The winner of the National Poetry Competition was announced today. Naturally, my name didn't trouble the list of prize-getters. I did enter one called "Pomegranate", which is an angram of "Great Poem? N/A". Nuff said, really.
Still, I'm trying to absorb all of the proper literature that I failed to bother reading years ago, when it might have made a difference. Who knows, my thirtysomething nervous system might not be closed to inspiration just yet. And supposedly writing is one of those rare skills that does tend to improve with age - unlike maths, where apparently you go alarmingly off the boil even as your twenties run out, and the ability to form completely new concepts in general, which declines on the same abrupt timescale. At thirty three, I should have increasing difficulty appreciating the importance of new ideas, and linking them to existing knowledge. I suppose I can see evidence of this in my blindness to that masterstroke of fashion that is wearing your jeans somewhere roughly above the knees, as the kids seem to now. So I'm not one of the kids, but maybe there's hope yet.
Speaking of ageing: King Lear. To date I only know the Shakespeare lays I did at school, and Hamlet from the David Tennant version that was on last Christmas, so given the reputation Lear has I thought i'd give it a try. Well, now i've almost certainly lost you, so you won't even notice that i've run out of time and been forced to wrap it up wuickly by saying: rule of three! Just as in fairytales: the bed that's too, hard, then too soft, then just right, so Goneril, Regan, Cordelia. Only this is, masterfully, a realist fairytale, so the one who's just right - Cordelia - is perceived as quite the opposite and rejected, with disastrous consequences. Well, that's it I think.