I normally actively avoid reading two books by the same author in succession, but here I am, half way through Iain Sinclair’s Landor’s Tower. I think on balance I prefer his non-fiction, but there’s enough of conspiracy theories and Welsh literary history to keep me going. And quite by chance I opened Kilvert’s Diary at random the other night to find the bit where he talks about Capel-y-Ffin and Llanthony Abbey – places of personal significance to both Helen and me. (I may have to continue this literary trail and read Kilvert properly next: just those few pages I read were beautifully observed, and gloriously pagan as only the Church of England can allow its ministers to be.)

In the current catalogue of Postscript Books (an excellent mail order enterprise I may have to try and ally my incipient publishing company to), there’s a collection of Walter Savage Landor’s poems. The paragraph describing it says one of his poems has been described as the best short poem in the English language – and it doesn’t bloody well say what it is.

And while I’m connecting everything up into my ever-growing Ubertheorie, editor and I were discussing Eric Gill (with his Sans) the other day. Gill lived at Llanthony for a while in the 1920s. (I wonder if the film Sirens – which the IMDB has the wrong poster picture for! – is based on Gill at all, albeit set in Australia rather than Wales..?)

You see, I was supposed to be at a pub quiz this evening, so now I’m pouring out random trivia (which surely should really be ‘quadrivia’).

At last the chance to rhapsodise about Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital. I love some of his earlier books (although the one novel I read was largely incomprehensible to me at the time), but this one works so much better (not that I’ve quite finished yet). It’s Last of the Summer Wine scripted by Edgar Allan Poe; it’s the Dark Side of Fatty Ackroyd.

(I haven’t done any of this kind of lunatic perambulation for a while now – alas my fellow fugueurs now live elsewhere or have babies – and I damn well miss it.)

Only 10 pages left to go now – he’s certainly rushing the last bit. Which is just as well, because most of it is about nasty Essex people chopping each other up and distributing the bits.

But the best bit for me, the most elegiac of all, was in the grounds of the erstwhile Joyce Green Hospital near Dartford, and with the old codgers wandering around the mud and salt flats. What made it particularly spectacular was that I read it in the great hall of Imperial College while H and the rest of the choir sang Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius at me (and several hundred others) – perfect combination. Great concert, and something of an elegy for H, too, as it was the last one she’ll do for that particular kwa.

I think there’s a lot more subtlety in Sinclair’s tone in this book: he’s still very good at invective, but it’s always tempered with a sort of metallic nostalgia. And although he hardly rhapsodises about the grey hinterlands that are being lost to developers, the whole thing is nevertheless pervaded with this sense of loss, and it’s quietly moving to read of all these brutal sanitoria being transmuted into clocktowered Crest estates and all the rest of it. Corking stuff.