Well, of course...

...AV didn't win but the sheer possibility of voting on the process itself was welcome. It may also be that the No vote was tinged with a lingering desire to kick Nick Clegg, who will be black and blue by now. And not just that kind of blue. There's that nice line about the dreadful headmaster (Conk) in Martin Bell's 'Headmaster: Modern Style'.

Prometheus-Conk goes free. Joe gets the vultures.

Joe, Conk's deputy, is 'Chief-eunuch of the stock-room! Emperor of pen-nibs'

So Dapper Dave goes free and Nick gets the vultures. But remember Noes, you voted for the two-party system ad infinitum, so now it's Dave for the term.

I can't personally see what else Nick 'emperor-of-pen-nibs' Clegg could have done at the time of the General Election. Not even Polly Toynbee can: all she really says is that he should have looked less happy about it. If the LibDems hadn't joined a coalition government the economy would have been sent sliding down the chute, all the way down to the bottom of the Irish bog. Labour had well and truly lost the election and the numbers would not have added up, so there was only the Tories. The gamble would have been - and might still be - that the worst of the crisis would be over by the time of the next election and then the Libbies might even take some of the credit.

I remember the outcry when the coalition was announced. I understand people being passionate in a cause, but lacking any reality sense is another matter.

And frankly, though I vote Labour on essential principle, it doesn't mean I have to like the actual party or its spokesfolk. The cries of Tory Cuts! immediately after the first emergency budget, might have sounded worse but been a great deal more honest as Bigger Tory Cuts than Labour Cuts, and for different reasons! That I would believe. Regression to mantras is the sure sign of the huckster.

I know. All very well to talk about realism but it is no more realistic to expect party spokesfolk to talk like honest human beings. OK, to borrow a catchphrase, I am just saying like.

What Does a Poet Look Like?

That was the question posted up on the nicest small bookshop in the world, The Book Hive in Norwich (see my previous plugs for this marvellous store, voted best bookshop in the country last year). The question was asked by the poet Luke Wright and I happened to be the first answer to it today. The second answer will be tomorrow, and so on until Luke's list runs out of poets daft enough to have agreed to be on it. It may of course be possible that some bookshop customers will have glanced at the first option and decided they have seen enough of poets to last them a few years. (Potential conversation: Who's that over there? - Him? That's the poet. - So what does he look like? Couldn't you have got a nicer looking one? - Not at the price... etc)

The minimum demand was to spend an hour in the shop looking like yourself. There was some suggestion on Facebook of velvet jackets, silk cravats and floppy hats but I prefer to be out of uniform. In fact I spent about five hours there from late morning into late-mid afternoon. The ancillary task was to write a poem to go in an anthology.

The first part is relatively easy since the bookshop is gorgeous and full of the most tempting books. I sat on a stool my laptop in front of me, under a shelf starring The Arabian Nights. Some of the time I was translating, and some of the time I was drafting a poem sparked by something in one of the books. Meanwhile Henry, the proprietor, was supplying me with coffee and tea and conversation. The bookshop was busy at times. I am not sure how many people came to look at me, but they were all greeted with affability, some of them enjoying a coffee on the house (Henry's coffee is quite strong). A few authors dropped by, a highly gifted undergraduate, a gifted graduate, a number of young and middle aged to whom the shop was a social port of call at which they might well leave with a book or two (I left with seven at the end.) The arrangement was that I would be picked up by daughter H once she was through at the hairdresser, while C babysat Marlie who will be one tomorrow. The sun shone, the shop was nicely cool, the rhythm of intense work - conversation - drifting - more intense work suits me generally and it suited me here.

At the end Henry asked if I wanted to suggest a table of ten books with some thematic connection for him to display, with a short note on each book. Why not?

This is the poem I was working on: an amateur photograph of a young woman in 1954. Clearly on holiday, she is standing by a door with her friend nearby. Her face is movingly beautiful in a perfectly ordinary way, the merest touch of inwardness, of apprehension or concentration, in her expression. I hang the poem out here to dry.

Our Beautiful Mothers
For Henry Layte

Our beautiful mothers are leaning against a doorway
with windblown hair and a girlish grin.
They are eternal and terrified and slim
with perfect skin.

Our beautiful mothers are clutching towels
on the hotel terrace in their sweet white shoes.
Their friends are tucking their hair up and smiling
with all to lose.

The air is acid and kind and ruthless.
Our beautiful mothers are stuck in 1954,
their hearts hovering, whole and broken,
in the draught, by the door.

I felt it a little like a popular song as heard through the door of a bar.

*

And daughter points out that Ten Poems About London, to which I wrote an introduction and contributed a new poem was third in the poetry bestsellers list in last Saturday's Guardian. The book appears under my name, but I didn't edit it. That credit is due to the publisher, Jenny Swann. It is a beautiful small book and contains work by Elaine Feinstein, Sarah Wardle, Elizabeth Bartlett, W.S. Graham, A W Stencl, two people called Blake and Wordsworth, and a certain Anon, who looks very like Everyman.

