BAA, which runs Heathrow, has admitted it turned down an offer by the British Army to help shovel away the snow and ice on its runways. Instead, it went it alone, and has cancelled thousands of holiday flights, spoiling Christmas for tens of thousands of people. It also only invested half a million pounds this year in cold weather removal gear, but boasted of profits of over 350 million. Heathrow should be ashamed. The truth is, British companies offload the suffering onto the British people, when bad weather strikes, shrugging their shoulders and blaming an act of God or aberrant weather, when in fact the fault is in their own balance sheets - the weather is perfectly ordinary at Christmas (we had snow last year too) and such snowstorms, in American, Canadian, or Russian, cities, would be shrugged off, as minor, easily de-iced and cleared away. This is incompetence with a human cost.
When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....
Comments
As an expat, I often have family to visit at Christmas - not this year sadly as we know from past experience that bad weather and bad company policy can truly throw a spanner in the works.
B.
Tell me about it! My sister is stuck in New York and can't get home (at least she has George Osborne and Andrew Neil for company!) and my step-daughter who is flying in from Turkey can't get her flight confirmed. Merry Christmas everybody!
Best wishes from Simon
-Phil