It's been quite a week here in Lake Wobegon.The accidents and incidents that accumulate into the fabric of a life were here and there slightly more remarkable than most weeks. It ended not least with the remarkable calm of a friend's house at which it simply wouldn't occur to her to have the England game on.
I'd left home knowing it was 3-0 from the ludicrous boorish shouts of one person in particular from the pub within earshot on such occasions and didn't know it had ended 6-1 until I referred to the internet once home again. Such practice could be extended to simply checking a newspaper to see who won the World Cup the day after the final. I'm sure now there are some who think it might be England and I'm nobody to say it won't be. But I'd better stay in touch with it because there is a possibility that England will play Japan and I'll need to be across that to keep up with e-mail correspondance with my anglophile friend over there.
We might be on opposing sides but the wrong way round, given my minor penchant for Japanoiserie, but that's how it ought to be rather than hollering like a dionsaur in its agonising death throes on account of your country being ahead of some foreign one you'd hardly heard of before being drawn in the same group.
But even the cat was passable on a gentle Sunday afternoon and I got my old Roman and Greek history books back in good order after the long loan for the use of for Open University purposes.
What seems major, essential and unmissable to some actually isn't. I wasn't the only person not in a pub or in front of a telly during my twenty minute walk, although it was roughly half-time. Apparently football hasn't been made compulsory yet.
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I haven't read quite as much of Matthew Klam's Sam the Cat as I might have yet but I might have if I'd foind it more compelling. It is the short stories that had made the recent novel so long awaited and is a precursor in covering the same gound by bemoaning the absence of the complete, ultimate fulfilment in serial relationship dissatisfaction. Perhaps literature or pop music mis-sold the expectation of idealized love and we should be inundated with companies who want to help us claim compensation but I'm sure it was ever thus. Klam is no Tolstoy, George Eliot or Thomas Hardy but is readable enough to fill in with until the next order comes through, which is a life of Ronnie Spector. Now, she should know.
Meanwhile, let us hope to pursue ordinary lives from which we can consider the extraordinary when we feel like it.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
