Full-Time Job

 You know me by now, I hope. I'm not one to complain. Sooner than we know, in the summer, it will be four years since I left full-time paid work behind in a position to do things I'd rather do instead. I've never thought it was the wrong decision and there has been enough to do but at the moment, as my friend observed today, I can enjoy the life of the 'man of letters' I might always have fancied even though nobody would have paid me to do it.

I'm not a great deal more successful at it than I was at being footballer, cricketer or cyclist but by now I'm not sure that success is the point (see forthcoming poem in the Larkin Society journal). Enjoyment is the point and that's nice work if you can get it. 

The next edition of About Larkin is due in April featuring the poem Success and the Larkin-Rosemary Tonks essay and really all I ever wanted was to be part of the Rosemary Gang so having that in print helps with that.

Great events, like last year's Messiah and Lauren & the Heatwaves, take some time to recover from their reverberations and Monday's Rosemary event is in that category. There was simply nowhere else I'd rather have been.

Kind comments came from unexpected sources about my short story The Decline of English Fiction and thus, why not, the pdf is available for the asking. I re-read it in the light of somebody thinking it was any good and so I did, too. I'm unlikely to do better at prose fiction.

Two books of poetry, from Kathryn Gray and Sue Hubbard, are up for review in the foreseeable future but Tuesday is Chichester, Thursday is Portsmouth Cathedral and Wednesday night is my subject to lay before Portsmouth Poetry Society, the poems of Michael Donaghy. Do come - by 7.15 in North End as per website on the link over there →.

So, busy, busy man that I am, I wouldn't want it any other way.

Maybe I should get time off for good behaviour except I can't see that happening.