A Ticket to the Ryder

My least favourite sporting event of the year is not the silly horse racing team game at Ascot in August, the Shergar Cup, nor is it any car racing, none of the football, the T20 cricket, all overhyped box office products of little consequence that they may be - it is the Ryder Cup.
I remember how desperate they were to make it competitive that they had to bring Europe in to help the UK out, since when it has been sold to those who do as they are told as something of awesome significance. But, no, golf's bad enough without reducing it to this tedium. It means avoiding Radio 5 all weekend, which isn't that hard to do, and hoping it doesn't intrude into the Danny Baker Show.
It only demonstrates to me that if you want to sell something badly enough, there are usually people dumb enough to buy it. As if it's worth keeping Oliver Kamm's relentlessly repetitive grammar column in The Times on Saturday because market research tells them it is a contributory factor in making some people buy the paper because reading him makes them feel clever. (It worked on me for a little while).
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Which is seconded by our old mate, Jacob. That was a consummate performance on Question Time, attentive, well-organized, polite and impressive. So much so that one hardly noticed, among the two other yobs representing the more bullish gender, Rod Liddle and the Labour stalwart, that his main argument for Leave is to benefit his extensive portfolio of worldwide investment funds which, in the midst of that brouhaha, he was able to confess with impunity.
He is very good at what he does. He might say he doesn't want to unseat the Prime Minister, only to change her mind on one thing. I'm the same with him. I'd like somebody that good to lead a centrist, Roy Jenkins-type revival, so I've only got to change his mind about virtually everything, plus perhaps his hairstyle, and we'll be fine.
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Another weekend, another long lie down. In fact the first for three weeks, and thus overdue. I mean, doing things and going places is all very well but it eventually doesn't compare with indolence, that one can learn to grow into.
It is so glamorous and tempting that I wonder what would happen if I didn't write anything. No more poems, not the Red Herring book, perhaps not even this. Would it be possible to read a book, attend a concert or listen to a new record without wanting to say something about it. It would be difficult and I might not even bother to think anything about them if I didn't. It seems a bit Buddhist, or some such thing, but might be worth a try.
Meanwhile, the distracted process continues whereby one isn't committed enough to one book (The Waves) before another turns up that one would prefer to read (Jane Glover's Handel in London), which is betting without the few weeks' worth of things put by. It becomes a sort of flow, opting to allow the choicest words to flow over one for the sake of it, not worrying too much what they mean but knowing, to one's deep satisfaction, that one isn't going to have to review it for the TLS, with such informed erudition, but just let it happen.
It's a new biography of Housman, that Amazon have at £11.50, not £25, for 500 pages, they have in there this week. Can't they shift it, I wonder. On the other hand, does Housman deserve to be the next poet whose biography I read when I haven't read one of Tennyson yet.
But I have an idea that it might be possible for the onset of age to bring with it a glimpse of the peace that passeth all understanding, and that might be something worth having.