OF course January is the cruellest month. As an old boss of mine used to say: “The grim reaper is on the downstroke JDQ.” Covid and influenza are killing thousands. And if that wasn’t enough we’ve got the ongoing decay of Britain’s mephitic political elite and its insistent negligence regarding the public good. Then too there’s the stench emanating from the more cloacal sectors of the English press.
Given the current state of moral entropy what better way to start 2023 than by going back just over a century to TS Eliot’s laugh riot?
As Matthew Hollis has it, the poem was written in a time not unlike our own where “civilization and progress ... seemed emptied of meaning, robbed of certainty or value”.
