Afer a few days of coming home to find no new book or record arrived in the post one realizes all one's orders have been fulfilled. But one can begin to miss that small thrill. With three novels piled up and waiting, though, and the effect of reading Gramophone every month not resulting in any sort of spending spree, maybe I don't need the fix.
The surfeit of choice in Gramophone has resulted in buying less rather than more, if anything. What does one do in the face of such overwhelming opportunity. Not as much as you might. In fact, the reviews, although undoubtedly informed and useful, begin to blur into each other. The subscription might be stopped in due course, the vanity of regarding myself as a Gramophone subscriber having been enough for the time being.
Karthryn Simmonds' Love and Fallout was an enjoyable read and an extended one, for a poet. I can't imagine that I'd have read a Greenham Common novel without it. It was affectionate satire for the most part, I'm fairly sure, and not just of Greenham but a variety of 'women's issues'. I did wonder if there was one too many threads in the plot woven into the design. They can't all come to a climax together without a bit of congestion but it is an accomplished book, sympathetic, nicely observed, not to be under-rated or categorized in any limiting way.
Meanwhile, A Very British Scandal lived up to all expectations and I have watched the first episode twice already. It took me straight back to the books on Jeremy Thorpre which tell me very little I don't remember vividly from first reading them.
Jeremy's letter about the marriage of Princess Margaret to Lord Snowden is a classic for any anthology of letters and is very much in tune with a theme I want to elucidate from each of several issues here.
That, without being deliberately oblique or 'alternative', it is rewarding to see a little bit further than received opinions. That one can survive on a diet of slightly less and not demand a constant flow of new acquisitions to satisfy an appetite or addiction, that enough is enough and over-indulgence not always necessary. That grimly puritanical, sloganizing campaigns can be gently and affectionately seen for what they are without taking a contrary position.
And in a similar way, the wedding of Prince Harry to the utterly compelling Meghan need not be dismissed in the ready-made terms of righteousness and piety that some regarding themselves as leftist reserve for their own private use. Quite how royal the marriage is is open to some discussion anyway but given the pomp and circumstance accorded to it; the presence of God called upon as well as the Clooneys, Beckhams, James Corden ( ! ) and, of course, Elton; the reverent commentary detailing the horses, jewellery, clothes, children and weather as if all were of sublime significance - and I enjoyed it more the longer it went on because I started to 'get it', I'd like to know from any of my contemporaries, all throwbacks to the great days of the 1960's and 70's, how they can be such devout fans of Monty Python and yet say they don't like this. They're not watching it properly. Try harder. It's worth the effort.
And I'll extend that to football pundits and professionals, the very most dreadful class of broadcaster ever given airtime. I think it reached its nadir a few weeks ago when somebody diagnosed Southampton's parlous situation as being due to them 'not scoring enough goals'. You don't need to be an ex-professional player paid to be on the wireless to come up with stuff like that. I could have gone on the racing channel this afternoon and told them why San Benedeto lost me my last fiver. It didn't run fast enough. It had got to the stage where these people seemed to be in competition to see who could get away with saying the most gormless thing and yet still get football fans nodding sagely at the wisdom offered.
So I think we've turned the corner and the only way is up, only really now waiting to see if Fulham go up before the agonizing coverage of yet another World Cup. Because I heard Jurgen Klopp, or somebody, droning on about their team last week and I thought, no, it is quite brilliant how these people show up week after routine week of unfascinating drama and deliver still further rococo variations on the same tired old theme. Arsene Wenger became the maestro of the incredibly dull interview whereas Ferguson could be a phrase-maker and Mourinho's early work was to be admired but, no, all is forgiven. In a saturated market so full of old rope you'd think no more could be produced, a bit like the campus poetry weighed in by the cartload in America, they insist on producing more. They make prolific composers like Telemann and Vivaldi look frugal in comparison. Hats off to them. The football talk goes on indefinitely and I will henceforth admire it rather than cringe.