Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 The trouble with Johnnie Walker's Sounds of the 70's was rarely better demonstrated than this afternoon. Absolutely top marks for Curtis Mayfield but Queen and now Sultans of Swing, that most dreadful dirge so beloved of guitar-heads.

Yes but, so what. But that is what the 70's were like. Memory becomes selective and lines up the T. Rex, Bowie, Chi-Lites, Chic and late Motown, not to mention Hurricane Smith but there was a lot of long hair and interminable self-indulgence. It has been a long process rather than a Damascene moment converting from the 70's to the 60's but that process is complete, notwithstanding that decades are only for convenience identified as those periods ending in 0's and, given the option, I'd have 1963 or 64 to 1972 or 73. I think that would cover it as best possible.

--

About Larkin 57 is out and about with the essay and poem in it. And there they go, released into the world to find their own way. There's no more I can do for them now.

Compare and contrast is the short cut to any 'critical' essay, providing any number of ways of putting two or more things into context in comparison with others. You can't miss, really, and I understand that that is what students ae given to do these days to help them on their way.

So, Larkin is downbeat and ironic, is he. Considered in isolation one would have to admit, no, not all the time because there was The Trees but you stick him up against Rosemary Tonks whose levels of dissatisfaction are more passionately expressed and he's clearly of a different temper and so both writers can be assessed against their opposites without either losing out in the process.

-- 

40 years is it, since John Betjeman died. Well done, BBC4 for a whole evening of him tonight.

Fair to say, I think, he was the subject of my first 'criticism' in print in the ill-fated Allusions magazine that was as much my fault as anybody's at Lancaster University in 1979. A very routine review of The Best of Betjeman wasn't the worst of it. What a mess it was. Don't ever blunder into editing a magazine unless you know what the aim of the project is and those who do it with think so, too.

A couple of subsequent such involvements weren't quite such disasters but it's a role best left to those with a talent for it.

Until having to go to a new record price a couple of years ago to secure Rosemary novels, a signed Collected Betjeman was the most I'd paid for a book. It's not a brilliant signature - quite late, one might think, or a bit hasty- but for all his retro refusal to be anything more than a quaint versifier, I'd have him rather than Ezra all day long.

--

Give Johnnie Walker his due, though. We've had Metal Guru and a feature on Diamond Dogs in the meantime and no show that has those two should have too much to apologize about. Bowie did take himself seriously sometimes but even that was somehow part of the act. Maybe we all need to be able to do that.

A Portrait of the Artist in His Own Work

In what is scheduled to be the big climax of the recent excursions into Joyce, Richard Ellman's biography is a fittingly monumental way to end. The detail, the grasp and the depth of scholarship is, well, awesome as long as the word is not reduced to that mild term of approval it has become among those who don't necessarily know what awe is.

It is 'literary biography' in the purest sense, making every available connection between the life and the work and in Joyce there's more of that than there is in most writers. Like Falstaff being Sir John Oldcastle or Margaret Peel in Lucky Jim being Monica Jones, there would appear to be few characters anywhere in Joyce that aren't made from real people, and people he knew in real life. Up to a point, I dare say that most literary fiction has an element of encoded autobiography but Joyce's work and his autobiography merge into this one thing.

There is as much to admire in Joyce, in his ideas, as there is to have reservations about in his personality but, try as I might, it's not easy to think of a major writer who seems unconditionally likeable. Maybe it is finding that balance between admiration for the work and doubts about the authors in real life that make for much of the fascination of literary biography. Joyce is quoted, at the age of about 16 or 17, as saying,

How could I write the most perfect love songs of our time if I were in love? A poet must always write about a past or future emotion, never a present one....Poetry must have a safety valve properly adjusted. A poet's job is to write tragedies, not be an actor in one.

And that is as good a guide to 'ironic distance' as one is likely to get, especially from one so young. Many writers never go beyond the 'I' of their poems, are never anything but the protagonist in their own work, never see themselves from any other perspective and are always involved in their own tragedies so that they never achieve any more than that one dimension.

At college, Joyce admired John Byrne, who became Cranly in the fiction, 

in a world of foppishness, Byrne had the courage to be plain. But it was his mnner that attracted: he moved about with the air of a man who knows all the secrets but disinclines to exercise the power he threby possesses.

I'm sure we have all seen qualities in others that we would aspire to emulate but don't achieve. If Joyce tried to be like Byrne it came across as more aloof or even disdainful, as one of his outrageous talent almost has a right to do, but it can't be expected to make one eminently likeable. Genius is only compatible with sociability if it is a genius for sociability. Those Shakespeare biographers who imagine the sympathy and humanity of the writing to have also been a feature of his character are assuming more than they should because the writer and the person-in-the-world, to manufacture a Sartrean construction, can't be so easily conflated.

The amount of work that Ellman's 744 pages of text in his 887 page book, by the end of the index, took is unthinkable and he couldn't have done it without such a compelling subject but I'm sure it's heading towards the highest echelons of great books somehow indistinguishable as 'secondary' to the life and work it describes by being as impressive as its primary sources. In some ways perhaps I wish it didn't insist on cataloguing the correspondances between the life and the work to such an extent but with Joyce that is almost the whole point, that they were inseparable. The art and the artist are two different things usually but in Joyce to isolate one from the other is like someone said taking the UK out of the European Union was, like trying to return a cake back into its original ingredients.

It will be a good couple of weeks, in both senses of the phrase, before Ellman's Joyce is finished and there are ever likely to be further thoughts about it here but it should be in its rightful place at the end of the Joyce shelf ahead of the book I've been waiting for for longer than I waited for any other - the biography of Thom Gunn. I've waited so long for that that I'm only at about 80% of the anticipation I once had for it but not having it would make all that waiting a waste of shame. There was a time when it was an ambition to live long enough to read it, if there were ever to be such a thing and so, fingers crossed, it looks like we're almost there.

He's another who had good ideas about taking the artist out of the art but then somehow found that his work was all about him. Maybe that's a trap that it's not possible to avoid. It's a paradox that Schrödinger himself might have enjoyed.   

Shostakovich and Kafka

It's like being a teenager again, really.

Rightly or wrongly, some authors seem to lend themselves to a particular demographic of readers. Jane Austen is surely for ladies, Hemingway for men of a certain type and science fiction for nerdy kids and those who remain such after achieving the age of majority. I was about 15, I reckon, when I read Metamorphosis and also recorded Shostakovich off the radio through a microphone onto cassettes. 

