The real thing

Sean O'Brien has won the Forward Prize. Again, again.

To put this into context, the Forward Prize is the UK's premier award for a collection of poetry, it's a recognition of sustained and outstanding work, and Sean has now won it three times. Which is not only unsurpassed, it's unequalled.

And this guy is a friend of mine, y'know? I was getting drunk with him last week; on Saturday, I'm cooking curry for him and his partner. Sometimes I still find myself just a little bit awed by the people I mix with. I've always been vulnerable to that name-dropping gene (have I told you about the time I met Tolkien? I have? Oh, damn. Sorry...), but the hitherto-unconfessed secret is that I do it to myself too, sotto voce. I don't need other people to brag to; I can impress myself, by the roster of my own friends. How sad is that?

Long green things

So I was standing there at the chopping-board slicing up a courgette, as a man very well might who was planning on making a courgette-and-manchego tortilla for his lunch; and Mac was getting excited, stretching up and trying to claw himself a piece (I swear he's grown, since he arrived; he didn't use to be able to hook a paw over the edge of the chopping-board, I'm sure), and we had this whole conversation about how courgette is not cucumber, and I know he likes cucumber but a courgette is not the same thing at all, for all that they may look alike to an eager little cat, and didn't he have a nose, couldn't he smell the difference...?

And like that; and then of course a piece fell on the floor because that just always happens, and -

Yup, you know what I'm going to say. You have always known it.

Nom-nom-nom.

Add courgette to the list of Mac's Favourite Veggies. Actually, you can add zucchini too, that may be cheating but it'll give us something beginning with z, which is always a thrill.

"Let no one's work evade your eyes..."

...and if you're going to plagiarise, plagiarise the best.

I'm reading through and to some extent reworking the story I wrote last week, and I've just reached the scene where my best-ever eunuch dwarf is growing melancholy over a pipe of drugs, yattering with a sergeant about how the old times were better; and what he says is "We have seen the best of this city," and when I wrote it my fingers almost automatically went on to make it read "We have seen the best of this city, Master Sergeant," and I didn't really know why I'd done that, he hasn't referred to the man that way before; but Master Sergeant is of course a recognised rank, and it has a pleasing rhythmic ring to it, so I was happy to let it stand.

And now this evening, reading through, of course it's obvious where that came from: almost the same mood, almost the same rhythm,

"We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow."

And so the sentence stands, no question. I'm always suspicious when cinema gets self-referential, it's like it has nothing to refer to except its own brief self; but literature, now, when that reaches back to echo what has gone before, that just makes me feel at home and comfortable, settled in...