November 2008 Archives

            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".