While Shostakovich stayed with me, Kafka didn't. I think I suspected Metamorphosis of being science fiction. I'm sure I read The Castle but kafkaesque had entered the language and we all knew what it meant - it was like trying to get an answer out of Virgin, Ovo or Boris Johnson - and, like Orwellian, there appeared to be little to be gained by re-reading Animal Farm which was a tremendous book for 16yo would-be intellectuals to cite but there was an unimaginable amount of other literature to look at, too.

However, recently prompted to get over all that prejudice, I took up with The Trial and, yes, it is all that but it is impressive, too. Kafka is not only kafkaesque, he's a great writer, too.

The only proper approach was to come to terms with existing conditions. Even if it had been possible to improve specific details - which, however, was nothing but superstitious nonsense - one would have at best achieved something for the benefit of future clients, at the expense though of doing oneself irreparable harm through attracting the attention of ever vengeful officials.

Some of the most affecting books are those that tell us what we already know but serve as confirmation. In the introduction written by Richard Stokes,

The Trial...represents his written defence in the trial he had in his imagination initiated against himself and which was to consider the warring claims of literature and family life

and it doesn't look a big stretch to me to connect that with the theme in Sean O'Brien that we are somehow guilty of being ourselves. Maybe there is more to Kafka than the nightmare labyrinthe, not least because it's not all political, it's psychological. It is a condition and it quite likely belongs in the accumulation of ideas about themes in James Joyce, Rosemary Tonks et al. Maybe his letters and a biography should go on the list of forthcoming attractions so that one can read more of what one already knew but never saw so well expressed.

Shostakovich can't ever be blamed for the labyrinth he was caught in, only for being brave enough to stick it out in Soviet Russia while adopted celebrity lifestyles in America.

The thrill of last summer's Messiah by Malcolm Keeler and Portsmouth Baroque Choir in Chichester has only now been challenged by the very different experience of Katie Wilkinson's Shos Viola Sonata about which it would be easy to say it 'went beyond words' but that's what music ought to do and it would put me out of a reviewing job. But today was an exemplary day, going back to the String Quartet no. 3 and some Tatiana Nikoleyeva Preludes and Fugues. Why don't I listen to that all the time? Because there are so many other things, too.

But we need a Top 6 Shostakovich at the very least and it begins roughly where I began with the String Quartet no. 3 and proceeds with the ever-inventive 24 Preludes and Fugues, whether played by Nikoleyeva or the composer himself. The Viola Sonata, of course, as below, and the monumental Lady MacBeth of Mtensk, which is nobody's easy listen. I'd probably have the Piano Quintet, op. 57, for sentimental reasons notwithstanding how it has the composer mixing austerity and lyricism as only he ever did. I'd much rather have another String Quartet than his popular hit from The Gadfly but the symphonies are too big for me and so God Only Knows how far he'll penetrate into that All-Time Big Four of Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven if I ever get to grips with them, and the jazz.

Katie Wilkinson and Marios Argiros in the Menuhin Room

Katie Wilkinson and Marios Argiros, Menuhin Room, Portsmouth, May 11 

Two last works by two essential composers make one wonder if they sought out the maturity of the viola in the knowledge that they had deeper thoughts to express by that stage. They didn't have the same things to say by any means and maybe Brahms did first have the clarinet in mind for his op. 120 but in any esoteric debate about it, he wouldn't have gone to the trouble of a viola version without good reason.

If Brahms had reasons to suffer on account of being neither Beethoven or Clara Schumann's husband, even those hurts don't compare with those undergone by Shostakovich, who somehow remained capable of writing lighter, playful music but, as 'last words' go there's a vast difference between the moods they found themselves in.

Brahms op.120 no.2 opens with a melodic line as velvety as any that had gone before, with Marios providing the dramatic flourishes from the piano but the old man, 63, is becalmed and unregretful for the most part. Allegro amabile is upgraded to appassionata with grander ambitions before the third movement emerges from some sotto voce gazing into eternity and then ending with relish and vivacity from both players. 

That was a very fine thing and op. 120 no. 1 would have made for a fine programme with it and nothing to complain about at all. But that is betting without the Shostakovich op. 147. Beginning with fractured pizzicato and chilly atmosphere, the moderato is storm-tossed and then shimmers bleakly. Katie delivers it all with tremendous, but never over-stated, panache and cadenzas that serve to emphasize one's solitariness in an empty universe.

Shostakovich is often at least half-joking, and needed to be, and the Allegretto is a sceptically lively folk scherzo. At his most considerate, he gives the viola open strings to play so that the other hand can turn the page. But he's not joking much in the Adagio, an unworldly fragmentation of the Beethoven Sonata no. 14 that he didn't say was moonlit. It achieves such stillness, like time itself stopping as that theme emerges and breaks up in both parts. There might be other music that goes to further limits of consciousness but not much that does it so coherently and compellingly. The last note he ever wrote moves through twelve bars, an E back in C major, including ten semibreves and that is his final resting place, flatlining towards the silence that it implies.

I don't always convince everybody that Shostakovich was the greatest composer of the C20th but while Sibelius 5 was on the wireless this morning and I'm very aware of other candidates, I need no further evidence myself. While music played live and in the flesh is ever likely to be better than anything that comes out of a disc, the difference was never better demonstrated than it was today.

That was scintillating, an edge of one's seat performance, glued to it, and I'm very glad that Katie and Marios do requests and can be booked if you happen to find yourself in the same pub as them. Sometimes things work out for the best. 

Rosemary Tonks and James Joyce

There was another gentle prod towards linking together Rosemary Tonks and James Joyce while having another look at
The Halt During the Chase. Sophie says of Guy,

'...And the books he reads ! I wanted to understand him, so I went to the library and got hold of one of them, Ulysses by James Joyce. And I took the trouble to read it through, right down to the glug-glug-glug gog-gog-gog bits.'

So Joyce, for Rosemary, represents something - the sort of writer her protagonist's would-be boyfriend would read, something a bit out of the ordinary- and something she can reduce to absurdity in her ironic way.

Sophie, like Min in Way Out of Berkeley Square, is 30-ish and in a similar way behindhand in establishing herself, trapped to some degree at home, most tellingly,

I was really terrified of the women in Philip's set...Name any subject, and they had a brand-new set of opinions on it. Another thing: I hadn't had a miscarriage or an abortion, and that marked me down straight away...No left wing and no miscarriage? You cannot hope to become a fertility tyrant of the middle classes, and earn the right to exclude, snub and humble others, without a story about babies...

 

There is a huge difference between Rosemary's head-on satire and Joyce as a comic writer. I'm not sure how much my enjoyment, and admiration, of Joyce depends on him making me laugh but Rosemary's novels do so on a regular basis.

