The Cygnus Trio in Chichester

The Cygnus Trio, Chichester Cathedral, May 19

Tchaikovsky chamber music. Who knew. Ballets, big symphonies, the melodrama of the 1812 Overture, the Piano Concerto and one of the great violin concertos, yes, but he's not often, if ever, heard on these lunchtimes which are so often solo or small ensemble affairs. Well, the Cygnus Trio knew and the Trio in A minor, op. 50, is no small affair. Size isn't everything but neither is it to be measured by the number of musicians or decibels.

The Trio is in two lengthy movements, with the first, Pezzo elegiaco, in memoriam the pianst Nikolai Rubinstein, not textbook elegy perhaps with its grand gestures and energy. Javier Montañana's violin and Hannah Lewis's cello interacted lyrically before the theme was taken up by César Saura's piano. Some fitting solemnity was achieved in music that made much of relatively simple thematic material.

As could equally be said of the theme and variations of the second movement. There was no doubting this young trio's talent and the fine sound they made but some music can take its time to be convincing before thoroughly doing so.  César's opening exposition of the melody was almost devotional before the rapt violin and song-like cello did it their ways. It was quickly elaborated on with decorative piano and pizzicato strings, some tinkling top-end music box effects and Peter Ilyich taking on the challenges from Johann Sebastian and Ludwig to show how many different things he can do with the same tune.

It bounced around in dance and song and was in turn soulful, serene and spirited towards a presto climax with drama aforethought that had me thinking, not for the first time, that the end was due. He could have been hinting presciently towards Rachmaninov. But, no, in a consummately well-done final passage, the Trio made the Trio tread gently to its rest like a perturbèd spirit getting back to its grave before dawn.

The Turn of the Screw

A few months ago it was Dana Gioia I was so glad to 'discover', however belatedly. Now, it's Henry James who looks like taking high order among the writers of fiction that I've ever read. The tendency to want to make lists persists. It seems unhealthy but when one pronounces something as a 'favourite', it's useful to have defined to what degree. Not everything can be a priority, not everything a specialism and not everything a favourite. I'm less sure of my fiction writers than I am poets but, on the evidence of two novellas, Henry James looks destined to be very highly regarded.

The Turn of the Screw was better than The Aspern Papers and that was great. I'm glad the Introduction says that, like Hamlet, it,

will continue to inspire widely differing interpretations.

One is especially never sure in ghost stories exactly what is going on but Flora and Miles, the children, are impossibly charming yet increasingly and disconcertingly threatening. The presence of past domestic staff at Bly, Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, as apparitions has something to do with it. It keeps the pages turning, especially with James's prose being so sumptuous and not as forbidding as I've assumed for so long without ever have checked for myself.

It's tempting in the first blaze of being impressed to put him ahead of long-established rivals. By all means, he's in many ways more sophisticated than Hardy and maybe George Eliot but it remains to be seen how he compares further down the line. I'm not throwing over Hardy on a whim after fifty years but it is much to James's credit that the comparisons even arise. It happens once in a while that the rest of a writer's back catalogue set me up for an extended session of reading. There is a lot of James. It is to be hoped that the two or three I pick up next are good choices. Much will depend on them as to how far into his work I go.

On Not Liking the Beatles

 The way I access the internet, via Firefox, shows me a selection of items that it seems to think I might like and, given the sort of thing that thrives on the internet and my reluctance to engage with much of it, it doesn't do badly at it.

It regularly features Far Out magazine and a series on 5 artists that some iconic artist couldn't stand, in which number one for somebody from Pink Floyd was the other members of Pink Floyd. Well, there wasn't much left to do without Syd Barrett, the only interesting one, apart from resent each other.

But today we have 10 musicians who couldn’t stand The Beatles.

I'm slightly Beatles-sceptic in not accepting everything they did as holy writ but, born in 1959 and being most taken with She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, aged 4, they are in my musical DNA. There are great things in that early-middle period. But they haven't got into my top plenty bands for a long time, don't turn up often on DGBooks Radio and don't come anywhere near the conglomerate achievement of Tamla Motown.

But, who are these dissidents, then? For the most part, largely who one might expect, the usual suspects of the predictably dissident.

I knew Frank Zappa would be there, who is stratospherically in a category of his own in the 5 artists I can't stand. Painfully, boorishly, boringly contrary to a fault. John Lydon had to be there except I had a lot of time for what he did once although the same by now applies to him.

I'm not put out by Julian Casablancas because The Strokes were a busted flush of dumb posturing from the beginning, the answer to their first album, Is This It, being, No, It Isn't. 

We know Elvis and The Beatles didn't get on too well. We also might think Elvis wasn't that bright, or even a musician.

Van Morrison is over-rated and I don't care what he thinks. Similarly Todd Rundgren, although one would like to think better of both.

Trent Reznor is, or was, apparently in Nine Inch Nails. That doesn't register at all here. 

Quincy Jones later apologized for what he said.

 

Which leaves Lou Reed and Michael Stipe, both of who are probably ahead of the Beatles on any list I might make. You'd almost expect it of Lou, though, notoriously difficult as he was while notoriously brilliant at his best in what he did. Sometimes great artists are like that. And sometimes so are the rest of us but we have less of a get out clause.

Which leaves us with St. Michael of Stipe, the paragon of cool, indie sensitivity and surely better than the pop music equivalent of those literary troublemakers who go out of their way to deride Shakespeare.

And, yes, he is. Far Out put him at number one in their list to make it look more shocking but it's not what he said. He's maybe only slightly more Beatles-sceptic than I am. He likes other stuff more. Is all.

While this series of features has seemed worth a look, I've not investigated one before and now I have, I found one scurrilous. And so, 1 Magazine Whose Features Are Not To Be Trusted-

Far Out.

 

That doesn't mean it's not a good game and I can rarely help myself when the opportunity to make a list presents itself. So, 5 artists that I can't stand-

obviously Frank Zappa, inevitably Queen, necessarily Pink Floyd, quite possibly Black Sabbath and Music by John Miles.

But I'd prefer to be writing about things I like, not those I don't like. If you don't like football, Eurovision, the ongoing debacle of politics or Strictly Come Dancing, you don't have to. Don't, then.    

Ackroyd, Henry James, Four Poems, Next Prime Minister

Chichester's Oxfam bookshop served up Peter Ackroyd's essays in The Collection and Henry James, The Aspern Papers and The Turn of the Screw this week. 

