Tell It Like It T-I-S and other stories

Good performance by Dominic yesterday, I thought. I didn't watch all seven hours of it but I found it compelling to watch until about halfway. While one can see why there were so many headlines about 'revenge' this morning, that's how it surely was. We could see that from the outside. As has been said, there was only ever one way that the Johnson-Cummings axis of power would end, two very different narcissists very badly matched. One is a brilliant obsessive maniac and the other is an incompetent buffoon (and maniac).

I'm not inclined to join any Dominic Cummings Fan Club, though, because he will forever mostly be the sinister Svengali behind the horrendous referendum and General Election results but he's good at what he does and I like a maverick genius and so, apparently, does he. They are preferable to gormless oafs more suited to being in a play by Molière.

Precious little will come of it, I dare say. Oh, they'll have their own review, run by one of their stool pigeons. It's much the same at Prime Minister's Question Time. Whatever the question is, the answer is that the British people don't want to know about all that and the vaccine is working (because he's had nothing to do with it). 

And although the enemy of my enemy is not entirely a bad thing, two wrongs don't make a right. Conspicuously excused the torrential flak were Mssrs. Sunak and Gove who happen to be two of the current top three in the betting for next Prime Minister (Mr. Starmer being an honourable second favourite but not one I'd put money on), so I don't need to be Laura Kuennsberg to think he's got ideas about being the puppet master again.

I'd rather not be writing about all this. There must be other things more uplifting. But the more one sees this Prime Minister blundering on in his own special boorish way the more I want to use the only outlet to put on record my own same old song, which is Don't Say I Didn't Tell You, which will actually do for a song title.

So, to put in the more uplifting stuff- the postman's doing a fine job, bringing the latest batch of book purchases one by one each day. I'll be just as glad as he will when it's over. Although he has to carry them round, I have the great inconvenience - at my age- of having to be up and about quite early to answer the door for those thicker books that won't go through the letterbox. Maybe that's good for me. Otherwise I have to wait until something or somebody comes on the radio that makes me decide I could do something better. I think it's Mondays that Rod Liddle comes on Times Radio to say what he thinks. Right, that's enough of that. Time to get up. He might be something rather than somebody.

But last night, being in between books, I embarked on what I hope will be an ongoing programme of taking a poet from the shelves and reminding myself. I chose Norman MacCaig and was, of course, not disappointed. He's never less than a pleasure and it's a shame there aren't more that bear comparison with him but not much of his work makes me want to write like him. It's clear, it's fine, it's honest and admirable but it's not encrypted enough. Without wanting to do an Oxford Professor lecture on the subject, I'd ideally like at least the suggestion of other things shifting below the surface. In poetry, telling it only as it t-i-is only gets you 90% of the way there.

But the Second Balzac Festival will be along in due course with three more of La Comédie humaine lined up promisingly for later. That will make 6 or 7 of them I'll have read. I've seen mention that there are 96 of them altogether and they're not short novels. I don't understand how one can both have the time to write that much and have had enough time to witness enough of 'life' to write about.

They might not be top priority with a borrow of the recent Ishiguro due tomorrow and Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy, the Time-Torn Man, which I should have read years ago, ahead of such reliable stock books.

--

This picture was unresistable and I wish I could think of a poem to go with it. As it is, the poet I most associate with photographs of swans is me, as per The Perfect Book. Maybe I'll drag in Yeats and The Wild Swans at Coole at a stretch although these weren't at Coole, they were at Hilsea. Still gorgeous, though. Apologies if the pixels don't make it quite publishable. It is cut from a bigger picture but I couldn't get any closer because they were out in the middle of the water.