Always grateful for anything less than chaos

Although how I was expected to get Lope de Vega and 'neonate' in Saturday's Times crossword, I don't know. But I did, with a little help from my friend, the internet.

A few weeks ago, an e-mail questionnaire arrived from Virgin media asking in no uncertain terms 'what is the most we could charge you without you leaving us'. Not bloody much was the answer since my 12-months fixed price had already been put up, which brings into question their definition of 'fixed'.
I have since, though, found channel 198, which is You Tube. Yes, I have the internet on the computer and I dare say with the right wires that could be displayed on the telly but I won't be bothering to do that. But what I can do now is type in Mozart Piano Sonatas and there are five hours plus-worth of the whole shebang to accompany, quite fittingly, reading Murakami. Haydn Piano Trios have made for good company, too, but this does threaten the future of the CD.
Why would one buy such music when it can be whistled up for free. Well, because one still wants to, I hope, but it is almost the paradise one dreamed of aged about 13. Just about all the music you can think of in one convenient machine, from obscure 70's long-hairs like Alquin or Jack the Lad to Josquin Des Prez, Pergolesi and, looked up following the feature in Gramophone, a quite glorious La Cenerentola by Rossini, which needs to be watched, not just listened to.
But, no, Virgin, I'll keep paying but I've only just dragged myself into turf investment profit for the year and I don't intend to have earned it just to pass it on to you.
--

Although, still with Gramophone, I am waiting for Cappella Amsterdam's Josquin- Motets and Deplorations in the hope of finding anything to compare with the lament on the death of Ockeghem, I was most gratified to find the only disc to be nominated more than once as their disc of the year by their reviewers (by Lindsay Kemp and David Vickers) was the Vox Luminis/Buxtehude Abendmusik, which is imminently expected to see off the Belcea Quartet's wonderful Shostakovich and all other comers to be mine, too. I'm not sure if Gramophone's reputation is enhanced by this coalescence of opinion, or mine. But I don't believe in coincidences.
--
More than halfway through Killing Commendatore by now, I am looking forward to reading some short books, this having followed Hermione Lee's Virginia Woolf, but fear Larkin's letters to his mother and a biography of Tennyson coming at Christmas won't be those. I'm wondering if I can see off Saturday Night at the Greyhound by John Hampson in my spare time.

The Gallery Press have promptly furnished my order for the belatedly-discovered Against the Clock by Derek Mahon, taking the loving care to not only use a jiffy bag but wrap it very neatly in brown paper within. It is an indication of the care some sellers take over their product and reminds me of once, in the late 80's in Winchester, buying a local magazine of poems and short stories for a couple of quid and watching in awe as the vendor did the same, like a sommelier decanting a bottle of Pauillac. But it means that the O'Brien walkover in the year's poetry awards, with Duffy and Mahon to make a game of it, is no done deal. And, with Murakami and Josquin to review before Christmas, the awards might have to wait until the new year. We will see.

That shortlist, however, does reflect back on the recurrent discussion of what a state contemporary poetry is in.
It might not be for the likes of Jeremy Paxman or even Stephen Fry to say so but others have been saying so, too. And I'm sure it has ever been thus.
My shortlist of O'Brien, Duffy and probably Mahon represents my age group, being someone whose pop music doesn't penetrate far into the C21st and whose radio listening consists of R3, R5, I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue on R4 and Johnnie Walker on R2.
It is possible that, for poets and poetry readers (if there is any difference) under 40, there are young poets that represent a new golden age and it's not for me to say they don't any more than I'd prefer the hit parade to still be full of T. Rex and Tamla Motown.
Time often does us no favours but I will be amazed if any new poet, or pop artist, turns up between now and kingdom come that does it for me like the old ones did.
Poetry does not look to me to be in a healthy condition but I remember objecting profoundly in a first year seminar when a young lecturer announced in 1979 we wouldn't be reading anything after Auden and promptly went to the admin office, claimed to have a timetable clash with a philosophy lecture and changed my seminar group.
We've all been there, what goes round comes around, etc. 

