5.37. Awakened by squalling of youngest, aged three, who’s convinced it’s morning. Six hours sleep is plenty, isn’t it?
8.51-9.26. Battling through London traffic on my sturdy hybrid, without incident other than the usual jarring from pot-holes. Last week I was menaced by a geezer who looked like an aging associate of the Kray Twins. ‘Did you spear me?’ he demanded, advancing threateningly from his silver hatchback. ‘You speared me!’ ‘I don’t even know what “spearing” is,’ I expostulated. After a long hard stare he allowed me by, but hurled at my fleeing back a pleasingly Pinteresque epithet: ‘You watch it, you two-bob c***!’
9.30-11.00 Marking and administration – chiefly beginning to set up a conference on the work of Stephen Spender for the end of February (it’s the centenary of his birth next year). Open package of books on Milton to be reviewed – another centenary – it’s 400 years since his birth . One is a lovely edition of Paradise Lost with reproductions of 12 engravings from the first illustrated edition of 1688. ‘While I abroad / Through all the coasts of dark destruction seek / Deliverance for us all.’
11.00-12.00 Lecture on Tennyson: Mariana’s sheds still broken, still sad and strange. Her life still dreary, she still wishes she were dead. Lecturers get older, but the poems lecturers lecture on don’t. Nor does the audience – I briefly refer to Margaret Thatcher, for reasons I can no longer recall, forgetting that most of my audience had only just been born when she fell.
1.00-3.00 Tutorials – Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Antony and Cleopatra. ‘Thou yet beholdst me, Eros?’ I borrowed this line, without the ‘Eros’, in a poem called ‘Hooked’, collected in Soft Sift. When I did so, for some reason it seemed like a breakthrough. It doesn’t now.
4.00-6.00 Staff meeting: impassioned discussion of this and that.
8.22. Children in bed. ‘Dusk has fallen / like a stone / quipped the prince / of the quotidian.’
(Mark Ford)
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