Tim Heald's Blog

To Pooter or not to Pooter

2010-03-03T12:00:01Z

    I've been thinking more about my doctrine of "reasonable expectation" in the light of my re-entry into "normal life" in the UK. I understood, of course, that the journey home from Auckland would be long and not much fun . This was true: three hours at Auckland Airport, three hours twenty to Melbourne, around two hours wait in Melbourne, and then six or so to Singapore. The Tanglin Club was the usual wonderful sanctuary but in about forty-eight hours we were off again with thirteen and a half hours after a three hour wait. The Customs shed was a nightmare and so in a different (and over-priced way) was the Heathrow Express. The Oyster Card to Waterloo worked but the man issuing a ticket to Tisbury spoke no known language and appeared to have started his job about five minutes earlier. The bag for my hot chocolate was too weak and collapsed. All this was depressing if predictable.
   However I really hadn't expected to get to the barrier and be met by a jobsworth obviously transferred from duty on the East German side of the Old Berlin Wall who told me firmly that I had the "wrong" ticket and she could not let me on to the train. I'm afraid I was unamused and got on the train nonetheless, had a word with the very civilized guard who said the whole thing was ludicrous, I had paid quite enough already (over £36)and I was not to worry.
   So she was contrary to "reasonable expectation" whereas everybody and everything else came within my definition. The only moral seems to me that you have to meet unreasonable expectation with equally unreasonable (though scrupulously polite) ingenuity. This time it worked. Apart from anything else I have a real loathing of mindless bureaucracy. Which this was.
   Anyone I'm home and I wish I could say it was great. Sadly it's not much. In fact it's pretty dire. The Ray Gosling story depressed me enormously. It wasn't so much the core of the perceived story - Gosling's apparent "confession" that he had assisted the death of a gay lover. In any case this is sub judice so I can't comment even if I wanted to. What really saddened me was the uncontested observation that Gosling, now 70, had been declared bankrupt about a decade ago and was living in some sort of sheltered home in Nottingham. This is a man who brought pleasure to lots of us during his radio career and this is how he is rewarded. Compare and contrast the umber of out and out spivs who have tried to make our lives as miserable as possible and you have the reason for my depression. It's not right and just makes me want a nasty old corrupt communist regime whereby entertainers were rewarded with vodka, dancing girls and dachas and being an entrepreneur was a crime. I think there's a lot to be said for it and I'm only half joking. I don't feel Gosling has enjoyed "reasonable expectation".
   I sent quite a lot of this blog, which now goes back seven years, to a friend in the writing business and he read it and said that at times it seemed slightly "Pooterish". Naturally, I have been pondering this, not least because he also said that this might be deliberate. He was referring, of course, to the humorous classic first serialized in Punch towards the end of the nineteenth century by George and Weedon Grossmith and later published in volume form as the "Diary of a Nobody."
   At first I was mildly offended by the verdict not least because the most important feature of Mr. Pooter's diary is described in "Wikipedia" as "a tendency to take oneself excessively seriously". Another definition I found on the internet says "somewhat pompous, unintellectual and unimaginative (but basically well-meaning) traditionally with an unexciting lifestyle; probably derogatory if used by a Guardian reader, more sympathetic if by a Telegraph reader".
   On reflection, however, I have decided to take it as a compliment on the grounds that the original was predicated on the notion that there were far too many diaries of "somebodies" and not nearly enough, ie none, by nobodies. Let's hear it for nobodies, is therefore the distinctive cry of the Pooter. In an age of celebrities and bankers I'm inclined to think this rather a good thing. Yes, of course, Pooter is self-important (though who is to pontificate on what's important and what not, besides which if you yourself aren't important to you then who on earth is?) and he is snobbish and right-wing and probably a Telegraph reader. On the other hand he hasn't done anyone any harm and his values , though conservative, are, on the whole, admirable. A friend rang this morning and said we all should have been bankers: the more you screw up the greater your rewardz. Pretty true. More so in the UK than most places and the net result is to persuade the majority to pay no attention to rewards, money and so on. No matter how hard you work, how worthwhile the things you do, it makes no difference. I'm afraid that breeds indifference and cynicism not to mention a complete distrust of the alleged system.

   Incidentally I suppose I began blogging because I thought it was the correct thing to do and also because publishers seemed to be turning so many blogs into lucrative books. I now realise, however, that most of these were the work of people who had not previously written anything and certainly nothing commercial. I also realise that part of the essence of the true blog is to engage in conversation which I don't wish to do. Also that the true bloggers- see Richard Dawkins and others - are amazingly angry. I am not yet angry enough. Just Pooterish.

   Anyway I have almost finished a second crime novel; I await response to various ideas and pieces of work; I went on behalf of "The lady" magazine to see the Duchess of Cornwall in action at Helston,, friends have been to see us.other friends are coming; I have booked tickets for the States in May; it is very cold and the wind is blowing. Oh, and the computer is on the blink and with the expert's brother. The expert is in Bali. I wish I were there as well.

   I cannot think how people got through this long,long abject winter and I am incredibly relieved that I was able to spend so much of it away. I can't think how so many survived and seem optimistic and cheerful. It's very salutary.

Reasonable Expectation

2010-02-02T21:53:30Z

Lucy's wedding was the high spot of the month; an informal affair in a garden with a view overlooking the Matakana coastline in New Zealand, presided over by a Kiwi celebrant called Sykes (female), followed by speeches and supper and skyped home to the bride's brother in a frosty West London. I spoke, before supper, and tried to be mildly embarrassing for the last time, recalling the occasion that Lucy had been confronted by her brother, now a teacher at St. Benedict's, and asked to remove the pin from his nose which he had inserted with huge sartorial enthusiasm a few hours previously.He had since repented of this but could not remove it unaided. Lucy did the trick.

Penny and I flew to Auckland from Brisbane on New Year's Day and have spent the entire month in New Zealand. Australians, including my dear wife, tend to be odd about New Zealanders and New Zealand; the British less so. It is incredibly beautiful and on the whole attractively empty. I am becoming slightly bored with people telling me that the top of the north island is as far from the bottom of the south as Canada from Mexico but when you remember that the country only has just over four million inhabitants roughly a third of whom are in or around Auckland it makes one think. It is also almost ludicrously benign - devoid of the killer crocs, lethal spiders, dodgy dingoes and above all the crippling drought which make Australia slightly problematic. Australians tend to be patronizing about Kiwis and the funny way they talk. To a Brit , however, they don't talk any funnier than the Australians (of whom I am incidentally very fond - he says patronisingly . After all I married one) Nevertheless Australian attitudes to its smaller neighbour across the Tasman seem similar and no more justified than Spanish condescension towards Portugal or American to Canada. It's just big brother syndrome.

Anyway I like it here and people - including some transplanted Brits and Australians - couldn't have been kinder and friendlier. I have written lots of the latest novel ("Death in the opening Chapter"), a successful piece for the Lady about the visit of Prince William and another piece about the wines and other attractions of the Matakana country for Country Life. On Saturday we are going to drive over to Wally's (Wally is a lost Australian bird called a galah - a sort of noisy budgerigar) on the Wharf at Whakatane for fish and chips (fush and chups in the vernacular) and maybe on Sunday we hope to go to an amazing sounding estate nearby for clay pigeon shooting. Depends on our new friend Virginia. I have the use of a lovely old Land Rover from Yeovil but Penny doesn't like my driving and keeps complaining that it is very wide and the roads very narrow. We didn't hit anything on the way to and from Rotorua the other day and the Land Rover reminds me of driving Cecil round North Africa with Martin and Bill many years ago. Unfortunately I told Penny about the time I almost backed Cecil over the side of the Rock of Gibraltar and she holds it against me. Silly me. I should know better. And maybe have known better in 1963 on Gibraltar.

Last night we had a scary electric storm but generally the views of Lake Tarawera are spectacular and everything grows and flourishes.No wonder Cook christened this area the Bay of Plenty. I had a birthday on the 28^th and am feeling incredibly old. The spuds, though, came from the garden. As did the leeks and carrots.

I shouldn't be here, of course. There is a school of thought which says I should be back in the UK, suffering, but ...All my life I have taken a modicum of risk but this doesn't necessarily win friends. For instance Alison and I often took the children abroad, most dramatically to Toronto and to Santa Fe, New Mexico. On both occasions I was warned that to spend a year away from home would severely interfere with their education, would be generally disruptive and contrary to decency and common sense. On our return after, on both occasions, a thoroughly enjoyable and productive time away (I think) I was told by a number of people that it was "different for you". Quite how was never very satisfactorily explained. Maybe it runs in the family. My father who, in my opinion, erred slightly on the risky side of life, was, as a young man in World War Two sent to Naples to get hold of lifejackets for the members of his battalion to wear on the perilous crossing of the River Garigliano. Bye-passing the usual channels he went directly to the Royal Navy and was given the requisite number of Mae Wests which were otherwise surplus to requirements. He returned to the line with his trophies, the men crossed the Garigliano without anyone drowning, and my father obviously thought he had done good. Not a bit of it. There were regulations to cover that sort of thing and any number of jobsworths to complain about that shocker Heald who had broken them. No matter that lives were saved. My father had broken the rules and used his initiative. Bad show.

I know I am going to get flak for applauding this and saying that, to a certain extent and within obvious limitations, one has to ignore rules, other people and even what passes for common sense, but I nevertheless believe it quite passionately. It may end in tears but it's important to be able to say, in the words of the Sinatra song, that you did it your way.

So here I sit on the shores of Lake Tarawera tapping away at a crime novel set in an English Literary Festival. I have no agent, no publisher and quite possibly no audience. Tant pis. I shall revolve in, well I won't be able to revolve, since I have every intention of being cremated but if the book is published posthumously and becomes a huge success I shall be jolly cross. However we shall see. I like it. In fact I know it's rather good but unfortunately that won't make any difference. Good books don't get published; bad books do; good books remain unread; bad ones become best-sellers. Fact of life. And proper writing is a disease which afflicts proper writers. We can't stop. Some of us end up revered, award-winning and prosperous. Others don't. It doesn't, alas, have an awful lot to do with talent or hard work and I don't think one has any alternative but to plug away. Pity about the people who get in the way but don't, please, think that any commercial failure is the result of indolence or lack of foresight.

I see that the Grim Reaper continues to scythe away. He got Michael Mavor, ex headmaster of Loretto, Gordonstoun and Rugby aged only sixty two on holiday in Peru and he reeled in Geoffrey Van Hay who used to be a suave, pin-stripe trousered presence behind the bar at El Vino in London. Not to mention the mother of our hostess in New Zealand who was in her nineties but even so...

And even when it isn't the finality of a death sentence there are other evidences of passing years. Our latest consignment of mail included an invitation to the farewell party of a friend who had been at the same publishers for forty years. I remember him as a young man when we both had everything before us. Now we are members of the old guard about whom we used to giggle forty years ago. Incidentally I recall a military friend of mine writing a rather good biography. When I remarked, rudely, that I didn't know that he could write English he answered that our friend was his editor. This explained the excellence of his prose. My Army friend then looked thoughtful and said that in the military his editor would have been a first-rate fighting man. Unfortunately all soldiers were dogged by a body called HQ Company. It was his philosophy to pare HQ to an absolute minimum but he had noticed that in publishing HQ company was ginormous and fighting men thin on the ground. "I wonder what they all do", he mused contemplating the dead wood at the heart of the ailing business. Life is dogged by huge HQ companies.

I remember once speaking at a writers' conference and the evening before I was due on a highly successful and famous author spoke. I thought he was entertaining and instructive but my friends, mostly unpublished and struggling, were furious and unimpressed. "He made it seem so easy", they chorused. I don't think that's what he meant. He was just trying to emphasise the fact that he had been lucky and good fortune can strike anyone. (Likewise bad). But my new friends didn't agree. They thought he had failed to suggest that it was amazingly hard work. So, I would venture to suggest (and was very careful to say next morning!) it is.

I don't for a moment deny my good luck. It's been phenomenal and as I sit typing this and looking out across sunny lawns and shrubs to the lake beyond I count my blessings. But I wouldn't claim that it's easy. My experience is that if you don't work you don't get. And even if you do work you don't necessarily get. On reflection that's wrong too. One of the sad and depressing things about life is that many of those who reap the greatest rewards - financial anyway - seem not to do a hand's turn. But I don't see the satisfaction of a life spent in HQ company.

On the other hand there is a school of thought that says that confronted with problems and adversity you pull in your horns, hunker down and do as little as possible. That's a parody but not far from the truth and it's emphatically not my style. Confronted with adversity one has two alternatives. One is to go into your shell and give up; the other is to come out swinging. As the late Randolph Churchill said when things are bad you put on your best overcoat, get hold of the most expensive cigar you can, and walk up and down Piccadilly smiling broadly.

I am of the Churchillian persuasion which is, I think, why I am in New Zealand enjoying the sunshine and working very hard rather than shivering in the cold back home and doing nothing. Not everyone thinks this desirable or right, but it's the way I am. It's in the genes. I protest too much.

That said, I have, I think, arrived at a policy of "reasonable expectation" which sums up my beliefs and actually everyone else's in a sense, if you see what I mean which you probably don't. "Most people" are in salaried employment and "reasonable expectation" means that they can expect to be so for the foreseeable future (another interesting concept). This means that they can plan and budget accordingly. Those relatively few of us who are not in salaried employment have also to rely on "reasonable expectation" but we don't enjoy a regular salary and all we have to go on is past performance. In my case, I think, it was reasonable to expect that I would go on having fiction and non-fiction books published, sometimes serialized, and that this together with more or less regular income from journalism would correspond to a reasonable salary.

