The Bad Boys of Portsmouth Poetry

 Kev and I aren't 'bad' at all, really- well, I'm not- but it amuses us in what we take to be 'later life' to imagine ourselves vaguely significant. Like The Movement, we are no kind of movement at all but at least we are mates, which they weren't. Kev's more Beat whereas I make Larkin look like a free-wheeling 60's troubadour in comparison. But it's a picture for the photo album if one still kept such a thing.

--

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the words above are by no means the whole story of today in Chichester. Poor Rokas was always up against it after I'd emerged from the Oxfam Bookshop with the Complete J.S. Bach by Helmuth Rilling.

172 discs is a week's worth of non-stop music by the greatest creative artist that ever lived, five star reviews throughout at Amazon where it is available for £191, secondhand for £134, and Oxfam were asking £49.99. As snap decisions go, it was quite snappy.

One needs to find time to play these things, and live long enough, so I left Complete Mozart, Schubert and Scarlatti Sonatas on the shelves there. I can't imagine they will still be there next time but I am at least safe in the knowledge that I got myself a bargain.

--

On the other hand, having got along okay for a while with The Whirlpool by George Gissing, it was abandoned because I didn't care enough. I went upstairs and found Thérèse Raquin instead which was even better than I remembered it with its hideous psychology and thriller plot. Zola is the real thing in a French team of the period that England would do well to match with Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant and onwards to Gide and Camus. The Masterpiece is on order from the library alongside a biography of Brahms and Madame Bovary is being given a further outing while I wait.