A mixed bag of a day

Porridge for breakfast, which is a sign of some significant change in the way I chart my course through life. Porridge? It came with jam ... so I remain a wuss, lest anyone think I'm wholly transformed.

Porridge came with salt when I was a child eating at my grandmother's kitchen table in Rockbank Street, Bridgeton. I loved my grandmother when I was a wee boy. I even suffered her daily dose of cod liver oil with something approaching forebearance but salty porridge is a taste one has never acquired.

After Spike had left to travel to work at the Multicultural Disability Advocacy Association I settled down with a pot of tea to finish reading Angus Calder's 1987 introduction to the work of T S Eliot, which is one of The Harvester Press "New Readings" series. It is a decent introduction, well worth reading although it draws a rather condescending conclusion with this observation:

"I suppose that I have in the past pushed [Eliot's oeuvre's] claims largely because it seemed to rebuke the timerity and insularity of much recent British verse; now that poets neither timid nor insular such as Geoffrey Hill, Norman McCaig and Charles Tomlinson have produced notable post-Modernist oeuvres of their own, Eliot's is no longer so needful for that purpose. He is not yet 'folded into one party' with such adversaries as the Georgians but I no longer feel so inclined to fight on his behalf, in a battle for 'Modernism' against easy-oozy English continmuity."

Frankly my dear Angus, who gives a damn? The end apart, however, it's a decent, even informative read.

After my taking of tea and deconstruction of Thomas, I ventured out into a day of domestic chores; buying stamps at the post office, shopping for milk, fruit juices and tissues at the supermarket, picking-up Spike after work. We took a chance on finding late-night-shopping parking at the Westfield Mall in Parramatta. There, we bought essentials: a new iron, a four-slice toaster and some emergency hosiery. Who could have guessed that all three would be put to use so quickly or so memorably?

I posted a copy of Kaboom to Johnny Geller at Curtis Brown in London. So maybe it was a day of domesticity; maybe a day with a touch of ectasy; maybe a day that the label 'writer' came a little closer. Maybe it was a day including all three, although the latter is still open to question.
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