Ackroyd will be taken in bite-sized bits. Going straight to his Larkin, by way of the Motion biography, one finds him taking a dim view of Larkin's dim views without any compensating consideration of the consolations. He is firmly set against the man and his poems and unforgiving. Looking at his verdicts on other poets, that seems to be his way. Undoubtedly highly astute and discriminating, he is also sometimes a bit cheap in his put downs and one is tempted to put him and his book down, too, in the same way. Much of the journalism comes from The Spectator and there's an unattractive disdain in his tone until he gets to a poet like Prynne who is one whose poems are difficult enough for him. 

Maybe it's a good idea to read writers one doesn't like sometimes but after a while this is one volume that might find itself back on Oxfam's shelves in due course.

Whereas Henry James, who I've long thought I wouldn't like, is likely to be collected much further. His reputation for overly involved sentences and being heavy going was not corroborated by The Aspern Papers which I have just enjoyed enormously and seen off in short order. Atmospheric, beautifully done and Venetian, one wonders at the intensity of obsession with the great poet, Jeffrey Aspern, and the fact that Juliana Bordereau, his girlfriend, is now 150 years old when 100 would be plenty but that was captivating stuff and it might have turned out that James was the greatest writer I'd not read before and whatever else Oxfam have of his is likely to follow The Turn of the Screw. 

--

In case it transpires that I return to the sullen art of poetry readings in the near future, I rehearsed with the microphone on the laptop and have produced a recording entitled Four Poems. It fits perfectly into the five minutes I'm guessing would be the requirement, even including thirty seconds to get up and walk to the front. I wouldn't want to do more than five minutes, not least because I'm not sure many would want to listen for any longer, but it's hardly worth going to do less.

Not having heard myself do it much before, it's not as easy as one might think to get it as good as it sounds in one's head. I know the rhythms are there because I put them in but it's necessary to concentrate to get them right.

After four attempts it wasn't bad, without being flawless, but not to worry. It was intended to be made available here but it looks like incorporating audio files isn't possible, or at least far too difficult for me to do. So I guess it doesn't matter anymore.

The four poems are Piccadilly Dusk, Fiction, Windy Miller and Rainyday Woman. 

--

Meanwhile, surely even the political obsessives at Times Radio must eventually weary of reporting and speculating on the process of arriving at our seventh Prime Minister in ten years. To think we once looked down on Italy for their rapid turnover of governments.

Running the country must be a hard job and yet those doing it feel the need to continue with the internal machinations of what is only really a game of realizing their individual ambitions.

Keir Starmer is a good man hard done by, let down by his own party more than anybody else because, like most recent Labour Prime Ministers, he's not really Labour. It can't be wrong to lack charisma because Attlee was the best there ever was but he's not very good at it. The parallels with his direct opposite, Boris, pile up, most noticeably when he announces he's going to do ten years when he might not have ten more weeks.

I tipped Shabana Mahmood here a fewc weeks ago but that was about as good as the feeling I once had for Amber Rudd. So far unblemished, she'd no more carry her backbenchers with her than Keir or any other bluish type who might try to balance the books as a priority. But it's an impossible outcome to call. And whoever wins this time has three more years to survive and so will by no means be guaranteed to lead Labour into the next General Election. When was the last time the leader of the Conservative party could be backed at 50/1, and more, to be the Next Prime Minister.

These are unlikely days but it's likely they will get unlikelier yet.  

Edward Thomas on Richard Jefferies

 Edward Thomas does Richard Jefferies something of a disfavour in his critical biography. It's a brilliant, clear sighted and appreciative account but it quotes so heavily from the Jefferies books that one feels as if one has been provided with the salient points, a generous selection of highlights and know Jefferies well enough from it without needing to go to the original texts unless one wants the fine detail. It's such a great tribute of close reading and deep appreciation that it threatens to eclipse the need for its subject.

I've had it here for years but it soon became apparent that I'd only ever read the first chapter, which is a survey of the countryside south of Swindon that I know not quite as well as they did from having ridden through parts of it on a bike in the 1990's.

Thomas and Jefferies are kindred spirits in many ways, being so attentive to nature. Thomas was really a city man, though, and appreciated the countryside as a visitor. Coate, when Jefferies was there, wasn't on the outskirts of Swindon, it was a separate place. Thus Jefferies is, or first was, the sort of rural man who, however thoughtful and dreamy he might have been, loved the natural world in the same way as Ted Hughes did and King Charles III once did, who both saw fit to kill it whether by gun, fishing rod or other device. To the credit of Jefferies, he at least progressed to a preference for watching a bit longer and preferring to delay or make less use of his weaponry. Whereas Hughes often seemed to be reducing animals to their visceral parts and Jefferies sometimes becomes all mystical about what nature has to offer, it is Thomas whose sensitivity to the elements might appear more mainstream to us now, who get our milk from Tesco and much of our countryside from train windows.  

The autobiographical The Story of My Heart, the hymn to female beauty The Dewy Morn and the novel without a plot, Amaryllis at the Fair, look like the places to go in due course, perhaps Amaryllis first, but, as has happened before, I intend to go further into a writer and then another turns up - and here comes Henry James- but Jefferies has been tremendous value so far and I'm by no means finished with him yet. 

Orpheus Leander & Gina Kruger in Chichester

 Orpheus Leander & Gina Kruger, Chichester Cathedral, May 12

 Following hard upon the excitement of the Menuhin Room's Portsmouth 100 extravaganza, it often seems to me a challenge for who comes up next on my little schedule. Not only that but my brief preparation for this was to listen to Alina Ibragimova and Cédric Tiberghien's Brahms. No pressure, then, but Orpheus Leander and Gina Kruger are a class act in their own right and weren't aware of such things anyway. 

First, though, George Meredith's poem about a lark has been somewhat eclipsed by the music it prompted Vaughan-Williams to write. But music is much better at transcendal ideas like,

As up he wings the spiral stair,
A song of light, and pierces air 

With fountain ardor, fountain play,
To reach the shining tops of day, 

Gina's piano evoked the warm, summer earth and the echoes of folk tunes until Orpheus's violin spiralled and trilled and eventually until refined itself out of sight.

Internet research suggests that his instrument might be by William John but whoever made it, it provided a great sound throughout in his hands.

The Brahms Sonata no. 3, op. 108, began with an unfolding Allegro, mildly agitato in both parts but it is the shorter Adagio that stays in the memory with three runs through its long, longing melodic line performing the old trick of leaving one wanting more. Delicate light from the piano illuminated what might, imaginatively, have been insect flight in the poco presto before the Presto finale generated passion and energy in what is only a part of the rich repertoire provided by Brahms's late chamber music.

