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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