First Four Questions

The TLS has its own Twenty Questions feature. It's a long time since I ended my subscription  but their e-mail still arrives each week, giving a tempting glimpse of what one could have if one went to the lengths of finding a shop that sold their paper.

Nevertheless, a questionnaire is hard to decline even if it's only the first four questions out of twenty that one can see. It's only the same as it ever was, not being able to watch a quiz on telly without taking part and not quite as much reading these questionnaires for an insight into the inner lives of the eminent person interviewed as thinking what one would have said oneself. So, as far as it goes, 

 “How can I know what I think, until I see what I say?” (E. M. Forster). How much of your writing surprises you?

Not all that much by now. I'm unlikely to suddenly find out in the process of writing anything that I believe in God, had misjudged Boris Johnson or should have been listening to Pink Floyd and Bruckner rather than Tamla Motown and Bach and Handel. 

On the other hand, if any piece of writing doesn't find something one hadn't been expecting to say then it was probably not worth writing.

What is the first thing you remember reading or having read to you?

Thomas the Tank Engine was certainly the first book I ever borrowed from a library, Nottingham, circa 1965. There were the heroic escapades of a collie dog called Black Bob. 

But, probably like most people of my age, Janet and John was the first set text at school.

Is there a particular sentence that has stayed with you throughout your life?

Not one, no. Plenty of good lines from great poems or novels. But, an almost throwaway line that Danny Baker used to use when encourgaing listeners to take part in his radio phone-ins,

All you've got to be is any good. Not throughout my life but for about the last twenty-five years.

What is the most interesting item on your bookshelf?

It's surely got to be a book signed by a poet who I thought of as a god at the time and for a long time afterwards. My copy of Touch by Thom Gunn. I was overawed in his presence in Cambridge in 1979 when he did so and he was kind enough to make a conversational gambit. But, no. I could think of nothing to say by way of reply.

Related to that is a magazine called Navis, no.6, Summer 1997, on the back of which my name appears in block capitals as a contributor to that issue, above Gunn's in ordinary type who had been in a previous issue. I got paid just about enough for that poem to spend it on a copy of the magazine with Gunn in. 

My copy of Larkin at Sixty, ed. Thwaite, was bought from one of his secretaries that he had given it to but I have no evidence ot its provenance.

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.

Top 6 - Things it says here

 You keep writing long enough and you will repeat yourself. Time and again, the longer you go on.

Caitlin Moran, Robert Crampton and Giles Coren have furnished the pages of the Saturday Times for as long as some of us can remember, it seems, and by now we might be excused for thinking we've heard it all before. Caitlin still has her moments, Robert is clearly an okay sort of bloke but Giles is transparently struggling to pad out the requisite word count when he yet again resorts to an unfunny 'listicle' which is what they call one of those items that begins with a passable idea and then offers less and less convincing variations on it until the space is full of words, like those less gifted writers in junior school who, when asked for two sides, wrote in their largest handwriting, managed to get onto page 2 and then wrote THE END in huge letters.

I know what it's like. None of us are a bottomless well of inspiration. One of my lesser used ideas not repeated often enough to quite make the list below is that poets are 'mature' by the age of 30 and start repeating themselves after they reach 60. It is such a theoretical theory that I'm not even going to name one example as evidence of it.

But, for anybody who's been a regular visitor here over the years - and thank you for being there if you have - they must be becoming aware of certain 'set pieces' like I am. I am because I'm aware of having written it. The music reviews recycle the same 35 or so adjectives. I know. I've made a spreadsheet of them. I am reviewing the situation regarding the reviewing of concerts when they resume in September but it can't go on like that. By now, Artificial Intelligence should be able to produce the DGBooks concert review.

These might not be statistically the proven Top 6 Things it says here but they are six that come readily to mind.

There is no manifesto. That is the manifesto, mainly with respect to poetry but further afield, too. There are no rules. By all means go with whatever rules you want but voluntarily undertaken rules aren't rules, they are 'form'. 

Which leads to all you have to be is any good, unashamedly lifted verbatim from Danny Baker. 

And a thoroughgoing scepticism about anything purporting to be avant garde. No, every generation has some. They think they're the first to re-invent it all but the mainstream is a more inclusive tradition than they think.

Larkin's An Arundel Tomb goes to great lengths to undermine its famous last line. If I learnt one thing at University- and I didn't learn much - it was to read the whole poem and not help myself to certain lines in isolation from the others.

 

Boris Johnson was a compulsive liar, vanity project and completely unfit for office and we knew that many years before he was ever in a position to be a candidate for leadership of the Conservative Party, with Prime Minister attached.

 

What I know about 'rock' music comes from the early 70's in the first years of being a teenager. I soon saw through the posturing designed to sell its machismo to impressionable white boys, though, and spent 1974 listening to Beethoven and Shostakovich. I returned to pop music via Al Green's Greatest Hits, Tamla Motown and Bob Marley's Exodus about 47 years ago. The other gang at school had been right and I and my mates had been wrong. I remember John Peel being quoted as saying a similar thing about Tony Blackburn. I never tire of saying it about Cliff Richard.

I love saying they were right and I was wrong.  

It's the Same Old Song

 Tomorrow (as I wrote last Friday) in The Times, once I've looked at the book reviews, the quiz, the birthdays, the obituaries and done the crossword, I'll turn at last to the magazine where Caitlin Moran and Robert Crampton will have turrned out another example of their column, Robert about his fitness, lack of it or how his children regard him as they grow older; Caitlin probably about what it's like to be a feisty female. They are good at it but they've been doing it for a long time.

One of my favourites was Michael Bywater who, in the Independent on Sunday, once provided a short essay on Bach that said he 'flattered us by being of the same species'. I was devoted to the broadcasting of Danny Baker before the final and most comprehensive of his sackings but for some time he put in a generous word count in a column in The Times on Saturdays, too. Eventually, I'd heard much of it before but didn't mind because I liked it. I only draw the line at paying £30 to go to a theatre to hear it all yet again.

Some audiences like to be provided with exactly what they expect. Most TV and radio shows are very strictly formulaic. They hardly dare not do the same thing every time, just play different records or have different guests or questions in a quiz. Mostly, sometimes some of the records, guests and even the questions are the same.

If I had a radio show, I'd like to think it would be different every time. Maybe one week a poetry reading with some pop records and a chat with a sportsperson, the next some new classical CD releases and then maybe a few new books to review, mention the new film, Chevalier, and look forward to the weekend's horse racing. It would be a bit like what I try to do here, not having a radio show, but it wouldn't get an audience because they'd never be sure if it was going to be about Milan Kundera, Dietrich Buxtehude, Maggi Hambling, Boris Johnson or a horse that might win at Royal Ascot. What they want is Tony Blackburn doing Sounds of the Sixties where the only question is whether it will be Say a Little Prayer, the fact that he once worked on Radio Caroline or that Adam Faith made very brief records.

It is the same here, though, having been doing it for so long. It won't be long before the next record on the pop music feature, here labelled A Perfect Day of Pop Radio, will explain how gloriously in the 1970's I abdicated from the orthodoxy of long-haired white boys in denim playing 'rock' music in favour of Al Green and Tamla Motown. We are only ever days away from the next enthusiastic review, very sincerely intended, of a local concert that will recycle a few choice adjectives from those I've done before.

It will have been some of lyrical, dazzling, contemplative, shadowy, stately, fractured and so depending on if it was Schubert, Handel, Mozart, Mozart, Mozart or Ligeti.

One of the great things about poets like Larkin is that they didn't do any more than they felt the need to and then stopped. There's a lot to be admired about that.

I like doing this and do it for my own sake more than anybody else's which is a good thing for writing to be. I have at least genuinely gone quieter than ever in poems, not much presenting itself as being necessary, or possible, to write.

We will have to see. 

