The odds on a 2019 second referendum and a Remain vote are now nearly down to the 2/1 I was quoting a few weeks ago, so I'm not saying put money on it but I am saying what other possible solutions are there.
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I daren't even look at the review below, done later on the other night. Maybe it's okay, I don't know, but apologies to Ms. Poirier, and all concerned, if it's incoherent.
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It has been a fine midwinter holiday and it isn't over yet. Many thanks to the rail service for at least doing what it said it would when I needed it to, for once.
It is a bookish time, as befits a bookish website, and serious thought and logistical planning might need to go into more bookcases as a new year plan. They surely must go into the second bedroom eventually but it might mean losing the old 'music centre' which can no longer play cassettes and is never asked to play LP's anymore. If I never achieved the original plan of being a librarian, at least I ended up living in a library.
On the subject of which, Larkin's Letters Home is very much the gentle, olde worlde comfort blanket of a read one might expect of it although I won't pre-empt a fuller word on it here. It might just squeeze onto the Larkin shelf in a very tight fit but otherwise it is going to create a crisis of curatorship with not only the individual volumes of poems, two Collecteds, three biographies, three sets of letters, memoirs by others, the two novels, the juvenilia, the photographs, the Oxford anthology, the jazz book, the journalism and interviews and the critiques. Everything but the Complete Poems, which is more complete than it needs to be. And I've said about 'completism' before, it's a hopeless and undesirable project.
So, with Natalie Clein's new disc being something like the programme she played at Wigmore Hall recently, I thought I'd better begin next year with that. One thinks one can listen to Mozart opera forever but maybe even Princess Margaret didn't drink champagne all the time and the world is many and various. While I have several Natalie discs, there is no attempt being made to have them all, the same as when I realized how many Mozart operas there really are, I thought better of pursuing all of them, at least for the time being.
There are too many people to keep abreast of to think one can have all of all of them. I'm slipping behind on Sebastian Faulks, the big push on Julian Barnes has stalled but, reverting to the list obesession, the litany of those one has 'nearly all' of is longer than one thought.
'Complete Work' sets of Buxtehude and Chopin are taken for being what they say they are.
George Eliot, Patrick Hamilton (given the eventual surrender and ordering of Impromptu in Moribundia) and Murakami are an unlikely trio of fiction writers. Oh, yes, and Richard Yates, Salinger and Raymond Carver.
I can't be far off nearly all of Maggi Hambling's published books.
I'm not even convinced I have everything of my own.
T. Rex, The Magnetic Fields, R.E.M.
But, then, of course, the poets, where a Collected or Complete only begs the question of what else they wrote. I won't index this post with all the necessary tages-
Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Chaucer, Eliot, Edward Thomas, Thom Gunn, Larkin, Hughes, Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Sean O'Brien, Roddy Lumsden, Julia Copus, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Keats, Ivor Gurney, Rochester, Ovid, Catullus, Tibullus, several more contemporary people who have by no means finished yet and apologies to those I've forgotten. And, to what end, because owning them all doesn't mean I've read them all. In order to know, or at least think, I have them and thus can list them here, which would appear to be the point.
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But the holiday sporting programme brought its own rewards.
Fulham's now water-tight defence have only conceded once in three outings, which has presaged a march up to 18th place. If they could have sorted out who takes the penalties, I'd have landed the 8/1 about 2-0 v. Huddersfield. Get a grip, lads.
Yesterday's racing was like taking candy from a baby with Champagne Platinum, Lady Buttons and Champ zooming in. My safety-first policy might have saved me from the poor house in the long run but it also denies me access to the rich house when I only lay out that which keeps the year's profit at a modest but satisfactory level and should have piled in. And then the blitzkrieg attack on Taunton today gives half of it back but never mind.
But the highlight was the high risk strategy of putting my treasured 1900+ rating at Chess24 on the line by entering a tournament last night, for which I was no.1 seed on ratings. I was an uneasy favourite, though, and an obvious 'lay' in any betting that might have gone on, not having played for a few days, etc.
Grinding out 3 wins out of 3, that rating was heaved up to 1931 before, tiring and confused after a 150 move game, I crashed and burned in the last two games and slumped to 5th out of 18.
(5th, BorderIncident, with leaders to 2 out, weakened under pressure, found no extra, 7/2 2nd fav, from 5/2)
On a recovery mission this afternoon, though, fiddling a 4-0 result against some German victim, I restored myself to a lovely 1910, that flatters me more than Piers Gaveston ever did Edward II. I don't know if it is regarded as the height of good sportsmanship to play quickly in 10 minute games but rules are rules and wouldn't be rules if they weren't.
One bangs out the familiar openings (Queen's Gambit with white; Sicilian Defence with black), like the 'H Bomb', Nakamura, and gains a time advantage. If one plays accurately enough until the opposition is down to a minute, one can play out a lost position and get the verdict. It's not nice and it's not pretty but it can work.
I had one of those four games won but was lost in probably two but you've only got 10 minutes, Herr Deutschlander, and your time was up.
I hope my kalanchoe plant (pictured) survives. Picked up from Tesco Express for 30p, on its way out, I extended my People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals compassion to Homeless Houseplants. It was the least I could do.
It is not as instantly gorgeous as the cyclamen I so sadly failed with some time ago but maybe it makes up for that with personality. I've put it more into the natural light, wondering if photosynthesis might help, and it is still trying its best. Maybe if it had its own website or You Tube following, it would feel encouraged.
So, there we are. 2019 may or may not see me finishing with full-time, guaranteed, waged employment and then it's either survive on one's wits, savings and the racing results or the devil and the deep blue sea. But I don't see why Caitlin Moran, Giles and Vicky Coren and all those people should be the only ones knocking out reams of material about what it's like being them if I can't be paid half as much for explaining what it's like being me. There's plenty more where this came from.
