Hogmanay

Which, as some cynic remarked, is the Scots term for people being sick on the pavements in Glasgow. My warmest memories of the occasion are before the liver-punishing years of my late teens and early twenties, too often spent in complete drooling oblivion of The Bells as we call midnight up here. As a wee boy it was something that impinged even more than Christmas. Jings, I remember when my faither worked on Christmas, so much of a non-event [suspect as a relic of the garish garments of the Scarlet Woman enthroned upon the Seven Hills, I imagine, even in the 1950s.] The house was beezed up till it shone, a table held bottles [dark rum and whisky for the men, advocaat for the women; this was a faintly alcoholic thinnish custard and with greatly sophisticated daring they put a wee cherry in it on a stick] and plates of sausage rolls but predominantly shortbread and black bun, a confection described by R. L. Stevenson as 'inimical to life.' We got to sit up in our pyjamas and waited for the magic moment when the New Year was ushered in by the fog-horns and sirens of the shipping in the docks at Grangemouth. That, rather than the chimes of Big Ben, is what I associate with the season. Tonight, however, I will, having spoken on the 'phone to my son and my 'flu-struck wee sister, have a judicious dram or three of the praedict Scotch Malt Whisky Soc's 44.38 [61.1% vol. 'A powerful nose--nail polish, treacle, golden syrup and caramelised sugar. Much kinder with water--scented wood and crême brulée. Hot and spicy taste at full strength. Velvety sweet with water. Flavours of Christmas pudding.' All perfectly accurate in descriptive terms; if you want pretentious wine merchant's style try this account of a 1968 Chateau Lynch-Bages: 'Just the wine for those who like the smell of Verdi. Dark colour, swashbuckling bouquet and ripe flavour. Ready for drinking, but will hold well showing a gradual shift in style as it ages into graceful discretion.' That just calls out to be read aloud by Francis Urquhart, does it not?] and get to bed before the hour which has lost its magic and comes attended by too many ghosts for comfort. Tennyson managed a defiant paean which you can thrill to if you forget everything that came after it including two world wars, the Shoah, various other genocides, starvation, pestilence etc, etc, etc.

'Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.'

Bildungsbürgertum

Or the clerisy in Coleridge's terms, the German term, admirably succinct, for the more periphrastic 'educated middle classes.' This has always been a bit of a problem in this septic isle, witness the entry in Fowler's Modern English Usage under intelligent) (intellectual:

'While an intelligent person is merely one who is not stupid or slow-witted, an intellectual person is one in whom the part played by the mind as distinguished from the emotions & perceptions is greater than in the average man. An intellectual person who was not intelligent would be, though not impossible, a rarity; but an intelligent person who is not intellectual we most of us flatter ourselves that we find in the looking-glass. Intelligent is usually a patronising epithet, while intellectual is a respectful one, but seldom untinged by suspicion or dislike.'

That is from the corrected 1937 edition but what a can of sociological worms it opens up even today. Whole tranches of social and intellectual snobbery are revealed and some of us can remember the distaste with which those who knew that Aquinas was not a mineral water withdrew the hem of their garment from the rich but crass beneficiaries of the Grantham Gargoyle's monetarist policies back in the 80s and early 90s. As the grandchild of proletarian autodidacts I don't see culture/learning as the prerogative of the middle class anyway and would like to see it very much more widespread and much more highly valued than it is today. You have to warm, however, to the story told me tonight by an old colleague, umquhile Head of German at my last school, anent his Christmas in Germany with teacher friends and their two twenty-something children, back home for the festival. On Boxing Day they went as a family to see the new film version of Mann's Buddenbrooks and then repaired to an inn to discuss it as a group (the daughter had read it but the son hadn't) and then the oldies went home while the youngsters went on to a disco. All treated as perfectly natural and high culture blending equally naturally with the bopping: what more could you ask?

