pumpkinstrokemarrow

The price also includes a range of internationally acclaimed dining options, swimming pools and entertainments. Said to be almost as good as London's West End. Perhaps even better on the swimming pool front where the West End does not do all that well, at least in so far as municipal swimming pools are concerned. So we can pay all this money to have facilities which are said to be almost as good as those we enjoy at home . We get a stateroom which might be a bit larger than our bedroom and which might have a window with a watery view. Every morning we get to queue up for hours so that we can get off this floating palace and every afternoon we get to queue up for hours so that we can get back onto it again. Unfortunately the advertisement says nothing about the facilities offered smokers. Do they sport internationally acclaimed smoking options? The finest Havanas stored in the finest humidors? Can I be sure that no-one is going to be smoking anywhere near me?

Should you be rushing to book, remember that the price quoted is based on double occupancy. Hefty single supplement applies. Remember also that this never to be repeated DT reader offer may be withdrawn without notice at any time. For ourselves, I think we shall stick with the Isle of Wight. We can think about, if not watch, the huge cruise ships pulling out of Southampton from the comfort of the Puckpool Tea Garden - which sells beers, pies and ice-creams, to mention just a few of the merely locally acclaimed items on their menu a couple of years ago.

Thinking of home comforts, part of yesterday's reading was another go at 'Suite Francaise', from which I share a tit-bit. It seems that if you were a prominent French writer between the wars that it would be normal to team up with a similarly prominent French politician. You, being rich, provide him with material benefits. He, with his hands on the levers of power, can pull strings for you. The tit-bit was that the material benefits might include the loan of your mistress for a couple of days to entertain the politician at the races. Very open minded chaps these Frenchmen. Or perhaps I have misunderstood the French.

Another part was Howard's End, with a preface by one Alfred Kazin, of whom I had never previously heard, the book having been taken out of the library in the wake of a viewing of a Merchant Ivory adaption which I had enjoyed. Well cast with Vanessa Redgrave as Mrs. Wilcox, Antony Hopkins as Mr. Wilcox, Helena Bonham-Carter as Miss. Helen Schlegel and Emma Thompson as Miss. Margeret Schlegel. Not luvvies I particularly care for in themselves, but well cast on this occasion. On reading the book again, the first time for more years than I can remember, struck by the sensitivity with which Forster was able to describe personal situations which do not quite work out for one reason or another. Maybe a reflection of his problems. But still find the cultural aspirant, Leonard Bast, embarrassing and awkward, even as a character in a story. Maybe a reflection of my problems. But last night got around to reading the introduction by Kazin, with which I was much struck, not that I am quite as enthusiastic about the book as he seems to be. But he draws attention to the start of chapter 6, where Forster announces that 'we are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet. This story deals with gentlefolk, or with those who are obliged to pretend that they are gentlefolk'. Kazin reminds us that no-one thought that the lower orders were worthy of serious literary attention, in English anyway, until Hardy got around to it towards the end of the 19th century.

He does not appear to be very keen on Joyce, while recognising his place in the canon. 'Ulysses will always be the grand, cold monument (of the modernist novel, of which Howard's End is certainly not one. More kin to Jane Austen)' and a quote from Virginia Woolf's diary: 'a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples... An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me, the book of a self-taught working-man, & we all now how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?'. Perhaps, while we no longer have the high cultured of those days, the chaps like Gladstone who used to knock out a bit of Latin poetry by way of relaxation after a full day's work (a snippet from the DT), at least we do have good quality education and opportunity available for all those with the wit to take advantage of them. No need to be snobby about people from the working classes any more.