By way of an encore, we had Autumn Leaves, as per Nat King Cole and Johnny Mercer, hinting that Orpheus could help himself to a career in place of Andre Rieu if ever he felt inclined to. We might wish he would but not at the cost of losing the Brahms et al. That might be too much of a waste of talent and a fine violin.

City of Portsmouth Centenary Recital

 City of Portsmouth Centenary Recital, Menuhin Room, May 9

Andrew McVittie and Valentina Seferinova's little black books must have been well thumbed as they assembled the cast for this starry, celebratory gathering. Portsmouth being a city for a hundred years is as good a reason as any to celebrate its vibrant musical community. If the programme couldn't quite accommodate the whole directory of locally-based talent, it represented a generous helping of it.

Whereas it might be usual for any perceived 'star names' to appear later by way of a climax, it's a great thing to get on first and have one's performance done and out of the way in order to relax and enjoy everybody else except Valentina and Karen Kingsley were to re-appear throughout after their piano duo setting of the Pomp & Circumstance no. 1 in all its wordless glory, and hope. So the first to relax was actually Sara Deborah Timossi whose Legende by Wieniawski, accompanied by Valentina, was soulful and poignant in all its Jewish heritage and maybe the performance I'd most like to hear again.

Karen then returned in solo mode to make Reginald Jevons's The Sea ripple and build, at which point I'd better apologize for these rather peremptory comments but so much was packed into such a seemingly short time if nowhere near as short as advertised. It literally, and inevitably, overflowed. 

The much-loved piano team, Kate Burrows and Helen Morris, were gorgeous in the meditative lilt of Rachmaninov's Vocalise before Angela Zanders was beautifully phrased, possibly with hints of rubato, in her Chopin Polonaise. Up to the interval Amanda Fox accompanied Melanie White's flute in her own The Wind in My Mind, an in memoriam full of longing delivered with a soaring, full tone at its climax.

Immediately impressive once we were seated again was Narina Dalali, brave enough to play more Rach within earshot of Angelina Kopyrina, a Moment Musicaux that was all waterfalls and executed with great clarity.

Melanie brought her flute back to play Deep Blue by Ian Clarke with Kate Ham's champagne harp, exquisite and spellbinding with elements of whale song, bringing together Portsmouth's centenary with that of David Attenborough.

I don't know how much Ian Schofield's Danza Eccentrica owes to Sarasate but it was definitely semi-Satie and quite possibly technically challenging although you wouldn't know that when it's Valentina back on the piano stool.

Some debate about the word 'stalwart' as applied to Karen and her partner in both music and life, Rob Blanken, seemed to be nervous about any connotations of age it brought with it but I travelled there by bus pass and I don't think the Kingsley-Blankens are qualified to do that yet so they are, thus, young. James Walker's Sonatina, in three movements, had them skipping together, then moodier and nocturnal before the final breezy rhythms.

By way of some elegant calm before the storm, Andrew, as ever the debonair soul of wit but today in his element and so more so as compere, contributed Phamie Gow's War Song, elegiac and reminiscent of the Maxwell-Davies Return to Stromness that he has so memorably performed before.

And then, not least because she is a hard act to follow, Angelina Kopyrina dominated the stage and the whole auditorium with the Liszt Mephisto Waltz. Heard it all before but it retains all its dazzling blast and blasting dazzle before and after its breathless midway contemplation each and every time and, each and every time she plays I think, nah, she's had plenty of standing ovations out of me, I'll take this for granted. I can't, though, and there I am again like a jump jockey unseated by their horse.

Except, Karen and Angela did follow, with Piazolla's Libertango. Very much not a favourite composer of mine but by then happy to be convinced by anything which Angela's expansive top end of the keyboard over Karen's angular inflections were completely successful in doing.

What a stunning occasion, what an impressive line-up to put together, what a joyous celebration and what a privilege to be there. It matters nothing to me whether Portsmouth is a city or not or how long it has been so. But it matters much more than most things that its musicians can put on a such a show for the love of it. If such events were put on more often they would, by definition, become more routine than special. On the other hand, what happened around these parts in 1927, I wonder. Something, surely. Don't worry. It was announced that Angela has plans to mark 200 years since Beethoven departed this life. It's good to have things to look forward to. 

Restless Human Hearts

That is one helluva book for only the second effort by a writer not successful in his day as a novelist and not much read now beyond the society doing such good work in and about his place on the outskirts of Swindon.

It's a Victorian 'sensation' novel full of drama and a certain amount of unlikeliness but a rip-roaring read in which one can suspend disbelief not only in its outrageously contrived climax but elsewhere, too, and care less about such considerations. Not least because its digressions are, for me, its highlights and not, as is suggested elsewhere, ballast to fill out the word count required for three volumes. 

What shall we do with ourselves? This is the cry of our age. We have exhausted all passions and all pleasures. 

I'm sure it was ever thus, or seemed so. 

 

It wasn't easy to keep track of who was who and how their often problematic relationships built into whatever the main theme is but Jefferies is a vibrant writer without having done a university creative writing degree and was writing the equivalent of a television drama to keep the audience agog. Quite how this lines up with the writing he's better remembered for, about the countryside, is not obvious beyond the radiant purity of Heloise but I'll be pursuing Jefferies further. Next in Edward Thomas's book on him that has been on the shelves for years but not, as far as I can remember, ever read in full.

The climax comes when the luxuriantly atttactive Carlotta is trapped in a railway carriage with a cobra and jumps out to escape from it. We might assume her dead as some kind of just desserts for her vanity and selfishness but she isn't and quite why a lady in a railway carriage had found herself in such a situation is perfectly reasonably explained away. In the circumstances, I'm surprised such dramas don't happen more often.

It's a big canvas and a crowded dramatis personae and art for art's sake might not have been its first concern. One can't make either Carlotta or Heloise the central character and, as such, it's more like the map of society laid out in Hardy's The Woodlanders than anything concentrated on the destiny of one.

One or two are lost along the way. But, having had all the excitement, Carlotta retires to Torquay as a monument to her former glory. Heloise is made ideal, reading Tennyson to her son which represents some idea of C19th English consummation, I dare say. It is a happy ending. 

But, for me, it might only be a beginning. There is stacks of Richard Jefferies to be had and if this is not regarded as his best work then I'm interested to see what is. I'll see what Edward Thomas has to say first. 

Graham Dixon, Oh Mother, What Did You Do?