Christmas Diary

 Dinner with my friends was not such a big affair as I'd thought, and hoped it wouldn't be. Kind of them to ask, I could hardly hope for better neighbours, and they surely needn't have. Not being of Christian lineage, they don't really do Christmas but, then again, I thought, neither do I beyond a few vestigial social observances. I don't know if the card I gave them was the only one they got but I did some internet research and carefully transcribed,

শুভ বড়দিন 

on to the envelope. Carefully enough, at least, for them to be able to read it, the Bengali for Merry Christmas. 

I'm with my mother on Merry. I'd prefer Happy but one takes what translations one can find. I'm with my mother because she thought it implied boozing. Merry would be the least of it but there are no cards with which to wish people a Paralytic Christmas which, if anything, might be the 'real meaning' of the pagan festival co-opted by Christianity but either way I have considerable resistance to compulsory jollity.

It's a time when most things seem to stop before we then go round again. R.S. Thomas did it well in Song at the Year's Turning when he still observed rhyme and metre before withdrawing to free verse,

Song at the Year's Turning

 

And that's what it is.

The 'despair' that Thomas refers to might not be that felt when news items announced that the King was likely to pay tribute to his mother in his first 3pm speech. It would have been something of an omission if it had slipped his mind. It is the same sort of despair that, a few years ago, a news item reported some university research that found that men liked watching football whereas women liked shopping. You simply can't tell the difference between news and satire. I'd have thought that would contravene rules about stereotyping, especially in universities where they have time on their hands to consider such issues, and do. I know and have known women with considerable interest in football. I can't immediately think of many people at all that enjoy shopping.

Despair might also be caused by Jeremy Clarkson. It has done for many years. But just when it looked like he could be personable on Millionaire and maybe modified some aspects of his xenophobia, you simply can't tell how many levels of irony are involved in his latest apparently newsworthy pronouncement.

Irony can only really have one level which is that where what is said is not literally meant. Of course, not even I, here, should add to the publicity he does such things for but I wonder why he does it. It only makes some of us more Team Meghan. I'm not anti-Charles, William or Catherine and I'm sure Meghan's not as perfect as she looks but Clarkson, who is by no means stupid, is a blockhead who writes only for money, to adapt Dr. Johnson. He has very convincingly demonstrated why Meghan has a complaint and he's undone any progress he might have made towards making himself look palatable. He's back at Square One. He's not even there. Look what they did to Danny Baker for an innocent, not very good joke. He was exiled to podcasts and touring provincial theatres to recycle all his inventive gabble.

I dare say we always knew Clarkson was still dreadful but now, alongside the economic theories of Liz Truss, the charisma of Boris Johnson and Trump's campaign slogan that Hillary should be 'locked up', it's all imploded many billions of years ahead of the universe is predicted to do when it will become inert, in stasis and devoid of all meaning.

 

Meanwhile, we have another year to see what happens. Dr. Zhivago is first up on the reading list to see if the book is better without Julie Christie providing quite such unnecessary distraction. I thought perhaps I'd treat myself to another recording of The Well-Tempered Klavier to compare with the long-established Bernard Roberts on the shelf but the reviews, on Amazon at least, suggest I have a very good account already. Three essays are ready to go, more or less, to where they are aimed on top of the one already carried forward. The turf account has recorded worthwhile success for the outgoing year but it remains to be seen if it can get any better and how much gets carried forward.

And so, on the precarious, fragile, temporary basis that we inhabit the moment, life's a gas and I hope it's gonna last but not forever, not until the 12th of Never, because that's a long, long time.

I can't bear not still being the owner of all that pop vinyl I was never going to play again that I sold for mere money. I will have some compensation, though, by re-investing some of that meaningless cash in The Marvelettes. This is an amulet against any kind of despair,

Simon Armitage - A Vertical Art

 Simon Armitage, A Vertical Art (Faber)

The prompt arrival of this book was most welcome. I'd been waiting for it since long before it was even a forthcoming title having heard the podcast of the lecture on raptors with special reference to Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes. But there's plenty of us want the book, to have the words on the page to look at and concentrate on rather than having to listen.

The lectures are the main part of the job of Oxford Professor of Poetry, three a year for the four-year term. Prof. Armitage was it from 2015 to 2019.

Previous incumbents include such names as Auden, Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, Paul Muldoon and James Fenton. If General Elections can return the most unsuitable of Prime Ministers sometimes, the democracy by which Oxford graduates elect their Poetry Professor seems to work with some vanity candidates and the equivalent of Monster Raving Loonies being summaarily passed over. With his Queen's Medal, CBE, FRSL, this Professorship and then the laureate job, Simon's now only missing the Nobel Prize from a Grand Slam. If that seems like over-achievement, to me if nobody else, it might be due to some squint in my perception that makes poets older than me look more important than those younger and maybe also that Simon adopts a modest demeanour and rather than being the grand old curmudgeonly highbrow that was Prof. Hill, he dupes us into thinking he's still that nice lad from Marsden, Mrs. Armitage's boy. Well, he knows what he's doing, as these lectures-made-into-essays amply demonstrate.

To start with the raptors, what I most wanted was the last word in commentary on Gunn's Tamer and Hawk, the masterpiece analysis of the masterpiece poem. Like any close reader (with books by Tom Paulin and Paul Muldoon some years ago now finding poems re-echoing more than a Prince Far I dub album), Simon finds things that are there to be found that the poet may or may not have consciously put there but most won't be unwise enough not to take credit for. The language sometimes does those things for you and are probably among those things that Sean O'Brien once called the 'earned surplus' which I took to mean if you get it right then even more things happen for you. In the first line, for instance,

I thought I was so tough,

he doesn't think it's,

stretching the point...to notice at a subtextual level the word 'thou' hiding

I don't know if he means once, in 'thought', or also in four out of the five letters in 'tough', re-arranged, but since it's Saturday, I have been doing The Times crossword. But I would certainly not have thought of that and I'm not convinced Gunn did, either, but it's one example of how, as he says elsewhere, it's in the reader rather than the poet that the poem takes place and, after thirty years of reading all sorts of poetry professionally, how alert he has become. It is symptomatic of the professional that he is tempted to read The Hawk in the Rain by Hughes as a 'poem about writing' in the same way that The Thought-Fox explicitly is,

This is a poem in which the serried furrows of ploughed land are lines; in which each clay-clogged step is a poetic 'foot', etc, etc.

Well, yes, no and maybe but as a later lecture discusses the 'state of the nation' of poetry and its place in universities and how it can lead to excesses of its own, and the horrors of inbreeding, it is difficult to say quite where the line should be drawn between that which is of genuine interest and entirely admissable and where it should stop. Some people in Oxford University have been inventing the Astro-Zeneca vaccine, others are involved in arcane thinking about words put decorously on a page while, at the bottom end of the evolutionary chain, blond yobbos commit vandalism for vandalism's sake in the name of the Bullingdon Club and are then let out into society to put into practice what they learnt there.

  

Not all poets are as deserving of our attentions. Well, not mine anyway, but as well as astute insights into a selection of those that surely are- Elizabeth Bishop, Hardy, Gunn - Prof. Armitage demonstrates the most catholic, with the smallest and most commendable 'c' possible, range of interests by talking about Walt Whitman, Edmund Spenser, some fairly postmodern Americans and Kae Tempest. It's possible I'll give Spenser a closer look one day but not one day soon but I'll manage without the rest of them. Not being quite up to date with the latest trends in political correctness and staying on the right side of 'cancel culture', it had escaped my notice that Kate Tempest is now Kae Tempest and should not be referenced with gender-specific pronouns. I was bemused by what looked at first like appalling proof-reading so I was glad of the internet and thus got myself updated.

I hope my ignorance of what goes on in other silos of the poetry community is no offence. My offence is having no time for Kae's work. It is to Simon's great credit that he has time for it. When he goes to heaven, his reward will be that he can hear more of it. When I go to hell, that's all there will be.

