I'm more impressed by Michelangelo this afternoon than I was this time yesterday having painted a ceiling this morning. The ceiling I painted was no more than two square metres in the porch where rain had got in before I had the guttering above done last year, it wasn't as high as the Sistine Chapel's and I 
was only attempting to apply some silk white rather than anything on this scale but it gave me some small insight into the problems he must have encountered.
The main problem is that paint, like anything else that has weight, is subject to the effects of gravity. I think Michelangelo's paint would have been a bit thicker than mine and not so much of it would have dripped off his brush onto him, his ladder ( ! ) and the non-ceiling parts of the chapel. I don't think Pope Julius II would have been impressed to find his inner sanctum splattered with all the paint that missed the ceiling although Michelangelo would have inadvertently anticipated Jackson Pollock, the Dripper, by 450 years if he had.
There might not be many painters and decorators who provide reviews of local classical music concerts for the internet or poems and essays on poetry for any publications that'll have them and it's best if I keep my attempts at their sort of work to a minimum, too, but one can hardly ask a professional to come in and do such a small job. The painting took maybe twenty minutes but the wiping of surfaces afterwards took more than that.
Oh, what fun I had.
It is best if we all stick to what we are good at. At school it was at an early stage that those who didn't look like being academic enough to do Latin were not persevered with but I think in my case they kept me doing Ancient Roman up to reading Caesar's De Bello Gallico and Ovid because I'd have been even worse at Woodwork and Metalwork. I wish one could have been taken off rugby union at an equally early stage but they could see I was quite good at sport, I just didn't like that one. Now, fifty years later, it's becoming apparent that it's dangerous. I could have told them that but, sadly, in Gloucester, rugby takes on the proportions of a religion more than just representing one's prescribed quota of exercise.
However, the painting of the Bosham Road Porch ceiling could count as a valuable apprenticeship for the much more ambitious project of the bedroom ceiling. I think I'll be looking for 'non-drip' although it would be best if that applied not only to the paint but the person applying it.
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I was more at home in The Times on Saturday when the headline of a review of a new book on Anaximander called him, The greatest mind you've never heard of.
Well, I have, actually. There was a poem about him in my 2000 collection, Re-reading Derrida on a Train.
Yes, Anaximander, Jacques Derrida, Tycho Brahe, they're all in there. It's not easy to convince all of those who think painting a ceiling, putting up a fence or fitting a carpet is easy and I can see their point if they think what they do is more useful than what I do. I do, too.
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Paul Morley's The Age of Bowie will be done with shortly. I've had plenty of reservations about it, below, but maybe I chose the wrong Bowie book to read. Morley is one of those writers who likes to be in his own books but there are things to be said for it in mitigation.
We have got as far as Let's Dance by page 430, out of 471, which is 1983. The book has gone into detail about the formative years and is called The Age of Bowie and spends most of its too many pages on that, which was the 1970's. We must be grateful that he doesn't go to such lengths to make such claims for the later work.
Bowie was a work addict as well as a drug addict and it's easy to forget the film career. As easy to forget as it is to believe that a generation not born when Hunky Dory came out knew him from his role in Labyrinth and not for Ziggy Stardust. That's like knowing Bing Crosby for Little Drummer Boy.
We are also reminded that Bowie worked with not only Marc Bolan but John Lennon, Mick Jagger, Nile Rodgers and Freddie Mercury, among others, but we can tell that Morley is making sure we know he has as little regard for Queen as any other right-minded pop-picker when he writes, of Under Pressure,
Queen haters who were Bowie lovers were torn at the time, as the man who had just been 'Low' and 'Lodger' should not be singing with someone who for musical snobs, or realists, of the time was a corny pop music equivalent of Bruce Forsyth.
So, Paul, your book is a 2:1. There's a lot of good work in it but it tries too hard and is over-written. You want too much to both capture the perceived elusiveness of Bowie and yet appreciate it. Putting more distance between yourself and your subject could have achieved something better and saved some repetition of the same idea being recycled time and again which might have been what Bowie was doing and how he fooled you into it.
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Edward Thomas is a poet celebrated by having a Fellowship rather than a Society in his honour. There's posh. I can't imagine that all the poets that have such groups fixated on every detail of their lives would have enjoyed the idea but what can they do.
Not get themselves famous is one thing they could have done, or hide the 'real' them behind a series of disguises like David Jones did as David Bowie and all the personae he inhabited as such so that Paul Morley could be one of all the Paul Morleys he's been by writing a book about them.
Honestly, it never stops.
However, the Edward Thomas Fellowship are likely to be good people. Their annual walk near Petersfield is on 5th March,
I hope the weather is not inclement and one could make a day of it by attending the talk in the afternoon.
Sanity, sanity. All of it, one has every reason to hope, should be sanity.
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