Light Relief

'English History has always been subject to Waves of Pretenders. These have usually come in small waves of about 2--an Old Pretender and a Young Pretender, their object being to sow dissension in the realm, and if possible confuse the Royal issue by pretending to be heirs to the throne.
Two pretenders who now arose were Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck, and they succeeded in confusing the issue absolutely by being so similar that some historians suggest they were really the same person (i.e. the Earl of Warbeck.)
Lambert Simnel (the Young Pretender) was really (probably) himself, but cleverly pretended to be the Earl of Warbeck. Henry VII therefore ordered him to be led through the streets of London to prove that he really was.
Perkin Warbeck (the Older and more confusing Pretender) insisted that he was himself, thus causing complete dissension till Henry VII had him led through the streets of London to prove that he was really Lambert Simnel.
The punishment of these memorable Pretenders was justly similar, since Perkin Warmnel was compelled to become a blot on the king's skitchen, while Perbeck was made an escullion. Wimneck, however, subsequently began pretending again. This time he pretended that he had been smothered in early youth and buried under a stair-rod while pretending to be one of the Little Princes in the Tower. In order to prove that he had not been murdered before, Henry was reluctantly compelled to have him really executed.
Even after his execution many people believed that he was only pretending to have been beheaded, while others declared that it was not Warmneck at all but Lamkin, and that Permnel had been dead all the time really, like Queen Anne.'

This went down surprisingly well with Year 8 history classes who 'did' Tudors & Stuarts. Mind you, they were only given it after the end of year exam......

(Pause....)

I've never been remotely impressed by the late H. Pinter. I remember a visit to an almost empty Edinburgh theatre, probably the Playhouse, in the early to mid 70s for a performance of The Homecoming. I had gone with friends who were then kindly seeing to it that I didn't, as a consequence of getting knocked back by a stunningly lovely, witty and intelligent Ulsterwoman, spend each and every evening in Willie Ross's howff, the Oxford Bar. I recall, apart from the excruciating tedium, the member of the St John's Ambulance Brigade in attendance at the back [were they mandatory features in theatres, as they were on the football terraces, or just at catatonia-inducing productions?] who punctuated the first act with yawns and groans of 'Dearie me!' and 'Oh dear, oh dear!'; and then the interval when we were first at the bar [not difficult given the tiny numbers in the theatre] and where we stayed on for the remainder of the performance. I suppose this makes me some sort of philistine in the metrocentric eyes of the Guardian and Independent, but what the hell, archy, what the hell.

Getting Over The Christmas

Actually it was pretty OK, really and Santa was very good to me: clothing, alcohol (especially the Scotch Malt Whisky Society 44.38, Hot & Spicy Christmas Pudding, which has to be one of the best malts I've ever tasted) and books. Obviously my friends and family know me well by now. The boy gave me Paul Avrich's The Modern School: Anarchism & Education in the USA and my wee sister gave me the new life of Chic Murray. What more could one ask?
I still find this gem from Myles na gCopaleen a perfect summation of what the season oft time is and just a brilliant piece of writing:

(Enters public house on St Stephen's Day, obviously shattered with alcohol. Lowers self into seat with great care, grips table to arrest devastating shake in hands. Calls for glass of malt. Spills water all over table. Swallows drink with great clatter of teeth against glass. Shakily lights cigarette. Begins to look around. Fixes on adjacent acquaintance. Begins peroration.)
'Bedam but you know, people talk a lot about drink, whiskey and all the rest of it. There's always a story, the whiskey was bad, the stomach was out of order and so on. Do you know what I'm going to tell you....?
(Pauses impressively. The eye-pupils, almost dissolved in their watery lake, rove about with sickly inquiry. Accepts silence as evidence of intense interest.)
'Do you know what it is?'
(Changes cigarette from normal inter-digital position, holds it aloft vertical, taps it solemnly with index finger of free hand.)
'Do you see that? That thing there? Cigarettes. Them lads. Do you know what I'm going to tell you...?'
(Is suddenly overcome by paroxysm of coughing; roots benightedly for handkerchief as tears of pure alcohol course down the ruby cheeks. Recovers.)
'Them fellas there. Them fellas has me destroyed....'
(Collapses into fresh paroxysm. Emerges again.)
'I wouldn't mind that at all (indicates glass). I know what I have there. There's eatin' an' drinkin' in that. Damn the harm that done annywan, bar been taken to excess. But this...'
(Again points to cigarette, looks of sorrow and horror mingling on 'face'.)
'Them lads has me destroyed.'