We wait a long time before the 'vertical art' of the title is explained. Poems usually start at the top and make their way down the page, when on paper, whereas music takes place in its own time and paintings don't tell you where to start. But, as Simon is ever circumspect in distancing himself from any ready-made assumption, I wasn't going to assume it was that. It might not be quite so simple for Prof Armitage who, uncharacteristically, abandons his immaculate common sense and, maybe having spent too much time on campus, eventually tells us that,

poetry is a vertical art, its verticality extending from orchestrated line endings and managed intervals. 

 

There really is no need for that when common or garden Danny Baker had the recipe for anything and everything in his phrase, 'all you have to be is any good'. Do whatever you like but let's see the benefit of it.

But Simon is making a case for the poetry that has been written since some of it saw fit to abandon the structures that it, whether that meant English, European or all poetry, thought it had to observe. Poetry, he says, has had to find other ways to differentiate itself from prose, and has, and although they might have been difficult to appreciate at first, the so-called New Generation that in 1994 he was co-opted into, did so without being Modernist, by being more Bishop and Larkin than Pound, Eliot or W.S. Graham, led, let us think and hope, into a world in which all and any types of poetry are possible and available. You make your choice just the same as you do between all the available flavours and combinations of them as you would in an ice-cream parlour.

He makes the point that such things matter to so very few people. But to those of us that it does matter, it matters very much. If anyone had so much time on their hands that they thought they might like to know what the poetry world was like by now, this is a snapshot that details all its grandeur and its failings. 

Prof. Armitage spoke, and then wrote, with the laconic wit that provided as many laugh out louds as Alexei Sayle did in his books except they came from different directions. Much of the Armitage humour is in-house, at the expense of other poets or the poetry industry but even Lexi would have been proud of,

in May 2015, nine people were killed when rival motorcycle gangs, including the Cossacks and the Bandidos, explored a difference of opinion in the car park of the Twin Peaks restaurant and sports bar.

 

Let's hope that there is a difference between poetry and stand-up 'comedy'. Or perhaps it doesn't matter any more. Some of the stories Simon tells in the in-between bits of his readings are as good as what Alexei does. All you have to be is 'any good'.

Red Sayle in the Funny Set

I'm not often disappointed by books. I enjoy some more than others, of course, and for different reasons, but I usually pick wisely. As with horses, I'm not very adventurous, no great risk taker, and so the hit rate remains quite high. I was prompted to acquire the two volumes of Alexei Sayle memoirs, Stalin Ate My Homework (2010) and Thatcher Stole my Trousers (2016) and have enjoyed them as much as anything. His onstage persona is not a persona, it's him, and it's all true, seen through his lapsed Communist hyperbolic perspective.

The first volume is his childhood as the only child of activist left-wing parents, the luxury holidays in Czechoslovakia and Hungary and the second leads him through college and some unlikely jobs to his career in entertainment. While certainly they are funny enough and provide laugh out loud moments, it is the truth of them that impresses most. I'm not averse to autobiography of such mainstream stalwarts and have Vic Reeves, John Cleese, Alan Bennet accounts of their lives with the three Danny Baker volumes generally regarded as masterpieces of the genre but Alexei's as good if not better.

Although he's those few years significantly older than me and his involvement in left-wing politics more thoroughgoing, it's a recognizable world he describes of  1960's and 70's avant gardism, protest and studenty zeitgeist. There is no higher accolade for writing than that one wishes one had written it oneself. Alexei makes points about the avant garde and Marxists that I've tried, and largely failed, to make myself.  Now that I've seen him do it in books that will have reached a far bigger audience that any I can, I can stop trying and admire him from a polite distance.

My several attempts to delineate what it was about Campus Marxists are outclassed by some distance by Alexei's first hand reportage from the front line of the shambolic, narcissistic, righteous, doctrine-infested and fractured 'far left' which would be more hilarious if it weren't so sad. How true it is that the most radical revolutionary ideas were put forward by police stooges that such organisations as the Communist Party were 'riddled with' is hard to say and he makes it sound fair enough that he amongst others were in it for the inevitable violence by suggesting that the police they fought wanted a fight just as much. The only thing I can add to that is a meeting I went to once where the guest speaker was a defector from the National Front to the Socialist Workers Party. I suspect he just wanted to be on the winning side, as the Anti-Nazi League then were.

But Alexei also saves me the trouble in his vignette on football which, of course, in Liverpool was nearly as big a deal as pop music and going on strike. After the impassioned outcry from football supporters following the (so far) abortive European Super League and the Cup Final yesterday allowing the Leicester and Chelsea variants of the species (there is no difference between any of them) to go through all their devotional rituals, it was a huge relief to read Alexei,

My main problem was that I had great difficulty sinking my personality into that of the crowd, of submerging myself into a mass of people who all felt exactly the same thing, the same joy, the same anguish, the same rage, the same uncritical belief in the rightness of their cause. I, by contrast, couldn't remain partisan for more than a few minutes. If the opposition team were losing I would begin to feel sorry for them and start wanting Liverpool or Everton to concede a goal,

 

and it is precisely that. I've not often had that problem supporting Fulham but it must have been some innate sympathy for the underdog and a horror of the triumphalism of winning trophies that made me side with Fulham from the age of 6 or 7, having been brought up to be a Notts County supporter and a brief but unsuccessful effort to convert to Forest.

It only now occurs to me that my latest picture at the top of the website has me looking more like the mature Alexei than the Salman Rushdie I so vulnerably was told by a few different sets of people I resembled in early middle age. It is probably a symptom of narcissism to admire people that one fondly imagines oneself to be a bit like (again, Danny Baker; Sean O'Brien; Stuart Maconie) and one surely flatters oneself. It might be the Jewishness that I've also come to regard as belatedly essential to who I am and uphold in the face of the terrifyingly bleak tenets of Catholicism but I hope I mainly like Alexei because he's any good. 

To like books on the grounds that one imagines oneself reflected in them is vanity, not literary criticism, and one shouldn't do it.

The Paradise I Always Dreamed Of

'The paradise I always dreamed of' was a phrase I heard several decades ago now that I liked and stored away for my own use to enrich my absolutely captivating conversational repertoire. One of the first times I used it was in the 1980's when pubs were suddenly open all day. 

The horrors that have been visited on us by our vengeful gods this year might have had compensatory upsides for some of us and for a long time, one of them looked like being me. Those now distant last days in the office had me saying things like 'suits me' or 'I can't see it making much difference to me'. A copper-bottomed excuse to stay in knocking out Times crosswords with the sort of off-hand panache that I did today with shelves of records to re-acquaint myself with and even more books, most of which I've forgotten. Nothing could possibly go wrong (which is another useful phrase I like, lifted shamelessly from Danny Baker).

And for a few months it didn't. I even opted out of working from home, the endless maths involved in wondering if the pension was yet sufficient being brought to a welcome end by deciding that it must be, a decision that was endorsed by last month's bank statement showing outgoings and incomings within a pound of each other in a satisfyingly Micawberish demonstration of equilibrium.

 

There's a book I can write. There's two, actually. There's as many as you can think of. For enjoyment rather than contractually, not for financial gain. I won't be bothering The Bodley Head with Memoirs of the Gloucester Sunday League 1975-77. The market for sardonic reflections on the pop music we used to think we liked has been crowded out even if it's odd to see Pete Paphides doing for a slightly later generation that which only my Bowie generation and the Beatles generation should surely be allowed to do. And I'm becoming even more convinced than Philip Larkin was right, and well served when his expressed wish that his diaries should be burnt was carried out by one of his more-than-you-might-have-thought girlfriends. So, not being sure why he wrote them in the first place, I'm not amenable to trying to reconstruct my under-achieving, vainglorious life from the brief notes of where I went, what I did, bike rides and horses that won from the pocket diaries upstairs.

I thought I might become more familiar with the operas of Mozart and Handel and possibly even remember their stories but music, like anything else worthwhile, is not a tool for self-improvement. It mainly sounds good but hurts when Donald Macleod plays something on This Week's Composer that can't be bought on CD. It happened the other week with something gorgeous and choral by Pachelbel and again this week with Desmarets.

