Vergissmeinnicht (Keith Douglas)

Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.

The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.

Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht
in a copybook gothic script.

We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that’s hard and good when he’s decayed.

But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move,
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.

For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.

The Motor Bus (A.D. Godley)

What is this that roareth thus?

Can it be a Motor Bus?
Yes, the smell and hideous hum
Indicat Motorem Bum!
Implet in the Corn and High
Terror me Motoris Bi:
Bo Motori clamitabo
Ne Motore caedar a Bo -
Dative be or Ablative
So thou only let us live: -
Whither shall thy victims flee?
Spare us, spare us, Motor Be!

Thus I sang; and still anigh
Came in hordes Motores Bi,
Et complebat omne forum
Copia Motorum Borum.
How shall wretches live like us
Cincti Bis Motoribus?
Domine, defende nos
Contra hos Motores Bos!

Naming of Parts (Henry Reed)

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighbouring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,

For today we have naming of parts.

from The Last Devil to Die, chapter 56 (Richard Osman)

What she really doesn't like, pay aside, is the teaching.  And, more specifically, the students.

There's one with her now, an identikit boy of around twenty, a first year, certainly.  He's called Tom or Sam, or maybe Josh.  The boy is wearing a Nirvana t-shirt, despite being born many years after Kurt Cobain died.

They are discussing an essay he hasn't written.

Autumn Journal IX (Louis MacNeice)

Now we are back to normal, now the mind is

    Back to the even tenor of the usual day

Skidding no longer across the uneasy cambers

    Of the nightmare way.

We are safe though others have crashed the railings

    Over the river ravine; their wheel-tracks carve the bank

But after the event all we can do is argue

    And count the widening ripples where they sank.

October comes with rain whipping around the ankles

    In waves of white at night:

And filling the raw clay trenches (the parks of London

    Are a nasty sight).

In a week I return to work, lecturing, coaching,

    As impresario of the Ancient Greeks

Who wore the chiton and lived on fish and olives

    And talked philosophy or smut in cliques;

Who believed in youth and did not gloze the unpleasant

    Consequences of age;

What is life, one said, or what is pleasant

    Once you have turned the page

Of love?  The days grow worse, the dice are loaded

    Against the living man who pays in tears for breath;

Never to be born was the best, call no man happy

    This side death.

Conscious - long before Engels - of necessity

    And therein free

They plotted out their life with truism and humour

    Between the jealous heaven and the callous sea.

And Pindar sang the garland of wild olive

    And Alcibiades lived from hand to mouth

Double-crossing Athens, Persia, Sparta,

    And many died in the city of plague, and many of drouth

In Sicilian quarries, and many by the spear and arrow

    And many more who told their lies too late

Caught in the eternal factions and reactions

    Of the city-state.

And free speech shivered on the pikes of Macedonia

    And later on the swords of Rome

And Athens became a mere university city

    And the goddess born of the foam

Became the kept hetaera, heroine of Menander,

    And the philosopher narrowed his focus, confined

His efforts to putting his own soul in order

    And keeping a quiet mind.

And for a thousand years they went on talking,

    Making such apt remarks,

A race no longer of heroes but of professors

    And crooked business men and secretaries and clerks;

Who turned out dapper little elegiac verses

    On the ironies of fate, the transience of all

Affections, carefully shunning an over-statement

    But working the dying fall.

The Glory that was Greece: put it in a syllabus, grade it

    Page by page

To train the mind or even to point a moral

    For the present age:

Models of logic and lucidity, dignity, sanity,

    The golden mean between opposing ills

Though there were exceptions of course but only exceptions - 

    The bloody Bacchanals on the Thracian hills.

So the humanist in his room with Jacobean panels

    Chewing his pipe and looking on a lazy quad

Chops the Ancient World to turn a sermon

    To the greater glory of God.

But I can do nothing so useful or so simple;

    These dead are dead

And when I should remember the paragons of Hellas

    I think instead

Of the crooks, the adventurers, the opportunists

    The careless athletes and the fancy boys,

The hair-splitters, the pedants, the hard-boiled sceptics

    And the Agora and the noise

Of the demagogues and the quacks; and the women pouring

    Libations over graves

And the trimmers at Delphi and the dummies at Sparta and lastly

    I think of the slaves.

And how one can imagine oneself among them

    I do not know;

It was all so unimaginably different

    And all so long ago.

