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Hilary, I love you
Apr. 29th, 2004 08:57 amI'm walking round the house singing Kipling's A Tree Song to the tune Peter Bellamy wrote for it (one of the few songs I can sing without wobbling off into indescribable ugliness) but it doesn't help. The sun isn't coming up from the south- or anywhere else. It's stuck behind a cloud and the wind is bitter.
We had nice weather in London, but this is England and these past couple of days have been horrid cold.
Judy sends me a quote from Hilaire Belloc with an appended remark that condemns him as an effete Bloomsberry. I correct her for the nth time. Poor Belloc. On the cusp of adolescence I stayed in a holiday house down in Somerset which had shelves full of his stuff. This being England (see above) there were lots of wet afternoons- and me and Hilary curled up in an armchair together. Reader, I married him. Well, sort of. He's become one of those voices that are always there, whispering- or in his case harrumphing- inside my head. I love him for being so damn conflicted. A dogmatic catholic and an atheist, a libertarian and an elitist, a salon-haunting hater of high society, an Englishman and a Frenchman. It goes on and on. His best book is called The Four Men- and every one of them is himself and they walk the length of Sussex, bickering all the way.
And, of course, he was the finest comic poet of the 20th century.
We had nice weather in London, but this is England and these past couple of days have been horrid cold.
Judy sends me a quote from Hilaire Belloc with an appended remark that condemns him as an effete Bloomsberry. I correct her for the nth time. Poor Belloc. On the cusp of adolescence I stayed in a holiday house down in Somerset which had shelves full of his stuff. This being England (see above) there were lots of wet afternoons- and me and Hilary curled up in an armchair together. Reader, I married him. Well, sort of. He's become one of those voices that are always there, whispering- or in his case harrumphing- inside my head. I love him for being so damn conflicted. A dogmatic catholic and an atheist, a libertarian and an elitist, a salon-haunting hater of high society, an Englishman and a Frenchman. It goes on and on. His best book is called The Four Men- and every one of them is himself and they walk the length of Sussex, bickering all the way.
And, of course, he was the finest comic poet of the 20th century.
