Tim Heald's Blog

I don't dream much or if I do I don't remember them but the other night I dreamt I was back on a national paper, probably the old broadsheet Daily Express and I was instructed by the features editor to go to some high street somewhere and investigate a new pub which had just opened. It was called the Obama.

 

            I don't know whether or not it replaced The Garibaldi or the Duke of York and I'm afraid I woke up before I got there but it was interestingly vivid and set me thinking in all sorts of ways. First of all, of course, there is, as far as I know, no such pub. I think this is a pity because the name has a certain resonance about it and I like the idea of saying to someone. "See you in the snug at the Obama for just the one" or something similar.

 

            Anyway it was just a dream and as far as I know there is no pub opening called the Obama. On the whole, in real life,  it seems pubs are closing, and for a variety of reasons this particular aspect of our national life is diminishing. If there were to be such a pub-opening the Daily Express wouldn't have any feature writers to go out and report on it. Nor any reporters. The days when the editor, Derek Marks, said "There is no finer thing for a man to be than a reporter on the Daily Express"  (note the sexism also unacceptable today) are long gone. Today's papers would have endless commentators ready to tell us what to think about the Obama. But no-one to tell us what was actually happening on the spot. Of this I was reminded by the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Guardian's media page which looked back on the quaint 1980s when there were hardly any columnists and papers wasted a lot of time on reporting something called news. Nowadays a PR agency would issue a press release and that would be the basis of the column.

 

            As I said, it was just a dream and I am certainly not going to say that newspapers were better in the old days. On the other hand they were very different. Very different. Likewise life. I am certainly not going to fall into the trap of shaking my head and saying in a fogeyish way that the old days were better but no-one can deny they were not the same. I am told, incidentally, by Simon Hoggart in my paper, that the minute I am tempted to say that the old days were better I should say the single word "dentistry". To which I would only respond that in the last year or so I have twice had excruciating tooth-ache but can't remember having such a thing in the past. Age, I suppose, but I'm not so convinced that dentistry has improved as much as Simon would have us believe.

 

            I suppose I don't need dreams to convince myself or anyone else that everything has changed. Life is not the same. Everything is different. Even dentistry. This is a given, although I think the pace of change has been extraordinarily fast recently. I'm more intrigued by the question of whether or not life has improved. Age naturally makes us conservative because we are nervous of unfamiliarity and we become increasingly bad at dealing with innovation. Novelty tends to perplex us. I didn't particularly like nor sympathise with the pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed, essentially male dominated, deferential, unquestioning world in which I grew up, but it IS the world in which I grew up and if only for that reason I feel/felt  comfortable with it. The food was revolting, the religion-filled but otherwise empty Sunday was pretty grim, the pervasive attitudes were smug and old-fashioned but they were what I was used to and for that reason I felt and feel safe with them.

 

            Anyway I had this dream. Much more mundane than Martin Luther King's but, in a way, more interesting. Quite apart from all the other issues raised I am simply not aware of a pub called The Obama. I think there should be such a thing. I'd like to see it debated. In my dreams...

 

            In real life I suppose the most interesting achievement was seeing a double-page spread under my bye-line in the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph. It was about Donna Leon, the American crime novelist I interviewed in Venice.  I also had an obit of Hugh van Es in the Guardian. And a book review in the Tablet. And I think we're going to do Richard Cobb's letters to Hugh Trevor-Roper as a single volume; and I plug on with Jardine and with Tom Braun. I am determined to see the return of Bognor in hard covers. So busy, busy, but in a slightly depressing way my heart isn't in it as much as it was. I would like to say it's because I think the contemporary conventional media has lost the plot. This, I am told, I must not say even if I believe it to be true.

           

Earlier this week I took the train up to Wiltshire to see my Mama, oversee the delivery of the "new" car and generally take stock. On the way home I thought, somewhere around Newton Abbot at about 6.30 pm that I might have a glass of wine and a peanut or two. I was travelling on a Cross Country train from Glasgow and there was no announcement about catering. However I asked the "train manager" if there was a buffet on board and he smiled sweetly and said it was in the next coach. I walked through and was confronted by locked doors. However my new friend was close behind so he got out his keys and opened up to reveal a rather sheepish individual who was taking stock or whatever but in any case closing down. I asked if they would be re-opening and was told, rather truculently I thought, that they no longer provided food and drink in Cornwall.

 

            This seemed a powerful metaphor for our condition. No food and drink in Cornwall. There is a widespread school of metropolitan thought that believes that Cornwall is beyond civilization and doesn't DESERVE food and drink. This is sometimes echoed by the Cornish. When I mentioned my dispiriting experience to one local he said 'Good'. As far as he was concerned the more cut off we are the better.

 

            For me, of course, it's slightly different. I need to work and counter the idea that because I live in Cornwall it doesn't mean that I am dead or retired. This is a depressingly widespread assumption and even people who have lived here and are well-disposed emphasise the problems. In fact it is possible to go to and from London quite cheaply by train and the sleeper leaves at midnight and gets in, in time for breakfast. There is also the usual problem with people who have regular and predictable incomes. Someone actually said that I should be rigorous about London visits and not go unless the resulting income doesn't at least match the outgoings. However, as only freelances really understand, it doesn't work like that. For instance I have just received invitations to the AGM and summer party of the Royal Society of Literature and a books and arts party from the Editor of the Tablet. Neither will guarantee income but I really ought to show my face. Conversely if I don't go there will be those who shrug and say that I am retired or dead as I obviously live in Cornwall and don't cross the Tamar. Which I'm afraid is why so many people live in or much nearer London.

            Anyway this morning I walked down to Readymoney Cove, up through the woods and along the cliffs. It was a beautiful sunny day, sky was blue, sea likewise and all in all another timely reminder of why one lives in Cornwall and why one is lucky to do so. Then on Bank Holiday, Penny and I went to Plymouth and sailed out into the sound on a rackety old ferry (well she FELT like a rackety old ferry even if she was at the cutting edge of ferrydom) in order to see off Mervyn Wheatley and his fellow-competitors on the Solo Transatlantic Yacht Race to Newport, Rhode Island. Mervyn and I once shared a study at school and here we were half a century on in our respective vessels on Plymouth Sound, attended by the Duke of Edinburgh no less, and celebrating an exercise of sublime pointlessness. I confess I was consumed with admiration. I remember Mervyn boxing for the school. He admitted the other day that he had never actually won a match, though he had never lost one either. His technique was simple. He simply stood in the ring and looked terrifying. His opponent danced around in a poncey way ducking and weaving while Mervyn remained motionless. If someone was foolish enough to get within range he hit them and they fell over. Few were that stupid.

            I mentioned this to a fellow passenger on the boat who gave the impression that he had served in the Royal Marines with Mervyn and he looked thoughtful and said he got the impression that Mervyn could still look after himself. Indeed he did, standing at the back of his yacht, much as he done in the school boxing ring all those years ago as the band played Colonel Bogey on his loudspeaker system. He has a bath on his yacht - a fact I noted with further admiration. Anyway the whole apparition and in particular my one-time study-mate filled me with ludicrous pride and elation.

Daft bugger, but rather magnificent.

Not enough of that around these days of MP's expenses and credit crunch. I am delighted to say that in mid-October, however, I will be delivering a long paper on crime writing at the University of Antwerp. I am much looking forward to it, indeed I regard the challenge as rather wonderful and my equivalent, in its much quieter but perhaps more cerebral way, of taking part in the single-handed transatlantic sailing race. The prospect cheers me up no end. Life in the old thing yet, carpe diem and all that. As the CO said in Beyond the Fringe , we need gestures like this.

Futile maybe, but essential, admirable and above all enormous fun.

            The woods on my walk the other day were an absolute riot of primroses, bluebells and wild garlic and made my feel positively fotherington-thomas-like. Hello flowers, hello, sun, hello spring! I don't know really why one bothers to go anywhere else especially at this time of year when everything except the morning paper seems to be full of blossom and hope. The organic vegetable people who send us boxes of delicious, muddy food, say that this is a better-than-usual spring but they have also just acquired a French farm in order to bridge the apparently usual six week hiatus in the British organic vedgie scene. This comes around now and represents the gap between the last of year's sowing and the first of next. Real-life green shoots all round and maybe it's OK to feel a bit like fotherington-thomas.

            I spent a week of the most glorious weather in the beautiful city of Oxford which was looking particularly resplendent - all glowing burnished yellow walls and luscious green lawns. Unfortunately, however, much of my time was passed in libraries of one sort or another. These, while admirable in their way, are not the most appropriate places to while away some of the few bright days of the British year. My main objectives were the letters of my friend and former tutor Richard Cobb. At their best these are wonderful. My favourites on this visit were ones in the Merton College Library to two other historians of the French Revolution, John Roberts who was Warden of Merton (and once when Master of the Postmasters at a party of his threw me over his shoulder when I questioned his qualifications for a Judo black belt) and John Bromley, who was Roberts' tutor at Keble College. John Roberts is dead now but has written a glowing encomium about the Bromley papers. My favourites among these caches were a short one recalling the visit of Cosmo Gordon Lang when college visitor and Archbishop of Canterbury - the two go together! - which he wrote to John Roberts and two to Bromley, one describing Richard's first visit to India, which he adored, and the other about a stay in a public ward at the Royal Free Hospital following an alcohol-assisted fall and limb breakage. All three are, I believe, classics.