Neither am I convinced that there's enough to link them together to make for a proper 'compare and contrast' or where such an essay would find an audience. How tangential can a premise be and still mean anything of significance. On the other hand, if the main benefit of writing is that one enjoys doing it, nothing else matters. So we will see. It might be like the essay a friend of mine did for Prof. Norman Sherry, Graham Greene's official biographer, who told me, I could have given it 0 or I could have given it 80, so I gave it 80. I don't know if universities still work like that any more.

Kafka-esque

The finale of the D'Oliveira book was as deeply moving as any. 

Having arrived where he had, with only him knowing he'd lied about his age to get there, and achieved so much so belatedly it is a measure of the dignity of the man that he got through, like Kenneth Clark's Civilisation claims that classical culture did, by the skin of his teeth. Such stories survive knife-edge, cliff-hanging situations or else they wouldn't have become stories at all and we thus never know how many such stories there never were because at one point or another the project failed.

Thoroughly decent and only wanting to do what he did - play cricket- he was put in impossible positions by the opposing demands of a wicked world that would seem beyond our ken by now if that world hadn't continued to re-invent its capacity for wickedness in however many other ways. It is a story of more than derring-do, not least due to the humility, bravery and also talent of its hero and the parcel of rogues he had to deal with. While always having known that the MCC was infested with them and it wasn't only the South African government he was up against, I'm glad to read how Ray Illingworth was one of the good guys, alongside John Arlott, who took Baz's side. Good for him.

 

Something else entirely prompted the possibility of a Kafka revisit, not at all to do with being the victim of regimes in place because they are in place and whose victims don't understand and aren't ever told why they are guilty. It's an idea that can be extended into all those petty little gripes I look back on so resentfully like compulsory rugby union at school, having to do an essay on Vanity Fair at university and being told what a fine democracy we live in and then being given a choice between Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn at a General Election.

I'm not as well up on Kafka as I thought I was but a look at one of the other stories in Metamorphosis and other stories is enough to suggest he's writer worth reading for more than just what he says, and that is how he says it. The Library Service will provide The Trial. I'm sure I read either that or The Castle in the 1970's but I haven't been back since. He might have been one of those 'teenage' writers one first comes across at that age and then leaves behind but it's possible he's worth another look. 

 

It was once possible to think there was some sort of concensus about what common sense was but perhaps I was the more deceived. I like Rishi Sunak more than I like many Conservatives but, given the qualities of his predecessors and the idea that David Cameron is now regarded as statesmanlike, that's not a big call. And he achieves it while promoting the Rwanda plan and claiming the next General Election is 'in the balance' which shows how bad you can be while still being the preferable face of the Conservative Party.

There doesn't seem to be common sense any more - the relatively thin gap there was between Ted Heath and Harold Wilson- when students at illustrious Cambridge University, supporters of Donlad Trump, Liz Truss herself et al just say what they say and keep on saying it.

Times Radio, and maybe The Times itself, seem to be able to retain some perspective and, having interviewed Monty Panesar, the ex-troubled cricketer now standing as one of George Galloway's candidates, at first ridiculed his lack of grasp but subsequently softened into sympathy for someone who actually made other politicians look good and perhaps it's not his fault and maybe he needs help.

Nicola Tait Baxter & Mina Miletic at Chichester

Nicola Tait Baxter & Mina Miletic, Chichester Cathedral, May 7

Many of the pieces one knows best are those one had recordings of first and thus had fewer to play. For Christmas or a birthday in the mid-70's, my parents gave me a cassette of Dvořák's Greatest Hits and so some of his music is very familiar. It's not so much Songs my mother taught me but songs my parents bought me. Lunchtime recitals are mainly of chamber music and so today's programme, which was all Dvořák who is not best known for that, was a rarity. I'm not sure I can remember any previously but it was most welcome. 

One of those 'greatest hits' was the Slavonic Dance, op. 46 no. 8, which in today's inventive arrangement by Chuchro retained all the orchestral brio and zest and another was those Songs, op. 55 no. 4, immediately providing the other half of the composer's personality with its wide-open spaces and broad perspective. That was necessarily the highlight for me. Georgia Mann described a piece for cello by Dvořák as 'sumptuous' this morning and if it's a good enough word for her to broadcast to the nation, it's good enough for me to borrow here.

The centrepiece of the programme, though, was the Polonaise in A, more ambitious and demanding with the drama in Mina's piano and Nicola's cello going to both the violin and bass ends of its range.

Silent Woods returned to the lento, profound and atmospheric and showing off the lush cello tone to best effect. If it works like a poem and sounds like a poem, it's probably a poem.

The Rondo, op.94, was a finale made of a folk dance with vestigial traces of Mozart in places, full of textures and emphases to propel it forwards. Dvořák comes across as almost as untroubled as Haydn was last week, at least on this evidence and I'm not aware of too much of a downside to him.

An entirely convincing performance and a few minutes in hand allowed for an encore, Dobrú noc, má mila (Good Night, My Darling) which was all serenity and clarity.

The New World Symphony surely counts as his greatest hit and I'd have the Song to the Moon from Rusalka but there were plenty more exhibits here with which to make his case in competition with his mate, Brahms, and he shouldn't be far away from him in the rarefied strata of late C19th greats.

The Differences

 It's been music here recently. The website is called David Green Books but that has become a misnomer. But Sheffield Wednesday play on other days, too. It's an obvious thing to say that music isn't held back by words and thus in some ways seems able to do more than poems and stories. Painting, similarly, although they are both bound by their respective aural and visual limits and perhaps poems are of interest for the ways in which they can slip their surly bonds but you won't get a Ph. D. in Aesthetics for doing 100 thousand words extrapolated from that.

-- 

I'm not in a bookish moment at the moment. Sport books don't often raise themselves to the condition of literature but, like the Larwood biography, Peter Oborne's Basil D'Oliveira is a story of high controversy and provides some insight into how the world was in some places at the time.

We very nearly didn't have the privilege of having heard of him, never mind getting his autograph at Worcester. Born in 1931, his test match debut for England was in 1966 and he only just got there in time without possibly the selectors knowing how old he was.

John Arlott comes out of the story with great credit, which can't be said of everyone involved.

There are similarities in the careers of Larwood and D'Oliveira in the ways they were treated by a sport ridden with such divisions but the difference might be that Larwood was saddened by his experiences in professional cricket whereas D'Oliveira heroically overcame his circumstances. Whereas Larwood's test career was over at 28, the D'Oliveira dynasty at Worcester continues to this day with Brett currently captain.

--

There is a human trait that tends to be dissatisfied with things as they are that then complains even more when they are changed. I saw it in work plenty of times.

