Garrison Keiller set me off. What with being all tied up with family delights: weddings, and the arrival of young Sam, I had a few weeks of the 'Writer's Almanac' podcast to catch up with. There we went, Garrison and I, weaving through time and space, taking in events significant to the date, with a poem to cap it all. Better than the news, because there isn't any news, and this is a good thing, as what news there is, is all so gloomy these days. Reflection on past news (a much better descriptor than 'history' don't you think?) inspires my thoughts for the day, and here they are:
"It was on this day in 1940 that Winston Churchill declaimed in the House of Commons, 'Never in the history of human conflict, have so many owed so much, to so few .... ' " Winston, Garrison tells me, endlessly rehearsed his speeches in the bath. Suddenly, there's a connection. I would, I think, live in the bath if the water never cooled down.
"What have we done?" The journal entry of the pilot who dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6th 1945. Indeed.
The first television picture was a straight line. And it WASN'T transmitted by who I thought it was, and E Annie Proux was born in Conneticut. I would have gone to the gallows swearing she was Canadian.
Philip Larkin, a superb poet who wrote, "Deprivation is to me as the daffodils were to Wordsworth." I liked that. But he wasn't from Hull at all, he was born in Coventry.
Random stuff. Makes me think. How much other stuff that I believe to be true, really isn't, and does it matter?
I shall run a bath and think about it.
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