            My other task was to meet Thomas/Tom Braun's brother, Christopher, to further our plans for a collection of  T's writings, particularly his verses, some of which appeared in the Oxford Magazine. These too are wonderful. The light stuff strikes me as similar and just as good as A.P. Herbert and the translations particularly from German and Greek strike me as very fine and, of course, a lot more serious. I was very fond of the writer, who died tragically after a car crash last year, as well as being in some awe of his erudition and scholarship. He could evidently be an uncomfortable colleague - he was a Fellow of Merton College for most of his adult life - and sadly never published a book, but he always struck me as being a quintessential Oxbridge don of the very best sort. I fear people like him, if there are any, are going to become the victims of progress and efficiency. But then I have just been reading the autobiography of a Corinthian scholar and cricketer, R.C. Robertson-Glasgow who expressed similar apprehensions more than six decades ago. I suspect elderly fuddy-duddies have been similarly worried for centuries and mercifully the fears are never entirely realized.

            I was, however, depressed to read a piece in Saturday's Guardian by Ian Jack saying, in effect, that the days of the professional writer were over. According to him it had been a relatively short period in any case and historically authors were amateurs or at least part-time professionals. Nowadays the internet (and blogs such as this) are the prerogative of all and the days when people like him and me could base their whole lives on writing  are over.

            I was reminded of a piece I wrote about Bristol in the Spectator a few months ago. I recalled that in the 1970s my father's last job was working with WD and HO Wills, the Bristol based tobacco company. They were immense and apparently indestructible. Now, however, although they still pay my  mother a pension from their Imperial Tobacco office people in England have virtually kicked the smoking habit and the firm which once permeated the whole of Bristol society has ceased to exist in any recognizable sense. A few decades earlier my mother's family owned a company based in the small Somerset town of Martock - maybe it's a large village, I'm not sure. Then quite suddenly people in this country stopped wearing gloves. The company no longer exists.

            At the time of my father's death I had just left the Daily Express and had my first book published by Hutchinson. Both the paper and the publisher still exist but they have changed beyond real recognition and Ian Jack is writing an article saying that the trade or profession that I entered all those years ago as an optimistic young graduate has in effect become no longer cable of supporting life.

            Well, I suppose life changes all the time and this is part of its appeal. It is extraordinary, however, that my family have been intimately involved in three facets of British life that have declined so absolutely. Glove-wearing, and smoking cigarettes, and producing words on paper have all gone, are going or, depending on one's point of view, about to go. It is also a fact of life, I believe, that as one gets older one is less comfortable with change and unfamiliarity. So I feel uneasy and threatened for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the alleged credit crunch or pig flu.

            Looking back over the last month I see that it began with a few days in London, a coffee with the re-incarnated books supreme at the Daily Telegraph, a tour of Godolphin House with the local branch of the Art Fund and a visit from friends from Australia. I am keen to make a little pilgrimage in my father's foot-steps  during World War Two when he won a Military Cross in the landings at Salerno and fought his way up Italy until being halted on the Gothic Line where he won an immediate Distinguished Service Order. Life was rather different then and maybe one shouldn't look back to distant days. I feel, however, that this is something that should be done. I have started planning; have a reading list; am talking to Raleigh Trevelyan who was at Anzio where my uncle was killed and who wrote about it all; am about to write to Professor Amedeo Montemaggi, the leading authority on the battles of those days. And so on.

            So watch this space.

            Meanwhile I shall go for a walk and enjoy the wild garlic and the wrong sort of blue-bell which looks, from a distance, much the same as the right sort, and has the desired effect of lifting the spirits no end.

            And Krystian Zimerman is playing Schubert as I type.

            Life can't be wholly horrible.

            Outside, yachts are sailing out to sea and inside I shall now proceed to the relevant web-site and try to post this blog.

I was going to do a Carpe Diem piece about being in Verona, noticing that a production of "La Traviata" was coming up, booking a couple of cheap seats in the Gods and thanking our lucky stars, God or whatever. However when we came back a week later and checked in to our (cheap!) hotel the clerk met us with a solemn face and said that the production had been cancelled owing to a national strike. Well, only in Italy, could an evening of pleasure be cancelled because of a national opera strike but nonetheless it was a warning of a different sort: making plans is God's invitation to practical jokes. Or something.

Anyway we went and had an expensive meal instead and I felt suitably chastised. I have to say, incidentally, that when the doleful concierge told us the news Penny immediately burst into tears whereas I'm afraid I laughed. I suppose I'm just punch drunk. Nevertheless whatever one's attempts at making the best of all possible worlds God has a strange habit of moving the goal posts when one is least expecting it. So Carpe Diem makes perfect sense but don't expect to have the same success rate seizing tomorrow, let alone the day after. They may never happen.

One of many enjoyable days in the Veneto was at Sirmione, where Tennyson and Ezra Pound both visited and about which they both wrote. It's a resort on the southernmost tip of Lake Garda and on a Sunday in March sunny, crisp and crowded. We had lunch with Kate, my god-daughter, her husband James and their two small children. Come to think of it Sirmione is probably not, technically, part of the Veneto. Also, God, playing an unexpected hand, caused the cancellation of our train - a trans Europe express to Basel - but I outwitted him by nipping on the next one to Torino instead. It means getting out at Peschiera del Garda rather than Denzeuela or whatever which I rechristened Desdemona but we still made it to Sirmione. Pause for thunderbolt.

Anyway Kate who has lived in Milan for a while wanted some recommendations for places to visit and although I'll send her separate recommendations I thought I'd rehearse the idea here first. Equal first and completely different would be Bassano del Grappa and Padova, aka Padua. I'd never even heard of Bassano which is about an hour by bus from Vicenza where we stayed for the first fortnight and on the main train line from Venice to the Brenner pass. It was here that I ate my first baccala with polenta - a rather elegant variation on a Norwegian salt cod with local maize porridge staple or, as in the posh-ish hotel by the river, the said porridge dried and rolled then grilled. Bassano was also where Penny bought me a ludicrously over-priced but wonderfully authentic black Borsolino hat which goes perfectly with the Magee Donegal tweed overcoat she bought me in Dublin the other year. Old friends and others will be as amused as me by the idea of Heald as a walking sartorial statement but the coat and hat plus the Williams boots, the cords, the tweed jacket well, eat your heart out Teasy-Weasy. No better than that. I actually look almost smart. Great packaging, pity about the product.

But the high spot of Bassano is the bridge, a wonderful, unique wooden edifice with a cover and cobbles, designed by the ubiquitous Palladio. At one end there is a Grappa bar and museum and the other another bar and a museum to the mountain troops or Bersaglieri of whom the locals are very proud but about whom Brits tend to laugh. We disparage them with jokes about North Africa but never, I think, fought them face-to-face on their own terrain in the Dolomites and Italian Alps. They wear large feathers in their hats, sing wonderfully, drink a lot of grappa and have turned the bridge into a personal shrine. Anyway we both loved Bassano and it joins that select band of places where in an ideal world I would like to rent a garret and write a book or two.

Padua is another and much better known story. We decamped from Vicenza for a final week based on the Albergo Verdi which was a nice newly renovated boutique job in the old university quarter marred only the pigeons which began cooing on our window-sill very early in the morning. The other refrain, mercifully confined to non-sleeping hours, was "Dottore...Dottore..." It seemed that a lot of students had graduated recently and there were little groups all over the University area serenading semi-naked people, often covered in foam or soap, and chanting "Dottore...Dottore" in honour of their new qualification.I've heard it said that everyone in Italy is a Dottore.

This was good and there were wonderful things to do and see - notably the Giotto murals in the chapel by the old Roman amphitheatre, the huge hall above the shops in the Piazza de Erbe, the massed angels in the dome of the Duomo Baptistry. As so often I loved the strange and quirky. In the top floor of the museum near the Giottos there is a coin museum, the Bottacin. It leaves me pretty cold but Mr. Bottocin lived in Trieste where he made friends with Maximilian, the Hapsburg who built Miramare and went to be Emperor of Mexico only to be executed by the soldiers of Benito Juarez, a scene inaccurately commemorated in Manet's picture in the National Gallery. All Bottocin's amazing numismatical cabinets are there along with some sad pieces of Maximiliania. There is the hat - a sort of white, feminine Ascot job which he apparently wore on the day of his execution. There is also a lugubrious portrait of a foppish general who was shot at the same time. I also enjoyed seeing Saint Antony's bottom teeth preserved in a chapel in his eponymous basilica. You couldn't help wondering whose teeth they really were. Also why so many people venerated such absurdities and why there were people clutching on to the side of his tomb elsewhere in church and apparently holding intimate conversations with the deceased. Sometimes I really dislike the Church. St. Antony, the city's patron saint, seems to have been a dab hand at rescuing infants from cauldrons of boiling water and sewing on severed limbs. Oh well. I enjoyed the teeth though.

Seriously though Padova , as the city is locally known, struck me, us, as being wonderful, not least because in a tourist sense it is eclipsed by Venice which is very close and full of tourists. Padova seemed not to be and yet it had loads of wonderful things to gawp at.

I went to Venice for one day and interviewed the American crime writer, Donna Leon, who has been setting crime novels in her adopted city for almost two decades. Also present was her friend Toni Sepeda who has written a companion volume of Commissario Brunetti's walks and backs it up with guided pedestrian tours of the city. So after a coffee-fuelled natter I accompanied Toni and two Chicagoannes on an hour or so of chilly trudge past the Guggenheim, down to the Salute and back up the Zattere. Penny and I had lunch in the Antico Dolo, recommended by Richard, my former literary agent and a haunt of Guildo's. I had the tripe. Very good and very typical.Then we stopped for just the one at Saraceno by the Rialto. This is touristy but is also a haunt of Brunetti and of her creator. Penny dropped Donna's name to our waiter which provoked much enthusiasm but no cut in costs. And so back to Padova on the train, feeling like real Italian commuters and rather superior to the tourists stuck in the Serenissima. She is gorgeous but she is over-priced.

