27 JANUARY 2008
Tim's blog has been a regular feature since May 2003...
So this, like most of my life, is a mixture of business and pleasure . . . .
LAST WEEK was Belgium and although this was my Christmas present to
Penny I have written a speculative travel piece which I shall now try
to flog. I had the computer with me and was able to buy wi-fi time at
the hotel in Ghent. Irritatingly, however, this had to be paid for by
credit card and although I bought an hour's worth for 4.50 Euros a time
I quickly discovered that it wasn’t an hour that could be switched on
and off at will but that when you switched off you lost any remaining
time you might have had. I was able to keep in touch and organize
various projects but I shall be glad when we are through this
particular phase in the technological revolution and internet access
becomes a natural part of staying in a hotel for which no extra charge
is made. Contact was not helped by the fact that my mobile phone
supplier really did put me through to a call centre in Delhi where a
nice man discussed cricket and said he was being paid £150 a month. He
didn’t seem to know much about my mobile phone however and I was
effectively incommunicado for over a week. Nul points!
Thanks to the Internet however I fielded a letter from Piet Teigeler,
boss of the international crime writers’ organisation giving me the
dates of the next conference outside Montpelier in France and adding
the web-site of the conference hotel. I was able to book this and have
it confirmed from the hotel in Belgium and all is now safely sorted. A
triumph for new technology. I also exchanged enthusiastic e-mails with
Reader’s Digest about a new project. And fielded a draft will from the
lawyer who is drafting one for me.
A sort of semi-resolution with this new sort of blog is to muse less
and not to whinge at all. This little anecdote breaks both resolutions
but it is so revealing that I feel I must pass it on. I was sitting
in the waiting room of an upmarket publishing industry organization
when one half of the couple on the sofa opposite said to the other
half, “How are we going to decide which novel to adapt without
actually having to read it?”. I took it they were a TV or film
production duo and, if only in deference to my now broken resolutions,
I offer no comment.
Tomorrow is my birthday and, since you ask, I shall be 64. I am sure
that this is the new 44 or even younger but it still feels
distressingly like the same 64 it has always been and I am reminded,
of course, of the wistful old Beatles’ song, sung by a young man for
whom 64 was still an impossibly long way away. Now I am almost there
and two of the Beatles are dead and gone.
I shall be celebrating by going up to Oxford for one of our Cobb
dinners in memory of Richard, my friend and former tutor, whose
letters I am editing for John Nicoll at Frances Lincoln. John can’t be
present as he will be up the Nile on a holiday so I shall apparently
have to say a few words, quoting from one or two of Richard’s
wonderful letters. David Gilmour, one of the organizers of these
dinners, tells me that he has “relented” and will, after all, let me
see some of his own letters from Richard. This is good news.
After Oxford I take a train to Penzance where, with Penny, I will do a
sort of reconnaissance for the garden trip she is organizing for the
Friends of the Royal Asiatic Society (Hong Kong Branch) which is
scheduled for this summer. Then home for more work and on Saturday to
a performance of La Boheme by Garden Opera in the Plymouth Guildhall.
I once wrote about Garden Opera for a glossy magazine and may do so
again. So this, like most of my life, is a mixture of business and
pleasure. I find it difficult if not impossible to separate the two.
Which makes me very lucky. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Tim Heald
