The Marshes in Autumn and other stories

A few drops of rain are preferable to excessive heat for our weekly exercise afternoon. Remembering this week to go right-handed, like they do at Ascot, rather than left, like Cheltenham, it was more likely to be the cooler weather and fewer stops that produced a big improvement in our time rather than being more suited to a right-handed track.

It's not quite a different place going the other way round but one sees things slightly differently and the tide is never further out than it was today, which makes it mudflats more than an inlet from the sea. And there is much to enjoy about the deeper, darker colours notwithstanding that the birdwatchers, who have been there in numbers in recent weeks, presumably agog at the migrating season, have let us have the place back.  

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I heard this from Joni on a R4 tribute by Lynne Truss at the weekend and haven't been as moved by a pop record for a long time. I didn't know it. When Johnnie Walker then played In France They Kiss on Main Street on Sunday, I was concerned  that she might have died but, looking her up, it seems she's much better. That's great news. Without ever being one of my absolute elite list, she has always been great. All those 60's and 70's singer-songwriters seem to be predicated somehow on Dylan and I've got a lot of time for many of his things but it seems to me that Carole King and Joni are the preferred options. I'll be checking this posting with the words provided to see if she remains on the acceptable side of 'pop songs as poetry'. Sometimes they go a bit too far. Sometimes it's best just to catch a line or two and fill in the rest for yourself.

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More good news is finding Simon Armitage's Oxford lectures are due in print next Spring, which is very welcome. They are available on the internet as recordings but a book is something to have and hold, like ordering a couple more Joni albums on CD even though one can play them on You Tube whenever you like. Possession is nine tenths of expressing some allegiance to the work.

Simon's lectures included an exhaustive analysis of Thom Gunn's Tamer and Hawk and there's really no point in me doing a second rate job on the early masterpiece in my work-in-progress book when he's already put his first-rate account on record.

But, otherwise, Wide Realm, which is the current ante-post favourite to be my Gunn book's title, is emerging steadily. It doesn't matter how long it takes because it's enjoyable to do and there is no rush. It might be my own Key to All Mythologies and not really intended to be finished, not least because I know it will never be as good as it could have been.

But another 500 words or so a couple of times a week fit neatly into the routine that has built itself organically into the retirement days. The weeks bloody fly by and, for the most part, quite happily despite all the reasons why they might not.

Not having to be a professional writer and producing the thousand words a day as a job is a fine thing. Reading Sebastian Faulks's Human Traces is making me wonder if it's the same book I abandoned several years ago and then gave away, only buying it back in paperback to re-instate some sort of completism to my Faulks section. But I don't know how they do it, producing such quality writing out of the grind. I suppose talent has a lot to do with it.

Nobody could ever convince me that poetry is in any way a better thing than the novel. Try writing a poem and then a novel. Which of them is better and which was hardest to do. 

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I had heard about preposterous results that people had been getting out of a questionnaire on the National Careers Service so I did it myself. I dare say it works on algorithms, an algorithm being defined suddenly not as a clever bit of kit but a completely useless programme that gives out hilarious, or dangerously misleading, results.

Following the NCS feature as constructively as I could it told me I should have been an actor or an editor. I can't see me doing any more acting than that I use to get by in everyday life but editor is a good result. Maybe I could have been that. I have been it a few times. Fair enough.