And so back to reality. There was a copy of the Tablet with my piece on the trans-Siberian railway, waiting at home. Good old Tablet. It seemed reassuringly literate and intelligent - elitist you might even say - and none the worse for that. I sent my piece on Donna Leon and Venice to the Telegraph and my man there pronounced it "lovely". So that was good.

A day or so later I took the train to Wiltshire to see my old Mum. Coming back we were delayed because of a wipe-out of the signalling system near Taunton. No trains into Cornwall for hours and when there was it was standing room only. I was about to make unfavourable comparisons with Mussolini and trains running on time and then I remembered the morning we had arrived at Vicenza station to find a brusque "Cancellato" against the name of the trans-European express to Basel on which we had booked. So it isn't better in continental Europe.

It just SEEMS better.

            Visiting Scotland was probably the high spot of the last two weeks. The purpose of the visit was to address the Cricket Society of Scotland's branches in Edinburgh and Glasgow. This occasioned much mirth among my Sassenach friends although my researches in to the life of Douglas Jardine for my Methuen book on his MCC tour of India in 1933/4 suggests that the Scot may have been the best captain England ever had.

 

            We flew up from Exeter by Flybe which was incredibly quick and painless and far cheaper than the train which trundles all the way from Par, ten minutes from home, and ends up in Waverley Station within walking distance of the New Club where we stayed. I don't see how we can possibly reduce carbon emissions and so on when flying is so cheap and convenient and rail travel so uncomfortable and expensive.

 

            Edinburgh was warm and almost balmy compared with the frozen south but that changed on the Sunday night when the snow fell and the city was carpeted in white stuff. As before I was struck by the difference between the two places. We spent the Monday in Glasgow, arriving later than hoped because two trains were cancelled because of unexpected and apparently unaccustomed cold. The first time I visited I was walking down a street when a completely strange woman at a bus-stop handed me the baby she was carrying, lit a fag took two deep sucks and accepted the baby back with a smile and thank-you. Edinburgh by contrast has always seemed polite but even though I understand more of what people say, slightly more distant.

           

            Anyway we saw a lot of old friends in Edinburgh, visited a rather unsatisfactory Jean Muir exhibition in the Museum and went to the wonderful Art Galleries which used to be run by Sir Timothy Clifford whom I remember as a not very impressive member of my platoon struggling across the Mendips during a blizzard while he and a future banker called Jonathan Long tried unsuccessfully to open a tin of spam. As always I was struck by the profusion of beautiful late Georgian or early Victorian terraces, crescents and circuses. How on earth can there be so many elegant residences in such a moderately small city?

 

            The talks both seemed to go fine. The audiences seemed friendly and knowledgeable in both places and in Glasgow we sold so many books that we actually ran out of "Village Cricket" which was gratifying. I have a sort of theory that there is always someone in an audience who knows more about your subject than you do yourself, no matter what it is. My prime example was talking to the scarily erudite Hampshire Cricket Society some years ago and thinking I would give them some Italian cricket as I had just returned from reporting the finals of the Italian six-a-side cricket competition in Cesenatico and I thought that even the HCS would be relatively ignorant about this. They clapped dutifully when I'd finished but the first questioner began his remarks with "When I was keeping wicket for Bologna last year..." Much the same happened in Glasgow. I had said how one wartime England team was the best ever as it had Denis Compton on one wing and Stanley Matthews on the other. One of the audience got up and admitted that it wasn't a bad team but not as good as the Scottish team they played at Hampden Park and which beat them. He added, for good measure, that he knew because he was there. Collapse, in my case of stout party.   He was extremely nice about it but I felt suitably deflated, as nearly always, and it just goes to prove my point. Moral; never assume!

 

            The whole brief excursion was a wonderful opportunity to renew old acquaintances of all kinds as well as making new ones. I had a jolly lunch in Glasgow with an ex-Daily Express photographer, and suggested in a vague way, that we should collaborate (presumptuously in my case) on a Glasgow/Edinburgh picture book called "A Tale of Two Cities" which Canongate could publish for a vast fortune. I somehow know it will never happen and that it will be done instead by someone like Ian Rankin or Alexander McCall Smith. Nevertheless it was a very merry lunch and we agreed that we had been very lucky to work together on Fleet Street in the last of the glory days. We then went and looked at the once magnificent Black Lubianka which had once housed the Scottish Daily Express and was just up the road from the Café Gandolfi. It looked abandoned and neglected and we felt both sad and triumphant. Well, I did.

 

            Actually we seem to have been away a lot and I haven't had my nose at the keyboard/grindstone in the way I should. Age and the promise of a pension perhaps. The month began in London immediately after Tom Braun's memorial and a lecture by the Chichele Professor of War in Oxford. As a result I seem to be helping Tom's brother Christopher with a slim volume which should include Tom's brilliantly witty occasional verses. The first Monday of the month I was in Putney and it snowed completely crippling the capital. Even the local cinema was closed. Next day we were stuck for about half an hour on Putney Bridge in a tube but still managed an enjoyable lunch at the Frontline Club with the travel writer, Peter Hughes. We agreed, quaffing wine and contemplating the death of friends and relations, that spending our way out of the recession was the way to go.

           

After Edinburgh there was a trip to stay with my Mama punctuated in the middle with a weekend in London and an overnight in Swanage to discuss the return of Simon Bognor with the writer, Jeremy Paul. Bognor's return got an airing in the Times, together with my plans for a royal anniversary book, on my birthday in January and I sent Jeremy my newish Bognor short story, Harry's Beard (in honour of the great HRF Keating) and my complete Spain-based novel. It was an enjoyable visit and productive too, I think. The on-dit is that nobody wants crime novels such as my Bognor's return but we both agreed that the on-dit was mistaken and ridiculous. At least I think we did. We shall see but my view, shared I think by Jeremy, is that wit, style and a waspish sense of "contra mundum" are exactly what is needed in these dumbed-down, credit-crunched times.

 

London was interesting as always. I saw "Doubt" which I enjoyed very much, and the new Woody Allen which I also enjoyed and "Slumdog Millionaire" in which I was disappointed perhaps due in part to the hype. We also tried "Terroirs" and Thomasina Mier's Mexican place in Covent Garden, Wahaca. I thought both were really good.  The proprietor at Terroirs had an MBA from Montpellier and was brilliant at dealing with Penny when she sent her Prosecco back because it was cloudy. He brought a new glass without argument but explained that the cloudy glass was perfectly OK but due to the fact that the wine was organic it looked a little murky That was all. In other words he accepted that as the customer she was entitled to change things but that didn't mean to say that he was in any way at fault. Admirable I thought.

 

The last blog was a bit late being posted because I keep getting it all wrong and the instructions are in my view gratuitously misleading. Apparently I should use "Write Entry" not "Create New Blog". As the computer whiz is in India for six weeks it was difficult to get right though he was able to sort it out from his hammock slung between a couple of palm trees in Kerala or something like that. Then it was back to P.G. Wodehouse. Good for him. Admirably unlike Sir Fred the pension and his fellow garagistes.

 

The confusion made me wonder not for the first time why I do this blog. The only real answer is that it - or the opportunity - exists, and most people, though not all, seem to quite like it. My own belief (not shared by everyone) is that the more honest the better. And if in the process you seem to be whingeing then tant pis. Which is why I finish by saying that I have complained to as many people as possible because on returning to Tisbury station and paying £9 in parking fees to a ticket office man who was very much not there  when I left on Saturday morning I found a parking ticket and a demand for £50. Evidently my explanatory note left on the windscreen counted for nothing; nor the fact that the station was unmanned when I left .

 

In my letter of protest I said that I thought this was evidence of incompetence and greed. As it happens I believe that these two things are now pervasive and endemic - vide Sir Fred and others. Saying so is evidence of grumpy old mannishness and my chronic pensionability. Bad PR, very. To which I'm inclined to shrug and say that I feel like that and if I feel like that I don't see why I shouldn't say so. I do feel assailled by incompetence and greed and if that makes me a grumpy old man I think I'm grumpy and old enough to say what I like.

 

Besides which I think I'm right.

It would be wrong to suggest that the sudden and totally unexpected death of my younger brother James was anything other than the most significant event of the last few weeks. It was indeed one of the most significant events of life so far and very uncomfortable for all of us especially I would imagine for those of us who claim to be orthodox Christians. It seemed, and still does, to be gratuitously cruel. Bad enough if you think it was an accident of fate, worse still if you have to accept that it was done by God, on purpose.

 

As I become more and more of an agnostic if not atheist I tend to be more phlegmatic about the bloodiness of life. On the whole actually and with reservations I have to concede that I've been very lucky and privileged but on balance life is pretty unpleasant but why should one expect it to be anything else? I suppose that what one comes back to and what any unexpected and premature death elicits is a sense of "Carpe Diem". Jim got just over sixty years which, in the present British climate, is a pretty good knock. It was good that when I last spoke to him some 48 hours before his death he sounded relaxed and happy. When we tidied up his effects we found walking boots, a new volume of the collected poems of RS Thomas which he had obviously been reading, a bottle of Irish whiskey into which decent inroads had been made and notebooks and a laptop. All this suggested a well-rounded, hard-working, individual who was enjoying life and living it to its full.

