The Record 2009 - Keble College - University of Oxford

Keble College: The Record 2009
who have fulfilled their potential despite Shirley Williams’s
disastrous edict, but I maintain that it made their task harder
not easier. I write as one of the earliest beneficiaries of the great
1944 Education Act. We were in a twofold sense a richly gifted
generation, and it grieves me, in scanning the index to Keble
Past and Present, to have to face the fact that we seem to have
disappeared from the face of the earth.
Provided that the ‘tensile thread’ between the intractable ideal
and the manageable but inadequate praxis is preserved, British
governance, education, and art will survive. But it all hangs by
that thread. If British education does perish, then the best I can
say is that this beloved College, together with my second alma
mater, the University of Leeds, will be among the very last to
go.
Excerpts from a work in progress
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I can hack most laureates roster-homage
Make a pranged voice nasal through ruptured matchbox
Brief the act undangerously heroic
We will survive it
This astounding people (Disraeli) their spears
Beating shield-hides murmuring high basso
Hive-like buzzing rage become torpor almost
Blood self-enthralling
Assegais whish-washed in the fleshy Empire
Jelk you inside out like a dumdum bullet
Death by numbers one-shot Martini-Henry
Redhot on target
Errant Chelmsford yet if slow Pulleine had
Ordered form square he could have saved their breakfast
Might have subscribed that long-abandoned letter
Dead on the table
Stand-to those viewers · Mark how Chard and Bromhead
There with stout Hook posthumously ill-fictioned
And a Welsh Jew Land of our Fathers bless them
Staggered the impi
Though your own sapped psyche so courts retraction
Soldiery’s grand comedy plays to curtains
Who denies this I would expect the Queen to
Rise up and smite them
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