Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guility, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

i loved dave eggers’ and jm coetzee’s appearances, but the WH Auden poetry reading session would have to be my favourite.  the above poem (lullaby), whose first stanza I have only posted,  is regarded as one of the finest love poems of the last century. but does it take any of the romance out of it knowing that it was written by auden with a burly truck driver in mind?

i got to work this morning at 7am to open up the library for a tradesperson…who didn’t f*&$ing turn up. 6 emails to three different people and two unreturned phone calls, i am still waiting for the assets department to ‘get back to me’ about something which I actually cant remember is now cause it was so long ago.  the spine label printer suddenly stopped working and after three weeks we are still unable to download marc records into the library management system.

is this one of those ‘welcome to the public system’ things, or am I just having a particuarly bad time?  i need a vacation.