Yes - perfect.

As a rule of thumb, the writer groups I'm in split into two camps.

Those of us that know our limitations. ( The majority ).

And those that think every word they write is worthy of a Pulitzer prize.

You tend to find the big earners in the first group, and the basket cases on the second.

I find it easier to drink beer and talk shyt, usually has them in stitches as I recount my drunken antics.

post op ladyboys with cucumbers and farmers spring to mind.

Buk was in a 'class' of his own.


Blood of the Gods

'The ultimate glory is to get drunk and drunker,' Bukowski wrote and he wasn’t terribly particular how he attained that greater glory. His broad tastes were revealed in his ode to his IBM Selectric typewriter into which, over the years, he’d spilled 'beer, wine, whiskey, vodka, ale' and cigar ash. Bukowski wasn’t the least bit prejudiced — all were welcome, so long as they were cheap. Whenever Buk managed to claw a paycheck from the Man, he’d stock up, laying in jugs of cheap wine which he positioned in a semi-circle around his bed as totems against the cruel world lurking outside. “So I stayed in bed and drank,” he wrote. “When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.”

In the bars he leaned to cheap drafts and well liquor, for as he wisely noted, 'Liquor is like a symphony . . . you don’t use it as a downer, you use it to leap up into the sky when you have pain.' Like many drunks, his taste in booze shifted with his age and tax bracket. He drank Schlitz and rotgut when he was poor and undiscovered then traded up to good German wine, quality whiskey and the occasional Heineken when fat royalty checks finally found his mailbox. “The blood of the gods,” he said of wine. “You can drink a lot of it and stay relatively sane. I used to drink an awful lot of beer. But wine is the best for creation. You can write three or four hours.”

Drinking beer “was like breathing,” a man without wine was a “bird without wings,” and whiskey, well, whiskey made him misanthropic.

Largely a solitary drinker, Buk abhorred the party circuit, saying, “My theory is if you mix enough people together you don’t get soup or salad, you get shit. That’s the sign of a good whiskey drinker anyway, drinking it by yourself shows a proper reverence for it.” True Story: Diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer, Bukowski was told by doctors he would die if he took another drink. The news shook Buk so badly he ducked into the nearest bar and sank a couple beers to steady his nerves. He managed not to die (while drinking prodigiously) for another 40 years.

Death by alcohol poisoning, what a way to go

www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151201-philip-larkin-englands-most-miserable-genius

I have always "enjoyed" reading Larkin.

A strange person.

His father a true fascist ,attended the Nuremburg rallies. Larkin himself always very right wing, but of a different ilk.

At his best, the very tight simplicity of his verse, childlike,is appealing to me.

My oft quoted Larkin poem :



  “Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.” But in a letter he called the poem ”very corny”, and after the workbook draft he added the comment: “bloody awful tripe”.

For all our Mango nomads (Pikeys).

Places, Loved Ones
Philip Larkin (1954)

No, I have never found
The place where I could say
This is my proper ground,
Here I shall stay;
Nor met that special one
Who has an instant claim
On everything I own
Down to my name;

To find such seems to prove
You want no choice in where
To build, or whom to love;
You ask them to bear
You off irrevocably,
So that it's not your fault
Should the town turn dreary,
The girl a dolt.

Yet, having missed them, you're
Bound, none the less, to act
As if what you settled for
Mashed you, in fact;
And wiser to keep away
From thinking you still might trace
Uncalled-for to this day
Your person, your place.