Maybe I should have foreseen a collapse of all this more or less completely and more or less simultaneously. Unfortunately I didn't. Add in the unexpected death of my younger brother and a semi-debilitating stroke for my mother and you have a pretty bad case scenario which runs, I think, counter to "reasonable expectation".

The question now is how do I deal with this? My answer is to fight one's corner. I can't change personal disasters but I can strive to get myself back track.

A case in point though. Next June there is an international crime writers; conference in Oklahoma City. I would like to go. I contacted the English Speaking Union in New York about it and have as a result been asked to undertake a speaking tour of their branches in the American south-east. They don't pay but they will look after myself and my wife once we get ourselves to Savannah, Georgia. En route I would like to call in on my daughter Emma and her family in Miami.

I think this is all perfectly reasonable but many won't and don't. Which is, I suppose, another way of saying that I would never have hacked it at headquarters.

I belong in the trenches with my friend the editor of the last forty years. "Reasonable expectation" is what I look forward to and I am determined to make it come to pass!

An absolute shocker

2010-01-04T01:07:08Z

An interesting Lithuanian Christmas Eve with Penny's brother John and his family at their house high in the hills on the New South Wales/Queensland border. John's wife is originally from Lithuania and likes to keep some old customs one of which is Christmas Eve and involves twelve dishes, all fish or vegetarian, each of which you have to sample and no alcohol. You also wish each other a happy and prosperous new year and break unleavened bread.

What I found almost most fascinating is that at the end of the year Lithuanians traditionally wipe the slate clean, cancel all debts and generally start afresh. Terrific, of course, but alas life for most of us isn't like that and we don't have the luxury of being able to start completely fresh because the accumulated baggage stays with us no matter what. So even though this is a time for taking stock and making new resolutions there are things which have been done and things left undone and they can't be changed. I'm all for wiping slates clean but there is, for better or worse, a limit. Our slates can't be wiped clean if only because much of the writing is indelible.

On the plus side the arrival of Henry Heald on November 25^th is the best news. The third grandson and the first to carry the family name and a British birthplace. Welcome Henry. In the summer my son, Tristram, got married, and I am now in Auckland in anticipation of the fourth wedding, that of Lucy. When she is joined in holy matrimony next Friday that will make all four children married and still with their spouses. Almost a record.

My job on Friday is to "give Lucy away" though the service seems likely to be predictably contemporary and will take place en plein air or under canvas and as far as I can see with minimal religious involvement. My Lithuanian sister-in-law, responsible, of course, for Christmas, eve has urged me not to do what all Australians do which is to make a really insulting speech on such occasions in the belief that this illustrates true devotion. I am further encouraged in this by the words of Gabriel Garcia Marques, the great Colombian novelist, who is retiring from public life because he has lymphatic cancer. His words, accompanied by a chanson and pics of Paris have been sent on by Annie van Es widow of the photographer Hugh, whose wake Penny and I organized at the Frontline Club in London and whose obituary I wrote last year for the Guardian. Marques says we should speak fondly of our nearest and dearest, reminding them at all times of how much we adore them.

Well, I will do my best, but I am reminded that I was brought up and educated in an old English tradition which thinks tears and expressions of love rather cissy and bad form while encouraging one to go in for stiff upper lips and loads of deprecation and understatement. Old habits die hard and I am wary of too much public display of emotion. On the other hand...Whatever else I do however I shall use Lucy's mantra about me as a source of constant encouragement. "Dad...you're so embarrassing." I feel that's my role in life, both generally and in particular. Which includes, of course, saying the unexpected and contrary as often as possible. More on all this next month.

The down side began with my younger brother's funeral in Wells Cathedral. He actually died at the very end of 2008 but his departure has cast a shadow over the whole of my 2009 and will I am afraid be part of the rest of my life. This is very un-Lithuanian but a mark of what I mean. There are certain things which can't be eradicated and which are part of one's life however one comes to terms with them.

I suppose that the sudden death of a close and younger relation always has a significant effect - you'd have to be pretty bloodless to be unaffected. The most obvious lesson is probably "Carpe Diem". For example on this trip to New Zealand I was quite keen to explore the South Island where I have never been. My wife who is naturally more sensible and cautious said that we had neither time nor money and we would be much better leaving the south to "Next time". I protested that there might not be a "next time" but I lost as usual and I have a horrible feeling that I will never see the South Island.

Death seems to have that effect and there seems to have been an increasing number of them in 2009. Some of them were contemporaries, some a little bit older, a very few younger. People's passing inevitably changes one's mental furniture and I find that this means many of one's assumptions alter as well. If life is just one clattering carousel there is no escaping the fact that one is getting to the moment when one falls off, or is taken off, that new people are arriving and that the balance of power has shifted. My elder daughter, Emma, will be forty next year, and will hate me for telling everyone but it's as big a landmark in my life as it is in hers. A man with a forty year old daughter is a senior citizen, a pensioner, a grandfather and will, if he gets into trouble, be described as such in the morning paper - if there is such a thing.

So, suddenly, this is where one is at: old man in a hurry. Much advice has, as always, been of the sit tight, hunker down, take no risks variety and while I am, contrary to much general perception, very sensitive about advice especially from experts. all my life I have been counselled to be cautious and then when a calculated risk works out I am told that "it's different for you". Such is life and if I have advice it is to listen to everything that is on offer and then to take the decision oneself erring on the side of risk. That way life is interesting, rewarding and relatively free of "if only". There are an awful lot of sad people around who will never know what they might have achieved if they had only taken what seemed at the time to be an unacceptable risk. Carpe Diem.

I have undertaken two speaking engagements to interesting foreign parts in the last year. One was a trip north of the border to speak to the Scottish Cricket Society in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Know-all Sassenachs and even some Scots assured me that there was no such thing but there was and Penny and I had a thoroughly enjoyable and unorthodox visit to both cities. We also spent a few days in Antwerp where I conducted a crime-writing workshop to some daunting Flemings. I enjoyed the whole business even though I found my audience suitably daunting and Antwerp itself was every bit as remarkable and wonderful as I had hoped. Our B and B, overlooking the cloister of the St. Paulus Church was quite one of the most special either of us have ever experienced.

We also spent a week in Krakow and almost three in the Veneto where I interviewed the American crime writer, Donna Leon for the Daily Telegraph. In a different (and better) world I would have written lucratively and publicly about both these places but the world has changed and though I wrote about them here, with enthusiasm, I couldn't generate interest from traditional outlets on which I used to feel I could rely. The same has been true of the latest long visit to Australia and New Zealand which has taken in all five days of a fascinating cricket Test between the West Indies and Australia at the Adelaide Oval, a tour of Manning Clark's old house in Canberra, weddings in Sydney and outside Auckland, and much much else besides. But there you go. There is a widespread saying voiced by today's young Turks that says the days when you could do a deal over lunch at the Garrick Club are long gone. I'm afraid I belong to a generation which believed in the efficacy of such lunches. It reminds me of the great Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson's response when I proposed writing him a proposal to bolster my notion of writing him a biography of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland. I explained that such proposals were now very much the vogue. Christopher looked perplexed and said that he wanted no such thing on the grounds that "I know who you are; I know who Barbara Cartland is; and I know what a biography is." We did the deal; I wrote the book,; it was a critical and commercial success.

Anyway from a commercial and creative point of view my 2009 was an absolute shocker. I use the word advisedly because when my mother was startled by a loud explosion shortly after arriving at the military HQ in Dorchester, Dorset, in World War Two the Regimental Sergeant Major, said, by way of explanation, "It's that shocker Heald". It was my father who was, at the time, the Weapons Training Officer, and who amused himself by removing the pins from hand-grenades and then throwing them after the longest possible interval. This earned him the family sobriquet of "Shocker" which was generally pretty well justified.

Anyway from a professional point of view my 2009 was an absolute shocker. I could go into more painful detail but I have already used up 1500 or so words and I don't want to seem unduly grumpy. I'm told it's bad for business and I hope that from this point of view as well as many others 2010 will be a huge improvement on its predecessor. Not that 2009 was consistently dreadful. It wasn't. There was much to enjoy. But professionally speaking it was an absolute shocker.

And I see no sense in pretending otherwise.

Hurrah for Henry!

2009-12-09T01:00:52Z

Let's start with some unequivocally good news. We are, to echo the words of Mrs. Thatcher, a grandfather. Henry Heald arrived in the early hours of November 25^th. Mother, father and Henry all appear to be doing well and last Saturday, the morning before flying away to Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, Penny and I went over to Ealing, bearing gifts, to say hello. I am pleased to report that Henry seemed fine, slept throughout our visit, twitching slightly, not being sick or difficult in any way and is obviously destined to score 100 before lunch at Lord's in roughly two decades time as well as winning a Nobel Prize later, becoming Prime Minister, Pope,a national treasure and much else besides His two cousins in Florida are already rubbing their hands in gleeful anticipation of a third member of a gang to come and I am extremely pleased to be able to pass on news which seems to be to be good without reservation. I don't wish to tempt fate nor to be unduly triumphalist so meanwhile, this is what I had to write before the happy event.

I'm sorry. I hate sounding old and grumpy but...

Last week I ordered a Royal Horticultural Desk Diary from Amazon, for my mother's 89^th birthday. There should have been a saving though the charge for p and p lifted it more than somewhat. Anyway I ordered it and was told that thanks to the marvels of modern science I could "track" my parcel's progress using my special Royal Mail 13 character tracking number, It actually specified 13 characters and I duly put in my number and counted the characters which came to 13. However when I sent it I got the response "Sorry. Your tracking number is too long". Twice. I gave up.

Earlier that day I had had a letter from some outfit in Preston saying that my aged Ma was getting a winter fuel allowance of £275. There was an asterisk next to the amount and underneath in parentheses the information that the amount was affected by the fact that according to their records there had until recently been someone living with my mother. This person had recently left and my mother's handout was consequently being reduced. I thought this slightly peculiar as my mother has been living on her own since my father was killed in a car crash in 1972. I rang the people in Preston and the woman who answered was charm itself but could not alas help as this sort of thing was dealt with by someone else. After three different calls to three different numbers I got a charming man who said that he could do absolutely nothing without my mother's National Insurance Number which at that stage I did not have at my fingertips. I found it in the file and rang back. Another charming person answered, female this time, and from somewhere near Doncaster. She checked everything, took every conceivable sort of detail in the interests of efficiency, security and heaven knows what else and then said that she could find no record of my mother whatever. This, despite the fact that my mother's 89^th birthday is next week and she has, to the best of my knowledge, been drawing a pension for decades.

I'm sorry, I really am, and I don't mean to sound old and grumpy, but there are times when I don't seem to be able to help myself. Meanwhile we flew off in a smart new Qantas airbus, sitting at the back of the plane in Tourist, me between Penny and a mercifully small woman. The video system was fantastically sophisticated and I was able to watch take-off and landing on screen as well as see Julie and Julia. A thirteen hour flight though so when we got to Singapore and went straight to the Tanglin Club without passing go we checked into our room (Number 14 aka Bouganvilla) and crashed out. Then after a short stay in an uber-Christmassy city - so many carols and lights and trees amid such stifling humidity, we embarked on another Qantas flight which was mercifully shorter though with a less sophisticated video system and marginally better food and service which wasn't saying much as the food on the first flight was disgusting and the service slow and charmless. Almost non-existent actually.

And so to the Adelaide Oval for the whole of the Test match between Australia and the West Indies. Also, on the day, of our arrival, the annual, Lord's Taverners' "Sundowner" as guests of John Bannon, a former premier of the State, prominent South Australia cricket person into whom we had bumped at a party for the Australian cricket team at the London High Commission on the eve of the Lord's Test, My leg is playing up. But more a little later.

More death I fear. Geoffrey Moorhouse, the former Guardian hack and author. Communications are fantastic. I was able to read poor Geoffrey's obits in Wiltshire and London, then compose a brief note for the Guardian, transmit it from the Tanglin in Singapore, read it on the internet and have a chat with Geoff Trew on Skype. Geoff said he would scan it and sent a copy asap. I had spent the previous Saturday afternoon with Geoff and Nicolas, son of the late great Arnold Ridley, freezing to death nostalgically while watching a one-sided rugby match at Rosslyn Park. I was also able to send a couple of "Royal Blogs" to the Telegraph and to read them as well. Unfortunately the Adelaide Hilton, aka 27 William Street, didn't have the relevant password which was with the Singing Professor in China and he didn't return until the Sunday, which meant that I was less communicado in Oz than in Singapore, at least to start with.

The Guardian ran my recollections of a walk with Geoffrey in Yorkshire when he revealed that his real name was Heald, but that he lived his life as Moorhouse because his Ma left home v early and remarried. The death of those most intimately concerned meant that he could reveal this. What the Guardian didn't say was that I had read his latest elegiac column in the Oldie and had written to him saying that I, like him, was visiting New Zealand to see rellies and suggesting we might meet down under. Sadly Geoffrey wouldn't be making the trip as planned (and foretold in the Oldie) and his elder son Andrew emailed giving me the news as he had found my letter among his father's papers. Forward planning is God's idea of a joke: discuss.