Introduction from Delia Smith's Christmas (Delia Smith)

If there's one person in the world who probably needs this book more than anyone else, it's me.  For years my own Christmas preparations have been, to say the least, fragmented and fraught: recipes here, notes there, and fading memories of what I might have done last year if only I could be sure!  What I needed, it seemed to me, was a sort of personal Christmas organiser, something I could reach for in October and keep by me as a guide all the way through to the point where the last of the Christmas leftovers have been dealt with.

Then I began to think: if that's what I need, how many other people might need the same?  It would be nice of course to be able to say at this point that the contents of this book can zip you through all that Christmas catering without a worry or a care.  Unfortunately that is not the case, because unless you are superhuman, believe me, there will still be some hectic days ahead of you.  But what I have set out to do here is to be a sort of friend in the background, providing practical information, offering new and different recipes (as well as the more traditional ones), and if not entirely removing the pressure of Christmas cooking then going some way to ensuring its success.

Christmas has its critics and, if we were honest, I'm sure each one of us has, at some time, wished we could quietly quit the planet and come back when it was over.  On the other hand, at what other time of the year can we turn our minds to the sheer joy of feasting?  The sharing of fine food and wines with family and friends is a deeply ingrained human (as well as religious) activity, without which our lives would surely be diminished.

As a veteran of many a Christmas campaign, my final message to you is not to worry.  You will be pressured, you will get grumpy, but it will all be worth it.  Just set your mind on that glorious moment on Christmas Day when the last of the washing-up has been done.  By then you will probably have enough food in the house to last for several days, so fill your glass, put your feet up and forget all about it for another year!

In Westminster Abbey (John Betjeman)

Let me take this other glove off
As the vox humana swells,
And the beauteous fields of Eden
Bask beneath the Abbey bells.
Here, where England's statesmen lie,
Listen to a lady's cry.

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans,
Spare their women for Thy Sake,
And if that is not too easy
We will pardon Thy Mistake.
But, gracious Lord, whate'er shall be,
Don't let anyone bomb me.

Keep our Empire undismembered

Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,
Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,
Honduras and Togoland;
Protect them Lord in all their fights,
And, even more, protect the whites.

Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots' and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
Democracy and proper drains.
Lord, put beneath Thy special care
One-eighty-nine Cadogan Square.

Although dear Lord I am a sinner,
I have done no major crime;
Now I'll come to Evening Service
Whensoever I have the time.
So, Lord, reserve for me a crown,
And do not let my shares go down.

I will labour for Thy Kingdom,
Help our lads to win the war,
Send white feathers to the cowards
Join the Women's Army Corps,
Then wash the steps around Thy Throne
In the Eternal Safety Zone.

Now I feel a little better,
What a treat to hear Thy Word,
Where the bones of leading statesmen
Have so often been interr'd.
And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait
Because I have a luncheon date.

from The Balkan Trilogy (Olivia Manning)

The difficulty of dealing with Guy, she thought, lay in the fact that he was so often right.  She and Clarence could claim that their evening had been spoilt by the presence of Dubedat.  She knew it had, in fact, been spoilt not by Guy's generosity but their own lack of it. 

-

Guy had taken her there once but the visit had depressed her.  She liked the Greek boys but was shy with them - being so constituted that she could cope with only one or two people at a time; but Guy, she saw, was having the time of his life.  He was an adolescent among adolescents, and they were all elevated by the belief that, together, they would reform the world.  She was made uneasy by their faith in certain political leaders, their condemnation of others, the atmosphere of conspiracy and her own guilty self-doubt.  She was an individual and as such had no hope of reforming the world.  The stories that inspired them - stories of injustic and misery - merely roused in her a sense of personal failure.

'But you must sacrifice your individuality,' Guy told her.  'It's nothing but egoism.  You must unite with other right-thinking, self-abnegating people - then you can achieve anything.'

The idea filled her with gloom.

from Letters from Father Christmas (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Cliff House,

North Pole,

Christmas 1943

My dear Priscilla

            A very happy Christmas!  I suppose you will be hanging up your stocking just once more: I hope so for I have still a few little things for you.  After this I shall have to say "goodbye", more or less: I mean, I shall not forget you.  We always keep the old numbers of our old friends, and their letters; and later on we hope to come back when they are grown up and have houses of their own and children.

    My messengers tell me that people call it "grim" this year.  I think they mean miserable: and so it is, I fear, in very many places where I was specially fond of going; but I am very glad to hear that you are still not really miserable.  Don't be!  I am still very much alive, and shall come back again soon, as merry as ever.  There has been no damage in my country; and though my stocks are running rather low I hope soon to put that right.