 

It was incredibly tough on my mother who found his body; tough on his widow and children; tough on his relations; tough on his friends. Not too bad for him, perhaps but pretty ghastly for the rest of us. Suddenly a life which still had endless possibilities and potential has come to an end. Jim's got a birth date and a death date  and his chapter is closed. The funeral in Wells Cathedral was very well-attended (we reckoned on more than 300 mourners), dignified, moving and vastly improved by all the participants - priest, speakers and readers, being people who really knew him so that we all had a real sense of a personal tribute. Afterwards I had a word with the priest who had run the service and he said that he had introduced James to the American mystic and writer, Thomas Merton, and also remarked that James had been a regular at Sunday morning services but had never once stayed for the coffee session afterwards. In other words he had a strong interest in the religious but was essentially quite a solitary person. Or words to that effect.

 

I went to see my GP this morning to have my fairly regular blood pressure test. It was up which is scarcely surprising though slightly depressing. We may have to treat it slightly "more aggressively" if it stays high. I suppose one of the several thoughts provoked by my brother's death is that once we reach 60 we are well and truly in the drop-off zone. If we keel over at this age there is perhaps a marginal sense of a premature demise but not a lot. Younger people and even our contemporaries will say that we had a "good innings" which in a historical sense is probably true though it's not exactly cheerful.

 

Still, as one of our fellow-lunchers remarked the other day, "It makes a welcome change to be discussing death and not poverty". Which is, perhaps, true. The poverty news is depressing, not least because it appears to be self-inflicted or at least man-made, and in some instances at least forces regrettable changes in career as well as circumstance. It's sad, for example, to hear of good travel-writers who are forced to sell up and turn to something completely different because the market has dried up. One gets the impression that most publications have a longish back-list of commissioned articles and are not commissioning anything fresh for the foreseeable future.

 

It was my birthday on the 28^th, a seminal one, noted with a photograph in the Times and provoked some fascinating messages, the most unexpected being, I think, the one from Tim Mason with whom I had been at pre-prep school, Danesfield in Walton-on-Thames circa 1950. Amazing and rather wonderful. For the first time in my life I feel rather proud of Danesfield which I'm afraid I barely remember. Do I feel a re-union coming on. Are there other Old Danesfieldians out there? Did we do all right? Would the school be proud of us? Does it matter?

 

Tomorrow, God, cut-price-airline and weather permitting we go to Edinburgh so that I can drone away to the Cricket Society of Scotland in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Penny says I mustn't use words like "drone" because people may believe I mean it. I explain that it is all part of the Englishman's disturbing  tic of self-deprecation which is actually a thinnish disguise for extreme arrogance. Never mind, the Scottish trip is an interesting exercise in Ancient and Modern.

 

I am having lunch on Monday with David Cairns once the star photographer on the Daily Express. That's ancient. So is coffee with Camilla Cowie whose parents owned and ran the wonderful Connaught House, at Bishop's Lydeard outside Taunton, where I was at prep school . I suppose that's ancient too. So, in a slightly more up to date way, is my wonderful former agent Richard Simon with whom we are having supper on Sunday. David Gilmour - Sunday lunch - is Balliol (ancient) and Richard Cobb (ancient but shading into modern). On Wednesday we are having supper with Merryn, Sandy and their children and they are definitely Cornish and modern. The cricket talks are about books that are in print and to a brand new audience, so they're modern. Shepherd and Wedderburn, the lawyers are modern whereas maybe Ivor Guild WS is ancient.

 

I don't really know if these are meaningful definitions and distinctions. Oh, during the month we went to Cracow, using up air-miles., It was wonderful but fantastically cold. I have been invited to give a paper at the University of Antwerp in October. Jeremy Paul and I are going to work together an a TV adaptation of the new return of Simon Bognor.

 

In other words "und so weiter" and the mixture as usual, a judicious mixture I feel, of past, present and future. Overshadowing everything however is  the death of my brother James. It's affected everything. I miss him a lot. I am still trying to work out what it means. Above all I suppose I feel RIP. He was much loved and much appreciated and he had many joyful moments giving them out as well. But it was a tough little life in many ways and RIP seems a meaningful and apt sentiment. RIP James - you deserve it and we miss you.

 

 

The end of the year is the traditional time for taking stock, for reflecting on the past twelve months and musing on the next. The conclusion of 2008 is generally considered to be a particularly glum period with a series of financial disasters characterizing the recent past with even worse to come. It will seem perverse, therefore, if, on balance I take a rather bullish view of life. Perhaps I am more puritan than I thought; perhaps I hope that we may see a greater esteem for what the late Roy Jenkins described as "the less acquisitive professions". It would be good if greed became as shameful as it used to be; if essential competence was more highly regarded; if we became less enslaved by conspicuous consumption and more motivated by altruism. I happen to think that much of the world in the last few years has been profoundly unattractive and I sense some prospect of society becoming a happier whole. Who knows, may be we'll even return to a world in which people believe once more that there is such a thing as society.

 

The past comes first and two deaths loom largest, not because I feel gloomy about them but because they are very important to me and because they remind me that I was really lucky to have known those concerned. Both the dead are women and I loved them dearly and feel much better for having known them. I'd hate that to sound goody-goody-two-shoes not least because both of them were robust, no-messing-around people, without an ounce of schmaltz or false sentiment in them.

 

One was my godmother, Mary Sharpe, and the other was my friend, Kate Mortimer.  They are united, of course, in death but were remarkably similar in life even though there was a quarter of a century between them. My godma was the sort of person of whom it was said, almost invariably "We'll never meet her like again" and "They broke the mould after they made Mary". She won the war, ran an Empire, was indomitable, slightly scarey in the nicest possible way and underneath an imposing exterior something of a softy. I remember many moments but best of all the one when I asked her why, during the war, she rode a Royal Enfield motorbike. She looked at me with what I have described - in a phrase lots of her friends and admirers recognize - with an expression of "fond contempt" and said that, "dear boy" the Enfield was the only bike that could be repaired in a jiffy by removing one's stockings and doing something clever involving cam-shafts and reef knots.

 

Kate was, gloriously, the same sort of person. She had a half-blue at cricket, got a brilliant First at Oxford and I remember once asking a cabinet minister friend what she was doing only to be told that she was "sorting out Poland for us". Which, naturally, and with great good humour, she was. I should have introduced them as they lived quite close. My Godma was in the middle of Chagford and Kate in a farmhouse between Okehampton and Sampford Courtenay. They were both avid Christians and believers in the Authorised version. They were also both very funny.

 

I remember Kate once sending me a postcard after I had split up with my first wife writing to tell me that she had given a lecture on "the meaning of loyalty" to a mutual friend who had criticized me. Kate was resolutely loyal. So was my Godmother. This did not mean that either was uncritical. Far from it. If they disagreed with you or with something you had done they let you know. Forcefully. But nothing ever interfered with their support. I knew that they were both always there for me no matter what and although I loved them both for all sorts of other reasons it is for their unswerving loyalty that I most remember them. The late Brian Redhead once asked me, apropos Prince Philip, if I felt better for having known him which was a much smarter way of asking whether I had liked him. I feel privileged to have known Kate and Mary and feel much better for the experience. I salute them both and thank them and God or what or whoever - should they exist which I slightly doubt although they never did. He or it or whatever did me a good turn when I was given them.

 

I delivered the address at Mary's packed memorial in the little church at Gidleigh in Devon and I wrote Kate's obituary in the Independent, so I have been able to pay a public tribute already but it seems appropriate to record another now at this time of reflection. I miss them both but I feel perhaps ludicrously enriched by having known them.

 

What else has been good about 2008? Maybe not a lot. I have just received a note from the States saying that I have been selected as "A Great Mind of the 21^st century" and may, for many dollars, have a plaque to prove it. Such,my wife tells me, is life and it is not the first time I have received such an accolade. Part of me would love to see the complete volume of great minds, all 1,000 of them, all paying out considerable numbers of dollars for the book and the concomitant things-to-go-on-walls. What of those who don't pay up? Anyway I'm jolly chuffed to be a Great Mind. Coupled with the accolade from Penny's chiropodist in Redruth who took rather a shine to my feet (despite her warnings) I'm feeling pretty bucked up myself from tip to toe. Perhaps one should hurry past the middle but even so.

 

Professionally I suppose the year has been pretty bloody. I have an outstandingly brilliant outline for a new royal book; an outstandingly brilliant complete new novel featuring Simon Bognor plus two outstandingly brilliant beginnings to sequels; BUT my outstandingly brilliant new agent, Caroline Michel, has failed to find any takers. The only book to appear under my own name is the history of Palmers Brewery in West Dorset. This is a very gcod example of its kind but I can't pretend that it is either great literature or a world best-seller.

 

I have had one or two pieces in the Mail and the Spectator but nothing that really set the pulse running. It looks as if I'll be involved with a new Readers Digest humour special for which I produced one of their inimitable "blue books" but even though it will be good I don't think any of us really expect it to be great.

 

There were drones and there are more to come. I talked about cricket to societies in Chesterfield, High Peak, Old Trafford, Southport and Liverpool which was challenging and fascinating and just mildly depressing because I felt that this kind of cricket society is probably in terminal decline. The sort of cricket they represent and enjoy is also under threat from 20/20 and similar instant forms of the game done better, I think, by baseball. While on the subject of cricket I continued to enjoy and cherish my Presidency of the Fowey Cricket Club and I was pleased that we managed to raise more than £1100 for Marie Curie in a match between "my" team and the Cornish Crusaders which had to be abandoned before a ball was bowled on account of the weather.

