The season brings, early, one of the most welcome Christmas cards of all: John Julius Norwich's slim miscellany which he calls A Christmas Cracker, being "a commonplace selection" by himself. Like all good crackers it contains a fine assortment. A note on the inside cover reads: "I am deeply grateful to my old friend Seamus Heaney and my new friend Maureen Duffy for allowing me to reproduce their two splendid poems about Seamus's mouldy blackberries." Seamus`s poem, from Death of a Naturalist, tells of the hoarding of canfuls of the berries in a bath in the byre, only to find them covered with "a rat-grey fungus". He felt like crying "That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not." Maureen Duffy, in her poem tells him briskly "You should have put them down to turn to wine", detailing the process. "Lost vintage of blackberries you squandered. Preach sermons for me." And she gives him other advice on the natural world.
The Cracker is not without a touch of broad repartee. Norwich refers to "the danger nowadays to persons in high positions of an excessively mouvemente sex life." And he refers to the different attitude apparently prevailing in America some 80 years ago. "When in 1919 the presidential candidate Warren Gamaliel Harding was campaigning for election and some heckler raised the question of his notoriously unrestrained libido, the agent would leap to his feet with the words: "We're not running this horse as a gelding."
Then there is Bishop Jeremy Taylor who had his seat, for a time, near Dromore, Co Down (did he not?). There is a piece of prose by him which makes you wonder if Shelley had absorbed it when he gave us "Hail to thee, blithe spirit" and so on in his Ode to a Skylark. Here is Jeremy Taylor: "For so have I seen a lark rising from his bed of grass, and soaring upwards, singing as he rises, and hopes to get to heaven and climb above the clouds; but the poor bird was beaten back with the loud sighings of an eastern wind .. . till the storm was over and, and then it made a prosperous flight, and did rise and sing, as if it had learned music and motion from an angel as he passed sometimes through the air about his ministries here below."
A sober last page, just two lines from Robert Frost: "Forgive O Lord, my little jokes on Thee. And I'll forgive Thy great big one on me."