I know the audience of Radio 4 are well-known for any change to their schedule because they are a conservative lot and change necessarily means disruption. Perhaps I've become their Radio 3 counterpart, in counterpoint, suddenly lost and disorientated by the new arrangements. 

They benefitted from having me as a listener from earlier on Saturday mornings when Danny Baker was sacked for the final time by the BBC, from Radio 5, and I've hardly been back there since. But with Record Review now broken up and moved elsewhere, I'm not sure if the estimable Tom Service doing a weekend morning show is what I want and certainly Earlier with Jools Holland is well-intentioned but Astor Piazzolla is a poor attempt at eclecticism, on Thursday Essential Classics played the theme from Star Wars and Friday Night is Music Night is now on the wrong channel.

In the school summer holidays in the 1970's, Radio 3 played something C18th and I was prompted to imagine a formal garden like that set out in Winchester, sunlit and timeless and if it's possible to have so many radio stations on which one is guaranteed to get Dire Straits followed by Madonna followed by Huey Lewis & the News then one station centred on 'classical' music through the ages isn't much to expect and fits the BBC's allegedly non-commercial, Reithian remit.

But in the same way that there is no magazine beyond the Saturday Times that caters for me and so I write this for myself, so I might spend more time with the discs on the shelves and do my music for myself because there's a lot of them up there that don't get played and I must have bought them for a reason once upon a time.

Anemos Wind Trio at Lunchtime Live !

 Anemos Wind Trio, Portsmouth Cathedral, May 2

Music is possible without a piano. Some of us lunchtime regulars at Portsmouth and Chichester Cathedrals could be forgiven for not realizing that but a change is as good as a rest, it is said, and the rare combination of flute, clarinet and bassoon made for some excursions down some roads less travelled.

Anemos is a fluid group of musicians by the looks of it, able to accommodate to a variety of wind repertoire and today were Helen Walton, Rob Blanken and Richard Moore.

Ian Harrold's Divertimento, op. 40, was 'available for hire' and that is all was known about it. If Rob's answer to Richard's question was ad-libbed and not rehearsed there's a future for him in improvised comedy. The piece was choreography for breath, as was much of the set, with Richard by no means strictly a bass-line part.

In among some slightly eccentric things, Mozart's Divertimento No. 4, K.439b, at least allowed us to feel at home for the main course. The Allegro was joie de vivre, the Menuet and Trio graceful and the Rondo exactly as expected. In between those movements, though, the Larghetto and Adagio were the obvious standout moments.

Without intending to provoke controversy I would contend that Mozart saved his very, very most gorgeous ideas for his operas and the second movement especially could have been an idea he had left over. Led by Helen's flute it floated in that way that only Mozart does and the fourth movement was literally soave sia il vento.

It is often useful, whether in an art gallery, at a poetry reading or at a concert, to hear from the artists involved. I, for one, was glad of Richard's explanation that Marko Mihevc's Mutatio Eroicae was a Croatian 'musical joke'. It can be a problem with a lot of 'modern art' that one is not sure whether it's supposed to be funny. With the deconstruction of Beethoven 3 it was a devilish thing and I'd have asked about time signatures if I'd remembered to. Perhaps it was in 4/4 - I wouldn't know- but some of it might have been in π/x and a good example of how music is actually mathematics and not always easily so. With Radio 3, some might say, continuing to move inexorably towards easy listening - and playing the theme from Star Wars this morning- we might have to go out of the house more and more to find things of such interest.

Leonardo de Lorenzo, with another Divertimento, op. 24, provided a set of flourishes, not least among which was a bassoon trill, in a gladsome round of gaiety in what was a short, sweet and entirely diverting set that showed it's perfectly possible for an audience to be blown away by wind instruments alone.

English Piano Trio in Chichester

 English Piano Trio, Chichester Cathedral, Apr 30

Pal Banda's cello came from the Esterhazy court in the time of Haydn so it's not entirely out of the question that it played the Trio in G minor, Hob.XV:1 when it, the piece and Haydn were all young. 

On a clear day, Haydn is your ideal man because he always seems such a cloudless musician. The opening moderato is sunny with Jane Faulkner and Timothy Ravenscroft exchanging intricacies and ornaments on violin and piano. The menuet and trio was eine kleine polished and, needless to say, civilized and such formality demands a presto finale. Its frolics and high-spirits didn't let expectations down. I'm not aware that Haydn knew it was possible to end any other way. There was never a dull moment and never a cross word.

Chichester's Yamaha piano has been played by any number of illustrious pianists but I doubt if any of them played the Trio, op.25 by Francis Edward Bache, pronounced Baitch, on it. No, I've not heard the name before either but I don't think it's anything to be ashamed of.

The Allegro brought to mind the famous Mendelssohn Violin Concerto and with his dates being the tragically short 1833-1858, that's a workable comparison. With Pal more prominent with a very fair share of the melodic line, it's a busy first movement and a very democratic piece because although the band is called Piano Trio, nobody is left in a supporting role for long and it is genuinely a trio. 

There were shades of melancholy in the Andante and the ghost of Mozart might have brought those in but the piano-led Allegro breezed happily without a care in the hands of these vastly experienced and impressively together players. There was still hardly a cloud in the sky.

Happiness writes white, as has been said, but we all benefit from some escape from our darker thoughts from time to time and the English Piano Trio provided a welcome tonic for the Chichester faithful.

Inspīrātĭo Ensemble

  Inspīrātĭo Ensemble, St Mary's Church, Hayling Island, Apr 28

Some favourite local musicians playing some very favourite composers provided every reason to venture into deepest Hayling Island. It's peculiar how one sometimes listens less to those composers whose music one likes best while seeing what else there is but Bach, Handel and Vivaldi produced pieces by the score ( ! ) so there's never a shortage.  

Inspiratio is a new venture that can only add further riches to what is already a vibrant local music community and today were  Catherine Lawlor, vln, Mikhail Lezdkan, clo, Amy Muller, pno, and Piers Burton-Page providing some witty, epistolary narrative in what became increasingly obviously not the voice of J.S. Bach.

The cello repertoire would have to be re-invented if the foundations now provided by the Bach Suites had not been stumbled on by Pablo Casals. Mikhail's account of No. 1 is calm to the point of understatement compared to some but the Courante was still acrobatic and his amicable sound was sympathetically housed by the Saxon surroundings.

In an all-Bach first half, the famous Air combined Catherine's singing violin line with Mikhail's ambulatory accompaniment but it was the Well-Tempered Violin and Cello that probably took more than just me by surprise. Three Preludes from that encyclopedia of keyboard invention, arranged Lezdkan, made for entirely convincing chamber music for strings. And there is no case to be purist about it because the composer himself never heard them in what is now their familiar piano versions. They were an unqualified success and with a few more such arrangements should be rushed in the direction of a recording studio as soon as possible. 

