Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 While it is a fine thing to have a variety of interests one can't do everything at once and so progress on the bookpile slows dramatically during Cheltenham. Concerts, too, have to move down the priorities. It's a shame that Chichester Cathedral always seem to have a good one this week but it would have to be exceptional to be more important than the Champion Hurdle, the Arkle Chase, the Supreme Novices and the day on which all still seems possible.

Tuesday did nearly all that was expected of it for me so I'll still be a going concern by the weekend. Then, once we get past the National meeting and Cheltenham in April, my main attention with unusually be on football as an idle few bets from last summer on the English leagues comes to push and shove with me sitting pretty at present on Arsenal, Top 4, and Leicester, Derby and Wrexham for promotion. Mr. Coral would buy me off for a perfectly reasonable profit but I'm sticking with it for the time being.

Something that can be missed, though, is orders that don't turn up. One supplier, I noticed, hadn't fulfilled a request from some W.F. Bach keyboard music and now haven't reacted to my choivce of some Busoni as a replacement. Edna O'Brien's book on James Joyce is delayed beyond reasonable doubt, too. But a favourite pastime, having piled up a number of options, is deciding what to read next. Some weighty volumes, mostly Joyce-related, will take me much of the way to the Gunn biography in the summer but rabid and radicalized as I've become as an ardent naysayer to the Christian church, the arrival of Catherine Nixey's first book means that might jump in front of them.

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Before that I'll be very thrilled to have my Rosemary Tonks- Philip Larkin essay in the Larkin Society journal and feel part of the gang of Rosemary followers. The Larkin Society conference is underway in Hull right now but it's a mighty long way whether in Cheltenham week or not. Then perhaps the dog days of summer might inculde some time spent improving upon another essay intended for them.

It's been a good, productive period recently with also a well-received evening at Portsmouth Poetry Society introducing the work of Michael Donaghy. But things move on. Dick Francis had an annual schedule by which he produced his stream of cliff-hanging, turf-based thrillers and I assume that Ian McEwan, Sebastian Faulks and all of them don't take long between seeing one book through the presses before embarking on the next. One ought to look forward more than back and I was intending to finish by reporting on a success with the much-vaunted Brighterdaysahead at Prestbury Park but, as can happen with these reputations that consist more of talk than proven achievement, it was not to be so I'll return to the form in the book with Galopin des Champs in the Gold Cup tomorrow and, either way, finish not much ahead of or behind where I started the week. The Saturday after Cheltenham is not usually a day to be glued to the racing. One has seen enough by then. It would be a really good day for Chichester Cathedral to move its Tuseday concert to, if only they knew.