Oh Babe, What Would You Say

Usually, reading Jonathan Bate's Ted Hughes, An Unauthorized Life would be amazing enough. It could be time to review it this time next week, all being well. I have noted many page references as I go; I have spent too much time in my life forlornly looking through books for the bit I want to quote thinking,
Surely it was in this chapter, around about here, halfway down the left hand side. 
But it never is.
So now I have to remember to insert a sheet of paper in any book I might want to write about to avoid that debacle. An elementary piece of the book reviewer's methodology, one might have thought, but I've learnt the hard way.
We will wait until then for some thoughts on Bate's Ted which would be amazing enough were I not also reading another book, more slowly, less highbrow and for some louche relief at bedtime, which is Graham Lord's Just the One, The Wives and Times of Jeffrey Bernard. Oh, My Giddy Aunt. It would make anybody with bohemian aspirations feel completely outclassed. It makes even Ted look as if he wasn't even trying to attract women. It makes Dylan Thomas look like a discerning wine-taster. Each page has more delinquency and vagabond ruin than any other book can muster in its entirety. I can't recommend it highly enough except to say that its monumental decadence is magnificent beyond all imagining until you realize quite how sad it is. He surely makes Baudelaire look lke Freddie Bartholomew. I can think of no higher tribute.
-
But tune in next week for the Hughes as well as, either on Thursday night or Friday (who's to say these days), the Saturday Nap as Bookiebasher goes for the hat-trick.
Not spending much time in betting shops now in the internet age, I've found the magic one, Betfred in Cosham, on whose telly my horses never lose. Traditions are quickly established and, slipping out for a late lunch from the office, the highlight of a Friday is now going there to see the selection win as easy as you like, as Onefitzall did today. And if Betfred is The Bonus King, the bonus is where you have another tenner just to establish one's bona fides and not get thrown out as a vagrant.
Let's get carried away on a temporary wave of tipping success while we can on the day that Peter O'Sullevan was remembered. This is what the Saturday Nap was supposed to be like, not a litany of excuses but a page in my notebook where the results column says WW, for 'won, won' and genuinely thinks we can extend it to W Six Times, the old formbook comment  that is shorthand for 'waited with will win when wanted'. You see, there is poetry everywhere, even in the formbook.
--
It's not good news that Stephen Fry is standing down from the chair of QI but I think he might return as a guest one day and then we'll see. Sandi Toskvig, of the Women's Party, will take the show into the second half of the alphabet while, I dare say, Stephen does something More Interesting instead. Like, whatever happened to that film about Handel he was supposed to be making. Get on with it, lad.
But we must give Sandi her chance. She had a good story on an old episode I saw this week in which she was to make a programme about sailing round the coast of Britain and had to go to be measured for a life-jacket. She still has the business card from the life-jacket expert who measured her for it at the prestigious life-jacket company. And his name was Will Drowne.
       

Danny Baker - Going Off Alarming

Danny Baker, Going Off Alarming (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

The difficult second album sounds like the first one but you just somehow know it isn't quite as good. It's not just that the style is now familiar or the shock of the new has worn off, you know that if they had been releaed the other way round, you would have noticed an improvement.
It is still great stuff, though. Whereas Stephen Fry is routinely apologetic about his privilege and good fortune, Baker relishes the way that his life unfolded with fate just handing him one good turn after another. It surely takes a certain type to be brave enough to take advantage of it each time, nonetheless. If you were always too craven to leave your dull office clerk role then you weren't giving it a chance and that might be because you knew you didn't have it in you anyway.
This is another mixture of domestic chaos and celebrity encounters. Baker's father is central to much of the family action with his own way of dealing with finance, superstition and anybody who upsets him. It was a classic piece of Spud's uncomplicated repartee that made one of volume one's best anecdotes. Used sparingly and appropriately, the 'f' word can be a powerful linguistic effect. However, I don't remember Danny himself using it quite as often in the first book as he does here. Perhaps he is turning into his dad, as we all do, but it becomes tiresome and, all added together, they must add almost a page to the book's length. It doesn't add to the authenticity of an account of life in Deptford and we could do without it.
The celebrity meetings chosen to be included here are Frank Zappa, who is no more boorish than I personally would have expected him to be while Kenneth Williams, Tommy Cooper and Ken Dodd have equally convincing, but likeable, parts before we are treated to some Spike Milligan. However, it is the more extensive passage on Paul Gascoigne that is most entertaining, insightful and ultimately, moving. One would need the resilience and resourcefulness of Baker and Chris Evans to even attempt a day out in such company and Baker's account of one such is easily the highlight of this volume.
Perhaps one expects too much of a celebrity memoir although Danny Baker is a speccially unphased celebrity that comes from no known template, and to expect quite so much from London TV studios as one took from the NME and life with pop groups of the 1970's, well, realistically, it was never going to happen. But the story ends with the television career in front of the camera apparently drawn to an abrupt halt and very soon, the public assume you are finished.
You could, of course, spend a weekend much less pleasurably than catching up with the story to 1996.

