Pulchritudo et Salubritas

I see that my hometown has been in the news today:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/dorset/7430008.stm

I remember a time when my sister and I derisively nicknamed Bournemouth 'BOB' (Boring Old Bournemouth - we were about 12 at the time) - now its all corpses in suitcases, drug-dealing gangsters (sorry Mr Carr, "legitimate businessmen"), and dead students. Still, some things never change:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bournemouth_School

Good to see that Mr Granger is still at the helm, slowly steering a once-fine school into the abyss.

And whilst I'm running down my homeland, this story didn't exactly fill me with patriotic pride:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7429638.stm

The choicest line? "It's sweaty on there but I'm going round and round until I vomit" - well said Mr Peter Moore from Brighton. Still, all of this is perhaps understandable: the Circle Line is liable to reduce even the most saintly of souls to violence and vandalism, even without the presence of alcohol.

I'll leave with some words from that ardent and spare chronicler of the decline of modern England, Philip Larkin:


'Nothing To Be Said'

For nations vague as weed,
For nomads among stones,
Small-statured cross-faced tribes
And cobble-close families
In mill-towns on dark mornings
Life is slow dying.

So are their separate ways
Of building, benediction,
Measuring love and money
Ways of slow dying.
The days spent hunting pig
Or holding a garden-party,

Hours giving evidence
Or birth, advance
On death equally slowly.
And saying so to some
Means nothing; others it leaves
Nothing to be said.


From 'The Whitsun Weddings'

There we were aimed. And as we raced across
Brights knots of rail
Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss
Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail
Travelling coincidence; and what it held
Stood ready to be loosed with all the power
That being changed can give. We slowed again,
And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled
A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower
Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.