REPORT 23  JANUARY 2005

Life wasn’t meant to be easy . . .

This time last year I wrote that I was feeling “remarkably bullish” about the prospects for 2004. By the end of January Penny’s mother was dead and a friend and neighbour had died a few hundred yards down the road after being punched by a stranger on his way home from a quiet dinner at the Yacht Club. On a more mundane level I’d had a couple of credit cards confiscated by American Express and Diners despite the fact that I’d been a customer of both for more than thirty years, paying them amounts of interest that I hardly dare think about. I thought they were glad to have me!

Now the year is whimpering out in the wake of the dreadful tidal waves in South East Asia which, as my new friend Martin Hesp suggested in his weekly Western Morning News column really makes any whingeing from people like us seem in the worst possible taste.

Penny and I are just back from a few days in France getting away from things in Avignon. It was very salutary and beneficial in all sorts of ways not least because, as always with me, visiting France gives an extraordinary sense of context and perspective. Twenty minutes in the Channel Tunnel and suddenly you’re in this totally alien place which seems so familiar at first glance and yet is so utterly foreign. Everywhere I sense the ghost of my friend and former tutor, Richard Cobb, or of that fine writer M.F.K. Fisher, both of whom loved France and seemed, in such an extraordinary way, to be both subsumed into it while always on the fringe, looking on.

We stopped over in Paris and the following morning, before getting the train to Avignon we walked from our modest hotel (Les Trois Gares, within walking distance of the Gare de Lyon – highly recommended) down the very chic Rue de Rivoli, round the glorious Place des Vosges and then struck past Notre Dame (sparkling bright from renovation) and over the Seine to the left bank and then up the Boulevard. St-German to Les Deux Magots for just the one. It was snowing and most Parisiens seemed not to like it though I saw one van driver, an Algerian I guess, laughing and trying to catch flakes in his hand as they fell. Passing the Brasserie Lipp I remembered having lunch there with Brian Perman, then PR head of Hutchinsons and the publicity girl from “Day of the Jackal” which was being filmed at the time. I was supposed to be interviewing Fred Zinneman, the director, but he backed out at the last minute and lunch at Lipp was the consolation prize. The New Statesman editor Anthony Howard later published my piece about not getting the interview – the only time I’ve had an article in the Staggers.

Anyway the Deux Magots has a large carte with all sorts of things including a list of the last few winners of the Deux Magots Literary Prize created in memory of Andre Malraux. I didn’t recognise a single one of the names – no Salman Rushdie, Alan Hollingshurst, Martin Amis. Not even Julian Barnes. I wasn’t sure whether to be ashamed of my ignorance or delighted by French disdain for English letters. On the whole I felt strangely elated but maybe that was just the kir.

Another example of difference yet sameness came with the horrible news of the tragedy around the Indian Ocean. I had been reading a rather good crime novel by Louis Sanders, set in the Dordogne, when Penny joined me and said the TV was showing some rather confused pictures of some sort of ocean disaster in the Orient. We didn’t think much more about it and went off to a spirited performance of “Singing in the Rain” at the Avignon Opera House (songs in English, all other dialogue in French, very Maurice Chevalier, more some other time). By the time it had finished the TV news was clearer but, of course, the focus, was completely un-English and remained so on TV and in the press over the next few days. Everything focussed on wretched French tourists who had gone missing in harrowing circumstances. There was a graphic feature in the local Provencal paper on a Vaucluse family who seemed to have perished. News bulletins were full of shots of French paramedics assembling at Roissy Airport to fly out to the disaster-zone and of French charities assembling emergency supplies. No mention of British casualties or British aid but we knew that as soon as we returned to our own domestic sources of news the stories would all be about British this and British that as if nothing else much mattered. As indeed it proved. Even the Guardfian had a headline on the front page claiming that British aid led the world.

