READING/READ:
Hideous Kinky – Esther Freud (re-reading this – brilliant memoir of a childhood in North Africa)
Selected Letters – Rainer Maria Rilke (Rilke’s letters are like other people’s best novels – W H Auden called him ‘the Santa Claus of loneliness’)
Water Music – T C Boyle

LISTENING:
Sentimental Anarchist – Jono (young Glaswegian – tight pop songs, better than chart shit)
Two Feathers – Rory Ellis
A Drunkard’s Masterpiece – Johnny Dowd
Blessed In An Unusual Way – David Childers

JACKIE’S TOP DOMESTIC TIP: If you accidentally spill some salt on your carpet, don’t freak out and buy heroin. Just pour some red wine on the stained area and in no time at all the stain will be gone. No need to even mop up – it will just vanish when dry.
 
GOOD BUT DOOMED BOOK IDEA: I’d love to compile a book of deaths and funerals of people – from the famous, to ones I’ve been told, and ones from my own experience. If only I was more famous – then a publisher would let me do this, like how everybody lets Alex James write as much rubbish as he wants, even in The Spectator for god’s sake. Andrew Neil and now Alex James. Both despoiling a magazine once edited by the likes of Brian Inglis. They’ve even told Jeremy Clarke to stop writing about sex drugs and violence – easily the best column (Low Life) in the mag...
ANYWAY, here’s the end of a beautiful piece about the death and funeral of Rainer Maria Rilke. He cut his hand on a rose thorn and died of leukaemia: he summed this up in a poem written in French, the first line of which is: ‘oh rose, oh pure contradiction’....
   
‘Without pity the stony clods beat on the sunken coffin. But those who trembled at the hardness of this moment might have found comfort in the spectacle of the children who, with touching constancy all through the stranger’s interment, held the heavy wreaths so high with their frost-blue hands that they did not touch the earth till we lowered the wreaths into the grave, not to overburden it, but to fill it with green...
   
Thus the rough winter earth of a humble country churchyard closed over this darling of men, and now that he was given back to his greatest solitude, there remains what the lament of a woman expresses so movingly:
   
“Rilke is not dead: from Muzot to Raron the way is not long. He lived in a tower on a hill, and the whole land belonged to him. Now he rests at the foot of a church, alone as in Muzot. The church gives him its peace, the angelus in the morning, the angelus in the evening, and the mighty landscape is his. Every cloud, every peak – his; the roar from the valley, the song of the Rhone rise up to him. When a jackdaw wheels in the sky – it does it for him; and when the earth under its light burden of snow becomes soft and the scent seeps through and fills the whole region with living life – this scent too, will be for him. Spring will thaw away the last snows and strain towards him with its great surge.”

(“And at last they need us no longer who were early ravished away.
Gently we’re weaned from the earth, as we mildly outgrow
the breasts of our mother. But we, who have need of such great
secrets, for whom out of sorrow so often arises
blessed advancing: could we have being without them?
Is the legend in vain how once in the weeping for Linus
a bold first harmony burst the inflexible starkness,
whereupon the tumultuous void, which an all-but divine youth
stepped suddenly out of forever, fell into that timeless
pulsing which now transports us and comforts and helps.”)