Industrial Strength Humbug, With Or Without The 'Bah!'

According to the online Guardian (and yes, as Orwell said of the Telegraph, just because it reports something doesn't mean that it isn't true) Channel 4 has invited the President of Iran to deliver its 'alternative' Christmas broadcast today. Alternative to what? Yes, I know that they put up an alternative to Betty von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha each year but how alternative is another head of state? Of a theocratic state? Of a theocratic, gay-murdering, union-crushing, union-leader-torturing state? Here's an idea for the plonkers at Channel 4 to mull over as they foregather at the Groucho: thinking outside your box should lead in this instance to speaking truth to power and Ahmadinajad is power incarnate, power of a very ugly sort, uglier far than that wielded by Betty. Let's hear from the gays in Tehran, let's hear from the union members. And if that costs too much, give the mike to some of the many thousands who've been dumped on the unemployed scrap-heap in the UK thanks to the greed and incompetence of capitalist banking. But they're just ordinary joes, yes? Not got the buzz and pizzazz of some celebrity, have they?

Seasonal Verse

Anent the velleities that the season sometimes stirs in the lapsed, here's evidence from Thomas 'The Village Atheist' Hardy that even the most adamant can be, temporarily, moved. Written in 1915 and collected under the title Moments of Vision. I didn't feel it should be included in the same paragraph, never mind the same post, as Mgr Ratzinger.

The Oxen

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
'Now they are all on their knees,'
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
'Come; see the oxen kneel

'In the lonely barton by yonder coomb
Our childhood used to know,'
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

Enjoy what is to be enjoyed, thole what is to be tholed, and may the former outweigh the latter in your lives.

Sadly, Snake Oil

In my mis-spent youth I studied theology [don't ask], my only claim to any intellectual distinction being the vicarious one that I was taught by a man who had himself been taught by Karl Barth. For some years I was a card-carrying Christian. Today I know that I will well up when the treble solo begins, signalling the start of the service from King's College, but that has more to do with my pushing in to my seventh decade than any residual stirrings of the faith of our fathers. Sadly, because I admire the work of Bach, Donne, Hopkins, Rublev, Tallis, Wren, Monteverdi, and many others, it remains simply snake oil. High grade snake oil in some instances but snake oil for all that. And you can always rely on the Holy See to step in and knock any nascent yearnings for a quick blast of the Sarum Rite sharply on the head. Lesbian and gay people going about their own lives and loves are presented as on a par with climate change in the life-on-earth threatening stakes. What patent cobblers. What about religious types who're happy to destroy a tube carriage full of commuters or the doctors at an abortion clinic? How risky are they, Benedict?

That's My Boy!

Card from my son shows Santa and small boy, the former saying, 'You saw Mommy kissing no-one, understand?' Inside the makers have printed 'Peace, Love, Understanding' below which the boy has inked in, Fuck off, hippy. I must have done something right with his upbringing....

Deck The Halls

After we had our tea yesterday my wee sister, brother-in-law and I set off in their car to tour the town and its satellites, keen to view the exterior Christmas lighting and wondering in a socio-anthropological kind of way if the financial crisis might have damped the festive spirit a tad. I'm happy to say that it had not. There was lots of seriously naff exuberance on display, though none quite in the league of the illustration. The most excessive, baroque extravaganzas were to be found in that area described by one contemporary novelist as 'The Bosnia of Falkirk.' Some of the houses must have been a serious drain on the National Grid and one was probably visible from Alpha Centauri. As we drove down the street in the council scheme where we had spent our childhood my wee sister remarked, 'Look at those reindeer in the flat next to ours' and it was strange to hear that 'ours' over forty years after we moved from the place. We went on to recall the 'fairy lights' of our 1950s childhood, though Very lights might have been more appropriate: they were thick, chunky bulbs strung on strong black cable, hung around where a picture rail would have been if our council flat had run to such a thing, looking as if they had once graced the engine-room of a dreadnought or been used to light the dug-out in Journey's End. They had been painted in jolly primary colours and we thought they were magnificent.