Voting and shooting

I went to vote in the morning when the voters are mostly elderly but putting out a decent team. One old man is in conversation at the door on the way out. He has a mobile frame and lets drop that he is ninety-eight. He was born in 1913 and was five years old by the end of the Great War. Already twenty-six when the Second World War breaks out and thirty-three when it is over. He has been retired longer than that. He is thirty-six years older than me. Thirty-six years ago I was twenty-six. The astonishing numbers game. He wends his way slowly along the narrow pavement. I have never seen him before.

Inside, the desk with its volunteer officers, and they are still there in the evening when I walk C down to the church hall that is the polling station. I ask them if it has been a brisk day. Not as brisk as at a General Election, they say. Three of them are old and the fourth is a woman on the younger side of middle aged. Good citizens. They get no lunch apart from the sandwiches they bring. I firmly expect the votes in the local elections will be mostly Tory (they always are), and so might they themselves be. The old in rural areas often are and, if not, they might just be Lib Dem, that is if they haven't gone into Clegg-meltdown mode. As far as candidates go there are four Con, one Lab and one Lib Dem. Then there is the AV voting slip which is as simple as it can possibly be. I make my mark in the Yes column. It might, just possibly, the one occasion when my vote counts - unlikely but just a little more likely than it counting in any other election. I can quite see why people don't vote when the result is a foregone conclusion. Why go out on a cold and rainy night? Because it is a citizen's duty? Because, given the history of the world, it is more of a privilege than you might think (my answer)? Why else the ritual walk that means a statistical nothing? That 'statistical nothing' seems the best possible reason to be voting AV this time before returning to the ritual. It is, surely, a healthier system for an unfit body politic.

But I expect to return to the ritual tomorrow.

*

The Bin Laden case continues to take odd turns. Why not wait for the story to be fully documented before announcing the death in one version that must quickly be corrected by a second, then a third? It seems extraordinarily clumsy. I feel absolutely no sense of regret about the man's death as such. He killed thousands, so while I would have preferred a judicial process, such a process was never possible. An arrest and trial would have woken the devil all over the world. A kidnapping from a foreign country would be an international scandal. As concerns the moment itself, shooting the man you have suddenly come face to face with after years of searching is an understandable if not ideal human reaction. His sheer presence - the myth concentrated into a man - would have been enough to send the nerves into overdrive. So you do it, as Von Stauffenberg might have done it, as the Italian partisans did with Mussolini, end of story. Then you face the music, if music is to be faced. You know people just love to hate America and you may as well give them another excuse. The cynics and the idiots are already dreaming of Osama / Che t-shirts. They will eventually determine that Bin Laden died fighting for freedom in the way they understand freedom: t-shirts and berets.

Interesting to consider the Obama side of the equation. Losing president becomes winner president, suddenly turns botched-job, dishonest president. There may be a Republican stake in this, in all the twists and turns, but there probably isn't. Conspiracy theory should always be the last resort. Botched is first choice, schemed is second. I don't deny it happens, of course. And conspiracy makes better cheap fiction than botch does.

Bin Laden wasn't cheap fiction though: he was real death to many, real deliberate death, not incidental death, not collateral damage. So now he is dead. In the long run, as Keynes said, we all are. This shortened his run which, all things considered, was pretty long.

The ninety-eight year old voting this morning has outlived a good number like him. He picks up his mobile zimmer frame and makes his painful way to the polling station, registers his vote, and leaves.

I have no ambition to reach the zimmer age, but if I do I hope I'll be doing the same.

Norwich: energy and celebration

In university today for a tutorial and to pick up necessary papers, bumping into one person after another. A longish conversation with Giles who says he loves living in Norwich.

He's right, there is something humane and energetic about the place, and now the football team has performed the miracle of two promotions one after another so they'll be playing Premier League football next year. Maybe I will buy a season ticket. Maybe I'll buy two.

It is hard to think of Norwich as a city if your idea of cities is a European capital or a 19th century industrial metropolis. You can walk across the centre in about twenty minutes. Most of the streets are narrow and winding, on the medieval plan. The buildings are generally low and ancient. It is like Bruges without the canals, or Cambridge without the colleges, though it has plenty of small medieval churches to compensate, as well as two cathedrals and a castle. And yet the scale of it feels small and soft. Houses are curved, crooked, dimpled, worn, far from absolute. The city has its rougher edges as the crowds at the wrestling venues show, but even the aggression has an famillial warmth.