I am now sitting in a state of maximum e-frustration. On the one hand I keep getting little messages saying that my connection with the wi-fi thing is terrific, no worries. On the other every time I try to actually send messages I get another couple of messages saying that I have failed to connect with server, have failed at this, failed at that and am stuck, stymied. Any moment I expect the thought police to turn up and charge me with some unidentifiable Kafka-like offence. Being very simple I can't understand why something which is so wonderfully simple in darkest Wiltshire and cutting-edge Singapore is apparently not possible here. I have put my blogs for the Telegraph on to a memory stick which I am assured will work perfectly. Meanwhile I shall do the same with this and hope for the best. But I feel I would be better off like someone in Scoop, relying on cleft sticks, pigeons, paper and pencil. Ah progress!

So, for now, I will cease and have a shower instead. An ancillary problem - no not a problem but a fact of internet life is that whenever anything fails to work everyone else assumes it's your fault and that you are an imbecile, a Luddite, don't know anything, are too old to be alive at all. You think the reverse but don't dare say so. Everyone apart from me and sundry cats and dogs are out. The wife and the hostess are doing a girlie supper; the Prof is at choir practice; the boys are doing whatever boys do these days and I have spent a few happy hours trying to make sense of communications. I sense I may have managed a passable stitch up and sent cricket blogs to the Telegraph from the lovely Adelaide Oval where we have been every day of the Test. Lucky us. And it's enthrallingly and surprisingly two-sided. Gayle spent all day all day making a big hundred, I had lunch with John and Catrine Clay whose daughter lives in the hills at Mount Barker, our dinner host from a few nights back was there and came over to congratulate me on not looking quite so Pom(egranate) pink, and there are oysters and Aussie meat pies and pretend Cornish pasties with carrots in them - an amazing culinary solecism!

I fielded a reassuring email from Caroline, my Ma's main minder - thank you Caroline - and another from my niece telling me she was finalizing her plans for a Wiltshire Christmas. So, in a frazzled way, all is right with the world. In fact, better than all right. Hurrah for Henry. Penny bought him an Australian cricketing teddy bear at the Oval and I like to think that in twenty years or so he will be rampaging through Australian cricketers, ursine or human. Meanwhile we're lucky to be here and welcome to the team. Good to have you batting at three or opening the bowling or whatever.

Which reminds me. August 8^th. 2010. Fowey. A great cricket match. A band. The Army. Something to put in your diary and look forward to. I'll bore you about my leg some other time. I hear voices off - the ladies are back. The possums are at play on the roof. The West Indies are about three hundred ahead with three wickets left and a full day to play. So tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow...Next stop the Barossa.

criminal royalty and cricket

2009-11-03T10:58:46Z

The Masterclass in Antwerp was probably the high-spot of a busy month. I talked on character in crime fiction following in the footsteps of Professor Jim Madison Davis of the University of Oklahoma who spoke last year on plot. We started at 8 in the theatre of the Literature Centre, had one coffee break and were still going strong at 11.30 when Mieke who organized the whole affair said we had to leave the hall because the staff had to get home A small group of us adjourned to a nearby bar and I stayed until 1.30 when Rene Boers, Mieke's husband, walked me home to our digs where a worried Penny - she's heard me droning on professionally a million times before and had stayed in with a good book - was waiting anxiously. Next day we heard that the really hard core had stayed in the bar until five.

Antwerp was everything I had hoped for and more. It used to be one of the world's most important cities and it's still Europe's second biggest port and home to what is arguably the centre of the world's diamond trade. Perhaps most significantly it is the home of Rubens and his most famous pupil van Dyck. I associated the former with blousy naked women and the latter with small men with pointed beards sitting astride vast horses but in Antwerp the best examples of their work seem to be religious pictures of one kind and another. Our brilliantly stylish accommodation, run by the equally brilliant Monika, was just opposite the Paulus Church and we went there for Mass on Sunday which was, for me, almost the best moment of a fascinating visit. Stunning pictures, architecture and atmosphere.

Otherwise we did a lot of walking, visited Rubens' house, had lunch with Georgina and Nigel - moules and frites opposite the cathedral -, watched Rene lead a demo against a proposed bridge (and were delighted when the referendum that Sunday won the day with 60% of the popular vote), went to the fabulous print museum, attended a concert at a hall a tram drive away from the centre, had a smart dinner in a converted pumping station, loved Monika's breakfasts with the most scrumptious boiled eggs and generally had a great time savouring a seriously civilized city with relatively few tourists. It's so easy and cheap to do Flanders. You can go anywhere in Belgium for no extra charge if you take the Eurostar to Brussels. Next time I want to go to Mechelin, HQ of Cummins Diesels where the fascist green-shirts shot at Richard Cobb and his Poles during the war. And missed.

Antwerp was in the middle of a longish trip away from home which began with a gastro-pub lunch with Peter and Jenny Hughes, continued with a wake for van Es at the Frontline Club and continued frenetically until I came home on a crowded train after the 8^th fully subscribed Old Shirburnian Media lunch. I never cease to be amazed when thirty or so grown-up and slightly bolshy men solemnly rise and sing two verses of the school song in Latin. At the Groucho Club in the middle of Soho after a good and prolonged lunch. Apparently it's the only Old Boys' event which is in the official school calendar. And this year they even had to turn people away because they were over-subscribed. Van Es, by the way, was the Dutch photographer who lived in Hong Kong and took the photo of the last Americans piling up a rope ladder into a helicopter as they tried to get out of a lost Vietnam. A successful evening I thought and made odder yet when a man came up and introduced himself as Simon Pike whose father was once Chaplain-General to the Forces and later Bishop of Sherborne. Simon had arrived at Lyon House the same term as my brother James and for a while the two were "best friends". He didn't, unsurprisingly, know that James had died.

The day beforfe the Media affair I had lunch at the Fire Station in Waterloo with Christopher Braun to discuss the anthology of his brother Thomas' work. We both think we are progressing and I hope we are. Christopher has amassed some 400 possible entries, mainly light verse both published and unpublished. Tom, as I always knew him - the family always called him Thomas - was a genius in his own inimitable way.

Otherwise. Well, I had lunch with Lindsay Fulcher, basic, nice Thai round the corner from "The Lady" which is now edited by Stanley Johnson's daughter, Rachel, sister of Alexander aka Boris. We had a chat before lunch and as far as I can see I am now the Royal Correspondent of the "The Lady". Arise Dame Tim! Who would have thought it but, hey, why not?! I am pursuing potential interviewees, preferably Royal Ladies.Heard Colin Amery give a lecture on Nicholas Hawksmoor at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street. Fascinating and a good subsequent debate about how redundant or semi-redundant churches should re-invent themselves. Colin was on the Orient Express to Venice with Gavin Stamp many years ago and the two did a wonderful drone round Venice. I remember embarking, improbably, at Ealing Broadway.That lunchtime I., but I will be accused of name-dropping. It was good to see old friends including Rachel's Dad who I realize I have known for more than half a century. My first words to him, as far as I can remember, were "Please Johnson sir may I clean your rugger boots". I'm not certain about the sir" but otherwise true. If I didn't clean his boots I'd be beaten for not having enough signatures on my "fag chit". To his credit Stanley was amazed and appalled.

Met up with niece Becky and had a family do to celebrate Tristram and Beth completing a half marathon through the royal parks - Tristram did it in 1 hr 42 which is an improvement of ten minutes on his previous best. Then last weekend I went up to London and stayed with Alexander and Kirsten. A and I went to see London Welsh beaten by Doncaster and afterwards listened to a wonderful sounding male voice choir wearing blazers and looking like massed bank clerks of a certain age. Alexander cooked biryani and dhal that evening. We were accosted at Old Deer Park by Mr. Hartigan who had taught Alexander at the Oratory. And on the Sunday I had lunch at Simpson's in the Strand courtesy of the Mugar Memorial Library in Boston, Mass, which collects my stuff. More old friends and acquaintances.

Anyway am now back looking out at grey drizzle. I finished my book on Jardine in India and have sent it off electronically to Methuen. And, in a way most interestingly, I have been "blogging" regularly for the Daily Telegraph about royalty. I'm rather enjoying this and we've had lots of hits and some comments. Odd that the one that really seems to excite people is Prince Philip and his alleged "gaffes" which seem to polarize opinions amazingly. Some people think he's terrific and saying what we'd all like to and other people say he's appalling, Neanderthal, never done a day's work in his life and so on.

As before I am depressed at the angry, brown paper bag semi-literate quality of some of the responses. And people are astonishingly lacking in self awareness. One correspondent complained bitterly about the laziness and awfulness of various members of the royal family, failing to make a plausible case - I didn't say there wasn't such a case, only that the frothing complainant failed to make it. Check out the comment on the www.blogs.telegraph.co.uk site (I think) and see if you agree. The most bizarre moment was, I thought, when he banged on about our obsession with PC and non PC remarks and then commented that if being PC meant tolerating someone who is offensive then you could count him in. What he didn't seem to realize was that he was the one being offensive and people like me who didn't agree with him but said so in an inoffensive way were the ones being tolerant.

But I suppose I would say that, wouldn't I? Check the site and see if you agree.

A month in the (town and) country

2009-10-03T07:12:15Z

Travelled up to London on the 2^nd of the month and returned by a prolonged journey on train and bus (engineering work silly) on Sunday 20^th. So a hectic period doing all sorts of things including trying to drum up work but, on the whole, away from the humdrum tapping away in front of the screen which is essential but boring to write about - and I presume to read. The charging around is tiring and challenging but more fun for both reader and writer. I think.

So to London for an interview with Renegade TV who have 3D footage of the Queen's Coronation in 1953. We watched the two DVDs at home first and were amazed at how incredibly ancient and dated they seemed. The commentary in particular seemed impossibly deferential and fruity; the Queen impossibly young and the soldiers impossibly numerous. Never seen so many chaps in khaki. I suppose it was all more than half a century ago but I remember it myself which is unnerving. To so many people it's history but for people such as myself it's part of one's life. Inevitable and obvious but salutary even so.

The filming was in the old Breakfast TV studios where, once upon a time, Anna Ford poured a glass of wine over Jonathan Aitken. I felt an ass pontificating away to camera while wearing a pair of cardboard 3D glasses which come mid-November will be given away free in Tesco and with copies of the Sun and News of the World. It was surprisingly hard work and seemed to go on for ever, most of it destined presumably for the cutting room floor.

Afterwards Renegade laid on a car to take me to Alexander's house in Ealing. It was the first time I had been there and we made the journey courtesy of Satnav which was something of a revelation. I simply gave the driver the Post Code and he drove to the front door without a single query pulling up outside the correct terrace house in the suburbs apparently effortlessly. I felt like a High Court judge who had never heard of the Beatles. Modern technology?! Jolly clever, these science fellows!

Kirsten, Alexander and I went out for a very adequate Indian meal at a modest restaurant within walking distance of the house; Alexander lent me a novel by David Peace about Brian Clough; we talked a lot about everything and I had a very enjoyable brief stay. The only depressing thing was that the perfectly nice but essentially small terrace house would probably have cost at least £250,000 to buy. (They rent).Property prices particularly in the capital are absolutely scandalous and show little or no sign of coming down, any more than bankers' salaries which are, equally scandalous, though whether they are cause or effect of our present discontents remains mysterious to me at least.

From Ealing I tubed back into central London before checking in to the Army and Navy Club for a single night and an evening at the Society of Bookmen which meets once a month at the Savile Club and which I hadn't attended for ages. It was particularly good to see Sue Bradbury, formerly editorial director of the Folio Society and an old friend with whom I had done many enjoyable jobs. The speaker was the CEO of Atlantic Books and sitting almost opposite me at the top table was the son of Anthony Cheetham who was almost a contemporary of mine at Oxford. Disconcerting as always to find one's contemporaries' children grown up and being taken seriously. Perfectly understandable but disconcerting nonetheless.

Penny came up on the Friday and I met her at the Frontline Club before staggering off to Tooting where we were staying with our friend Marcia. Tooting is a relatively mixed community - as is Ealing which has a lot of Poles as well as Indians. Living in places such as this means, among other things, some fascinating new taste sensations in exotic restaurants. That evening we went to a vegetarian South Indian which was spectacular. In particular we started with some wonderful puff pastry bombs full of chili and coriander which you bunged in your mouth and which then almost literally exploded with an amazing combination of heat and flavour.

The following day we went to the National Theatre for "The Pitmen Painters" a drama about worker-education between the wars. I thought it was funny and thought-provoking and made me think, inevitably, about Sandy Lindsay who was Master of Balliol, a leading light in the WEA and I think the first Vice-Chancellor at Keele. On the Sunday Penny and I were at Lord's in a packed house for a slightly anti-climactic and one-sided Australian victory in the one-day match. Australia won the series 6-1. It was nice to see Brett Lee back and we sat in reserved seats where I met a disarmingly keen prep-school cricketer called Toby who asked me all sorts of tricky questions. I later sent him my book on Denis Compton.

I found all this salutary not least because it was so unlike life in Cornwall. Cornwall is fantastic and I love it but it IS rural and, in a way, remote. In a number of ways it is every bit as sophisticated as the metropolis but we don't do state-of-the-art South Indian vegetarians, or international cricket. We do have some goodish theatre but we can't match the National and we certainly can't do so on a day-to-day basis. Kneehigh Theatre, the native Cornish theatre company, is world-class but seem to be relatively unappreciated here.

