Top 6 - Things it says here

 You keep writing long enough and you will repeat yourself. Time and again, the longer you go on.

Caitlin Moran, Robert Crampton and Giles Coren have furnished the pages of the Saturday Times for as long as some of us can remember, it seems, and by now we might be excused for thinking we've heard it all before. Caitlin still has her moments, Robert is clearly an okay sort of bloke but Giles is transparently struggling to pad out the requisite word count when he yet again resorts to an unfunny 'listicle' which is what they call one of those items that begins with a passable idea and then offers less and less convincing variations on it until the space is full of words, like those less gifted writers in junior school who, when asked for two sides, wrote in their largest handwriting, managed to get onto page 2 and then wrote THE END in huge letters.

I know what it's like. None of us are a bottomless well of inspiration. One of my lesser used ideas not repeated often enough to quite make the list below is that poets are 'mature' by the age of 30 and start repeating themselves after they reach 60. It is such a theoretical theory that I'm not even going to name one example as evidence of it.

But, for anybody who's been a regular visitor here over the years - and thank you for being there if you have - they must be becoming aware of certain 'set pieces' like I am. I am because I'm aware of having written it. The music reviews recycle the same 35 or so adjectives. I know. I've made a spreadsheet of them. I am reviewing the situation regarding the reviewing of concerts when they resume in September but it can't go on like that. By now, Artificial Intelligence should be able to produce the DGBooks concert review.

These might not be statistically the proven Top 6 Things it says here but they are six that come readily to mind.

There is no manifesto. That is the manifesto, mainly with respect to poetry but further afield, too. There are no rules. By all means go with whatever rules you want but voluntarily undertaken rules aren't rules, they are 'form'. 

Which leads to all you have to be is any good, unashamedly lifted verbatim from Danny Baker. 

And a thoroughgoing scepticism about anything purporting to be avant garde. No, every generation has some. They think they're the first to re-invent it all but the mainstream is a more inclusive tradition than they think.

Larkin's An Arundel Tomb goes to great lengths to undermine its famous last line. If I learnt one thing at University- and I didn't learn much - it was to read the whole poem and not help myself to certain lines in isolation from the others.

 

Boris Johnson was a compulsive liar, vanity project and completely unfit for office and we knew that many years before he was ever in a position to be a candidate for leadership of the Conservative Party, with Prime Minister attached.

 

What I know about 'rock' music comes from the early 70's in the first years of being a teenager. I soon saw through the posturing designed to sell its machismo to impressionable white boys, though, and spent 1974 listening to Beethoven and Shostakovich. I returned to pop music via Al Green's Greatest Hits, Tamla Motown and Bob Marley's Exodus about 47 years ago. The other gang at school had been right and I and my mates had been wrong. I remember John Peel being quoted as saying a similar thing about Tony Blackburn. I never tire of saying it about Cliff Richard.

I love saying they were right and I was wrong.