Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song.

My goodness me, I'm such an ignoramus.

Marlow. Once home to T.S. Eliot. I feel I should have known that.

He lived there around the time he wrote The Wasteland ...

Lets look up and smile

a poem that meant the world to my father, and is very special to me too, studied in those hazy days at university.

Not QUITE enough of an ignoramus to think that Eliot wrote the lines about the Thames, which are oft misattributed to him. The lines were taken from Prothalamion, a poem written by the Tudor poet Edmund Spenser.

I DID know that Jerome K Jerome lived in Marlow and wrote much of Three Men in a Boat there.

I DIDN'T know that the Shelleys lived there. Mary finished Frankenstein and Percy wrote Revolt of Islam, in a house a couple of hundred yards from The Hand and Flowers.

I simply adored Marlow.

A beautiful town with such literary echoes.

Which writer could fail to be entranced?

Listening with that plastic smile people wear when they are trying not to scream.

Yesterday, P.G. Wodehouse, today, Raymond Chandler.

No, I'm not planning a lie-in...I was referring to Philip Marlowe, detective. And even that's not true because today we're off to Marlow, without the e...

...and I got distracted by Philip Marlowe, when looking for quotes.

More inspirational figurative language:

“The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.”

“He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.”

“The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back.”

Reading phrases like that really makes me up my game and inject surprise and variety into my own writing, so to Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse...

 Yes, off to Marlow today to have a meal at Tom Kerridge's pub - The Hand And Flowers.

This is Pete's Christmas present from me. June 20th was THE FIRST AVAILABLE DATE when I booked in early December, last year. Should be the best meal ever.

I am doing the honourable thing and going with him. Such self-sacrifice!

Back tomorrow. Late blog.