I talk to people whenever I can. I am very unguarded. You've only to put a few pennies into some chaps and you get some wonderfully unexpected talk. But it has to be the right moment. In Suffolk you won't get a thing back if you choose the wrong moment. They won't talk politics in the pub. Their attitude is puritan in such matters. Politics to them is a kind of necessary function which stinks. They stare straight back into Wilson's eyes on the pub telly with that hard blue gaze of theirs, and God knows what they are thinking!
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Saturday, February 04, 2023
A Necessary Function Which Stinks
Ronald Blythe, Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village (New York: Pantheon, 1969), pp. 160-161 (Hugh Hambling speaking):