Graham Dixon, Oh Mother, What Did You Do? (Pulchra Veritas)

A book that begins by identifying Ted Hughes as a Movement poet and proceeds to cite names such as Alan Ginsberg and Elliot makes one wary. Pulchra Veritas might well be Graham Dixon's own imprint and he doesn't appear to employ an editor. But he knew Thom Gunn and, as it turns out, the reader is rewarded with not only first-hand knowledge of the poet but some original and perceptive readings of the poems. That he turned himself into a psychotherapist after his literary studies is evidenced by his analysis of Gunn as a personality in parallel with the poetry. The subtitle Pose and Repose in the Life, Letters and Poetry of Thom Gunn is a summation of the main theme emerging, that of a search for respite from the traumas and discontent in Gunn's life. 

The poses adopted by characters in Gunn's poems, and by Gunn in real life, were always defence mechanisms to hold a threatening world at bay. The comparisons with Ted Hughes and the violence of nature were always dubious. Gunn is naturally a more withdrawn presence, adopting roles, attire and attitudes in order to get by.

Dixon's title comes from a diary entry by Gunn after his mother committed suicide when he was fifteen. As a psychoanalyst might, he makes much more of this devastating event, when Gunn and his brother found her, than purely literary commentaries do. It is not dissimilar to Sylvia Plath, gassing herself in desperation over her marriage.

It is that, several readings of early poems that find the coded homosexuality in them, Gunn's continued wearing of a Nazi leather belt and the late set of poems about the serial murderer, Jeffrey Dahmer, that make Dixon's account vividly one that shows Gunn exceeding perceived boundaries into amorality. While these elements of Gunn are not new discoveries, the prominence they are given puts emphasis on much more exotic material than the hippy, drug-taking bohemian scholar that had already marked him out as a maverick.

Dixon is insightful in his readings of such poems as Carnal Knowledge, Tamer and Hawk and Rastignac at 45 but also clear-sighted and confident enough to identify when the less successful parts of Gunn's uneven output fail. There are great poems in each of the books but some of the middle period, from Moly to Jack Straw's Castle, were experiments that didn't work. At times, in making the point, it might mean that Dixon has overlooked some fine poems that did but it's honest and time well spent to elucidate when even Gunn's talent was insufficient to carry his dark imaginings. If the LSD and prolific promiscuity went a long way in search of repose, it was a dangerous enterprise, didn't entirely work and the mantra from Gunn's early, if now dated, masterpiece, On The Move, that 'one is always closer by not keeping still' remained thematic for the rest of his life.

If the publication of Larkin's life and letters brought out unappealing detail that damaged his reputation, the same could have happened to Gunn but he didn't have quite such a reputation to damage beyond poetry readers of a certain age. In both cases one needs to be able to separate the work from the personality but friends and those who knew them for the most part liked both poets as people and if Larkin's later politics were unsavoury, Gunn is not overly concerned with politics. But one is never entirely sure what is hovering in the depths of his thinking even when he can write some of the most gorgeous poems of his or any other generation.

So, Graham Dixon's book is worth having as an honest and meaningful contribution to Gunn Studies. It is persuasive in making him more specifically a 'gay' poet, for better or worse than I, for one, had thought. It provides more about the vulnerability that the tough posturings of the Lines for a Book that he at least partially later disowned were written to overcome. One is the more aware of the contradictions and paradoxes of a life that he often successfully expressed but only sometimes successfully resloved. There was a time I thought that his apparent urbanity and intelligence put him in control of his poems and, by extension, of his life but it seems not. He was a sort of adventurer but it begins to look like those adventures were only ways of looking for escape. 

Paul Bessell, Finding Dad

 Paul Bessell, Finding Dad (Mirror Books)

What a mess, says Peter Bessell somewhere in the middle of this book. Whatever his talents were not- like business, honesty or 'faithfulness'- he was a genius of understatement. It comes before he is dragged back into a mire of problems in the trial of Jeremy Thorpe but after his downward-spiralling business disasters had led him to intend to commit suicide.

At first a success as a local entrepreneur and then MP, he expanded his horizons with ambitions that proved beyond his ability to sustain them and was soon out of his depth and accumulating unmanageable debt. He had been a lay preacher, a serial ladies' man and had nearby neighbouring fellow Liberal, Jeremy Thorpe, as his closest friend but the wreckless, fantasist party leader proved the paragon example of a friend that with the like of which one didn't need enemies. Having done a disappearing act to evade his creditors and somehow restored some equilibrium to his life, his earlier attempts to help Thorpe rid himself of Norman Scott, the troublesome part-time model, came back to do more than haunt him.

In California with his long-term mistress, the faithfulness that Bessell could never show to his wife or other girlfriends was ill-advisedly much more resolute in how he stood by Thorpe who had less compunction about selling him down the river. The charismatic but deeply flawed Thorpe had once brilliantly lampooned Harold MacMillan by re-working John 15:13 by suggesting that Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his friends for his life but then was guilty of it himself. And yet it was that constancy that finally finished Bessell when, having no choice but to testify against him, it was Thorpe that was acquitted. Bessell's problem seemed to be that he never had much choice, not even being able to kill himself when he wanted to.

That Thorpe should need to rely on and then abandon such a dodgy, thin-ice operator as Bessell in the first place is indicative of what a ramshackle outfit the resurgent Liberal party of the 1970's was. If charm, generosity and this level of devotion to such a charlatan were Bessell's good points then his weaknesses both outnumbered and overpowered them. Paul Bessell's reconstruction of the story is understandably as sympathetic as any account by a son who loved his father can be expected to be but, desperate though his downfall is, it's not easy for anybody else to have a lot of sympathy for a liar, fraudster and one unfit for the high stakes games he chose to play. One's sympathy is for his wife, Pauline, who knew precious little of his triple life and rackety schemes.

A Very English Scandal (2018) was a farcically funny account of the Thorpe Affair but Finding Dad is harder to laugh at. Paul Bessell is thorough in putting together so much detail about the labyrinthine duplicity of a plot no fiction writer could invent and one reads through encounters with Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Kissinger, two US presidents and the outskirts of the mafia with disbelief, sadness or horror but not to humorous effect.

It's to full of immorality for a morality tale and the hero has the wrong ratio of heroism to fatal flaws for it to be Shakesperean tragedy. It is more likely an insight into what sort of things are always going on with even Paul having to accept he didn't get to the bottom of it, like what sort of 'secret work' his father was doing, if any, for the American government or if it was simply an effective cover for the way he duped several women who thought they loved him into thinking that he loved only them. 

Having been reading three books at the same time, it was this that took over and was finished first. Not necessarily the best book but in some ways the most gripping and, in a competitive field, the most lurid. It's not to my credit that I was drawn to it over the others. 

