REPORT 31    AUGUST 2005

Otherwise it's been Cornwall and the keyboard . . .

I've just had an e-mail update to say that the petition to Save Our Sleeper has just gone past the 1,000 signature mark. The Save Our Sleeper campaign has a web site at www.saveoursleeper.com and is the response to an apparent plan to axe the nightly train service between London Paddington and Cornwall. This enables me and others to leave London at midnight and be home for breakfast and vice versa. It's a brilliant service and a life-line for many of us. Without it maintaining a career and living in this wonderful place would be significantly more difficult. Sometimes one feels that there is a whole race of bureaucrats whose only purpose is to make life more difficult for the rest of us is. This is a case in point. Any support gratefully received.

Talking of Paddington, Penny and I were up there when the second lot of bombs were planted on the London public transport system. As we had been travelling in to London when the first ones went off this seemed a rather eerie coincidence. Once again we were staying right opposite St. Mary's Hospital at the Frontline Club but that morning we had walked up the Edgware Road, past Paddington Green Station where the suspects are now being held and to Lord's Cricket Ground for one of the most exciting days of cricket one could possibly imagine. Australia all out for 190 and then England reduced to 21 for 5 before an only partial recovery.

It was heady stuff but in the middle of it all people's mobiles started to ring and before long all 30,000 of us in the ground realised that there had been some sort of repetition of the horrors of a fortnight before. Then we started to hear sirens from the roads around the ground and the rest of the day was punctuated by the noise of police and ambulances and helicopters overhead. It was quite surreal being in that lovely cricket ground absorbed in an epic Ashes match while the world appeared to be collapsing outside. Thank heaven no-one was killed or injured this time. After play we hurried down to the media party at the Ritz and then met our friend Raleigh Trevelyan for a drink at his flat before a Lebanese meal in Shepherd's Market nearby.

Everywhere we went seemed crowded and busy and there was an obvious determination to carry on as normal. All the same we felt at least a bit jittery and depressed and I think a lot of people in town were feeling the same. When my son Alexander joined us for more cricket on Sunday he pointed out that he has to use the tube every day to get to work and he passes through Victoria twice a day. If he is going to go on doing his job and earn a living that's unavoidable and for hundreds of thousands of other Londoners the position is similar. After that second Thursday the question in many of their minds was no longer 'if' but 'when'. It doesn't matter how often you're told that you're more likely to be struck by lightning that's still an uncomfortable realisation.

On the other hand the cricket, though ending in a damp anti-climax and a thundering English loss was still a wonderful antidote. Lord's on an occasion like that is magic - even in the rain which almost wiped out the final day. We even managed to negotiate a ticket for Penny to see her fellow Australians triumph on the Sunday though not before a depressing encounter with the traditional blazered jobsworth who told us that it would be impossible for Penny to get in even though we knew the ground wasn't even a third full. Luckily a better blazer bailed us out but it was irritating, to put it mildly, to come up against such pompous obstructiveness. I've written (I hope not equally pompously) to the Secretary, Roger Knight, to complain about the bad blazer and thank him for the good.

I got to three of the four days cricket and on the other day had a useful meeting with Madeleine and Jacqui from the offices of Book Aid International, the admirable re-structured and named Lady Ranfurly Library which sends books to Africa and is a charity worth supporting, I think. Then, in the interests of my Princess Margaret research, I had lunch with Lord Snowdon which was extremely enjoyable and informative. However I don't think I should say more until I've written it up for the book! 

Otherwise it's been Cornwall and the keyboard though the marvels of modern communication and particularly this website mean that the isolation conjured up by that is more apparent than real. The web-site has yielded a request from the Oxford and Cambridge careers people for a piece for their handbook, two or three approaches from BBC radio producers and a cheery greeting from a speakers agency in Sydney (Celebrityspeakers.com.au).  Quite apart from establishing a link with them which may, I hope, be useful in the future I have also put them in touch with Lucy at her events company in Auckland in the hope that they might be able to do business. So the site seems to be working.

The work has been mainly on Princess Margaret with a bit of stuff for Palmers' brewery, A Death on the Ocean Wave and help with David Taylor's new top-secret project. I also have a book on crime at sea to review for the Literary Review. Oh and I completed my biographies of humourists for the Readers Digest. It's always challenging to keep the balls in the air and balance business and pleasure, guaranteed-money and speculative venture, fact and fiction, books and journalism but that's my choice and I am certainly not complaining.

A final note on cricket. Today, the beginning of August, is the President's match at Boconnoc and I've helped provide one or two players for Anthony Fortescue's side though I don't think I can manage to steal away myself. And on Saturday we had lunch in Withiel at Simon and Judy's place. Simon has transformed the field outside their house into a cricket ground with a proper wicket made by a local groundsman. On August 30th they are staging a match in aid of the church restoration. There will be an all-day bar and a hog roast in the evening. With luck I might flog a copy or two of Village Cricket. Bishop Bill will be there and we're hoping for Marg Jude from Australia who taught Penny hockey and used to open the batting with Rachel Heyhoe-Flint. It should be a great day. Then we'll be off to Yorkshire for Alexander's wedding and supper with my old old friend Bill Trythall, once, at prep school 'fourth brainiest boy in Britain' - he got fourth scholarship to Winchester - and for more than thirty years - God help us all - has been a history lecturer at the University of York.

Funny how no-one tells you when you're young what it's like to grow old!

Tim Heald

Report Number 31  AUGUST 2005                                                                               Return to Homepage