That Special Book

I see that the annual postings count is very much in line with previous years but I'll do this anyway. It's the writing of it I enjoy because it is of little consequence if anybody reads it, then someone reads about themselves here and is kind enough to get in touch but by now I don't know how I'd read a book or listen to a record if I wasn't trying to think of what to say about it.
I remember Colin Lyas, lecturer in Aesthetics, saying in an interview that he wasn't a proper aesthetician because, if asked in his last moments if he'd prefer to think about a work or enjoy it, he would prefer to just enjoy the performance. I may, sadly, have gone the other way.

Ideally I'd do less of this. I never wanted to be a blogger but, as it used to say in the blurb, I have a face that suits me to radio and voice better suited to the internet, and there surely would be less of it if I only wrote when I had something worth saying to say.

But having in short order nominated Best of Year in my chosen genres, and then done the seminal Poem of the Decade, the last thing I ought to have the nerve to do is some sort of Lifetime Achievement.
I know many people have that 'special book', one that they 'live with'. I know someone who does, or at least did, read The Catcher in the Rye every year. I know of someone who reads Dickens, all of him, and then does it all over again. I once heard from someone who said they only ever listened to Handel (and The Magnetic Fields). I remember a contributor to the old Philip Larkin Society Forum - livelier than you might think- who claimed to only read Larkin because he was the best, which did make one wonder how they knew as much.
Somebody on the radio a few years back knew the whole Mozart catalogue by Kochel numbers and the arrival of The New Grove Mozart today, to go with all these operas I'm spending my turf account profit on, made me wonder if I could make it a bedside companion and assimilate a small part of that knowledge because it is that list I mainly bought it for.

But it won't be that. The ultimate record release might well be the Ton Koopman Buxtehude Opera Omnia, if one could only have one, but that's not the question and neither is it the sort of answer that those people give who are so devoted to one book that it doesn't need choosing, it simply is such a thing.

I did once, perhaps still do, have a project on here that might be called The Best Book in the House, which would select two or three from such categories as Poetry, Fiction, Biography, History, Sport, Science, etc. until ending with a shortlist of, say, Dubliners, the copy of Touch signed by Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979, Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper and either memoirs by Danny Baker or Stephen Fry or biographies of  John Donne or Jeremy Thorpe, but no, having to invent a process to decide on a 'special book' means there isn't one.
Marriage seems like a similar idea .

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But I feel like adding some kind of Special Admiration Award for Theresa May, for what she's been through if not for what she's achieved. God only knows what her view of human nature must be like by now and yet she's kept up a brave front of smiling, weird fashion icon, odd dancing and devotion to obviously lost causes.
And by now I must abjure any regard for Jacob Rees-Mogg, all of which was based on his paragon example of courtesy, immense grasp of his own version of the facts and when Vicky Coren, chairing Have I Got News for You, said she found him 'strangely attractive'.
The adverb has long taken precedence over the adjective it is qualifying in that off-hand judgement.
Of course, he was always the cringeworthy creep he looked like and any camouflague that made him look anything else has evaporated as he has seen his spurious referendum win come under scrutiny, his goals not quite so achievable and his demeanour less assured.
Getting back to where we were might cost us three Prime Ministers, all the time and words spent on it, not least by another hero, Laura Kuenssberg, whose word count must be uncountable and all obsolete almost as soon as uttered. But we can send the bill to Boris, Jacob and Nigel, and the sinisterly-named European Research Group, whose research had a foregone conclusion, which is not what research is.


Remain can still win this.
Keep Hope Alive.
Don't Give Up On Us, Baby.