Juggling

 The art of juggling was always beyond me. But I'm juggling books, quite enjoyably, for a few days. It throws up all kinds of unlikely links.

The Richard Jefferies book by Edward Thomas can be sensibly left until I've finished Restless Human Hearts. But the novel, for all its characters and maybe bittiness is taking some sort of thematic shapre for me and, since he is so enjoyable to read, the contemporary fault-finding of it seems disproportionate compared to its good points. It's a great performance even if technically flawed.

As below, the digressions are to be treasured rather than dismissed as 'padding'. And if at first there appear to be too many characters, maybe they all have places in the scheme of things. Two-thirds of the way through, it's possible to see the parallel stories of the various dissatisfactions as different attempts at resloving them. By the end, we might find which of them Jefferies thought the most workable.

It's unlikely to be the artificiality of vain, glamorous Carlotta. I'm thinking it might not be the religious devotions of Georgiana, or her ground-breaking short-term marriage contract. 

A captivating chapter in which a famous stained-glass window on the continent is found to be 'tame and flat' in comparison with one hidden in a corner of Gloucestershire - in Fairford, I reckon- that becomes a 'breathing reality, breathing fire and torture and misery indecribable' makes Ella the representative of art whose temperament prefers it to the actual, real world of love. But perhaps Jefferies's sympathies lie mostly with Heloise and her mystical attachment to nature.

 

It's not going to be quite so easy to empathize with Peter Bessell, the subject of Finding Dad by his son, Paul, however charismatic he was if one had met him. There is some sort of connection to Carlotta in how such people use and abuse others in pursuit of their own tawdry purposes. Bessell was an MP and part of a long tradition of deelpy untrustworthy types that has thrown up the likes of Profumo, Stonehouse, Maxwell, Johnson, Mandelson and, I dare say, my one-time hero, Jeremy Thorpe.

It looks like being a horror story about one bent on serving themselves in a Faustian pact with chance that they had no chance of ultimately gaining from but what does one expect from a book one saw advertised in the Daily Express. It was never likely to be morally uplifting.

 

Another one-time hero was Thom Gunn and, separating the artist from the art, he still rates in the top echelon of poets in his best work. And, again, to those who met him- which I once very briefly did- he was an utterly convincing charmer, if bringing with him some louche reference points. Graham Dixon, author of Oh Mother, What Did You Do?, knew him much better than that but any book that begins,

Linked with other Movement poets such as Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn....

must be dubious from the outset.

Dixon was given the postgraduate job at Berkeley of grading Gunn's undergraduate class's papers. I'd prefer not to have my work marked by someone who thought Hughes was a 'Movement' poet and so one reads him warily from thereon in. 

It must be significant that Dixon moved into psychotherapy and, as such, a case like Thom Gunn's must be irresisitible to him. It's not yet clear how much the over-diagnosis going on is Dixon's fault or largely understandable given his subject matter.  

It's quite possible that the account of Gunn provided by the book will prove to be worth having, with certain credibility but already it is making me look back on those days when the object under consideration in Eng Lit was the text and not the author. The revolution whereby the text was studied to the exclusion of any reference to its author was misguided but counter revolutions are often worse and by now poems can be reduced to symptoms in the diagnosis of the author who is put into the role of patient.

Some of Gunn's poems weren't very good but plenty were brilliant. It would be more rewarding to read those and understand why. Let's give Graham Dixon an even break and see if he can contribute.

Bunting, Jefferies, Edward Thomas

Books, like events, can be overtaken by others more pressing. Basil Bunting's letters were a diversion but not a priority for me. Having reached the end of the first part, I'll go back to them one day when more attractive propositions are harder to find. It's a good place to leave it, in December 1938, just as Bunting has told Ezra Pound where he stands vis a vis Ezra's unpalatable views,

You know as well as any man that a Jew has the same physique and a similar amount of grey matter as the rest of us. You know as well as any man that to hold one individual guilty of the sins of another is an abomination. You know as well as any man that the non-Jews have contributed their fair share, of the bankers and other millionaires of doubtful honesty...

Every anti-semitism, anti-niggerism, anti-moorish, that I recall in history was base...

and so, whatever one might decide about Bunting's poetry in due course, he has made his point and deserves much credit for that. I'm still not convinced I'm going to like him but that one letter makes the £1 I spent on the book £1 well spent and I'm glad of having read it.

--

There's an equally memorable, if entirely different passage in Restless Human Hearts by Richard Jefferies. There are several but one in particular for me. These shifts into meditation in some loose way are reminiscent of how Tolstoy makes his books the length they are, extrapolating lines of thought at intervals in his involved narrative.   

I've had to make a diagram to keep track of the relationships and dynamics between the characters in Restless Human Hearts. The title is rightly in the plural. Quite how all the infatuations relate to each other remains to be seen but I'm ready to guess that the vain, glamorous but hideous Carlotta is to be contrasted with the almost unearthly Heloise. 

The second part has already become melodramatic with a duel and a tragic riding accident and critics who find the book flawed- as only Jefferies's second attempt- might have a point but, such reservations aside, it still makes for great reading.

The pages that I was most taken by reflecting,

What a curious system it is to teach us, not only at school, but at home, and in the early part of our life, ideas and feelings which we must afterwards spend years in endeavouring to unlearn...

and the next long paragraph,

We know so much nowadays. Everything has been done. Every possible emotion has been felt in every imaginable manner. Every combination conceivable of human relationship has been worked out, and the quarry is empty....

And that was in 1875.

That by 2026 it seems to us that maybe it wasn't quite the case then suggests that if it seems so now, it might not be so yet, either. And thus might never be. As with Francis Fukuyama's pronouncement of the 'end of history', we are all tempted to think we've arrived at a crucial point only for the next generation to find themselves in among the next pile of theories, wonders, crises and absurdities. It must be a state of mind to think everything has been done rather than a piece of cultural analysis.

Kant, Hegel, Sartre, Derrida then Baudrillard all came and went but none of them turned out to be the last word. To arrive at Boulez two hundred years after Bach shows that it's not always linear progress. Surely pop music has run its course but only older people whose time has come and gone would say so. Mark Radcliffe on Sounds of the 70's said that the Bowie and T. Rex sounded so 'fresh' and could have been made now. But, no, they sounded tremendous because they were from the 1970's.

 

Alongside the Jefferies novel, I'll go further into the Edward Thomas biography of him that I remember the first chapter of- the detailed, evocative description of Wiltshire- which is gorgeous. And from there, we will see how far Jefferies Studies can go. There's no shortage of material. 