And form is temporary but class is forever so my currently reduced rating for 30 minute games at Lichess is only like when Fulham struggled in the third and fourth tiers and I will be back. But sport is, for almost everybody, 'you win some, you lose some' so it's not really the result that matters. It probably is the taking part, after all.

But now that much of what I was looking forward to in my sensibly, modestly-downsized 'lifestyle' has been confiscated, the November of lunchtime concerts and meetings in the café society of Cosham High Street, which is as close as Portsmouth gets to Sartre's and Simone de Beauvoir's rive gauche, are unlikely to happen. I remain eternally grateful for the weekly big walk but we don't hear much piano music on them.

'Be careful what you wish for' was another maxim I always liked and most dreamt-of paradises prove not to be. 'People believe what they want to believe' was the reductive but unavoidable conclusion of my erudite letter to the editor of The Times in response to absurd claims in the Credo column that Jesus would have loved Mother's Day. And these clichés keep on coming because they are any good.

My last little book of poems didn't get reviewed anywhere. I didn't send any review copies out. But what any astute reviewer, I hope, might have said, was how it didn't try to avoid cliché and somehow make the age-old language 'new' or even try to 're-make cliché', to refresh it. It took cliché at its word and embraced it.

November is going to be rubbish but it's going to be worse for others than it is for me. There's always, as they say, somebody worse off than you.    

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

One thing one might miss when eventually passing up the opportunity to be paid good money for attending the office in favour of living off immoral earnings will be the joy of arriving home to a neat package and trying to remember which book or record it might be. The first challenge, though, is to not damage it as it gets wedged under the door or opened by orange knife.
Today's case in point is the Alban Berg Quartet's Complete Beethoven String Quartets. One must not live by Bach, Handel, Mozart and Buxtehude alone because I can entirely see why others put Beethoven in the same bracket. I gathered my own Complete Symphonies, taped from the wireless, on cassettes as a teenager but never played the Choral because I didn't trust the C120 tape it was on, which rather defeated the object but at least I knew I had it.
Op. 132 was on the radio the other week, from Wigmore Hall, and was entirely convincing in making its own case. CD's really are for nothing these days. I very nearly bought this no. 15 Quartet on a record by the Fitzwilliams, whose Shostakovich set is beyond all critique. But, not so fast. There was the Complete Quartets on 7 discs for, was it, £12.
Come off it, that's not fair. I almost wanted to insist on paying more.

There might be plenty to complain about regarding the price of 'top' sports events, like Premier football, test matches - and is it really £90 for a day at Gloroius Goodwood - or Covent Garden or Ed Sheeran. Don't go, then. But the Proms, Monday lunchtime at Wigmore, or Tuesday at Chichester are worth it and if one wants to go to a big race meeting, one just waits for Corals to offer a day out to your turf mate and a guest and make sure you're his guest.

But what is worth it is the BBC.
Much meaner than the move to ask over-75's to pay the licence fee had been George Osborne's sly move to not abolish it but make it funded by the BBC themselves rather than him. Why not abolish benefits and tell Tesco that they have to give food to the disadvantaged.
Radio 3 is worth £150 a year on its own so the telly, the rest of the radio and the website is free. I was relieved that R3 was not on the list I heard of things that might have to go but that doesn't mean it won't occur to a Boris government that Classic FM plays enough Elgar so that'll do.
Radio 5 was mentioned and, frankly, without Danny Baker, it is only a fraction of what it was so those who want to listen to the same football chat every week can go to Talksport, who I understand do little else.
It was never a penalty. Our club needs a new left back, midfielder and a striker who scores 20 goals a season. The ref was a disgrace. The chairman/manager has got to go. We might get into the play-offs if we can stop conceding 3 goals every time.
There you are, that's next season sorted.

But the worst thing is how it is assumed everything can be paid for. Like 40% or more going to University; the NHS keeping people alive to extraordinary ages which only costs them more on ever more restrictive resources; Civil Service pay rises (not justified and I work there so I know), police and now the elderly's right to watch Strictly Come Dancing.
But it's the same every week so if you've seen it once you've seen them all.
--
But it's free here so tune in next week to hear about Faber & Faber, the Untold Story by Toby Faber. Now that it's arrived I can see the answer to the doubt I had about it before - why Philip Larkin was missing from the group portrait on the cover featuring its most famous names. He is sneaking furtively away on the back cover.
Very clever.
--
And, for those who have been riveted by news of my recent high-flying internet chess career.
Reader, I nailed it.
The 15-minute rating has been raised to 1925, which makes me almost worthy of breathing air on the same continent as Magnus Carlsen. I nurtured a rating of 1923 for 10-minute games alongside it for a few days, sitting in my tent like Achilles. For a few days I maintained that in the upper 1800's until the inevitable collapse occured.
I saw recently the self-evident idea that a great poet has to be recognized as such by every succeeding generation or else they lose their place and soon aren't great any more.
Class is forever but form, I'm afraid, is only temporary. So that story is over. Mission was accomplished but it will be a long time before I can again slip the surly bonds of mediocrity to touch the face of competence. I will be like the West Indies when I saw them v. Hampshire.
It was a low-key morning. Viv Richards had a lie-in and came out after half an hour or so to replace the substitute fielder. Hants must have thought it was going okay at 120-2, with Courtney and Curtley languid in the outfield. But then one wicket went down, then another and after some adventurous slogging by the fast bowler, they were all out for 220.
I'll mooch about in the 1700's and wait for the next rush of inspiration.

The Beethoven is sensational. Six more discs to try later. Stuff worth having is not too expensive.
     

The Fabulous Baker Boy

Another Fine Mess.
Not for the first time, Danny's got himself sacked from the BBC.
He should have known better and it wasn't big or clever but it shows how the second most dangerous thing in our culture, after all the things they rightly complain about, is the tendency among the politically correct to seek out offence where there is none.
In a generation of entertainers who have substituted swear words, gratuitous sexual references and there's also Framkie Boyle, many of who are not well-placed to pass judgement on Bernard Manning, Jim Davidson or Roy 'Chubby' Brown, for wit, Danny Baker has never needed to fall back on such strategies with 'nothing below the waist' one of his taglines, a fine line in the puncturing of pomposity and a wide range of reference points from when we were younger from the polite generation of Harrry Worth, Deryk Guyler and his sign-off at 11 on a Saturday morning taken from Leonard Sachs.
His chosen Desert Island Disc to save after Bernard Cribbins et al had been washed away was The Next Time by Cliff Richard, which he cited as the last hurrah of an age of innocence. This man is not a threat to our properness.
He has updated the tradition of Reithian values but now the BBC, who have been struggling in recent years, since the Cliff debacle, prefer to stick with the deadbeats they have rather than the greatest radio broadcaster of his generation. Radio 5 will struggle. I'm not doing Saturday mornings for them. I'll be off to Record Review on R3; some will presumably migrate to R4 and expect not much from the dull, slightly gormless Rev. Richard Coles while some poor sod is going to have to soldier on at R5 without the rights to the Sausage Sandwich Game. Five Live is up against it with Phil Williams leaving the late evening slot, the ingratiating Chris Warburton far too keen to impress whenever given the Breakfast slot where Nicky Campbell is at least clever, and now this.
The morning after Liverpool's miraculous result against Barcelona (which was actually news to me), all Five could do was broadcast Liverpool supporters shouting, in their chosen mode of celebration, so I turned over to R4 where they interviewed Roger McGough, who was characteristically fey, notwithstanding Evertonian, but endlessly preferable.
Very sorry to see you go, Dan. Saturday mornings won't be the same any more and I don't know where you will turn up next. At the height of my cycling career, in the mid-90's, I needed to get out on the road to pile up the miles of arduous endeavour of a weekend but my start would be delayed as long as possible to hear as much as I could of Baker and Kelly Upfront. 
I'll miss you is too easy to say.
--
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, last weekend's crisis of having nothing new to read was first of all filled by Daphne du Maurier, who I need to read more of, but then by Andre Gide's The Counterfeiters, which has waited patiently for donkey's years for my full attention.
I think it was worth waiting. Much longer and more complex than those beguiling essays like The Pastoral Symphony, The Immoralist or Strait is the Gate, I don't think I'm going to quite assimilate the whole diagram of characters available on Wikipedia but, being a novel about a novelist writing the novel that perhaps it turns out to be, one can't accuse it of not being many-layered, and it has memorable passages worthy of noting down,
he said my mistake was to start from an idea, and that I didn't allow myself to be guided sufficiently by the words

