Personal Best and other stories

Three novels read in a week. I don't think I've done that before. 

Conditions were favourable with them being medium-length books, not Proust, and not doing any writing to speak of but it's a credit mainly to the books that they were all the thing I wanted to be doing. Vita Sackville-West now has three more arrivals on the 'forthcoming' shelf and I think Graham Swift's Shuttlecock, also arrived today, makes me a Swift completist.

Heaven knows what it's like being a Booker Prize judge, having to see off books quicker than at that pace for two or three months. Judging it on one's own one could discard quite a few after ten pages or so but on a panel with the well-known comedian, the journalist and the ex-cabinet minister, one would need to turn up to meetings in a position to talk about each of them. I don't think I could stay committed to such an undertaking for long enough.

Graham Swift's Tomorrow pulled off the unlikely conceit of being 249 pages of monologue by a sleepless mother to her twin 16 year old children at 3 a.m. on the eve of a momentous thing she and her husband have to tell them. Despite her formative years having been at Sussex University in the 1960's I'm still not sure a parent would be quite so frank with her children but, there again, she's only rehearsing it to herself. But Swift, despite as ever not being able to function without bereavement, makes of it a tender and compelling text and yet more evidence, if it were needed, why I should never invest time and effort in writing fiction because if that's the standard one is up against, you've got no chance.

Some of it was read to the accompaniment of a disc of Mozart String Quartets which did actually give rise to some writing, a poem called Background Music, which now waits, scribbled on a folded sheet of A4 to be considered for being typed up. 

It had to be induced somewhat and so isn't as immediate and 'successful' as the best one is capable of producing which always seem better for coming 'as naturally as leaves to a tree' but some upholstery and fiddling might make it passable. Heaven knows, they are worth having if they make one feel fulfilled but they aren't easily come by.

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My radio listening has noticed the latest irritating habit in interviewees. It's nowhere near as bad as the pandemic a few years ago that began with Australian cricketers and spread through sport if not further when they'd begin every answer with, 'look', or 'listen', as if to suggest that the interviewer, having put the question, was immediately going to lose interest or weren't going to take the point.

A recent trend among reporters was to identify any crisis as a 'perfect storm'. Admittedly, having self-styled libertarians like Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in charge during time of plague was a perfect 'perfect storm' and well done to whichever journalist used the phrase first but all the others liked it so much it spread though them like the virus itself.

The latest fashionable usage is to say 'what a good question' an interviewer has put. It has the double advantage of bringing the interviewer onside by complimenting them on their adept technique and grasp of the issue and enhances their own answer by suggesting that it is either hard to answer or that their own expert analysis is exactly the definitive answer. But the fashion for it is not likely to last. They will all soon realize that everybody's doing it and so it's not worth doing any more.