13 JANUARY 2008
Tim's blog has been a regular feature since May 2003...
It made me feel like a real noble savage. . . .
LAST WEEK was a dull perfection – wonderful for me to experience,
boring for you to read. The weather was foul, the town virtually
empty, at least of those who don’t live here, I wrote, sorted,
organised, walked on the cliffs and generally lived the life a writer
is supposed to live, conjuring words out of my head and committing
them to disk.
The only real interruption to the routine was writing an obituary for
the Independent about Kevin Sinclair, the Hong Kong hack with
the trademark tracheotomised neck through which he spoke belligerently
and unstoppably, who died a couple of days before Christmas. Even that
though was, in a sense, part of the job. Sixty five years reduced to
six hundred words: try to be as fair but entertaining as possible; be
economic with the truth but don’t lie; copy as soon as possible; try
to find a photo. I wasn’t sure about Kevin and I don’t think he liked
me much but he tackled thirty years – thirty years! – of cancer very
bravely and I think he would have appreciated the hackish nature of my
task.
Otherwise it was the novel which grinds on more slowly than I would
wish and not helped by the fact that I don’t know how to turn it into
the best-seller I would like. I got notice of my PLR payment by e-mail
during the week and although the recent crime novels score relatively
highly I can’t pretend that they make as much as I would wish. Like
many writers, I suspect, I feel they are much better than most and
deserve a bigger sale and more publicity than they achieve. I know
some people like them very much and the new one will be worth waiting
for I promise. The return of Simon Bognor after too long a full-length
absence!
I completed a draft introduction to my collection of Richard Cobb
letters to which my publisher, John Nicoll, reacted with commendable
speed and initial enthusiasm. I wish all publishers were as
writer-friendly. I’m probably too close to the subject to be able to
form a sensible judgement, and to Richard too, even though he died in
1996. A true friend as well as former tutor and I’m glad to say that
the next of our irregular commemorative dinners has been organised by
Maurice Keen and David Gilmour and is to take place in Oxford on my
birthday at the end of the month. John Nicoll, who can’t make it,
warns me that I shall almost certainly have to say a few words.
Which brings me to the dodgy question. raised by one reader, of what
is work and what is pleasure or to put it in more fiscal terms when
does essential life-supporting stuff become holiday and vice versa. My
great problem is that whereas most people have no difficulty in
dividing their life into compartments I find that mine doesn’t work
like that.
The dinner and speech (if that happens and it’s probably too dignified
a word for a short drone) are cases in point. I hope the dinner at
least will be fun. I shall see old friends in agreeable surroundings.
I would go for pleasure and old time’s sake no matter what. And yet it
relates to a book I’m compiling and is, therefore, in a sense “work”.
The Spectator used my piece on Bristol which meant a whole page
and I honestly think the excitement and satisfaction is the same as
more than forty years ago when I had my first article in the magazine
and was billed alongside L.P. Hartley and Evelyn Waugh. Work? You must
be joking. And yet it’s what pays the bills. I suppose I’m very lucky.
Friends rang one day and asked if we’d like a brace of duck, shot
nearby a day earlier. They were unplucked and ungutted so I sat
outside in my drizabone and dealt with them, consigning feathers,
wings, heads and intestines to a black binliner. Work in a sense, but
I confess I loved it, and it made me feel like a real noble savage.
Well, Richard Briers in “The Good Life”!
Next week should be similarly mundane until Thursday when we go to Par
Station and pray that First Great Western trains can get us to London
more or less when they say they will. Last time they cancelled and it
took me about eight hours to get to London and it’s a bore to put it
mildly. Work? Yes, certainly. I have two crucial meetings to do with
representation for different sorts of project on the Thursday and
another vital one with a lawyer the following morning. But it won’t
all be work and even the work will have its pleasurable moments.
I hope that some time next week the new phone I have from Orange will
actually work – that’s a story I really should write. I hope I’ll be
further on with plans for a research trip to India. And book reviews.
And articles. And books themselves. Words mainly but experiences of
all sorts of different kinds and, increasingly, a pleasure in just
being alive and capable of savouring the exotic and the mundane in
disturbingly equal measure.
That’s the progress report for today but if there is a message it is
that, unlike so many, I have the greatest difficulty distinguishing
between work and time-off. In a sense this makes me very lucky, but in
another very perplexing, very vulnerable and not much liked!
Tim Heald
