I am not at all sure that the reunification of the siblings has been a good idea.
So far we have had the still-ongoing dispute over bed ownership, an anguished midnight phone call enquiring whether I was really going to sell the early-edition Harry Potter books, which I am not, in fact it had never occurred to me, and a complaint that one of them, mentioning no names, had left a rotting kebab under his bed.
They appear to be driving one another into paroxysms of alarm, all of which require arbitration. I was very glad to get up this morning and recall that in fact it was the middle of the night in Canada and they would all be asleep for the next couple of hours at least.
It is merely a matter of time before the She Loves Me More Than You debate rears its ugly head again, and they start telling one another that they have been adopted.
In other news, I have started doing my first assignment for the Master’s’s qualification. This is to read about fifty poems, which they have emailed to us, and then write one. This has to be an Elegy, with the theme of The Ocean. You can read mine when I have finished it.
This led to a spirited debate about poetry on the taxi rank, because you can’t do anything private there, it would not be a good place to indulge a penchant for dodgy pornography. We do not often talk about poetry on the taxi rank, it is not like discussing what rotters the council are, which happens quite regularly. Hence it was interesting to hear everybody else’s opinion.
We decided unanimously that our favourite poets, in no particular order, were Spike Milligan, Mike Harding and Pam Ayres, with somebody expressing a vague liking for John Cooper Clarke, and John quite liked some bloke from Barnsley whose name he had forgotten. I checked afterwards but none of these make an appearance on the Cambridge reading list, unless the bloke from Barnsley is there, since we don’t know his name. I thought this was disappointing.
I have read some of the poems Cambridge has sent. They do not make merry reading, absolutely nothing to compare with the glorious ringing tones of On The Ning Nang Nong. Also I do not think you ought to be allowed to write poems about being miserable unless you add a last verse about how you cheered yourself up afterwards. Sylvia Plath should have been given a kitten to look after and sent on some brisk walks, and maybe the literary world would have been spared a lot of moaning.
What rarified academic activity, fancy reading poems, how middle class and sophisticated I am getting, these pages are really going upmarket. Anyway, apart from that you will not be surprised to hear that it is raining. The washing is dangling limply above the stove, and it has been so gloomy that I actually lit it, the stove, not the washing, obviously. It wasn’t cold, I just didn’t at all like the idea of trying to dry myself with a damp bath towel later.
However, I have taken my own advice about adding a cheery postscript to a moan, and can tell you that the wet weather has made some people cheerful. I took the lady from the ice cream shop home in my taxi and she said that the lashing rain meant that business had been so rubbish she had been given the rest of the day off. She was very pleased, and, I think, secretly hoping that it would last a few days.
It isn’t exactly desperately needed. The flip-flop-swallowing mud on the fells has only just dried out enough to be a mere squelch, which I suppose qualifies as a drought in the Lake District.
I hope we get some drought again tomorrow.
