High Cloudlets and other stories

There is somewhere a picture of me in the bus stop at Adlestrop where they have the sign from the old railway station platform and the poem on a plaque on the bench. But the phrase, 'high cloudlets' came to mind looking up onto my own bit of sky yesterday and so the occasional series of photographs that suggest poems continues.

It is the view I get when looking away from my reading matter when outside. As a  supporter, but not member, of the Cloud Appreciation Society, it is often of interest and one can feel the same thought every time as aeroplanes make their way to or from Gatwick (I expect), that I'm glad it's not me up there but it's their choice so maybe they like it.

But yesterday was idyllic without me being as much a fan of summer weather as I was in the 1980's. A walk out to Milton Lock with some informed turf chat followed by a couple of hours with the latest book taken from the stockpile of recent purchases was simply as good as it gets and I've not felt as good for years as a result. It must be the Vitamin D.

The book at the moment is Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy, the Time-Torn Man, which I should have read years ago, intended to but didn't until now. It is, surely, one of the best books I've ever read. It qualifies on all the criteria that such
a high accolade might be decided on such as (necessarily) its subject matter but also the writing, how it works 'as a book' and, most crucially, how much one enjoys reading it. It's hard to imagine anything being more enjoyable than reading this. It prompts me to think about the 'Best Book in the House' idea, which might need to be more of a Top 20 than a Top 6 and probably done in genres first. But we will see. There's 3 x Balzac, 2 x Gogol, Anna Karenina and Laura Cumming on Velasquez lined up before Ivor Gurney arrives and, for all rejoicing, there is live concert music to look forward to in Chichester in early July, so one might look back fondly on lockdown as a time when there was nothing else to do.

--

I had been haunted by the phrase from a poem, 'we are astronomy', wondered where it came from and thought it might be me. It was but I was mis-remembering myself. 

It's from Horror in The Perfect Book,

The madness dispersing inside 

us is astronomy and, for all 

we know, the next cupboard or door

opened will reveal Vincent  Price,

the music that you love to dread

or all your nightmares come at once,

 

I still quite like it but am less sure about it now. It ought to evoke more than vastness and it might be a bit vague about that. Perhaps one day I will reassess myself and find that, actually, once I've put a line through all those poems I have doubts about, the Collected Poems will be a pamphlet of about a dozen.

While having all the virtue-signalling of frugality and self-criticism it might also be an ironic masterpiece to collect so few and possibly even send out that message to others.

If we saw only the very best work that poets did, we might appreciate the poetry more than the poet.

--

Coming soon, the most expedited of deliveries of a most wonderful new disc of Buxtehude, Schutz and Dijkman arrived conveniently before I went out today. It is just one more thing to look forward to in a packed programme.

It is a great thing that some people have so very little to complain about. It's an even better thing that I'm one of them.

    

Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun

 Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun (Faber)

This would have been 'science fiction' in the 1970's but the science has caught up with the fiction and so, by 2021, it is fiction. It's not the big, green monsters with all kinds of lethal weaponry endlessly warring over the planet Xarg, it's much gentler and more powerful than that. I have been told by Science Fiction readers that the inter-galactic settings were used to reflect on human issues. Well, obviously. Human issues are all we know. There was no need of the spacecraft, monsters and ray guns, then. And so, when a proper writer writes it, it is on earth and very specifically about 'being human'.

Klara is an AF, Artificial Friend, bought for teenage Josie, who is seriously ill. Her elder sister has already died, possibly from a similar disorder. What humans most fear, it seems, is loneliness and a robot to interact with is the artificial solution. Hearing the story from Klara's innocent, ever obliging point of view, we might be reminded of The Catcher in the Rye and not wanting to grow up but it is Ishiguro's own The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go that bear the closest comparisons with their parallels of lives sacrificed entirely to provide for others. 

The 'portrait' that Josie is sitting for is not so much a portrait as a statue. But not a statue at all, it is intended that Klara becomes a replacement Josie if the girl, as is likely, dies. For the benefit mainly of The Mother,

what was becoming clear to me was the extent to which humans, in their wish to escape loneliness, made maneuvers that were very complex and hard to fathom,

and if Never Let Me Go was unbearably bleak, Klara is only less so due to the 'humanity' of the AF. While the story is straightforward, the issues it causes to be raised are not. Klara is required to learn Josie's walk, to become her and become so her so completely that she must learn her 'heart', that essence that makes her individual, human and Josie. It's Klara that doesn't think she can so, if the humans thought she could, the line between what's a machine and what is human have become blurred.

