Up a Bit, Down a Bit, Along a Bit
Posted by P S
16/12/2009
There’s a Dylan Thomas poem that begins: ‘This day winding down now / At God-speeded summer’s end’. The ‘Prologue’, I think, to the Collected Poems.
I had the Dent paperback edition but was given the Dan Jones edition of The Poems, with, curiously, a lurid pink dustjacket, by my sister’s first husband. I have it still. Thank you, Hugh.
This year, then, winding down. A blacker view would posit that it’s the world that is winding down, with politicians still seemingly unable to get a grip on a terminal problem. Their impotence is not just to do with money. Many of them would have to go home and say, in effect: it’s been a good party for many of you. Now the greedy, selfish, heedless bingeing and the unearned sense of infinite entitlement will have to stop. That would go down a storm with the voters, n’est-ce pas, nicht wahr, innit?
Well, well, there is always foreign policy to absorb us. The Iraq inquiry, which looked rather shaky at the outset, possibly looks a little shakier still just lately.
And there is Afghanistan. The United Kingdom is now shunting money that way; and there is a new piety in the media coverage, not least because there is little reported except the deaths of British soldiers and the grief of their families, friends and colleagues.
What is there to say that has not been said countless times before? There are people in positions of power and responsibility who maintain that it’s a war of necessity and a war that can be won. There are others who wonder whether this is not a category error, who cannot understand why we went in the first place and why we are still there.
Another age, another ‘war’. J. G. Farrell’s Troubles concerns Ireland at the close of the Great War and into the early 1920s: ‘The Major only glanced at the newspaper these days, tired of trying to comprehend a situation which defied comprehension, a war without battles or trenches.. Why should one bother with the details: the raids for arms, the shootings of policemen, the intimidations? What could one learn from the details of chaos? Every now and then, however, he would become aware with a feeling of shock that, for all its lack of pattern, the situation was different, and always a little worse.’
The financial crisis, despite its devastating effect in selected areas and the consequent leap in job losses, sometimes threatens to reveal itself as an elaborate and protracted banking bonus scheme. Appearances may, of course, in this case as in others, be deceptive.
And on the plus side? Okay, there are some damned good books around. And yes, there are real bookshops still to be found. Into the Bath branch of Topping & Co. the other day, we went with a list of likely Christmas presents and a readiness to add others. On a table, in the back room, lying in wait, was David Haycock’s Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War, Old Street Publishing, £20. How had I missed the Jenny Uglow review in The Guardian? I can’t say. But – come on, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, C. R. W. Nevinson, Paul Nash and Dora Carrington! The Great War! Nicely covered with protective wrapping (as Topping do with many of their hardbacks) . . . This is what you don’t get with internet shopping. The unintended and the unforeseen: picked up, looked at, browsed through, hefted.
Sold.
And not even a present. Or, at least, not one that's leaving the house . . .