Monthly Archives: September 2025

September 20: me at my most sophisticated

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On the TV channel SkyArts I read a little trailer for a documentary. It was a biographical programme about the famous and influential 20th Century poet T. S. Eliot. It said something like: The fascinating story of the life of T.S. Eliot, the man responsible for the poems that would inspire the Broadway musical Cats. I suppose they thought this would get more viewers in than the man who wrote the seminal modernist poems The Wasteland and Four Quartets. Barnard Castle was built during the Norman conquest and was was owned by the Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III. It was also, of course, the day trip venue of Dominic Cummings, advisor to Boris Jonson during the Covid period. Andre Previn, despite having spent his life devoted to Classical music as both a conductor and a composer, seems to be mostly remembered for his appearance on The Morecombe and Wise Show.

You cannot know how posterity will channel you or how others will see you. Of course, circumstances constantly force you to behave in a way suitable to the moment and away from your natural instincts and inclinations. Jobs push you away from yourself, make you act on behalf of the company you work for or more in keeping with your job title rather than your personality. It is a miracle that we ever emerge unscathed from the combat with the world. This act of shifting away from yourself for the sake of the circumstance is perhaps the most sophisticated act we have to perform as an individual. I consider myself fortunate that it is rare that I have to abandon myself to represent some other entity. Many people – mostly people with fancy jobs – just drift away, and when, later in life perhaps, they try and pick up that old lost self, they are not quite sure what it is thay are holding in their hands anymore. As I say, I’m lucky. The closest I get to abandoning my self is when I am just nodding along and pretending to listen to a dull interlocutor. That’s probably when I’m at my most sophisticated.

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September 2: colours

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I was in a second-hand shop in Southwold, Suffolk last week and found a pale green shirt that looked as if it might fit. Second-hand clothes are mostly in better condition than my normal clothes waiting for me at home. They’ve certainly been ironed more recently. I took it to the till to buy it and the young man there said , it’s the same colour as what you’re wearing already. I said, yes, I’m very predictable. Pale green is the colour I have learnt to buy. Different times of life dictate different colours. I can’t really wear red anymore like I used to, being high in colour as it is. I look like some Dickensian pie-eater if I’ve got a red shirt on. I have to have colours that compliment my high colour. By high colour I mean that as the day progresses I gradually move into the zone of spntaneous combustion. I start the day pale as an underfed vampire but as I move forward past midday the blood starts to flow. There is another batch of colours, I find. Favourite colours that I would like to wear but have learnt to eschew, whereby I am obliged to fight against my self. Brown is the big one here. I probably like brown so much as it was the colour my mum used to dress me in as opposed to the blue she gave my big brother. It must be that deep emotional pull that drags me into the magntic field of brown. Fashion, of course, is irrelevant, working on the assumption that we can all wear any colour for the benefit of their season’s profits. In recent years I have come round to the opinion that blue is about right for me, which, of course, goes massively against my deep-set identity, blue being my brother’s colour. My mind doesn’t know how to deal with this. It is just one of those things that keeps my sense of my own identity fluid, or, rather, dragged around a bit. I am not any of those things I once thought I was. Imagine that.

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