Welcome To Hardy Country

It's an indicative confession that this man with a respectable first class degree in English has never before in his sixty years read any Thomas Hardy. This man, the Overgraduate aka Big Fat Pig (though getting slimmer - more of this below) has always struggled with the Victorian novel - loved David Copperfield but couldn't hack the rest of Dickens, fought through Middlemarch through a sense of obligation, etc.

Well anyway shame at this omission has caught up with me and I have pulled from the shelf a three novel collection of Hardy texts which I seem to have acquired for the princely sum of one of your English pounds. The nagging guilt must have acted upon me when I bought it, although I cannot for the life of me remember when that might have been. And now I've started on Tess of the D'Urbervilles, so I intend to finish. It's heavy going particularly as I came to this after the quick pleasure of re-reading Simon Raven's Fielding Gray. However I can see why Hardy has admirers and before we got to Tess's fall (I strongly suspect this will not be the lowest point of her trajectory) I was taken with one of the best descriptions of joyful drunkenness that I have encountered:

The fresh night air was producing staggerings and serpentine courses among the men who had partaken too freely; some of the more careless women also were wandering in their gait ... Yet however terrestrial and lumpy their appearance just now to the mean unglamoured eye, to themselves the case was different. They followed the road with a sensation that they were soaring along in a supporting medium, possessed of original and profound thought, themselves and surrounding nature forming an organism of which all the parts harmoniously and joyously interpenetrated each other. They were as sublime as the moon and stars above them, and the moon and stars were as ardent as they.

Now you have to admit that's rather beautiful.

So I mentioned, did I not, that the Pig is shrinking. He is playing a bit of golf (not too badly as it happens - not well but you know what I mean) and that is a help but more importantly the Pig is regularly gracing the mean streets of Four Oaks in his athletic gear. He is up to ninety minute runs and one hundred and fifty minute cycle rides. There is power to add. Hopefully.