However, two other books due this week will be making their demands. 

Oh Mother, What Did You Do? Pose and Repose in the Life, Letters and Poetry of Thom Gunn by Graham Dixon promises a reassessment that will be interesting to assess, mostly because it depends what sort of assessment it reassesses.

Paul Bessell's Finding Dad might not prove to be uplifting, it being Peter Bessell's son's findings about his life which is likely to be louche, salacious and probably scandalous although it depends where one's scandal threshold is set. The story of Jeremy Thorpe, my teenage political hero, seems a bit quaint, a bit Midsomer Murders, post-Boris, in the Age of Trump and so quite cosy. We will see. I wouldn't have ordered it if I expected it to be a vindication of Bessell including evidence for his beatification.  

Shakespeare in Oxford and other stories

 When one's life is one big holiday, time spent anywhere else but at home is only an excursion, not really any more of a holiday than one was having anyway. Not being in favour of travel for travel's sake, I don't go as far as I might but a few days up the road, or railtracks as it was, proved to be time well spent.

Swindon doesn't feature large on the literary map but Richard Jefferies and his museum there turned out to be a rewarding visit. Restless Human Hearts, the early three-part novel from 1875, is highly readable, clearly delineated and with pertinent passages worth quoting that, in due course, I surely will. I knew of Jefferies only from the fact that Edward Thomas wrote a book on him and that he had lived in that place by Coate Water. With the likes of Thomas Hardy for competition, success as a novelist was never going to be easy but he stuck at it with some conviction, it seems, before making more of a name as a nature writer while Thomas progressed from countryside prose to major poetry status. Having reached a suitable place at which to leave Basil Bunting aside, I'll gladly divert to the more likeable Jefferies for the foreseeable.

The bus pass gets one to Oxford and back. I don't know if it was exam time but a number of young people around town in gowns made me wonder if they still wear them while reproducing their versions of Suetonius.

I was reacquainted with the gorgeous Alfred Jewel in the Ashmolean, spent a few minutes with Walter Sickert's Brighton Pierrots so familiar from my front room and don't know why the internet can't find me the de Hooch that I'm sure I saw there in among all the ancient porcelain. But a major personal breakthrough came thanks to the kind lady in St. Michael's Church whose forebearance allowed me to expatiate on some Shakespeare biography.

The font over in the opposite corner. Shakespeare once stood next to it when it was in another church.

Yes, in St. George's.

He stood next to it at the christening of William Davenant, his godson.

Yes.

Who was born to Jane, or Jeanette, landlady of the inn where he stayed on his way from London to Stratford.

Yes.

Good. So can you tell me where that inn was, at no. 5 Cornmarket Street.

And, yes, she could. I'd been counting from the wrong end and finding a shoe shop. If you count from the other end, you find the Golden Cross, set back from the street in a courtyard and exactly the detail I was looking for.

Not only that but if you go on the right day in September, they will show you the room that Shakespeare stayed in.

I said I'm ready to accept that Shakespeare was the real father of Davenant, as later claimed by the boy. There might have been a bit of a trend for actual fathers being designated as god fathers in those days. She said, yes, in those parts it is widely believed to be so.

Without it being classed as a conspiracy theory, in any way subversive or unpatriotic. Just something that happened. And I found that most 'refreshing'.

I didn't want to outstay my welcome and appear any more of a bore than I had been already. Oxford surely has its share of them. So I'm glad I didn't think to ask whether there was any correlative local pride taken in the Earl of Oxford's claim to authorship, or that made on his behalf. Because that is a conspiracy theory, it is nonsense and it's a shame that such low-level rumour-mongering is allowed to pass as some kind of scholarship. Except it makes for a bit of a diversion, cul-de-sac though it turns out to be.

So, yes. Not a holiday but a useful day out and I felt much the better for it.   

Bargain Bunting

Yesterday I bought a book in a bookshop. That wouldn't have sounded remarkable years ago but it's extremely rare now. For a long time I've been much more likely to buy a cup of tea in a bookshop than a book. It's my fault when bookshops close and I have no recourse to disappointment. The Letters of Basil Bunting were in among sundry sale items for £1 in Waterstones and I even had to think about it at that but it looked worth a try. The sticker underneath the one that said £1 said £8. Today I looked it up on Amazon and there it's £37.50.

It's possible the letters are a reverse way in to understanding Bunting. I derive about as much from the poems as I do from his mate, Ezra, and that's not much. But the likes of Donald Davie and Thom Gunn held him in high regard and he is a 'major' figure of C20th poetry, if in a tradition that has never done much for me.

Any friend of Ezra's comes with any amount of warning signs and to call Bunting a maverick might be an understatement. But his political imprisonment was not for the same reason's as Pound's. He was a Quaker, pacifist and conscientious objector. I still can't help being suspicious of him, his severity and acerbic attitudes bringing to mind Geoffrey Hill, who he looks a bit like in old age and shares some aesthetic principles with, I'd guess.

So maybe the book will be enlightening. Whether it will lead to a Damascean conversion to Modernism, 'high church' seriousness and the elitism of difficult poetry remains to be seen and seems unlikely but there's a limit to have far one can get reading more and more about a handful of favourites and time spent outside of a comfort zone must be at least occasionally necessary even if it turns out to be unproductive. 

For a long time I've thought of Bunting and his like as generally a bad thing for poetry while not in the least objecting to that minority who write, read and enjoy such esoteric work. I suppose I take an equal if opposite view of those whose writing is too obvious. So maybe I'll report back on any alteration that this bargain buy brings about, either that I've embarked on an in-depth study full of enthusiasm or that my prejudices were only confirmed.    

Craig Greene & Robert Patterson at Lunchtime Live!

Craig Greene & Robert Patterson, Portsmouth Cathedral, Apr 16

Chopin and Debussy provide a nutritious and enjoyable staple diet for the piano repertoire, often heard and fare enough. If it seems we don't get enough Bach perhaps it is unrealistic to expect to live on champagne all the time because then what would one have left for a special treat. Gladly, Craig Greene and Robert Patterson served up Three cantata movements, arranged by Leonard Duck, which were exquisite and long on the palate.

The congestion of four hands over, under and across each other in Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring was like watching a game of Twister, the timing and teamwork required something to behold with it getting mighty crowded in the middle of the keyboard. These Edwardian settings were by no means overly sentimental but works of great artistry in themselves. Sheep May Safely Graze was beautifully done and Wachet Auf completed an idyllic triptych with the melodic line moving from Craig at the higher end of the register to Robert in the engine room.

