Well, blow me down! Philip Larkin turned up on The Archers this evening, in the form of his fine late poem, 'The Mower' – or rather the last two lines thereof. Wonders will never cease*. However, I do recall an episode a long while back when the late Nigel Pargetter – a lovely fellow but not the sharpest knife in the box – suddenly discovered his inner classicist and started quoting, in Latin, from Virgil's Georgics.
Here is the whole of 'The Mower' –
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
Apologies for the long absence. Tomorrow, DV, I shall resume with something more like a proper post...
* A quotation from Lichfield's own David Garrick.
There was another Larkin (no relation) on The Archers long ago, in the days when there were still yokels in Ambridge – Jethro Larkin, a farm labourer, who I think worked on Dan Archer's spread. His daughter, the estimable Clarrie, is married to Eddie Grundy. (By the way, for the benefit of American readers, I should explain that The Archers is a six-days-a-week radio 'soap', an 'everyday story of country folk', that has become an English institution. I have been following it for decades, a reluctant and often rebellious addict.)
ReplyDelete