 

Another drone was at the annual Governor's meeting at the University College of Falmouth. This was fun because not only was the audience wall-to-wall grand governors, it also included Nicholas Trefusis and Michael Galsworthy whom I first met in 1952 when I originally pitched up as a little boy at Connaught House School near Taunton. Brian Perman, whom I originally met in the Youth Hostel in Rome in 1962 was also there as was Betty Jarrett, widow of the significant Derek Jarrett who taught me history at Sherborne. So although the overall atmosphere was strange and intimidating I felt I had the support of old friends. Much appreciated!

           

I've always made a point of combining business and pleasure particularly where travel was concerned but last year was pretty ghastly in that respect. I wrote a couple of pieces based on the Lancashire and Derbyshire trip but was unable to find a taker for either. We had a very enjoyable few days in Paris mainly looking at Picassos but I was reduced to blogging, unpaid, on the PFD web-site about that. We also had an enjoyable few days in Venice with the Friends of the Fan Museum. This included a day out doing Palladio, who was celebrating his 500^th birthday, and I wrote about this for the Spectator. They, alas, have also been hit by the credit crunch so that the piece has not yet appeared there either. Sarah Standing says she will keep trying and hopes to find space in the New Year. So fingers crossed.

 

I should be really bothered by this and the general down-turn in work but somehow I feel more optimistic than I have done at more obviously buoyant times. I'm not sure why this should be. Perhaps it is my looming 65^th birthday on January 28^th. If I make it I start to collect an old age pension. The amount will be pitiful and it seems to be administered by the current combination of prim politeness and devastating incompetence. Nobody has been in touch with me except the pension people who send me long repetitive statements telling me that I owe £00.00 and need do nothing. When I said I'd like to be paid quarterly the (consummately polite) woman on the other end of the line said that in all her life in pensions she had never known such a thing. Most people get paid weekly or monthly, so once again I'm a freak.

 

65 is nothing to write home about - my Mum is 88 and won't even get a royal e-mail or whatever for another twelve years. The pension is derisory and I'm regarded as past it despite feeling energetic and bright and having lots of hair not to mention near-perfect feet as well as one of the great minds of the 21st century.Maybe it's the fact that my two younger children are getting married - Tristram in July and Lucy the following January. Yhat means that all four children will be legally attached to their partners. And the two grandsons seem bright and well even though living in Miami.

 

So maybe its grand-paternal bliss that's making me all euphoric. Or the thought of drones to come - the Baconians in St. Alban's in January, the Scottish Cricket Society in Glasgow and Edinburgh in February. A Dorset drone with the novelist Michael Dobbs in May. Or cricket, lovely cricket. I have lots of tickets for Ashes stuff and will take the Oz wife to the first day and Saturday at Lord's and the boys on the Sunday. And we have charity games here in Fowey in aid of the blind on July 28^th and Marie Curie on August 16^th.

 

And travel. I forgot to say that Spectator Business took a piece on crime writing based on the meeting of the International Crime Writers in Frontignan in the South of France last August. We're using air-miles to get us by Easy Jet to Krakow in January. Not much sausage and vodka if the pound continues to plummet but the flight is paid for. I've never been to Poland and I'm keen to see it. In Ealing the other day I bought some Krakowka and pickled paprika in a wonderful Polish deli. The Poles went to Ealing because there were cherry trees in the front gardens and this reminded them of Warsaw!  And somehow we have to put together a trip to Auckland for Lucy's wedding in January 2010. This may seem a tall order; probably is; but it has to be done. Dad has to be there! And will.

            Christmas Day was quiet and domestic punctuated by telephone conversations with all four children. Strange that when I spoke to Lucy in New Zealand early in the UK Christmas hers was ending whereas Emma in Monterey, Mexico, to whom I spoke hours later was operating almost a day later and had hardly begun.. Around lunch time we heard that Harold Pinter had died. We knew Harold, had policed a play of his in Basel, lunched with him, had T shirts envied, lobbied the Israeli Embassy, discussed Arthur Wellard and been in regular touch with Antonia. Strange when someone you know and is also famous dies. They're not entirely recognizable and there is a horrid tendency to be corrective.I suppose he was a great playwright but the interesting thing about so many modern playwrights is that they are best known for what they left out and of no-one was this more true than of Harold. I think it's very noticeable that no-one has quoted any lines of his. Everybody remembers the pauses and silences; nobody considers the words. Interesting.

 

            And so Christmas is over; the sun is shining, I have sent off about 40,000 words of Richard Cobb, people are coming in droves to look at Penny's amazing artificial eco-friendly Christmas tree and 2009 looms or lowers depending on one's state of mind. As I say I approach it in a spirit of optimism looking forward to birth, marriages and pension. The optimism is probably misplaced but what the hell. It should be an interesting and eventful year. Happy thoughts to all my readers and may you/they multiply and have more than ever of mine on which to feast the eyes.

 Enjoy, enjoy.

While we can!

 

And I'd just typed this and was sitting in the kitchen drinking a reflective glass of wine with Penny and a visiting friend when the phone went and we learned that my mother had just found my younger brother dead on the bathroom floor at her house in Wiltshire. Funeral in Wells Cathedral this Thursday.

 

I think I need time to think this one through.

On Remembrance Sunday I discovered that we had no garlic or anchovies in the house. Shock, horror. I mean how can one live without staples such as this? I went down town early for the War Memorial Service and mentioned our plight to one onlooker-wife who said that she too was out of garlic and if I was going to replenish stocks at the Spar which was open even on Remembrance Sunday then could I bring her a bulb too. Which I did. I got back just as the parade was shuffling to its position holding, as it were, a collective wreath of poppies. I had two small tins of anchovy fillets in the pocket of my smart Donegal tweed overcoat and two garlic bulbs one of which I presented to my friend.

 

Now, come on. The experienced blogger/columnist can surely make words out of such a credit-crunch predicament. Did hundreds of thousands of our ancestors die in order that we should have garlic and anchovies? Does it matter? Is this fair? Discuss.

 

And while in grumpy-old-man mode I had a note from Santander telling me that I had acquired an amazing two new shares for £6.31 a go. My holding is the tiny legacy of an involvement with Abbey National many years ago and I honestly haven't the foggiest how much it's all worth. Not a lot but I'm curious and so I phoned the number at the bottom of Santander's  note. Everyone was charm itself and handed me graciously on to other more relevant departments  until after about a quarter of an hour I found myself listening to a frightfully polite recorded message advising me to telephone the number I had initially dialed a quarter of an hour earlier.

 

When I mentioned this to people I bumped into while out shopping I was met with hollow laughter and the gradual realization that practically everyone had had a similar experience albeit with different organizations. My view is that it almost beggars belief. Almost, but not quite. And part of me believes that the current ridiculous crisis is just as much the result of this sort of incredible incompetence as it is to do with greed. Greed has something to do with it, of course, but it's beaten out by uselessness and the combination is lethal.

 

In a sense I suppose that what I seem to be saying is that historians, columnists and other important opinion-makers and shakers go on as if earthquake, wind and fire; birth, marriage and death; with a possible add-on for war, civil unrest, financial implosions and one or two other cosmic events are what really matter whereas the reality is that it's tins of anchovies, bulbs of garlic and a modest shareholding in a foreign bank of which none-one seems to know or care anything very much though that infinitessimal tiny bit more than nothing is done by machine, recorded for security purposes, in no language readily intelligible to man except for the politeness which borders on the unctuous.

 

By this token the most important matters of the last few weeks have had to do with cricket and at the end of the day I begin to wonder if being made president of the local cricket club wasn't the most significant, interesting and rewarding thing that ever happened. Maybe I exaggerate but not, I think, much. Forget real life whatever that may be. Anchovies, garlic and shares in Banco Santander loom much larger but not as large as cricket.

 

The month began with the cricket club's annual dinner at the Royal Fowey Yacht Club. One stalwart admitted that he was the oldest player and he was 33. Most were a great deal younger; several brought along wives, girl-friends and partners and the atmosphere was resolutely relaxed and informal although the evening ended with presentations and speeches. I felt more grand-paternal than I think I have ever felt and although the players have done a sterling job in keeping things going, notably on the field of play where they are responsible, I think, for making sure that the club consistently punches above its weight, I felt the need for more pensioners.

 

Nevertheless, if only in the interests of self-preservation and mutual camaraderie, I felt - and feel - the need for a few more of the gnarled and wrinkled. It has always seemed to me that the most successful societies are those which best manage to mix up differences of all kinds, not least those of age.

 

One way of doing this is to build up aspects of the club that have little to do with the leagues. The Leagues have been the saving of cricket but they are not perfect and there is a danger that they can create an imbalance. Last year we plotted a charity match in aid of Marie Curie and raised over £1100 even though not a ball was bowled. Next year we will do the same match, playing this time I hope, on Sunday August 16^th. This is the beginning of Fowey's great regatta week so there should be lots of people around to come and watch and give generously. Michael Williams has accepted our challenge to his inimitable Cornish Crusaders. Only the really sweaty wet-bobs will be on the high seas en-route to Falmouth and it should be a great day. The other charity game is inked in for Tuesday 28^th July and will be played in aid of the Cornwall Blind Association. That's between the Ashes Tests at Lord's and Edgbaston. I intend having a private bet to see which game raises the most but in any case please put them in your diary and try to come.