In Klara's stilted understanding of the world the smart phones that people habitually refer to are 'oblongs' in the same way that 'Martian' poets, mainly Craig Raine, described books as,

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings,

and, like Holden Caulfield, she becomes fixated on such detail as the Cootings Machine that is polluting the world. While her human associates fall out or are plagued with tensions, rivalries and tantrums, she is unfailingly respectful and caring. If this is Ishiguro's view of human nature it's a dim one but entirely recognizable.

I wasn't completely convinced for at least 250 of its 307 pages but if I can usually remember the premises of novels and how they begin but not always the endings, the point of Klara and the Sun is how it ends which is how it is in Dubliners, The Remains of the Day and all the best fiction. That stands to reason. Otherwise they'd have finished sooner.

It is emotional and one has to wonder why it is. I don't think it's sentimental. That would ruin it. Ishiguro's too good for that. I was moved by it as one is meant to be. Having been shown what being human was all about, much of which had been awful, I wasn't sure whether that made me 'human' or not.

We might be less precious than we thought we were.

Tell It Like It T-I-S and other stories

Good performance by Dominic yesterday, I thought. I didn't watch all seven hours of it but I found it compelling to watch until about halfway. While one can see why there were so many headlines about 'revenge' this morning, that's how it surely was. We could see that from the outside. As has been said, there was only ever one way that the Johnson-Cummings axis of power would end, two very different narcissists very badly matched. One is a brilliant obsessive maniac and the other is an incompetent buffoon (and maniac).

I'm not inclined to join any Dominic Cummings Fan Club, though, because he will forever mostly be the sinister Svengali behind the horrendous referendum and General Election results but he's good at what he does and I like a maverick genius and so, apparently, does he. They are preferable to gormless oafs more suited to being in a play by Molière.

Precious little will come of it, I dare say. Oh, they'll have their own review, run by one of their stool pigeons. It's much the same at Prime Minister's Question Time. Whatever the question is, the answer is that the British people don't want to know about all that and the vaccine is working (because he's had nothing to do with it). 

And although the enemy of my enemy is not entirely a bad thing, two wrongs don't make a right. Conspicuously excused the torrential flak were Mssrs. Sunak and Gove who happen to be two of the current top three in the betting for next Prime Minister (Mr. Starmer being an honourable second favourite but not one I'd put money on), so I don't need to be Laura Kuennsberg to think he's got ideas about being the puppet master again.

I'd rather not be writing about all this. There must be other things more uplifting. But the more one sees this Prime Minister blundering on in his own special boorish way the more I want to use the only outlet to put on record my own same old song, which is Don't Say I Didn't Tell You, which will actually do for a song title.

So, to put in the more uplifting stuff- the postman's doing a fine job, bringing the latest batch of book purchases one by one each day. I'll be just as glad as he will when it's over. Although he has to carry them round, I have the great inconvenience - at my age- of having to be up and about quite early to answer the door for those thicker books that won't go through the letterbox. Maybe that's good for me. Otherwise I have to wait until something or somebody comes on the radio that makes me decide I could do something better. I think it's Mondays that Rod Liddle comes on Times Radio to say what he thinks. Right, that's enough of that. Time to get up. He might be something rather than somebody.

But last night, being in between books, I embarked on what I hope will be an ongoing programme of taking a poet from the shelves and reminding myself. I chose Norman MacCaig and was, of course, not disappointed. He's never less than a pleasure and it's a shame there aren't more that bear comparison with him but not much of his work makes me want to write like him. It's clear, it's fine, it's honest and admirable but it's not encrypted enough. Without wanting to do an Oxford Professor lecture on the subject, I'd ideally like at least the suggestion of other things shifting below the surface. In poetry, telling it only as it t-i-is only gets you 90% of the way there.

But the Second Balzac Festival will be along in due course with three more of La Comédie humaine lined up promisingly for later. That will make 6 or 7 of them I'll have read. I've seen mention that there are 96 of them altogether and they're not short novels. I don't understand how one can both have the time to write that much and have had enough time to witness enough of 'life' to write about.

They might not be top priority with a borrow of the recent Ishiguro due tomorrow and Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy, the Time-Torn Man, which I should have read years ago, ahead of such reliable stock books.

--

This picture was unresistable and I wish I could think of a poem to go with it. As it is, the poet I most associate with photographs of swans is me, as per The Perfect Book. Maybe I'll drag in Yeats and The Wild Swans at Coole at a stretch although these weren't at Coole, they were at Hilsea. Still gorgeous, though. Apologies if the pixels don't make it quite publishable. It is cut from a bigger picture but I couldn't get any closer because they were out in the middle of the water.

