We've had a couple if false dawns here with Racetrack Wiseguy hoping to point the way to the payout window but if it isn't the jumps season proper now it never will be.
Last week, the three wise men lined up to provide Sebastopol on a wonderful day at Wincanton; today the Prof and I had five out of five between us so we did okay, not as okay as if we had pooled our money and gone for the accumulator but, always remembering not to lose overall, we gained usefully, and it's Cheltenham tomorrow and that is always good, even just watching the grass grow there is worthwhile.
The Early Auden is as impressive a scholarly achievement as Prof. Mendelson's Later Auden and, yes, one is allowed to skim over the exegeses of some of those longer poems which detailed some of Wystan's abstruse theories and don't seem to be the point but otherwise one can't speak highly enough of them but reading, for once, is not a pressing concern.
I hadn't realized I didn't have Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice on CD. Quite honestly, I don't know any more and I gaze at the shelves planning the incursion of records onto another shelf. I must have been assuming Purcell's Dido & Aeneas was it, which is one reason why I'll not be invited to write for Gramophone. But it was a situation soon remedied by Anne Sophie von Otter, Barbara Hendricks and John Eliot Gardiner. It's the sort of masterpiece that makes me want to do Top Six Operas, just so that I can include it, along with The Magic Flute, La Boheme, Tosca, Rinaldo and another Mozart or Handel. Gluck's Alceste was one of those unlucky items, bought at the same time as something it's nowhere near as good as, and will have to wait a while to make its case.
But I never thought I'd have to write that I have an Amazon voucher and don't know what to spend it on. Of course, the forthcoming Julian Barnes, but what else. Something based on the reviews in the next Gramophone, obviously, but it arrived and suggested some Haydn Quartets. Maybe it is that but maybe the moment I've done it, something will come on the radio that is the more required so one must learn to keep one's powder dry.
So, with the two indices, the year's turf account and the chess ratings in good health, the nights drawing in with the promise of evenings with a book and a record, or gin, the most glorious 60th birthday party being glazed to perfection by memory, one can't ask for any more than Burt Bacharach swapping his back catalogue of pop songs with me. I've risen like a helium balloon back into the mid 1800's in short chess, always leaving the rating of 1925 for longer games untouched until the other matches it again, quite inexplicably. Now, again, I just click on a piece and move it and gather satisfactory results (one way or another) whereas since those stratospheric days a few months ago, I've mooched unprepossesingly in the 1500's or 1600's.
I don't know what the difference is. Form is temporary but class is forever, etc. but we're not really talking about 'class' here. I just don't know why it happens like that. I suppose that, when I did such things, I might try to write poems but they were unsatisfactory or not write poems for several months and then one would arrive that I was pleased with. It could be astrology for all I know.