Culture

Approaching her death, and the end of Claire Fuller’s third novel, Frances Jellico — for the most part a stickler for order and rules — admits that ‘the truth isn’t always the right way’. A wasting disease has given her dementia, ‘but is kind enough to leave the summer of 1969 intact’. She dips in and out of her memories in a fugue state of disorientation and, it would seem, sedative-induced dreams. ‘A sharp stab of pain in my arm and once more I am in the attic at Lyntons.’ Lyntons was a Georgian stately home in Hampshire, whose garden architecture, including ‘orangery, grotto, mausoleum and sundry follies’, she was sent to survey for things of value.

The writer and chemist Primo Levi saw poetry in Mendeleev’s periodic table, describing it as ‘poetry, loftier and more solemn than all the poetry we had swallowed down in liceo; and come to think of it, it even rhymed!’ So I thought it might be an idea to challenge you to write a poem inspired by it. Your entries were generally witty and well-turned, with frequent nods to Tom Lehrer, whom I also had in mind when I set this assignment. Honourable mentions go to Frank McDonald’s smart acrostic, as well as to Martin Elster, Nicholas Stone and Christine Michael. The winners snaffle £25 each.

Across the fields from the medieval manor house of Toad Hall, and the accompanying 16th-century timber-frame apothecary’s house which Alan Garner dismantled and moved 17 miles to join it in Blackden in rural Cheshire, sits Jodrell Bank Observatory. Here huge telescopes scour the cosmos, seeking radio waves from distant planets and stars. This juxtaposition between past, present and future, all existing in harmonious symbiosis on land that Garner’s family have lived on for 400 years, seems the perfect metaphor for the creative output of this most singular of English writers.

It is often said that we should worry about the world we are leaving to the younger generation. I am a bit more worried about the poor world, given the state of the younger generation who will soon have custody of it. Last week, for example, the students of Manchester University have decided that Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” is not suitable for their college because he was raaaaacisst. Of course. They have replaced his poem with some vapid drivel from the serially overrated Maya Angelou. It might have been better if they’d simply rewritten Kipling’s verse, adapted it for modern times.