the holy land

Good morning, Baroquistas. Ms B can report that she is ever so slightly* the worse for wear, having successfully - some might say too successfully - navigated a monster day. It started with work, but was dominated by a funeral, and then an emotional bonding session in a Wetherspoons pub in Wanstead (over champagne and chips) with a group of people she'd never met before (but now loves), and finished with the launch of Maurice Riordan's long-awaited third collection, The Holy Land (Faber), at the London Review of Books bookshop.*

The funeral service was beautiful, with a beautiful vicar who really conveyed a sense of what Julia was like, and lots of exactly the right sort of religion - much comfort - which was a relief. It felt surreal. Even the location felt surreal; I'd never been so far east before. There's a distinctive atmosphere out there, like stepping back in time, or out of time: village green, big houses, capacious pubs, and a general air of net curtains and pebbledash...

The funeral itself was also harrowing. Very hard. The hardest part of all was the awful witnessing of other people's grief. It really felt as if the whole packed chapel-full of people were almost physically supporting Julia's family, but even among the other mourners it was somehow shocking to see the men in their beautiful black ties crying. It all felt very raw and primal, outside life. Clearly the funeral chapel is a place where we step aside from the world for a minute. But it is life: that's why it's so awful, and awe-ful. Everyone afterwards was hyper-kind.

Then into the underground - a different kind of stepping-outside-life. Sitting there in the artificial light of the Central Line - having had a row at the barrier and had to pay extra to get in there because it is in Zone Four - everything felt strange, even the familiar stations of dear old London.

Holborn: out I got. Dizzy, feeling a bit ill, but grateful.

The launch party was overwhelming. Of course it was dark out by then, I was full of champagne, and the LRB shop looked exaggeratedly lit and full and buzzy. It was totally thronging with poets - so much so that the room was impossible to work, and the mood (phew!) was one of love overflowing. Reunions and embraces on all sides. It was easy to enter into that mood after the experience of the harrowing funeral ; good to have something to do with all the emotion, and actually very affirming and wonderful to be in a room packed out with people who are still alive, many of whom are rather dear to Ms Baroque, not least the author himself. Wonderful things were said and done. (And there was one other person there who had been at the funeral, and who spontaneous remarked how hard, unexpectedly hard even, it had been.) So I was held aloft on this sea of life, and floated through the evening...

Maurice, though, never reads for long enough! I suppose he was too busy signing books to have time for reading. Someone said to me, "and do you have one of the very rare, unsigned copies?"

The day finished, predictably, with one of those endless don't-want-to-be-alone-yet after-hours treks (the nighttime version of the London Trudge) across Soho (with a poet who's doing a PhD on Coleridge,*** and a barrister who looked like the younger Sam Neill) looking for yet another place to shout over the music and cigarette smoke. Ms B arrived home in a cab at 3am with no voice left, feeling very loved-up and wrung-out. It is now time to drag what's left of her to work (where there is a 68-page final layout to proof, including about a hundred footnotes). She is not sure if she can make it. First, Fresh & Wild, I think, for some of their hangover elixir (cure, not cause), and a coffee from Absolutely Scrumptious.

* This is a euphemism. (edited in: it also turns out to have been the beginnings of the gallstone attack that landed me in hospital for a week with a blood infection! I was wondering why the hangover stuff didn't work...)

**It looks extremely beautiful. I love these colourful typographical Faber jackets. Really lush and sumptuous.

***I talked to him about Charles Lamb - apropos Coleridge, of course. He says, "all the people who are studying Lamb are really lovely people." Of course they are! He also says he wishes Coleridge hadn't written so much.