27 years since the Financial Times killed one of England’s finest poets | Hacker News Reader

27 years since the Financial Times killed one of England’s finest poets

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Here is a good one;

Office friends by Gavin Ewart

Eve is madly in love with Hugh

And Hugh is keen on Jim.

Charles is in love with very few

And few are in love with him.

Myra sits typing notes of love

With romantic pianist’s fingers.

Dick turns his eyes to the heavens above

Where Fran’s divine perfume lingers.

Nicky is rolling eyes and tits

And flaunting her wiggly walk.

Everybody is thrilled to bits

By Clive’s suggestive talk.

Sex suppressed will go berserk,

But it keeps us all alive.

It’s a wonderful change from wives and work

And it ends at half past five.

One of the downsides of working from home.

FYI: (and, indeed, of mine):

> The intelligence and casually flamboyant virtuosity with which he framed his often humorous commentaries on human behaviour made his work invariably entertaining and interesting.

> The irreverent eroticism for which his poetry is noted resulted in W. H. Smith's banning of his The Pleasures of the Flesh (1966) from their shops.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Ewart

I didn't know this story, as I had thought sitting for a lunch profile interview with a reporter only signalled the end of one's career.

that sounds like very much the way I'd like to go.

"There are two things you need to know," she said. "The first is that Gavin came home yesterday happier than I have seen him in a long time. The second - and you are not to feel bad about this - is that he died this morning."

For some reason that strikes me as the most moving thing I have read in a long time.

Speaking of moving things, the poem about a convalescent cat actually made me tear up a bit (I have a 17 year old convalescent cat):

https://poetryarchive.org/poem/14-year-old-convalescent-cat-...

Thank you for that. Our cat died at 16 about seven years ago and that poem fits perfectly. And yes, the tears are coming even after all these years. We gladly paid the vet for whatever they thought might save him until she gently said it was time to let him go. As my wife said we owed it to him to give him whatever chances we could.

Agreed. Dying in your sleep, having been fed a good meal with good company, at a seasoned old age with your wife by your side is as good as anyone can dream of.

"as anyone can dream of"

Viking warriors and co would probably disagree. Not the gloriest way to Valhalla..

(personally I rather care how good I live, than how I die)

I don't think you're necessarily talking about different things. I mean sure at the moment you take your last breath it doesn't really matter. But it sounds like this guy lived well into his late 70s with a partner, a social life and the means to enjoy retirement. That's clearly preferable to contracting some kind of cancer in your 50s, suffering emotionally and physically (and, in places like the US, financially I guess) for years before dying.

It's not something I like to think about or dwell on, however, and being overly focussed how you might die is not the best way to spend your precious time on this earth

Sure thing. My point was just, that I focus on living before death and yes, his death sounds like the life he had before was quite nice.

But I know there are people who actually care a lot about the moment of their death (like the vikings), which I do not.

There's probably a point in life at which the relative importance of those concerns changes for you.

I doubt it, I have been close to death already and I know it can happen fast and allmost any moment as a surprise. Or it can come after a long, lone suffering, whis is of course the scenario everyone would likes to avoid.

The only way I'd like to go is not to go at all. Death scares the hell out of me and living forever is the only acceptable choice.

Threaded: <https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1584116278150602752.html>

What is the point of this website? I see it often but doesn't Twitter and Nitter etc automatically provide this functionality? Genuine question.

Twitter throws up multiple dark patterns for me and tends strongly to unreadable/inaccessible at best.

Threadreader presents just the thread, formatted for easy reading, without all the additional Twitter crud. The experience with Threadreader is vastly superior in my experience.

It does and it doesn't: first, twitter often only lets you see the first few posts if you are not logged in; and second, it groups the posts together into something you can read without distracting interspersed comments, like the forum posts of yesteryear.

>twitter often only lets you see the first few posts if you are not logged in

that would be a reason, but I've never personally encountered it. I see full threads even when logged out.

>you can read without distracting interspersed comments, like the forum posts of yesteryear.

I've never encountered interspersed comments on Twitter threads. they're visible the way they're visible in the thread reader website, one after the other. other comments come at the end of the thread.

I don't need to see an avatar, date and username above each sentence of a blog post. Twitter monologue threads are dumb, the whole premise of the service is to write under 280 characters (used to be 140).

The practice has some merits.

Sometimes a thread simply evolves out of a conversation.

Sometimes one comment just leads to another.

And sometimes it's helpful, useful, and/or interesting to have individual sentences or paragraphs of a thread split into their own items, so that it becomes more clear what specific parts of a discussion are especially engaging, confusing, interesting, etc. People can comment or respond to specific parts of the thread rather than the whole thing.

For writers who are accustomed to either global/overall feedback, or none at all, this can be enlightening. It's about as close to the experience of giving a live lecture or presentation as exists online, in that in a live presentation people can also respond or react to specific moments as they occur.

I believe all of that can be done just as well if not better with a traditional comment section like the one here on hn. My other issue is that the conversation is very difficult to follow since it's split into many threads.

>it becomes more clear what specific parts of a discussion are especially engaging, confusing, interesting, etc. People can comment or respond to specific parts of the thread

Quoting solves this.

Obviously Twitter works for you, which I find enlightening since up until now I thought that the experience is subpar for everyone and the reason long form content is posted on twitter is purely because it's easier to spread it around. Clearly there's more to it.

For what it's worth, I don't use Twitter.

My comments above are based on my experience writing, reading, responding to, and otherwise interacting with and observing longer toot threads ("tootstorms" on Mastodon, comparable to "tweetstorms" on Twitter).

And are compared with experiences on numerous other platforms and systems, ranging from Usenet to HN, and in particular including Reddit, G+, Diaspora*, and Mastodon.

Mastodon is a rough Twitter analogue. It tends to give a broader exposure than forum-based or friend-based (e.g., Google+, specific subreddits) forums. And again, in particular what I observe is people responding to specific toots within a longer stream in a way that's simply not evident in other formats. It's not an unallowed good. It is a notable characteristic of the format, however.

Some examples are hashtagged through my profile (though this link doesn't seem to be working at the moment): <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/tootstorm>

As an alternative, try: <https://toot.cat/web/tags/tootstorm>

It loads a lot quicker for 1

They should be chastised for this.

The guy had fun, get over it.

American?

No, pretty sure they spell it chaztized

Why does the article open with speculating that it might be the most expensive lunch ever. It even ends the first paragraph making it clear that it means expensive as in "final bill to the restaurant" and not a broader "loss to humanity". And what does the fact that menus weren't printed until 2003 have to do with discerning if this was an expensive bill or not?

Contemporary "Lunch with the FT" columns show exactly what items were ordered and the total cost in a little summary box (including cost of the various items, like a restaurant bill). This format did not take hold until 2003, according to the linked Twitter posts, so there is no way to discern from the 1995 column how much was spent.

The linked posts indicate that the FT recently checked with the its accounting department but could not quickly find the record for a lunch more than 25 years ago.

It would have been clearer if the posts/FT said "menus and prices were not printed until 2003" instead of "menus were not printed until 2003", but perhaps this was seen as redundant as most menus include prices.

(Updated and corrected once I re-read the original thread. This is much simpler to answer than I first thought!)

I'm guessing that the FT has a long standing regular lunch interview column, which has included for the last two decades (but not previously) a record of what was consumed during said lunch.

"Lunch with the FT" is exactly this.

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