Sunday, October 13th
Reading in Martial’s “Epigrams” this morning:
Why you ask, whenever you show your face
is there a public stampede, a vast unpopulated space?
The answer – you may as well know it –
Is that you overact the poet:
A grave fault,
Ligurinus, and one which could easily earn you assault.
The tigress robbed of her young,
The scorpion’s tail, the heat-crazed puff-adder’s tongue
Are proverbial, but you’re worse;
For who can endure ordeal by verse?
I could not have said it better myself. Reading this early in the morning rather set me up for the day, and I decided to have a shower. I’m almost ashamed to admit it, but I’ve not bothered for a few days. Almost, but not completely, because it’s of bugger all consequence.
Melissa telephoned. As is often the case, her timing was bad. I was cutting my toenails. I like to do that post-shower, if they need it.
Cook – a disconcertingly and obviously happy Cook, I’m not sure why she should be happy – delivered a splendid roast chicken Sunday dinner this evening, with sweet potatoes roasted rather than the usual. She ain’t a bad ‘un, in all honesty, though she can be dreadfully annoying at times.
Monday, October 14th
Woke at 5.30, had a pee, then went back to sleep for a couple of hours and had weird dreams. I seem always to have weird dreams if I go back to sleep around that sort of time. But I was too sleepy to stay awake. Got up around 8 but I couldn’t get going, so went for a walk with Winnie. It didn’t help much.
I need some new underpants. This is probably not something usually deemed worthy of a diary entry, but my life is a lot of little things, and nothing it seems is too small sometimes, even when it’s something of little or no consequence, though underpants are not unimportant.
I don’t look at many literary journals these days, because they’re usually quite boring, but when I do I often notice things called “prose poems”. However, I have to say there’s more often than not nothing at all poetic about these paragraphs of very straightforward prose. Surely something with the word “poem” in the label should have something vaguely poetic about it.
Melissa telephoned. This is a diary entry also of negligible consequence, and I may be starting to question the entire enterprise, but probably it’s too late to stop now, and there’s always posterity to consider.
Wednesday, October 16th
Awoke from a dream in which I was playing catch-ball with a delightful damsel I had never seen before in my life. I would throw the ball and she would catch it, and then she would throw the ball and I would catch it. This went on for some time before I woke up. Where is my copy of “The Interpretation of Dreams”, I wonder. This dream may be of consequence. But what on earth am I saying?
Melissa telephoned. It was a weather report. Does she not realize I have windows to look out of?
Thursday, October 17th
Jethro took the carriage in to the local carriage-maintainers for its annual pre-winter overhaul. We don’t want any wheels falling off in the snow! But the price they charge for what amounts to doing next to nothing beyond standing around admiring it and having a fag is outrageous. It’s like they’re printing money. I suppose it’s of little consequence, but it would matter a lot if I was poor.
Melissa telephoned.
Received from the postman a new slim volume of poetry by a chap I’ve known and met with intermittently over the course of some 20 years. I shan’t name him, for reasons not completely clear to me, but he is of the Irish genre and persuasion and has had in the past something of a reputation as a ladies’ man. I like his poetry most of the time, and I like most of this latest effusion. It’s a little slight, perhaps, and a smidge over-personal for my usual tastes, but it’s done with eloquence and a light touch, and I shall give it a mental “tick”, and an 8 out of 10. That’s good, because most verse these days barely merits a 3.
Friday, October 18th
Apropos of nothing at all it occurred to me today that I attract dysfunctional people like honey attracts the bee. Over recent years I’ve been temporary friends with an alcoholic who fell apart at the seams and who I had to abandon because he was too much to cope with, and I was also friendly with a schizophrenic but they both disappeared, and there was another chap who was so erratic I couldn’t handle him and I think he may have had sexual tendencies that I didn’t appreciate. They were all good mates when they were functioning normally, but a real pain when they were on bad form, as it were. But the bunch I hang out with these days are all pretty solid folk, even if they do have the odd quirk. Also, there aren’t many of them, which is also alright.
Melissa telephoned. She wanted to talk about thermal underwear, and said that I shouldn’t be too eager to get into mine because I wouldn’t feel the benefit when it gets properly cold. I agreed profusely, but shall do what I want. It’s of some consequence that I manage my own underheating.
Saturday, October 19th
A pleasant walk with Winnie, followed by a light lunch in the snug of The Old Curmudgeon’s Arms, where the barmaid was a floating dreamy slip of the material of which dreams are made, and terribly flirty, and of course I shall go back there before too long for a second look and find she’s been replaced by her grandmother.
Melissa telephoned. Cook fielded the call, and whatever they spoke of can have been of negligible consequence, because when she tried to report to me she couldn’t remember any of it.
Apart from that one minor interruption, which took all of a minute, it was a quiet day of reading and listening to the wireless and gramophone records (Brahms, mainly), which is also the plan for tomorrow unless someone comes along to disrupt the peace and quiet.
Cook dished up a delightful casserole this evening, the first of the chilly season. Warming and filling, and somewhat doze-inducing after three helpings and most of a bottle of red splosh.
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James Henderson (Gentleman)
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