All of which is a way of saying that much though I love living in Cornwall and having a view of the Fowey estuary and being able to walk out on to the cliffs without having to get in a car and drive anywhere I do need a fix of town-life from time to time. That's not at all the same as saying I want to live in London. Done that, been there and I don't fancy the constant hassle, noise, dirt and, my dear, the people. When I did live in town I was pretty happy spending time there and only fairly occasionally venturing out to the countryside though I confess that for most of my time in London I lived near Richmond Park and the river. Latterly I lived so close to Palewell Common that one could walk out of the back gate, in to the common and be in Richmond Park in moments, so it wasn't very urban living.

I know people in Fowey who haven't been to London in years and don't even venture across the Tamar.I don't think I could do that. I need a regular fix of the big smoke but I'm more than happy now to reverse the norm and to be based here in the relative wilderness while making occasional forays into what passes for urban sophistication. Perhaps it's a function of age. Maybe it also has something to do with the sophistication of modern communications. In any event I like living down here but I need to be able to go up there from time to time.

On the Monday I had a working lunch with Christopher Braun brother of Thomas whose collected writings we are engaged in putting together. Then, that evening I saw Ion again and by chance. I'd had breakfast with him at Roast in Borough Market. And Tracey, the aspiring writer who we had met at the Australian High Commission, came to the Groucho for a chat before we returned for a jolly dinner with Marcia and friends where I banged on at length about how I longed for curry goat. Wait a mo though. Maybe I had breakfast with Ion on the Tuesday because that was the day I was encumbered with luggage and temporarily lost my credit cards and valuables at Tooting Bec station. In any event I had lunch at the old Brasserie St, Quentin with Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson before heading off to Wiltshire and my Mama where on Wednesday Julia, the daughter of Ma's oldest friend, my Godma who died last year, came to lunch and the following day I drove Ma over to Anne and Anthony Johnston's for tea before heading back to London where we had lunch with Shakey from Hong Kong and went to see David Fellows, the lawyer, to discuss wills before I met Emma Hartley from the Telegraph to discuss royal blogging.

And on the Saturday there was another ODI at Lord's, won again by Australia quite easily, with Ricky Ponting back from a break in Australia and then supper with the Australian High Commissioner, John Dauth, whom I had known in an earlier life when he was seconded to the Royal Family with the job of looking after Prince Charles and the press.

So all in all that was quite a busy week and it's not altogether surprising that I can't remember whether I had breakfast with Ion on the Monday or the Tuesday. Not over yet though. On the Sunday Marcia, Penny and I drove to Paddington, put Penny on a train back to Cornwall, went home and read the Sunday papers before venturing out to the neighbours for delicious curry goat (they had taken me at my word!). The first half of the week included a working lunch with one editor, John Nicoll, to discuss the Richard Cobb letters; another working lunch with another editor this time from the Mail on Sunday; a party given by a former Jardine bigwig from Hong Kong; another brilliant Tooting curry with my son Tristram and Beth; a book launch at the Garrick for my friend Ion Trewin's biography of Alan Clark; and so late to my Ma's;a hair cut at Odette; the first ever annual Guild of Speechwriters' conference in Bournemouth; a very old friend of the family from Vienna days for a cup of tea and finally on Sunday home allegedly by train but actually because it was Sunday partly by a trundling bus through much of West Somerset and East Devon on account of the traditional Engineering works.

Back home I should have put my feet up but there was a piece about Willy Shawcross and his new book on the Queen Mum for the Lady who also asked me to become their Royal Correspondent; much blogging for the Telegraph made more difficult by having to grapple with new IT challenges; reviews for the Tablet; plans for my workshop in Antwerp; lunch for ten held, thanks to a lovely Indian summer, out of doors and overlooking Fowey harbour; this diary/blog; bits of books and now I am tapping away at the keyboard while keeping one eye on the screen which is showing England against Australia at cricket yet again, though this time in South Africa.

So, gentle reader, behold an old man in a hurry. Now we have something approaching a respite before heading off across the Tamar again on Wednesday. I wouldn't have it any other way and I think I much prefer to be based in darkest Cornwall with forays up country. Much better that than the other way round.

I think.

Up to a point.

Perhaps.

Anyway, carpe direm, scribble, scribble, hurry, hurry...

To seethe or not to seethe

2009-09-01T18:30:40Z

One of the many problems of the internet - though I don't fully understand the connection - is the growth in anonymous bile. I quite understand that if you write you place yourself in the firing line and become a potential victim of abuse. Reviewers can be extremely rude and I write as a some-time reviewer. On one occasion J.B. Priestley tried to get me fired from the Daily Telegraph team. He failed; I was right; but I was quite rude. Basically I have no problem with signed articles and reviews or opinions expressed by audible or visible people who have an identity. I am enjoying the spat between "Lord" Sugar and Quentin Letts - I am very definitely in the Letts camp on this one and one of the reasons I am on his side is that he was rude under his own name. I have no sympathy with people, usually, on the net who are vituperative but hide under a pseudonym.

There is an odd paradox here because when I started in journalism the first person pronoun was at a premium and you were expected to report "facts" as if they were objective. "I" was not allowed to intrude. This was difficult, possibly impossible, but the point is that we had to try to be as dispassionate as possible in what we reported and to tell it as it was. This is now, quite dramatically, not the case. Everything is about "personality" and the writer intrudes in a way that would not have been countenanced in the dim and distant.

Anyway I resent the idiotic bile served up under a cloak of anonymity that sometimes appears on the net. I know that what I write is not necessarily to everyone's taste but I have qualifications of various pretty unassailable kinds and whatever one thinks of publishers one has to go through a variety of professional qualifications before getting published. I don't really see why I should have to be vilified by people who don't even have the guts to say who they really are. Also let's be real about this. I know that my books reach a certain sort of professional standard. They are literate, well-researched and generally adequate. If a reader doesn't like one of them that's their privilege (or Problem) but don't tell me they are illiterate or ungrammatical or ill-researched. And don't skulk behind a made-up name. At least have the courage of your apparent convictions.

I suppose it is tempting to use the opportunities presented by the web to have an intemperate rant at anyone who appears to be more privileged than you but the extent of this secret anger is, to me, perplexing and worrying. I remember Lady Antonia in her period as Chairman of the Crime Writers Association, looking around at her apparently beaming and friendly members and telling me not to be fooled. Under that smiling and affable exterior there was a collective seethe. I am not sure I believed her at the time but I begin to think that she was right and not just in the limited context of the CWA. There seems to be an awful lot of pent-up anger in the world. And much of it is expressed in anonymous "reviews" on the internet. I think you have somehow to ignore these when they are directed at you but it isn't always easy.

I find it bothering not just because I don't enjoy being vilified but because I am depressed to feel that so many people are apparently nursing such furious resentments. Still, I suppose it's better to vent them on Amazon or Tripadviser than to cause actual bodily harm. It's still unnerving though.

End of grump.. The highlights of the month have probably been the charity cricket match between "my" team and the Cornish Crusaders and Regatta Week and the visit of the Red Arrows RAF aerobatic team. I also attended a Driver Awareness session in Dorset. And worked away on my books about Jardine in India and the collected letters of Richard Cobb. England have won the Ashes and I watched on TV. Now a busy month looms with a lot of London and I feel oddly flat.

We raised about £500 for Marie Curie. Interesting in that it was less than half of what we got last year and we had a full day of cricket whereas last year we were rained out.and got about £1100. It was extraordinarily difficult getting a team together and the ground , while beautiful, seemed to have deteriorated in some important respects. The sightscreens were dilapidated, the nets had vanished and there was no paper in the ladies' loo. The Crusaders won comfortably and boasted one batsman and at least one bowler who seemed too good. More to the point we only had two players from the club teams.

There is obviously much to do before the Salamanca Band arrive with an Army team on behalf of the Army Benevolent Fund next year. I am keen to build up a modest programme of charity matches against the likes of the Crusaders and the Choughs but there is no financial reward and there are a lot of people who say I shouldn't even try. That, unfortunately, isn't my style. We had to admit defeat over the Real Tennis Court for Cornwall which I still think is a terrific idea. Likewise successful charity cricket matches at the Fowey Club. Watch this space!

And so to Regatta Week with the Red Arrows performing on the Thursday and a rather scary lunch with all our male guests being serious yachties who had sailed single-handed across the Atlantic three times (Mervyn) or done innumerable Fastnets (Geoff). I, needless to say, was terrified, being a total dry-bob and not knowing port from starboard and having no idea whatsoever about how or when to scandalise the mainsail. Anyway everyone seemed wonderfully tolerant and although the rain came just as the Red Arrows appeared we got a spectacular rainbow with photographs of ditto in all the national papers. Also an impressive V formation fly past by Canada geese who were as impressively disciplined in their way as the boys (and one girl) in blue. It all made me think of Richard Cobb who loathed the RAF and particularly Hillary with whom he was at school and Cheshire who was a Merton contemporary at Oxford.

I transcribed endless letters of Richard's. amalgamated them, and then edited mercilessly. Well, it seemed merciless to me. The idea is to concentrate on his letters to Hugh Trevor-Roper but to include the best of the rest. The working title (rather good though I say it myself) is "My dear Hugh" and I have just sent off a draft to John Nicoll, the publisher. Fingers crossed. I really feel we have a book now and potentially a very good one. In a better world it might even be a best-seller but (he says bitterly) I am no chef nor super-model and only celebrities sell books. Richard was many things but not a celebrity!

Anyway we shall see. I am amazed by the volume of his correspondence never mind the quality, which is remarkable. It's a cliché to say that no-one writes letters today but I'm afraid it is nonetheless true for being a cliché. Richard and his contemporaries wrote long and very entertaining letters and I think someone like Richard (not that there was anyone quite like him as he was sui generis) was among the last of the great letter writers. Diarists are different and bloggers are a new phenomenon but letter writers seem to me a dying breed.

Likewise cricketers such as Douglas Jardine. I have promised Metheun they will have a finished book about his tour of India bu the end of October so that they can publish next year. I will keep my word.

I was at all five days of the Lord's Test and I am going to be at the two Lord's ODIs. I was absorbed by the wonderful Test and I hope to be greatly entertained by the two games to come but I agree with Mike Atherton who said the other day that the advent of the helmet had changed the game more than anything else. The other day at the charity cricket our captain batted in a cap - all right it was an Eton Rambler cap, but there is no doubt that the protective headgear makes a huge difference. Peter Lever, the ex England fast bowler, came to our game (he now lives at Okehampton). It was he who once felled the New Zealand number eleven with a bumper and was terrified that he had killed him.. I remember listening to Denis Compton talk about being knocked over by Ray Lindwall, having stitches in the wound and coming out to bat again. He went on to make a huge hundred but the point is that at the back of one's mind in pre-helmet days there was real fear. You really did feel you might be killed. That's gone and there's no doubt the world is different.

Same with letter-writing and, the internet, and the anonymous bile that appears to go with it. The world is a different place and many of the changes are also improvements. Not all, however. In some ways it is a nastier, more threatening place and we should be allowed to say so. Yes yes. We are all living longer and are better off but a world in which we don't write letters, in which we play games in protective clothing and have a licence to be anonymously angry is not necessarily better than the world we have lost.

End of lesson. Tomorrow I head for London to be interviewed about film from the 1950s. It depicts a lost world that seems in many respects absurd. The movie was sent to me on a DVD but my laptop can't decode it and all the efforts of my tame, university qualified expert, have failed to make it accessible. There is a moral here. Plus ca change...but that's not quite it. More like two steps forward, one step back. But that's not right either.

I think that for me the most interesting fact is that as one's life stretches out one realises that all change is not necessarily for the better; but one cannot possibly say so because to complain is to show one's age. And above all, one mustn't be seen to seethe. You must grin, you must bear it, you must maintain a stiff upper lip. At all times and at all costs. But part of me regrets the past and wants to seethe even as I smile.

Two cricket matches, a medal ceremony and a wedding

2009-08-03T13:27:06Z

Four potentially memorable events and three triumphs with one failure brought on by God and foul weather. That's pretty good, particularly given that two of the successes took place out of doors and were therefore susceptible to rain. For the most part, however, God was kind and the rain didn't fall. It did last Wednesday. In fact it was coming down so hard that it bounced back up as if we were in the tropics. If the doom-mongers are right that's where climate change is taking us anyway so this was just a taste of things to come.

Anyway the cricket match here in Fowey was rained off and we are going to try to reschedule it for later in the season. It's a bore in all sorts of ways not least because one of my star players was Tom Kendall's son, James, who played at Bradfield and Durham University and was obviously good. Quite by chance I sat next to Tom one day at Lord's. More of that later. Anyway, it bucketed down and we called it off. I phoned or e-mailed as many people as I could think of and went up to the pavilion and stuck up a couple of notices. The main bore in a way was the raffle which was good - a night at the Marina, a painting by Charles' wife, a package from Tim Smit including a family ticket for Eden, a signed book by Rick Stein, two by me (Denis Compton and Village Cricket). For Marie Curie we have some of the same but also a coupon from the Old Quay House, a terrific print of a lion from David Parry. So fingers crossed for third time lucky and booze, BBQ, PA system and, of course the team. On the one hand the Cornish Crusaders and I definitely have James Turpin of this parish and Phil Johns, once a demon fast bowler for Cornwall and now of the HSBC. But watch this space...

