Yes, I agree. We’ll pull ourselves together.
We eat too much. We’re always getting pissed.
It’s not a bad idea to find out whether
We like each other sober. Let’s resist.
I’ve got the Perrier and the carrot-grater,
I’ll look on a Scotch or a pudding as a crime.
We all have to be sensible sooner or later
But don’t let’s be sensible all the time.
No more thinking about a second bottle
And saying “What the hell?” and giving in.
Tomorrow I’ll be jogging at full throttle
To make myself successful, rich and thin.
A healthy life’s a great rejuvenator
But, God, it’s going to be an uphill climb.
We all have to be sensible sooner or later
But don’t let’s be sensible all the time.
The conversation won’t be half as trivial—
You’ll hold forth on the issues of the day—
And, when our evenings aren’t quite so convivial,
You’ll start remembering the things I say.
Oh, see if you can catch the eye of the waiter
And order me a double vodka and lime.
We all have to be sensible sooner or later
But I refuse to be sensible all the time.
— Wendy Cope
Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?
Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison—
Just for paying a few bills!
That’s out of proportion.
Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losels, loblolly-men, louts—
They don’t end as paupers;
Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines—
They seem to like it.
Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets—and yet
No one actually starves.
Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that’s the stuff
That dreams are made on:
For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,
And will never allow me to blarney
My way to getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.
I don’t say, one bodies the other
One’s spiritual truth;
But I do say it’s hard to lose either,
When you have both.
— Philip Larkin
I’m tired of Love: I’m still more tired of Rhyme.
But Money gives me pleasure all the time.
— Hillaire Belloc
Half past twelve. The time has quickly passed
since nine o’clock when I first turned up the lamp
and sat down here. I’ve been sitting without reading,
without speaking. With whom should I speak,
so utterly alone within this house?
The apparition of my youthful body,
since nine o’clock when I first turned up the lamp,
has come and found me and reminded me
of shuttered perfumed rooms
and of pleasure spent—what wanton pleasure!
And it also brought before my eyes
streets made unrecognizable by time,
bustling city centres that are no more
and theatres and cafés that existed long ago.
The apparition of my youthful body
came and also brought me cause for pain:
deaths in the family; separations;
the feelings of my loved ones, the feelings of
those long dead which I so little valued.
Half past twelve. How the time has passed.
Half past twelve. How the years have passed.
— C. P. Cavafy
translated by Daniel Mendelsohn
