General Blog About Everything

This is how Sylvia Plath put it, hard and clear, in her last poem, "Edge":
"The woman is perfected./ Her dead/ Body wears the smile of accomplishment,/
The illusion of a Greek necessity/ Flows in the scrolls of her toga,/ Her
bare/ Feet seem to be saying:/ We have come so far, it is over.." Dead
indeed. The bare feet suggest the slab, which makes "toga" only a fine word
for a morgue shroud. And knowing what we do, about what the poet herself was
about to do, we can’t help reading these lines as an imaginary, anticipatory
self-portrait, post mortem. The cause of death and of "the smile of
accomplishment" is suicide.

Luke Sutton could be forgiven for accepting the applause a little sheepishly
after his seventh catch of the innings set a new wicketkeeping record for
Roses matches here this morning.

Sutton’s feat, which also equals the Lancashire record for all first-class
matches, denied Yorkshire a batting bonus point as Oliver Newby found the
edge of 19-year-old Ben Sanderson’s bat. But given that the home side had
already pocketed four, it was something of a hollow victory.

A five-year-old boy and a four-year-old girl have died from suspected stab
wounds, police said today.

Inflation in the European single currency area jumped to 3.6 per cent during
May, up from 3.3 per cent in April. The figure matches the 16-year high seen
in March and was slightly above market expectations.

The private equity giant Carlyle Group yesterday revealed it is working on a
bid for Filtronic, sending the shares in the UK electronics group soaring.
One analyst predicted that the potential deal could be worth about £66m

BHP Billiton has submitted its first round of documents to the European
Commission in an effort to convince the antitrust watchdog that its £75bn
hostile bid for Rio Tinto will not hurt competition.