The Balzac Mystery and other stories

Lately, rather than buy a book by Balzac I read Pere Goriot that I already had, had read years ago and enjoyed it so, doing all I can to put off Finnegans Wake, I decided to have my own little Balzac Festival.

Goriot is much like King Lear.

I had a vague idea that I also had a book of short stories. A lot of ideas I have these days are a bit vague. But, looking where it should be, where it might be and even some places where I wouldn't expect it to be, the stories weren't to be found and it didn't seem like something I'd give away.

So I ordered second hand paperbacks of Eugenie Grandet, The Black Sheep and Selected Short Stories. As a form of satisfying entertainment, there is no better value than three such books. Balzac should have been an accountant. His surveys of post-revolutionary, Napoleonic France are all about money which, of course, equates to social status which in turn is all they care about. It won't take long for me to finish The Black Sheep and that will be enough of that for the time being and I'll be thrust back into finding anything to get myself into to put off the final Joyce.

But the Selected Stories still seemed distantly familiar, on the very outposts of memory. More the titles than the stories, none of which I remembered having read before, but it was a bit like that feeling you get when you think you know somebody but have no idea where from or who they are. In this case, it was the opposite, knowing exactly what the stories were but not being sure if I had any previous acquaintance with them. And this is what it's like, following the Sebastian Faulks debacle in which I reached page 70-odd of one of his novels before going upstairs to find an identical copy of it. 

I don't really need to buy another book in order to fill my days with worthwhile reading. I could read any number of the ones I have and they would seem like new all over again. I have an index in my head of how good they were but not what happens. I was looking at Faulks's Paris Echo last night only to find from the synopsis that I had read it but I borrowed it so no scrutiny of the shelves would confirm that I had. I'm still hoping to read books I haven't read before, though, otherwise I won't have the joy that their arrival brings with it.

Coming soon - new poems by Andrew Motion.

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The Butcher Said, a horse, got home by the shortest of noses at Bangor today. One less inch in it and it would have been a dead heat which was a fine way to regain the winning thread after a bit of a plunge on High Definition in the big two-year-old race at the Curragh on Saturday when it came from a long way behind, having traded at 100/1 in running, to win comfortably enough by almost a length. That is what he had done first time out so either he takes a while to get into top gear or the jockeys are so confident that they are showboating on him. He is thus favourite for next year's Derby but fools rush in on such long-term gambles because whatever price he is, and it's 8/1, that is a fair price about him even running in the race at this stage never mind winning it.

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The shifting, not quite there, qualities of language can make for fine poetry in the right hands suggesting many things in a phrase and echoing with allusions. In other disciplines, though, like law or medicine, it's for the best if everybody knows precisely what a word means.

In politics, too. If only. I'm thinking of how the terms 'libertarian' and 'liberal' sound so similar, as if being in favour of one must be the same as being in favour of the other. We need to go carefully here.

Liberal has had a hard enough time defining itself as it is with the Liberal Party being a repository at various times for ex-Labour right-wingers like the since-disgraced Cyril Smith, various devout methodists, the flawed visionary that was Jeremy Thorpe, a lot of well-intentioned idealists and the centrists like Charles Kennedy that were brave enough to be there where the likes of Blair, Major, Ken Clarke and Amber Rudd should be now. They should not be confused with the ungracious, spoilt bad boys of the fourth form whose idea of an ideology is that they should be able to do what the hell they like. Libertarianism is less an ideology than the attitude so brilliantly demonstrated in Boris Johnson that 'Freedom' is a policy and that will do. 

Freedom is an easy thing to be in favour of, from Nelson Mandela, through any number of less successful terrorists, to the misleading slogan 'arbeit macht frei'. Nobody, surely, votes against 'freedom' because it is, beyond dispute, a good thing. Except that, in some hands, it comes to mean their freedom at the expense of that of others.

I don't want to sermonize too long but the freedom to drive as fast as you like means you're going to kill somebody else, for instance. Libertarianism, which this Prime Minister, many in his government, in a weird alliance with Piers Corbyn and David Icke, would dearly love to adhere to, is mad, bad and dangerous to know and lacks all empathy with anybody else and any sense of community.

But I must pay tribute to my friend, Jeff, last week, who characterized Johnson as a boy in short trousers trying to think of an excuse why he hasn't done his homework. He never has but it was the most pertinent insight into the odd phenomenon since Matthew Parris's succinct summation of the 'incompetent scoundrel'.

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It's amazing that there is still so much to be grateful for, for those of us lucky enough in late September when we really should be back at school. One has to get out of the house. Exercise is as important as sleep if not quite as enjoyable but it can be nearly so, spending such a perfect afternoon in places walkable from one's front door. The tide is receding and an hour and a half later is gone.