 

Quite apart from trying to introduce some entertaining, competitive non-league cricket into our season I hope that it will broaden the base of our support and membership. I'm also looking at re-instating some kind of youth scheme. I went up to the local community college for exploratory chats and had a ditto with Chris Biggs who is President of the increasingly successful Lankelly-Fowey Rugby Club which has now got a very strong youth section. I walked past the ground the other Saturday morning on my way to 4 Turnings Garage - the poor old Rover was declared a "write-off" after a risibly un-life-threatening shunt in Salisbury early one morning, but that's another silly story - and the place was heaving with little boys charging hither and yon, over-excited Dads shouting at them and Mothers talking happily to each other and looking mildly superior though pleased that their menfolk were so sweatily employed. It reminded me of the old days in Richmond at the Old Deer Park where I also found myself recently, watching London Welsh play the Pirates.

 

That too is another story and there has been lots more going on professionally and socially. Tristram, the younger son, came for a long weekend and we went for long walks on the coastal path; Penny and I went to Plymouth for a great Beryl Cook exhibition; I have blogged on the agents' web-site - see Peters Fraser Dunlop on Google and there is, naturally a web-site you can dial up directly.

 

But nothing quite matches the fun of being President of the Fowey Cricket Club and helping them become ever more broadly-based, part of the community and so on. I'd hate it all to sound goody-two-shoes because it really isn't like that. And, naturally, I am steaming on with the Richard Cobb letters; the Jardine tour of India; the resurrection of Simon Bognor and his brilliantly eclectic crime novels. And there have been other cricketing triumphs - a whole load of tickets for the Lord's Test against Australia next year to which I shall be taking Penny on the opening day and Saturday and my two sons on the Sunday. And at the very end of the month I was allowed on to Radio St. Austell Bay where I chose a whole lot of idiosyncratic music and showed off shamelessly.

 

But cricket, lovely cricket, is the best fun. Meanwhile we have Christmas and I hope everyone has a happy one after which I shall be back for my last blog of 2008. I have a strong feeling that England will lose the two impending tests in India but down here in the grass roots something is stirring. I can't wait for the summer of 2009 and for some proper Cornish cricket.

 

            I got a cheque for syndication from the people who sell-on Daily Mail pieces. Not exactly retirement, south of France, money but a cheque for second rights in my piece about the passing of the QE2. The worrying thing is that the cheque was not made out to me but someone called "Tim Herald". By the same post came a legal document addressed to me at the wrong number of the same street. The owner had scribbled "Unknown" across the envelope which is a bit of a blow as I thought, after more than a decade living in this small town in Cornwall that I was tolerably well known.

 

            So there you are - after a lifetime of public scribbling I have a wrong name and a wrong address and I begin to think I have become an unperson. I have been indulging in a correspondence with another writer, rather a good one with some "acclaimed" as they say nowadays - titles to his name. He said that writers such as us just "peter out". Maybe so. At times like this with freakishly foul weather and an apparent breakdown of the world's banking system it would, I suppose, be easy to become down-hearted, especially if one's fragile identity appears not even to have been stolen but tiresomely mislaid.

 

            However we are not down-hearted not least because we have been to Venice by Easy Jet  from Bristol and, as always, Venice was a breathtaking, wonderful, maddening, unique experience. You know you are being ripped off and there is no escape but somehow it matters less than elsewhere.

 

 We spent much of the time with the Friends of the Fan Museum which gave the experience an extra dimension and we also had a memorable day out in Palladio's city of Vicenza just down the road and that was a new and  fascinating experience about which I have written for the Spectator. Sarah Standing, whom God preserve, seems to like it. We stayed at a small hotel tucked away behind the Accademia (The Agli Alboretti) so even though we splurged on our own water-taxi (If I am allowed back in a re-incarnation I am going to return as a Venetian taxi driver) and a silly meal or two we saved on the flight and accommodation. And Bristol was, we both thought, the perfect compromise between the primitiveness of Newquay and the congestion of Gatwick and Heathrow. We will return.

 

            The serious Fan fans stayed at the Concordia and the Metropole and two of our expensive meals were in the hotel's grand and expensive restaurants. One of the good things about Venice though is that some of its most extraordinary attractions are cheap or free. Just walking across the Piazza and looking at a full moon shining on St. Mark's is one of life's great moments and it costs nothing. The Titian Ascension in the Frari church and the Carpaccios in the Scuola of St. George don't cost much. Gazing at them you almost feel justified, J.G. Links-like, in forking out ludicrous amounts of money on the dry martinis in Harry's Bar. Incidentally they really are made with vermouth not dry white wine. As I have said before I think one of barmen must have been pulling Joe's leg.

 

            Talking of Links we used his book "Venice for Pleasure" as we always do. It is quite simply the best guide book ever written. We also took a little library of Venetian books written in English. One was Salley Vickers' "Miss Garnet's Angel".centred on an otherwise relatively little known church which was not far away from our hotel and was an early port-of-call. We also took the first two Donna Leon detective stories. Donna Leon is an American academic who settled in Venice about fifteen years ago and writes an annual crime story set in the city. And finally we took Michael Dibdin's "The Dead Lagoon", which features the return to his home of Dibdin's detective, Aurelio Zen. It's brilliant as was Dibdin, who died a year ago, and whom I met briefly some years back at a Semana Negra in Gijon, Spain and whom I enormously admired.

 

            The paradox is that Venice has been the scene of so many murders in fiction whereas in real life it is one of the most law-abiding and safe cities in the whole of Italy.

Actually it is almost a dead city. You only have to slip into a church during Mass on a Sunday morning to find an elderly and tiny congregation being addressed by a querulous priest to realize that there's hardly anyone left. However in fiction everyone knows exactly where the Questura or police HQ is and the city has become a bit like the quintessential Miss Marple village. Everyone knows that it's as safe as houses used to be in real life but that when it comes to fiction it doesn't even matter if you walk very softly and carry a ginormous stick you're still at permanent risk.

 

Anyway in deference to all this I have resuscitated the notion of my own murder story set in the Serenissima. I embarked on the story so many years ago that I was able to christen it  quite reasonably "Another Death in Venice". Now, time has moved on so remorselessly, that I have inserted another word so that it is to be called "Yet Another Death in Venice." I shall dedicate it to Michael Dibdin and his widow, K.K. Beck, and it will be another triumph for Tim Herald of the wrong fixed abode.

 

Meanwhile we struggle on. We now have a "new" car, a venerable Renault Clio to replace the written-off Rover that was, apparently terminally injured in the morning shunt in Salisbury some weeks ago. I am appalled at the process by which an apparently minimal, indeed cosmetic, injury to car results in it being "written-off" and the erstwhile owner being presented with a derisory cheque by way of compensation., Luckily it seems to be a "buyers' market" and one even hears extraordinary tales of people being offered two cars for the price of one. What intrigues me is why anyone should buy a new car for many thousands of pounds when one can purchase the same car, apparently quite serviceable though "used" and a few years older, for a fraction of the cost. I find it deeply perplexing, but then I don't really like cars and would much prefer to travel everywhere by train.

 

Except that trains don't work. Yesterday, Sunday, we went in to Plymouth by train to see a showing of Buster Keaton's the Navigator at the Jill Craigie Theatre in the Roland Lewinsky building in the theatre. The film was charming and we had a relaxed and enjoyable lunch overlooking Sutton Harbour in a nice Iranian-Italian restaurant called Zucca. But on the way back we discovered that the trains had been "rescheduled". This actually meant that the advertised Paddington train was running an hour or so late but because of the alleged "rescheduling", First Great Western could claim it was "on time". So we didn't get home till after eight in time to discover that Andrew Castle had been eliminated from Strictly Come Dancing and Lewis Hamilton had won the World Motor Racing Championship.

 

Talking of the awfulness but inevitability of cars brings me to my friend Tom Braun, the brilliant and erudite Oxford ancient historian who died recently and whose obituary I have penned for the Guardian. Tom didn't drive. He didn't publish either. He knew the whole of Herodotus off by heart and at least half a dozen languages ancient and modern but he was gloriously old-fashioned. From time to time however kind friends took him out for a drive. On one of these treats the vehicle was apparently sideswiped by a lorry near Coventry and Tom received serious injuries. He was rushed to the local hospital where, evidently, he was in intensive care for 33 days. When he finally died it was not, I am told, as the direct result of the injuries he received in the crash but of infections picked up in the hospital.

 

            The story is a dreadful tale of our times and almost the only consolation is that Tom would have enjoyed telling it, chortling throughout and quite possibly rendering it in verse. There is a Quaker funeral this week which I can't attend and a memorial at Merton, his Oxford college at the end of January. I shall try to go and hope that there aren't too many other deaths in the interim.

 

            Meanwhile life in the word factory continues. I sit here working on new crime novels, the Jardine book and the collection of Richard Cobb letters. Other ideas are in the pipeline. We went to Dorset to stay with the lovely Cleveleys and to go to the annual dinner of the Society of Dorset Men in what used to be the school gym at Sherborne and is now the central school dining room. It was great to see the Cleveleys but I fear we didn't enjoy the dinner much. Nor our attempt to stop off for lunch at the new "acclaimed" Mark Hix fish restaurant in Lyme Regis. Tiddly, widdly, no lunch, no lunch. A pie and a pasty and a sorrowful letter to Mr. Hix instead. Seeing Cleeves Palmer from Palmers, Brewery in Bridport was better. Cleeves had the page proofs of the company history which I helped write and it's going to appear along with a fulsome intro by Prince Edward. It's only a tiny thing but good, nonetheless.

