The Wintle Blog

I have been silent, on this blog, for a while, because swarming events have, for once, left a man who likes to be a man of words bereft of them. This week I spent some hours holding the bruised and purple hand of a 95-year-old lady in a hospital bed. She told me she was close to death. That probably is true, but how close, I do not know. After all, we can’t (or shouldn’t?) control the gates of time, although she opened them for me. Anyway, at some point as an evening gathered grey around the place, between gasps for breath she murmured from memory this poem, by William Butler Yeats. On the train back to London I spent an hour or so memorising it myself, which seemed both an act of devotion, and a duty, and a foolishness. Make of its alchemy and symbols what you may – and I am now trying with some intensity to muddle through them – but I think you will agree that the cut in time and space between the second and third verses is one of the most dramatic and poignant ever accomplished by a...

I found a new verb, this weekend. To platform, or to be platformed. Picked it up on the 11:06 from Paddington to Castle Cary. We drew up, unwontedly, just outside Reading, and if there was any possibility of hearing, locally, a single blackbird singing, or even, farther and farther, all the birds of Berkshire, it was obliterated by the guard’s announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, it looks as if we’re going to be held outside the station waiting for a platform. Please do not attempt to leave the train until we are fully platformed and stationary within the station.” To platform. To shape like a plat. Which is, I discover, a map or a plan, or a variant of plait, as in braid. Or, better, the French word, one half of plat-du-jour. I think, therefore, that to platform is to imagine the dish you’d most like to eat at your next meal, and to platform fully is to realise in your imagination not just the dish, but the place in which you’d most like to eat it. So as the train leaves Reading and...