Retirement Diary

 It may still be a false dawn to think we are post-plague. There's still deaths in three figures each day and the more of the Prime Minister's brand of clueless optimism one hears the less - the even less - one is inclined to be encouraged by it. But one presses on because, really, what else can one do and it appears I've arrived at a period of contrived busy-ness that one needs to make the most of while one can. I hardly get a day off what with the walks, the concerts, today's visit to Scrabble Club and a go at indoor bowls on Weds as part of Portsmouth's very worthy two weeks of festival for the over-60's. I'm wondering if the office will take me back so I can have a rest.

Yoko got it right when I told her I was going to Scrabble Club. God help them that have to play you.

First go, my letters spell out FLORINS, I stick it on the end of DUET, score 76 and the game is already all but over. I apologize to the nice, kindly people who've just turned up for a gentle social morning and on my next turn show them that but for the want of an I to latch onto, I had QUAGMIRE for another 50 bonus.

I'm really not someone you want at almost any sort of genteel gathering. The librarian said they were thinking of having chess. I dread to think. Meanwhile I'll maybe get put back in my place at indoor bowls. I haven't played bowls for about 45 years.

But libraries are good, aren't they. It means, even in this day and age, not all books have to be bought and then found shelf space for. This little local facility had David Copperfield, the autobiography of Ruby Walsh, more cycling books than any library would have had 20 years ago and so I'll be a customer, I'm sure. Whether they'll get me the new Paul Muldoon to save me the expense of buying another dose of sublime mystification, I don't know, but I'll do what I can to keep such an admirable service in work.

 

Maybe they can get me Katherine Duncan-Jones's Ungentle Shakespeare, the new Sebastian Faulks, Glyn Maxwell's On Poetry, a biography of Edmund Spenser and all kinds of things for when I've finished Balzac's A Harlot High and Low in which we follow Lucien back to Paris with all the usual expectations of flying too high and crashing disastrously but with plenty of profound reflections on the nature of ambition, society, 'love' and money on the way.

It is with much regret that I record that poetry is not my friend at present. My persistence in undermining all the shortcomings I think I find in it have eventually persuaded me there's not enough left to like about it. Is it not mostly what so many outside of the poetry community think it is, a lot of preciousness indulged by critics who only compound the problem by trying to show that they 'get it'. At best it is a magician's trick done with language and at worst it is transparent virtue signalling. 

I very much hope it isn't and some time spent with a selection of time-honoured favourites will dispel my doubts. The Essay on the wireless this week is devoted to Ted Hughes which might not help much. A well-respected friend describes him as 'unreadable' and if I don't quite go that far, I do know what he means post-Wodwo. Tomorrow, Tuesday night's essay is Sean O'Brien making the comparison between Hughes and Larkin first established by Alvarez. One might reasonably expect that to be authoritative common sense but it will be interesting to see along which lines Prof O'Brien makes his distinction.

But tune in here first to read about Maria Luc and her Debussy, Chopin and Prokofiev in Chichester. What more could one reasonably want.