A Kind of Renunciation

Ali Smith's Hotel World provided excellent Bank Holiday weekend reading. She came recommended from a few directions and this was a title more recommended than most. Impressively done. One might want to say it's more of a long prose poem than a novel, susceptible as it is to some non-traditional stylistics but we must not be led into the temptation of invlovement with such genre definitions - do they matter, no - and Ali Smith captures life as it is lived by more than one might think, I think, has her heart in the right place and is well and truly among the finest of contemporary British fiction writers.

But nothing is better than the hugely anticipated and not one bit disappointing A Very British Scandal with Ben Whishaw doing Norman Scott some great favours, Hugh Grant not far behind capturing a good deal of the Thorpe charisma and plenty of fine work in support. I watch each episode again the following day and episode two built on the first, especially in the black comedy category. So it's onwards again this evening with Hopkins' Lear to keep me up past my bedtime. I must remember to make some notes to do my homework with.
But after The Perfect Book and, slightly to a lesser extent, it not being mine, First Three Tales, I don't know if I'm suffering some syndrome akin to post natal depression, which is not the deflated feeling one gets on returning from South Africa but something like 'after the Lord Mayor's Show'. Is that it. Another thing now behind us and no longer to look forward to. There is no urge to write anything more, not poems and not anything else either.
It comes at the same time as the eleven months it has taken me to squander the personal best gambling profit I was showing halfway through last year. All gpne, it's all come to nothing, and while being level for eighteen months with several huudred pounds profit to show for the previous five years is a highly respectable performance, one can only see the abyss into which one is steadily dripping money. I was lucky for longer thasn I dereved to be, flattering myself that I was reading it right and knew what I was doing. So continued involvement is subject to a moritorium and, in the absence of horse racing and writing, there is a gap to fill.
Having given football pundits some credit recently for their stalwart efforts, the coverage of Liverpool's trip to the European final was more grimly overdone than any royal wedding. The message was endlessly about the passionate support but nobody, not one of them, foresaw the goalie handing it to Madrid quite so complicitly. While one can admire the fervent attachment the supporters feel towards this inglorious trivia, one must also be glad not to suffer from it. Of course, Fulham done good in the play-off, ensuring a return to a Premiership that will be very hard work, and I did find commentary on TalkSport for a second half of some tension that gave some clue as to how people can get caught up in such melodrama but somewhere, not very deep down, it didn't matter. I cared little more about the careers of players I wouldn't recognize in the Fulham Road than they do about The Perfect Book.
I'll have to keep faith with the overgrown churchyards, Wigmore recitals, this week's abject failure with Saturday's Times crossword having warmed up so convincingly with Wednesday's and re-assess what can usefully or at least enjoyably be done henceforth.
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
There are people, I understand, who take pleaure in their garden and home maintenance. Now there's a challenge to someone who only tidies up once the piles of books, papers and disorderly records makes the house almost un-navigable and that one volume you want to find lost in an unindexed wilderness.
I'm not looking forward to it but I'm increasingly distracted about how the days are filled once the empty consolation of paid work eventually comes to an end. It's the same only different to being endlessly rich; once there is no struggle it's hard to find a reason to do it. Ask the Rolling Stones.