I impress myself that I can find such things upstairs but, having thought I'd read it over 40 years ago, when George Orwell seemed to be every sixth former's novelist hero, I'm not sure I had. I'm still very much Gordon Comstock from Keep the Aspidistra Flying, or not even that, but I was worried that the common sense, the intelligence we prided ourselves on circa 1977 and the politics would no longer convince after so long, as Orwell is re-assessed by Richard Bradford to see if he stands up to the Trump-Putin-China-silly oik Boris generation of world leaders.
He almost certainly does because, as the point has been made, China is now possibly more like 1984 than Soviet Russia was while God only knows how Western leaders now gormlessly preen about as if they were the point whereas once they only had to worry about the very obvious dangers of girls like the lovely Christine Keeler.
Coming Up for Air is a tremendous read, at fault only for the indulgent space allotted to the joys of teenage boys going fishing. Angling is the only sport that could be put up against car racing and golf as possibly even duller but it isn't really a sport and it might be Orwell's point about teenage boys in those days that they thought it was fascinating.
George Bowling is ordinary but doing well enough in the lower middle class position he's trapped in. His friend, Porteous, knows books and Latin and otherwise but George has a wife he doesn't like much, who doesn't trust him and you can't blame her and, in an England just pre-WW2, he is nostalgic for the world just pre-WW1. In among a few telling leitmotifs, 'stream-lined' is a recurrent adjective that means modern and bad.
He is a precursor of Larkin's Mr. Bleaney, of what Betjeman already was then but became more so, and a couple of generations before what Sean O'Brien echoes now. But George knows that you can't go back. WW2 is going to make sure of that, like WW1 had done, even if one couldn't have done anyway.
Of course he wasn't St. George Orwell any more than Albert Camus is a candidate for beatification but they got closer than most and the way he's carried forward all the way since we first read him at school is impressive.
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He made the weekend as good, and glorious, as it was. Regular readers might have noticed that Racetrack Wiseguy disappeared from these pages as anonymously as Jacob Rees-Mogg was airbrushed out of the General Election campaign.
I struggle to tip the winner of a walkover at present but it has always been the great advantage of a diverse range of interests that when one is doing badly, others will compensate.
Having failed at the Saturday Times crossword for two weeks, the chess rating is on the up again but such things are like football clubs, and share prices. They go up and down and, really, it is of no interest if your team are pushing for automatic promotion to the Premiership but get completely done over in the Cup because only an idiot could possibly care.
There's a new book of poems by David Harsent on its way which means it could be a good year for the Old Guard in poetry, with O'Brien due in May. Poets worth having who are clever enough not to be only clever. And, putting the Orwell compendium back upstairs, I lingered over a re-read of The Goldfinch, very unsure that I could finish it before a Graham Swift re-issue arrived ahead of his new title due before you'd know it.
It had started well, having found a non-descript print in a charity shop for £2 that was unlucky enough to be in a frame that seemed to be the right size. The episode that followed, which was me putting my beloved print into the frame, was an imaginative re-make of Eric Sykes and Tommy Cooper in The Plank.
One should, of course, do things properly, in a planned way and get it right but I'm not one for that and think I know better. I got the ill-fated, sub-Cezanne watercolour out easily enough but didn't see why I should remove all the nails holding the back of the frame in. First of all I cracked the glass but, having put the glass on the floor, proceeded to stand on it. Hilarious enough until you notice your fingers bleeding and realize you don't want to get blood on the precious Hammershoi after it's come all the way from China, ruining my claim to a minimal carbon footprint in one aesthetic purchase.
So, from then on, I took it seriously and now there it is, the hooks on the back re-aligned and a thing of beauty.
My own simplistic pop art, Lips & Bananas, can go in the corner where Gwen John's been biding her time for years and she can come out and be alongside Hammershoi, with the Vermeer on the other side, to make a triptych of geometric quietude to satisfy anybody who wants to put down their book for a moment and gaze at them while Andras Schiff takes you through Bach's Partitas.
Tis too late to be wise, that's all there is.
Perhaps art is all there is and might not be enough.
It's going to need to be.
