Peter Rhodes: Coleridge's bad day

NOVEMBER the Fifth falls on a Saturday. So this year, oh, blessed relief, will we have one single, national and unified Bonfire Night, unlike other years when firework displays thunder on, night after night? Apparently not.

A PAL who knows about such things says if there is only one bonfire night then people go to the biggest organised displays, which means charities running smaller displays lose out. So the smaller charities feel obliged to run their events on different nights. Expect four days of gunpowder, treason and tinnitus, as usual.

OUR old cat is still limping and the vet's next step, having tried an assortment of drugs, is to send him for an X-ray of his poorly leg. This is when it starts to get really expensive. It is that moment, almost unknown in mathematics, when one leg equals an arm and a leg. By chance, a friend is due in hospital this week for an NHS X-ray which is, of course, free. How difficult can it be to stuff a tabby cat under your nightie and smuggle it into the scanner?

THANKS for your views on Dispatches (C4) which, as I mentioned last week, looked at the life of luxury enjoyed by gold-plated pensioners while so-called millennials in their 20s and 30s root for grubs in the forests. Or something on those lines. One reader dug out his old receipts and discovered that the 1994 equivalent of today's flat-screen TV was a 26ins telly which cost him an eye-watering £1,075. Today's desk-top computer costs £369 but the equivalent 20 years ago cost him £528. Millennials have grown up in a world where their clothes and gadgets are assembled in far-off factories where wage rates are a fraction of their own. They inhabit a bargain-basement world.

THE strange thing about Dispatches was the huge, trumpeting herd of elephants in in the living room that no-one mentioned. While there was much discussion of houses and flats being too expensive for new buyers, nobody made the obvious point that if the population of a small island rises from 50 million to 70 million in a single lifetime, living space is going to get rarer and costlier.

I WROTE yesterday about Bob Dylan's poetry being compared to that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. An unimpressed reader sends me these lines from Dylan: "Once I had a pony, her name was Lucifer / She broke her leg and she needed shooting / I swear it hurt me more than it could ever have hurted her." Okay, even Coleridge had his off days.

ONE of Coleridge's worst days came at his home on Exmoor in 1797 when, in a drug-induced dream, he began writing his wondrous poem Kubla Khan. He was interrupted by an unknown "person from Porlock." By the time Coleridge got back to his desk, the inspiration had gone and the poem, intended to be 300 lines, ends at 54.

I HAVE always had this mental image of Coleridge, out of his skull on opium, weaving such lyrical lines as: "And close your eyes with holy dread / For he on honey-dew hath fed / And drunk the milk of Paradise." Once the dope wears off and his visitor departs, he picks up his pen and, to his astonishment, finds himself writing: "There was a young girl from Nantucket / Who washed dirty socks in a bucket . . ."