I guess I haven't discussed it, but in recent months I've been catching up with the rest of the world by watching Ted Lasso. I missed it when all the world was excited about it because we were too cheap to have Apple+ and even now I have to watch it alone because of Mary's intractable enmity towards sport spectating in all forms.
The show is all that was promised and more. Much more serious than I thought, and humane, a super-serious soap opera with buckets of laughs and sports and attempts round characters, in Forsterian terms, though within the constraints of a TV show (i.e. it can only do so much).
In the penultimate episode Ted is at the pinball machine in the show's favorite Richmond pub while his mom talks to his friend, the assistant coach. The female bar owner brings him a pint and asks him why he's only pretending to play. He says he wants to give them some time to catch up. The bar owner looks over at them and says this.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can, And don’t have any kids yourself.
I was like, wait a minute. She's not speaking there, that's verse. I rewound it and then, using the preferred search engine, looked it up. Lo and behold, she was reciting "This be the verse," by Phillip Larkin, the name of a British poet I had heard before but knew little about (1889-1951, Oxford grad, librarian, it turns out).
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