pumpkinstrokemarrow

This from my shaggy dog story from Henri Troyat, the author of the fat biography of Tolstoy which I read recently (30th September). Troyat, despite being born in Moscow, has written lots of stuff in French: biographies of all kinds of literary and historical giants - a feat in itself if they are all as fat as the biography of Tolstoy. Then a whole raft of novels, novellos, plays and what have you. No wonder they made the chap a member of the Académie française. I should say that the shaggy dog story is not actually about shaggy dogs; rather, pretty short haired dogs of a breed called 'petit lévrier italien'. A sort of small greyhound. But, entertaining nevertheless, and I shall report further in due course.

Came across a different sort of literature the other day in our 1863 golden treasury of songs and lyrics. To wit, a poem by one T. Gray, presumably the chap who wrote Gray's elegy. This elegy, however, is not for a grave yard but for a cat who drowned in his attempt to fish some goldfish out of a Chinese vase. Which all goes to show that the Victorians were not as stuffy as they are made out to be: stuffy people do not write comic verses about the sad death of a pet pussy. Also that Victorians kept their goldfish in ceramic vases rather than glass bowls. Maybe they had not learned at that point how to make these last at a reasonable price.

And now to bang the law and order drum, as befits my age. Not impressed by student demonstrators who complain about being kettled. They do, I grant, have a right to peaceful protest within the confines of the law. But the police have a right, on the behalf of the rest of us, to intervene if they have reasonable grounds for belief that the protest will not be peaceful. Is likely to result in damage to the property of third parties. Or to persons. Furthermore, children below the age of criminal consent should not be there at all.

This despite my being a veteran demonstrator from the student disturbances of the late sixties. And in my defence I would say that while our demonstrations were not altogether or always peaceful, we did not go in much for smashing things up. Left that sort of demonstration to the French.