Midwinter Spring

'..is its own season/ sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,/ suspended in time, between pole and tropic./When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,/the brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,/in windless cold that is the heart's heat,/reflecting in a watery mirror/a glare that is blindness in the early afternoon.' Already the sun is dipping and blindingly bright for all that. And we approach the shortest day which always reminds me of another poet. The shift to the Gregorian calendar wrecked Dr Donne's conceit in the title and throughout his verses but I love the opening of his Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day, Being The Shortest Day.

'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's-feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.

WTF?

The blog Lenin's Tomb [best place for the bastard] has a post up on what it calls 'The Greek Intifada'. Perhaps the swuppies' hot flush for clerical fascism has overwhelmed their tenuous grip on reality yet again. The Greek insurrection is anarchist-led, you tosser, and no dressing it up in other clothes will wash with anyone who can see through your mendacity. Get tae fuck.

Breakfasts #2

The alarming breakfast, a paradox of a mixture with its blend of the healthy fruit and the lethal booze, was, of course, the good Doctor's. Mind you, given that he got up about 3pm most days this was no early jolt to the system. Beats muesli, though.

Breakfasts

I had always considered Coleridge's Sunday breakfast of six fried eggs and a glass of laudanum and soda to be heroic until I came across this one. Not just for Sundays either but taken on a daily basis.

One pot of coffee
One Wild Turkey in a tumbler with only two ice cubes
Two bloody marys
Two large glasses of orange juice
Two Heinekens
Four pieces of toast
Four whole grapefruit
Six eggs
Eight sausages

Guess whose. Answer tomorrow.

'Social Unrest'

['Liberty Leading The People' 21st century version.]


On Monday of this week Dominique Strauss-Kahn, managing director of the International Monetary Fund no less, made a speech in which he suggested that unless the financial system is reformed to benefit the many rather than the few then the anger of the unemployed and the other victims of capitalist greed could well turn to violence. Indeed it could and it will be no bad thing if the rotten edifice is brought down at last and a new world built in the shell of the old. Chances are that this time round, with no savings to cushion the pain of unemployment and tightened belts, indeed with vast consumer debt to exacerbate matters, life will be much harsher for everyone. People will become very angry and they'll know exactly where to direct their anger, too.

Caveat Venditor!

Yesterday we had Dickens and his relevance to the day's news events and now it's the Over-reacher himself, Christopher Marlowe. Some punter has had his attempt to sell his soul turned down by Ebay and now he'll never be in the agonised position of Dr Faustus,


O lente, lente currite noctis equi:


The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,


The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.


O I'll leap up to my God: who pulls me down?


See see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament....





Of course, on a less full-blown tragic note there is the case of that other seller of his soul, Max Beerbohm's Nineties poetaster, Enoch Soames. Max's account of His Satanic Majesty gives, perhaps, a closer version of what the Ebay seller might have expected than the Mephistophilis of Marlowe.


"They made a queer contrast in that sunlit room--Soames sitting haggard in that hat and cape which nowhere at any season had I seen him doff, and this other, this keenly vital man, at sight of whom I more than ever wondered whether he were a diamond merchant, a conjuror, or the head of a private detective agency....I was sure he was not an Englishman, but what was his nationality? Though his jet-black hair was en brosse, I did not think he was French...His eyes were handsome, but--like the Vingtième's tables--too narrow and set too close together. His nose was predatory, and the points of his moustache, waxed up beyond his nostrils, gave a fixity to his smile. Decidedly, he was sinister. And my sense of diascomfort in his presence was intensified by the scarlet waistcoat which tightly, and so unseasonably in June, sheathed his ample chest. This waistcoat wasn't wrong merely because of the heat, either. It was somehow all wrong in itself. It wouldn't have done on Christmas morning. It would have struck a jarring note at the first night of Hernani."

In fact, forget the poor geezer who's left with an unwanted soul and get hold of a copy of Seven Men and give yourself a treat with Enoch Soames. Ideal for cheering up a dreich winter evening.

