The Godfather Pastiche and other stories

I've been watching The Godfather in instalments, not being much taken up by films but thinking one ought to know about a reputed masterpiece. 50 years on, it's hardly its own fault that it looks to me like a parody except that it is the thing that such parodies are based on.

Wendy Cope, in her 'other prose' reports how she,

sat and wept with laughter at the beginning of a programme called 'A Cornishman's View of the North East' 

for five minutes before it dawned on her that she wasn't watching Monty Python and thus The Godfather looks like a hilariously well-observed pastiche of The Godfather, Brando brooding and mumbling. Sadly much of its appeal is likely to be for the sort of men that are thrilled by guns and gratuitous violence somehow being a necessary part of their way of life.

I am enjoying it but not necessarily for the right reasons.

 --

Cheltenham couldn't possibly have been expected to continue at the same level as Tuesday and peaked too soon, great moments and great horses though there still were, and are still to come.

It really hasn't, though. My mug punter Pop Music Theory outdid the usually more profitable appliance of science when You Wear it Well won the Mares Novice Hurdle ahead of Luccia.

But that's sport for you and there's no such thing as a cert. We done okay and got out ahead of where we started which is more than what most bookmaker's clients will have done. The plan works fine but it's in the long run, a percentage game, not usually in a one-off smash-and-grab.

But rather than be a New York mafioso without much of a sense of humour, we can do it for fun and without gunning down the opposition in restaurants.

--

I went up the road to Tesco Express yesterday morning and wondered why One Stop had them queueing out of the door. They were still lined up ten back when I was on my way home but my new friend, Ash, who works there was in charge of supervising the queue so I went over and asked what the big attraction was.

Prime, she said but could see I was none the wiser. It's a new energy drink. Once it's gone, it's gone.

Oh.

Those in the queue didn't look like athletes to me. The genius of it seems to be whoever has persuaded the public that they really must have yet another flavoured sugar water confection, whether it be Coca-Cola, Lucozade, Irn Bru (in Scotland), Lambrusco or specifically this latest one. I'm a Pepsi Max supporter myself.

--

I don't know what Dr. Johnson would have made of such folly. Well, I do. He'd have been as non-plussed as me.

I'd left Rasselas aside from my Dr. Johnson programme, suspecting it of being a bit like Candide, I suppose. But, given that the next options were Phil Spector, a book on Donne that can wait and a  biography 'by' Cliff Richard that hardly needs reading but can provide a few pages of anodyne ghost-writing at bedtime, I took it up.

Oh, me of little faith. Of course it's brilliant. It says Samuel Johnson on the cover and that is as much of a guarantee as those things that are by J.S. Bach, Handel or Mozart. I'm not sure who else can be so confidently included on such a list.

Candide is a cartoon and an extravagant satire but Rasselas, right from the start, is written by someone who can't help but be a great writer. Lines, or paragraphs, that make you want to stop and note them down or read them again pile up and say that which you knew you knew but were not so able to so well express. It's a very short 'novel' and so might be re-read immediately and possibly be the first book for absolutely ages, if there were ever quite such a thing, that I'll carry around with me. Not to Tesco Express or One Stop, that would be madness, but when I'm going anywhere further.

I've been reluctant to do that in recent years, well aware that however far one travels, you can't help but take yourself with you which is a Johnsonian sort of conundrum. There is no escape. One can listen to Bach or Bowie but you can never quite become them. Lockdown was the perfect alibi to stay home, read books and be insular. But that cover has been blown, as it inevitably is being for those self-serving spivs we were unlucky enough to have in government when the plague was visited upon us. And now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party.

My diary has never been fuller. Concerts, race meetings, walks. It's what you must do. I like the idea of the hermit disdaining the world and all that happens in it but you can't. If you're going to do that, you might as well believe in God.