I wanted to buy Fiona McCarthy's (awful name) The Life of Lord Byron today in the Oxfam, I jingle-jangled my coins in my overcoat pocket, counted them (I had shouted, a few minutes previously - to a friend - that I had 'a few 'heads to splash on books' as he wondered down the steep road to B-- T--, grinning to myself) and found the disconcerting (as it shows, rather horridly, my genteel poverty) £1.63. The book was only £1.99 and not being able to afford such a poultry (chicken feed! Ha!) sum conjured personal laughter, spurred me to look down at someone examining My Story (by someone, somewhere who's never read Kant) and to trip and skip, smiling tightly, out of said, sad, shop. My shoes, also, are scuffed and require new laces and and a polish. I read, and walked (something thought to be very radical in T--), both in Brideshead and T--, in the light, the light, the light and flighty drizzle. I saw mama at the station, hair newly polished.
“Anyone who has been to an English public school
will always feel comparatively at home in prison.
It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy
of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying.”
Waugh, Evelyn
And I mused, rather smilingly, on this - and thought with anger on his thoughts on
SAINTS.
Oh it is so hard to be a Catholic!