Stephen Fry - More Fool Me

Stephen Fry, More Fool Me (Michael Joseph)

There might not be so many places that mention Maggi Hambling and Danny Baker in such short a space. This website is one where both are celebrated. The great painter is mentioned in a number of diary entries here, as she works on an oil painting and charcoal drawings of her subject, and Danny is glimpsed in one of the many lists of celebrity good time people in London in the 1990's.
But, for twenty five pounds, cover price, it has to be said you are paying for a fair expanse of material that was covered in The Fry Chronicles which in turn had markings in it to indicate which bits had been in Moab is My Washpot. And the last and longest section is of diary entries that tend to detail golf performances, number of words done on the novel, The Hippopotamus, who he played poker with at the Groucho Club and how much cocaine he took. It certainly is impressive how much work Stephen was doing while constantly having a good time but one gets the feeling with this book, it is a bit thrown together.
Not that it is ever much less than entertaining. We do get more of Stephen's self-criticism of what an 'arse' he is, how lucky and privileged he is to be able to feel such guilt at such luck and privilege. And, having provided text book advice for the novice cocaine addict, he descries and warns against the drug while admitting that it made him feel wonderful.
The Groucho Club with Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Blur and the 1990's Brit generation are trashily fascinating without being too uplifting and the rise to really quite some exalted hangouts and friendships is meteoric and almost, it appears, by osmosis and it is another book readily raced through as a priority as if nothing else mattered. But, of course, such fame and fortune are due to an immense talent and the work rate is phenomenal.
You can come back from attending official duties at Dundee University, pop straight over to do yet another commercial voice-over, meet up to write with Hugh Laurie in the afternoon before setting off to an opera or film premiere in the evening and then dinner or the club until the early hours of the next day. I never understand how anybody has time to write a diary each and every night but Stephen is something else. If everything else is allowable, and one is never in any doubt that he is an all round fine man, the one thing you really don't want to have paid good money for is the endless variations on the way he signs off the diary each night. Although, having just flicked through to check for some, there's not as many of them as it seemed. How very odd.

View from the Boundary

FIRE ! FIRE !

Portsmouth poet, me, narrowly saved himself from dire danger last night as he belatedly investigated a strange smell and found the kitchen on fire. Well, not quite the whole kitchen but I'd left the grill on and that was alight.
It perhaps wasn't quite life-threatening but one doesn't know that at the time. One thinks whether to throw water over it or cover it with a towel. The towel sounded right, although a waste of a towel, and is science correct to say that fire is stopped by cutting off its air supply. What if the towel catches fire. But it didn't. Well done, science.
It took all evening for the smoke to clear with front and back doors open and this morning I painted over the area above the cooker that showed smoke damage, which only now highlights some discoloured ceiling. But I might be more wary of the grill in future.
It could almost be a story from a biography of Philip Larkin, although to be fair to him, not even he was that remiss. But I'm pleased to be able to equal Jonathan Raban's blurb in which he says he read James Booth's new book in three days, very enjoyably. Assuming I finish it tonight. I have more than my usual amount of book review notes on it and so it might be a long one in the next couple of days. I call them 'reviews', thousands wouldn't.
--
Equally remiss was how I posted a listing for the Portsmouth Poetry society's National Poetry Day reading on the Poetry Library website and entered a start time of 7 a.m. Our host would have been less than impressed by a crowd of poetry devotees outside the premises first thing in the morning. But the Library helpfully corrected it very quickly this morning.
Having hoped to corner the market for poetry audience in Portsmouth on Oct 2nd, I find that we do have a rival event on at the same time so, if in doubt, you saw this one here first,

NATIONAL POETRY DAY

with 

PORTSMOUTH POETRY SOCIETY 

Special Guest - Maggie Sawkins

Winner of the Ted Hughes Award 2014 

to launch Calliope, a new booklet of poems from Portsmouth 

Thursday, October 2nd, gather from 7 pm for 7.30 reading 

St. John Ambulance Headquarters,

406 Old Commercial Road,

Portsmouth

(across the road from the Charles Dickens birthplace,

some car parking at rear, accessed from Sultan Road) 

Admission Free 

Calliope £3.50 

Refreshments

-- 

I might stop posting the Times crossword on Saturdays from now on. It used to be quite an achievement but now, having put a completed grid, of sorts, on the website four weeks running, perhaps it is not such a big thing to show off about. It was by way of a challenge, really, but all it really proves is that I've been dogged in pursuit of a goal and, quite honestly, not having to finish it with Word Finders and suchlike might be a bit of a relief as Saturdays soon become again more devoted to jump racing.
Although there is a way to go in 2014, my shortlists of Best Poem and Best Collection of poems for the year are still very short. This year's other subsidiary selections of best event, best novel and even best book of the year are likely to be more competitive. There were several excellent concerts earlier in the year which will be very hard to choose between but with James Booth, Murakami, Niall Williams and others already making great claims to being the best book I've read this year, plus The Goldfinch which was published last year, there are still Stephen Fry and Danny Baker to come as well as the one I'm possibly expecting the most from, Don Paterson's book on Michael Donaghy, 10 years (quite amazingly) after the early demise of the great man.

