Life's Work

            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