September 2009 Archives

One of  the many problems of the internet - though I don't fully understand the connection - is the growth in anonymous bile. I quite understand that if you write you place yourself in the firing line and become a potential victim of abuse. Reviewers can be extremely rude and I write as a  some-time reviewer. On one occasion J.B. Priestley tried to get me fired from the Daily Telegraph team. He failed; I was right; but I was quite rude. Basically I have no problem with signed articles and reviews or opinions expressed by audible or visible people who have an identity. I am enjoying the spat between "Lord" Sugar and Quentin Letts - I am very definitely in the Letts camp on this one and one of the reasons I am on his side is that he was rude under his own name. I have no sympathy with people, usually, on the net who are vituperative but hide under a pseudonym.

            There is an odd paradox here because when I started in journalism the first person pronoun was at a premium and you were expected to report "facts" as if they were objective. "I" was not allowed to intrude. This was difficult, possibly impossible, but the point is that we had to try to be as dispassionate as possible in what we reported and to tell it as it was. This is now, quite dramatically, not the case. Everything is about "personality" and the writer intrudes in a way that would not have been countenanced in the dim and distant. 

            Anyway I resent the idiotic bile served up under a cloak of anonymity that sometimes appears on the net. I know that what I write is not necessarily to everyone's taste but I have qualifications of various pretty unassailable kinds and whatever one thinks of publishers one has to go through a variety of professional qualifications before getting published. I don't really see why I should have to be vilified by people who don't even have the guts to say who they really are. Also let's be real about this. I know that my books reach a certain sort of professional standard. They are literate, well-researched and generally adequate. If a reader doesn't like one of them that's their privilege (or Problem) but don't tell me they are illiterate or ungrammatical or ill-researched. And don't skulk behind a made-up name. At least have the courage of your apparent convictions.

            I suppose it is tempting to use the opportunities presented by the web to have an intemperate rant at anyone who appears to be more privileged than you but the extent of this secret anger is, to me, perplexing and worrying. I remember Lady Antonia in her period as Chairman of the Crime Writers Association, looking around at her apparently beaming and friendly members and telling me not to be fooled. Under that smiling and affable exterior there was a collective seethe. I am not sure I believed her at the time but I begin to think that she was right and not just in the limited context of the CWA. There seems to be an awful lot of pent-up anger in the world. And much of it is expressed in anonymous "reviews" on the internet. I think you have somehow to ignore these when they are directed at you but it isn't always easy.

            I find it bothering not just because I don't enjoy being vilified but because I am depressed to feel that so many people are apparently nursing such furious resentments. Still, I suppose it's better to vent them on Amazon or Tripadviser than to cause actual bodily harm. It's still unnerving though.

End of grump.. The highlights of the month have probably been the charity cricket match between "my" team and the Cornish Crusaders and Regatta Week and the visit of the Red Arrows RAF aerobatic team. I also attended a Driver Awareness session in Dorset. And worked away on my books about Jardine in India and the collected letters of Richard Cobb.  England have won the Ashes and I watched on TV. Now a busy month looms with a lot of London and I feel oddly flat.

We raised about £500 for Marie Curie. Interesting in that it was less than half of what we got last year and we had a full day of cricket whereas last year we were rained out.and got about £1100. It was extraordinarily difficult getting a team together and the ground , while beautiful, seemed to have deteriorated in some important respects. The sightscreens were dilapidated, the nets had vanished and there was no paper in the ladies' loo. The Crusaders won comfortably and boasted one batsman and at least one bowler who seemed too good. More to the point we only had two players from the club teams.

There is obviously much to do before the Salamanca Band arrive with an Army team on behalf of the Army Benevolent Fund next year. I am keen to build up a modest programme of charity matches against the likes of the Crusaders and the Choughs but there is no financial reward and there are a lot of people who say I shouldn't even try. That, unfortunately, isn't my style. We had to admit defeat over the Real Tennis Court for Cornwall which I still think is a terrific idea. Likewise successful charity cricket matches at the Fowey Club. Watch this space!

