dear diary

A tree shattered on the ground, from yesterday's stormy winds: horse-chestnut I think. I was out driving late last night. I listened to Exile on Main Street, and decided that maybe it wasn't so very like Villette, after all. Then I listened to a country compilation, which happened to include someone's rendering of the Patsy Cline song I Fall To Pieces - or rather, the first verse of it - (this is one of those country compilations that costs £1 in Dr Barnardos, so you don't ask too many questions) - but of course that made me want to hear Michael Nesmith sing it, and I remembered I had Loose Salute in the car, so I listened to it for the millionth time, and after that I couldn't help going back to Magnetic South for the two millionth time. I compared my experience of this brace of albums with Exile on Main Street (from around the same period) and wondered if an album I was discovering so late in the day could ever acquire - for my brain - the ineffable burnish, the singular communicativeness, of these albums that I'd known for thirty years. [They should have been the first two vols in an extraordinary Star Wars-style triple trilogy, but it foundered after four volumes. The others were Nevada Fighter, the last of the First National Band trilogy, and Tantamount To Treason (the only release with the 2nd National Band). Since I seem to be in a senile phase of picking up my early life's dropped stitches, perhaps it's time I went in search of the never-heard-by-me Pretty Much Your Standard Ranch Stash.

Then I listened to Joan Davis' Promiseland, and even after all this it still sounded fantastic.

I've now remembered that the first trilogy was meant to represent tradition, the second trilogy the present-day and the third trilogy futuristic. This was one of those impossibly grandiose schemes that artists love to project, like Spenser's 24-book Faerie Queene, Wordsworth's Recluse, etc. They remind me of the usually-sensational unbuilt buildings that form such a large part of most architects' legacies. I'm waiting, not very stoically, to find out if Catherine Daly's and Richard Makin's trilogies end up being composed partly in the irrealis.

Of course most people find lost works, like lost sheep, unreasonably intriguing. (Who ever bothers to talk about Smile now?) That was why one of my regular conversations with Mutti was about the Swallows & Amazons books that WEREN'T on her shelf, The Picts and the Martyrs, and Great Northern?. I think perhaps she hadn't cared for them as much as the others, but anyway she didn't mind responding to my irritating questions.