The first of the triumphs was the presentation of my father's medals and other stuff to the Regimental Museum at the Keep in Dorchester. He had a CVO,DSO, MBE, and MC plus campaign medals, though typically one of the latter turned out to be missing. John and Lizzie Wilsey came, and John accepted the gongs. In public life they are General Sir John and Lady Wilsey which sounds amazingly grand. We also had Dick Hargreaves who is a sprightly ninety and had known my father in Greece in 1945 when he, Dick, was Brigade Major with the Paras and my father was 2 1/c of the 2^nd Battalion, Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry. After the war Dick became a Director of the Savoy Group and the two of them had lunch together in the hotel quite often. When I mentioned this to Kits Browning, he said that "everyone" was a Director of the Savoy Group and his father, who belonged to this club, used to walk across the park from Buckingham Palace or Clarence House and lunch at the Berkeley which was his particular favourite and also part of the group. Anyhow we all thought the Museum was terrific, the chaps in charge had been to a lot of trouble to make us feel welcome and well fed and watered, and generally speaking everyone, at least on the Heald side, left with a warm glow. It was a particular hit with the two small great-grandsons from Miami (and they with everyone else). When the medals have been rehung and the missing CVO (mislaid in a motel on an American trip!) I will take my mother over on a quiet, private visit. She was pleased by what we reported when we all got back to the Malt House but felt too iffy about actually attending.

From this I went up to London in time for a party at the Australian High Commission on Tuesday evening. John Dauth, the High Commissioner, and Ricky Ponting both spoke (amusingly) and we chatted to both. As Penny says, Ricky will remember every word!! And so, on Thursday, to Lord's for the Test. The first day of an England versus Australia Test at Lord's is one of those stunning moments no matter what. I missed my brother James who would normally have been there but, alas, stabs of nostalgia such as this, are increasingly part of life. I thought of Denis Compton and Brian Johsnton, whose lives I write, and who were utterly linked to this place and felt sad but the present was wonderful too. I bumped into Charlie Collingwood and we stood for a while inside the Grace gates waiting for our wives while the world and his wife came past. There was Ronnie Harwood and David and Sylva Marchwood - Charlie and Sylva both opened the bowling for their respective Sherborne schools. Eventually Penny turned up and we somehow managed to find seats in the top of the Tavern Stand. Strauss and Cook had a big opening stand, the Australians bowled like drains but they bounced back and one of the things that helped make the match such fun was the result was in doubt until the final morning. They may not be the best sides in the world but they are competitive.

After that I went on every day and it all merges into an agreeable blur made even more pleasurable by the fact that that England won after a fantastic final morning with Freddie Flintoff firing on all cylinders and the last five Australian wickets falling before lunch. In between there was much to savour. The Lord's Test is the prefect combination, as far as I'm concerned, of the social and the sporting. I was on my own on the Friday; with Penny on the Thursday and Saturday; with Alexander and Tristram on the Sunday and with Geoff Trew on the Monday morning. I wouldn't have missed it for anything. There was a lot wrong with the "organization!, unfortunately. At least one member I know went home and watched on TV because he couldn't find a viewpoint at the ground. Charlie Collingwood joined the queue at just after seven but his wife wasn't able to get in to the ground until after ten. There is much evidence of corporate greed, of overcrowding, of a general failure to understand the complicated often contrary equation of private club and public arena. Despite this it was a privilege to be there and I hugely enjoyed it.

And so, the following weekend to the final jolly of the trio, which was the wedding of Tristram, the youngest of my children and Beth, his long-term partner, at Hampton Court. There was no rain; bride and groom looked suitably radiant; all four children were present; ceremony went without hitch - even though the driver lost the bride and her father on the way -, speeches were exemplary; and we ended with a thoroughly satisfactory voyage to Richmond and back on the good ship Yarmouth Belle. The only snag was that as we docked at midnight Penny decided to make a speedy get away and was the only person standing as we docked. This manoeuvre was not executed the way Tosh does it on the Fowey Ferry and there was a significant clunk which sent Penny flying through the air and led via excellent and sympathetic medical students and paramedics, to an expensive taxi back into central London, and a visit to Dr. Cockshott. He said there was nothing broken but all the connective tissues were torn , there would be extensive bruising, a sling would be a good idea and Penny wouldn't be right for months rather than weeks. Since then there has been a lot of moaning and yelping.

By and large though we had a wonderful Test, a wonderful wedding and a wonderful medal ceremony. Pity about the charity cricket but three out of four represents a more than acceptable strike rate.

Today as I write this it is overcast, gray and rainy outside, I am transcribing Richard Cobb's letters to Hugh Trevor-Roper - time-consuming but necessary; fingers are crossed for the next charity match against the Cornish Crusaders on Sunday August 16^th in aid of Marie Curie.Next week I take the train to Wiltshire to see Mama, there are emails, Australia look as if they are going to make a draw of the match at Edgbaston, and life is almost back to normal. Flintoff is coming back on. It's the last gasp. 61 overs left. A china clay ship has just chugged in to harbour. I must phone Boxclever and hope there is someone there to answer the phone. Clarke is thirty two not out. The lead is ninety...What about Swan going over the wicket?

Of cricket, Brillopads and the meaning of life

2009-07-05T09:47:54Z

Over the last few weeks I have been sending out the following letter in my exalted capacity as President of the Fowey Cricket Club:

"This is just to let you know that we are planning two charity cricket matches here this summer.

The first is set for Wednesday July 29^th and will be the President of Fowey's XI v the Cornish Choughs. This one will be in aid of the Cornish Association for the Blind.

The second is to take place on Sunday August 16^th and will be the President of Fowey's XI v the Cornish Crusaders. This will be in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care. This is at the very beginning of Regatta Week.

We'd love to see you at either or both of these games. Admission this year is free. We hope to open around noon and start play at 2pm continuing till we have a result which we hope will be about 7pm. We're hoping to have a BBQ, drinks and music before play and a really interesting raffle during the (cream!) tea break. Last year, incidentally, we managed to raise over £1100 for Marie Curie without a ball being bowled. (I have a ghastly vision of managing a game this year but raising less money).

That's it really. There should be more, regular info on various web-sites, in the press and so on. I'd love to see you but if you can't make it a cheque to either or each charity would be great."

It's raining as I look out across the river and I am filled with dread that our games will be rained on. On TV I have just been watching a singularly unconvincing schools minister saying that all school leavers who want to will be able to attend university and the experience will be affordable and meaningful. Now a reporter is talking about BT's new scheme to lay off workers on a temporary basis on massively reduced wages. I think of last week when I rang a BT line and spent several minutes answering auomatically generated questions (recorded queries which are apparently not the fault of an identifiable person). At the end of a series of absurd games involving multiple choice - "If you require X press one; if you require Y press two..." and so on, I was given a new phone number to call. I eventually got a human being who spent an age asking me to unplug everything and take it to bits. In the end I gave up and fled to a meeting for which I was now running late.

So yes I seem to have become quintessentially grumpy and I feel I am assailed at almost every turn by incompetence masquerading as new, high, cutting-edge technology. Meanwhile I am sending out old fashioned letters about old-fashioned cricket matches. Rather fun actually. The idea of raising money for worthwhile causes while doing something enjoyable seems excellent.

Mind you, it doesn't just happen. This morning I had a session with Charles Whitehead, a keen cricket man, and the treasurer of the Blind. He had had some eye-catching posters printed and I said I would try to distribute them round town; I think and hope Matty will do the drink and Daniel the BBQ; Charles' wife and friends will do tea with help from Penny; the raffle looks in good shape; do we have a public address system? And so on. I rather enjoy it all but I suppose I should be working on books and/ or reviews- or even, heaven forfend, putting my feet up. I must email Mark Bennetts, the secretary of the club; we need a scorer and two umpires; and balls. As, I say, it doesn't just happen, but it's very rewarding to help MAKE it happen.We think we have covered all the bases but, alas, God can easily get in the way: rain, sprained ankles are obvious unpredictables but there are others. I don't know what they are but I'm pretty sure I will find out.

Last week I was at the Malt House visiting my aged Mama. On Monday we drove over to Wells Cathedral to see the place my brother loved so much and to have a brief word with his friend, the Precentor Patrick Woodhouse. It was a hot day and my Ma found it physically gruelling as well as mentally traumatic. She is, as she reminds me, from time to time, very old (88) and still living on her own in her own house. This is made possible by squads of well-disposed paid and unpaid helpers but there are as many unpredictables as there are in organizing charity cricket matches. I was reminded of this when she asked if I could get some Brillopads when I went shopping. The terrific village shop in Ludwell was able to provide a pack of these things which strike me as dated in the same way as Brylcreem or Grapenuts. I associate the, wrongly obviously, with the fifties.For the uninitiated they are wire-wool briquettes impregnated with some kind of soap. I paid cash while also buying some food for our lunch but I didn't ask for a receipt. I was suddenly reminded of the furore over MP's expenses and the fuss over moat-cleaning, duck-house purchase and so on. "MP claims for Brillopads", I fantasized, "No receipts provided." I know this is silly but I can't help feeling that much of this long-running story is also fantastically silly and possibly wholly unfair. There but for the grace of God go me and my Mum's Brillopads.

I also saw the accountant on my visit East of the Tamar. This was, as always, personally agreeable but professionally chastening. We didn't get down to as much detail as Brillopads though I did have to explain some expenses from the Scottish cricket association as well as what exactly I was doing in some foreign part on a now distant and half-forgotten day. More worryingly I was told how much I had earned in the past year and despite feeling that I had been working harder than ever I discovered, as I had feared, that my income was significantly lower than it had been in earlier years. I'm afraid this is a not uncommon experience in these difficult times. It was still salutary though and none the less for being, I suspect, quite widespread. Interesting. If you are going to hell in a handcart does it make any difference if the handcart is packed with other people? Is it hell that one dreads - or loneliness? Discuss.

Enough of such maudlin thoughts. I got a letter from the Biographical Centre in whichever Carolina does these things and the welcome news is that I have been awarded a Gold Medal for Wales. I don't really understand this. Gold Medals, well, why not? But Wales? I have no Welsh blood despite my mother's maiden name (Vaughan). Some of my best friends are Welsh but even so.

And cricket. Not just the charity stuff which is likely to prove nerve-wracking, but an Ashes Test Match at Lord's. Bliss. I am still a member of MCC and I will go every day. I shall take Penny on the first day and the Saturday. I shall take my two sons on the Sunday and my friend Geoff on the final day. Oh frabjous days! Maybe we'll even win. Do I care? Not as much as perhaps I should. England's best player is a South African which diminishes any pleasure I might get from an "English" victory though it might improve the occasion and particularly the play. My daughters are coming over from the USA and New Zealand. A son is getting married at the end of the month. In circumstances such as these how can one be concerned about Brillopads?

Meanwhile I intend to go to the International Crime Writers Conference in Oklahoma next June; and before that I have been asked to speak in such elusive but alluring sounding places as Savannah and Chatanooga. This prospect reduces the spectre of Brillopads even more. There is a lot to be glum about but even more reason for congratulating oneself on one's luck.

Dreams & Delusions

2009-06-08T13:10:53Z

I don't dream much or if I do I don't remember them but the other night I dreamt I was back on a national paper, probably the old broadsheet Daily Express and I was instructed by the features editor to go to some high street somewhere and investigate a new pub which had just opened. It was called the Obama.

I don't know whether or not it replaced The Garibaldi or the Duke of York and I'm afraid I woke up before I got there but it was interestingly vivid and set me thinking in all sorts of ways. First of all, of course, there is, as far as I know, no such pub. I think this is a pity because the name has a certain resonance about it and I like the idea of saying to someone. "See you in the snug at the Obama for just the one" or something similar.

Anyway it was just a dream and as far as I know there is no pub opening called the Obama. On the whole, in real life, it seems pubs are closing, and for a variety of reasons this particular aspect of our national life is diminishing. If there were to be such a pub-opening the Daily Express wouldn't have any feature writers to go out and report on it. Nor any reporters. The days when the editor, Derek Marks, said "There is no finer thing for a man to be than a reporter on the Daily Express" (note the sexism also unacceptable today) are long gone. Today's papers would have endless commentators ready to tell us what to think about the Obama. But no-one to tell us what was actually happening on the spot. Of this I was reminded by the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Guardian's media page which looked back on the quaint 1980s when there were hardly any columnists and papers wasted a lot of time on reporting something called news. Nowadays a PR agency would issue a press release and that would be the basis of the column.

As I said, it was just a dream and I am certainly not going to say that newspapers were better in the old days. On the other hand they were very different. Very different. Likewise life. I am certainly not going to fall into the trap of shaking my head and saying in a fogeyish way that the old days were better but no-one can deny they were not the same. I am told, incidentally, by Simon Hoggart in my paper, that the minute I am tempted to say that the old days were better I should say the single word "dentistry". To which I would only respond that in the last year or so I have twice had excruciating tooth-ache but can't remember having such a thing in the past. Age, I suppose, but I'm not so convinced that dentistry has improved as much as Simon would have us believe.

I suppose I don't need dreams to convince myself or anyone else that everything has changed. Life is not the same. Everything is different. Even dentistry. This is a given, although I think the pace of change has been extraordinarily fast recently. I'm more intrigued by the question of whether or not life has improved. Age naturally makes us conservative because we are nervous of unfamiliarity and we become increasingly bad at dealing with innovation. Novelty tends to perplex us. I didn't particularly like nor sympathise with the pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed, essentially male dominated, deferential, unquestioning world in which I grew up, but it IS the world in which I grew up and if only for that reason I feel/felt comfortable with it. The food was revolting, the religion-filled but otherwise empty Sunday was pretty grim, the pervasive attitudes were smug and old-fashioned but they were what I was used to and for that reason I felt and feel safe with them.

