Generational Conflict.

I put my mother's lunch in front of her (Sausages!) and she immediately starts to get to her feet.

"Where are you going?"

"To spend a penny"

"Don't do that. Your meal will get cold".

"No it won't and I'll enjoy it all the more for being comfortable."

And off she stumps. "Don't wait your lunch for me," she says- graciously.

"I have no intention to" I say severely.

Sometimes she wins these little tussles and sometimes I do. I like to think I win the important ones.

The Bronze Medallist

"Wandering between two worlds, one dead, one powerless to be born..."

I'd been reading an article about world politics- how the nation state is dying and the future is global- and these lines came into my head.

Apt.

I couldn't think who the author was. Shelley? Yeats? Neither as it turns out. They're by Matthew Arnold- from his Stanzas on the Grande Chartreuse.

Arnold is the third great Victorian poet. Tennyson is a supreme lyricist, Browning is the life force personified and Arnold can seem starchy and a little laboured by comparison. He's not quite as good, he takes the bronze while they compete for gold and silver. He's better perhaps in odd lines than in complete poems; Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, if I remember rightly, is a humourless exercise in late-romantic self-pity, and much too long....

But he's very quotable. "City of dreaming spires" is one of his. So is

"And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept by confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night"

That's from Dover Beach- which, whatever else one might say about him and his work, is a very great poem.