This and That, Not Including London

 Well, I didn't make it to London on Friday. The Euston train got no further than Milton Keynes (of largely evil memory), where damage to overhead cables up ahead had ended all serious possibility of getting to London, short of limping in very late, packed into a cattle-truck train and with no guarantee of a smooth return. After almost an hour amid milling crowds on that depressing station, I found an escape route – northwards, back the way I had come. I would get off at Tamworth, a stop before Lichfield, and take a look around the newly reopened castle. This should have been straightforward, but at Rugby (of entirely evil memory), the train ground to a halt for half an hour and more, thanks to a broken-down train ahead. By the time I 'alighted at' Tamworth, I was fast losing the will to live, but I made my way to the castle, paid the entrance fee, and climbed to the entrance (the castle was built on a pretty impressive motte). From Norman to Victorian, with something of every period between, the building – or rather buildings – has plenty of architectural interest, and the interiors, more or less convincingly reconstructed, reflect the range of periods. It's a castle that was lived in continuously from medieval to Victorian times, so is a good deal more interesting than some castles I have dutifully trudged around. The whole thing is, as one would expect these days, very child-friendly and interactive, but I made my studious way along the prescribed tour route, unmoved by the opportunity to dress up as a Marmion knight or test the weight of a broadsword. I even made it to the top of the tower, from where the views are impressively wide. This experience, followed by a stroll around the more agreeable parts of Tamworth, almost made up for the earlier ordeal by railway. 
  The upside of all those hours on trains and stations was the opportunity it afforded of getting on with my reading. I had with me a volume I'd picked up on the bookstall outside the Samuel Johnson House – a novel called Max Gate, by a New Zealand writer I'd never heard of, Damien Wilkins. As the title suggests, the action is set in the hideous house that Thomas Hardy built for himself in Dorchester. The narrator is a housemaid, Nellie Titterington, looking back on her time at Max Gate in the winter of 1928, when the great man lay dying. It's a fascinating and convincing reconstruction of the gloomy, claustrophobic Hardy ménage, and I'm looking forward to reading on. No doubt I shall return to this one. Meanwhile, having finally done with Carlyle's French Revolution, I have new bedside reading, in the form of a book recommended by a friend, Their Ancient Glittering Eyes: Remembering Poets and More Poets by Donald Hall. The first essay, on Robert Frost, is a splendidly incisive, but sympathetic and fair, portrait of that deeply flawed, often deeply unpleasant genius. The title of the book, by the way, comes from Yeats's Lapis Lazuli:
There, on the mountains and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient glittering eyes, are gay.