In Memoriam Barney Curley

 

Horse racing lost one of its livelier characters when Barney Curley died on Sunday at the age of 81. He knew what he was about even if it wasn't always appreciated by the bookmakers he took for all kinds of money and the hapless Luke Harvey and John McCririck whose job it was on the above occasion to politely enquire when he didn't.

He wasn't famous for Derby or Grand National winners but found his way to a few spectacular betting coups with less talented horses at the smaller tracks, his strongly held opinions being backed up with proper money when he was sure. One of my turf associates tells of working in a High St. betting office many years ago when the screens were flashing up warnings to staff to take no more bets on Barney's horse. They could see something was up and they were no longer interested in laying it at any price. They had been bitten more than once and by then were shy, which bookmakers usually aren't.

While always watchful for what he was up to, I can't remember benefitting from my interest in him. That was the point, really. The likes of me weren't to know.

I don't imagine him to be an easy man but it's an eclectic mix that qualify for an obituary here and it's often mavericks that are so honoured. It's not obvious that there'll be any more like him with racing and betting being more regulated than the old 'wild west' days which, well within my memory, had some unlikely stories, most of which were true. But he was certainly a serious man, having first thought about a career as a Jesuit priest before managing dance bands in Ireland and then taking on allcomers but mostly the authorities in horse racing and devoting much time, energy and money to his charitable work in Zambia.

More detail is available from more first hand sources than me, not least Graham Bradley's book, The Wayward Lad, which is a courageous defence against Barney's uncompromising criticism. Sic Transit Gloria Barney.

--

According to Simon Armitage's lectures, below, there is no need to be a 'maverick' poet because being any kind of poet is maverick enough. I don't know if he stretched that as far as to include Patience Strong but I take his point, having made it myself elsewhere once or twice.

While Simon's approach was exemplary for the most part, I've found it gloomy to think about since. As far as the poetry world goes, he's on the right side and he is well aware that these days the poetry world doesn't go very far into the rest of the world. Thus, it is absurd when the next sectarian clique announces its rejection of the 'mainstream' and their own, truer way, like Anabaptists, some more fundamentalist strain of Maoist but not really The Sex Pistols or punk rock. Apart from a few on its wilder shores, all they did was retrieve rock'n'roll from the overblown absudity it had become.

No, I'm sure Simon's right in suggesting that poetry is a minor enough branch line already without any need for further obscurantism. The mainstream is a wide and flexible thing and perfectly accommodating to all innovation - it hasn't stood still - with the general proviso, 'all you have to be is any good'. That's perhaps where 'experimental' work fails. Experiments that don't work in science are abandoned whereas some of them in poetry are published.

But my sorrow comes from the part of Simon's 'establishment' jobs that mean he has to say what poetry is, or isn't. He is very good at it, being roughly in the same region of the poetry map as I fondly imagine myself to be, but if he piles up a number of familiar ideas that's because they're familiar to me having been doing it for 45 years, they might not all be so familar to his students. One can also have a high ratio of agreement with his definitions and truisms but, with poetry being an elusive thing, being only as good as 95% true might not be true enough. To say something (which Simon doesn't, I'm just going to make something up) like,

Poetry happens at the intersection, on the cusp, where the pre-meditated marshalling of language engages in a chemical reaction with experience

is hopeless though I dare say there are creative writing tutors one could convince of its profundity.

It might think it is or its authors might think so but there's a lor of bad poetry, or poetry that doesn't work for oneself. Poetry is not a pejorative word carrying within it a sense of approval or quality. As in any other endeavour, one is likely to see bad poetry as much as one sees bad football, bad fashion, bad sandwiches or bad Prime Ministers.

With more of it being written than is ever read, or worth reading, an industry waylaid by not knowing why it's doing what it's doing and only serving itself, this is not the Golden Age it is from time to time promoted as being. Whether it is Paul Muldoon going further beyond the peak of his achievement twenty years ago, further than most can follow him into his allusive elsewheres so that a letter to the TLS asks of a long, opaque poem whhen he will publish the answers or whether it is at the bottom end of amateur work that delivers the same dreary worthiness, one can feel left as if the art form, or at least the art form as one knew it, has exhausted itself.

I know that isn't true and there's plenty to re-read and maybe things I haven't even read yet in the 500+ books on the shelves here. I hardly need to buy any more. In them there will be more than enough reminders of why I did it, why I tried and why for all that time it was their example that made the enterprise so rewarding and not my derivative efforts. I hope I haven't arrived here only to reflect it was all a waste of time.