Three popular classics from Bach's Greatest Hits done differently but gorgeously as if champagne had been successfully re-invented.

Before that, Schubert's Fantasie, op. 103, was imperious in its blaze of activity with no trace of the melancholy that I try to find evidence to the contrary of in his music. As such compulsive composers do, he goes to great lengths to find all that can be found in the thematic material if only because it must be there.

In both that and the Bach, it's hard to say whether Craig or Robert had the best job or starring role, not least because there's really no such thing. But three of Dvořák's Slavonic Dances were a headlong flourish of dazzling tempi with Craig rollicking along among the high notes. I can't remember the last time I was quite so glad of a prime position to see the hands. Any faster would have made it unviable. I asked. They had tried. And it wasn't.

A brilliantly thought-out programme made for a joyful occasion with mostly familiar music re-presented gloriously. Schubert and Dvořák are both great, forever with special places in one's favourite music, but - as regular readers might one day tire of hearing me say- Bach is well beyond that.

Without any more dispensing of enthusiasm, I must get on the internet and see if there is a CD of those cantata movements for four hands on piano. I need to serve my own purposes and it's no longer obvious that what remains of our lives is going to be quite as amenable as it has been so far. We might find ourselves needing such rafts to cling to. The opportunity to hear Craig and Robert play them again might not present itself so four other hands will have to suffice.

Retirement Diary

Anecdotal Evidence today reflects on the realities of retirement. I'll soon be six years in, well aware that when meeting retired people some years ago and asking how long it had been and they said 'xx years', I thought it sounded like forever. Except, of course, it doesn't feel like it to the incumbent of those years, in yet another one of those tricks that time plays on us. 

Maryann Corbett looks like a name worth reading more of.

Meanwhile, mention of seeing a Vermeer from a correspondent coincided with me realizing that not all my art books were shelved together. In among the misplaced batch was the sumptuous catalogue of the Pieter de Hooch exhibition in Dulwich in 1998. And if retirement is about anything it's about reading and gazing at such a thing while proceeding through more of the Complete Bach. Followed by The Hissing of Summer Lawns in an attempt to play a pop record once in a while.

C17th Dutch painting is the choice Golden Age of all Golden Ages. Some might say C18th music with Bach and Handel, maybe Shakespeare is a one man show, 1960's Tamla Motown, please insert your own examples. But Vermeer, de Hooch, Carel Fabritius and their contemporaries up to and including Rembrandt, set a miraculous standard. Quiet, domestic and suburban, Delft was something of a backwater to host a gathering like them, apparently not thriving economically and it's true that many painters went to the more cosmopolitan and more lucrative Amsterdam. 

One thing you need for a Golden Age is outrageous talent and it doesn't take long looking at what we have from Delft to begin to recognize that but then one notices how short-lived those three, at least, were. Fabritius was so cruelly killed by the massive gunpowder explosion aged 32. Vermeer, at 43, apparently by something like a stroke or heart attack in reduced circumstances and de Hooch at 54 after seven years in the asylum about which no more is known. It's no use at all to them that their stories add a patina of sadness to their brilliant lives. There may or may not be a connection between the hard times of Vermeer and de Hooch who could have fared better in Amsterdam but Fabritius is another case entirely.

Look how many ways de Hooch recesses backwards through doors and windows, and into another painting, in this. The gentle foreground scene is extended into other places where perhaps even less is happening. He didn't have to do that but time and again he does it. 

 

And this detail is spectacular. No need for guns and shooting, charging horses or Trump in the role of Jesus Christ for that matter. This is heroic, not only to think that anything so ostensibly mundane was worth representing in art but to do it so magnificently. To contemplate such a thing is what retirement and not having to attend paid employment was surely intended for.

 

Marco Polo on Hormuz

 Towards the end of his vivid accounts of his travels, Marco Polo does what Lyse Doucet does so well and reports on a conflict. The malik of Kalhat 'had a powerful hold over' the sultan of Kerman due to his control over Hormuz and,

commands the gulf and the sea even more effectively. 

If only Donald Trump had read Marco Polo before getting himself embroiled out of his depth.

 

The Travels are full of good stories, whether they're right or wrong. It's very much the sort of thing that can bring me a poem and I've been in search of such a thimng for quite some time. A Million Lies, a couple of weeks ago, isn't really it but Witness is a better effort. It was to be in ten syllable lines and two eight-line stanzas but attemps at form like that can be discarded. Some rhythm can be maintained without them, having used it as a framework to begin with. It could be revised further yet but, grateful for it as I am, it might be allowed to stand as it is.

Witness 

this region is so far north that the Pole Star
is left behind towards the south.
                           Marco Polo, Travels

Except there is no such topography
in which anything is further north than north.
No wonder some weren’t having it
about him seeing unicorns
but not quite as advertised,
ugly brutes wallowing in slime.
Well, yes, that was preposterous
but not for one
who’d not previously come across
such a thing as a rhinoceros. He believed his eyes.

Hyperbole is all that one has left
when one can’t see a limit to such wealth
and strangeness so that it looks infinite
like the universe still does and might be yet.
He didn’t tell the half of it, he said,
recalcitrant and not giving an inch,
for we see what we think we see. It’s true
as far as we know and not for them to say. 

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold

During the Late and Long Continuing Cold, An Eightieth-Birthday tribute to Peter Didsbury, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley (Broken Sleep Books).

 Happy Birthday, Peter Didsbury. An expanded edition of his Scenes from a Long Sleep is published today and this festschrift, edited by Sean O'Brien and David Wheatley, is available for pre-order at Broken Sleep ahead of its imminent release date. It features poems by an impressively gathered cast of the great and good with such as Don Paterson, Ian Duhig, Carol Rumens, Rory Waterman, plenty more than that and some good wishes from Douglas Dunn. And me, actually. It's a bit like a non-league player finding themselves in the England squad for a friendly match. 

Peter Didsbury has long been a central figure in the story of how Hull became an unlikely-sounding epicentre of British poetry in recent decades, post-Larkin, post-Stevie Smith and a long time post-Andrew Marvell. If Larkin's provincial hideout in its university library began something there and attracted Andrew Motion, it is perhaps more properly Douglas Dunn who might be regarded as the godfather of its mafiosi although 'movement' might be a gentler term for what could be regarded as a more coherent grouping than The Movement ever was. 

