REPORT 49    DECEMBER 2006

It seemed crazy to spend twenty minutes fussing over a single word . . .

IT'S BEEN an exceptionally busy month for travel with trips to Spain and Ireland as well as a flying visit to London for lunch with Lord Snowdon and supper with my second son, Tristram. My short story in the Detection Club’s new volume for H.R.F.(Harry) Keating’s was singled out for special praise by Martin Edwards on the Tangled Web site, along with stories by Len Deighton and Colin Dexter. Slightly Foxed have accepted my piece on Daphne du Maurier’s The Parasites for publication in mid-March next year and I’ve had some very helpful and positive feedback on the first two decades of Princess Margaret’s life from a couple of well-placed "vets". So, hectic but interesting and, on the whole, fulfilling.

Spain came first and got off to an unfortunate start because we went to a Lebanese restaurant in the Edgware Road the night before flying out and had, stupidly, a delicious raw lamb appetiser which I think gave us both upset stomachs. At any rate we flew into Madrid – courtesy of Air Miles and the appallingly high-priced Heathrow Express – feeling distinctly the worse for wear.

We had a brief time in Madrid before going our separate ways: Penny to a Spanish language course in Salamanca and I to an English immersion week for Spaniards run by a company called “El Pueblo Ingles”. Penny loved beautiful, historic Salamanca and found that instead of being part of a class she was doing one-on-one tutorials with a woman called Flor who spoke, in effect, no English. They conversed in French as, at least at the beginning of the week, Penny had no Spanish. It sounded rigorous but rewarding. She also did some sight-seeing and ate adventurously: baby goat and suckling pig with the hooves left on the leg in a style which sounds unmistakeably Iberian.

My week was very different. Over twenty “Anglos” and about fifteen Spaniards in a holiday village up in the mountains between Salamanca and the Portuguese border. From breakfast, where, as at all meals, Anglos and Spaniards sat together at tables for four until bed, we spoke only English. From ten till two and from five till nine we either did one-on-one conversations, usually while walking through the surrounding woods, or engaged in a variety of group activities from “conference” telephone calls to discussion groups, charade type party games or presentations of one sort of another. For example I did an hour of crime writing in which I delivered a short introductory spiel saying that the Pueblo and the course were perfect for an Agatha Christie style murder story and inviting the audience, split into groups of five or so, to come up with a title and the name of a detective with, possibly a sidekick. It seemed to work really quite well.

From my point of view there was an added bonus in that two of the Spaniards were lieutenants or “tenientes” from the Guardia Civil HQ in Madrid. I should have a funny picture of the two of them pretending to arrest and make off with the visiting crime writer but most importantly they both seemed rather tickled by the idea of acting as “consultants” to an English crime writer looking for Spanish authenticity. And out walking in the woods with the director of winter-sports at the Pyrenean town of Jaca I discovered that she was an autodidactic funghi specialist. In mid-sentence she suddenly darted into the woods and came back to tell me that she had found an oyster mushroom called, I think, pleosintus ostreatus . Apparently this part of Spain is famous for its mushrooms some of them fantastically poisonous and guaranteed to kill in seconds with no known antidote. Perfect murder weapon so she is signed up as well.

The short story about which Martin Edwards enthused involves the reappearance of my old hero Simon Bognor, now knighted (by mistake I think) and running his department, the Special Investigations outfit at the Board of Trade.He is obviously off to Spain to solve a poisoning at the Pueblo. A slim outline is already with my agent, the long-suffering Michael Motley.

It was, in many ways, a fascinating week. The Spaniards were all, as one would expect, fairly or very high-fliers and it was a wonderful opportunity to get to know them and to find out something about Spain and Spanish life. Pablo, our administrator, and Akemi (our half Japanese, half Californian MC) were inventive, industrious and kept the show on the road despite odds which could have been crippling were it not for the almost uniformly high level of enthusiasm. Even the grandest and oldest of us – and we included the recently retired Director of Education for one of the Canadian provinces and the CEO of a major Mediterranean airline as well as several over-sixties such as myself – had to be prepared to make ourselves look at least mildly ridiculous. As the computer whiz husband of the Canadian educationalist said, he/we were being pushed out of our comfort zones. On the whole this was good for us though several of us were quite relieved that our nearest and dearest were not there as witnesses.

It was helped by excellent catering, made manageable by a brilliant system of coloured plastic chips and signing up for one of two options for starter and main course. Our chalets – Spaniards in the top bedroom, Anglos below – were comfortable, the showers efficient, the water hot, the surroundings were lovely and we were allowed a couple of excursions into the picturesque if touristy village of Alberca. One day Ernesto from La Coruna drove up to the top of a nearby mountain and I was able to hitch a lift. For the most part, however, it was intensive talk. Very very hard work for the Spanish and surprisingly arduous for the Anglos. In the few free periods and the daily siesta I managed to do some editing and rewritinq of Princess Margaret on the computer and I tended to go to bed soon after supper.

In a way I suppose it very much wasn’t ‘me’ but rather to my surprise I enjoyed it very much though I was shattered by the time Penny and I met up in Madrid for a final short stay of which the highlight was probably a visit to the Thyssen Gallery which was showing an interesting collection of paintings by Sargent and a friend (Spanish) whose name, disgracefully, now escapes me. There is a web-site for the immersion course and the easiest way to find it is simply to google “el pueblo ingles”.

