k-punk

Attention, Marcello haters: if you can read this and not feel a postive hunger to hear the music desribed, there really is no hope for you.
What a wonderful invocation of the pull of Englishness in his musings on Roy Harper.
Interesting that Marcello should quote Hardy’s ‘In Time of the Breaking of Nations’, Hardy’s clinging to an Eternal Englishness in the face of the trauma of the Great War , a poem I misquoted/ misremembered here.
Hardy, particularly his poems, will always hold a special place in my heart. I first encountered him when I was starting my A-levels, and he was instrumental in my discovery that Literature could connect, could be more than a drab academic object of study. (Try studying Norman Nicholson for your O levels, as they were then, if you want to be put off poetry for life).
There’s an irony – I’m not sure if it’s horrible or appropriately poetic, or both – about the fact that Hardy, who devoted his last years to composing morbid but luminescent elegies for his deceased wife, should have been one of Laura’s favourite writers.