However, if the Bach letters as imagined by Piers sounded more full of bonhomie than we imagine Bach was then the vivacious Badinerie arrived in time to remind us that he couldn't have been curmudgeonly all the time. His music surely needs no advertisement by now but that session did a good job of advertising his personality as well as his talent for writing music for advertisements.

The value of such a worthwhile event isn't measurable in monetary terms but even then, the interval refreshments and 'retiring donation' arrangements were flawlessly giveaway.

Not quite a generation older than Bach were Vivaldi and Albinoni, for whose music Inspiratio were augmented by Amy Muller kindly and fluent on the piano for a Viv Sonata for Cello and Piano that invited us to try to separate out the fine differences between these contemporaries. By turns, reflective and lively with something like a gigue finale, it could easily have fooled me on the grounds that the cello by now can't help but sound like Bach.

Albinoni's dolorous Adagio had glimpses of a much later lark beginning to ascend in Catherine's violin and it's only Albinoni's because he said it was (apparently) in a more pre-copyright age.

But I'm more confident in telling Bach from Handel who, on most days, are my two composers of choice. The giveaways, in a three-handed Inspiratio Sonata for Violin and basso continuo, were the stately opening and decorous trills, the Queen of Sheba echoes in the second movement and those of the Water Music hornpipe in the finale. I'd be guessing if I said this was Catherine's most demanding challenge of the afternoon, not quite so much if I said I've seen her do more technically rigorous things before, not at all if I said she achieves them all so readily and I'd be hugely confident if I said this was the best way I've spent a Sunday afternoon for quite some time.

They will be there again, with Beethoven, Schubert and Mendelssohn - still very great composers- on Sun, June 23 and I intend to be so, too.  

Accommodating the Brahms and other stories

Filing away the Brahms Piano Works box-set might not sound like a big job but there can be collateral fallout. That shelf was full, you see, so it was again time for them to all budge up a bit and some at the end of shelves have to move up or maybe down. 

Thus far no composer has had to be split across two shelves. The order is more or less chronological beginning at the bottom left and progressing to the top right. The likes of Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven and to a lesser extent Buxtehude, Schubert, Shostakovich, could have all their discs together on the same shelf but adding in the Brahms and a few others that hadn't made it back there meant that such decorum was no longer sustainable. Mozart Opera has had to be unjoined from the rest of Mozart.

A database full of downloads or a treaming service that claims to have 'everything' could not compare with this edifice of hard copy items. A good game is to be had by lying on the settee opposite, picking out a disc and trying to guess what it is. Now that they've moved again, the game just got harder.

--

The Duncan Hamilton Harold Larwood book was a cut above many sports books for being better written and it's story is an involving one with Larwood very much his own man, as well as being his captain's man, as well as for the most part the most aggrieved party, at least from the point of view of a Notts man who admires genuine fast bowling. What was to follow in future England Test matches against Lillee and Thomson and Michael Holding and the various batteries of West Indians was very much the same thing except for being a belated backlash from those outposts of the Empire. It might have been, and might in some ways still be, a class-ridden game but it was never one for faint hearts. See also, long distance cycling and, against certain opposition, football. Rugby Union is not much more than a brawl to begin so can't really be included in the same list.

Next up might be the Basil D'Oliveira book, so long put off, but another from my All Time XI. They were two players you might not think had much in common but one thing was that the opposition tried to influence the selection of the England team by having them out and, in order to save a test series, the MCC were not averse to becoming complicit in such dealings. So, while we are involved in issues of 'sportsmanship', it is worth considering whether the powers that be thought that sport was important enough to put it ahead of box office takings or not.

--

The sports pages are not likely to be reporting much about the winner of the Candidates Tournament and thus the challenger later this year for Ding Liren's World Chess Champion title. Dommaraju Gukesh (born 29 May 2006) is, thus, 17, and so surely hasn't had time to learn all the databases of opening theory off by heart. There must still be something intuitive, inventive and imaginative to chess despite the fact that there are tens of thousands of games being played on Lichess at any given time.

I worry that, like noughts and crosses, the game must have a limit that will one day be reached, that anybody who cares to will know the best move and presumably black can negate whatever white does and it's always a draw. Or not, in which case white can win.

That doesn't seem to be happening any time soon, though. 

By the same token, there are only so many words and thus a vast number of ways they can be put together but if the number of words is finite then the number of possible combinations would be, too. Unimaginably enormous, but finite. 

That they need to make sense doesn't matter because 'sense', or artistic effect, lies in the eyes of the beholder or at least the author, as a few generations of avant-gardistes have deomonstrated. But poetry isn't over yet, either. Some of us might have lost track of it or lost interested in tracking it but, like pop music, it is still going on its merry way and there are plenty intent on following it.

But, as I've found with the winter games - the jump racing and, for what it's worth, the football- it goes on too long. I want to know the answer, as in a novel, and how it ends. You don't get that with sport, Coronation Street or anything else that 'keeps on giving', though, because they are designed to keep on taking away. Some things look as if they should be finite but remain inexhaustible whereas with others one is exhausted with them long before they are.

 

The Happy Biography

 I don't know if I've read a happy biography. The ending is inevitably downbeat. Perhaps David Bowie's meticulously planned departure made an artful job of it, perhaps one shouldn't see the inevitable as downbeat or perhaps it's me, insisting on life's minor key passages or, indeed, mostly reading the biographies of poets who, as a type, may tend towards being troubled misfits.

It might have been a radio life of Bob Marley that first made me think of biography as a sub division of tragedy. The early days of the Wailers calling out of studio windows to passing girls - including, I think, Rita- were bound to seem ephemeral in the light of the strange circumstances of his untimely death, notwithstanding the outlandish success of a career that put Jamaica up among the top echelon of pop music-producing countries. Nothing lasts forever, Carpe Diem, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, etc, etc.

Georges Simenon was prolific, wildly successful at what he did, with an immense energy for it but he wasn't happy and the final chapters of Pierre Assouline's biography are essays of assessment, the most profound of which reflect on his offspring. His only daughter, Marie-Jo committed suicide aged 25, the victim of a number of neuroses but the comparison is made with Lucia Joyce. Both of them were deeply loved by their fathers but their fathers were unable to help. 

I'm not entirely convinced that any parallels that might be drawn are due to their fathers' devotion to their writing. There will be any number of desperate cases not recorded in the biographies of authors. It is also inconclusive whether writers are significantly more melanchloic than non-writers but Sartre's 'grocer who dreams' that he thought was 'an offence to the customer' has a life also but not one that is investigated and written about like that of a famous writer. Perhaps it should be. One dispenses fruit and veg for a living and the other writes books but that's essentially the only difference between them.

