Sure is hot out there. I've done my daily ration of Anna Karenina outside and am now allowed in. Long gone are they days of the 1980's when I was a dedicated sunworshipper and the 1990's when I was a long-distance cyclist always monitoring the weather to fit in 200 miles during a summer week. I am the most sun-drenched now that I've been since those faraway days and I hope the sunlight vitamins are proving beneficial.
Beyond halfway in the Tolstoy I am not yet tempted to put it alongside Proust, maybe Middlemarch and suchlike in the Greatest Novel category. By all means Tolstoy is a great writer but my interest in agrarian reform in C19th Russia isn't a big part of my life. The zeitgeist of the Proust was dominated by the Dreyfuss Affair which is more in my line. I have begun to wonder, though, if there is an underlying template shared by these big novels having noticed that Karenin's role is vaguely the equivalent of Casaubon in George Eliot, that Anna has obvious parallels with Emma Bovary but my memory fails me on so much detail and I can't remember what happens to Ladislaw and how far he compares with Vronsky. I may be the wiser once I move on to the great A.N. Wilson's biography of Tolstoy and find out what it all meant.
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What more of a retirement idyll can one require than a day like yesterday, dropping in on another Portsmouth poet on the way to lunch with Yoko, picking up the August Gramophone, noticing the eight cygnets born earlier this year at Hilsea are all doing well and then reading about Josquin to the accompaniment of such gorgeously done piano. If I were a multi-billionaire I'm not convinced I'd want much more than that, like travel to the beginnings of outer space. I once went to Istanbul, which included my few hours outside Europe but 'travel' has never been the point of it for me. What little I took from what I saw of the telly version of War And Peace was the fulfilment of being at home, on one's own land, as it were, surrounded by those things one chose to be surrounded by.
The secret might be in not wanting more than that.
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But three-quarters of my regular social life has been threatened by positive tests for plague. It didn't prevent the trip to Chichester to see Pavlos and it only meant a circumspect move to outdoors yesterday but it has caused a hiatus in the Tuesday walking.
As we intrepidly approach the relaxation of so many measures put in place to counteract the virus, it is concerning to note that the government are accepting an inevitable kick-up of infections. My own evidence confirms that it's happening already, never mind what exponential co-efficient Freedom Day causes a week or so later.
I realize that libertarians like the Prime Minister don't actually believe in doing any governing. It's just as ironic that Nigel Farage only ever got himself elected to the European parliament he wanted to abolish that Boris only wants to be Prime Minister for vainglorious reasons and prat about without taking any responsibility for anything. But what is meant by this diafanous notion of 'freedom' that he, Trump and the villainous Brazilian President stand for. Death, as a statistical percentage figure, really. It won't have come as any comfort to those who died as a result of government laissez-faire that they were returned to the state of dust from which they came in the interests of the freedom of others to dance, attend indoor events and move about the world by aeroplane to indulge in holidays.
Quite hilariously on the radio the other day it was noted how at a wedding the rings were sanitized and all possible precautions were observed in a show of great propriety as if nobody had given any thought to what the happy couple were going to be trying their best at a few hours later.
Also heard on the wireless was a profile of the heroic Prof. Chris Whitty who is the modern sage and model of self-deprecating nobleness and expertise that does worthwhile things for their own sake and is good at them. You know there's something wrong with the mutation of democracy we lived under when the choice of Prime Minister at an election is between Johnson and Corbyn but, the inevitable fiasco having come to pass, there is a gibbering compulsive liar in charge while the sensible expert is abused in a public place by libertarians.
This is a false summer, it's sinister. I realize that Workington, Hartlepool and Bolsover had their reasons for not wanting the theoretical Marxism of Corbyn but that wasn't a good enough reason to visit such pestilence on us. He says he 'vaccinates, not vacillates'. No, he doesn't. It's not him that vaccinates, it's the NHS, and he vacillates on a weekly basis. And then has the nerve to present it as if he's 'saving the NHS'. No, it saved him.
There is simply no cure for people who believe what they want to believe, including me, and a good proportion of people are doing more or less what they can in the circumstances. It's them we depend on and need to encourage. Next week threatens to be when it flips over and heads back towards Square One, where we were eighteen months ago.
I'm sure our Christian friends have been doing all they can through the power of prayer but quite why they persist in the face of all the evidence is hard to fathom. Christianity is Literature and some of it's very good. I always enjoyed the last thing, late night broadcast of Compline on Radio 4 that was discontinued some years ago,
Be sober, be vigilant, because your adversary the devil,
as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour,
while not being entirely convinced about the 'sober' part, I can see how it works here.
Take care. Look after yourselves. Thanks for being there.
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