It would surely be improper to submit the sort of poem one might place in the middle of a book to thicken it up, or for the editors to include such things, in a tribute to a respected writer and that hasn't happened. I must look further than I previously have into the work of Carol Rumens on the evidence of The Sense of Vision. If Paterson's Hedgehog appears to begin like Aesop, it becomes more like Einstein. If, as I sometimes suspect, we are not living in a Golden Age of British Poetry then the ongoing parade of talent now assembled here is evidence that it's not so bad after all. And there's little for poetry to fear from AI when O'Brien puts in a signature performance in The Lost Language of Trains that only he could have.

Didsbury is inimitable and I don't think anybody has dared to try. It would have been unwise. What has resulted is a profound tribute to one who has always done it his own way from a litany of admirers doing it theirs.   

 

Desert Island Books

 For a long time now I've had in mind a feature for here called The Best Book in the House. It would have been one of those 'World Cup' sort of games in which titles would qualify for the later stages from groups like Poetry, Fiction, Biography, Music, Sport, Painting, Philosophy and even Science.

There might, very approximately, be 2000 books in the house. That's not loads but, along with the CD's, space for them is becoming an issue but I like them and rarely part with any of them. But it is assumed I have all the best books I want because if I knew about any others, I'd buy them. Signed editions by Larkin, Auden, Eliot, Rosemary Tonks and Elizabeth Bishop being beyond sensible at the prices they are.

So, to cut the game short, I stood in front of the shelves one at a time and noted down likely contenders. It's a brutal way of doing it but I can't sit down and re-read them all like a Booker Prize judge. It's a competitive game and if something isn't conspicuous enough then it probably isn't a potential winner.

What came of that was a list of 20 that didn't even have Elizabeth Bishop on it. That's how cruel the process was. But the answer hasn't been arrived at yet and there is still time for decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse. In fact, there might not be an answer as such. The closest I might get is a list of Desert Island Books. From the 20, I've put stars against 7 and been left in that awful position of having too many to fit into the standard 8 so the list could well be extended to 10. I lined up the 7 that seemed to have become the essential elements. But I'm not sure.

Not on the team photo are Proust, Camus, Hardy, Hamlet, Rosemary and the copy of Touch signed by Thom Gunn in Cambridge in 1979 because it is the artefact and its significance that matters, too. As yet there are no music books but music is at its best as music and I don't listen to books, I read them, so we will see about that.

But the 7, here lined up in all their glory, are at least among the best books I've ever read.

Dubliners didn't take much thinking about. Of all prose fiction, the outrageously both most artful and most natural. Not just The Dead but the way the other stories expand towards it. James Joyce would have been as much of a hero if that was all he had written. Possibly even more so given my preference for not over-producing.

Religion doesn't feature much in my life. One has to respect that of others while finding it absurd. Jesus Christ had more impact on the world than anybody since, though, and the CofE Conservative, A.N. Wilson, is the ultimate scholar in explaining who he was, in Jesus.

Another life I've taken some interest in is Shakespeare's and it makes one wonder quite high-powered married life can be when Andrew and Katherine Duncan-Jones were husband and wife for many years. Her Ungentle Shakespeare is readily the choice on Shakespeare biography in a wide but often dubious field.

Naturally, the Collected Larkin, I don't mind which. Poetry made sensible, perhaps more than it ever had been before, and the better for it.

Dr. Johnson's Selected Essays. Why. To tell you that, sir, would be no more necessary than to tell you why you breathe. It brings life to you and sustains it.

Not Donne's poems, spectacular though they are but a choice of books about him and them in which John Carey and others are deeply impressive but I enjoyed John Stubbs the most, as I remember.

That's a similar sort of tight choice as when there can't be room for more than one book about C17th Dutch painting but one is overrun with options. So, it isn't Andrew Graham-Dixon's Vermeer or Laura Cumming's Thunderclap. It's not the Vermeer because there's more to it than that and it's not quite Laura because, like Benjamin Moser, she brings herself, and her father into the story. I was enchanted by all three books, almost as much as by the art they take as their premise but Benjamin nicked it by making me wish I lived in Utrecht and so The Upside-Down World it is.

 

It might be best to leave it at this 7 that have seemingly selected themselves rather than not be able to decide on one more and so extend it to 10, then why not 20, 50 or 100. The carnage of any selection process is horrific. What I'd like as the next choice, as ever, is a remedy for the compulsion to want to make lists.

Grand National Preview with Racetrack Wiseguy

 It's too soon to say that the Grand National is getting easier but Willie Mullins is making it look so, even if he thus makes it harder for everyone else. He had five of the first seven last year, including the first three and could have as many as eight runners this year. The money has been for I Am Maximus, the 2024 winner and close second last time and those first two can't be left out again while they are obviously kept specially with this date in mind.

It looks like we are in another period of hardy perennials like we used to have with Red Rum, L'Escargot, Corbiere and Tiger Roll turning up time and again with solid credentials. Taking last year's race as a form guide, Nick Rockett and Grangeclare West are given a couple of pounds extra which makes it too close to call and by now none of them can be regarded as handicap good things.

I was in a betting shop not long after West Tip won in 1986 and some geezer was saying how his mate had made it a handicap certainty whereas his interlocutor said he had thought something else had been. Red Rum and Tiger Roll maybe but with 40 runners over more challenging fences in those days where anything can happen, such 'handicap certainties' are only such after the event. 

But it's not easy to look further down the weights to find much with which to take on this politburo of proven heavyweights. I'm happy to put lines through Banbridge, Gerri Colombe and Haiti Couleurs who have all had their moments but don't look to me like having another one here. Spillane's Tower, maybe; Iroko might be thereabouts; Panic Attack wouldn't come as a shock but, even given that it hasn't been quite the all-conquering season for Mullins and his recent strike rate is below par, you'd think he's ready again for this and so one surely has a sensible chance in what used to be regarded as such a hard race to pick. Not for me, it wasn't, though. Horses that I'd seen stay and jump once kept up a steady percentage of successes.

However, while not being able to keep Maximus out of the first four, I can't get away from Jagwar, receiving a stone from the big guns, after the way he finished at Cheltenham over the shorter trip having had to come from too far back. That looks ideal as an indicator since there is clearly still something in his handicap mark with a further win surely waiting to happen.

And since the weight difference between him and Johnnywho, who beat him half a length there, remains the same, the story suddenly writes itself. It could be all yellow and green and an index to the various different caps used to subtly mark out the JP McManus horses from each other and 1-2-3-4 for the likeable owner of an empire of horseflesh.

So,

1. Jagwar

2. I Am Maximus

3. Spillane's Tower

4. Johnnywho     

 

Update. With Spillane's Tower now running on Thursday, make that 3. Johnnywho, 4. Iroko.