Atticus Maximus

Finished 'To Kill a Mockingbird' on Saturday. Couldn't really put it down. The film left out lots of gentle conversation between the town's women folk that seemed to give a restrained air to the book. There are of course the several powerful moments for which the film is rightly famous and in the book they are far stronger because they are backed up by the thoughts of the narrator. An excellent book though again, I suspect the power is wasted on the teenagers who get forced to read it as part of their school-work. These worthy books - nineteen-eighty-four, To Kill a Mockingbird etc - are probably given to children as part of a plan to 'improve' them, a plan probably seen by some people as a lefty idea. Maybe I was unworthy at that age, not that I read any of these books. We got 'Where Angels Fear to Tread' and books so boring that I have forgotten them.

Strangely, while I was looking on Amazon for 'Where Angels Fear to Tread', I was presented a list of 'just reads' which included both this and 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. Looking through all the other lists, they seemed to contain these two books which is obviously Amazon's clever way of pushing recommendations at you. Look at the Sorority Girls' lists! SP must be their patron Saint.

So much I want to write about and it has all retreated to the back of my mind like a rat hiding under the furniture as you try to bash it. I did have so many ideas and it seems that I will have to resort to an oblique strategy in order to write anything further. Sometimes, I do not believe in anything, even myself. This world must be real but think about how your mind reacts with it. I sit here and all my interaction with the world goes fuzzy as if I am falling asleep. There almost seems to be a physical problem with the thoughts moving through my mind, a limit to their speed. Of course, when I start talking to someone, the brakes come off and all returns to normal but the problems are internal, a reaction to thinking about thinking. The poems may fly out of me, and I have been writing more than ever recently, but in the depths here there is something which I think is really important, the solution to everything - everything in relation to me rather than the rest of the world. When I was about 15, I went up on the British Camp, an Iron-Age fort in the Malvern Hills just above our house, and looking down on the Severn Valley, I got a feeling of completeness, an idea of that very moment as the one true point in the Universe. It did not matter that I could not define what it meant; it was enough that I had been there to experience it. The fact that I cannot define it by anything other than knowing that it happened has left me feeling empty at times over the years since it happened. Rationally I put it down to a chemical thing but you can see the idea of it being a religious or spiritual moment.

Lead on Peasants.