    Polar Bear - too "tired" to write himself (so he says) - 

I am, reely

sends a special message to you: love and a hug!  He says: do ask if she still has a bear called Silly Billy, or something like that; or is he worn out?

    Give my love to the others: John and Michael and Christopher - and of course to all your pets that you used to tell me about.

    As I have not got very many of the things you usually want, I am sending you some nice bright clean money - I have lots of that (more than you have, I expect; but it is not very much use to me, perhaps it will be to you).  You might find it useful to buy a book with that you really want.

    Very much love from your old friend,

            Father Christmas.

Channel Firing (Thomas Hardy)

That night your great guns, unawares,
Shook all our coffins as we lay,
And broke the chancel window-squares,
We thought it was the Judgment-day

And sat upright. While drearisome
Arose the howl of wakened hounds:
The mouse let fall the altar-crumb,
The worms drew back into the mounds,

The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, ‘No;
It’s gunnery practice out at sea
Just as before you went below;
The world is as it used to be:

‘All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters.

‘That this is not the judgment-hour
For some of them’s a blessed thing,
For if it were they’d have to scour
Hell’s floor for so much threatening....

‘Ha, ha. It will be warmer when
I blow the trumpet (if indeed
I ever do; for you are men,
And rest eternal sorely need).’ 

So down we lay again. ‘I wonder,
Will the world ever saner be,’
Said one, ‘than when He sent us under
In our indifferent century!’

And many a skeleton shook his head.
‘Instead of preaching forty year,’
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
‘I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.’

Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.

Spring Song, or, The Poet in Difficulties (A.P. Herbert)

I must not say, "The day is fine and hot."
That is complacency: so I will not.

I must not say, "The day is cold and wet."
That is despondency - more deadly yet.

I must not say, "The sky is grey and solemn."
That is defeatist - and perhaps Fifth Column.

And, if from every comment I refrain,
That's dangerous apathy, and wrong again.

I must not say, "There may be storms ahead."
That is a rumour, and must not be spread.

And then, I must not give our enemies
The smallest hint of what the weather is.

Nor should I say what flowers (if any) grow,
For any trifle may assist the foe.

So, with all proper reticence, I sing
That, by the date, I think it must be Spring.

from The Pursuit of Love (Nancy Mitford)

But Christian's politics did not bore her. As they walked back from his father's house
that evening he had taken her for a tour of the world. He showed her Fascism in Italy, Nazism in Germany, civil war in Spain, inadequate Socialism in France, tyranny in Africa, starvation in Asia,  reaction in America and Right-wing blight in England. Only the U.S.S.R., Norway and Mexico came in for a modicum of praise.

-

Feeling provincial, up in London for the day and determined to see a little life, I made Davey give me luncheon at the Ritz. This had a still further depressing effect on my spirits. My clothes, so nice and suitable for the George, so much admired by the other dons' wives ('My dear, where did you get that lovely tweed?') , were, I now realized, almost bizarre in their dowdiness; it was the floating panels of taffeta all over again. I thought of those dear little black children, three of them now, in their nursery at home, and of dear Alfred in his study, but just for the moment this thought was no consolation. I passionately longed to have a tiny fur hat, or a tiny ostrich hat, like the two ladies at the next table. I longed for a neat black dress, diamond clips and a dark mink coat, shoes like surgical boots, long crinkly black suède gloves, and smooth polished hair. When I tried to explain all this to Davey, he remarked absentmindedly: 

'Oh, but it doesn’t matter a bit for you, Fanny, and, after all, how can you have time for les petits soins de la personne with so many other, more important things to think of.'

I suppose he thought this would cheer me up.

from The Family From One End Street, chapter I, The Christenings (Eve Garnett)

Twin boys came next, and Mr. Ruggles, who had called at the Vicarage to ask for kind assistance in clothing his sons, only one having been expected, spent the Sunday after their arrival in church.  This was partly in order to be out of the way of the fuss at home which the twins' arrival had caused, and partly as a kind of compliment to the Vicar's wife who had been so obliging in the matter of extra baby clothes.  For Mr. Ruggles was not an ardent church goer, and it had crossed his mind on the Vicarage door-step that his last attendance had been the Harvest Festival held several months previously.