So, we will see.

The Fry Chronicles

Stephen Fry, The Fry Chronicles (Michael Joseph)

Stephen Fry only got a 2:1 and so I'm just as clever as him. And rarely can bare statistics have been used to contrive such a misleading conclusion. The very nearly First from Cambridge, top in Shakespeare, two dissertations -on Byron and Forster- bashed off in an evening each just before their due date, because he was appearing in every play that the student body could put on, taking wine in his rooms with friends on long afternoons and all sorts of other activity, does not bear comparison with my steady scraping of an adequate mark at Lancaster at the same time. It was always an outrageous lie, presumably put about by lesser universities, that a 2:1 was a 2:1 and a First a First wherever you took them and I've never seen it more graphically illustrated than here.

When he actually read any books in between all his other projects is hard to say but he remembered it all with an awe-inspiring capacity for academic work that he passes off as 'plausible' roguery. On the one hand it is a shame that academic work can be demeaned by such a mind but in the end I'm glad to see there is a level of intellect that can treat it thus.

This volume of autobiography takes us through Stephen's Cambridge years, recapping bits of the wonderful Moab is My Washpot, and up to the age of 30 when he has already established himself as an entertainment polymath, as writer, actor and comedian. After introductory sections on his addictions to sweets and cigarettes, he divides the book into two larger halves, on Cambridge and Comedy. He leaves us as he makes his first acquaintance with cocaine.

It is at first appealing that Stephen wears his erudition and talent so lightly as to be apologetic about them. In fact, he confirms my uncharitable view that he might have been capable of better. Although I'm as confirmed in my admiration of him as all but the most devoted of his army of followers, I wonder if his role as Oscar in Wilde isn't far and away the most authentic and profound thing that he's done. The journalism collected in Paperweight is marvellous and, of course, his roles in Blackadder and QI, and his general standing as liberal, downright fine chap make him worth his considerable stature each on their own but it all seems to have come to him so easily and without trying that one wonders if he shouldn't have been T.S. Eliot or Wittgenstein or someone of equally colossal status rather than just an all-round good egg.

And this, or something like it, seems to trouble him, too. How unkind I am to say so, but he seems to agree. If he had only once or twice digressed to explain his guilt and self-loathing at his lack of confidence, body shape, and feelings of unworthiness at his privilege and innate facilities, it would have been a touching and disarming aside, making us even more sympathetic to someone we thought we loved enough already. But he does it time and again, apparently needing to stop every so often to enter a confessional to unburden himself of himself. So, big, rich, famous people can be insecure, too. Now we know.

One can hardly call it name-dropping to mention that one's friends are Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson, then Rowan Atkinson and everybody else who played a part in that generation, my generation, of entertainers because their memoirs will be equally pleased to say they worked with Stephen but he is able to include illuminating anecdotes of Alistair Cooke, Harold Pinter, Olivier, Stephen Sondheim and Douglas Adams not for the sake of their names but for the value of the episodes they appear in.

I've rarely read a book that has used so many words I didn't know (maybe half a dozen or so) unless it was either by or about Derrida, Foucault, Wittgenstein or Stephen Hawking but I didn't bother looking them up. The context allows you to guess at a suitable synonym and it's all done in such a casual manner that you know you're not going to be examined on it at the end of term. It's a bit like reading a book in French and, not knowing what an ornithorynque is, register that the author had some kind of domestic pet although you do end up missing the point that it was a duck-billed platypus.

It's every bit the book you thought it would be- so friendly and approachable that you read it into the night long after you would have put other books down. And so you are disappointed to have finished it so soon. Like his hero, or one of them, Alan Bennett, it would be nice to just be able to switch him on and take part in his world but books and plays are finite and finished things and one's own world comes back to you once you've closed its covers. It was no more and no less than the book I had been looking forward to, a nice, warm blanket of kindly, well-judged chat from a world that few of us have the ability, potential or possibility to take part in but they do it for us, these people, and we are thus glad that they take the time to tell us about it.

Although it's adorable and deliciously lovely, it isn't the best in its genre, which will always or until further notice for me be Terry Eagleton's The Gatekeeper, which was much more laugh out loud and had a different view of Cambridge and Oxford Universities. The value of Stephen Fry is that he appreciates things and does things because he loves them without recourse to consultants, systems analysts or even, dare I say, profit motive because he enjoys a profit as much as any of us would if we could come out as far ahead as he has. But The Gatekeeper is the best book I've ever read and so it would be unfair to say that Stephen has again failed to produce the very best work in this somewhat self-regarding field.