horseradish maybe

Horseradish (Armoracia rusticana). Swindon, 5 October 2019.

This post isn't about horseradish. It's just a stopgap because I've been so quiet. This is partly because I'm doing some IT technical training and partly because I'm trying to write about Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, got bogged down in detail, and am now starting all over again. (Apologies for accidentally publishing it yesterday, and instantly withdrawing it. I know this generates a lot of false notifications.) I love this play so much that I  particularly don't want to be boring about it. I get a thrill from just reading the traditional editorial note:

SCENE  -- Rome ; afterwards at Sardis, and near Philippi. 

There's something very romantic about Julius Caesar, this cold-hearted play of realpolitik. Oh no, I can't start thinking about those aspects too... Expect a very long post at some point.

I also read Claire Tomalin's A Life of My Own ... She published it in 2017, aged 84, after all those biographies of Wollstonecraft, Mansfield, Austen, Pepys, Dickens, Hardy...

There are many human and moving aspects to the book: she lost a son after birth, a beloved daughter committed suicide after suddenly falling into deep depression, another son was born with spina bifida, her first marriage was often in crisis and ended in tragedy, her relations with her parents were complicated...

But I must admit I was most struck with how the book transports us into the heart of the London literary establishment that presided over the second half of the twentieth century (she was the Sunday Times literary editor in the 1980s). It's, inadvertently, a bit shocking; I mean from the perspective of 2019; also, maybe, from the perspective of an IT engineer in the provinces. I don't know if we'll ever again quite be able to accept the Oxford-Cambridge-London bubble. But maybe a new establishment is taking form.

Regular readers will have already sensed, perhaps, that I have quite conflicted feelings about twentieth-century UK literature. I was reminded of that while I read Tomalin's book. I deeply share her enthusiasm for the older writers she wrote the lives of. But of the many literary contemporaries she mentions here, whole generations of those feted by the press and each other, there were vanishingly few that I'd either read or felt the least desire to read. One day I might have to ask myself some hard questions about why this is.

Horseradish (Armoracia rusticana). Swindon, 7 October 2019.