Retirement Diary

 National Poetry Day all but passed me by. I was grateful to my usual landing places on the internet for reminding me and then yesterday's Free Thinking provided some discussion about poetry biography with special reference to Heaney, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

I had been sent in search, by such a mention, of a new biography of Heaney which caused me some excitement but I think the really big occasion will be the Fintan O'Toole book I found out about which isn't yet. There has never been a shortage of Plath biography and while I thought for a bit about the new Anne Sexton Selected, I prefer it if poets keep themselves out of their own work as much as they can rather than putting themselves on the dissecting table. Sylvia is an exception because she was sensational and hugely talented but I'm not sure everybody was capable of following her.

 

The weeks fly by, or have so far, and I can only wonder that I ever devoted most of most days to the day job. I only wonder if the winter will seem quite as good as my first three months. In theory it should, with every reason to stay in and the proper jump racing on the telly, but I've done more of those things I had lined up than I anticipated already and what to read after my little Balzac festival is a question. I might go upstairs and find two books I didn't finish at the first attempt - Zadie Smith's The Autograph Man and Sebastian Faulks's Human Traces. There was a time when I would finish a book out of a sense of duty but that duty was increasingly derelicted from time to time. The great success of going back to Proust encourages me to make use of other unfinished books there are.

 

My project on the Thom Gunn book is likely to remain a private enterprise as it's not likely to add much to the sum of human knowledge on the subject but since it has been my main area of study since I was about 17, it makes me feel as if I'm doing something to make gradual progress grinding it out. It's possible I don't want to finish it as I'd then need another project and so a couple of sessions a week seeing where it goes next are re-acquainting me with old ground as well as finding things I hadn't been aware of before. But it's a big job to organize quite so much material coherently and although a pristine paperback to have and hold and belatedly find the typos in might be satisfying but is beyond my level of ambition. 

 

But the rhythm of the days is not what I thought. I can't devote a day to such a job, or any other, like I thought I would. I thought I could 'be a writer' from 9 to 5 in place of the old job but there's no way I can adapt to such a discipline. Things come in smaller portions. R3 provides a reliable soundtrack but not all day and not if it doesn't come up with much of interest when I could be playing my own playlist. The 30-minute chess rating is at the bottom end of my acceptable range, at 1800, at the moment so has to be recovered to at least that before I make my way back to 1850. And today's racing at Fontwell recovered yesterday's awful return of 0 out of 4 and so we play again tomorrow, when there are big races at Ascot, Newmarket and then Longchamps, in the Conditional Jockey's race at Fontwell, which might be the risk-averse option.

It's Autumn walking, walking for the good of my health, one might say, from now on, which might not be quite the same as the glorious days we've been granted thus far but there are far worse things to be doing.