The Importance of Almost and other stories

 The index at the top there, Also currently appearing at, is selected elsewheres where I am on the internet. It is updated now that the Larkin Society's archive of their journal includes no. 53 with such a seminal essay in Larkin Studies by me in it. I'm in 54, 45 and 21, too, but the David Green in no. 20 isn't me.

I wonder how hard it is to create a page of pdf's like that. I'd be a bit interested in having the Collected Poems, Strange Fowl or Selected Essays amongst other things in such a place to obviate the necessity of doing anything else with them. We will see about that.

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The final movement of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony is a Thanksgiving after the storm but, not wanting to tempt fate, Portsmouth escaped the worst of Storm Ciarán as it unleashed its worst work in other places.

I'm aware of some damp on a wall of the library and archive room upstairs above the bookcase housing novelists in the second half of the alphabet. I'm aware of a neighbour who had a ceiling fall in recently and lesser problems next door a while before that to go with many years ago when that same room suffered leakage. I need such things to feed my natural appetite for anxiety because without such things to focus on, anxiety for its own sake would surely be madness.

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But, far from the maddeningness, the Autumn duly brings with it the customary upturn in form on the turf and 5 winners out of my last six horses duly obliging. The plus for the year returns to an all-time high and so now is the time to press on without getting carried away.

The Skelton stable appear to have lost their way at the moment and Shan Blue tomorrow is beginning to look so overdue that it might never happen and so could be a favourite worth taking on and so Famous Bridge (Wetherby, 3.00) could be a bet. And at Ascot on Saturday we might reasonably expect Mr. Henderson to have one of his better prospects ready and so Jango Baie (2.40) might be that.