June 2009 Archives

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.