set me pondering the decline of the moral centre, the rent cloth of state and self-survival stratagems. Back in Ox the January gloom presses hard and heavy but I can’t dodge a chuckle when I gaze at my replenished bedside book towers. I’ll take Riverman A Shropshire Lad when I’ve closed the covers, he likes to stomp the galley growling rhymes…
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went,
And cannot come again.