--

Which leads, a bit tangentially, to the book I'll finish tomorrow that I was sent in error by a seller some years ago. It wasn't even cost effective to send it back or anywhere else, which I would have gladly done, and so I could keep it. I didn't want it then but thought I'd read it now as a further avalanche of a forthcoming second Balzac Festival pile in with Anna Karenina (no, I've not read Tolstoy), the Hardy biography and then that of Ivor Gurney.

It's The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, written in 1774 when he was 24, and thus very high-end Romanticism. So much so that, I find, he later did his best to disown it and regretted the early celebrity it brought him. I don't know so much. It's not a bad book at all and I'm glad to have read some Goethe. It is necessarily precious, it being of its time and not having the same distance and irony we imagine we've developed since. Or, does it not and, have we really.

Taken on its own terms, it's fine thing. I'm tempted to say that Germany invented Romanticism and look what that mutated into and Italy invented Classicism which comes out as slightly more respectable only by losing their race to the bottom.

But I was much taken by Heinrich, a very minor character, who looks back at the time,

he speaks so fondly of, when he was in the madhouse and totally unaware of a thing,

in the words of his mother. It compares well, I dare say,  with the agonies of Youing Werther, so very much in love, it seems unrequitedly and yet it might have been.

That's where your poetry is.

--

I am most gratified to have written a short story of about 4500 words. I don't know if I'll read it. It's better if I leave it as a first draft and allow myself to think it is what I think it's like rather than find it isn't. Prose is like that. Endlessly improvable and Heaven Knows how Graham Swift, Sarah Waters or Julian Barnes do it.

And I've been maintaining a chess rating of above 1900 at all disciplines for more than a week, glancing into the abyss that takes one back down to 1800 but avoiding it. I'm either riding a tightrope luckily or maybe I've learnt something. It's the same as poetry, though. one enjoys the good times enormously and when it's not so good one reflects on its meaninglessness. They both appear to keep one from the madhouse, temporarily at least, for better or worse.

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'.

Days Like This

 One hopes for days like this and then one comes along.

The main reason for celebration is the second dose of vaccine which seemed so far off when first booked but came round in due course, having waited patiently. It is a heart-breaking and heart-warming experience with the helpful, cheerful volunteers and the kindly nurses. It is so well-run that it can't possibly be anything to do with our vainglorious Prime Minister and yet his otherwise inexplicable popularity is on the back of its great success as if he personally had invented it, arranged all the appointments and performed the injections himself.  But what really happened is that he underpaid the heroic NHS staff that saved his life among so many others. Incorrigible isn't the word, it's nowhere near damning enough.

So, one didn't at all mind walking home in drizzle. I like drizzle, I quite like rain in a number of circumstances. I have no conception of why people think that a holiday on a sun lounger in a resort that sells lager and cocktails in happy hours is essential to them but it looks like the same delusion that makes others, some of them the same people, think that the football results matter.

 

In the meantime, weeks can pass without anything getting written, with nothing that presents itself as worth writing. I had imagined that having all the time in the world would bring with it the chance to be a 'writer', whatever sort of writer I chose to be or of whatever ideas came to mind, but one needs something one believes in to write or else there is simply no point. 

It is more worthwhile to read good books than write bad ones and having torn through Alexei Sayle's percipient version of his early life, finished the Collected Hardy stories and gratefully completed my reading of the novels of Rosemary Tonks, I was waiting for Prof. Armitage's Oxford lectures. I had fetched from upstairs some of Oscar and a book by Goethe that I was once sent by mistake. I had ordered more Balzac and the Hardy biography I've been meaning to read for 15 years since it was published.

Those books will pile up as a bulwark against any early summer shortage because the Armitage book arrived today. I should be able to tell you about it next week, including why poetry is a 'vertical art'.  

But also, on days like this, when one gets the creative capability, or thinks one has, when it seems possible and suddenly anything seems possible, one must cash in. Out of thin air, an idea for a story arrived, I know not from where, and I added 700 words this morning to the 1800 I did yesterday and I haven't lost faith in it yet. Then, again in the way that 'inspiration' (as it were) comes not single spies but in battalions, a pop song was gifted to me and I knocked out two verses and the chorus, according to my Nile Rodgers-type formula. And then the Shakespeare biography work was miraculously woken from its coma. 

This time next year, then, I'm confidently expecting to be riding high in the hit parade as well as readily available in your nearest Waterstones in the fiction and biography sections if not the usually deserted corner they find for poetry, too. Or, on the other hand, the significance of a day like this might only have been the second dose of vaccine, which is thing I'm most grateful for.

The enjoyment to be had from the writing is in the doing of it. Unless it's prose fiction and then it's drudgery and almost certain to be as tortuous to read as it was to write. And, by the time any of it sees itself in print, it's long over and done with.

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.