Some reasons to be cheerful

 I maybe ought to fall asleep on the bath more often. It's okay, I do it plenty.

The other night I rested from the creative labours marking the knighthood of Jacob Rees-Mogg to find that Boris Johnson had resigned as an M.P.  And this afternoon I rise from my watery repose to find it is raining. Hurray.

Rain is soothing and gorgeous, the more so for being so unexpected. Not as much can be said for Boris whose every transparently grandstanding move is only part of the vast web of deception and vaingloriousness that he weaves about him. One is transfixed by the crassness of it, the relentless narcissism and the haplessness. Surely the law of diminishing returns eventually kicks in and even Grant Schapps, once his most loyal spokesman in the media, has now given up the unequal task of defending him.

It's been a gory freakshow and one could do with less of it but in a horror show sort of way, compelling, and I'm surprised to find that, having been sixth on a waiting list for the recent Sebastian Barry novel from the library, there is no such wait for Anthony Seldon's Johnson at 10. I can't have such a book in the house in the same way as Ezra Pound is an absentee from my collection of poetry biographies but anybody who enjoyed Fawlty Towers, Will Hay, The Office or even maybe Fred Karno is likely to be mesmerised by such a story. I won't say Dad's Army because they were heroic and much loved.

Further reason to be cheerful came this week when a young person asked ChatGPT to produce a David Green poem for me. One has no need to worry about any creative competition from AI on that evidence.

Maybe the app wasn't given enough of a sample to work with but more might have only confused it further.

It has a very limited idea of what a poem is. It's not alone in that but there's precious little trace of irony, allusion or ambiguity. It is one dimensional, cliché-ridden and faux-profound, again like a lot of human poetry, but what it does is imitate bad poetry which means it's not able to produce anything remotely 'good'.  If it can produce something that's anything like your work, as it did for Belinda Carlisle on Times Radio, it doesn't say much for your work, I'm afraid.

 

But I worry that my music reviews have reached a comparable level of redundancy. I wondered whether to produce a list to define the lexical limits of my music vocabulary. Rhapsodic, lyrical, flourish, climax, gentle, dazzling, light, meditative, contemplative, sombre, etc. The trouble is that I don't know what B flat minor is. The concern is that there are two concerts in the coming week and the words need to last me until the end of the excellent Menuhin Room series. I'll try to get that far and then review the situation, I think.