'Work in Progress'

The latest brainwave of a project towards something 'major' is to throw together many of the well-tried set pieces on C20th English Poetry I've got and then see how much filling in of gaps it takes to call it a 'book'. I'm hoping that a title will suggest itself during the process.

At present, putting in some foundations as and when they occur to me is probably the easy bit. But there's no rush and, as with the pop music book, to travel hopefully rather than arrive might be all I ever do but as long as I believe in it sufficiently to keep adding to it, maybe it will be okay. If one is Casaubon, one needs one's Key to All Mythologies.

Reading good books rather than writing bad ones remains the preferred option, though. 

I think I picked right in taking Andrew Graham-Dixon's Caravaggio off the shelf next. It's not as dry as the Schwartz Rembrandt but it's miles in front of Darren Coffield's Tales from the Colony Room which only serves as damning evidence of the difference between what booze makes you feel like and what it makes you look like.

The likes of Jeffrey Bernard, Francis Bacon, Keith Waterhouse, Peter O'Toole and all the self-made reprobates don't look well. The question that arises is only whether one is having a good time when one thinks one is having a good time, or not.

Quite why Darren doesn't mention Maggi Hambling among the
dubious illuminati is possibly to do her a favour.

But at least I have a new hero in Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan 1564-1584, a Catholic so fervent in his piety that he thought that sin was provoked by the sight of one's reciprocal gender but yet insisted on the visual representation of the sufferings of Jesus Christ.

His broader policy on eyesight remained unclear. 

However, the rhyme of fingi, cheating, with dipingi, painting, in a tribute to him by the artist's friend, Murtola, is very much the telling sort of thing one wants and can expect from Graham-Dixon's lively scholarship as Caravaggio, it is suggested, identifies with the cardsharps and vagabonds - perhaps with some benefit of hindsight but while an artist's early, formative years are often of the most interest, I'm confident that many adventures are to come in the second, third and fourth quarters of this clear-sighted and entertaining story.

--

Surviving a summer these days is like seeing out the fourth innings of a test match, if you can follow a tortured simile. The heat might get you, or the dog days of August but in the UK, unlike Southern Europe, we've been lucky so far. Relatively cool temperatures and some welcome rain have seen us through to now with only the equivalent of, say, three wickets down and we'll be into September in four week's time.

Quite what the major political parties are doing in moderating their commitments to reducing harmful emissions, fossil fuels and abandoning all hope of agreed targets is easier to understand than condone in the light of the Uxbridge by-election result. Short-term priorities, like next year's General Election, will cost future generations all kinds of horror but that's what politics is like and it's almost too late already.

I had thought my commitment to Labour in Portsmouth North was 100% after the questionable loyalties Penny Mordaunt has shown in the current parliament. Not that I'd ever be voting for her but I'd concentrate on the serious tactical push to overturn her 15000 majority.

It's not quite as simple as that, though. None of the cost of living, interest rates, Brexit, scandal and more scandal are going to seem so important once we are under water in a permanent heatwave. The likes of Mercury, Venus and Neptune are inhospitable because they don't have the fine balance of conducive conditions that our planet was blessed with, being where it is. The Green Party should get 90% of our votes with the oddball 10% inevitably unable to see beyond the likes of Farage, Corbyn, Jacob and Nadine who live in worlds of their own.

 I dare say it was ever thus but it is getting serious now.