Cometh The Hour, Cometh The Man

In these interesting times of ours the news that pours in through the airwaves has much food for thought to offer a literary cove. And it's not just because we are approaching Christmas that this particular literary cove's mind has been turning to Dickens. There's Purnell's plan for the undeserving poor for a start with its echo of the attitude to the 'surplus population' maintained by the surviving partner of Scrooge & Marley: 'Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?' And given the state of play in our unequal 'society,' with memories of the flummery of the State Opening still fresh, there's this from The Chimes:

O let us love our occupations,

Bless the squire and his relations,

Live upon our daily rations,

And always know our proper stations.

Finally, today, in the light of the duping of innumerable very clever bankers, the people who were, in their own estimation at least, Masters of the Universe, by an American hedge-fund operator and the loss of billions of ordinary people's money, including their pension funds, the mind turns at once to Mr Merdle. Perhaps the clever bankers should have listened to Jonas Chuzzlewit after all: "Here's the rule for bargains: 'Do other men, for they would do you.' That's the true business precept." Hollow laughter, as they say.

Soi Disant...

In his excellent compilation, The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten has the story of a New Yorker who, to celebrate making his fortune, buys a yacht and goes around in a captain's uniform only to elicit this response from his mother: "By me you're a captain and by you you're a captain, but by a captain are you a captain?" This came to mind after I'd read the nth report on the Greek riots to use the term 'self-styled anarchists.' I suppose this expression is being used to suggest that lots of the people lobbing mollies at the rozzers are not really au courant with the works of Bakunin, Malatesta or Rocker and are just opportunists using the riots as an excuse for a rumble and a spot of arson. That said, it does seem to be overdoing it to use the phrase so frequently and as a catch-all; I'm pretty sure from what I've heard recently from anarchist friends here that the movement is strong and well-informed in Greece and definitely hard-core when it comes to direct action. Large numbers will be, to coin a phrase, objectively anarchist and maybe the media don't like that idea one wee bit.

Songs To Fan The Flames Of Discontent

This week saw the end of the course I've been attending on political song. While not in the same league as throwing mollies at the filth, it has done a bit of consciousness-raising in areas that were not previously associated by me with the directly political. One of the best things to come out of it was the awareness of the Centre for Political Song at Glasgow Caledonian University, whose director gave us a workshop. Have a look at it and then go to their library site to see the extent and quality of their holdings of Scottish lefty archives. Very impressive and somewhere I'll be visiting in the new year.

Who Controls The Blame Pattern?

The media largely, is the answer, and we all, as the late Utah Phillips once said, assign blame in our own best interest, generally downwards to 'benefit scroungers' as the Daily Heil would say. He suggests that we should be assigning blame upwards, not to those getting a little 'something for nothing' but those getting a whole lot of something for nothing at all. This was brought to mind by a newspaper cutting seen yesterday: 'Tory Calls For Those On Benefits To Be Sterilised.' Here's a relevant little verse ['the rods' are the undercarriage of box-cars on which hobos lay while hitching a ride]:

The bum on the rods is hunted down
As the enemy of mankind;
The other is driven around to his club
And feted, wined and dined.
And they who curse the bum on the rods
As the essence of all that is bad
Will greet the other with a winning smile
And extend him the hand so glad.
The bum on the rods is a social flea
Who gets an occasional bite;
The bum on the plush is a social leech,
Blood-sucking day and night.
The bum on the rods is a load so light
That his weight we scarcely feel,
But it takes the labor of dozens of men
To furnish the other a meal.
As long as you sanction the bum on the plush,
The other will always be there,
But rid yourself of the bum on the plush
And the other will disappear.
Then make an intelligent, organized kick,
Get rid of the weights that crush;
Don't worry about the bum on the rods--
Get rid of the bum on the plush!

