Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

Stevie Smith's The Holiday isn't given an easy time on Good Reads, probably in return for not having given many of its readers an easy time, as several of them say. It is 'quirky' perhaps, and certainly acerbic, penetrating and even sentimental at times. Its 'weakness', if it is such, is the way it scans across a lot of issues and maybe lacks obvious direction but that is her way. Her assessment of a variety of English types is astute and less deceived in a way that her poems don't achieve in their faux-naive way. She is for me a much better novelist than poet while being singular as both. 

It won't take long. It might be discursive but it's also short. By way of contrast, I'm reading it alongside Pataudi, Nawab of Cricket, ed. Suresh Menon. I could hardly leave that on the shelves of Chichester's Oxfam
bookshop with him being an almost mythical figure of those long childhood summers of test cricket. Only 1967 in England it would seem and not mythical at all once these essays bring him to life but he was the only nawab I'd ever heard of until finding that his father was a cricketer, too, and played for England. That was what made him memorable, notwithstanding a relaxed playboy attitude, a rapid promotion to the captaincy of India and some innovations in batting and cricket that made him ahead of his time. His one test wicket was Colin Cowdrey.

Writing can sometimes be more exciting than reading except that it's hard to stick at it. I do enjoy my brief stints on C20th, my personal little survey of C20th poetry in English, though, and find myself with altered insights into those considered significant enough to be mentioned in any sort of detail. This morning's progress on Seamus Heaney was enlightening, for me at least. Once that chapter is done in 'first draft' the 'book' should amount to something like 25000 words which isn't really a book. That will be a crucial time, having to then read it, try to make it coherent, add in all the footnotes I've left undone and see if my heart is really in it enough to make it any more like a finished article. I hope I will because otherwise I'll have to think of another project to begin and eventually leave half finished. As with the 'first draft' of the novel, a winter project some years ago, I prefer the idea of it to actually reading it to see if it's any good. Daydreaming of what I imagine it's like is far more satisfying than ever looking at the blizzard of typos in the printed version of Time After Time. It's amazing how hard writing a novel is, not just the hard yards of setting it down but making it anywhere near worth reading. Poetry is the soft option, I've never had any doubt.

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The news often anticipates government announcements and makes the announcements not very newsworthy at all. While Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt represent the most acceptable partnership to front a government for what seems a very long time that is only because all the other runners in the field were so completely unacceptable. However, it is to be hoped that rumours of £20billion of tax cuts in an attempt to pacify the unpacifiable, never sated right wing turn out to be only rumours.

There can't possibly be £20b's worth of 'headroom' or leeway for a giveaway budget when the NHS, police, housing, schools, transport infrastructure, care, rivers, the sea, power supply and every other conceivable sector is in desperate need of funding which is the same old answer from anybody interviewed about any of their respective crises.

Surrendering to the lurid call of Truss and Mogg economics in the vain hope of salvaging the next General Election would be a dereliction of duty by those who have finally shown some signs of at least knowing what a sense of duty is. It would be at least as bad as Tony Blair, PM, proving to be an appropriate anagram of I'm Tory Plan B when, yes, he was Labour's most successful leader at getting himself elected but there's no point keeping the Conservatives out if you only do what they would have done anyway.

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It will soon be time for the Review of the Year, this channel's answer to the gala evening of Sports Personality.

Tuesday at Chichester should be my 44th concert attended this year which is a significant % increase on last year and any attempt to write about them differently, or even not at all, hasn't come about because there isn't really any other way and a concert not written about is like an 'unconsidered life' and it must be done. Having so few other types of event on my itinerary- and why would I - they will dominate the shortlist for Event of the Year. Then whether there are enough new books and records to form a shortlist, I'll have to check.