Look here, my dear fellow, I don't want to appear cynical but I have a horrror of reach-me-down sentiments

Whoever really loves abandons all sincerity

etcetera, etcetera

It isn't easy but it's worth the effort.
--
I hope to finish that before the arrival of This is Shakespeare by Emma Smith, which will mark a return to Shakespeare Studies for me after a hiatus. Prof Emma was on the wireless on Bank Holiday Monday. Luckily I was on R4 as I drifted in and out of consciousness. I heard Chaucer mentioned, some earnest talk about 'the canon' - yes, the bloody 'canon' which one minute is discredited as colonial, right-wing, nasty and insidious and the next is still there after all- and then something about Shakespeare. I thought, hello, this must be Prof Emma promoting her new book. Well, she sold one to me.
We will see what we think when it arrives and gets full attention, because it will because it sounds pretty good. It's going to need to be. She has some ground to retrieve but, unlike the self-proclaimed 'controversialist', Prof Sir Stanley Wells, I'm very open to listening to new ideas whether I like them or not. I don't regard myself as a controversialist.

There again, I don't regard Danny Baker as a controversialist, either. I don't agree with him that Steely Dan were the second best band after The Beatles or that Earth, Wind and Fire were the best Disco act.
I might go with T. Rex being the second best band after The Magnetic Fields and Odyssey being the best Disco act but I'm not going to go on Twitter to shout him down. He is very welcome to his point of view. 

A Ticket to the Ryder

My least favourite sporting event of the year is not the silly horse racing team game at Ascot in August, the Shergar Cup, nor is it any car racing, none of the football, the T20 cricket, all overhyped box office products of little consequence that they may be - it is the Ryder Cup.
I remember how desperate they were to make it competitive that they had to bring Europe in to help the UK out, since when it has been sold to those who do as they are told as something of awesome significance. But, no, golf's bad enough without reducing it to this tedium. It means avoiding Radio 5 all weekend, which isn't that hard to do, and hoping it doesn't intrude into the Danny Baker Show.
It only demonstrates to me that if you want to sell something badly enough, there are usually people dumb enough to buy it. As if it's worth keeping Oliver Kamm's relentlessly repetitive grammar column in The Times on Saturday because market research tells them it is a contributory factor in making some people buy the paper because reading him makes them feel clever. (It worked on me for a little while).
--
Which is seconded by our old mate, Jacob. That was a consummate performance on Question Time, attentive, well-organized, polite and impressive. So much so that one hardly noticed, among the two other yobs representing the more bullish gender, Rod Liddle and the Labour stalwart, that his main argument for Leave is to benefit his extensive portfolio of worldwide investment funds which, in the midst of that brouhaha, he was able to confess with impunity.
He is very good at what he does. He might say he doesn't want to unseat the Prime Minister, only to change her mind on one thing. I'm the same with him. I'd like somebody that good to lead a centrist, Roy Jenkins-type revival, so I've only got to change his mind about virtually everything, plus perhaps his hairstyle, and we'll be fine.
--
Another weekend, another long lie down. In fact the first for three weeks, and thus overdue. I mean, doing things and going places is all very well but it eventually doesn't compare with indolence, that one can learn to grow into.
It is so glamorous and tempting that I wonder what would happen if I didn't write anything. No more poems, not the Red Herring book, perhaps not even this. Would it be possible to read a book, attend a concert or listen to a new record without wanting to say something about it. It would be difficult and I might not even bother to think anything about them if I didn't. It seems a bit Buddhist, or some such thing, but might be worth a try.
Meanwhile, the distracted process continues whereby one isn't committed enough to one book (The Waves) before another turns up that one would prefer to read (Jane Glover's Handel in London), which is betting without the few weeks' worth of things put by. It becomes a sort of flow, opting to allow the choicest words to flow over one for the sake of it, not worrying too much what they mean but knowing, to one's deep satisfaction, that one isn't going to have to review it for the TLS, with such informed erudition, but just let it happen.
It's a new biography of Housman, that Amazon have at £11.50, not £25, for 500 pages, they have in there this week. Can't they shift it, I wonder. On the other hand, does Housman deserve to be the next poet whose biography I read when I haven't read one of Tennyson yet.
But I have an idea that it might be possible for the onset of age to bring with it a glimpse of the peace that passeth all understanding, and that might be something worth having.   

Tosca gets changed where you might see horses (5)

I was a dead loss on the Times crossword today. Since the Professor was taking me to Ascot, it seemed only right to explain to him what was going to win once we got there.
I might consult my solicitors to see if there is an offence whereby turf accountants can be charged with trying to dispose of successful gamblers by hospitality because Corals tried their level best, keeping not only food coming but also, every time we got back to the table from watching a race from the 'panoramic restaurant', there was another bottle of Argentinian Shiraz asking to be demolished. I'm not one for conspiracy theories but I've always understood there's no such thing as a free lunch, never mind a banquet, so it can't have been right.
The Saturday Nap was a confident one and it was very convenient the way it worked out so that the Prof's bookie provided the best view of it so that I could see it was going to win when it was still in another part of Berkshire.
I am not accustomed to such places but I doubt if even Princess Margaret could have found fault with the service, the understated politeness of everybody there, the attentiveness of the staff, who even provided the Professor with orange juice without showing undue signs of alarm. It is only now, back in workaday Portsmouth, that it dawns on me that I should have said,
Look, I'm sorry, but I'm not Beyonce, I'm just a layabout poet from Portsmouth, could you please treat me with less deference. You are making me feel guilty.
And the Prof said, it's a different planet.
Although dress code was suit and tie, as you can see it didn't seem to matter how battered and shabby it looked. They probably don't get many poets so don't have any rules to deal with them.
I missed no trick in waiting for Top Notch, as napped, to pay the train fare but now wish I'd asked Corals for odds against being sat next to a Fulham supporter which not only would have brought retirement forward to this minute but paid for anything else I could possibly think of.
Hello, Michael. Glad you tuned in.
And, Thanks, Prof. And, Thanks, Corals. Yes, I did have to be out of the house before Danny Baker came on but what can you do when, in two of his many favourite phrases that we never tire of, this one taken from Voltaire, it was a day on which we had our hats on the side of our heads and
Everything's for the best in this best of all possible worlds.    

Danny Baker - Going on the Turn

Danny Baker, Going on the Turn (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

There's a mistake on page 116.
I've tried my best to make sense of,
It's a common site
but, in the context, I'm sure it should be 'sight'. It's a mistake anybody could make and Danny Baker didn't go to university, like Shakespeare didn't, so it doesn't make him a bad writer but it does mean that his publishers should find better proof-readers. But Danny belongs to the spoken word and to radio, off the top of his head and come what may, his reliance on a wealth of stock phrases, in the way that Homer filled out his metre, rather than text written for the page, which is brilliant the way he does it but is only the way he talks written down. Spike Milligan said he thought he could talk but had to admit that Baker was something else.