A Good Kicking

William Hazlitt, in 1825, savages the Tory Quarterly Review:
"This Journal, then, is a depository for every species of political sophistry and personal calumny. There we meet the slime of hypocrisy, the varnish of courts, the cant of pedantry, the cobwebs of the law, the iron hand of power. Its object is as mischievous as the means by which it is pursued are odious. The intention is to poison the sources of public opinion and of individual fame, to pervert literature from being the natural ally of freedom and humanity into an engine of priestcraft and despotism, and to undermine the spirit of the English constitution and the independence of the English character. The Editor and his friends systematically explode every principle of liberty, laugh patriotism and public spirit to scorn, resent every pretence to integrity as a piece of singularity or insolence, and strike at the root of all free inquiry or discussion by running down every writer as a vile scribbler and a bad member of society, who is not a hireling or a slave. No means are stuck at in accomplishing this laudable end. Strong in patronage, they trample on truth, justice and decency. They claim the privilege of court-favourites. They keep as little faith with the public as with their opponents."
Thank goodness today's media aren't like that.........

'Marked RP'

Speaking of accent, as we were, there's a story about Nancy Mitford during the Second World War. She was doing her bit by fire-watching and had been invited to give lectures on the subject to trainees. But this lasted for only a short time and the invitations ceased. The organisers had to tell her why: "It's your accent. It irritates people so much they'd like to put you on the fire." Or 'fah'....Interesting that F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, went up to Wadham College, Oxford in 1890 from a day school in Birkenhead with a marked local accent which 'in about six weeks' he had converted to Received Pronunciation; compare that with Old Fettesian A.C.L. Blair adapting a sort of Estuarine-speak as he made his way to the glittering prizes. It's a rum old world.

Hyperlect On The Telephone

The Today programme on the wireless got the day off to a stunning start by broadcasting the telephone conversation between Mrs E. Windsor, aka von Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and the then Lord Provost of Edinburgh in 1958, to mark the opening of operator-free, direct dialling. The forelock tugging deference on his part was obviously par for the course then and, grimly, now but what struck this listener most forcefully was Ma'am's accent of fifty years ago. She must, over the decades, have been using the same kind of down-market elocutionist George Osborne is reportedly employing to take the cut-glass edge off his own tones for back then she was straight out of Love In A Cold Climate. It was quite the most depressing thing I've heard on the airwaves this week, and that's saying something: the whole moth-eaten charade of the State Opening just a day or so back and then this dire reminder of the deeply entrenched class basis of our 'society.'

Debased Coinage

You can see why R. S. Thomas had no TV and did not read the papers. On PM a few minutes back some rozzer who has supp'd full with the horrors of the Murdoch press called Karen Matthews, mother of the schoolgirl now seemingly abducted by herself and accomplice, 'pure evil.' For fuck's sake. What term, then, do you use to describe Dr Josef Mengele?

Residues

When, five years ago, I left teaching, my colleagues presented me with the collected poems of R.S. Thomas. I had long admired his austerely beautiful work and it was with keen anticipation that I borrowed Byron Rogers' biography, The Man Who Went Into The West, from the local library. I have only dipped in to the opening chapter and it does not disappoint. Here he is on poets and their distaste for biographies.
"It is as if [poets] fear the life, the sheer ordinariness of experience, might diminish the art. The old Yeats, looking back over the splendours of his early verse, wrote in The Circus Animals' Desertion,
'Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till.....'
But the life is the raw material out of which the poems come. Philip Larkin's long-suffering girlfriend, Monica Jones, told his biographer Andrew Motion, 'He cared a tenth as much about what happened around him as what was happening inside him.' The irony is that such a man, an intensely private individual, then wrote, often recklessly, about his own relationships, despairs, joy, and not within the decent obscurity of fiction but in the nakedness of poetry. And poetry, as Alan Bennett said, is a public-address system.
The more personal it is the more the poet goes to extremes when he faces the certainty that he will no longer be in control of its raw material. Larkin gave instructions in his will that his papers and diaries be shredded (also his copies of Swish and Nasty Nymphos, or whatever they were). Hardy burned his, and those of his first wife, but then had a brainwave. His first biography, by the second Mrs Hardy, appeared with remarkable speed, the first volume within months of his death, and it came with the imprimatur of being the authorised and definitive version. Only Hardy had taken one further precaution: he had written it himself, then burned the manuscript. The Hardys seem at the end to have had more bonfires than the retreating SS, the last being when the second burned the first Mrs Hardy's corsets."

Brilliant. Buy it this Christmas.

On This Day.....

....in 1956, Rosa Parks kept her bus seat after a hard day's work.