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Note on Prepared

Another Mill Hill Park poem (see also Art and Training).  They came out in different sizes.  This one is amiable in a clubhouse, faux-dapper way, with its artificial formality, its jolly rig-out of blazer and tie.  I’m reminded of Major Pollock in Rattigan’s Separate Tables.  This is a good time to admit my fondness for the petit-bourgeois.  I have a lower tolerance for the gentrified airs of the P.D.James variety.  Nevertheless, away from books there’s much about middle-class England of all kinds that’s likable, from the dotty élite to the over-anxious genteel.  I don’t like the otherwise admirable Betjeman who wrote How to Get On in Society (‘Phone for the fish-knives, Norman’).  As a response to a competition in Time and Tide, that piece is an amusing exercise in listing non-U usage: phone, fish-knives, kiddies, serviettes, toilets, frills round cutlets, cruets, imitation logs, lounges, vestibules, pastry-forks, couches, trifles, sweets, preserves, beg-pardons, doileys, tea-cakes, scones rhyming with stones, etc.  But is anything so pretentious as non-U avoidance?  And what’s so bad about doileys?  Ours are inherited from Finland.

I admire the charismatic and eloquent as well, any act not the copy of an act, though even these can be endearing.  There must be a connection between this range of tastes and the variety of my poetic mannerisms.

Alan Marshfield

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