Although he knelt, stood, and sat down with the congregation, Mr. Ruggles found it hard to keep his attention on the service, for his mind was busy with many things.  At the present moment the Twins filled most of it, but one corner, his gardening corner, was very much occupied with the progress of his spring vegetables and how it was that Mr. Hook at No. 2 One End Street was so much farther on with his leeks and carrots.  Then there was the problem of whether one or two more hens could be squeezed into the soap-box.  If the family was going to increase at the present rate, thought Mr. Ruggles, the more he could produce in the food line at home the better.  And then, always, of course, there was the Question of the Pig.  Here Jo gave himself up to a few moments happy dreaming ... Surely, in that corner between the hen-box and the little tool-shed, there was room enough for a small sty; he could take in a bit of the flower border and Rosie could have her clothes line a few inches shorter - come to that, he might even pull down the tool-shed altogether and keep his tools in the kitchen, though no doubt Rosie would object.  Anyway, with twins in the house, it was high time the Pig Question was really considered seriously.   There was a fleeting vision of the Sanitary Inspector, but it was of the briefest, and as the congregation sat down for the Second Lesson, hens, vegetables, and twins once more filled Mr. Ruggles' mind.

'Now the names of the twelve apostles are these,' read the Vicar.

Jo pricked up his ears.  Names.  There was another problem.  Rosie had been very quiet about names this time.  He'd said nothing himself, but he was sure she'd something up her sleeve - he believed she'd never quite forgiven him over that Carnation business and Kate.  It looked as if he ought to let her have some say in the matter this time, but, really, he drew the line at fancy and flowery names for boys,  and they would be fancy or flowery if Rosie had a hand in it he was sure.

'Simon who is called Peter and Andrew his brother,' read the Vicar, 'James the son of Zebedee and John his brother, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew ...'

'Seem to go in pairs-like,' said Jo to himself.  It seemed encouraging.  'Better pick two of these and get it over,' he thought, but the Vicar was reading on, and the next thing Jo caught was about a workman being worthy of his meat and that, too, he felt, was singularly appropriate and hoped his Sunday dinner would be a good one!  Then, as if an idea had suddenly struck him, he seized a prayer book from the ledge in front of him, and, after wetting his finger and rustling many pages found the place he wanted, he pulled a stub of pencil from his pocket, held it poised over the list of the apostles, shut his eyes and brought it down 'plop!'  James and John.  Jo breathed a sigh of relief - he'd been very afraid of Philip and Bartholomew - especially Bartholomew.  'That decides it,' he muttered, and Mrs. Chips, the grocer's wife, sitting resplendent in sapphire blue velvet in the farthest corner of the pew so that no one by any possible chance should think they were friends (so great is the gulf between grocery and scavenging), turned a stern and reproving eye on him.  But Mr. Ruggles was oblivious; a problem was solved, and his mind made up for him - a labour-saving device he much appreciated.  The Twins' names were settled, and he would slip round to the vestry immediately after the service and arrange for the christening.

from 'Boys' Weeklies' (George Orwell)

The working classes only enter into the Gem and Magnet as comics or semi-villains (race-course touts etc.). As for class-friction, trade unionism, strikes, slumps, unemployment, Fascism and civil war - not a mention. Somewhere or other in the thirty years' issue of the two papers you might perhaps find the word ‘Socialism’, but you would have to look a long time for it. If the Russian Revolution is anywhere referred to, it will be indirectly, in the word ‘Bolshy’ (meaning a person of violent disagreeable habits). Hitler and the Nazis are just beginning to make their appearance, in the sort of reference I quoted above. The war-crisis of September 1938 made just enough impression to produce a story in which Mr Vernon-Smith, the Bounder's millionaire father, cashed in on the general panic by buying up country houses in order to sell them to ‘crisis scuttlers’. But that is probably as near to noticing the European situation as the Gem and Magnet will come, until the war actually starts. That does not mean that these papers are unpatriotic - quite the contrary! Throughout the Great War the Gem and Magnet were perhaps the most consistently and cheerfully patriotic papers in England. Almost every week the boys caught a spy or pushed a conchy into the army, and during the rationing period ‘EAT LESS BREAD’ was printed in large type on every page. But their patriotism has nothing whatever to do with power politics or ‘ideological’ warfare. It is more akin to family loyalty, and actually it gives one a valuable clue to the attitude of ordinary people, especially the huge untouched block of the middle class and the better-off working class. These people are patriotic to the middle of their bones, but they do not feel that what happens in foreign countries is any of their business. When England is in danger they rally to its defence as a matter of course, but in between times they are not interested. After all, England is always in the right and England always wins, so why worry? It is an attitude that has been shaken during the past twenty years, but not so deeply as is sometimes supposed. Failure to understand it is one of the reasons why left-wing political parties are seldom able to produce an acceptable foreign policy.

