Thursday August 11th 2022

The temperature's rising. I know it's hotter in other countries but here in the UK we're just not used to it, so that's what makes it worse here, despite what the thermometers say - see ? haha!!!!

But was the headline "Desert Crossing UK" the right one to pick, you guys in the editorial office? I don't think so! Be honest, it's been making you feel embarrassed all day, hasn't it !!!! [I don't think they care about that sort of thing these days! - Ed]

Unfortunately Lois and I have to brave the heat today, and do more of what we were doing yesterday - trying to plan the downsizing of our massive book collection of literally hundreds of books, in preparation for a move to a smaller house in a month or two's time.

Yesterday we were assigning each book to one of 4 categories - and pay attention, because you might be having to do this some day - who knows?

(1) books that are too boring or too ragged or tatty to preserve, and so of no use and of no interest to man nor beast. (2) books that the British Heart Foundation will come and collect - i.e. travel books, novels and children's books, also CDs and DVDs; and (3) books that the Red Cross will accept if we take them along to the local Red Cross shop - i.e. intellectual books and other non-fiction that is of general interest; and (4) - whoops, I almost forgot this category - books we'll want to take with us.

Well today 2 further categories have arisen: (5) religious books to be taken to the headquarters of Lois's sect in Birmingham, and (6) other religious books to be taken to the houses of local sect-members.

See? I bet you'd never have guessed how complex an operation it is that we've embarked on.

And as the day wears on, our sitting-areas like the sofa where we sit in the evening become "contaminated" - if that's not too strong a word - with more and more books - what a madness it all is !!!!!!

it's only mid-morning, and books are already beginning to colonise

our sofa again - the one we'll be wanting to sit on tonight. What madness!!!!!

my 'much-admired' collection of DVDs

My own policy is just to get rid of everything that's officially mine. I know that Lois will find it much much harder than me to get rid of her own books and DVDs etc, so I figure that I might as well junk virtually all of mine, and if I do that, we might just stand a chance of being able to fit all of hers into our new house, and still leave room for perhaps a bed and a couch. It's a long shot, but it might just work haha!

Plus, I tend to think, "Well I've had my pleasure out of them, why not give somebody else a chance?" 

[You're living in Cloud Cuckoo Land if you think anybody's going to want any of these! - Ed]

19:00 Our elder daughter Alison, who lives in Headley, Hampshire, with Ed and their 3 teenage children, Josie (15), Rosalind (14) and Isaac (12), has posted a charming picture from an outing this afternoon to see a comic play at Guildford, Surrey. 

In one of the pictures we see the three children, plus Rosalind's friend, Lucia, an Italian girl. Lucia was a classmate of Rosalind's when the family were in Copenhagen (2012-2018), and the children were all attending international school there - what an experience to have had!

(left to right) Lucia, Rosalind, Josie and Isaac

20:00 We go to bed on another Philip Larkin poem, "Love Songs in Old Age" (1957), a sweet old poem about a widow who comes across some songs from her youth, and reflects on how music promises lots of happy things in life to young people, things which, looking back, you can see that it didn't deliver.

You have to do a bit of work mentally on this one, and imagine yourself back in an age when people bought the sheet music for songs they had heard and liked on the radio, and then played the songs on their piano, I guess. So you could imagine how the sheet music for a particular song or songs could "get lost" stuck behind something or other, or in a pile of something or other, and be rediscovered after 30 years, say, with various stains on them - oh dear!

Music was important to Larkin - he once said he couldn't live without jazz - again, you have to do a bit of work here, mentally, because as the programme's presenter, Simon Armitage says, "jazz was the hip-hop of its day", and Larkin was all his life a big Louis Armstrong fan.

As always most of the pleasure in a Larkin poem is in its language, choice of words and their soft cadences. 

It's an easy poem to understand, like most of Larkin's work, especially for older people: that feeling of nostalgia when you look back on your life, and you think about the hopes you had, way back in that far-off time when your life stretched before you with its promises of seemingly infinite possibilities. For this widow, at least, we know she had a child who liked colouring, but all in all it seems like her life didn't work out quite so wonderfully as she hoped it would.

It might not be sheet music for young people today, or even records, tapes, CD's etc, now that everything is "streamed". But music is as big a thing in young people's lives as it ever was. And whatever decade you were growing up in, that's the music that will always be top of your charts, that's for sure, if you live to be a hundred.

But what's a "frank, submissive chord"? There is some discussion about this tonight, and various interviewees have a go at composing one on a piano, and some of them certainly sound pretty "vulnerable", in the way a lot of young people feel in their difficult moments. And Lois and I certainly agree that there are particular sweet chords which can really "do things to you" - if you disagree, then you probably don't really like music, that's what we say!

22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzz!!!!!