Writing On Literature

There aren't many upsides to being a regular visitor to hospital, especially if you work there. This is the message I sometimes received from the nurses last year when I was in the Oxford JR to have my knee sewn back together. This year, I ensured my regular summer bed on Ward 2A by breaking apart the other knee. I thought after a year of economic stagnation the situation might have deteriorated. Maybe the curtains hadn't been washed since last July (my enduring memory of a year 2000 birth at RUH Bath was of bloodstains on the curtain. Not the one round the bed. The one at the window). In fact the John Radcliffe Trauma Ward had been restaffing

Eleven months ago, I jumped high into the air to catch a cricket ball. When I landed, without the ball in my hand, I ruptured the patella tendon in my right knee. This meant that the top half of my leg was no longer connected, in any active sense of the word, to the bottom half. I had an operation, and wore a leg brace for twelve weeks, but as a keen sportsman I know the strength to be gained from cliché. It’s how you bounce back. I could return stronger than I ever was. Yes and no. After Christmas I got myself fit – a bit of running, a spot of cycling. I started the cricket season at

In 2003, I went to Japan as Visiting Professor at the University of Tokyo, a post that had evolved from the Professorship held in 1924 by the First World War poet Edmund Blunden. Blunden wrote the prose account of his wartime experiences, Undertones of War, in the shadow of the University's grand Red Gate referring only to some trench-maps and his anxious unforgetting. Blunden's time in Tokyo was immensely productive, inspiring new poems, edited texts, critical commentaries. He also kept up with his beloved cricket (there is a separate chapter on Cricket in Barry Webb's definitive biography). However, my own combination of interests meant that while teaching in his shadow I was presented with a literary scoop, or so I

Over on our site in development (wait for it, wait for it), we had an interesting discussion about Scrabble and this year's British National Champion, the fantastic Mikki Nicholson. In principle, I like all games until my children start winning. And until recently I was a big fan of Scrabble. So much so that on my shelves I have a copy of Word Freak, by Stefan Fatsis. I have this book partly because The Times claims that 'Stefan Fatsis is the Hunter S. Thompson of Competitive Scrabble', but also because the book was published by Yellow Jersey Press in the days (2001) when Yellow Jersey published brilliant sports books no-one else would touch. The story follows US sports-writer Fatsis as

I know I keep promising to post up the first pages of J'suis pas plus con, or rather, I promised once and I always keep my promises. I have, however, been distracted by two issues. Computer malfunctions, which are boring. And stash. As an ambitious rugby player, I used to have the same hunger for stash as everyone else.  'Stash' was the stuff that came with selection to a team.  Stash is the extras, the perks, the over-and-aboves, and in those days, before the ease of printing onto synthetic materials, stash was expensive and therefore reserved most often for representative teams.  It was worth having. Typical items would be tracksuits, training tops, match shorts, maybe even a team-branded bag.