ANTHONY BAVIN'S CURICULUM VITAE
In the beginning, I wrote:
I am a lawyer who should long since have thought about retiring; and I live and practice in a small Hampshire town. I started to write poetry as a sort of therapy, when a novel I was trying to write wouldn't come right: It still won't come right - so I am still writing poetry!
I would like to think that all of my poems are essentially about LIFE (and about death which, after all, is a fairly integral part of life.) I consider myself a very average Mr. Average and that there is nothing startling about my subjects - Surviving, when others around one have moved on to some other place, the thrill of an affair of the heart and, when illicit, the humiliation of being found out, the sanctuary that is the office loo against the constant shrilling of the telephone; and on playing golf badly: And golf, with all its vicissitudes is really a thumbnail sketch of life.
If I don't come out of some of my poems exactly smelling of roses, then that's because we don't get life right all of the time. Never-the-less living life is a privilege; and I believe that, when you reach an age when you are entitled to subsidised bus passes, the time has come to try and put something back - whether that be with pen or paintbrush, score or script.
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Now, merciful release, that retirement has come : I am a lawyer no longer, no longer think of that seemingly ever elusive goal, retirement; and , certainly, I no longer live in Hampshire. Time to tear up the past and start over? I think not: One essential ingredient still remains. Me. But who, now, is me?
"...the boy's become the man, but the man is still the boy,
"And the right to wear the cloak of both of them,
"Is the right I claim."
Much, now, is very different: Wiltshire, the undulating Lambourn Downs, the space, the lights, the hues, and colours - and most of all the total absence of pressure. And parts of me are different, too: I begin to notice and enjoy, to see the things that I was blind to before: I also begin to take serious stock of how long I may be allowed to enjoy this unmitigated , sinful, idleness . So, in a way, a different set of pressures emerge: So much to do and see and contemplate on, so much to write about - in, who knows, how much time.
In the ten years since the opening lines of this were penned, I had become stilted and hide-bound: Subjects a-plenty there may have been but the truth was that I no longer cared to write about them - and even if moved so to do, other pressures stood in the way. Now there are wholly different subjects, different values and different vistas. A sudden sense of urgency fills me: And perhaps that is just as well, because mere contentment without fulfillment would surely send me to an early grave.
I wrote then and, with revisions, I write now,
"If I can do no more than to look back on my first seventy years with the benefit of hindsight and in the hope that someone finds that the words touch on some small facet of their own struggles, joys, guilt and self-recriminations, then writing must be better than simply doing nothing at all!
