Do I Love It (indeed I do)

 News that a copy of Frank Wilson's Do I Love You (indeed I do) changed hands for £100k made me wonder who could afford that, as someone who was once glad to have 45p to spend on a pop single. It's okay, he's a multi-millionaire and I might well buy some such worthwhile rarities if I was, too. It's also okay that these dancers of a certain age are no better at it than me but are brave enough to be filmed in the joyful act. I think I heard on the wireless that there's only two copies of which the whereabouts are known from a pressing of 250 before Motown pulled it. But don't quote me on that. The heartache of Northern Soul is only enhanced for me by the fact that, at its height in the 70's, I was stuck with lesser musics but soon to move to Al Green, plus Beethoven and Shostakovich, but it's a treasure now.

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Reading Ulysses has an echoing effect in it for me, not because it echoes the Odyssey or other literature or Shakespeare biography and not because I've ever been to Dublin but because I read each section just after having read the guide to it by Harry Blamires, so it all seems to be coming back to me. I'm not going to say I like it better than Dubliners or Portrait, not yet anyway, but any time spent with Joyce's prose is time well spent with its seedy immediacy, art rising above the clammy, restrictive Catholicism and lines like,

It is an age of exhausted whoredom groping for its god.

which concentrates so many of its themes into so few words. And, by the way, could you lend me five shillings. I'll pay you back Tuesday after Southwell races, there were a couple at the Curragh I was depending on today that let me down.

I don't think it will be Finnegans Wake immediately after but having as much time as the world affords, it could be further down the list. Reflecting that one spends so little time with one's very favourite things, I think the next project might be a day or two reading Larkin - the poems- from start to finish. Having seen his reputation done over after the publication of the Selected Letters, the decades since have seen him recover through recognition as a great Minor Poet to something alongside all the major Major Poets of the C20th. It might yet fall away again as its context ebbs away in the memory of those reading him and how good it is is valued beneath what sort of bloke we think he was without having met him. Well, I never met him but I've met a few who did and I have more multi-cultural, liberal-left, diversity credentials than I care to remember and Larkin's place in the Top 6 Poets, per se, isn't in any danger.

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It doesn't matter about the five shillings. I was only duly giving back yesterday's winnings in the age-old rhythm of the money that comes in going out again and money that goes out coming back in. It's like the tide of the everpulsing sea or the field contracting and dispersing throughout the day on the cricketfield. O, lordjesussaveus, it is but another lifegiving throb that makes one know one is a living thing.

But those things won't leave us, the things we were taught as children about good luck, bad luck, a merciful redeemer and ghosts. I didn't believe it was luck for one moment when yesterday I finished the Times crossword in short order with no help from Andy's Word Finder, typed up a new poem of sorts (see below), and landed the sure-fire double at Uttoxeter at odds of 4/5 and 13/8, winning by 20 lengths and 12 respectively. Longhouse Sale is a very good horse to be running at this time of year and jumped impressively for a novice. It won't be any sort of price again but will surely keep winning on summer ground. However, today's couple of setbacks make me think the auspicious line up of planets had shifted out of my star sign.

The Deceived was, I thought, a great drama and a rare excursion into watching Channel 5. Of course, not believing in ghosts makes being scared by a thriller that much more difficult but it wasn't a ghost so that's fine. But never trust a charismatic academic, it seemed to tell us. There's a lot of baloney about.

I'll be particularly grateful of Times Radio tonight as Radio 5 devotes itself to that most soporific of sports, golf. Soporific might be useful in getting off to sleep but I'm tormented by commentators talking about it as if it mattered. Midnight and the hours straight after it are when I'm most likely to be awake and need the radio. 7-9 a.m. is when I'm most likely to be asleep, which is a shame when it means missing much of Tony Blackburn's litany of ready-made DJ chat on Sounds of the 60's on which his soul and pop sensibility makes a better case for the 60's than Johnnie Walker's more West Coast, Eagles and Jackson Brown sympathies make for the 70's which, by rights, I ought to prefer.

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Having left the day job, I am trying to be in at least semi-retirement in the ill-fitting role of 'poet' but one wants to try occasionally. The vague idea I was trying to concoct became Hammershøi, taking the trouble to take the title from the internet to get the Danish crossed out 'o'. It hardly resembles the original idea at all in the end but a poem that works not only needs to be vivid, not vague, before setting out on it, but needs two sources rather than one, by way of adding dimensions - I like to think. The second part came when I found the leaflet and postcards I bought at the exhibition at the Royal Academy in 2008, it says there.

It's not particularly this painting the poem is about because it hasn't got the keyboard instrument in it but it has got the open doors. I'm not yet convinced about the poem but it is in the three on the A list of the five I've written since The Perfect Book and not yet condemned to the scrapyard of the B list from which there is so rarely any return.

Hammershøi

This is all that’s left of us, 

the same air that we walked through once 

still hanging as it had done then

unchanged by being made to speak

and left with no more than itself,

occupied, you might have thought, 

by hours that leak or disperse so 

the white door that wasn’t closed 

as if it wasn’t meant to be

allows it thoughts of other rooms 

that, one might guess, are similar 

to this one if not quite the same

with their finished music gone 

but that would be an adventure 

these long moments won’t undertake.