 

            I am writing this on a bleak, cold November day. We had the annual dinner of the cricket club on Saturday. Seemed to go OK. I am the President and on Wednesday I see the local school to try to reforge links. I have been trying to print up some Mandarin greetings for PEN writers in prison out in China to whom I am writing. The machine, unaccountably, seems not to work. Maybe it can't cope with Mandarin.

 

            Oh well. I saw son Alexander for lunch in Plymouth the other day with his wife Kirsten; son Tristram should be coming down soon; Lucy has announced a date for her wedding in New Zealand in January 2010; must write to daughter Emma in Miami. Life could be so much worse. It is criminal, in the great scheme of things, to be complaining about the loss of an identity or the death of a friend. One could, after all, be languishing in a Chinese prison and I shall now make another serious attempt to print out season's greetings in Mandarin. Meanwhile, as my friend Philip Howard says, when signing off: "KOB".

An aborted charity cricket match, a significant drone, an enjoyably desultory game of  Real Tennis, a tiresome shunt when someone drove into the back of my stationery car in Salisbury, a brief London visit to see the agent, an editor and my sons travelling on a stunningly reasonable advance deal train ticket - all this played out against a background of glorious Indian summer and the incomprehensibly glum collapse of the Western banking system. Not to mention the dispiriting use of the word "veteran" to entice people in to listen to the drone and a passing remark from a university contemporary that I am "an old and tired man". In other words September was a mildly humdrum mixture of pluses and minuses, pleasures and annoyances and a month when one was constantly being reminded that one is not as young as one was. An invitation to have a free flu injection was just one such  gesture which, though perfectly well-intentioned was still something one would, on balance, have preferred to have done without.

 

I have written about the cricket match and am still trying to place my immortal words so I won't bang on for too long in the hope that I will be able to direct you to some publication which will have my considered thoughts on the matter. I have one rejection so far and it bears out my firm belief that writing is the easy part. Marketing the words is a real hassle and the freelance, self-employed individual is completely powerless. This was something on which I touched at the significant drone of which more later.

 

Basically the charity cricket match was in aid of Marie Curie Cancer and it was a victim of the weather. Not a ball was bowled but all was not lost and somehow we managed to raise over £1100 for a thoroughly deserving charity. I have a feeling that Sod's Law, in which I believe profoundly, dictates that next year when we attempt a rerun we will manage a game of cricket but make less money. I do hope that's not the case. The match should have been played on the ground at Fowey, Cornwall where I am President and it was to have been against the Cornish Crusaders. Marie Curie, the Fowey Cricket Club and the Cornish Crusaders all have web-sites which should have some sort of corroborative evidence of our foiled intentions.

 

Nothing more to say except that the potential is tremendous. The ground is at the top of one of the most attractive seaside towns in the Kingdom and sandwiched between a large, thriving school and a smart hotel. The club already has two successful sides in the Cornish leagues but I'd like to see it build a strong local base with regular matches played for pleasure and charity. I would, wouldn't I? And I am entirely sympathetic to those stalwarts who have given time, energy, expertise and enthusiasm and see some clod-hopping incomer trampling in and thinking he knows best. I really don't but I'd like to be slightly more than a cipher and I'd like to raise the club's profile in the town and outside. Oh, and have fun while doing so. I don't think that's a lot to ask.

 

I'm just back now from the quick trip to London. Train was great. I got a very cheap old person's long-time-in-advance ticket which meant I had a big first-class table for four all to myself and a plug for the computer, plus a trolley service with free biscuits and hot chocolate. On the way back I was on the newly refurbished - well it's a million or so spent on mere titivating if you ask me - the loos didn't flush, the buffet still seemed archaic only better lit and so on. At about 3.45 there was a mild commotion, pounding of feet, cries of 'Help!' and a subsequent knock on the door and an inspection of the communication chord to see if I'd pulled it (I hadn't). After a while we trundled on and I got my tea and biscuits as we crossed the Tamar Bridge and we reached Par on time. I like the train and when it works it's wonderful. I got a lot of work done and had a good night's sleep.

 

London was interesting and I hope productive. Supper with the two sons and my niece Rebcecca was at a new (to all of us) cheap and cheerful Spanish in Old Compton Street. It was cheap and cheerful and incredibly crammed and crowded. Beforehand we had a drink or three at the Groucho with Lindsay Fulcher from the Lady, for whom I have just written a piece to mark Prince Charles' birthday. Who would have thought it? I mean Prince Charles sixty (that gawky little boy who got into trouble over cherry brandy) and me writing for the Lady. Oh well, Time.

 

The real purpose of the visit was seeing Caroline Michel, the new(ish) agent at Peters, Fraser, Dunlop. I think, hope, it was useful. The royal idea is frustrating because I know that in the end there will be at least one book to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the Queen's accession and at least one will make a lot of money. It seems to me that I should be the author of at least one book but already we have wasted an entire year while publishers have, not to put too fine a point on it, dithered. Authors tend, as a rule, to be too scared to criticize other parts of the industry in which they are involved but it does sometimes - quite often actually - seem to me that there is a conspiracy of "experts" whose main job consists of obstructing communication between the author and his or her readers. I absolutely accept that this is a simplistic view and that expert opinion would disagree. My views on "expert opinion" become rattier and less repeatable the older I get. However we shall get there in the end and the same goes for my whodunit(s). I write the sort of book in this field which "expert opinion" doesn't like. Basically "expert opinion" believes crime novels should be gorier, more disgusting and much wordier. I write short, sharp and intelligent. At least that's what I think, but then I would, wouldn't I? Some critics say pejoratively and ludicrously tdhat I write "cosy".Others agree with me but maybe I won't be vindicated until I'm long dead. This happens!

 

Anyway I am not downhearted and I keep being told that I must not seem negative. Nevertheless I feel, as increasingly often, that I am swimming against the tide and if one can't say this on a blog where, I would like to say, can one say it?!

 

The drone was also interesting and I think enjoyable. At least when droning there is absolutely no-one between you and the audience which is salutary, useful and, on the whole, refreshing. My experience, generally, is that even though there is always at least one person in the audience who knows more than the speaker about what the speaker is saying (even when the speaker's subject is ones' self) it's an entertaining, though challenging, exercise.. On the whole, and with rare exceptions, even dissenters express themselves mildly and politely and there is seldom blood on the floor. Most of the audience this time were, I think, the governors of the University College Falmouth and the similar organization at Dartington with which Falmouth recently "merged". These were almost all new to me but I also had a quartet who go back a really long way: two men were at prep school with me in the early to mid 1950s; another has been a friend since we met in the youth hostel in Rome in 1961 and the newest is the widow of an inspirational history master who taught me at Sherborne. So I was bolstered by very long-standing friends, which was reassuring.

I wanted to sandwich my life story between the reaction of an old General at the Rag when I first worked on the Daily Mirror and my latest news. It would have been nice to have been able to adduce some neat and learned conclusion but, alas, I couldn't. In the end I think all I was able to say was that most lives were a bit of a shambles and especially that of the self-employed writer. Enjoyable, very, but academically pretty unhelpful It occurs to me that the role of the academic and particularly the historian is to try to make sense of the senseless, impose a shape to the shapeless and so on. Unfortunately life isn't like that.

Oh, the shunt. Even now at least a fortnight after the "accident" occurred we are waiting for someone to come and take the car away in order to repair it.. Or maybe even write it off which is apparently an option even though my aged mother and I agreed that we could make it as good as new in five minutes with a pair of pliers. The shunt came after the Real Tennis game - relaxed, slightly sad, but at least I could hit the ball some times and my opponent who is older, wiser and still plays once a week living as he does within a twenty minute drive of the court at Walditch and it was nice to see Ben Ronaldson after all these years and he now has a beard and a wife anmd is no longer the little boy I remember from Hampton Court, enough said I think . Anyway we had a weekend in Salisbury, went to the cathedral and the Playhouse (Alan Ayckbourn since you ask, which it always is in provincial reps but there you go) and stayed in a dreadful over-priced apology for an hotel. I put Penny on a train to London and was growling through stationery traffic when a car went in to the back of me as I was sitting minding my own business and waiting for the vehicle in front to turn left. Suddenly, bang, I was hit from behind.

The driver was called Jade Mitchell; she was extremely apologetic. So were her three girl-friends. One offered me a cup of tea. I declined. We exchanged details and I drove on. Since then there has been a series of phone calls from strangers in far away places, few of whom seem to talk to anybody else. Much waiting, as described above. In the end a cheery figure drove from Redruth in a Ford Fiesta which I am now driving while the poor, barely damaged Rover is being "assessed". The general opinion seems to be that although everything is still working and I have been driving it for a couple of weeks or so and covering several hundred miles it will still be declared a "write-off". Seems crazy to me.

 

The other day the printer Penny bought from a discount warehouse went on the blink and the nice computer king took a look at it and said that it should go the way of the Rover. It could be repaired but it would be cheaper to buy a new one. I am left with a whole lot of useless (and expensive) ink cartridge and a duff printer. Surrounded, as we seem to be, by the crashing down of the whole edifice of the society in which we have been living these last few years I am struck, not for the first time, by a slight feeling of "told-you-so-ism". It seems to me that for years (since the advent of Murdoch and Thatcher) we have been a spiv society in which money is virtually the only thing that matters and certainly the thing that matters most. I'm not saying that things didn't need fixing but the society which seems to be collapsing was surely as unpleasant, and ephemeral, as the South Sea Bubble which in some ways it resembles. Down here in Cornwall we are surrounded by the extremes which characterize this society; extreme poverty living cheek by jowel with extreme wealth. The wealth is characterized by greed based on nothing much and the poverty by a failure to pay a decent wage for a decent job.