At first, this third volume of memoir from the Greatest Living Englishman looks like the thrown-together contract-satisfying third of three. 250 pages of more of the same to ensure the adoring fans like me will pay up and make the tills ker-ching to the sound of cash rolling in after the tour of stage shows is over and the royalties for the telly show have been spent. And we all have to go work, don't we, even if not everybody's job is being mates with Rod Stewart, Vivian Stanshall, the Stones, everybody else you can think of and Danny Kelly.
I have worshipped the ground he walks on for long enough, not least for the way he can handle the superstar status and get away with the money-for-old-rope routine and still see it for what it is. Try telling that to Simon Dee. There's one for the teenagers.
But if Going on the Turn sets off looking like the last trawl of stories about when he met Ronnie Wood or Peter O'Toole or use a picture of himself with Elton when there is no reference to him in the text, you know it can't possibly be going to be that and it very soon isn't. The book flags up early doors that there is trouble ahead and however much it digresses, and digresses within digressions, it is most overwhelingly, horrendously and graphically, about being treated for cancer.
I know there is a whole genre of 'misery memoirs' and this could have been such a thing in other hands but Danny isn't capable of writing such a book. Even if he had died, which was a serious possibility, one would have only been left on whatever upbeat was available. Those parts, that provide the ground bass for the whole book, are hideous and only perhaps readable, or writeable, because we know he emerges at the other end. Life, we can't help but be persuaded, is a gift and few have been provided with the gift to enjoy it quite like Danny Baker.
I'd have thought I was his biggest fan but I wasn't among the hosts of well-wishers inundating him with well-wishing at his darkest hour. I would also have thought it most unlikely that, considering the company he's kept since his Sniffin Glue and NME days, he had foregone the dubious pleasures of drugs but he says he did until he and his best mate, the equally admirable Danny Kelly, take a trip to Amsterdam to see what cannabis is like.
The account of that spectacular disaster wins the genuinely Laugh Out Loud prize not for this year but for several years back-dated.
And then, the frightening story of how he left his Radio London job in the face of business strategists who honestly had the nerve to go and tell him how he might celebrate the anniversary of Love Me Do. By asking listeners to phone in and say what their favourite Beatles track was.
Oh, for fuck's sake. There's less gratuitous swearing in this book than its predecessor, which isn't only because Baker quotes his father less than before but if Danny can do it because he can, in the same way that Philip Larkin did it in poems, then I'm going to treat myself to one, just the once, because you simply can't have corporate non-entities telling Danny Baker how to do a radio show because that is exactly as gormlessly as they'll do it.
But, in a sad coda, it seems like that is the way it's going. Dan accepts that Radio 5 would rather have a preview of the weekend's sport from 9 to 11 on Saturday morning, and not the Sausage Sandwich Game, and it is only by some old-fashioned indulgence that he's allowed to carry on with this last hurrah, the man who, on Desert Island Discs, if all his other records had been swept away by a big wave, would have wanted to hold on to The Next Time.
That is the measure of the man.
It has been an honour to be of the same species as Bach and Mozart but I'm glad I shared my time as a part of it with Danny Baker.

      

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

There are hundreds of TV channels to choose from but most of the time I watch old QI, old Not Going Out, old The Chase, and not much new. I saw Fern Britton heroically nominate Science Fiction for Room 101 the other night only to be howled down by a nerd called Robert Webb and then Danny Baker made a convincing but unsuccessful case for punk rock.
And then it comes to Sunday night and the BBC put the Prom of the St. John Passion up against Far from the Madding Crowd. I ask you.  But never mind how many league tables put Bach top of the greatest creative artist of all time, the intention to flick between channels in an effort to do both, Thomas Hardy won. Although I might have to go back to the book to see if that is really how it ends because I don't think it does.
--
Meanwhile, back on the page, Ben Pimlott's Harold Wilson hasn't taken long to answer the questions asked of it. Like were politicians always quite as shifty, manipulative and self-seeking as they onviously are now. Post-Blair, post-Cameron, and not yet safely post-Boris and with the cartoon swot, Jacob, now being posited as a contender, were past generations quite as conniving, ambitious and unworthy as them.
Well, in the example of Harold Wilson, yes, they were. It is a heavy book and probably far too dangerous tothrow at cats but it needs to be to unravel the complexities of Wilson's tactical genius. Pimlott is good, never less than thorough and comes up with regular fine turns of phrase, like, when Harold is deftly positioning himself to appeal to the centre and left of the Labour party while not really being of their ilk,
Wilson's actual distance from Gaitskell was so small as to be scholastic.
Lord George Brown is in there but deserves a book to himself and Marcia has already taken control of the project. If there isn't much good satire or comedy on the small screen - and how can there be with the news consistently weirder than any joking can make it look- one is grateful for that time before one can remember it for onself and, no, not much has changed. We've just got less respect for it now.
And, in praise of olden days, and in line with Danny's railing against the over-rating of 1976/77 in pop music, the debonair Jack Buchanan is one place we can go for balm in these nutcase times.
--
But we must do what we do and carry on doing it, regardless.
The Perfect Book was set for October 2019 as I collected more poems for a bigger book than the customary dose of 14 poems every four years. But I'm looking at the twenty I have, and have made some judicious amendments, and I feel an itch.
It's not a book the world needs and I'll give it away to anybody unguarded enough to express the slightest of interest but I want to see it. And so I stare at the poems from time to time, in between a novice hurdle from Roscommon and a beginners chase at Southwell on a Sunday afternoon, and wonder if they are any good. Or, rather, whether I like them enough because that's all that matters. And I think I do, possibly too much to subject the innocent darlings to a pamphlet competition in the hope of getting somebody else to do the donkey work of putting them through the presses. I can do that and save them from being bullied by poems by people with creative writing degrees or the horrors of being typeset and edited by a foster parent. Never mind if you're not short-listed for Forward prizes, reviewed in Poetry Review or read out at the Ledbury Festival, you were mine and I loved you for all your shortcomings and lack of competitive edge.   
On the other hand, of course, word might spread like wildfire through the disparate poetry communities about this wonderful little book that has made poetry by avoiding all the usual pitfalls that give poetry such a bad name for preciousness, virtue signalling, excess erudition or just trying too hard to be poetry and I'll be turning down contracts, invitations and professorships on a semi-full-time basis.
We'll see.   

Oh Babe, What Would You Say

The Monday of Cheltenham week is set by for some token attempt at Spring cleaning. It is dreaded and reluctantly approached with only the promise of some vague feeling of wothiness if I achieve anything.
This year I successfully invested a couple of hours sorting out piles of accumulated paper, the detritus hidden under tables in the front room and chronically occupying the so-called 'work surface' in the kitchen. It brought more rewards than the smug self-congratulation of having done some domestic chore.
It brought about the rearrangement of the speakers from the CD player and I'm sure they sound better now with more distance between them. I tested it out first with Robert Wylkynson's Jesu Autem Transiens which benefits from the thirteen voices that begin with one, gradually build to thirteen and recede back to one again. I convinced myself of an improvement, not being much of a hi-fidelity fetishist but seeing no reason why music shouldn't sound as good as it can.
But I did find letters and cards that brought back snapshots of what my life was like, say, in 2003. Good Grief, and grief plays a big part in some of it, I hardly recognize my life in those days though it's hard to say if for better or worse, it was just different.
But here is the original manuscript of the poem, The Cathedrals of Liverpool, concerning a visit there in 2005. This fascinating document shows how nearly fully-formed the poem was on arrival with not much crossing out or re-arrangement of words or phrases and that is what it was like.
I should probably be ashamed that it has lurked for 12 years in a pile of various papers, not because it should have been more carefully preserved but because the room could probably have been tidied up more often than it has. However, I'm not. Perhaps if I'd spent more time regularly making sure there was a place for everything and everything was in its place, I'd have read less books, played fewer records, not seen as many horse races or not written a novel and even if I won't be remembered for any of those things, I wouldn't want to be remembered for the diligence of my housework.
--
Meanwhile, I am indebted to Gillian of London who sends a list gathered from her colleagues at work entitled Hatred, asurvey of personal pet hates. I'm surprised there's not more to do in the private sector where I understood they were naturally more interested in efficiency, cost cutting and focus than the public sector where such things are treated like some vague school project.
I understand the premise very well while regretting that programmes like Room 101 and 99% of the material of stand-up comedians consist of moaning about stuff rather than the appreciation of things as happens in Private Passions, which is Radio 3's more music-related answer to Desert Island Discs.
It is clear from the lists that our Gillian is more prone to annoyance than the admirable, if somewhat disingenuous, Sarah who 'hates nothing'. But if Coldplay is such an obvious choice that it should be among a list of this that are already granted (like there would be nothing to be gained by listing Trump, Gove, Boris, cold calling, Clarkson, word clouds, corporate mission statements and the internal combustion engine), they do identify Radio 4 comedy, hashtagging, cat people and upward inflection and I particularly admire Caitlin who is sufficiently against the grain to nominate sunshine.
More than that, I would worry about the comprehensiveness of Gillian's list, that suggests she has immense trouble navigating her way through the day, if I did not know her to be entirely sound of mind and, yes, I agree with many of her targets.