And so to Regatta Week with the Red Arrows performing on the Thursday and a rather scary lunch with all our male guests being serious yachties who had sailed single-handed across the Atlantic three times (Mervyn) or done innumerable Fastnets (Geoff). I, needless to say, was terrified, being a total dry-bob and not knowing port from starboard and having no idea whatsoever about how or when to scandalise the mainsail. Anyway everyone seemed wonderfully tolerant and although the rain came just as the Red Arrows appeared we got a spectacular rainbow with photographs of ditto in all the national papers. Also an impressive V formation fly past by Canada geese who were as impressively disciplined in their way as the boys (and one girl) in blue. It all made me think of Richard Cobb who loathed the RAF and particularly Hillary with whom he was at school and Cheshire who was a Merton contemporary at Oxford.

I transcribed endless letters of Richard's. amalgamated them, and then edited mercilessly. Well, it seemed merciless to me. The idea is to concentrate on his letters to Hugh Trevor-Roper but to include the best of the rest. The working title (rather good though I say it myself) is "My dear Hugh" and I have just sent off a draft to John Nicoll, the publisher. Fingers crossed. I really feel we have a book now and potentially a very good one. In a better world it might even be a best-seller but (he says bitterly) I am no chef nor super-model and only celebrities sell books. Richard was many things but not a celebrity!

Anyway we shall see. I am amazed by the volume of his correspondence never mind  the quality, which is remarkable. It's a cliché to say that no-one writes letters today but I'm afraid it is nonetheless true for being a cliché. Richard and his contemporaries wrote long and very entertaining letters and I think someone like Richard (not that there was anyone quite like him as he was sui generis) was among the last of the great letter writers. Diarists are different and bloggers are a new phenomenon but letter writers seem to me a dying breed.

Likewise cricketers such as Douglas Jardine. I have promised Metheun they will have a finished book about his tour of India bu the end of October so that they can publish next year. I will keep my word.

I was at all five days of the Lord's Test and I am going to be at the two Lord's ODIs. I was absorbed by the wonderful Test and I hope to be greatly entertained by the two games to come but I  agree with Mike Atherton who said the other day that the advent of the helmet had changed the game more than anything else. The other day at the charity cricket our captain batted in a cap - all right it was an Eton Rambler cap, but there is no doubt that the protective headgear makes a huge difference. Peter Lever, the ex England fast bowler, came to our game (he now lives at Okehampton). It was he who once felled the New Zealand number eleven with a bumper and was terrified that he had killed him.. I remember listening to Denis Compton talk about being knocked over by Ray Lindwall, having stitches in the wound and coming out to bat again. He went on to make a huge hundred but the point is that at the back of one's mind in pre-helmet days there was real fear. You really did feel you might be killed. That's gone and there's no doubt the world is different.

Same with letter-writing and, the internet, and the anonymous bile that appears to go with it. The world is a different place and many of the changes are also improvements. Not all, however. In some ways it is a nastier, more threatening place and we should be allowed to say so. Yes yes. We are all living longer and are better off but a world in which we don't write letters, in which we play games in protective clothing and have a licence to be anonymously angry is not necessarily better than the world we have lost.

End of lesson. Tomorrow I head for London to be interviewed about film from the 1950s. It depicts a lost world that seems in many respects absurd. The movie was sent to me on a DVD but my laptop can't decode it and all the efforts of my tame, university qualified expert, have failed to make it accessible. There is a moral here. Plus ca change...but that's not quite it. More like two steps forward, one step back. But that's not right either.

I think that for me the most interesting fact is that as one's life stretches out one realises that all change is not necessarily for the better; but one cannot possibly say so because to complain is to show one's age. And above all, one mustn't be seen to seethe. You must grin, you must bear it, you must maintain a stiff upper lip. At all times and at all costs. But part of me regrets the past and wants to seethe even as I smile.