It's interesting to me that whereas knowledgeable analysts and experts have been predicting this collapse for years no-one however expert seems to have the foggiest idea of what's going to happen next. I really hope that we come out of this disaster as a saner, fairer world characterized by compassion, care, belonging and all the old-fashioned ideas and concepts which went with the "society" which we were told in the seventies or eighties no longer existed.

 

We shall see. The car shunt and the dead printer seem to me to be small private symbols of a bigger national mess. Part of me is saying smugly I'm afraid: "serves us right".

Anyway, end of lesson. On Friday I drove, in the borrowed Ford, to the north coast, to have lunch with Peter Dimmock, the old BBC hack who used to front TV sports, produced the Coronation and was closely involved in the story of the post-war BBC. His second wife's daughter Lucy Scott read Princess Margaret for the talking book. Hence the meeting. He seemed wonderfully chipper and we reminisced about the old days, the long dead, the legends in lunchtimes and so on, while the gale whipped the Atlantic up and sent it crashing against the shores and the local hotelier was said to be on the point of selling a penthouse to some Russian oligarch for a couple of million.

 

Heigh-ho. On the TV Andrew Marr is talking to Vince Cable and George Osborne. I have a feeling I used to play Real Tennis with Osborn's father. I think he was a baronet who made a fortune from wall-paper.

 

 I think I shall go and have a cup of tea.

 

 

 

            My daughter Lucy, the event-organiser in Auckland, is to marry Simon, the marine biologist. When Lucy rang her grandmother in Wiltshire Granny said, fondly, "About time" which is what someone from a war-time generation which married young and rapidly would be expected to say. My mother was only twenty three when she married my father and not yet twenty four when I was born. Lucy and I are, well, older. Simon rang earlier in the week very properly and sweetly to ask my permission. I probably shouldn't divulge such personal details but it suggests that not all younger people are so disdainful of tradition and their elders. Or maybe it's just that they do things differently in New Zealand., Anyway Lucy is getting married; Simon will become a son-in-law. This will follow on from Tristram and Beth's wedding next summer and will mean that all four children will be married. I already have the Mexican son-in-law in Miami and the Scottish-ish daughter-in-law in London. Now I shall have an English daughter-in-law in London and an an Anglo-New Zealand son-in-law in Auckland. Is this a record?

 

            Whatever else, it's remarkably ageing. I had lunch with Andrew and Sarah Duncan at the Old Thatch Inn in Cheriton Bishop the other day. They were baby-sitting their little grand-daughter. Needless to say they are exemplary grand-parents and the grand-daughter is enchanting. However when they took the child out in Exeter where they were staying no-one for an instant thought that they were anything other than fond grand-parents. It's a bit like not being asked for one's senior rail-pass. We all know that we're old, that we are ancient enough to have grand-children and to qualify for geriatric concessions on public transport but it would still be nice if people pretended. I have to deliver a speech to the annual governors' shenanigans at the University College of Falmouth in a few weeks and we have agreed that the word "veteran" should be included in the description of me. I seem to be the only person who questions this. It makes me sound old and grumpy. I certainly wouldn't waste good time and money giving up an evening to listen to a "veteran".

 

            Discuss.

 

            Enough of this. I had intended to devote much of this report to the question of stageing a charity cricket match. This I shall now do. It's taken up a lot of my time this last month and the incessant rain is dampening expectations. All the same... I went up to the cricket ground yesterday (Sunday) to check out Matty Bailey's mobile bar. There was a pub competition going on and there was a modest barbecue and Matty was doing the drinks. It seemed an exemplary trailer with spirits (which we won't need), freezers, beer taps and all the stuff one could possibly need. Matty has a wedding in Newquay so bar duties will be taken on by the landlord of the Safe Harbour who has, like Matty, played cricket for the Crusaders. I hadn't met Matty before but he introduced himself on Tuesday in church at a well-attended but more than usually sad funeral service. Ed Leverton who is also playing and together with Phil Johns - he's playing too - helped resuscitate the club in the seventies found it extremely entertaining to think of Matty and me discussing booze at the back of the Fowey Church and I agree but on the other hand this is how small towns operate and I confess to rather liking it. By the same token Richard Kittow will do the BBQ and do pig rolls taken off a pig leg. He is our friendly local butcher. Oh and James Staughton who used to be a neighbour and is the MD of St. Austell Brewery is supplying us with a quantity of free "Tribute", their ace ale. And so on. "My" team now includes Keith Parsons newly retired from Somerset, a formidable all-rounder, and Chris Hunkin who is ditto though less well-known; plus five Fowey boys - they've done well in the league this summer; Phil's young cousin from Gorran; James Turpin son of Karen of Fowey Fish whio is captain of Cornwall Under Twelves; and Ed and Phil if they can still struggle into their whites. I think "we" look pretty good.

            With the conspicuous exception of the Restormel Council Music Licensing Department everyone has been wonderfully supportive and encouraging so we just pray there is no rain and we have a jolly afternoon. John Thomlinson who was to have played his keyboard accompanied by friends on drums and guitar says you need a licence now just to sing happy birthday in a pub. You'd think the council would bend over backwards to help a charity event but apparently not. Surprise, surprise. And then bureaucrats are surprised that we don't like them. We're bound to get things wrong but we've already got several hundred pounds in advance donations and sponsorships and I'm hoping the raffle will make a few bob together with admissions and cream teas and and... It HAS taken up a lot of time but on the other hand it's a very good cause and we shall have fun raising the cash. And, in the last analysis, what are we here for anyway?

Cue for further discussion I'm afraid.

            The title for the veteran's drone at Falmouth College is "writing as a job" or something along similar lines. It ties in with what the college is trying to do in its journalism and writing sections. In other words it is trying to teach students about nuts and bolts and the way these things actually work rather than a sort of ffotherington-thomas, hello birds, hello sky, dilettante approach to the creative process. I am broadly in sympathy with this except for the very necessary proviso that we do need what the late, great Nicholas Tomalin, one of my principal mentors, once referred to a "a little literary ability". You don't want too much because that gets in the way of "rat-like cunning" and the ability to believe passionately in second rate projects but it IS actually essential for survival in this odd little world. I think. There may not be very much of it and other things may be more or at least just as important but there is an essential part of one's make-up as a writer however humble which is ultimately mysterious and even, if you are that way inclined, God-given. Yet again this is a cue for discussion.

            Looking through my diary I am, as always, struck by how much I have forgotten, how much empty space there has been and, forgive the cliché, how time flies. We returned from a busy few days in London on Saturday 2^nd and went over to  Truro for a convivial lunch with friends. One day the following week we took the train to Exeter for lunch with Janet Laurence at the Michael Caine place on the Cathedral close - criminal shop and other more general natter and chatter; I droned at the St. Ives' library the following week and drove up to my Ma's in Wiltshire stopping off on my return a few days later to buy salt cod in a Portuguese place in Chard. There is a significant Portuguese/Brazilian community in Chard which is not what you expect in rural Somerset! I found the cod which went into an ethnic salad for a lunch the following Thursday. This followed what is now an oldish tradition of entertaining out of towners to a meal on the day the Red Arrows Display team fly in a daredevil way up and down and round about the harbour, apparently for our exclusive benefit. They execute wizard prangs immediately in front of our little terrace. Before then my friend Martin Hesp and his wife came along to do an interview for his paper, the Western Morning News. A week later their photographer came to do his business on the said terrace in front of the same, once more, mercifully sunny, view.

            Last week my friend Sue Bradbury of the Folio Society came down from London on the railway sleeper for a lunch-time meeting with Tim Smit of the Eden Project and his Publishing Director, Mike Petty. We met at the Marina Hotel and all went, as far as I could see, extremely well. We were even able to sit outside and overlook the harbour. This place is magical when it's like this but alas it quite often isn't. This is a thought which occurs to this afternoon. It was quite fine this morning but now it has greyed over, the winds have risen and the rain is sweeping in from the sea. It is nothing like as bad however as New Orleans which is just beginning to take the force of hurricane Gustave brought straight into my study here in Cornwall thanks to Sky TV.

 

            This is salutary stuff. This morning the Independent ran my obituary of Jim Orr, former secretary to Prince Philip. Some time this week the new Spectator Business Magazine is supposed to be publishing my thoughts on crime fiction. I have to re-write my article on Barbara Cartland to mark the new TV docudrama for the Daily Mail; I am working away on my Indian cricket tour of 1933/4 for Methuen; and the same on the next Simon Bognor mystery novel.

 

            So it's work pretty much as normal except for the looming charity cricket match. I have picked up my last outstanding raffle prize - a signed copy and DVD of "Vanishing Cornwall" for which Kits Bowning took the pictures to complement the text by his mother Daphne du Maurier. Kiuts has given us this and I bumped into him down town and got the news that Penny's beloved Manchester City has been sold by a Thai billionaire to a sheikh from Dubai.

 

            Oh well. I've just heard that the Republican Vice-Presidential Candidate's unmarried seventeen year old daughter, the one with the silly name, is pregnant. I am supposed to take this seriously, More so than the charity cricket match. Which suggests that someone has their priorities wrong.

 

END