--

Next up is Harold Larwood by Duncan Hamilton. The real business of the fallout of the 'bodyline' test series of 1932-3 is yet to come but will soon enough as it is a quick, straight-forward read. What we have so far, though, is some evocatively written insight of what now sound like barbaric lives in mining Nottinghamshire, a regime of strict Methodism and improbable gentlemen and players apartheid. It was a hard ball existence and cricket was a hard ball game. 

Arthur Carr, captain of Notts, is an improbable hero in a cast of characters that by now belong in Ripping Yarns more than real life but there is evidence that they were real and anybody who thought the likes of Botham, Boycott, David Boon, Merv Hughes represented an age in which cricket had 'characters' might need to think again.

 

--  

One can suffer from fatigue in any undertaking. It is a tribute to the dedication of the likes of Larwood that they pressed on. I wouldn't. I've possibly seen enough of a season of horse racing by now and am happy to leave the annual plus where it is. I never quite realized how the football season drags on, either, until cashing in my bet on the divisions which now looks almost certainly a decision that passed up half of the profit. But, never mind. I won but should have won twice as much. It's just that it is a long haul, designed more than anything to persuade its followers to part with as much cash as it can. It's not the actual amounts that matter as much as that my little personal involvement could have been a yet more impressive win.

It is tiring, though, and good to have other things to turn to. The Easter recess put a hole in the music schedule but there's some good dates coming up, beginning with Inspīrātĭo Ensemble  It is to be hoped my adjectives come back refreshed as a very promising line-up of gigs leads up to summer.

Brahms has been composer of the month, or more, here, with the 6 discs of Piano Works so closely following upon the violin and viola sonatas. The pianists are a variety but that doesn't prevent it being a 'cycle'. For the most part it is pleasing if not compelling listening, and ideal accompaniment to reading as such but not always music that demands one puts the book down.

That is until disc 6 with the opus 116-119 sets but I had Stephen Hough  doing them already. It will not be filed on the shelves until I've been though from disc 1 again.

--

And, needless to say, something to write helps one to have a sense of purpose which isn't as easily come by as it was when attending paid work was a necessity.

A long, long time ago I can still remember when I regarded poetry as such a purist activity that I didn't want to write anything else but, like so many things, 45 years is long enough for things to go full circle. Even Larkin, by far best remembered for his poems, has a gravestone that says 'Writer', on account of his essays, jazz reviews and relatively minor novels. Yes, let's be that.

On a much less memorable scale, I'd put my poems first but I like doing the essays now, too. I have since done better than the one short story that appeared in print in the 1980's but I don't appear to be fitted for the prose job. That was convincingly demonstrated by the novel which was only done for the sake of having done such a thing. The play owes rather too much to All Gas and Gaiters but it is one. C20th serves as a poetry manifesto.

I need to improve in the novel department but you know it ain't easy, you don't know how hard it can be. Finding the lost, last ISBN number and in due course producing the last David Green (Books) title is more likely to be achieveable.   

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Sometimes perhaps it's the little victories that are more pleasing than any one might have that could be regarded as significant.

Just now, I'd cashed out on the Henderson 'good things' at Exeter because non-runners in the 4.55 meant I could have a couple of quid profit without a horse setting foot on the track. Johnny Blue became a 1/6 shot and notwithstanding that there's no point in such a price, he wasn't rock solid business anyway.

And so it proved. And it's nice to be on the right side of a cashout for once. It's not only a couple of quid for nothing, it's an odds-on-sized stake saved.

 

Quietly, discreetly almost, creeping up the chess ratings at Lichess on 30-minute Classical games, this morning I got back up above a rating of 1900 for the first time in maybe three years. I did once achieve 1918 so a personal best is still three more wins away. 1900 is a minor landmark and 1919+ would be a better one. Feats don't fail me now but 2000 is still light years away.

 

One sees Maigret in a slightly different light on closer acquaintance with Simenon who made him up. It takes a prodigious talent to produce such a body of work but admiring the work for what it is isn't the same as loving him who it all. Of course he's going to be that which came to be known as 'alpha male' but that's not a guarantee of a good thing. All your Trump and Boris are 'alpha' but also unspeakably awful whereas maybe your Camus was more like a humanist saint, as if there could be such a thing.

 

I'm very gratified to see the 'metrics' of this chronic divulgence of words for word's sake looking as healthy as they've ever done while remaining well short of 'trending'. Thanks for being there. I often wish I could be a bit more Wittgenstein and say nothing when there's nothing to say but there's a difficult choice to be made between continuing to string words together because it doesn't feel as if there's anything else to do and not stringing words together and finding there isn't anything else to do.

Two Wiseguys at Cheltenham

Today, there was me, the bullishly self-proclaimed Racetrack Wiseguy and my namesake horse, Wiseguy, trained by the charming Mr. Henderson. I don't think of myself as brash and so am glad to have several years of records going back as evidence of the turf wisdom I've accumulated in sometimes hard-won ways. Today wasn't my most successful day at the track but a small helping of that wisdom was used to keep my financial liabilities on Wiseguy to an absolute minimum. Just because you and your namesake horse are at the same track on the same day doesn't mean one gets heavily involved on a 12/1 chance in the hope of a miracle. It was always a 33/1 chance in disguise.

Wiseguy has been an increasingly forlorn hope ever since winning at Exeter in the Autumn when it looked like a prospect over fences. I decided against asking Mr. Henderson for a photo opportunity in case he'd say, quite frankly, Mr. Wiseguy, you can take him home with you because I can't do anything with him.

But it's all in the game. Prestbury Park is God's own country and it was never going to be a bad day once Peaky Boy had landed the odds, workmanlike enough, in the first. I can't stand the mounting anxiety of races going by without having a winner so the main bet going in in race 1 is fine even if the pay out is much reduced by the fav not running. I might not have won if it had.

 

The celebrations that followed Manofthepeople's win the 4.25 were extraordinary and incomprehensible at first, outdoing the gobsmacked silence that greeted the Gold Cup winner, Norton's Coin, when I was there 40-odd years ago. Let's listen to the interview. Oh, I see. Paddy Brennan, stable jockey to the very local Fergal O'Brien had made it his last ride and retired then and there.

Some of the crowd at Cheltenham know their stuff. Not necessarily the chavvy blokes in suits or the alarming young ladies that some of them are with or those with more taste who aren't. They haven't got a clue and the bookmakers are very pleased to see them. Cheltenham is a 'cashless course' and you can't buy anything there without a card but bookmakers are keen to make it known that they'll take cash. They're not so fussy.

