Recently, I’ve been getting The Circling Song polished up to a nice bright shine in time to receive its brand new ISBN and so be launched as a paperback on Amazon.  Over the last twelve months, I have received lots of support and not a little advice, some of it rather good.  Several of the suggestions have been taken on board and I hope that anyone who’s read it already will be able to tell the difference.

As an aside, I will add that anyone who bought the paperback on Lulu is entitled to a free upgrade to the new edition and any Kindlers who have edition one can download the new one for free.

So, advert out of the way, I’ll get on to what I want to say.  Firstly, I’m not a great writer – no surprise there – but I am an even worse poet.  Always have been; always will be. But just how bad a poet I am, few people were ever likely to discover until, as part of my revamp of the Circling Song, I decided to make one of the characters into a poet.

Now this was utterly unnecessary but the more I thought about it, the more it began to make sense particularly if some of Lear’s poems, it turned out, made veiled references to Henry Lawrence.

 George Lear is a farmer’s son whose experience of the war and contact with his pal, Henry, begins to turn him into something of a philosopher. His letters and diary entries begin to show this as the story progresses (although he still tends to “dumb-down” – rather charmingly, though I say so myself - his letters to his folks).  I felt that it would be a natural progression for George to try his hand at poetry, which wouldn’t be such a problem had he remained unpublished. Unfortunately, it turns out that he published regularly in a number journals, had a couple of his more humorous ones accepted by the Wipers Times and published his own slim volume in 1919.  Having read Robert Graves towards the end of the war, his poems take a rather more cynical turn and other influences see him move towards a preference for blank verse.  Although he is by no means a radical anti-war poet, he is classed among those who are angered by the conduct and futility of the war.

So I find myself constructing poems in the styles of at least three species of War Poet with no real understanding of how to do it at all. Is it pure hubris on my part?  It may well be but (and finally, I come to my point) because I’m pretending to write as someone else and not as Russell Cruse, I’m far less self conscious. You see, the poems are not about me and my life and my feelings (about which I am extremely coy) but about those of George Lear.

And so a huge part of my mental block about poetry has been shovelled away, leaving me to concern myself only with the language and not the sentiment.  I may still turn out to be the worst poet in the world but it won’t be me being criticised. The poems are his, not mine.

Anyway, here’s one of George’s efforts from 1918.  It’s called “Last Night”.  Feel free to criticise; after all, it's not me but him as gets the blame.  And he's been dead these forty years!

Last night, as soldiers will, too deeply of red wine I drank
And slept beneath the sky
And, as I slumbered there, I dreamed of those companions lost
Or driven out to die in muddy fields, forgotten holes
Yet never knowing why.

And one, my dearest friend, stood by me even as I woke,
(Though I knew it could not be)
Since now I slept no more, and yet he smiled and spoke:
Of wonders he could see; then (as he could not in life),
He showed his world to me.

And here, awake I seem, although I fancy still I dream but
Nature proves me wrong
For, upon my aching head, cool dew I feel, scent honied meadow-sweet,
Taste bitterness on wine-dry tongue.  And see aloft, the careless lark.
She circles still, the clouds among;

She circles yet, upon her song.
She circles yet;
Upon her song.

Every year, magazines and supplements are awash with recommendations for “Holiday Reads” (frequently the capital letters are obligatory).  Some are worthy, some are trash, others are, thank the stars, somewhere in between but few, I suspect are ever actually read.  And a jolly good thing too.

And I’m bound to ask how anyone can believe that the words “holiday” and “read” actually go together in the first place.

Can there be anything worse than lying on some ghastly stretch of orange grit, trying to keep the sun out of your eyes (isn’t it strange how, whichever way you face, the sun will always find a way to spoil your reading pleasure), trying not to get greasy sun cream and sweat all over the pages and trying to concentrate amidst all the distractions.  Give me a cosy armchair and a glass of whisky of a winter’s evening any day. 

And if you aren't on a beach, then what the hell are doing wasting time reading?  When I’m on holiday, I want to do things; see new places and have new experiences (or the same experiences somewhere else).  I may well read voraciously on the actual journey but once I’m there, I’m happy to leave the literature in the bag. (I do not take a suitcase.  That’s just mental).  If I feel the desire to read, it means that the holiday is frankly is a bit dull.

Of course, as many readers will know, there is something of the contrarian about me and I am one of those infuriating people who likes to make his own mind up when it comes to… well, pretty much everything, really and, n the case of holiday read recommendations, the cynic in me cannot but believe that the very concept is born of nothing more than the desire of the publishing industry to sell a few books. 

What?  You thought that journalists were driven by the desire to put you in the way of something you might like?  Well, you can believe that if it makes you feel better.  Personally, the lists often seem to me to be far too similar for them to have been devised independently of one another.

But if anything is worse that the recommendations of some hack, it’s the revelations we are forced to endure of what various worthies are packing for the summer.  Frankly, anyone taking “Coalition”, by Mark Oaten (as David Miliband claimed to be, or “Jerusalem: The Biography” by Simon Sebag-Montifiore – David Cameron’s selection - doesn’t deserve a holiday at all.  Personally, I’d love to see the look on the face of any companion who accompanies Alain de Botton on holiday, as he removes from his suitcase, Emile Durkheim’s “Suicide” and “The Anatomy of Melancholy” by Robert Burton.

Perhaps some of you might let me know what you managed to get through over the summer and, possibly more importantly, why you bothered.