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I enjoyed the Newsnight Review poetry special on Friday - I was most impressed with Simon Armitage, who was eloquent, considered, authoritative and uncompromising on poetry's behalf. I was also very much interested in Josephine Hart saying that neither The Waste Land nor Four Quartets had 'a political line in them': The Waste Land speaks to, for and about both collision between cultures and the modernist moment, which for me makes it highly political; and Four Quartets similarly is strongly connected with Anglo-Catholicism, royalism, quietism, traditionalism (and several other variations of isms) – its apparent lack of politics is part of what its politics means.

Anyway. I'm reading David Gaffney's excellent (and so easily devourable) Sawn-Off Tales at the moment. Reading the one about the man who betrays his barber, I was reminded of an incident that happened to me ten years or so ago, just after I'd come to Sheffield. I went to the barber's to have all my hair off (a number 1 all over was my cut of choice in those days - nowadays I go for a short number 2). When he'd finished and I asked how much it was he said, slightly indistinctly, 'a pound'. I thought I'd misheard – it seemed insanely cheap, so I said, uncomfortably, 'How much, sorry?' We looked at each other shamefacedly, and he said, 'Well, fifty pee then.'