REPORT 33 OCTOBER 2005
If you don’t produce publishable words you don’t get paid . . .
September really was an away month after a relatively domestic August.
We had two weeks in a rented cottage at Helmsley, North Yorkshire
where Alexander, the elder son, got married. Then we had a quick
weekend in Llandudno to visit my cousin David. A few days catching up
at home were followed by a week in Cephalonia sharing a villa
with longstanding Australian friends. Now we’re home again before I
head off for Princess Margaret research, a speaking engagement in
London and a twelve day Mediterranean speaking cruise on the QE2.
One of the most disastrous results of this is that Penny and I have both
put on weight. In my case the explanation is quite simple. Despite
doing a fair bit of walking I didn’t manage the absolute daily
discipline of forty-five minutes up on the Cornish cliffs. And
although I didn’t feel I was pigging out in a particularly disgusting
way I have to confess to some of that amazing Greek yoghurt with
honey, frequent breakfasts and the odd meat pie in Yorkshire. So now
it’s week of rigorous walking, fruit and lean grilled or steamed fish.
Holiday cottages don’t do bathroom scales – understandably – and I
actually think that the most significant help in dieting is a regular
monitoring of weight. Sounds obvious but I really think that the
greatest help in taking a stone off when I really needed to was an
almost obsessive monitoring of weight on accurate scales. I don’t
think the QE2 does scales either so we’ll just have to do what
Sheridan and Ruth Morley once demonstrated to us on a transatlantic
voyage – stick to caviar!
Despite good intentions conventional work has suffered more than I’d have liked. I
wrote a travel piece about wonderful North Yorkshire and this has
already been accepted by the admirable Country Cottage magazine who
commissioned it. Maybe I didn’t try hard enough to sell the idea to a
national newspaper but I did try, just as I tried to sell Greece and
the QE2. No takers. In view of some of the stuff that actually does
appear in national travel pages I find this, what should I say, well,
surprising. Inexplicable, actually.
The laptop came to Yorkshire and I did work on both novels – the projected one with David
Taylor and A Life on the Ocean Wave - the latest in the Tudor
Cornwall series. E-mail was restricted to a limited service via the Helmsley Public Library and I’m afraid I didn’t even take the laptop
to Greece though I did make numerous scribbles in my notebook and read
the excellent new Ned Sherrin autobiography which contains several
good Princess Margaret stories. I also, reluctantly, read The da Vinci
Code, at David Taylor’s behest.
I feel as if I’m the last person I n the world to have actually done this and at the
risk of being a bore I thought I’d air my thoughts. In a sense you
can’t argue with the sales figures nor with the (to me) surprising
number of otherwise intelligent people who thought it very good. I
thought it read as if it had been written by a partnership involving
Jeffrey Archer and Barbara Cartland which, in a gruesome way, is a
sort of compliment. The book has a certain undeniable page-turning
quality, a central idea which is obviously appealing, and nothing like
character, setting, long words or difficult ideas is allowed to get in
the way of the plot.
Enough said really except that I was intrigued that along with the murderous albino monk
the chief villain is a knight with a “thick English accent” and
leg-braces who says at one point “I schooled just down the road at
Oxford”. He is apparently a “former British Royal Historian” (do I
qualify?) and has been knighted by the Queen for writing a study of
the House of York. It’s not so much this character’s total
implausibility as his unquestionable villainy that I find interesting.
It seems to me that whereas the stock B-movie baddies always used to
be sinister wops and dagoes or even opium-smoking Chinese, they now
tend to be English aristocrats. The other thing that struck me about
the book is that drivers of cars never put their feet down on the
accelerator they always ‘gun’ the car and also that no-one ever
breathes out. They always 'exhale'. These are curious conventions. And
you’re right, if I’d been reviewing the book for The Times in my days
as that paper’s thriller writer I’d have given it a sceptical
thumbs-down and made sarcy jokes at its expense. And, I suppose, how
wrong I’d have been. I still think it’s fair old garbage though and
that to compare it with the really good books in the genre – almost
anything by le Carre, Gorky Park, the Day of the Jackal and so on – is
ludicrous. I know that many people think this is impossibly snobbish
and that it’s based on jealousy. Never mind, it’s what I think. And,
yes, of course I’d like the sales and the money but I wouldn’t be
proud to have written the book.
Whether it has lessons for me and David Taylor remains to be seen. Analysing its
success is quite an interesting exercise but I’m not sure whether that
means that you can learn from it. We shall see.
Our travels were nearly always interesting. In Yorkshire I couldn’t help reflecting on
what an influence Thomas Cromwell and Doctor Beeching had had on
British civilisation. The first, of course, destroyed the monasteries,
many of whose remains haunt that beautiful northern landscape and the
other did much the same for our railway system. Happily there have
been revivals – Ampleforth with a modern school and Abbey is a
considerable cultural influence in the area and we made a memorable
excursion from Pickering on the popular North York Moors steam railway.
I suppose a world in which loads of monks shunted around
the countryside behind Thomas the Tank Engine would not necessarily be
a better place but it has its attractions!
The main influence on Cephalonia seems to have been an act of God for most of the island
was hit by a huge earthquake in 1953 which led to a mass exodus of
islanders and the destruction of nearly all the old buildings with the
exception of one town and some villages in the far north. We were a
sort of gate-crashing duo in the sixtieth birthday party of the friend
of our friends which meant that everywhere we went we kept bumping
into new friends and acquaintances recently encountered at Gatwick.
This was sort of surreal and compounded my sense that the island
existed almost entirely for the benefit of Brits on holiday. As I
sometimes have the same feeling about our home in Cornwall this made
me slightly uneasy. Going for a walk down an attractive country lane
I found myself idly glancing at the name-plates outside bouganvillea
covered villas and finding that they almost all seemed to belong to,
as it were, Fred and Alice, Jock and Samantha or Henry and Fiona. I
dare say that is the way of the world but I’d feel more comfortable
with more natives and fewer second-home owners.
In between travel I squeezed in yet another medical for insurance purposes.
Blood and urine were taken in what seemed like copious quantities and I was made to cough
and breathe in and out as well as answer endless questions. The doctor
said at the time that he hadn’t found anything dramatically wrong.
However in answer to the smoking question I replied, truthfully, that
I had a very occasional cigar. This is literally true and at
Alexander’s wedding I along with practically all the other male guests
had one of the excellent cigars my son in law, Leonel, had brought
from Mexico. As a result Norwich Union insist on categorising me as a
‘smoker’ in exactly the same way as if I smoked several cigars a day.
My broker is working to reduce the premiums but, basically, the
company say they’ll impose punitive premiums because I am a ‘smoker’.
Am I alone in thinking this unfair and unjust? Crazy, I suppose, to be
honest.
So, it’s been an interesting few weeks but a bit of a luxury. One is lucky as a
freelance to be able to juggle one’s schedules. The penalty,
obviously, is that if you don’t produce publishable words you don’t
get paid. So it’s sleeves rolled up and back to the keyboard with a
vengeance. And no yoghurt and honey let alone ouzo or baklava!
Tim Heald
Report Number
33 OCTOBER 2005
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