3 FEBRUARY 2008
Tim's blog has been a regular feature since May 2003...
The Restaurant Car had the wrong sort of food . . .
LAST WEEK was Oxford for a Richard Cobb memorial dinner in Balliol,
then a reconnaissance in Penzance for Penny’s garden tour of Penwith
which she is organising for the Friends of the Royal Asiatic Society,
Hong Kong Branch (there’s a mouthful) and yesterday a trip to Plymouth
for a performance of La Boheme by Garden Opera. We had to leave before
the final aria and death but it was VERY good. Alas, however, the
final train (late as usual) departs from Plymouth at 9.19 which is a
bit of a bummer.
Took the computer on the train to and from Oxford – had an incredible
cheap first class ticket and all worked passably well except that
there was no electric power on the way up and the Restaurant Car had
the wrong sort of food. Makes a change from leaves on the line or the
wrong sort of snow I suppose.
But everything seemed trivial compared with the death of Miles Kington.
The first I knew about it was opening the Guardian and seeing a
picture of a genial grinning figure in an extremely snappy brown
Herbert Johnson looking Borsolino. It was Miles and it took me a
moment to realise that the picture was there to illustrate an obituary
by Stanley Reynolds. Miles and I did a couple of Festival performances
connected with a Folio Society book on After Dinner Speaking in which
he featured. Cheltenham was with Richard Ingrams and Fowey was with
the Bishop of Truro and on both occasions Miles impressed me and the
audience by being not only very funny but also extraordinarily
likeable. A perfect dinner guest which he, indeed, on one jolly
occasion, was. I once put him and Sheridan Morley in a book together –
Brought to Book – as quintessential English villages, thus inverting
the author’s cliché of turning real place names into fictitious
characters. Miles was a rare treat and I had no idea he was even ill.
He was 66, and gone early and for ever, like poor Sheridan and also
their editor at Punch, Alan Coren with whom, apparently, Miles never
got on.
On a lighter and more positive note I had a detailed and enticing
itinerary for an Indian adventure in the footsteps of Douglas Jardine
from Tanya Dalton of Greaves, the Indian experts. It’s, inevitably,
expensive and will cost at least five times the advance on the book.
And yet if the book is to be worthwhile I MUST do it. The obvious
solution is to secure some sort of journalistic commission, but this
is easier said than done (Amazingly!). I am working on it but all
suggestions gratefully received. .Meanwhile Edward Oakley of Mirzapur
whom we met when I was speaking on the Caronia a few years back, is
being incredibly supportive. We will get there in the end but it’s
going to be a struggle.
This week’s high spot looks like a visit to the dental hygienist on
Thursday morning. Which means beavering away on sundry books and
hoping that something will come of various irons in the journalistic
fire before driving to Wiltshire to stay with my mother and then
training to London. So a quiet, domestic writer’s week I hope, chained
to the computer, working through notebooks, cudgelling the brain and
hoping that there aren’t too many interruptions.
Bliss, but boring for the world outside my brain!
Tim Heald
