The Guess the Next Word Game and other stories

 The main reason I don't watch films very often is that there's not enough to do. For sure, last night's showing of The Little Stranger, from the book by Sarah Waters was fine and I'm okay with Depardieu, Emmanuelle Beart and Hitchcock but mainly, to the detriment of my quiz ability, I don't know about films.

This week, as part of my casual survey, I noted pictures of people with guns on three out of the seven days in the week's TV Guide in Saturday's Times. Sometimes it can be a science fiction character aiming a laser gun at some enemy from another galaxy, threatening to blow them into the nineteenth dimension. Sometimes it's James Bond or a gangster with a revolver. Or it can be a cowboy with a rifle. While I realize that someone pointing a gun can be a moment of some drama or tension, surely it must lose some of its shock value when it happens in every bloody film one sees. I much prefer a character gazing out of a window on a wintry scene contemplating the futility of it all.

But my mind wanders in films because it's too passive an activity. In reading, one is more involved in some kind of transaction with the writer. But even then, unless it is truly gripping, I can find myself wondering how many pages it is to the end of the chapter, if it's time to stop soon or if something in the writing triggers a poem, as Vita Sackville-West did today. Another diversion is a game I've long played which is to try to guess the next word when turning a page. It adds that extra bit of interest but also shows that I'm concentrating and am in tune with what is going on. During Graham Swift's Shuttlecock last week, I set a personal best by accurately enough getting the rest of the sentence and the next one to a high level of accuracy - six out of the eight words.

Shuttlecock is another fine novel by Swift but still doesn't make me a completist because, checking off the Swift section of the library against the list of his novels in the front of the last one, I find I'm still short of Out of This World. So that's now on its way as I pile through books most enjoyably at a space-filling rate.

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In Family History, Vita Sackville-West attempted a linguistic innovation of her own that might seem ambitious and eccentric but one can see the point of. Sadly, one novel can't effect such a change in the laanguage as a whole.

She differentiated between two different thats and stuck with the conventional 'that' for the conjunction while introducing 'thatt' for the pronoun. Or, as she puts it, 'the demonstrative adjective and demonstrative or relative pronoun'. As with my lack of attention during reading, I couldn't have been quite as forensically specific as that which is probably why I was only ever a 2:1 student and adopt an irreverent, devil-may-care attitude to reviewing sometimes rather than do it with proper professionalism. But I admire Vita's brave effort even if she's right that the unfamilar irritates until it becomes familar. And it never did.

She is a wonderful writer, though, in a way that contrasts rather than compares with Virginia. She and Graham Swift have filled recent weeks with the sort of pleasures that winter, lockdown and retirement are entirely made for.

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23 or 24 lines of a poem came fairly readily having got off to some sort of start while dutifully doing some Sunday walking and being able to remember it when I got home. The solitary walk can lend itself to the process once Vita has very tengentially provoked the possibility. There are a few blanks of one or two syllables left in it for later filling in if, on returning to it, it seems worth pursuing, typing up, putting in the file and possibly even printing off. Only then does it become any sort of candidate for 'being a poem' but it might see the light of day here at some stage anyway, with all the qualifying caveats to explain it away. Only then is it possible to say that thatt is thatt.