If you’re one of the many thousands who have been diligently following this blog in its first couple of weeks, you might wonder why it stopped in its tracks around 11 December. Here’s the short version.

On 11 December our daughter moved house. Amanda called BT and asked them to terminate our daughter’s phone line. Instead, the geniuses at BT cut off OUR line.

We spent two weeks fighting to get reconnected. We were bounced between call centres in Scotland, India and Essex. We spent a fortune on mobile phone calls. Sometimes we had to queue for 20 minutes to get an answer. Sometimes we got cut off by BT’s own computers.

Many of the Customer Service people were hugely well-meaning but they admitted that BT’s system simply wouldn’t let them reconnect us. The computers defeated them every time. Two days ago we got a land line again; only we didn’t have our original number, so no one knew where to call us. Today – Christmas Eve – we finally got our old number back. Wonderful.

However, in the meantime the cancellation of our landline had resulted in the loss of our broadband connection. We are told this can’t be reinstated until 3 January at the earliest. Until then, to get on the internet I have to trek to the public library. Even then I can’t upload material. So no pics in this blog until after 3 Jan.

Am I going to complain to BT? You bet. The disruption and inconvenience have been massive and the cost significant. Am I going to leave BT for a different phone company? You bet. Am I going to buy a wifi-enabled laptop? I am.

And in the New Year I’ll be back with – at last – the post about Julian Cooper’s great show of quarry paintings at Brantwood, news of Manchester salsa events, pieces about Alaskan poet John Haines and Ennerdale (Cumbria) poet Tom Rawling and much more. And a link to the spot about Tarot history and divination which I’m broadcasting on the BBC World Service around New Year. Plus the usual wonderful pics. Thanks for your patience! Have a wonderful Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Well, I promised to report on the Towering Inferno salsa event at the Tower Ballroom, Blackpool yesterday. Oh dear. By 8 pm the freezing fog was so thick that visibility was down to zero in south Manchester, and we heard it was just as bad further north. I didn’t fancy the drive up (nor the drive back down a possibly icy fogbound motorway at 3 a.m.) So we stayed at home. Call me chicken if you like. Though I’d prefer pollo. Well, you win some you lose some. El mani es asi as they say in Caracas.

Shiver me timbers! we never made it to the Tower

Chris McCully: poetry, fishing, and fine conversation

I had tea at the Cornerhouse with Chris McCully, who’s over from the Netherlands for a couple of days. Chris is a polymath: fine poet, serious fishing writer (he has a book on the way about sea trout ecology, on which he’s a leading expert), scholar of Old English poetry and historical linguistics. He writes regularly for Trout and Salmon magazine, and teaches linguistics and literature at Groningen University.

 We’re planning to write an article together about Tom Rawling, one of the finest Lakeland poets of the 20^th century and (like Chris) a scientific specialist on sea trout, who worked with Hugh Falkus, the famous naturalist and fisherman who revolutionised knowledge of these enigmatic fish. Not that I know anything about fishing: that’s Chris’s department. (Come to think of it, so is poetry. So where do I fit in?)

 We walked down to the neo-Gothic splendours of the John Rylands Library for a reading by James Fenton. Fenton, a taciturn and hugely impressive man, gave a powerful reading, starting with his elegy for the much-missed poet and editor Mick Imlah, who died, after far too short a life, in January 2009. Fenton’s elegy (due to appear in tomorrow’s TLS) was almost classical in its poise, brevity and intensity.

Jan Wilkinson, Rylands Director, talks to poet and publisher Michael Schmidt (centre) and James Fenton (right)

 Fenton went on to read a selection of his poems, with a particular emphasis on poems about war, on which he writes with peculiar intensity. He was a foreign correspondent in Cambodia during the last years of its war, so he knows the truth at first hand.

 Much of Fenton’s poetry draws on traditional ballad forms, as modified by Auden and  Kipling. Sometimes this can be immensely forceful though at moments it also, I feel, slightly flattens out subtleties. The ballad form is a dangerous friend. I asked him afterwards if he was conscious of the dept to Kipling and he said he was, but pointed also to Brecht, a model I hadn’t suspected. But it made sense. There’s a direct, unashamed and sometimes bitter plain-speaking in his rhymes that many contemporary poets would be afraid to use.