Norwich is full of writers and musicians and artists. There are bohemian streets and corners, student-haunted cafes and bars. The great Anglican cathedral, the bars, the wrestling, the bohemian life, the market, and the football team are sources of a more urban energy. When I was at the art college I would have coffee in Espresso or in Take 5, which, for a time was in the arthouse cinema. I could wander into other cafes or bars, or sit in a caff with an all day English breakfast for lunch.

This Friday I am starting a sequence of poet appearances in the Book Hive window and bookshop. Henry Layte, the owner, is another part of the energy. Daughter H and husband R are doing a superhero / evil villain session there on Saturday. The following Saturday the Voice Project are performing their vast choral piece, The Proportions of the Temple, in the cathedral with texts by Andrew McDonnell, Agnes Lehoczky and myself. That's part of the Norwich Festival - more energy.

Oh, and United have beaten Schalke 4-1. Joy unbounded after Sunday.

And tomorrow I shall go out and vote for AV. My normal election vote is worth nothing. So might this be. But I'd like it to mean something so there I go putting a cross in a box again.

Via the Royal Academy and a recording studio

One more brief unillustrated post. Caught the morning train to London from Oxford and met with ex-student Hen who is currently a Printmaker Fellow at the RA. She showed me around in the Schools, all vaults and arches and paper and equipment. We drank a long coffee and talked in the cafe then quickly dropped into the Watteau drawings. Hen is in her early 40s now but looks hardly older than she did at seventeen. Perhaps we shall do something together: an art-poetry piece. I hope so.

I set off to the studios where I was to record a couple of poems for, as it happens, the RA show of Hungarian photography at the end of June. The buses crawled up Ludgate Hill. I'd have got there quicker with crutches, walking backwards. I was some forty minutes late. But they were very sweet. I recorded the poems then some more material about photography and Hungary in response to questions. I am fully aware all this will be heavily cut, but it is best to have a decent chunk to cut from. This is all for the audio guide. Bits of the poems will be next to the photographs they address, both by André Kertész. One of them was a Poem on the Underground.

Having slept very badly the night before the journey home was a faintly hallucinatory experience, arriving some time after 6pm. Tomorrow into university.

*

I bought a Guardian and a Times to follow the Bin Laden story. It's a little like an earthquake: a major shock then the after shocks; first reactions followed by visions and revisions. As I wrote yesterday, the usual people are writing the usual things. The Times has given it many pages with every victim of every El Qaeda attack named and a selection of them with photographs and brief accounts. The man was responsible for thousands of deaths, and maybe more. The precise balance between what he might have conceived as murderous political redress, ideas of a caliphate, religious fury, and the sheer desire to dominate is impossible to establish. I doubt now whether we shall get refined and crystalline essence of Bin Laden or even Bin Laden-ism. We don't really know what kind of body politic Guevara would have established. Myths are bigger than political programmes.

There is still a long way to go with the Bin Laden story. The evidences of his death have yet to be presented. I note a video supposedly showing his death circulated on Facebook, but there's nothing there when it's clicked on. Possibly a hoax. There is also the balance between relief, delight and triumphalism in the context of international sensibilities to consider. And will the the event will have any bearing on the unfolding Arab Spring?

Tomorrow back to normal, or thereabouts.

Oxford and Osama

Class done, reading over. Particularly bright class. In three hours we work through 15 poems along with matters that arise. Quite exhilarating surfing poems and ideas. After lunch I am free for the afternoon until dinner and the reading. Jamie McKendrick and Jane Griffiths around. Jon Stallworthy talking about Yeats.

The big news of course is Osama. No time to watch the developing interpretation, but John Simpson downplays it and his report assumes Dubya's incompetence. The narrative line is the expected one. The significance fits the narrative that reverts to the default position. No doubt someone will get blown up soon. Interpret that!

Tomorrow home via London to record some material for the big Hungarian photo show coming at the RA.

Brief from Oxford

Today was the surprise party for A, dear Estonian friend. Her son had invited her down to Brighton, where he lives with his partner. A few friends were also invited for a long celebratory lunch.

In order to get this done we drove to C's parents' house in Hertfordshire on Saturday and spent the night in the empty house, first visiting c's widowed mother in the nearby nursing home. She can't live by herself and needs constant care now. Her memory goes on and off like a switch. Little by little there is less of her: thin armed and legged.It is as if life had moved into a furious reverse. She remains sweet and sharp in patches, then the internal light flickers and goes off, before turning on again.

The next day the trains to Brighton, all packed with Bank Holidayers. We walk the 20 minutes or so to the address and settle in the garden. Just three other guests. There is a Russian spread and toasts - three of them - with vodka that is clear as crystal. Eggs with caviar. Aubergine salad. Bowls of cold delicacies. And more vodka. We talk about art and language and institutions in the small garden. We hug and bid farewell and dash for the train. At London Bridge we part - I to Oxford, C home. It's late. Workto read. Plans to make.