I don’t suppose there is any very profound conclusion to be drawn from this unless it is to do that sense of sameness yet difference that had struck me the minute we set foot in France – as it always does. There was something awesomely unifying about the catastrophic events of those days and the fact that all around the world we were dismayed spectators. And yet the differences of response in different places was acute. And - as at least one commentator observed – very different in the affluent West and in the wretchedly remote and impoverished areas such as Tamil Nadu and the Anderman Islands where much of the worst destruction actually occurred.

It’s difficult in the immediate aftermath of something like this to feel tremendously optimistic about 2005 though I wonder how much we, as individuals, are affected by world events such as this. I know I’ve felt depressed and glum about the bloody shambles in Iraq all year and I wonder if someone living in mediaeval Cornwall would have experienced a similar feeling when contemplating, say, the 100 Years War. How, much nearer to our time, would one have felt living through World War Two. Would one’s joy at personal triumphs, or glad events such as births and marriages have been diminished or tainted? Can we truly understand the impact of historic events without actually having lived through them?

Can’t answer this and am not sure whether this is the right place to be posing such questions. Over the past year these “reports” have become longer, more rambling and, I suppose, self-indulgent. This is the way with “blogs” which, as I’ve said before, is what I think this has become. I read somewhere the other day that there are now five million ‘blogs’ around the internet and that many readers prefer them to newspaper columns or comments.

I suppose that what I have to remember (you too) is that whereas most of these messages are put out for no reason other than a desire to communicate or to share thoughts and experiences, mine derives, or should, from a hard commercial motive. I write these words so that people may be encouraged to go out and read my books and articles, or maybe commission new and hopefully lucrative work. It’s difficult to evaluate the success of this operation but I do get some professional and commercial responses. And anyway it’s often difficult to divorce commercial from altruistic. I’ve been pleased – all writers are – when a reader expresses interest or enthusiasm and only part of that pleasure has to do with money. Bad attitude for a professional hack, but there it is.

On the professional front there is a lot of activity ahead in 2005. The new “Tudor Cornwall” novel, “Death and the ‘Urbervilles” is published on March 31st with a launch here in Fowey. (No proofs yet which is a worry as this time last year I had already corrected the proofs of “Death and the Visiting Fellow”.) I am the President’s guest speaker at the great Cornish “Kernewek Lowender” in South Australia in May and in October I’m a guest speaker on the a QE2 cruise round the Mediterranean. I am contracted to produce the biography of Princess Margaret and a much-revised edition of my Denis Compton book by the end of the year. I am also committed to help out on a fascinating little project with Palmers’ Brewery in West Dorset. The great Travel magazine has failed to find financial backers but Chris Meakin, the founding editor, remains optimistic and intends starting all over again as soon as possible. There are, as always, various other irons in other fires, especially journalistic.

Meanwhile, also as always, bank managers and others seem to circle like vultures. I’ve just made it into Who’s Who for the first time, I’m as busy as I’ve ever been but it simply doesn’t seem to translate into financial security. It didn’t help that the Travel Magazine didn’t materialise last year; that the six part TV series on village cricket seemed to sink almost without trace in the aftermath of the Carlton-Granada deal, that the whodunit sold out its tiny print run and was not reprinted through ‘lack of demand’, or that the much publicised and mainly well-reviewed “Village Cricket Book” still hasn’t earned out its meagre advance. My friend the writer Tim Jeal wrote sympathetically about the inevitability of ‘post-publication tristesse’ and I think it’s a common affliction, even among writers who one might expect to be triumphantly exempt.

But one mustn’t grumble. As George Bernard Shaw wrote, “Life wasn’t meant to be easy, my child, but take courage: it can be delightful!”  Well, er, yes, I know what the old boy meant and he was right. Up to a point at least. Still, on the whole, and with reservations I think I’ll be quite glad to see the back of 2004. And I can’t honestly say that I feel as bullish now as I did a year ago. Which doesn’t, of course, mean that I am not entirely genuine when I write “Happy New Year!” in the hope that for as many as possible of us 2005 will be exactly that. 

Tim Heald

Report Number 23   JANUARY 2005                                                                              Return to Homepage