Why ‘Shaking the Grass’?

I’ve started this blog as a way of gathering together writing that I like. Letters, poems, quotations, excerpts from novels, scripts or dictionaries and, eventually I hope, plenty more besides.

My inspiration to start this collection online came from reading and then collecting John Julius Norwich’s glorious Christmas Crackers – if you have not yet come across them, you simply must. Many of the gems that I will include here I first came across in a Christmas Cracker. (I know it’s not quite the done thing to include other people’s discoveries in one’s own anthology but, firstly, I think these are words deserving of as wide an audience as possible and, secondly, this is all basically for my own amusement, so I’m not really bothered about the convention of the thing).

If I can, I will get permission from JJN’s estate to include here the thoughtful and amusing context which make his anthologies such brilliant fun. For now, even without the context, I think the original words speak pretty well for themselves.

The name of this blog owes something to a Christmas Cracker too. In the 2001 Cracker was a short verse by Ezra Pound that I had read years before and quite forgotten

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Pound was brilliant they say, but also, it seems to me, wilfully awkward and, frankly, a bit of an old glumface. One of the great joys of life is being able to read words with which countless humans have indeed shaken the grass.

Hence this blog.