Serendipity!

Thank you, sovay , for recommending Robert MacFarlane's The Old Ways.  It's a lovely book, and reawakening all sorts of neural pathways in my head, half remembered leys of thought.

Having gone to the library to get his earlier book, The Wild Places, I passed a dullish shelf with one new spine:  D. J. Taylor's Bright Young People.  I hooked it out and flipped it open on a poem by Brian Howard—a model for Anthony Blanche in Brideshead Revisited—written on "an undated sheet of Gargoyle Club notepaper":

I began it at Eton, but never was beaten
They met my misdeeds with applause
I loathed every game, but they knew, all the same
I was terribly sporting indoors
I was sacked in the spring for the usual thing
So I went up to Oxford, of course
Where they grew rather red, when I laughingly said
That my seat wasn't meant for a horse
So I took no more chances, but gave lots of dances
—And said every goodnight in my bed
Though they all think I'm funny, they're all easy money
After six, at the bar of the Troc
So I've no use for hearties, or debutante parties
I can get SO much tighter in tights
I can shave as I sin, I'm the scourge of Berlin
I'm the boy that was blackballed for White's.

And thank you, rushthatspeaks , for recommending Margery Allingham.  I've been having a mystery fit lately, and having worked my way through Tey and Sayers, I was seeking what I might devour.  Thank you, great university library, for keeping light fiction in cold storage.  Having failed to find her first titles on the shelves, I went looking online for ebooks and found this amazing site.  All the Campion books for $16.50!  All Ngaio Marsh likewise!  And Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot!  With other classics and oddities.  And yes, they're real:  at least, I've downloaded the Allingham package (they send epub, mobi, and pdf versions of each book), and it looks swell.

Nine