Sunday, 1 March 2009

Spurs excelled themselves in the League Cup Final and were probably the better team overall. But after extra time it all came down to a penalty shoot-out. I can’t remember Spurs winning a penalty shoot-out since 1984 against Anderlecht and they sustained their miserable record. Ho hum.

To console myself, I checked out some references in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles concerning the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1011. This is the sort of thing that Spurs fans do. I can now barely remember why this interested me. But the same Chronicle entry refers to the Danes overrunning East Anglia and the South East - imagine my delight in discovering that this is the first recorded use anywhere of the word Hertfordshire (or at least Heortfordscir but we know what they meant). Just two years to our millennium! I wonder if they’ll be a party with cake and jelly?

Recent reading

I finished reading David McKie’s splendid book Jabez – the rise and fall of a Victoria scoundrel dealing with the collapse in 1893 of the business empire founded on the Liberator Building Society. The book was very well written and researched and the Liberator collapse reflects many features of the current financial crisis: too rapid growth, toxic assets, greedy unscrupulous bankers - and of course the poor paying the price.

I have also recently treated myself to four of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason stories (The Cases of the Black-Eyed Blond, the Buried Clock, the Careless Kitten, and the Haunted Husband). I enjoy Perry Mason but do not read them often because one of my pretentions is that I will only read them in the green Penguin editions which you rarely now see in charity shops and I certainly won’t pay collectors’ prices for them!

Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems was an unexpected delight and journeyman Edward Marston’s Excursion Train was a little too self conscious about its period detail. LAG Strong’s The Rolling Road (1954) I mostly read because of its wonderfully attractive cover and its eccentric sub-title: The Story of Travel on the roads of Britain and the Development of Public Passenger Transport.