My Little Pot

As an angry and continually exasperated socialist the whole area of money is a prickly one for me. It's late March again, when Evan Davies' eyes get even further apart and Andrew Marr's arms seem to stretch even more Mr Tickle-like in panic and unholy enthusiasm about money-transfer and savings rates.

Obviously, in this day-and-age, if I don't look out for my family's future, no-one will ... crumbs that sounds Tory. It isn't meant to, but in a society where central government seem unwilling or unable to protect any individual (house buyer, house seller, shopkeeper, banker, public sector worker, private sector worker ...) the individual is forced to protect itself. This is a long way from the socialist utopia of work hard, pay your taxes and it'll all be all right. There is not a single utility or civil procedure that has not taken wrangling and barter from me this year - there are no safeguards any longer and it sems that the honest working public sector earner is being screwed at the bottom of the pile.

Anyway, I digress. My point is that I am engaged in a distasteful task - that of sifting through interset rates - variable and fixed - to move out modest penny-jar ISAs to get the best interest and income I can for the next year as the flipping state will take no interest in my welfare, never mind my growth. If my family is the flourish I must set my nose to the wheel. Terrible isn't it - we are all varnished into the Tory corner by a labour government who have allowed the private sector to declare open season on the working individual. Everything has its price in 2009 - everything has a catch, so out with the penny jar and out with the price comparison websites and off we go. Ugh.

Villette - the Best a Man Can Get?

I finished Middlemarch last week and turned straight to Kipling's odd and peculiar fairy-stories with a historical basis: Puck of Puck's Hill. I enjoyed it very much and it has left me hungry for more.

However, now I have moved onto this long-lost last novel by Charlotte Bronte. It's very enjoyable, especially the odd opening chapters which concen Polly, the doll-sized, grave and inscrutable child of the teacher Paul Emmanuel. It's intriguing and satisfying - not yet as deeply seductive as Jane Eyre, but I will keep you posted.

Walken's Jackanory

This cracked me up. If only school had been like this...

Vernal Stuff

The Naturalist

Haloing your new head is a never-so-blue sky
under which a cloud of gorse, (its invisible smoke
spring’s incense), causes you to reach,

rooted in the soil of my arms, to touch the beads
of its rosary of just-poached yolk
with your small, rock-pool fist and habitual gasp of why;

but I draw you back, telling an inward not yet,
and offer a single saffron bloom, clean as buttermilk
which you scent and wish to ingest
- unsure from scent alone if it is food or toy.

We skirt the brambles’ tousle and avoid
its unkempt combs. Not yet.
Instead you taste an ash-bud, brand new, its silk
a surprise: a softness you have already begun to forget.