see.

Meanwhile, About Larkin, the magazine of the Philip Larkin Society, is due to appear next at the end of next month with Move Over, Darling, a poem from The Perfect Book, tucked away in a corner. It is a very timely single taken from the album and I'm grateful to them for finding space for it.