At the end of a damp and gloomy week, there is a touch of sun in the sky. And there is some sense of achievement too, as I’ve finished and sent off the five poems to Ian Fosten. All I have to do now is turn up on Friday and say something about why I wrote them. “Because you asked me to” will not be an adequate answer. Dot has decided to come too, so I will have moral support. From there we will head north and stay the night at Toton by invitation, going on to Buxton the following day. I have also finished a sermon for Sunday, based fairly tightly on one I wrote exactly ten years ago.
On the subject of poems, Oliver sent me a brilliant one that he wrote at school. It’s about the moon, and called God’s eye, and has rhymes and similes and everything. Exceptionally good, IMHO, and he was sent to show it to the headmaster. Spoke to him and to Amy last night on the phone: Amy seemed to like the story I wrote for her and found it “very funny”. She thinks it’s my function to be funny, and she’s probably right. I must write her a really funny story.
Speaking of funny stories, I have just finished the current Booker prize winner, The Sense of an Ending, and it’s not funny at all. In fact it was rather disappointing, the plot depending on one character not revealing something that they had no real reason not to reveal and that was not too hard to guess anyway. I suppose it had some interest philosophically, but it belongs to a category that I find increasingly frustrating: well written but basically pessimistic and lacking in any trace of redemption. On a brighter note, I’ve now finished two of Kate Atkinson’s Brodie novels, which were unusual in combining good writing, murder and humour.
Going back in time – while Dot had a long lie-in, not knowing I’d left the house, I spent all of a chilly Tuesday morning in the garage showroom at Wrights, while a man did his best to disguise some scratches on the car caused by a vandal a few weeks ago, and another man tried to correct a problem with the direction of the lights. I think the latter was successful, but I haven’t really been able to try it out yet. Should find out this evening, when we eat at the Banningham Crown with Jessie and Roger.
I did go out to Mundesley library on Wednesday for a Paston-related Reading the Landscape session, during which Dr Richard Hoggett gave half a dozen of us some pointers on how to use computers to research local history. Difficult to pitch, you might think – and indeed one lady (out of an initial company of eight) left almost immediately after discovering it involved computers at a level beyond her expertise. Not sure what her expertise was. Rob had always intended to leave early, but another two also fell by the wayside after getting the direction they required. I could have left then too, but felt I should stay on as the only PHS representative, so I lingered. However, after 90 minutes I departed as well.
On Thursday Dot discovered she had a Nafpht meeting at Thurton, which interrupted our “day off” together. However it gave me a chance to finish off my poems. By way of compensation we went for lunch to Frankie & Benny’s, which seemed to be making an attempt on the Three Horseshoes slow service record until I complained, when the main course miraculously appeared. Staff were very apologetic, and the food, to be fair, was excellent. In the evening we went to the cinema to see The Iron Lady, which featured a tremendous performance by Meryl Streep as Mrs Thatcher but in the end I think got the balance slightly wrong: too much dementia and not enough time given to her earlier life. Still compelling, though.