From the Journals

3 May 1998

R.F. Langley

Another reading in Cambridge last week, with all the circumstances in place… the drive there after school on Friday after a quick bowl of soup… traffic jams to start in, so I go to the Wall roundabout to avoid having to cross the lane as I would have had to do had I cut across by Mill Cottages… and was glad I’d done so since the lane was full of almost-stationary cars… solid jams and fast jostling at the brief episode on the motorway, then the long unencumbered run across, nowadays without towns or villages, and the difficult parking around Sturton Street so I end up with the car a street away from the house.

The practice reading to Nigel and Ewan Smith in the evening, after we had listened to Perelman in the Keynes Room… I found that, sitting back under the balcony, I couldn’t hear him and followed nothing, though those alongside were chuckling… so, as I thought, I am quite deaf now. The copies of Jack* were there on the table in the Chetwynd Room, Rod Mengham seeming anxious that I should be pleased, relieved that I was… cream cover with the three black outline grass moths, exactly as I’d drawn them and run them off on the school photocopier, clean and clear so their forelegs, which don’t touch, don’t blot together at all.



Things as a whole seem as neat and tidy ...