REPORT 32    SEPTEMBER 2005

I sometimes feel like going out with a megaphone . . .

I wanted this to be a quiet reflective month at home but somehow it doesn't seem to have worked out quite like that. Part of my problem, I find, is how tiny irritants or diversions are disproportionately time-consuming. For example, after a trouble-free few weeks, the e-mail crashed. I suddenly started getting mad messages when I tried to receive or send. I'm sure lots of you will have had similar experiences.

Basically they say "You are an idiot. Your server does not exist. You have configured everything completely wrongly. Examine your settings. Do not try to get in touch with us to help put things right because there is no way of getting hold of us."

Faced with this I become impotently incandescent. However the trusty Carl Monaghan, my Cornish computer whiz, came to the rescue in an alarmingly Luddite way. First of all he said that he was going to be in Fowey tomorrow and could he fix it then. I explained that by the time he arrived Penny and I would be on a Virgin train en route to North Yorkshire for the wedding of my son, Alexander. 'OK', he said, 'talk me through it and explain exactly what the messages say'. There was a long silence after I had done so and he said, 'Remember that little box with the two aerials that I brought you the other day'. I said yes, and he told me to go to the back of it, remove the power point, count five and put it back again. Then wait for ten minutes or so and see if I could then connect with the internet and send and receive messages.

So, dear reader, I did and it worked. It was the equivalent of getting the TV to work by kicking it or shouting at the car when the starter motor fails. The received wisdom is that the world wide web is a thing of massive sophistication and sensitivity but, evidently, when it crashes all you have to do is unplug the mains and then reconnect and all is well. Ludicrous but true. Oh, and as a sort of postscript I should say that it held up for a few hours but by tea-time some worm or hacker had fought back and the mad messages had begun to re-appear. Nonsense, really.

Anyway it was essentially a Cornish month. When we first moved to Cornwall ten years ago there were people who said that they loved being in Fowey but went away in August. We thought this was insane but now we're not so sure. I wrote a piece for Country Life, reprinted in the Sunday Telegraph, a year or so ago, whingeing, in a Nimbyish way, about 'grockles' and 'emets'. I suppose it's a problem you always get if you live in a tourist destination but the problem here is that we are the kind of tourist spot whose appeal lies almost entirely in the sort of character which is destroyed by mass tourism. We're not Las Vegas or even Newquay.

A prime example of this is the little beach at Readymoney Cove past which I walk every morning on my daily conference with myself. Throughout August it is absolutely packed and there is always a queue by the ice-cream van. When it's deserted it's a pretty place which is how it looked one day in a large and enticing photo in the Western Morning News. When it's full, however, you might as well be in Margate or even the London Underground. The little town is similarly overcrowded with prams, pedestrians and SUVs all battling each other in the narrow streets. As long as you stay at home or get off the beaten track (which in practice means beyond reach of automobiles) life in Cornwall remains as idyllic as usual. Downtown or at Readymoney, however, it's pretty bloody. I sometimes feel like going out with a megaphone and telling people to go up to the north coast where there are miles and miles of sand waiting for people to come and sit on them. Down here isn't a place for crowds.

Luckily I was able to stay in most of the time. I had one obligatory hurried trip to London at the very end of the month. Somehow I now seem always to be attended by disaster when I go to town. This time it was a wretched mother who, with her two young children, jumped in front of the Heathrow Express at Southall more or less as I was arriving at Paddington to begin my train journey home. We were told that no trains would be leaving for at least three hours and that it would be better to go down to Waterloo and try to get home from there. In the event I arrived in Par at about 8pm, less than two hours after my original ETA. It wasn't much fun but almost the most difficult thing to cope with was my guilt at feeling irritated when the cause of my marginal inconvenience was so tragic. When the newspaper report appeared the following day, the deaths seemed just as sad only even more mysterious. Everyone said the dead woman had seemed perfectly happy, content and undisturbed. No-one could even begin to explain why she had decided to do such a terrible thing.

One of the people I met in London was Kerry Hood, head of PR at Hodder and Stoughton, who is looking after Sara Paretsky who had sent me a copy of her new book which Hodder are publishing next March. I've just finished it - on the train to York - and it's terrific. Sara is very keen to find out about cricket, a strange-seeming ambition for such a through-and-through Chicago person and the creator of the hard-boiled investigator, V.I. Warshawsky. Although the cricket season won't have started when she's over for publication I'm going to see if I can't take Sara to Lord's and show her the indoor school and the Long Room. I'd like to think I could find a market for a piece about such an unlikely event but I'm not holding my breath.

Kerry is also looking after Kate Adie, the intrepid and famous BBC foreign correspondent. I was able to tell her that I'd met Kate once, many years ago, when I was writing an article for Radio Times and she was an unknown Girl Friday at BBC Bristol. Even then her energy and ambition were both instantly recognisable and mildly alarming. Thinking about the encounter made me feel almost impossibly antique.

Otherwise the furthest afield I went last month was Truro for a broadcast and Withiel for a cricket match. The broadcast was a BBC Shoptalk programme in which I was supposed to hold forth knowledgeably about the Royal Warrant. It seemed mildly surreal to be sitting in a state-of-the-art studio in Cornwall having a conversation with the presenter and Peter York in London, Lady Lennox-Boyd in Lancaster and a biscuit-maker in the Scottish Highlands. Even more so to get a message from Simon Brett saying that he'd heard me on the car radio when driving through Chipping Norton. Oddest of all to miss the live broadcast but hear a recording on my laptop at home a day later.

