Avram Redux

Just when I all but gave up on West Ham manager Avram Grant, he wins three in a row, culminating with today's 3-0 away win over Stoke (who face West Ham in the FA Cup on their turf next weekend). Grant rekindles the faith of the masses just one week after many were ready to forsake him.

He's a maddening hero.

Like Job, Grant is tested fatalisticaly. First he endures the loss of Chelsea after a miserable team descent; second, he endures the loss of Portsmouth through debt and relegation; and third, he endures the inexorable slide of West Ham until the acquisition of Ba and Hitzlsperger a couple of weeks back.

Now the fortunes of Grant and West Ham are changing. Wins are wondrous contributors to self-belief.

Prediction? West Ham will clamber to the top of the bottom third of the Premier league. A good place to grow from in the 2011-2012 season.

Cantos I - II

I

We are planets, you and I,
Moving to harmonies outside ourselves reflecting
Inward.

I am the Soul on which this Hill is shapen.
There in the rhyll is found nothing key.
I am here. Golden Boy.

Acorss a sandtstrand, low Hullwater.
Father afieldt on Hornsea flats

or northward (to) a bleak-ness
Signed in sod, salt and sea.

II

Turn. Look here. See. smoothsoftlight

I know this silted place,
where salt is a stain to taste
proof is a burden,
spite is a sliver
and God is Light.

A Johnsonian Ramble...

I've finished one book in two years: Keith Richards' Life. Not a record I'm proud of.

Keef communicates a genuine love for the blues and an earnest determination to play the stuff right.

But at the end of the day, I'm not sure that his blues pilgrimage commentary outweighs his dreary addiction details for reading value. I DO envy him his French Riviera time with Anita P.

The World Of Wisden

Having made the decision to purchase all Wisdens for the years in which I have lived and breathed, I stand at the junction on several decisions directional, financial, and aesthetic. Do I collect from the end or the beginning or at both ends and work towards the middle? Do I go for prize one-offs like the volume I saw for sale this morning - a 1958 hardback in excellent nick with good type coloring on the spine and pristine pages without spotting or waving, for a very reasonable 65 pounds - or does one seek out oddlots and incomplete collections?

Truthfully I have very humble aspirations as a collector, wishing as I do only to covet a handful of decades. Bona fide collecteurs on the other hand will succumb to the more exotic thrillingly. Their world is an altogether different place from the one I inhabit. Collectors live in a world of misty arcaniana: of end papers, boards, leather reprints, Willow editions, replacement dustcovers (with option of traditional Wisden cover art or the recently introduced photographic covers). It's a fascinating business with its own special allure.

Here's what is called the Billings edition - a reprint that is itself a collectors item:

Should anyone care to gift me an issue, anything from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s would do quite nicely!

Cole Morgan

What is it about the paintings of Cole Morgan that captivate me? Ever since I saw his work at a show in Amsterdam a couple of years ago, I've been intrigued by his images. At the time I met him he was working with burning barns and other buildings and pencilled number sequences revealed from under scratched-off paint. Marvelous. No idea what he means by any of it, but then he invites you to visit his trail of grey asylums, Felliniesque fairs, and the twitching of number lists as they feverishly recombine to fix a place, time, thought, option. Morgan gives nothing away. His cypher is his alone. You? You're on your own mate.

If there ever was a purely aural equivalent of his work, it might be those odd "number stations" that broadcast endless strings of numbers supposedly used by intelligence agencies to convey messages - one notable source pumps out five-number strings in a digitized voice then rings out rounds of the English folk-song, "The Lincolnshire Poacher," triangularized to pinpoint an RAF base on the island of Crete. Odd darling, very odd.

http://speechificationaudio.s3.amazonaws.com/BBC_R4_Tracking_the_Lincolnshire_Poacher_24112006.mp3

England at Melbourne, Ashes Test IV

After three matches brimming with talent and testosterone and having scythed their way though the Australian batting order in Adelaide, England collapsed ignominiously against a modest swing-bowling set of "quickies" in Perth, momentarily bringing the Ashes Test to equilibrium. Suggest we move on quickly and sew this bugger up with a win.

... and of course we did. In Sydney. Resulting in 3 test victories on Aussie soil in one Series for the first time since 1928, or thereabouts. Records dropping like cheerleaders' knickers.

So c'mon Barmy Army - a huge hurrah before propelling us breezily toward the drinking dens of Sidney.