Anyway I had this dream. Much more mundane than Martin Luther King's but, in a way, more interesting. Quite apart from all the other issues raised I am simply not aware of a pub called The Obama. I think there should be such a thing. I'd like to see it debated. In my dreams...

In real life I suppose the most interesting achievement was seeing a double-page spread under my bye-line in the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph. It was about Donna Leon, the American crime novelist I interviewed in Venice. I also had an obit of Hugh van Es in the Guardian. And a book review in the Tablet. And I think we're going to do Richard Cobb's letters to Hugh Trevor-Roper as a single volume; and I plug on with Jardine and with Tom Braun. I am determined to see the return of Bognor in hard covers. So busy, busy, but in a slightly depressing way my heart isn't in it as much as it was. I would like to say it's because I think the contemporary conventional media has lost the plot. This, I am told, I must not say even if I believe it to be true.

Earlier this week I took the train up to Wiltshire to see my Mama, oversee the delivery of the "new" car and generally take stock. On the way home I thought, somewhere around Newton Abbot at about 6.30 pm that I might have a glass of wine and a peanut or two. I was travelling on a Cross Country train from Glasgow and there was no announcement about catering. However I asked the "train manager" if there was a buffet on board and he smiled sweetly and said it was in the next coach. I walked through and was confronted by locked doors. However my new friend was close behind so he got out his keys and opened up to reveal a rather sheepish individual who was taking stock or whatever but in any case closing down. I asked if they would be re-opening and was told, rather truculently I thought, that they no longer provided food and drink in Cornwall.

This seemed a powerful metaphor for our condition. No food and drink in Cornwall. There is a widespread school of metropolitan thought that believes that Cornwall is beyond civilization and doesn't DESERVE food and drink. This is sometimes echoed by the Cornish. When I mentioned my dispiriting experience to one local he said 'Good'. As far as he was concerned the more cut off we are the better.

For me, of course, it's slightly different. I need to work and counter the idea that because I live in Cornwall it doesn't mean that I am dead or retired. This is a depressingly widespread assumption and even people who have lived here and are well-disposed emphasise the problems. In fact it is possible to go to and from London quite cheaply by train and the sleeper leaves at midnight and gets in, in time for breakfast. There is also the usual problem with people who have regular and predictable incomes. Someone actually said that I should be rigorous about London visits and not go unless the resulting income doesn't at least match the outgoings. However, as only freelances really understand, it doesn't work like that. For instance I have just received invitations to the AGM and summer party of the Royal Society of Literature and a books and arts party from the Editor of the Tablet. Neither will guarantee income but I really ought to show my face. Conversely if I don't go there will be those who shrug and say that I am retired or dead as I obviously live in Cornwall and don't cross the Tamar. Which I'm afraid is why so many people live in or much nearer London.

Anyway this morning I walked down to Readymoney Cove, up through the woods and along the cliffs. It was a beautiful sunny day, sky was blue, sea likewise and all in all another timely reminder of why one lives in Cornwall and why one is lucky to do so. Then on Bank Holiday, Penny and I went to Plymouth and sailed out into the sound on a rackety old ferry (well she FELT like a rackety old ferry even if she was at the cutting edge of ferrydom) in order to see off Mervyn Wheatley and his fellow-competitors on the Solo Transatlantic Yacht Race to Newport, Rhode Island. Mervyn and I once shared a study at school and here we were half a century on in our respective vessels on Plymouth Sound, attended by the Duke of Edinburgh no less, and celebrating an exercise of sublime pointlessness. I confess I was consumed with admiration. I remember Mervyn boxing for the school. He admitted the other day that he had never actually won a match, though he had never lost one either. His technique was simple. He simply stood in the ring and looked terrifying. His opponent danced around in a poncey way ducking and weaving while Mervyn remained motionless. If someone was foolish enough to get within range he hit them and they fell over. Few were that stupid.

I mentioned this to a fellow passenger on the boat who gave the impression that he had served in the Royal Marines with Mervyn and he looked thoughtful and said he got the impression that Mervyn could still look after himself. Indeed he did, standing at the back of his yacht, much as he done in the school boxing ring all those years ago as the band played Colonel Bogey on his loudspeaker system. He has a bath on his yacht - a fact I noted with further admiration. Anyway the whole apparition and in particular my one-time study-mate filled me with ludicrous pride and elation.

Daft bugger, but rather magnificent.

Not enough of that around these days of MP's expenses and credit crunch. I am delighted to say that in mid-October, however, I will be delivering a long paper on crime writing at the University of Antwerp. I am much looking forward to it, indeed I regard the challenge as rather wonderful and my equivalent, in its much quieter but perhaps more cerebral way, of taking part in the single-handed transatlantic sailing race. The prospect cheers me up no end. Life in the old thing yet, carpe diem and all that. As the CO said in Beyond the Fringe , we need gestures like this.

Futile maybe, but essential, admirable and above all enormous fun.

Hello Flowers!

2009-05-04T10:31:56Z

The woods on my walk the other day were an absolute riot of primroses, bluebells and wild garlic and made my feel positively fotherington-thomas-like. Hello flowers, hello, sun, hello spring! I don't know really why one bothers to go anywhere else especially at this time of year when everything except the morning paper seems to be full of blossom and hope. The organic vegetable people who send us boxes of delicious, muddy food, say that this is a better-than-usual spring but they have also just acquired a French farm in order to bridge the apparently usual six week hiatus in the British organic vedgie scene. This comes around now and represents the gap between the last of year's sowing and the first of next. Real-life green shoots all round and maybe it's OK to feel a bit like fotherington-thomas.

I spent a week of the most glorious weather in the beautiful city of Oxford which was looking particularly resplendent - all glowing burnished yellow walls and luscious green lawns. Unfortunately, however, much of my time was passed in libraries of one sort or another. These, while admirable in their way, are not the most appropriate places to while away some of the few bright days of the British year. My main objectives were the letters of my friend and former tutor Richard Cobb. At their best these are wonderful. My favourites on this visit were ones in the Merton College Library to two other historians of the French Revolution, John Roberts who was Warden of Merton (and once when Master of the Postmasters at a party of his threw me over his shoulder when I questioned his qualifications for a Judo black belt) and John Bromley, who was Roberts' tutor at Keble College. John Roberts is dead now but has written a glowing encomium about the Bromley papers. My favourites among these caches were a short one recalling the visit of Cosmo Gordon Lang when college visitor and Archbishop of Canterbury - the two go together! - which he wrote to John Roberts and two to Bromley, one describing Richard's first visit to India, which he adored, and the other about a stay in a public ward at the Royal Free Hospital following an alcohol-assisted fall and limb breakage. All three are, I believe, classics.

My other task was to meet Thomas/Tom Braun's brother, Christopher, to further our plans for a collection of T's writings, particularly his verses, some of which appeared in the Oxford Magazine. These too are wonderful. The light stuff strikes me as similar and just as good as A.P. Herbert and the translations particularly from German and Greek strike me as very fine and, of course, a lot more serious. I was very fond of the writer, who died tragically after a car crash last year, as well as being in some awe of his erudition and scholarship. He could evidently be an uncomfortable colleague - he was a Fellow of Merton College for most of his adult life - and sadly never published a book, but he always struck me as being a quintessential Oxbridge don of the very best sort. I fear people like him, if there are any, are going to become the victims of progress and efficiency. But then I have just been reading the autobiography of a Corinthian scholar and cricketer, R.C. Robertson-Glasgow who expressed similar apprehensions more than six decades ago. I suspect elderly fuddy-duddies have been similarly worried for centuries and mercifully the fears are never entirely realized.

I was, however, depressed to read a piece in Saturday's Guardian by Ian Jack saying, in effect, that the days of the professional writer were over. According to him it had been a relatively short period in any case and historically authors were amateurs or at least part-time professionals. Nowadays the internet (and blogs such as this) are the prerogative of all and the days when people like him and me could base their whole lives on writing are over.

I was reminded of a piece I wrote about Bristol in the Spectator a few months ago. I recalled that in the 1970s my father's last job was working with WD and HO Wills, the Bristol based tobacco company. They were immense and apparently indestructible. Now, however, although they still pay my mother a pension from their Imperial Tobacco office people in England have virtually kicked the smoking habit and the firm which once permeated the whole of Bristol society has ceased to exist in any recognizable sense. A few decades earlier my mother's family owned a company based in the small Somerset town of Martock - maybe it's a large village, I'm not sure. Then quite suddenly people in this country stopped wearing gloves. The company no longer exists.

At the time of my father's death I had just left the Daily Express and had my first book published by Hutchinson. Both the paper and the publisher still exist but they have changed beyond real recognition and Ian Jack is writing an article saying that the trade or profession that I entered all those years ago as an optimistic young graduate has in effect become no longer cable of supporting life.

Well, I suppose life changes all the time and this is part of its appeal. It is extraordinary, however, that my family have been intimately involved in three facets of British life that have declined so absolutely. Glove-wearing, and smoking cigarettes, and producing words on paper have all gone, are going or, depending on one's point of view, about to go. It is also a fact of life, I believe, that as one gets older one is less comfortable with change and unfamiliarity. So I feel uneasy and threatened for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the alleged credit crunch or pig flu.

Looking back over the last month I see that it began with a few days in London, a coffee with the re-incarnated books supreme at the Daily Telegraph, a tour of Godolphin House with the local branch of the Art Fund and a visit from friends from Australia. I am keen to make a little pilgrimage in my father's foot-steps during World War Two when he won a Military Cross in the landings at Salerno and fought his way up Italy until being halted on the Gothic Line where he won an immediate Distinguished Service Order. Life was rather different then and maybe one shouldn't look back to distant days. I feel, however, that this is something that should be done. I have started planning; have a reading list; am talking to Raleigh Trevelyan who was at Anzio where my uncle was killed and who wrote about it all; am about to write to Professor Amedeo Montemaggi, the leading authority on the battles of those days. And so on.

So watch this space.

Meanwhile I shall go for a walk and enjoy the wild garlic and the wrong sort of blue-bell which looks, from a distance, much the same as the right sort, and has the desired effect of lifting the spirits no end.

And Krystian Zimerman is playing Schubert as I type.

Life can't be wholly horrible.

Outside, yachts are sailing out to sea and inside I shall now proceed to the relevant web-site and try to post this blog.

Grass Grows Greener in the Veneto

2009-04-08T08:13:11Z

I was going to do a Carpe Diem piece about being in Verona, noticing that a production of "La Traviata" was coming up, booking a couple of cheap seats in the Gods and thanking our lucky stars, God or whatever. However when we came back a week later and checked in to our (cheap!) hotel the clerk met us with a solemn face and said that the production had been cancelled owing to a national strike. Well, only in Italy, could an evening of pleasure be cancelled because of a national opera strike but nonetheless it was a warning of a different sort: making plans is God's invitation to practical jokes. Or something.

Anyway we went and had an expensive meal instead and I felt suitably chastised. I have to say, incidentally, that when the doleful concierge told us the news Penny immediately burst into tears whereas I'm afraid I laughed. I suppose I'm just punch drunk. Nevertheless whatever one's attempts at making the best of all possible worlds God has a strange habit of moving the goal posts when one is least expecting it. So Carpe Diem makes perfect sense but don't expect to have the same success rate seizing tomorrow, let alone the day after. They may never happen.

One of many enjoyable days in the Veneto was at Sirmione, where Tennyson and Ezra Pound both visited and about which they both wrote. It's a resort on the southernmost tip of Lake Garda and on a Sunday in March sunny, crisp and crowded. We had lunch with Kate, my god-daughter, her husband James and their two small children. Come to think of it Sirmione is probably not, technically, part of the Veneto. Also, God, playing an unexpected hand, caused the cancellation of our train - a trans Europe express to Basel - but I outwitted him by nipping on the next one to Torino instead. It means getting out at Peschiera del Garda rather than Denzeuela or whatever which I rechristened Desdemona but we still made it to Sirmione. Pause for thunderbolt.

Anyway Kate who has lived in Milan for a while wanted some recommendations for places to visit and although I'll send her separate recommendations I thought I'd rehearse the idea here first. Equal first and completely different would be Bassano del Grappa and Padova, aka Padua. I'd never even heard of Bassano which is about an hour by bus from Vicenza where we stayed for the first fortnight and on the main train line from Venice to the Brenner pass. It was here that I ate my first baccala with polenta - a rather elegant variation on a Norwegian salt cod with local maize porridge staple or, as in the posh-ish hotel by the river, the said porridge dried and rolled then grilled. Bassano was also where Penny bought me a ludicrously over-priced but wonderfully authentic black Borsolino hat which goes perfectly with the Magee Donegal tweed overcoat she bought me in Dublin the other year. Old friends and others will be as amused as me by the idea of Heald as a walking sartorial statement but the coat and hat plus the Williams boots, the cords, the tweed jacket well, eat your heart out Teasy-Weasy. No better than that. I actually look almost smart. Great packaging, pity about the product.

But the high spot of Bassano is the bridge, a wonderful, unique wooden edifice with a cover and cobbles, designed by the ubiquitous Palladio. At one end there is a Grappa bar and museum and the other another bar and a museum to the mountain troops or Bersaglieri of whom the locals are very proud but about whom Brits tend to laugh. We disparage them with jokes about North Africa but never, I think, fought them face-to-face on their own terrain in the Dolomites and Italian Alps. They wear large feathers in their hats, sing wonderfully, drink a lot of grappa and have turned the bridge into a personal shrine. Anyway we both loved Bassano and it joins that select band of places where in an ideal world I would like to rent a garret and write a book or two.

