Random Walk This Way

Well I suppose I have to review Goodbye to all That now don't I? Well as I said above, it is a lot less literary than I was expecting - anecdotal and down-to-earth rather than what you might expect from a poet but then again I suppose that even if you are a poet, living in the mud of the trenches might colour any prose with mundanity no matter how much good whiskey, silver cutlery and tasteful lighting you have in your dugouts. My overriding view of the trenches from the section I have already read is one of soft-lights, an ambience almost like those scenes of Victorians shopping you get on the top of chocolate tins. I know that this is wrong but not even the description of the poor sap who blew his face off with his own grenade gave me anything other than a slight jolt. I suppose that this is the horror – the acceptance of that horror as normal – the slow descent into trauma-causing disaster with out any real awareness that things are as bad as they can get.

Material World http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/thematerialworld.shtml yesterday was about Locusts. This together with the new Powergen advert for greener electricity involving millions of helicoptering sycamore seeds gave me a terrible dream of being in a world with thousands of locusts filling every available space and me being unable to avoid stepping on them. Actually there is a third influence for this which is Robert Graves description of stepping on mice and frogs that had fallen in the trenches. All of this dream happened in ten minutes sleep between seeing that it was nearly time to get up and then realising that I was late. I can still hear the crunch of the insects under my feet.

I have always wondered why we do not try and turn all the protein created in a swarm of locusts into something edible? Maybe the problem in locust-affected areas is that eating insects is against some local religious code. Locusts look like prawns anyway. I used to look after the locusts ate school. I had to go and gather grass for them at lunchtime and drop it into the cage through the hole at the top. There was always the thrill that one of them would escape. We made our own fun at that school.