Moved...

Playlist
Cloudland Blue Quartet – 10 Songs
Girls Aloud – Out of Control
Miles Davis – Big Fun

An interesting meeting first thing re Statistical Arbitrage...

After listening to the three new CBQ songs yesterday on constant repeat, today I dropped the middle one and expanded the playlist into a 15 and then 10 song set...

At home, rewrote as best I could the missing posts from 4th and 5th November and finished copying all jazz tracks from the jukebox to the external hard drive then deleted the tracks on the jukebox (2,793 of them) leaving it as the Classical Jukebox...

I have a plan...

Enjoyed “Big Fun” by Miles Davis, a CD given to me by German chum Jorg in 1998 when I visited him and Yvonne on the occasion of their wedding...

Tonight is the first time I’ve listened to it since just after receiving it, having declared it to be rubbish...

Now of course I love it...

Such is the way with music...

Sometimes you have an album which, in your head is brilliant yet you’ve not listened to it for years – eventually you do and you realise it’s rubbish..

Sometimes you have an album which, in your head is rubbish yet you’ve not listened to it for years – eventually you do and you realise it’s brilliant...

11 November today and, of course I was involved in something at 11am and totally forgot to honour the dead of two World Wars and various other conflicts since 11 November 1920 (the first Remembrance Day)...

However, on “The One Show” of all places, there was a piece on Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori” which brought back to me how moving this poem is...

In 6th Year at school, as part of my English SYS exam, I wrote a dissertation entitled “The Changing face of War Poetry Between 1914 and 1918”...

I always meant to get it back one day but just never got round to it...

30 years on, it’ll have been thrown in the bin years ago no doubt...

Anyway, here’s the poem, written in 1917 and published, posthumously, in 1921 - Owen died just seven days before the Armistice, having returned to the front in July that year following a spell recouperating in England in hospital...

He felt it was his duty to return given that his friend and mentor Siegried Sassoon had been invalided out and could no longer write of the horrors, first hand...

His poem remains one of the greatest condemnations of war ever written....

It was originally drafted as a personal letter to the famous pro-war poet Jessie Pope....

Dulce et Decorum Est
by Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!–An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime...

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,–
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie:

Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Highlight of the Day : Being moved...