On a Sunny Afternoon

Obviously, following Jill, one must re-read A Girl in Winter. Two further books towards the Gioia essay are due, so it says, by Tuesday.

Outside it was warm and quiet. Not too hot, and next door's kids seem to be away. Few novels can surely fill their first hundred pages with quite so little happening. Katherine is German, has been in England for two years and works in a library with some unattractive people. A colleague has toothache so she takes her to an equally unattractive dentist. Then in Part 2 we go back to her first visit to England when she came to stay with her penfriend, Robin, and his well-to-do family. That's about it but since I can't remember what happens, it's great with its lack of car chases, guns or gratuitous glamour. 

We are beyond halfway through August. After two weeks of below par performances on the Saturday Times crossword it was finished with no internet help at all by 11 o'clock yesterday. The horse I had a couple of quid on at Pontefract has gone in from 7/2 to 2/1. The Casiliero di Diablo Pinot Grigio remains on offer at £7.50 in One Stop. Becoming 66 and the state pension and bus pass are now only two months away.

I feel like a character in Camberwick Green, an idealized dilettante writer with my essay gradually gathering itself, bit by bit, to either be crafted into a sleek work of scholarship or, perhaps, a ragged, thrown together mish-mash redolent of something by Jackson Pollock. Surely it's up to me to make sure it's the one rather than the other but writing doesn't write itself, being a writer means you have to make it happen and not assume it is provided ready-made.

It's certainly true that some poems felt like they came from elsewhere and only passed through me on their way to the page but that is, I hope, the benefit of having found how to do it, almost sub-consciously perhaps. I've got two envelopes of back catalogue material to be sent out to good homes willing to take these now officially 'out of print' items and I'm pleased to be able to do so, to have arrived at this later stage, older than Larkin was when he died and, who knows, maybe with no more to come. Or there could be a whole new phase ahead, I don't know. But it's a rare thing, a sort of Sunlight on the Garden feeling that comes along less often than one would like. So let's make what we can of it while it's here.