 

Win, lose or draw, it's a fine day out. It wouldn't be if the choice was only between lose, lose and lose but it isn't and the fun you can have reducing Radio 5, not least in its football coverage, to absurdam on the way home is an entertainment in itself. 

It's lucky for me that one of my friends is good enough to drive there once a year. He got no more than he deserved when he somehow picked out the last two very healthily-priced winners the day after being at Fratton Park to see his favourite football team win their league. I'm pleased for him. Sometimes the fates suddenly realize there's a good guy whose turn it is to have a couple of memorable days and so they make it happen. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

There might not be many pop albums worth reviewing these days - in my ungenerous estimation - but doing it is made easy on a computer, as above. You can have the album playing on You Tube, a lyrics website open elsewhere and type it in, all on the same screen. The old 70's gunslingers on the NME sat in an office with a record player, a record sleeve and a typewriter and that must have been quite complicated in comparison but at least they had better records to listen to.

--

I took part in the BBC's Abba vote where you can allocate 5 votes as you see fit across their list of tracks. I'm very much on an outsider with The Day Before You Came but it's a class apart. I gave that 4 votes and 1 to Knowing Me, Knowing You.

--

I see Rolling Stone had Dancing Queen at no.1 and that could be favourite but it's an open heat. On safer ground, I hope you all came here and heeded the Grand National advice particularly as I said I had a second free shot at the race but 'doubled down' on I Am Maximus because I couldn't find anything else I believed in so much and so now I Am Wiseguy-imus. 

--

It looks like our Saturday nights with Maigret on Talking Pictures have come to an end but they were a great pleasure and lasted for a year's worth. Bruno Cremer continues in French with sub-titles on Tuesday nights.

I was very pleased with myself below with my comparison of Simenon and Balzac but it seems I'm not the first to have made it. Pierre Assouline includes it in his comprehensive account. That wouldn't have been the easiest biography to write given the amount of books there are to have read.

There might be a lot of things to 'admire' about Simenon, such as the prodigious output and energy but, like a lot of writers, he doesn't seem easy to like - probably on account of the necessary self-possession necessary to be such. Not much came between him and his ambition and he negotiated a way through wartime France by means of as much good luck as good judgement or perhaps moral fibre. His politics were a confused business in as far as he had any which could be said of many 'right-wing' people and that's probably what he was although not in a Nazi way.

As a writer he wanted to be more than the Maigret and pulp fiction man and maybe he could have been but he was interested in making money, too, and the contrast between his monetizing of his art compared to James Joyce's makes for two different ways of approaching literary creation.

--

So, with my own monetizing activities in good order after Aintree, we go to Cheltenham well aware that Mr. Henderson's horses are capable of winning again and he will want to make up for lost time in what remains of the proper jumping season. That will be Plan A on what is often a wide-open card.

One mustn't fret about money lost or, by the same token, money not won. Cashing in most of my little escapade into football on Arsenal top 4 with Leicester, Derby and Wrexham to be promoted could easily have been a mistake but if Leicester falter further and go into the rigmarole of play-offs, that'll do. Otherwise I'll have to try to see it as an 8/1 shot landed rather than half of a 16/1 winner thrown away.

One has to be phlegmatic. Winning is the point of it and I'm doing that, worrying about by how much only makes one seem like a fat bloke wanting another pie.

Great Western Rail are repaying my journey back from Swindon in full after their usual hapless attempt to organize some trains so I got paid for hanging round at Westbury for two hours. It must cost them a fortune doing something they are so bad at. Perhaps they should move into water management or run the Post Office with a system designed by Fujitsu.

It's not funny, though. About 25 years ago I went to Winchester for a big meeting about problems with work computer systems that were provided by Fujitsu.

Plus ça change, plus la même chose, as it were.

The Libertines - All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade

 The Libertines - All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade (EMI)

Few pop artists are as good in their later work as in that which made them famous. Mozart and Rembrandt's last work was probably their best but on Hackney Diamonds the Stones were their own best tribute act and The Day Before You Came was a different sort of Abba but even the most talented of pop acts, whatever glories they achieve as they develop, don't seem to end up in a better place than some of those they had been to. Peter Doherty, though, whether with Carl Barat or not, and having survived that dangerous age of 27, is proving more durable than the mercurial phenonmenon that he looks as if he should have been.

If All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade doesn't quite have a Can't Stand Me Now on it then we shouldn't have expected it to but it is an instant hit as soon as it begins and continues what has for the most part been an impressive catalogue.

The survey of broken England's dreaming is brought forward from 1976/77 and nothing new but it's the Clash more than the Sex Pistols he owes the bigger debt to, Mustangs bringing to mind All the Young Punks, the downbeat lives retaining a defiant optimism under 'dishwater skies' while I Have a Friend begins like the Buzzcocks. Merry Old England is a mordant meditation on the migrants who see it as a place of opportunity nonetheless.

Oh S*** is another of those in which Pete relies heavily on the degraded demotic, as he did in Gunga Din, but one of their signature guitar riffs makes it an immediate crowd pleaser. Using Swan Lake for a tune was done by Public Image Limited on the Metal Box album in 1979 so that's hardly innovative but stabbings weren't such an everyday occurence then. Untimely death has been a regular part of Pete's life and he takes a chillingly matter-of-fact view of it, especially when one realizes how much Songs They Never Play on the Radio owes to Karen Carpenter on Yesterday Once More. They are not so far apart given the breakdown of the genre barriers that pop music was once defined by. The irony is that wholesome, gorgeous Karen died aged 32 and delinquent Peter is still with us at 45. But after an album with hardly a missed beat on it, that was the track I played over and over.

 

His ongoing insociance and faux vulnerability combined with his smartarse self absorption makes for the sort of mystique that hangs around a certain sort of creative artist but all one has to be is any good and his formula goes on working and providing, disarmingly and often charmingly. For me he's the last of the English geezers. Pop music has been over for some time, commodified, sanitized, recondite and all been done before. It's the same with poetry in which I similarly have difficulty with anybody much under the age of 45, and 'classical' music by anybody much younger than me. Those ships have continued to sail without me. Doherty, though, is retro as well as keeping on giving. I was reminded that I picked up the Babyshambles Down in Albion album a couple of weeks ago. Once I got round to it, it was a bit makeshift and unconvincing. Anybody can have a bad patch because form is temporary but class is forever and he came through into an unlikely 'maturity', if you can call it that in someone who remains somehow child-like.

Songs They Never Play on the Radio

 

 

It's this week's Record of the Week at DGBooks and on DGBooks Radio.

