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CHRISTMAS REPORT 2005
I shall try to send a few old-fashioned cards. . .
This is by way of an e-Christmas card and I'm composing it in the
piano bar of a four masted barquentine moored off a deserted island
somewhere off the Thai coast. This is what I call a Rayner-Tour.
Jeffrey Rayner is a PR man whose main account these days is the Star
Clipper one. "Star Clippers" is a company owned by a Swedish
billionaire called Michael Kraft. It has three huge modern classic sailing ships each of which
takes beteen a hundred and two hundred passengers. These ships provide
all the pleasures of big-ship sailing with none of the pain. Their
web-site is www.star clippers.co.uk And this time I'm writing a
Somerset Maugham piece based on this Singapore to Phuket trip for the
magazine Slightly Foxed, a newish quarterly which also has an appealing website. (www.foxedquarterly.com/)
I called it "A fragment of a short story which might almost have been
by W. Somerset Maugham which was read out by Tim Heald on the occasion
of the Hesp wedding in the bows of the Star Flyer somewhere in the
Malacca Strait on the evening of December 5th 2005." It was obvious cock
and bull stuff about how he worked for some newspaper back in the old country and lived in a remote farmhouse with - and
here he broke down and cried a bit and then drank more rum which
seemed to cheer him up - this partner of mine. "And one day", he said,
"I'm going to make an honest woman of her".
Well, I thought nothing more of it. He was obviously tired and
emotional and a hot-air merchant of no fixed abode if ever I saw one.
But then, a year later, in a bar in Malacca, who should heave into
sight but the same fellow with a very attractive woman in tow.
Nevertheless and notwithstanding, Happy Christmas one and all, and a
peaceful few moments at least.
Tim Heald
The high-spot of the voyage was a wedding. Martin Hesp of the
Western Morning News married his partner Sue, after about twenty
five years together. I think Penny and I witnessed the actual proposal
at a bar/restaurant called Harper's in Malacca. Martin very
flatteringly asked me to be his best man so I not only guarded the
rings, made from rope on board ship, but also composed a little
something which I read out after the captain had done his stuff.
It ran as follows:
He was a rum sort of cove - rum being the operative word. We were
drinking industrial quantities of it on a beach in Nevis or up a creek
in Dominica, I forget which. His name was Martin, or so he said, and
he seemed oddly agitated. This was the yarn he spun.
A reasonable piece of pastiche I thought, and as Martin said, all
perfectly, well maybe a shade imperfectly, true. When I phoned him
after our return he said that his e-mails had been humming with
congratulations and that his family had all been suitably impressed by
the video of the wedding. The event was quite surreal but rather
wonderful. I'm looking forward to reading about it in the Western
Morning News. Or maybe not.
"You'll think me a rum sort of cove", he began.
"See", he said, "I told you so"...
We came home with a salutary bump. The flight seemed interminable with
depressingly chaotic scenes in airports such as Muscat and a potential
disaster when Beverley Byrne of the Lady got the only up-grade
of the flight and in her excitement left her passport behind in
Bangkok. Thanks to various cool heads not least that of the British
Embassy Duty Officer in the Gulf she made it home safely but not
without a scare. We ended up on a train from Paddington which, it
being Sunday, involved a bus ride from Tiverton Parkway to Plymouth.
When we finally arrived back in Fowey we found, naturally, that the
bathroom work was still incomplete and we had various wires sticking
out all over the place and rubbish had been blown over the cliffs in
the gales and was now sitting reproachfully among the foliage on the
vertical slope outside the house. The post was mixed, as usual on such
occasions, and my desk-top computer had succumbed to viruses and
despite whatever I attempted produced nothing more than a blinking
blank screen. Thank heaven for the laptop. And because the
refurbishment of the "fax room" is still not finished I'm surrounded
by a forest of dismembered filing cabinets, plastic bags full of
documents and general confusion.
I sometimes, sort of, feel that this sort of inconvenience is the
price one has to pay for the self-indulgence of sailing round the
Andaman Sea. Serves me right!
The saddest news was that Dr. Gotlieb died while we were away. Howard
was the presiding genius at Special Collections in Boston University
and had been collecting my stuff since the early seventies. At a
Boston dinner in London a few weeks ago he was prevented from
attending because of ill health but his colleagues all said it was
nothing to worry about. Then he went in to hospital for what should
have apparently been routine procedures and he never came out. I shall
miss his cheery greetings and our occasional meetings. He was one of
those people who seems to be a complete one-off and I never entirely
believed anything he said about his background. This only enhanced his
slightly mischievous air of mystery and in no way detracted from his
amazing achievements at Boston. I got the news from Valerie Grove who
was at the dinner and wrote the (very good) Times obituary.
And so Christmas. We are getting cards, many containing the much
maligned round-robin letters. Some of these are brilliant - take a bow
Brian Cuthbertson formerly the PR man for Macau. Others less so. Penny
has written hers which she is sending out by snail as she is still a
technological Luddite and says with some justification that it's so
much more fun to open a real envelope and read something on paper. I
sort of agree but time and technology wait for no man despite my
crashed machine and though I shall try to send a few old-fashioned
cards, this and e-mails are going to have to shoulder much of the burden.
We have made precious few preparations for the festive period. My
brother is driving my mother down and we'll have a couple of friends
in on the day which looks like being a traditional roast turkey and
plum pudding sort of occasion. Emma who, hurrah, hurrah, has just
produced Daniel, a brother for little Leonel (aka the Financial
Adviser) will be in Miami with her family; Lucy in Auckland with
boyfriend and so on; the sons - who I saw for supper in London last
week - will be with in-laws of partner's family in Northampton and the
Isle of Wight and Penny's brothers will, of course, be in Australia.
This contracting world is all very well, but.
So for whoever reads this, Happy Christmas. I am unsure of the
function of such emissions but the evidence is that there are some of
you out there reading the Heald blogs - if that's what they are - and
I'm getting a wide range of enquiries and approaches from TV producers
wanting royal chatter to cricket enthusiasts on the sub-continent
wanting my take on the region's sporting and political developments. All intriguing and
exciting.
Oh and a gratifyingly large number of people offering letters of
Richard Cobb's for the planned collection.
It's a lovely sunny day, now, back in Cornwall. I am typing and
watching England play cricket rather unconvincingly against Pakistan.
The post has just been with another batch of greetings and I have
written yet another cheque for a man in a Cornish rugger jersey for I
know not what. Oh well season of good cheer and friendship and
what-have-you. It would be good to feel a little more relaxed and on top of things and better still to
feel imbued with the religious spirit of the time.
I shall be back at New Year for a different sort of message!
Report Number
36 CHRISTMAS 2005
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