Brag, sweet tenor bull ...

A beautiful, cold, blue-skied November morning in Birkenhead, down for coffee and newspaper in the new Caffe Nero, I read, to the background sound of Classic FM-type music, how much we are a client of America and that this is where the true loss of our sovereignty is to be located, not in our membership of the EU. And the football, we cannot reconcile ourselves to our new, modest place in the world. A nice piece by Simon Jenkins about how he was taught at the age of ten by the late Vernon Scannell who died in his eighties the other day.

I was listening to Ted Hughes' reading of Four Quartets this afternoon ... the backward half-look again ... but even Hughes cannot conceal the easy sanctimony of some passages. I must return to Leavis's critique of the poem. I listen to it warily enough becaue it still has enormous power and its rhythms get into your brain, which, while it shows that it is real poetry, sometimes you just don't want it in your brain. Years ago I read Basil Bunting talking to this effect, how as a poet he needed to keep his distance. As to the allegd murderer, Peter Tobin, and the primitive terror, the first instinct is one of a kind of glee or delight to hear that he has been attacked in prison: it is an instinct that I vigorously disown, but it starts up and reveals our origins to ourselves. I expect there are more advanced souls than me who have no such instinct, and I am glad of that ...