I had only a few days at the computer in Cornwall before heading off to Dublin on a direct flight of under an hour from Newquay airport. The journey should have been an enjoyable doddle and the flight on Air South West was fine, including a spectacular passage across the tip of Pembrokeshire. It was almost ruined, however, by the ghastliness of the little airport at Newquay. I have written to one of the Lib-Dems’ recently ennobled local MPs to see if we can’t get something done but, basically, the nightmare had to do with the increased “security” measures. We had recently experienced Heathrow, Madrid and Cork but Newquay was something else again. I have never seen so many jobsworths in fluoresecent jackets. Two examples will give some idea of how bad it was. The “Security” area could only be entered by pressing a succession of keys on a pad by the door from the check-in area. This pad was in full view of the waiting passengers and every time an official pressed the buttons they did so very slowly and in full view of the public. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to discover the number and get through the supposedly “secure” door. Inside one of the conveyor belts jammed after we had all removed our shoes so that they could pass through the radar machine. One of the jobsworths solicitously gave me a pair of shoes when I and they had been checked but unfortunately they were the wrong shoes and belonged to another passenger. By the time we finally made it into the departure lounge I was not only feeling patronised and frustrated but desperately insecure. If you can’t even return the right shoes to the owner what chance do you have of discovering explosives concealed about the person.?

Ah well. Dublin was lovely. In the fifteen or so years since I was last there it has been transformed by an injection of Euro-cash so that it has become positively chic. Rather like Spain which seems to have bounded straight from poverty to affluence with no pause for moderation in between. We were there for the Australia versus Ireland rugby match at Lansdowne Road. Penny’s longest-standing friend Judy Magee, whom she knew as a child in Adelaide, is married to Rick Lee who is now on the Oz Rugby Board. So we joined them for the game which was played in a howling gale and won convincingly by the Irish who looked extremely good and even more so at playing in foul weather. The Australians became rather subdued and I was ordered, by Penny, to move away from her and sit with the English – even though I was merely being scrupulously impartial and merely analytical – in other words applauding the Irish and denigrating the Australians. We managed to bluff our way into a nearby hotel where the teams, management and so on were enjoying the craic so joined in the fun.

We stayed, thanks to twinning by the London Army and Navy Club, at the St. Stephen’s Green-Hibernian Club, which was charming and central, and mildly old-world. A touch of the Ireland I remember – oil paintings, horsey men in Donegal tweed jackets and black pudding for breakfast. Talking of Donegal tweed, Judy turned out to be descended from Magee, the tailor, whose eponymous shop was round the corner just off Grafton Street and where Penny insisted on buying me a really nice herringbone overcoat which is almost certainly “too good to wear” and which will have to double up as a Christmas and birthday present. Not only is Judy descended from Ireland’s best-known tailor, she also claims kinship with Daniel O’Connell, the Liberator, whose statue stands at the bottom of his street just the other side of the Liffey. We were photographed in front of him, together with the pigeon permanently perched on his brow.

We also saw the Borat film (quite funny but only quite and oddly old-fashioned); did a touristy bus tour; caught up with Oliver and Yona Caffrey at a delicious lunch at the Meirion Hotel – thank you, Oliver, whom I first met at elephant polo in Nepal where he was, typically, playing for Scotland; saw the Book of Kells and the Yeats paintings at the National Gallery – father and son, and generally wandered around admiring Georgian front doors, marvelling at new dockland developments and generally contemplating progress and, in my case at least, harbouring nostalgic prejudices.

So it’s home in Cornwall before yet another long weekend, this time, to Brittany, to see our old friends and neighbours from whom we bought our house more than a decade ago. .I would hate anyone to think that life was all play and no work but on the whole I accept that it’s more fun than not. Which reminds me of the Duke of Edinburgh’s reaction at Holyroodhouse when he asked me how I was getting on with my book about him. I said, ill-advisedly, that it was fun. “Fun”, he exploded, “It’s not supposed to be fun.”

But there again what exactly is work? As technology changes so much and journalism changes enormously the writing of books seems to remain much as it was when I started doing it forty odd years ago. Some worries remain constant but not often understood by those who don’t actually write books or are bothered about doing so. For example I am confronted by a small but niggling problem at the moment and I am not sure how to resolve it. A published source, long since dead, made an allegation about one person’s feelings for another. Both the people concerned are also long dead but the only surviving child says – through a third party – that the allegation is “rubbish”. I will naturally try to get this surviving witness to explain why they think it’s “rubbish” but I am doubtful about being able to do so. If I can’t but I simply get a reiteration of the ‘rubbish’ verdict, what should I do? My instinct is to repeat the original assertion and to say that an interested party who wishes to remain anonymous – and whose identity I can’t prove- says that it’s rubbish. Perhaps this is a cop-out. It’s taking up a lot of my time, maybe disproportionately. It reminds me of worrying over a single word in a Blake Morrison passage about the noise made by motor-car exhausts. After about twenty minutes of discussion one of my class (a university creative writing group I’m afraid) put up a hand and said that it seemed crazy to spend twenty minutes fussing over a single word. I replied that sometimes this was what a writer had to do and if you didn’t understand why then you should leave the job to the professionals. What a crabby old visiting fellow! But I still think I was right. In any case that’s the sort of thing which takes up a lot of my time.

In between having fun.

Tim Heald