In My Beginning is My End

 It's not obvious how much longer it's going to take but the current Prime Minister's tenure has surely entered a phase one step closer to its end. There aren't many political careers that don't end in failure, viz Thatcher, Blair, Wilson and even Churchill, but it was never more apparent than in the current incumbent's case, the seeds of his demise were there long before he got within grasping distance of the much coveted position he has occipied so haplessly. Nothing was more obvious than that's what it would be like.

I progress, never less than entertained, at least, but not always impressed by A.N. Wilson's Our Times, and a similar process is involved in the reduction of him in my estimation, for what that's worth, from immaculate scholar to what one always thought he was, an oddity of bygone right wing sympathies. Or maybe they might not be as bygone as one would like to think.

Many of his pointed put downs are amusing, if highly critical, and he does just as good a job on Jeffery Archer as he does on Michael Heseltine, for example. That's not hard to do. But I eventually had to draw the line at Mary Wilson being described as 'dingy'. That's not Mary Wilson from the immaculate Supremes. Not even Wilson could be provocative enough to call Diana Ross or any other Supreme 'dingy' but I'm sure he could find fault if he felt like it in the cause of his throughgoing dismissal of most things. No, he meant, the self-effacing, third-rate poet (look, he's got me at it now) that was married to Harold. It steps over into 'ad hominem', or in this case 'ad feminam', to be quite so unfair. Her poems weren't as good as his hero Betjeman's who in turn wasn't as good as Larkin but that, at the very least, is unkind and unnecessary.

Thus, I will take my leave of Wilson for a while. It's quite possible he'll be returned to for The Victorians, among which he's likely to find more to his pre-socialist liking, and After the Victorians for these comprehensive surveys but for the time being, enough is enough. It's possible one can have a bit too much of anybody, as in The Thom Gunn Letters or Larkin's role in John Sutherland's account of Monica's life.

So, with time for one more requisition from the admirable service provided by the local libraries, I see they have some Edward Thomas short stories I didn't know about. They, and whatever else I find to go with them, will be Christmas reading, possibly with another look at the very un-Christmassy Nausea by Sartre.