We've not such a thing before and probably won't have one again but we're having one this week.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 I don't think I'm exactly 'trending' but the metrics suggest that a few more than usual having been turning up here recently so you are all most welcome. 

Tomorrow is a particularly difficult day with a very fine concert in the Menuhin Room clashing with one of the last big days of horse racing until it goes literally flat for the most part until October, for me at least. It's an awful decision to have to make and if I hadn't landed the odds today I'd probably go to the music but I'm not a one-trick pony and there are other great music events lined up so it's all about Aintree tomorrow and right now I'm in that delirious moment of thinking that anything's possible and re-investing some of today's profit will land me five grand I won't know what to do with when my homework proves 100% correct and pays well over five grand. 

It might not, of course, but somehow horse racing brings out the optimist in those of us usually so devoted to pessimism.

--

Found in among the radio schedules this week was an old Great Lives on Radio 4Extra, the half hour in which a well-known person makes the case for a hero of theirs and, it seems, somebody else makes the case against. 

I always want to take part in any such enterprise but can't be sure who I'd nominate for that because I can often see the case against. From cricket, though, both Basil d'Oliviera and Derek Randall seem hard to find fault with; Elizabeth Bishop from poetry; I'd be glad to defend Danny Baker. And there are still one or two non-famous people from real life who haven't been far short of perfect.

But guess who Bernard Manning nominated - Mother Theresa of Calcutta. Not Roy 'Chubby' Brown. Mr. Manning had a serious, spiritual side, you see, didn't regard himself as offensive and didn't think it was proper for little kiddies in faraway places like India to be left in dustbins. He was not a complicated man. He knew what he thought and he thought what he liked. 

I wouldn't say he was provocative. One of the most underwhelming assessments of a poem at our local poetry group is 'thought-provoking'. But, no, not at all - what thoughts did it provoke.

Mr. Manning's insistence that he wasn't racist consisted of saying that he treated everyone the same and made jokes about all kinds of people and he once did a benefit gig for a little Pakistani kid. And, yes, maybe, or maybe not. But he made me feel racist by making me realize that it wasn't just Yorkshiremen I found rather too forthright, it was Mancunians, too, so perhaps having provoked such thoughts in me some 22 years after the fact, Mr. Manning should have appeared on Radio 4 more often. Like on Thought for the Day which I think continues on its dreary way. Or perhaps I'd go on Great Lives and nominate Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg. 

Oh, I'm sorry, there seems to have been a misunderstanding. No, I don't think they led great lives but they thought they did.

--

An impressive life was lived by Georges Simenon as detailed in Pierre Assouline's biography. Even in its early stages Simenon possesses an energy and self-possession that few could hope to match. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it, wise enough to know that he can't write the good books he aspires to without doing an inordinate, highly committed and opportunistic apprenticeship writing generic bad ones.

I was once impressed by the factory method by which Dick Francis produced his cliff-hanging thrillers, one per year, according to his plan. However, that is pedestrian and lazy compared to Simenon's timetable in which novels could be delivered on a 15-day timetable.

It is the literary equivalent of Tin Pan Alley, the hit factories and it doesn't mean that the end product is the worse for it but the definition of 'special' includes the idea that it can't be endlessly produced on a large scale. Even Tamla Motown disintegrated under such pressure in due course.

So many words, so many works, remain suspicious. There has to be a formula. Not every Shakespeare sonnet, Mozart symphony or Rembrandt painting is quite as good as the best of them. Perhaps not all of Bach is quite as good as the very best of him. And so Simenon, much as we might enjoy his work, benefitted from 'facility'. Like Balzac. He did it easily, not without hard work but without difficulty.

I'm impressed but I'm impressed in the same way that I've sometimes been by the way people have been brilliant at things that I don't want to do - Tiger Woods, Lewis Hamilton, Kirkland Laing. I still like to think that less is more, that a small number of truly great things is better than a vast pile of good things. That's the case for Elizabeth Bishop, not J.S. Bach but, as ever, there are no rules.

Aintree Preview

Cheltenham isn't what it once was, the Grand National isn't either, policemen have been looking younger for longer than I care to remember and my favourite TV programmes are Dad's Army and the Maigret's from the 1960's and 1990's on Talking Pictures TV.

It is still possible to back winners, though, and I suppose I'd even take an interest in golf if I could make it pay. Don't quote me on that.

It is no longer proper to refer to the 'loony bin'- and for good reasons - but anybody suggesting we take on Willie Mullins tomorrow could be a candidate for such a place with Irish racing and him in particular in such ascendency over horses that live in the UK. One really, really would like to see Mr. Henderson back winning big races with Shishkin and Sir Gino but their prices don't seem to have the lingering doubts factored in and, even if they did, a good effort by an 8/1 loser doesn't pay out. There's no room for sentiment even in compiling my modest annual profit. I do enough daft things as it is and I'm talking myself out of those horses as I write.

Firstly, though, tomorrow, we'll start with the last where Honky Tonk Highway looks like she's being backed for the in form Skelton stable who helped themselves to lesser prizes at Market Rasen today. Having always been a believer in Grey Dawning, who convinced at Cheltenham, I'll just about take the short price that he's recovered from those efforts and will be able to confirm the form. They'd be the bets with the other races swerved with the possibility that Saint Roi might prevent the Skeltons having it all their own way but I'd rather have the races in a different order and not do that until we are winning.

 

On Friday, Chianti Classico was almost too good to be true at Cheltenham and would have to be very tempting if he could do that again but Mystical Power is surely a Mullins good thing after making me think I was off to a winning start there. Aintree could be that fraction easier and he could be the best business of the three days.

I remember very glibly, some 40 years ago in the pub, telling someone that I didn't always back the winner of the National but I'd always find a winner elsewhere on the card. To be fair, I didn't do too badly at the big race but I can see no reason why Teahupoo doesn't win the hurdle at 3.05 and that goes into the trebles from the four horses in bold type here that is the bet.

The more optimistic and ambitious types might want to flirt with the idea of untold riches and the excitement of the race which was once, like the Cup Final, something that almost everybody was interested in but now they aren't. I'm slightly put off by two of the three pundits on the At the Races preview, including Matt Chapman, agreed with what I'd done already, I Am Maximus, pictured. That would be hard to take for Mr. Henderson who trained him once but now Mr. Mullins does and the case was made that if anything in this field has the potential to be better than we know already, it's him. I hear my friends saying Mr. Incredible and Vanillier and I can see why they do but I went through the race again, looking for somewhere to hedge with a free bet and I decided to double down on Maximus rather than cover it with something else.

 

Cheltenham's gorgeously quieter meeting comes next week and then, as I always say, I shut up shop and wait for the October pay days. It's never quite like that but heaven knows I try.