They wanted me to play in the cricket match which was at Withiel in aid of the church roof but Penny and the better part of valour persuaded me not to. Last time I played, two years ago for the TV series on village cricket, I pulled something and could barely walk for a fortnight. I didn't fancy a repeat. Betty Jarrett, widow of my wonderful school history teacher Derek, had introduced us to Simon Skelding and Judy Douglas-Boyd who live in a lovely house on seventy acres on the outskirts of the village. To raise money Simon spent much of the year turning a field in front of the house in to a cricket pitch. Absolutely no expense spared. They were lucky with the weather and the ground looked as if it had been a home of cricket for at least a century. Bishop Bill of Truro captained one side and bowled his loopy spinners to good effect, Simon captained the other side; there was a beer tent, a hog roast, an extravagant cream tea, nobody seemed to care very much who won or lost, they raised a lot of money and in the middle of the afternoon a helicopter arrived to fly Simon to a golf match first thing the following morning. This, I thought to myself, is how the other half lives!

The high point of August is the Fowey Royal Regatta. Our friends, Betty Fu and Jonathan Sharp, were supposed to be coming from Hong Kong to stay for the week but they were booked on British Airways who got involved in a contretemps with their catering company and cancelled a whole lot of flights including Betty and Jonathan's. Apart from daily sailing races, a furry dance, the Royal Fleet Auxiliary Sir Galahad, a carnival procession and various displays by the band of the Brigade of Gurkhas we did out usual elaborate lunch for what we call Red Arrows Day. As usual Penny excelled herself with a white gazpacho of garlic, oil and almonds; a whole salmon (actually Graham The Fish had skilfully removed the middle so that it fitted the dish) a chicken roulade, a Catalan salad and finally berries and a pistachio panacotta. Oh and I did a rather good (though I say it myself) cheat's Pimms from an Elizabeth Luard/Jane McQuitty recipe in the Oldie - gin, martini rosso, Grand Marnier, diet lemon, loads of ice, cucumber and mint). The rest of the week was blissfully sunny but about an hour before the aircraft were due to begin their spectacular display it started to rain quite hard and they cancelled. None of our guests seemed to mind much but we have promised to invite them all back next year, put on the same menu, dv, and hope for better luck!

All this sounds blissful and lazy but blissful though it may have been I continued to plod away on biographies, novels and the usual raft of speculative projects - enjoyably so and to reasonable effect. An interesting-plus was that Country Life phoned to say that two years after I originally wrote a piece for them about the oyster fishery on the River Fal they would finally like to print it. I swallowed hard and phoned round to establish that the characters were still alive and the industry still flourishing. Both were happily so and the piece duly appeared towards the end of the month together with photographs by Twinkle Treffry. Better late than never I suppose. Now all that remains is to actually get paid for it. It was, I may say, a commissioned article and...oh, stop complaining I can hear everyone say, you're bloody lucky to be published at all. All the same I can't help feeling there are easier ways to make a living.

Two other unexpected pluses were that the sales people at Time Warner suddenly realised that, thanks to the nail-biting Ashes series, cricket was sexy once again and so they would produce a paper-back version of my 'Village Cricket' book as soon as possible (cover reproduced below).

The original and sensible plan (shelved!) had been to publish at the beginning of the season but I suppose this is better than having to wait till next year. The other good news was from John Lawton who is organising the annual cricket dinner at Boodles' Club at which I'm speaking. Apparently we've not only sold all 65 places but there is a waiting list. I told him I don't think I've ever had a waiting list for anything before.

The latest edition of the Thomas Hardy Society Journal contained the piece I wrote for them about "Death and the D'Urbervilles", the second Tudor Cornwall mystery. It also included a competition with the book as first prize for the person who produced the most plausible solution to other murders in the Hardy canon. This was good but less so was a magisterial review of the book by the Chairman of the Society who is also Professor of English Literature at the University of Kent. The gist of his verdict was that while the book was "amiable" (there's a dismissive word) it was full of solecisms and all-round sloppiness. I felt like referring him to the enthusiastic notice by Philip Oakes, who really is an expert witness, in the Literary Review but didn't. Odd, though, how one pays so much more attention to the bad reviews than the good. (You can read Tim's piece for the Thomas Hardy Society Journal here.)

So here I am on a Virgin train heading north. Virgin came up with a couple of first class return tickets as a recompense for a disastrous, standing-room-only journey home from North Wales last year. It is a sunny day and we are sitting in the station at Cheltenham Spa. To-night in York we are to have dinner with Bill and Jo Trythall. Bill and I met at Connaught House School in 1952. He got fourth scholarship at Winchester earning him the unofficial title of 'fourth brainiest boy in Britain' and we were re-united in 1962 at Balliol where we both read Modern History. Bill has been a lecturer at York University ever since graduating. The following day we pick up a car from Hertz and drive over to a rented cottage in Helmsley where Alexander is getting married. All four children will be there including Lucy from Auckland and Emma ftom Miami. Also the first Mrs Heald. It will be the fIrst time the fIrst and second Mrs Healds have set eyes on each other. I don't think any of us are much looking forward to it but I'm sure everything else will be fun.

More next month !

Tim Heald

Report Number 32  SEPTEMBER 2005                                                                               Return to Homepage