Stevie

I was prompted by a passing mention somewhere into the market for Stevie Smith books. She's not really up among my favourite poets, the faux-naivety is perhaps a bit much but I am one for a poetry biography and Frances Spalding's does a fine job, the life and the ideas behind the poems being more convincing than the poems themselves. 

I was quite taken with her idea that,

man is so lonely that he invents Godin order to have someone interested in him,

and her reading of Robert Graves's King Jesus which on the face of it, from what it says here, sounds like A.N. Wilson's account and,

constructs a Jesus who is fantical, deeply versed in rabbinical law and anxious to fulfil prophecies found in Jewish mystical texts.

While Stevie clearly wasn't always the eccentric spinster she played the part of so well in later life, she was always in some way a natural outsider and could be unforgiving in her assessments of those around her. I doubt if I will be buying the poems beyond those I have already and are in Me Again. There's plenty of Elizabeth Jennings by the bedside to be going on with who, although dedicated to Catholicism, is a more amenable poet. I'm not sure I can think of any other writer whose sub-text and meaning were so much better than the way she chose to express them but it's a life with lots to like about it in that faraway world of early C20th suburban London.

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The mini Elgar festival that has come about in the Chichester lunchtime Autumn programme could have propelled him, however belatedly, up my hit parade. Probably not as high as Brahms, say, who may or may not be Top 10 but I certainly had been neglecting him and rating him below his worth despite ploughing through that big biography some months ago. The Violin Sonata turned up today so soon after reporting its non-appearance that I'm not sure if it is an expedited replacement or a very slow delivery of the original item but it will sit nicely alongside the Piano Quintet in due course while the new arrivals pile up. The complete Mozart Pianbo Concertos are also late but it will be no hardship at all to make my way through them.

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I never more appreciated why horses need a week or two's break between races than how my legs still felt yesterday after Sunday's Edward Thomas walk. Of course, a horse can reappear in very short order after an easy win but I couldn't have done today's modestly idyllic walk at Itchenor yesterday. Good Lord, there are some outrageous houses hidden away down there and I'm the more convinced that if those houses send their children to Bedales School then VAT on the fees is entirely to be expected.

Even Jacob's aloof disdain can't really pass of the charitable status of such privilege but I did wonder if the library would have his book. I wonder quite how absurd his world view is when one reads a whole book of it. I will almost miss my self-righteous disbelief at some of that which has poured forth from Boris, Liz Truss, Suella, Jacob et al once they are banished to, let's hope, ten years in opposition. So, in the most honourable tradition of irony, I might read some Mogg. Whether I'll risk being seen with it in public is another matter, though. I might have to borrow something more respectable, like a Jeffrey Archer novel, to hide it behind.