If you didn't imagine Gyles Brandreth and I as natural mates - should we not say 'bedfellows' - I wouldn't have blamed you but I have come to not mind, in fact quite like him. Obviosly not Boris despite the Latin, not even the sneaking admiration for Jacob's strange charm, that seems to have evaporated recently, but Gyles is a different matter.
A couple of years ago he said on Just a Minute that he had a Latin master at school called Mr. Stocks. So had I, and am unlikely to forget. So I contacted Gyles to compare notes. It was not the same Mr. Stocks.
But this week, on the same programme, he challenged the assertion that Anne Hathaway was allegedly pregnant when she married Shakespeare. Quite rightly, he pointed out that she was not 'allegedly pregnant' but was pregnant. And, before being challenged, he was just about to explain about Judith.
No, not Judith, Gyles, she was one of the twins, conceived within wedlock. Although alleged by some not to have been fathered by Shakespeare. Me, for instance, although I take no credit for the original idea.
It's Susannah, the name you were looking for, Gyles. You're good but you're not that good.
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I would like to offer an alternative to the hastily-assembled Top 6 Jews posted in celebration of my newly confirmed Ashkenazi heritage. They certainly are six Jews with whom I have some feeling of affinity but a Top 6, as such, might be expected to include Albert Einstein and Yehudi Menuhin. So, I want to present a, still personal,
Top 6 Jewish Musicians
Felix Mendelssohn
Marc Bolan
Yehudi Menuhin
Natalie Clein
Lou Reed
I could go on for quite some time here but a tradition grew up in the Top 6 to have a certain other something about the sixth, so, in support of what seems to be considerable new acknowledgement of her talent,
Fanny Mendelssohn
None of which newly proven DNA should deflect attention from the significance of Kurdish and Druze found in our family line.
Now all the impulse to go east rather than west makes sense.
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.