As the Team's Head-Brass (Edward Thomas)

As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.
                The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away? '
'When the war's over.' So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out? ' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps? '
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more ... Have many gone
From here? ' 'Yes.' 'Many lost? ' 'Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

The Trees (Philip Larkin)

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief. 

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain. 

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

from The Case of the Gilded Fly, chapter 1, Prologue in Railway Trains (Edmund Crispin)

To the unwary traveller, Didcot signifies the imminence of his arrival at Oxford; to the more experienced, another half-hour at least of frustration.   And travellers in general are divided into these two classes; the first apologetically haul down their luggage from the racks on to the seats, where it remains until the end of the journey, an encumbrance and a mass of sharp, unexpected edges; the second continue to stare gloomily out of the window at the waste of woods and fields into which, by some witless godling, the station has been inexplicably dumped, and at the lines of goods trucks from all parts of the country, assembled like the isle of lost ships of current myth, in the middle of a Sargasso Sea.  A persistent accompaniment of dark muttering and shouting, together with a brisk tearing of wood and metal reminiscent of early Walpurgis Night in a local cemetery, suggest to the more imaginative of the passengers that the engine is being dismantled and put together again.  The delay in Didcot station amounts as a rule to twenty minutes or more.

Then there are about three fausses sorties, involving a tremendous crashing and jolting of machinery which buffets the passengers into a state of abject submission.  With infinite reluctance, the cortège gets on the move at last, carrying its unhappy cargo in an extremely leisurely manner through the flat landscape.  There are quite a surprising number of wayside stations and halts before you arrive at Oxford, and it misses none of these, often lingering at them beyond all reason, since no one gets either in or out; but perhaps the guard has seen someone hurrying belatedly down the station road, or has observed a local inhabitant asleep in his corner and is reluctant to wake him; perhaps there is a cow on the line, or the signal is against us - investigation, however, proves that there is no cow, nor even any signal, pro or contra.

Towards Oxford matters become a little more cheerful, within sight of the canal, say, or Tom Tower.  An atmosphere of purposefulness begins to be felt; it requires the utmost strength of will to remain seated, and hatless, and coatless, with one's luggage still in the rack and one's ticket still in an inside pocket; and the more hopeful occupants are already clambering into the corridors.  But sure enough, the train stops just outside the station, the monolithic apparitions of a gas-works on one side, a cemetery on the other, by which the engine lingers with ghoulish insistence, emitting sporadic shrieks and groans of necrophilous delight.  A sense of wild, itching frustration sets in; there is Oxford, there, a few yards away, is the station, and here is the train, and passengers are not allowed to walk along the line, even if any of them had the initiative to do so; it is the whole torture of Tantalus in hell.  This interlude of memento mori, during which the railway company reminds the golden lads and girls in its charge of their inevitable coming to dust, goes on usually for about ten minutes, after which the train proceeds grudgingly into that station so aptly called by Max Beerbohm 'the last relic of the Middle Ages'.

But if any traveller imagines that this is the end, he is mistaken.  Upon arrival there, when even the most sceptical have begun to shift about, it is at once discovered that the train is not at a platform at all, but on one of the centre lines.  On either side, waiting friends and relations, balked at the eleventh hour of their re-union, rush hither and thither waving and uttering little cries, or stand with glum, anxious faces trying to catch a glimpse of those they are supposed to be meeting.  It is as if Charon's boat were to become inextricably marooned in the middle of the Styx, unable either to proceed towards the dead or to return to the living.  Meanwhile, internal shudderings of seismic magnitude occur which throw the passengers and their luggage into impotent shouting heaps on the floors of the corridors.  In a few moments, those on the station are surprised to see the train disappearing in the direction of Manchester, with a cloud of smoke and an evil smell.  In due time it returns backwards, and miraculously, the journey is over.

The passengers surge self-consciously through the ticket-barrier and disperse in search of taxis, which in wartime collect fares without regard of rank, age or precedence, but according to some strictly-adhered-to logic of their own.  They thin out and disappear into the warren of relics, memorials, churches, colleges, libraries, hotels, pubs, tailors and bookshops which is Oxford, the wiser looking for an immediate drink, the more obstinate battling through to their ultimate destination.  Of this agon there eventually remain only a solitary few who have got out to change, and who dawdle unhappily on the platform among the milk-cans.

