Supper with Les Murray

A very late call from H and M - come to supper with Les Murray. Help us keep genius amused. We eat fish. Les and I drink Guinness, the rest wine. Damn fine fish. The Murrays were Scots but Les's wife was born in Budapest. I knew that. It isn't a deeply, widely, literary evening. More jokes, some of which Les might have found amusing. Tomorrow he reads at the Playhouse with Andrew Motion. I don't remind him that we once shared a taxi, C and I and Les and John Ashbery - at the London International Poetry Festival one year, a long time ago. High couture and aesthetic mien meets Boeotia (after Peter Porter). There are only two tables taken in the restaurant. We are the loud one.

Otherwise a long dour day of one very long meeting. James Hamilton kindly sends me a YouTube of a man climbing into an enormous white balloon by simply pressing against the skin of it. It looks faintly gynaecological. Even more so when he emerges, His vest rides up on a plump stomach. His trousers are almost dragged off so he is in his underpants. He looks like a baby in a nappy.

Time I tried some of that. Get my head twisted up in a big white balloon that is. A pillow will have to be the next best thing.