October 2008 Archives

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.