Padua is another and much better known story. We decamped from Vicenza for a final week based on the Albergo Verdi which was a nice newly renovated boutique job in the old university quarter marred only the pigeons which began cooing on our window-sill very early in the morning. The other refrain, mercifully confined to non-sleeping hours, was "Dottore...Dottore..." It seemed that a lot of students had graduated recently and there were little groups all over the University area serenading semi-naked people, often covered in foam or soap, and chanting "Dottore...Dottore" in honour of their new qualification.I've heard it said that everyone in Italy is a Dottore.

This was good and there were wonderful things to do and see - notably the Giotto murals in the chapel by the old Roman amphitheatre, the huge hall above the shops in the Piazza de Erbe, the massed angels in the dome of the Duomo Baptistry. As so often I loved the strange and quirky. In the top floor of the museum near the Giottos there is a coin museum, the Bottacin. It leaves me pretty cold but Mr. Bottocin lived in Trieste where he made friends with Maximilian, the Hapsburg who built Miramare and went to be Emperor of Mexico only to be executed by the soldiers of Benito Juarez, a scene inaccurately commemorated in Manet's picture in the National Gallery. All Bottocin's amazing numismatical cabinets are there along with some sad pieces of Maximiliania. There is the hat - a sort of white, feminine Ascot job which he apparently wore on the day of his execution. There is also a lugubrious portrait of a foppish general who was shot at the same time. I also enjoyed seeing Saint Antony's bottom teeth preserved in a chapel in his eponymous basilica. You couldn't help wondering whose teeth they really were. Also why so many people venerated such absurdities and why there were people clutching on to the side of his tomb elsewhere in church and apparently holding intimate conversations with the deceased. Sometimes I really dislike the Church. St. Antony, the city's patron saint, seems to have been a dab hand at rescuing infants from cauldrons of boiling water and sewing on severed limbs. Oh well. I enjoyed the teeth though.

Seriously though Padova , as the city is locally known, struck me, us, as being wonderful, not least because in a tourist sense it is eclipsed by Venice which is very close and full of tourists. Padova seemed not to be and yet it had loads of wonderful things to gawp at.

I went to Venice for one day and interviewed the American crime writer, Donna Leon, who has been setting crime novels in her adopted city for almost two decades. Also present was her friend Toni Sepeda who has written a companion volume of Commissario Brunetti's walks and backs it up with guided pedestrian tours of the city. So after a coffee-fuelled natter I accompanied Toni and two Chicagoannes on an hour or so of chilly trudge past the Guggenheim, down to the Salute and back up the Zattere. Penny and I had lunch in the Antico Dolo, recommended by Richard, my former literary agent and a haunt of Guildo's. I had the tripe. Very good and very typical.Then we stopped for just the one at Saraceno by the Rialto. This is touristy but is also a haunt of Brunetti and of her creator. Penny dropped Donna's name to our waiter which provoked much enthusiasm but no cut in costs. And so back to Padova on the train, feeling like real Italian commuters and rather superior to the tourists stuck in the Serenissima. She is gorgeous but she is over-priced.

And so back to reality. There was a copy of the Tablet with my piece on the trans-Siberian railway, waiting at home. Good old Tablet. It seemed reassuringly literate and intelligent - elitist you might even say - and none the worse for that. I sent my piece on Donna Leon and Venice to the Telegraph and my man there pronounced it "lovely". So that was good.

A day or so later I took the train to Wiltshire to see my old Mum. Coming back we were delayed because of a wipe-out of the signalling system near Taunton. No trains into Cornwall for hours and when there was it was standing room only. I was about to make unfavourable comparisons with Mussolini and trains running on time and then I remembered the morning we had arrived at Vicenza station to find a brusque "Cancellato" against the name of the trans-European express to Basel on which we had booked. So it isn't better in continental Europe.

It just SEEMS better.

Writing wrongs

2009-03-02T18:37:08Z

Visiting Scotland was probably the high spot of the last two weeks. The purpose of the visit was to address the Cricket Society of Scotland's branches in Edinburgh and Glasgow. This occasioned much mirth among my Sassenach friends although my researches in to the life of Douglas Jardine for my Methuen book on his MCC tour of India in 1933/4 suggests that the Scot may have been the best captain England ever had.

We flew up from Exeter by Flybe which was incredibly quick and painless and far cheaper than the train which trundles all the way from Par, ten minutes from home, and ends up in Waverley Station within walking distance of the New Club where we stayed. I don't see how we can possibly reduce carbon emissions and so on when flying is so cheap and convenient and rail travel so uncomfortable and expensive.

Edinburgh was warm and almost balmy compared with the frozen south but that changed on the Sunday night when the snow fell and the city was carpeted in white stuff. As before I was struck by the difference between the two places. We spent the Monday in Glasgow, arriving later than hoped because two trains were cancelled because of unexpected and apparently unaccustomed cold. The first time I visited I was walking down a street when a completely strange woman at a bus-stop handed me the baby she was carrying, lit a fag took two deep sucks and accepted the baby back with a smile and thank-you. Edinburgh by contrast has always seemed polite but even though I understand more of what people say, slightly more distant.

Anyway we saw a lot of old friends in Edinburgh, visited a rather unsatisfactory Jean Muir exhibition in the Museum and went to the wonderful Art Galleries which used to be run by Sir Timothy Clifford whom I remember as a not very impressive member of my platoon struggling across the Mendips during a blizzard while he and a future banker called Jonathan Long tried unsuccessfully to open a tin of spam. As always I was struck by the profusion of beautiful late Georgian or early Victorian terraces, crescents and circuses. How on earth can there be so many elegant residences in such a moderately small city?

The talks both seemed to go fine. The audiences seemed friendly and knowledgeable in both places and in Glasgow we sold so many books that we actually ran out of "Village Cricket" which was gratifying. I have a sort of theory that there is always someone in an audience who knows more about your subject than you do yourself, no matter what it is. My prime example was talking to the scarily erudite Hampshire Cricket Society some years ago and thinking I would give them some Italian cricket as I had just returned from reporting the finals of the Italian six-a-side cricket competition in Cesenatico and I thought that even the HCS would be relatively ignorant about this. They clapped dutifully when I'd finished but the first questioner began his remarks with "When I was keeping wicket for Bologna last year..." Much the same happened in Glasgow. I had said how one wartime England team was the best ever as it had Denis Compton on one wing and Stanley Matthews on the other. One of the audience got up and admitted that it wasn't a bad team but not as good as the Scottish team they played at Hampden Park and which beat them. He added, for good measure, that he knew because he was there. Collapse, in my case of stout party. He was extremely nice about it but I felt suitably deflated, as nearly always, and it just goes to prove my point. Moral; never assume!

The whole brief excursion was a wonderful opportunity to renew old acquaintances of all kinds as well as making new ones. I had a jolly lunch in Glasgow with an ex-Daily Express photographer, and suggested in a vague way, that we should collaborate (presumptuously in my case) on a Glasgow/Edinburgh picture book called "A Tale of Two Cities" which Canongate could publish for a vast fortune. I somehow know it will never happen and that it will be done instead by someone like Ian Rankin or Alexander McCall Smith. Nevertheless it was a very merry lunch and we agreed that we had been very lucky to work together on Fleet Street in the last of the glory days. We then went and looked at the once magnificent Black Lubianka which had once housed the Scottish Daily Express and was just up the road from the Café Gandolfi. It looked abandoned and neglected and we felt both sad and triumphant. Well, I did.

Actually we seem to have been away a lot and I haven't had my nose at the keyboard/grindstone in the way I should. Age and the promise of a pension perhaps. The month began in London immediately after Tom Braun's memorial and a lecture by the Chichele Professor of War in Oxford. As a result I seem to be helping Tom's brother Christopher with a slim volume which should include Tom's brilliantly witty occasional verses. The first Monday of the month I was in Putney and it snowed completely crippling the capital. Even the local cinema was closed. Next day we were stuck for about half an hour on Putney Bridge in a tube but still managed an enjoyable lunch at the Frontline Club with the travel writer, Peter Hughes. We agreed, quaffing wine and contemplating the death of friends and relations, that spending our way out of the recession was the way to go.

After Edinburgh there was a trip to stay with my Mama punctuated in the middle with a weekend in London and an overnight in Swanage to discuss the return of Simon Bognor with the writer, Jeremy Paul. Bognor's return got an airing in the Times, together with my plans for a royal anniversary book, on my birthday in January and I sent Jeremy my newish Bognor short story, Harry's Beard (in honour of the great HRF Keating) and my complete Spain-based novel. It was an enjoyable visit and productive too, I think. The on-dit is that nobody wants crime novels such as my Bognor's return but we both agreed that the on-dit was mistaken and ridiculous. At least I think we did. We shall see but my view, shared I think by Jeremy, is that wit, style and a waspish sense of "contra mundum" are exactly what is needed in these dumbed-down, credit-crunched times.

London was interesting as always. I saw "Doubt" which I enjoyed very much, and the new Woody Allen which I also enjoyed and "Slumdog Millionaire" in which I was disappointed perhaps due in part to the hype. We also tried "Terroirs" and Thomasina Mier's Mexican place in Covent Garden, Wahaca. I thought both were really good. The proprietor at Terroirs had an MBA from Montpellier and was brilliant at dealing with Penny when she sent her Prosecco back because it was cloudy. He brought a new glass without argument but explained that the cloudy glass was perfectly OK but due to the fact that the wine was organic it looked a little murky That was all. In other words he accepted that as the customer she was entitled to change things but that didn't mean to say that he was in any way at fault. Admirable I thought.

The last blog was a bit late being posted because I keep getting it all wrong and the instructions are in my view gratuitously misleading. Apparently I should use "Write Entry" not "Create New Blog". As the computer whiz is in India for six weeks it was difficult to get right though he was able to sort it out from his hammock slung between a couple of palm trees in Kerala or something like that. Then it was back to P.G. Wodehouse. Good for him. Admirably unlike Sir Fred the pension and his fellow garagistes.

The confusion made me wonder not for the first time why I do this blog. The only real answer is that it - or the opportunity - exists, and most people, though not all, seem to quite like it. My own belief (not shared by everyone) is that the more honest the better. And if in the process you seem to be whingeing then tant pis. Which is why I finish by saying that I have complained to as many people as possible because on returning to Tisbury station and paying £9 in parking fees to a ticket office man who was very much not there when I left on Saturday morning I found a parking ticket and a demand for £50. Evidently my explanatory note left on the windscreen counted for nothing; nor the fact that the station was unmanned when I left .

In my letter of protest I said that I thought this was evidence of incompetence and greed. As it happens I believe that these two things are now pervasive and endemic - vide Sir Fred and others. Saying so is evidence of grumpy old mannishness and my chronic pensionability. Bad PR, very. To which I'm inclined to shrug and say that I feel like that and if I feel like that I don't see why I shouldn't say so. I do feel assailled by incompetence and greed and if that makes me a grumpy old man I think I'm grumpy and old enough to say what I like.

Besides which I think I'm right.

End of a Chapter

2009-02-17T03:44:46Z

It would be wrong to suggest that the sudden and totally unexpected death of my younger brother James was anything other than the most significant event of the last few weeks. It was indeed one of the most significant events of life so far and very uncomfortable for all of us especially I would imagine for those of us who claim to be orthodox Christians. It seemed, and still does, to be gratuitously cruel. Bad enough if you think it was an accident of fate, worse still if you have to accept that it was done by God, on purpose.

As I become more and more of an agnostic if not atheist I tend to be more phlegmatic about the bloodiness of life. On the whole actually and with reservations I have to concede that I've been very lucky and privileged but on balance life is pretty unpleasant but why should one expect it to be anything else? I suppose that what one comes back to and what any unexpected and premature death elicits is a sense of "Carpe Diem". Jim got just over sixty years which, in the present British climate, is a pretty good knock. It was good that when I last spoke to him some 48 hours before his death he sounded relaxed and happy. When we tidied up his effects we found walking boots, a new volume of the collected poems of RS Thomas which he had obviously been reading, a bottle of Irish whiskey into which decent inroads had been made and notebooks and a laptop. All this suggested a well-rounded, hard-working, individual who was enjoying life and living it to its full.

It was incredibly tough on my mother who found his body; tough on his widow and children; tough on his relations; tough on his friends. Not too bad for him, perhaps but pretty ghastly for the rest of us. Suddenly a life which still had endless possibilities and potential has come to an end. Jim's got a birth date and a death date and his chapter is closed. The funeral in Wells Cathedral was very well-attended (we reckoned on more than 300 mourners), dignified, moving and vastly improved by all the participants - priest, speakers and readers, being people who really knew him so that we all had a real sense of a personal tribute. Afterwards I had a word with the priest who had run the service and he said that he had introduced James to the American mystic and writer, Thomas Merton, and also remarked that James had been a regular at Sunday morning services but had never once stayed for the coffee session afterwards. In other words he had a strong interest in the religious but was essentially quite a solitary person. Or words to that effect.

I went to see my GP this morning to have my fairly regular blood pressure test. It was up which is scarcely surprising though slightly depressing. We may have to treat it slightly "more aggressively" if it stays high. I suppose one of the several thoughts provoked by my brother's death is that once we reach 60 we are well and truly in the drop-off zone. If we keel over at this age there is perhaps a marginal sense of a premature demise but not a lot. Younger people and even our contemporaries will say that we had a "good innings" which in a historical sense is probably true though it's not exactly cheerful.