Noble, from Exercises in Style (Raymond Queneau, trans. Barbara Wright)

At the hour when the rosy fingers of the dawn start to crack, I climbed, rapid as a tongue of flame, onto a bus - mighty of stature and with cowlike eyes - of the S line of a sinuous course.  I noticed, with the precision and acuity of a Red Indian on the warpath, the presence of a young man whose neck was longer than that of the swift-footed giraffe, and whose soft hat was adorned with a plait like the hero of an exercise in style.  Baleful Discord with breasts of soot came with her mouth reeking of a nothingness of toothpaste.  Discord, I say, came to breathe her malignant virus between this young man with the giraffe-like neck and the plait round his hat, and a passenger of irresolute and milk-white mien.  The former addressed himself to the latter in these terms: 'I say, you wicked man, anyone might think you were treading on my toes on purpose!'  Having said these words, the young man with the giraffe-like neck and the plait round his hat quickly went and sat down.

Later, in the Cour de Rome of majestic proportions, I again caught sight of the young man with the giraffe-like neck and the plait round his hat, accompanied by a friend, an arbiter elegantiarum, who was uttering these words of censure which I could hear with my agile ear - censure which was directed to the most exterior garment of the young man with the giraffe-like neck and the plait round his hat: 'You ought to diminish its opening by the addition or elevation of a button to or on its circular periphery.'

from 'Subject Reviews: Roman Literature', Greece & Rome 39 (1992) (Don Fowler)

The lack of detailed modern commentaries on the second half of the Aeneid has also long been felt, and is at last being addressed.  Oxford now offer us Book 10, and Cambridge Book 11.  Steven Harrison’s **^BVergil, Aeneid 10² is a revision of his doctoral dissertation supervised by Nisbet and Horsfall, and it is a fine piece of work.  Like other recent volumes in the Oxford Classical Monographs series, it offers a translation as well as a text, plus an introduction, detailed commentary, and an appendix ‘Some Aspects of Vergilian Style’.  The overall interpretation is broadly Augustan, though Harrison’s earlier days in Balliol have not been entirely expunged: the ‘glorification of Augustus’, we are told, is ‘full-hearted and unambiguous’ (p. xxiv) but much more ambiguity is admitted in the presentation of Aeneas and Jupiter (see, e.g., the excellent note on the Aegaeon simile for Aeneas at 565-70, where he rightly resists Gordon Williams’s attempt to defuse the simile with an assumption of embedded focalization, or the discussion of Jupiter’s ‘insincere temporizing’ on 111-12).  Even if one admits that there ‘need not be a full typological analogy between literary and historical characters’ (p. xxvi) this is a difficult line to hold, and I think the Aeneid is more disturbing of Augustan order than Harrison admits.  In Vergilian studies, I am a great believer in Solon on civil war (frr. 350-7 Martina): this is all a bit sane for me.  The commentary especially is stuffed with really excellent points, but they are not always developed enough and can be expressed with a blandness which belies their interest.  In the appendix, for instance, we are told that Vergil ‘colours his narrative’ with colloquialisms, the sort of metaphor which usually signals moronic Edwardianism: but Harrison’s discussion of register in the commentary is first-rate, with, for instance, the exact observation on the use of capillos at 832 that it is a touch of ‘pathetic realism’.  Similarly in the appendix, we are told that the pastoral language used of Cycnus and Mezentius ‘provides variation and contrast with the world of epic’, but on the latter passage (835-6) he observes, more exactly, that the locus amoenus description ‘provides a pointed contrast with the surrounding sufferings of battle’.  If only he hadn’t brought in variety, another concept whose use inevitably signals an uninteresting critic, as if the Aeneid was the London Palladium.  If there is one pressing need at my alma mater it is to kill off Oxford ‘elegance’, which is like the miasma that seeps up from the Thames on wet November evenings and rots the brains.  ‘\flameoff\’ as they say on the computer nets: this is too good a commentary to be used for sermonizing.  It is a major contribution to Vergilian studies which we shall all find ourselves using constantly.  I hope a paperback will be produced at some stage to make it available to poorer scholars; if so, someone in OUP might like to check what happened to the final proof of p. 179.

from The Ha Ha Bonk Book (Janet and Allan Ahlberg)

Jokes to tell your Mum

Mums are busy women.  For instance, if your mum is the Prime Minister, she has to run the country.  If she is the Queen, she has to run the country as well, and make Prince Philip's sandwiches.  The Queen, by the way, likes jokes about horses, wooden legs and Englishwomen, Irishwomen and Scotswomen.

One more thing: mums are supposed to be the experts on children; but this is not always so.  After all, who else do you know who gets you up in the morning when you're sleepy, and sends you to bed at night when you're wide awake?