Rubaiyat

When I was about 12, my Dad suggested I might like to read the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and provided me with a very small, slim, leather bound book. Illustrated. It would be untrue to say I read it (about a quarter maybe). Vast amounts of rhyming verse has never been my thing and I wasn't terribly impressed by the subject matter.
Still, the famous verse has naturally stuck in my head.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Well, this evening, the loaf of bread (ie dinner) remained at home but here's the wine*
and thou**
I only wrote all this because I liked the reflection of the sinking sun in the wineglass. And I had to look up the Rubaiyat in wikipedia.
The internet is a wonderful thing.
I never realised that

The moving finger writes and having writ
Moves on; nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it

was his too.
Far out.


*albeit a very small, glass shaped flask
**or, Barney as 'thou' is known around here.