Still, as one of our fellow-lunchers remarked the other day, "It makes a welcome change to be discussing death and not poverty". Which is, perhaps, true. The poverty news is depressing, not least because it appears to be self-inflicted or at least man-made, and in some instances at least forces regrettable changes in career as well as circumstance. It's sad, for example, to hear of good travel-writers who are forced to sell up and turn to something completely different because the market has dried up. One gets the impression that most publications have a longish back-list of commissioned articles and are not commissioning anything fresh for the foreseeable future.

It was my birthday on the 28^th, a seminal one, noted with a photograph in the Times and provoked some fascinating messages, the most unexpected being, I think, the one from Tim Mason with whom I had been at pre-prep school, Danesfield in Walton-on-Thames circa 1950. Amazing and rather wonderful. For the first time in my life I feel rather proud of Danesfield which I'm afraid I barely remember. Do I feel a re-union coming on. Are there other Old Danesfieldians out there? Did we do all right? Would the school be proud of us? Does it matter?

Tomorrow, God, cut-price-airline and weather permitting we go to Edinburgh so that I can drone away to the Cricket Society of Scotland in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Penny says I mustn't use words like "drone" because people may believe I mean it. I explain that it is all part of the Englishman's disturbing tic of self-deprecation which is actually a thinnish disguise for extreme arrogance. Never mind, the Scottish trip is an interesting exercise in Ancient and Modern.

I am having lunch on Monday with David Cairns once the star photographer on the Daily Express. That's ancient. So is coffee with Camilla Cowie whose parents owned and ran the wonderful Connaught House, at Bishop's Lydeard outside Taunton, where I was at prep school . I suppose that's ancient too. So, in a slightly more up to date way, is my wonderful former agent Richard Simon with whom we are having supper on Sunday. David Gilmour - Sunday lunch - is Balliol (ancient) and Richard Cobb (ancient but shading into modern). On Wednesday we are having supper with Merryn, Sandy and their children and they are definitely Cornish and modern. The cricket talks are about books that are in print and to a brand new audience, so they're modern. Shepherd and Wedderburn, the lawyers are modern whereas maybe Ivor Guild WS is ancient.

I don't really know if these are meaningful definitions and distinctions. Oh, during the month we went to Cracow, using up air-miles., It was wonderful but fantastically cold. I have been invited to give a paper at the University of Antwerp in October. Jeremy Paul and I are going to work together an a TV adaptation of the new return of Simon Bognor.

In other words "und so weiter" and the mixture as usual, a judicious mixture I feel, of past, present and future. Overshadowing everything however is the death of my brother James. It's affected everything. I miss him a lot. I am still trying to work out what it means. Above all I suppose I feel RIP. He was much loved and much appreciated and he had many joyful moments giving them out as well. But it was a tough little life in many ways and RIP seems a meaningful and apt sentiment. RIP James - you deserve it and we miss you.

Er...Happy New Year

2009-01-05T10:59:16Z

The end of the year is the traditional time for taking stock, for reflecting on the past twelve months and musing on the next. The conclusion of 2008 is generally considered to be a particularly glum period with a series of financial disasters characterizing the recent past with even worse to come. It will seem perverse, therefore, if, on balance I take a rather bullish view of life. Perhaps I am more puritan than I thought; perhaps I hope that we may see a greater esteem for what the late Roy Jenkins described as "the less acquisitive professions". It would be good if greed became as shameful as it used to be; if essential competence was more highly regarded; if we became less enslaved by conspicuous consumption and more motivated by altruism. I happen to think that much of the world in the last few years has been profoundly unattractive and I sense some prospect of society becoming a happier whole. Who knows, may be we'll even return to a world in which people believe once more that there is such a thing as society.

The past comes first and two deaths loom largest, not because I feel gloomy about them but because they are very important to me and because they remind me that I was really lucky to have known those concerned. Both the dead are women and I loved them dearly and feel much better for having known them. I'd hate that to sound goody-goody-two-shoes not least because both of them were robust, no-messing-around people, without an ounce of schmaltz or false sentiment in them.

One was my godmother, Mary Sharpe, and the other was my friend, Kate Mortimer. They are united, of course, in death but were remarkably similar in life even though there was a quarter of a century between them. My godma was the sort of person of whom it was said, almost invariably "We'll never meet her like again" and "They broke the mould after they made Mary". She won the war, ran an Empire, was indomitable, slightly scarey in the nicest possible way and underneath an imposing exterior something of a softy. I remember many moments but best of all the one when I asked her why, during the war, she rode a Royal Enfield motorbike. She looked at me with what I have described - in a phrase lots of her friends and admirers recognize - with an expression of "fond contempt" and said that, "dear boy" the Enfield was the only bike that could be repaired in a jiffy by removing one's stockings and doing something clever involving cam-shafts and reef knots.

Kate was, gloriously, the same sort of person. She had a half-blue at cricket, got a brilliant First at Oxford and I remember once asking a cabinet minister friend what she was doing only to be told that she was "sorting out Poland for us". Which, naturally, and with great good humour, she was. I should have introduced them as they lived quite close. My Godma was in the middle of Chagford and Kate in a farmhouse between Okehampton and Sampford Courtenay. They were both avid Christians and believers in the Authorised version. They were also both very funny.

I remember Kate once sending me a postcard after I had split up with my first wife writing to tell me that she had given a lecture on "the meaning of loyalty" to a mutual friend who had criticized me. Kate was resolutely loyal. So was my Godmother. This did not mean that either was uncritical. Far from it. If they disagreed with you or with something you had done they let you know. Forcefully. But nothing ever interfered with their support. I knew that they were both always there for me no matter what and although I loved them both for all sorts of other reasons it is for their unswerving loyalty that I most remember them. The late Brian Redhead once asked me, apropos Prince Philip, if I felt better for having known him which was a much smarter way of asking whether I had liked him. I feel privileged to have known Kate and Mary and feel much better for the experience. I salute them both and thank them and God or what or whoever - should they exist which I slightly doubt although they never did. He or it or whatever did me a good turn when I was given them.

I delivered the address at Mary's packed memorial in the little church at Gidleigh in Devon and I wrote Kate's obituary in the Independent, so I have been able to pay a public tribute already but it seems appropriate to record another now at this time of reflection. I miss them both but I feel perhaps ludicrously enriched by having known them.

What else has been good about 2008? Maybe not a lot. I have just received a note from the States saying that I have been selected as "A Great Mind of the 21^st century" and may, for many dollars, have a plaque to prove it. Such,my wife tells me, is life and it is not the first time I have received such an accolade. Part of me would love to see the complete volume of great minds, all 1,000 of them, all paying out considerable numbers of dollars for the book and the concomitant things-to-go-on-walls. What of those who don't pay up? Anyway I'm jolly chuffed to be a Great Mind. Coupled with the accolade from Penny's chiropodist in Redruth who took rather a shine to my feet (despite her warnings) I'm feeling pretty bucked up myself from tip to toe. Perhaps one should hurry past the middle but even so.

Professionally I suppose the year has been pretty bloody. I have an outstandingly brilliant outline for a new royal book; an outstandingly brilliant complete new novel featuring Simon Bognor plus two outstandingly brilliant beginnings to sequels; BUT my outstandingly brilliant new agent, Caroline Michel, has failed to find any takers. The only book to appear under my own name is the history of Palmers Brewery in West Dorset. This is a very gcod example of its kind but I can't pretend that it is either great literature or a world best-seller.

I have had one or two pieces in the Mail and the Spectator but nothing that really set the pulse running. It looks as if I'll be involved with a new Readers Digest humour special for which I produced one of their inimitable "blue books" but even though it will be good I don't think any of us really expect it to be great.

There were drones and there are more to come. I talked about cricket to societies in Chesterfield, High Peak, Old Trafford, Southport and Liverpool which was challenging and fascinating and just mildly depressing because I felt that this kind of cricket society is probably in terminal decline. The sort of cricket they represent and enjoy is also under threat from 20/20 and similar instant forms of the game done better, I think, by baseball. While on the subject of cricket I continued to enjoy and cherish my Presidency of the Fowey Cricket Club and I was pleased that we managed to raise more than £1100 for Marie Curie in a match between "my" team and the Cornish Crusaders which had to be abandoned before a ball was bowled on account of the weather.

Another drone was at the annual Governor's meeting at the University College of Falmouth. This was fun because not only was the audience wall-to-wall grand governors, it also included Nicholas Trefusis and Michael Galsworthy whom I first met in 1952 when I originally pitched up as a little boy at Connaught House School near Taunton. Brian Perman, whom I originally met in the Youth Hostel in Rome in 1962 was also there as was Betty Jarrett, widow of the significant Derek Jarrett who taught me history at Sherborne. So although the overall atmosphere was strange and intimidating I felt I had the support of old friends. Much appreciated!

I've always made a point of combining business and pleasure particularly where travel was concerned but last year was pretty ghastly in that respect. I wrote a couple of pieces based on the Lancashire and Derbyshire trip but was unable to find a taker for either. We had a very enjoyable few days in Paris mainly looking at Picassos but I was reduced to blogging, unpaid, on the PFD web-site about that. We also had an enjoyable few days in Venice with the Friends of the Fan Museum. This included a day out doing Palladio, who was celebrating his 500^th birthday, and I wrote about this for the Spectator. They, alas, have also been hit by the credit crunch so that the piece has not yet appeared there either. Sarah Standing says she will keep trying and hopes to find space in the New Year. So fingers crossed.

I should be really bothered by this and the general down-turn in work but somehow I feel more optimistic than I have done at more obviously buoyant times. I'm not sure why this should be. Perhaps it is my looming 65^th birthday on January 28^th. If I make it I start to collect an old age pension. The amount will be pitiful and it seems to be administered by the current combination of prim politeness and devastating incompetence. Nobody has been in touch with me except the pension people who send me long repetitive statements telling me that I owe £00.00 and need do nothing. When I said I'd like to be paid quarterly the (consummately polite) woman on the other end of the line said that in all her life in pensions she had never known such a thing. Most people get paid weekly or monthly, so once again I'm a freak.

65 is nothing to write home about - my Mum is 88 and won't even get a royal e-mail or whatever for another twelve years. The pension is derisory and I'm regarded as past it despite feeling energetic and bright and having lots of hair not to mention near-perfect feet as well as one of the great minds of the 21st century.Maybe it's the fact that my two younger children are getting married - Tristram in July and Lucy the following January. Yhat means that all four children will be legally attached to their partners. And the two grandsons seem bright and well even though living in Miami.

So maybe its grand-paternal bliss that's making me all euphoric. Or the thought of drones to come - the Baconians in St. Alban's in January, the Scottish Cricket Society in Glasgow and Edinburgh in February. A Dorset drone with the novelist Michael Dobbs in May. Or cricket, lovely cricket. I have lots of tickets for Ashes stuff and will take the Oz wife to the first day and Saturday at Lord's and the boys on the Sunday. And we have charity games here in Fowey in aid of the blind on July 28^th and Marie Curie on August 16^th.

And travel. I forgot to say that Spectator Business took a piece on crime writing based on the meeting of the International Crime Writers in Frontignan in the South of France last August. We're using air-miles to get us by Easy Jet to Krakow in January. Not much sausage and vodka if the pound continues to plummet but the flight is paid for. I've never been to Poland and I'm keen to see it. In Ealing the other day I bought some Krakowka and pickled paprika in a wonderful Polish deli. The Poles went to Ealing because there were cherry trees in the front gardens and this reminded them of Warsaw! And somehow we have to put together a trip to Auckland for Lucy's wedding in January 2010. This may seem a tall order; probably is; but it has to be done. Dad has to be there! And will.

Christmas Day was quiet and domestic punctuated by telephone conversations with all four children. Strange that when I spoke to Lucy in New Zealand early in the UK Christmas hers was ending whereas Emma in Monterey, Mexico, to whom I spoke hours later was operating almost a day later and had hardly begun.. Around lunch time we heard that Harold Pinter had died. We knew Harold, had policed a play of his in Basel, lunched with him, had T shirts envied, lobbied the Israeli Embassy, discussed Arthur Wellard and been in regular touch with Antonia. Strange when someone you know and is also famous dies. They're not entirely recognizable and there is a horrid tendency to be corrective.I suppose he was a great playwright but the interesting thing about so many modern playwrights is that they are best known for what they left out and of no-one was this more true than of Harold. I think it's very noticeable that no-one has quoted any lines of his. Everybody remembers the pauses and silences; nobody considers the words. Interesting.

And so Christmas is over; the sun is shining, I have sent off about 40,000 words of Richard Cobb, people are coming in droves to look at Penny's amazing artificial eco-friendly Christmas tree and 2009 looms or lowers depending on one's state of mind. As I say I approach it in a spirit of optimism looking forward to birth, marriages and pension. The optimism is probably misplaced but what the hell. It should be an interesting and eventful year. Happy thoughts to all my readers and may you/they multiply and have more than ever of mine on which to feast the eyes.

Enjoy, enjoy.

While we can!

And I'd just typed this and was sitting in the kitchen drinking a reflective glass of wine with Penny and a visiting friend when the phone went and we learned that my mother had just found my younger brother dead on the bathroom floor at her house in Wiltshire. Funeral in Wells Cathedral this Thursday.

I think I need time to think this one through.