"An August Bank Holiday Lark"

A line from a Larkin poem is taken as the title for Northern Broadsides' Great War centenary tribute. The production reached us here in Cheltenham this evening, where the Everyman hosts it all week - well worth catching a performance, as it's excellent.

For the Tobacco Factory's Shakespeare a fortnight ago, there was acres of empty seats: tonight was different - down to the imaginative pricing, I guess (all tickets £10). We certainly had money's worth. The storyline was predictable - an idyllic pre-War world shattered by the arrival of War Office telegrams - but treated in a way that moved me far more than War Horse. The company's Director, Barrie Rutter led the cast of 12 multi-talented performers - actors, singers, dancers and musicians all.

Sitting up in the Balcony, with - I thought - nobody to annoy alongside or behind me, I took some photographs during the big scene just before the interval. "Not allowed!" I was quickly told by the usher. "Please delete." Oh dear! They were rather good ones. I have inserted instead a picture of a university friend: I heard from our companions at the play that he had died recently.

Even back in the early 'Sixties, Roger Taylor, a tall man, affected the image of someone older, with Meerschaum pipe, deer-stalker and silver-topped cane. I last saw him in September 2012 at our College reunion. He was living in a caravan: once, his home was Lowndes Square, Belgravia. Now, I gather, he is dead. "Never such innocence again."

Bloomsday

Radio 4 went to Dublin yesterday, and did so in style. Bloomsday has never been so widely publicised, surely! I failed to stay awake for Molly's soliloquy, but have hopes to ListenAgain.

My battered copy of Ulysses has two covers: this is the inner one. (The outer one contains photographs from Joseph Strick's film.) I bought it in July 1967, rather later than the Lady Chatterley trial: Philip Larkin, whose ‘Annus Mirabilis' also dates from 1967, had therefore already received his sexual awakening.

I can't recall Ulysses doing much for me in that regard. The linguistic ingenuity grabbed me far more than any dirty bits. I know I took a long while to struggle through it - I recall reading part one hot Summer's afternoon when lying on the deck of Freddie Harmer's boat, as we sailed down the River Alde. The dust cover has a quote from The Times, half a century pre-Kindle: it begins: "That the format of a book can affect its readability has long been known..."

Welltown

Today we turned our back on the West Country in order to drive home. What a glorious week of Indian Summer it’s been! We have spent these last three nights in the great comfort of Caroline’s cousin’s old house overlooking the Atlantic Ocean: their informal garden - tables and chairs covered with lichen - spills out onto fields full of sheep and Red Devon cattle, grazing right to the cliff top near Willapark. John, a naturalist to his fingertips, set a light trap on Saturday night which caught moths galore in the freak conditions. Old Fr. Storey is still the priest at St Paul’s Tintagel – as he was when I first came to Welltown with Caroline in 1976.

Addendum: We canvassed with John the possibility of having decided - as part of our carbon awareness - not to travel all the way down to Cornwall for Jeremy Faull's funeral. He responded later, by email:

Brooding about the challenges of remote understanding, I came across this stanza from Philip Larkin and his Going, Going poem of 1972:

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes.
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

A different sort of distance, but it left me wondering, could we really have experienced St. Breock and its carved benches without being there?