I’ve succumbed to temptation and taken out a subscription to Slightly Foxed, The Real Reader’s Quarterly. I used to read it in the library at my club but newspapers and magazines are too toxic for members to handle these days.
While I was about it I bought a new Slightly Foxed edition, The Empress of Ireland, as a present and a jute shopping bag to add to the considerable number piled up in the kitchen. In the autumn edition seventeen books are reviewed, two of which I have read: Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford and Party Going by Henry Green. I hope I find a gem or two amongst the rest. SF production standards for their books and their almost hundred page quarterly are high but for the latter that comes at a price: £48 a year. The reviews are fairly short which is good, unlike The London Review of Books to which I have cancelled my subscription as the reviews are too long and too dry.
Slightly Foxed have published a poem on their website that I suspect is going viral among folk who read. I was sent it by my friend the HFM (Hedge Fund Manager). So I apologise if you have already read it and sent it on to everybody on your Christmas card list.
A Brief Pageant of English Verse
I won’t arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
I’ll sanitize the doorknob and make a cup of tea.
I won’t go down to the sea again; I won’t go out at all,
I’ll wander lonely as a cloud from the kitchen to the hall.
There’s a green-eyed yellow monster to the north of Katmandu
But I shan’t be seeing him just yet and nor, I think, will you.
While the dawn comes up like thunder on the road to Mandalay
I’ll make my bit of supper and eat it off a tray.
I shall not speed my bonnie boat across the sea to Skye
Or take the rolling English road from Birmingham to Rye.
About the woodland, just right now, I am not free to go
To see the Keep Out posters or the cherry hung with snow,
And no, I won’t be travelling much, within the realms of gold,
Or get me to Milford Haven. All that’s been put on hold.
Give me your hands, I shan’t request, albeit we are friends
Nor come within a mile of you, until this trial ends.