25th MARCH 2008
Tim's blog has been a regular feature since May 2003...
Most of the instructions seemed to be in Chinese . . .
SOMEONE suggested I should have a t-shirt for the cricket society
tour: Chesterfield, High Peak, Old Trafford, Southport, Liverpool.
Quite a tempting thought. The first two were back to back one week and
the next three on consecutive evenings the following week. Not a huge
amount of travelling once we were “oop north” and the longest schlep
was the drive home from Liverpool on Easter Monday. Glad I’ve done it
Someone, incidentally, made the point that we were gathered to
celebrate Denis Compton who was in his prime in the thirties and
forties and that therefore anyone under fifty should stay away. I was
quite aware that with a relatively few exceptions the audiences were
senior males. I was also told that membership in some places was in
decline. I hope this isn’t a universal trend. A week or so ago I complained that Barack Obama wasn’t a black in the
accepted sense- too preppy and privileged- seeming and not a spokesman
for the oppressed. Now he has come up with a speech in which he says –
in effect – that he is an ethnic mongrel and represents any one of a
different number of communities This seems much nearer the mark - and
also, incidentally, makes me wonder why even the tiniest piece of
“black” ancestry makes one “black” whereas the least adulteration of
“white” stock makes one “non-white”. I remember being in Tasmania a
year or so ago and finding that many people were desperately searching
for the merest smidgeon of native ancestry because that would in some
mysterious way render them aboriginal.
At one of the meetings my introducer had, (enterprisingly and quite
correctly) looked at this blog and consequently fulfilled the first
rule of public speaking: that no matter what your subject there is
always one person in the audience who knows more about the subject
than you do – even if the subject is yourself. I think it was Ross in
Southport.
Anyway Ross, if it were he, and my apologies if I’m wrong, made the
point that in writing up my experiences I wrote about audiences as
well and that therefore the Southport members should expect to feature
on the next of these reports along with those at the other meetings.
This raises a crucial point about blogs such as this. They are
primarily about me and my take on life around me but they also include
others who don’t necessarily expect to find themselves exposed in this
way. It’s a valid point and one which used to occur even more
problematically when I was working on the Atticus and Pendennis
columns at the Sunday Times and the Observer. In a blog
it’s more difficult because there is no sub or other editor apart from
oneself and we all know the old saw about the man who writes for
himself having a fool for an editor.
I include others in these reports and there have been times in the
past when people have felt that I have gone public when I should have
remained private and that I have even betrayed confidences. This is
something that happens frequently when a person writes stuff of any
kind for a public audience. If one is researching a particular subject
for a particular purpose the difficulties are more easily addressed
though even so you’re faced with the difficulty that on the one hand
as a reporter your job is to make your interviewee relax and tell you
things they might not otherwise reveal whereas as a human being it is
your wish to help them keep reasonably stumm. Quite often during my
professional life I have found myself on the one hand gleefully
accepting someone’s indiscretions while on the other privately wishing
they would shut up and not be so unguarded.
It’s a bit the same with the blogs. On the one hand I feel that if I
am going to write anything worthwhile I have to involve other people
to an extent whereas I also accept that I must exercise a degree of
editorial control, not offend against Chatham House rules and so on.
It isn’t always an easy path but in the case of my audiences on the
recent – very enjoyable for me at least – tour of cricket societies in
the north of England I feel I must write something while at the same
time I accept that the meetings concerned were essentially private
ones limited to members of the society concerned.
That makes it sound as if I’m about to say something absolutely
mind-blowing about these occasions and I really am not. What I would
like to say is that these meetings are two way processes and involve
audiences as well as the speaker. In the case of the cricket societies
this speaker finds the audiences more than usually daunting because
they all boast a genuine collective knowledge and enthusiasm which
this speaker doesn’t encounter at other venues – on cruise ships for
instance, or even at Literary Festivals. Cricket is a fantastic bond
and guarantee of enthusiasm and friendship so the sense of
intimidation is less than it might otherwise be but there is,
inevitably, a sense of worry that members of the audience will know
more than you do whether it is about whether or not Bob Scott actually
hit a towering six at Charlesworth sometime in the late sixties or
precisely how many runs Denis Compton made in his final test.
Anyway I found the tour challenging and fascinating and I hope that
audiences enjoyed the occasions as much as I did. It’s very useful and
salutary to meet a real audience and to encounter one’s readers at
first hand.
On that note it was a great pleasure to meet Martin Edwards who
entertained me to lunch at his club, the splendid Athenaum in
Liverpool which apparently predates its London namesake by half a
century. Martin, like me and Robert Barnard, is one of a small group
of crime writers who were at Balliol College, Oxford. He has very
kindly given me an entry in his own blog (www.martinedwardsbooks.com)
and there is an interesting follow-up from a former reader in the
States who, slightly depressingly, wasn’t aware that I was still
writing...
Keeping in touch wasn’t always easy on this trip. A particularly low
spot was the Internet Café in Manchester where most of the
instructions seemed to be in Chinese and where this also seemed to be
the preferred language of the staff. The Peak District was wonderfully
rural but the down-side was that there was barely a phone signal from
the cottage in Eyam where we stayed and certainly nothing as
sophisticated as a wireless signal for the computer. Good thing too
probably but there were moments when it became mildly frustrating and
the depressing thing is that try as one might I seem to have to clear
so much spam off the site every time I switch on to pick up messages.
The weather was pretty foul and I did virtually no walking despite
packing the trusty Chris Brasher boots. Nor, despite doing some novel
and two (speculative ) travel pieces did I get a lot of writing done.
Anticipation, and recovery from, the evening performances took a
surprising amount of time. One wouldn’t want to make too much of a
habit of it and it certainly fills me with admiration for actors who
have to do a nightly performance on long runs in improbable places.
High extra-curricular spots included matins in Gilbert Scott’s
wonderful Anglican cathedral in Liverpool (didn’t like Paddy’s wigwam,
Sir Frederick Gibberd’s Roman Catholic counterpart nearly as much);
the Man City Spurs game at home which, mercifully, City won; Anthony
Gormley’s hundred men on the sands at Crosby; sundry gastro-meals at
lovely Peak District pubs and the train journey from Hathersage to
Manchester.
Work? Yes, most certainly. But stimulating work in different
surroundings. It was a pleasure to come home but a treat to be away.
Thoroughly enjoyable but never easy. The Duke of Edinburgh might well
say, as he once did to me when I was writing his biography, “Fun. It’s
not supposed to be fun.” This was fun all right but never in a trivial
over-easy sense of the word.
AND ON REFLECTION....
An increasing number of us have complex genes which can’t be reduced
to old-fashioned black-white groupings. As a pinko-grey of
predominantly Anglo-Saxon background with dashes of Norse and Celt (I
think) I find racial over-simplification depressing. So if Obama is
going to complicate it then that’s good.
Tim Heald