For me, musically, it begins with Queen and includes the jazz that Radio 3 plays on Saturday at tea time.
It seems that interviewees have suddenly abandoned the automatic verbal tics, 'Listen' or 'Look', that I think originated in Australian cricketers, and replaced it with, 'Yes, No'. It is mainly jockeys that I hear saying it but that's because I hear more jockeys interviewed than any other section of the community. Politicians are obviously beyond the remit of the question but should not be asllowed to say they are 'going to be clear about this' and any use of the recondite phrase 'going forward' should be severely dealt with going forward.
There is the bloke who is always hoovering the aisles of the local Tesco Express who thinks that his job is a higher priority than me looking at the available bread.
I dealt with virtue signalling recently.
Performance poets by which I do mean Kate Tempest and not John Cooper-Clarke.
And the way that columnists, from the wonderful Vicky Coren or her husband, to her malicious brother, only stretch out to the required word count by making desperate lists. But beneath contempt of all columnists is Giles Smith, of The Times, who needs to be told that he is the worst Danny baker tribute act in the world and there are opportunities for his sort working for Uber. And if Oliver Kamm ever makes anything other than the same grammatical point in his column, I'll gladly start reading him again.
And I'd love it if either the BBC Music Magazine could be a bit more than a glossy coffee table adornment with a CD attached or, preferably, Gramophone could have a CD with it.
I'm not keen on the ablative absolute either; the fact that there's no point going anywhere anymore; films, and, once you get into your rhythm, I can see how this can get out of control and I'd rather say I'm never happier than having the comfortably predictable Danny Baker Show, switch over to Record Review, with the Times crossword looking do-able, a good thing lined up at 7/4 in the novice hurdle at Wincanton, a couple of books to read and all is right with the world.
But, for me, it's films, unless they're French or old, the 'special effects', the franchises, and the complete lack of anything else to do while you are expected to watch them.                        

Let there be less of it

Having been most disgruntled by Richard Ellman's biography of Yeats, I've had Brenda Maddox's George's Ghosts waiting to be looked at to see if she provides a more coherent account of the life rather than a detailed exegesis of all the supernatural baloney that he involved himself in.
It was a close run thing in the early pages and Yeats was nearly abandoned as a lost cause but I persevered long enough for the book to convince that it is a sane and useful document of the life, personality and relationships and it is most welcome.

With Buxtehude proving a hugely enjoyable companion, mostly in the choral works, as I come to the end of a firrst run through of the 29 disc set of Opera Omnia, the next stage is to retrace my way back through some highlights noted on the way and read more of the booklets and text to formulate a clearer idea of the oeuvre. It is a case of instinctively knowing what is right and not for one minute has it seemed like an overdue extravagance to blow most of last year's horse racing profit on such an investment.

It has also meant a period of restraiut in ordering books and records while I catch up with this backlog of essential reading and listening. January has been a record low point for acquisitions with only one disc arriving, af fortepiano and viola da gamba pieces by C.P.E. Bach, and I surprised myself by ordering the paperback of David Starkey's television series on Music and Monarchy, in which he has been gentle with us, informed and sensible in his telling of the composers who wrote and played for the British royals.

But a considerable list is accumulating of further requirements and, in preparation for next year's biography of Charlotte Mew by Julia Copus, a collected Mew will be necessary; there's piano concertos by Leopold Kozeluch, which could be Mozart in disguise; I see that we are due some Simon Armitage poems in March, which is also when The Magnetic Fields' 50 Song Memoir reveals its rich cargo and that is without essentials such as volume three of Danny Baker's memoirs, Sean O'Brien's stories in Quartier Perdu and the very long awaited Clive Wilmer's selection of Thom Gunn. Luckily, the last few days have seen some horses doing the required business to pay for them.

But there are events to mention, too, for anyone in their vicinities. Feb 11th is Pauline Hawkesworth's book launch, with a supporting cast of readers from Portsmouth Poetry Society (see below), of which I'm delighted to be one; The Jess Davies Band have a date forthcoming in Southsea in March, where it's possible one or two songs in the set might be co-authored by me and, further ahead in July, and different again, my nephew goes straight into time-trialling at the deep end, with plans to ride the Welsh CA 12 Hour, which now incorporates the WTTA event that I used to ride in the 1990's, in the Monmouth area for which I will be glad to support and advise in the inevitable obliteration of the one family cycling record I ever held.

So, while there is plenty to be involved with, and I can report that Time After Time, my novel about club cycling in 1969, is 78% done in its first and only draft, and will be ready to be printed off, photographed and then put away in a drawer, there is likely to be less of this internet broadcasting. It's not good for me and it might be better for those who read it if I do less of it and appear no more than once a week or when there is something worth the saying.       

Best CD and Best Event 2016

There is unfinished business held over from last week on these important matters.

There is still one disc on its way but it's hard luck on Venezia 1700 by Thibault Noally because I have a hard enough job on my hands already.
How to go about deciding is the first step. We need to weed a few out. I can console the Couperin disc with the thought that it probably would have won did I not have a recording of it already but, as a disc, it is very unforgiving to mark it down for interrupting the choral glories with less spectacular instrumental interludes. The Mozart is very fine indeed but similar strictures can be applied in that more soloists and less choir would have made it better. The Abrahamsen is the most 'extreme', which is no mark against it, but might not be the choice if one could only keep one disc and had to lose the rest. Which leaves the marvellous account of Telemann that I can't really find any such ultra-critical fault with except that it is not a wonderful cello concerto by a composer of my generation, later augmented with a spectral vision of Purcell rising out of a Berlin-period David Bowie piece.
There are pieces in the middle of Errolyn Wallen's Photography that didn't do as much for me. There would have been ways of arguing the case for any of these five discs but Errolyn's is the last to be thrown over the side of my balloon.
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I have already dismissed Prof Sir Stanley Wells and those from the world of Shakespeare Studies for their cursory denigration of the Curtis-Green letter in the TLS. We remain interested in hearing from any of them if and when they come up with a reason why Hamnet Sadler could not have been father of Shakespeare's twins.
Meanwhile, how does one compare a great day at the races with a Monteverdi opera.
Namanja Radulovic put in an impressive late bid with his Khachaturian Violin Concerto.
It has to be a completely arbitrary decision.
The one that made me feel best, and helped a great deal towards another record profit for me vs. the bookmakers, notwithstanding that Cheltenham racecourse on a fine day is some way ahead of what Wordsworth said about being on Westminster Bridge, it's Cheltenham's April Meeting, and thanks to Nigel for taking us there and Richard Johnson for riding Fox Norton to the win that tied so many bets together in the novice chase..
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So, a new record profit, a profit for the Saturday Nap feature and, I'm surprised to find, more posts here than in any other year (which wasn't supposed to happen), as well as plenty of evidence in the award winnersto suggest it was a good year. Strange to reflect, then, what a godawful large affair and very bad year 2016 was for the 'liberal intelligentsia' that I'm allegedly one of. Bowie and Prince were shocking news items before the Referendum and Trump but what can you do.
As well as the Venezia disc, there are Delmore Schwartz, poems by Charlotte Newman, commentary by Stephen Burt on contemporary American poems and my introduction to the Avant Garde for Portsmouth Poetry Society to look forward to in the New Year. And then later, the third volume of Danny Baker's memoirs as well as the very long-awaited Selected Poems of Thom Gunn in which I hope Clive Wilmer will have done some annotating to make the wait worthwhile.
If that wasn't enough to look forward to, the novel Time After Time should be finished in its one-off draft by the Spring, to be read by only the very select few who both want to read it and I decide are allowed to, as well as, I hope, some pop songs I've had a hand in writing.
There should be no need to revert to the stand-by of the My Life in Sport series, which still has running, chess, pool and darts and possibly even my brief career in gaelic football  to recount but that sporting memoir is always waiting to be completed.
Thus, it only remains for the Christmas Nap to be posted later this week and that will have been that for another year.
Best Wishes to Everyone.
Keep the Faith.
It'll Never Be Over For Me.

