[Steve Bucknell]

Thanks again, Jerome, for your research and posts. I think your:" What a fascinating transition from metallurgist to master of light verse up there in the New Yorker etc with Nash and the others..." is spot-on. I hope to ask R.P. more about this. The more clues I pick up he seems a fascinating mix of down-to-earth scientist and almost-mystic. There's a transformation of base metals into....much improved base metals!

I read "Allotments" while I was in the British Library. A skillful and pretty coffee-table book with nice verse about life on allotments, celebrating the small, disorderly and particular. He describes the characters on a typical suburban allotment :" the orderly, the disorganised, the laborious, the lazy, the experts, the simpletons, the practical, the philosophers, the experimenters and the traditionalists." Sound like anywhere you know?

Thanks again, Steph.

And I leave you for now with a touch of R.P.'s mystical side:

"Be of good comfort, for the light once lit
May shine when life has long extinguished it,
And, being a kind of lingering reflection,
Prove the sole evidence of resurrection."