‘above all then great /banks of clouds tether my elate muscle, to /nothing & its fields – still fresh & green.’

RIP Jeremy Prynne. A sad day.

Our household elders (apart from me), Ted (10) and Jessica (15).

In the Book of Judges, Jephthah does battle with the Ammonites, which you'd have to say sounds like a fairly easy victory by anyone's standards.

George Buchanan did not enjoy his Portuguese holiday (inquisition, torture), would not go again.

‘Dreein aa the dule’ of George Buchanan’s Jephthah, translated from the Latin into Scots by Robert Garioch.

Drummond of Hawthornden rhymes ‘Tasso’ and ‘asse, hoe!’

Some of the remarkable Rosicrucian carvings at nearby Edzell Castle, inspired one gathers by the work of Giordano Bruno.

9 January 1631 was ‘fatall. but happye.’ to Drummond of Hawthornden, that poet notes in a very accident-heavy chronicle of his life.

Simplify your social life by emulating Mr Pepper from Woolf’s The Voyage Out, who negotiates social gatherings by walking to the middle of the room, saying ‘Ha ha’ as loudly as he can, telling himself he has done his duty, and walking out again.

I am currently listening to all of Bach's cantatas in chronological order (an experience I can heartily recommend), and was pleasantly surprised to find Bach sampling Spring from Vivaldi's Four Seasons in this aria from cantata 27. www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2iR...

I wonder what Wendy Mulford has been up to in recent years. Should she, that is, remain in the land of the living, which needless to say I hope she does. Here's a fine poem from her And suddenly supposing.

All my life I have been asking people if it was 'caliginous in the metropolis'. One day someone will give the right answer.

I enjoyed the essay by Kathyrn Maris in the Little Review on poets writing about their father's penises, but has she not missed a trick in overlooking the 'courting tackle' of Michael Longley's 'Choughs', not to mention this disarming example from Paul Muldoon ('October, 1950')?

Some glimpses of Rosslyn Chapel (interior photography not allowed).

Happy eightieth birthday to that fine poet Peter Didsbury, from Sean O’Brien, me, and all the contributors to During the Late and Long Continuing Cold, a Festschrift in his honour published by Broken Sleep Books. Hoping he enjoys the work we have taken such pleasure in secretly assembling.

An interesting story about prizes and literature today.

In Craigmillar Castle.

Another fireplace from Newhailes House. Sir John Dalrymple on the left has the grim distinction of having authorised the Glencoe massacre.

Rococo fireplace, Newhailes House, Musselburgh.

Sadly truncated career means this Wardrobe never got to be a chair. Closet status not known.

A familiar face has popped up in Woolf’s The Voyage Out. With strong views on suffragism!

Delighted to find actual treason in this biographical note of a 17th century poet in an Oxford anthology (the sentence beginning ‘She bore thirteen children…’).

In his best-selling Literary Theory: An Introduction, Terry Eagleton quotes a forgotten Oxford Professor of Poetry called George Gordon saying that it is the mission of Eng Lit to 'save our souls and heal the state'. Strong stuff. Except it turns out George Gordon said the complete opposite.

From a Good Friday meditation by the remarkable Aidan Mathews.

Serendipity as I turn from reading my Dryden (he’s very good you know) to Aidan Mathews, only to find a poem on the subject of that same 17th c. bard. Had it been about church architecture I expect he could have called it ‘chancel culture’.

On Geoff Hattersley, whose Collected Poems was published by @brokensleepbooks.bsky.social a few months ago: rorywaterman.substack.com/p/geoff-hatt...

Was listening to this charity shop find on a tape recorder in the kitchen when our daughter walked in and said ‘Don’t flush your dog!’

A melancholy poetic prière d’insérer by Elizabeth Jane Leon (1582-1612).

‘Batrachianism is such a rewarding pastime.’

In which I meditate on the baroque modernism of Michel Butor's north of England novel, L'emploi du temps. brandnewcarnation.substack.com/p/the-baroqu...

Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? Classical folly by Loch Skene.

Should Christina Rossetti ever be canonised she would make an excellent patron saint of desk diaries.

Wittgenstein’s ‘critique of pure raisin’.

Whenever I type the name of a correspondent with an accent grave/fada in their name I write the word ‘cliché’ to meet my diacritic needs, then delete the first five letters; but must also brace myself for the day when I finally send an email addressed ‘Dear Cliché’.

While one is aware of the author of Harry Potter having borrowed character names from Edinburgh headstones, can I be the first to have wondered if the character of Vernon Dursley owes anything to this fine portrait by David Wilkie of William Chalmers Bethune and family at the National Gallery?

‘Visible absences, colours of the mind’ (Geoffrey Hill, ‘Terribilis est locus iste’).

The motivational art of David Shrigley.

Ian Sansom on the many Audens, ghostly penis included.

A diary piece of mine on Scottish poetry of the long eighteenth century. substack.com/@davidwheatl...

I recognised someone in the street and asked him to sign a book. A great moment, I felt.

Baudelaire at the StAnza festival, with QR code.

Joan Eardley’s Catterline, on the Aberdeenshire coast.

A Scottish poet who died even younger than Robert Fergusson, Michael Bruce (1746-1767). ‘Refulgent’ and ‘inglorious’ I like.

Idea for a Latvian-Italian restaurant called Riga Toni.

Looking up Stendhal syndrome once I remember reading ‘Stendhal travelled to Florence, where he suffered from Stendhal syndrome.’

Jessica in a box.

Is this the great postwar Manchester novel.

‘Der Spaziergang.’

There is a (William) Meston building at the University of Aberdeen, but I wonder how many people who walk past it are aware of the stinging satirical verse of this Jacobite soldier and professor (1688-1745).