When one's cup runneth over

it is always a good idea to remember that it doesn't always seem like that. Perhaps the two ends of this spectrum aren't that far apart but are only what 'seems'.
Hamlet might say,
'Seems,' madam? Nay, it is. I know not 'seems.'
but he is either wrong, dissembling or trying to convince himself.

Does anybody ever know what really 'is' or are we all prisoners of what it 'seems' like to us.

Yesterday, among a welter burden of books arriving here, all ordered to turn up while I was here but I was out so some of my very kindly neighbours took them in for me, was the nearly three-inch thick biography of Harold Wilson. Having enjoyed so much two books on the skullduggery of Jeremy Thorpe, flamboyant bon vivant, I thought that for 1p plus £2.80 p&p, I'd see if the fascination could be extended into the life of another wily operator from 1970's politics.
But the book, the Ben Pimlott in hardback, represents something a weightlifter might be expected to pick up and hold above their head in the qualifying rounds of the local championships. It's not possible to tell from the label how much it cost the dealer to post but, once you've factored in the jiffy bag, it must have been more businesslike for them to throw it away than charge me £2.81 for it. And yet it seemed to them they were doing some business.
I can't imagine I'm going to read all of that, with Byron's Women ahead of it on the waiting list. But such is business, such is commerce. Something was seen to happen. It kept people in work and the world was kept busy. Which makes me wonder why my work keeps awarding me shopping vouchers for perceived 'successes'. I am honestly no good at the job but, like some character in a film blessed with serendipity, I recently keep finding myself in the right place at the right time.
It's not always easy to spend £20 on something you really need because you'd have bought it already but I did once buy some cat repellant to keep them from doing what I didn't want them to do on the frront of my house, a pair of trousers that said Jasper Conran on the label (imagine that), I got the book about Barney Curley's betting coup and this summer made maroon the colour to follow, augmenting a pair of soft shoes with shorts and t-shirt to not quite match. But I don't think I ever did quite as well as this week when finding exactly the sort of new hat I had in mind in TK Maxx and could afford an English-German dictionary into the bargain. What a pretty picture they make.

It would seem like I'm doing a marvellous job but, really, I'm not.
And it seems like I have no alternative but to read any new novel by Ian McEwan. You just have to, don't you. But, having ordered it, I saw a few reviews and thought, No, I'm not having that. But what seems in this case becomes what is. Not reading a new McEwan novel now would be like not buying the Sex Pistols' album in 1977, or not buying the next instalment of Danny Baker's memoirs.
I thought I'd have finished it by now, it is only a day's worth of reading if you don't watch Doncaster races, but I'll finish it tomorrow and maybe review it soon.
And it seems that I can actually read one novel while, somewhere else in my busy head, I can be planning another.
Heaven knows how many times I've struck out with ill-advised intent on producing a novel. About five or six times, at least. There were Private Dancer, Midtagspause and a few that never had titles, none of them interesting enough to sustain my interest in writing them never mind expecting anybody else to read them.
But maybe this time, with a plan in place, writing about something I know something about, let's see if we can nail it this time, with Time After Time, no literary masterpiece but a story about amateur cycling in those dark days of 1969 when the public weren't very much aware that such a sport even happened. I don't care if it's rubbish and I certainly don't expect anybody to read it but I'd just love it if I could print off 50 thousand words and say, there it is, I wrote a novel.
It seems as if I have an idea I'm excited about enough to see it through. But I don't know if it is.       

A View from the Boundary,

which is what these column inches of miscellaneous reflections always used to be called.

County cricket is such a long-standing tradition that nobody involved in it seems to still remember why it happens. It is a venerable ritual that needs to be observed, so that people like the major in Fawlty Towers can look at the scores over breakfast.
Because Nottinghamshire were playing Hampshire, it was necessary for me to attend because I am a fervent supporter of my home town team and can name one or two of their players, although Derek Randall, Reg Simpson, Gary Sobers, Gamani Gooneseena and Basharat Hassan weren't actually playing today.
All the time Hants were struggling to 270 all out, it appeared that Notts were winning but as soon as they batted and were immediately 0 for 1, they weren't. When neither batting side, while batting, think they are winning, it can be slow going and that is what happened on a day when the weather contributed most to the day. There's only one thing worse than the cricket being not very interesting and that's when it stops completely.
Luckily, the wit and wisdom of the assembled group conjured fine entertainment from the newspapers and from the thin air at the back of their minds. So The Times crossword was filled in, possibly correctly- I don't know, followed by the Telegraph. The Call My Bluff  game was followed by an improvised Sausage Sandwich Game, copyright Danny Baker, where the result was Stenhousemuir 2 Patrick Thistle 0. Then, a traditional game of Today's Birthdays, in which contestants guess the age of those famous people whose birthday it is, e.g. Anatoly Karpov, 65; Lady Olga Maitland, 72, was followed by a new game that turned out to be most successful, guess the temperature from yesterday's World Weather which was further improved by guessing the location having been told the temperature and its initial letter. Although I had been first to get anything spot on by guessing the temperature in the Falkland Islands yesterday at 5, I was soon outgunned by Spenno in the reverse game, having guessed Mumbai was specifically as hot as the degrees stated, and it turned out to have been Marrakesh.
So, you can see how the English summer can be survived- not by the vicarious spectating of arcane sport but by doggedly getting all the value you can out of the newspaper while Hants and Notts battle grimly on over there in the sunshine, like, as it were, 'too bald men fighting over a comb'.
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Meanwhile, I know by now it's time to think of which book to read next and order it because I'm nearly halfway through the latest. It is long overdue that I added Yeats to my poet's biographies and Richard Ellman's The Man and the Masks still looks like the best critical biography.
I've never been sure about Yeats, having been introduced to all such things when Eliot was regarded as god in C20th Poetry. I've felt I owed W.B. something ever since I changed my mind during the final exam at University, having intended to write about Eliot, saw the questions, liked the one on Yeats best and somehow, from somewhere, scribbled out a masterpiece.
I still haven't decided, his formative years having been difficult, the fashions of the fin de siecle for Madam Blavatsky and all kinds of baggy mysticism not having done him any favours - it's a good job he hadn't been a teenager in the 1960's- and one needs to give him more time. For a moment Ellman seems to make a good case for his dual personalities alongside Jekyll and Hyde and Dorian Gray and the difference between character and personality, which seems to prefigure the Ego and Id, but then Yeats reverts to type and involves himself in all the wrong things. But perhaps wrong things is all there were. I can't say that books on Eliot or Pound made them attractive figures either so there's plenty of time for Yeats to make a case for himself. It's not as if he doesn't have a great oeuvre to back him up and whenever was it that we had to like the poet anyway. Even though the fashion has by now swung decisively back to literary biography and away from the text and text alone as the object of appreciation, it is still very important to have written some great poems.