The Way Through the Woods and other stories

 It is such an occasional series that it hardly ever happens. Several years ago I thought I would collect photographs that reminded me of poems but I can only remember two I've done so far. Until today,  remembering to record the furthest I've been from home since September, when I saw this by Rudyard Kipling.

It was a hugely enjoyable walk, with six rather than the customary two it has been, and all the better for the future it promises. 

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Unfortunately the Wiseguy advice for the Grand National didn't get in, being no. 42 when only 40 can run. So I'm left without much inspiration. For the record, I've done Any Second Now/Burrows Saint as a reverse forecast which means I need them to be first and second in either order but I've only done it to take part. The Professor tells me he has Kimberlite Candy and Minella Times and I'd be as pleased as anybody to see the great Rachael win on the latter of those. Maybe it's tomorrow that Thyme Hill (3.35) rewards my faithful support.

One gets back to a winning thread at this game and then can feel robbed when it doesn't all go your way but I can have no complaints and win, lose or draw tomorrow, we will arrive at the end of a successful jumping season in a good position. And that'll do.

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I'm very much struggling for a first line, a way in, to a poem called Lockdown Trains about the empty carriages shuttling up to London and back from here and the network repeating that process across the country. I don't necessarily always start with the first line but one does seem to need one. I've been looking at how poems begin, including my own. It's never been a problem before but at this rate I won't be having a triptych of plague poems, it'll be a diptych. 

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Reading the Complete Stories of Thomas Hardy is a joy unconfined. Yes, of course, the plots do depend on a series of alarming coincidences, one of which might happen but which, taken as a set, do begin to stretch credulity. But that doesn't seem to matter and is hardly the point.

We did The Woodlanders for 'O' level with a tiny, tweedy, bearded man called Mr. Broome who might have looked a bit like Erik Satie. I don't think it was him that really set literature alight. I remember somebody (it might have been me) saying that Romeo and Juliet were 'naive' but he was more perturbed by our reaction to Journey's End when we were supposed to be moved by the futility of WW1 trench warfare and we said something like, well, they were soldiers, what did they expect.

I can now see how teaching can be a thankless task and I'm very glad I was wise enough not to try to do it.  But those fourth form days, entranced by Hardy's rich fatalism, alongside the volumes of Solzhenitsyn that went to show what a serious person I was, were formative years and it's a great thing to have 950 pages more of Hardy all these decades later.