A few years ago I was researching a book about the Landmark Trust. This was a doomed enterprise for all sorts of reason but I remember staying in a typical Landmark property in Lancaster (typical buildings seemed to me to be a pineapple, a mill-keeper's cottage, a mediaeval watch-tower), got up early in the morning walked through beautiful, strange and ancient streets and found myself humming "one more step along the way we go" and feeling very alone. Not lonely but alone. I was quite optimistic, quite happy, fatalistic, realistic and was on my own contra mundum. Not at all bad but I experienced a strong sense that this was what life was about.
I sensed this the other day inWiltshire watching my mother. She will celebrate her ninetieth birthday in November and she is having ever greater probems with vocabulary and communication while, as far as I can see,suffering little or no diminution in brain capacity. Because of this, and for other reasons, she is retreating more and more into a world of her own with her own thoughts and where no-one else, even those closest to her, are unable to go. I do feel sad about this but not disconsolate. In the end, I think, we are, however gregarious, however blessed with family and friends, on our own.
End of solemnity and seriousness. It was just a thought and one which I wanted to share. It may be that the self-employed writer is more prone to such feelings but that doesn't make me less aware of them, nor, for that matter, dangerously inclined to universalize. Things may be different for others but basically we bring nothing in, we take nothing out, and when chips are down it's just us.
It's been an interesting hard-working few weeks for me with a number of trips down memory lanes which some people think counter-productive but which I rather enjoy. One of the more recent was a day in Sherborne. I am now contracted to write a history of the school, which is sometimes said to date back to the eighth century and to be sandwiched between an interesting trio of royal Old Boys - Alfred at the beginning and the Crown Prince of Qatar and the King of Swaziland more recently. I stayed with John Harden, the Secretary of the Old Boys - thank you John, thank you Caroline - before a morning with Peter Currie and an afternoon with Michael Earls-Davis. I remember them both as masters when I was a boy at the school and it's strange to meet them again on more or less equal terms even though there is still, inevitably, an urge for me to call them sir and to defer most of the time. Pete taught me French and Michael was in charge of the Combined Cadet Force. I perversely enjoyed ceremonial drill and the Field Day. The former involved thumping military music which I like and the latter meant seeing beautiful rural
Anyway I am determined to enjoy being the new "Unks" Gourlay, the peculiar, scholarly schoolmaster who wrote the last
Anyway from there I took the train to Wiltshire to stay at my mother's for a few days.One brief excursion was to the Lamb at Hindon for lunch with Michael Dobbs with whom I shared a stage a year or so ago. Thoroughly enjoyable occasion in every way but we should have been at the Beckford Arms at Fonthill Gifford. We had booked but she burned down in the middle of the night. The last time we attempted a meal there she was closed for several months of refurbishment. Sorry Beckford Arms, no jinx intended.
One of the big plusses of my stay at the Malt House was the chance to get to know the latest addition to my greater family, Henry, a grandson now eight months old. Henry seems to spend most of his life chortling while not bawling or sleeping, eating or trying a spot of interesting projectile vomit. How enviable to lead a life so uncomplicated by thoughts of mortgage and mortality, but, alas, it is all to come while for people such as his grandfather a descent into a second age of not-so-serene simplicity is getting all too close. But steady on, I must not be maudlin.
And so to Balham where my younger son Tristram and his wife Beth celebrated a happy harbinger with dinner in a brasserie in which the ubiquitous Rick Stein appears to have a stake. He's everywhere. Inescapable.Balham is no longer Peter Sellars' famous "Gateway to the south" distinguished only by the ever-changing traffic lights. It has become trendy - a place of suits, ladies who lunch, salsa bars and yes, the ever-present Rick Stein. Next day I spent brow furrowed over the collected Tom or Thomas or TFRG Braun and all his works which his brother Christopher and I are trying to edit into acceptable volume form. A labour of love in which Tristram came galloping like the
In the meantime the letters of Richard Cobb where the cast-list of characters has risen to almost 10,000 words and the proposed jacket of my book on Douglas Jardine's tour of India in 1933 and 4 which Methuen are to publish this autumn: all muscular Christianity, pith helmet and a posthumously maddening sense of missionary zeal, lesser breeds and Gandhi in the distance rattling his bed of nails.
So I'm exhausted and yet can't sleep.. It is the middle of the night and I should be in bed but am instead at the keyboard. Perhaps this is the punishment God has in store, a sort of Sisyphus substitute where the self-employed writer is bound to an eternal QERTY and forced to rap out ceaseless drivel for an illusory audience. Oh well. Scribble, scribble. Could be worse. And there is the Connaught House reunion to look forward to. Autumn 2011.
