Tim Heald's Blog

            I got a cheque for syndication from the people who sell-on Daily Mail pieces. Not exactly retirement, south of France, money but a cheque for second rights in my piece about the passing of the QE2. The worrying thing is that the cheque was not made out to me but someone called "Tim Herald". By the same post came a legal document addressed to me at the wrong number of the same street. The owner had scribbled "Unknown" across the envelope which is a bit of a blow as I thought, after more than a decade living in this small town in Cornwall that I was tolerably well known.

 

            So there you are - after a lifetime of public scribbling I have a wrong name and a wrong address and I begin to think I have become an unperson. I have been indulging in a correspondence with another writer, rather a good one with some "acclaimed" as they say nowadays - titles to his name. He said that writers such as us just "peter out". Maybe so. At times like this with freakishly foul weather and an apparent breakdown of the world's banking system it would, I suppose, be easy to become down-hearted, especially if one's fragile identity appears not even to have been stolen but tiresomely mislaid.

 

            However we are not down-hearted not least because we have been to Venice by Easy Jet  from Bristol and, as always, Venice was a breathtaking, wonderful, maddening, unique experience. You know you are being ripped off and there is no escape but somehow it matters less than elsewhere.

 

 We spent much of the time with the Friends of the Fan Museum which gave the experience an extra dimension and we also had a memorable day out in Palladio's city of Vicenza just down the road and that was a new and  fascinating experience about which I have written for the Spectator. Sarah Standing, whom God preserve, seems to like it. We stayed at a small hotel tucked away behind the Accademia (The Agli Alboretti) so even though we splurged on our own water-taxi (If I am allowed back in a re-incarnation I am going to return as a Venetian taxi driver) and a silly meal or two we saved on the flight and accommodation. And Bristol was, we both thought, the perfect compromise between the primitiveness of Newquay and the congestion of Gatwick and Heathrow. We will return.

 

            The serious Fan fans stayed at the Concordia and the Metropole and two of our expensive meals were in the hotel's grand and expensive restaurants. One of the good things about Venice though is that some of its most extraordinary attractions are cheap or free. Just walking across the Piazza and looking at a full moon shining on St. Mark's is one of life's great moments and it costs nothing. The Titian Ascension in the Frari church and the Carpaccios in the Scuola of St. George don't cost much. Gazing at them you almost feel justified, J.G. Links-like, in forking out ludicrous amounts of money on the dry martinis in Harry's Bar. Incidentally they really are made with vermouth not dry white wine. As I have said before I think one of barmen must have been pulling Joe's leg.

 

            Talking of Links we used his book "Venice for Pleasure" as we always do. It is quite simply the best guide book ever written. We also took a little library of Venetian books written in English. One was Salley Vickers' "Miss Garnet's Angel".centred on an otherwise relatively little known church which was not far away from our hotel and was an early port-of-call. We also took the first two Donna Leon detective stories. Donna Leon is an American academic who settled in Venice about fifteen years ago and writes an annual crime story set in the city. And finally we took Michael Dibdin's "The Dead Lagoon", which features the return to his home of Dibdin's detective, Aurelio Zen. It's brilliant as was Dibdin, who died a year ago, and whom I met briefly some years back at a Semana Negra in Gijon, Spain and whom I enormously admired.

 

            The paradox is that Venice has been the scene of so many murders in fiction whereas in real life it is one of the most law-abiding and safe cities in the whole of Italy.

Actually it is almost a dead city. You only have to slip into a church during Mass on a Sunday morning to find an elderly and tiny congregation being addressed by a querulous priest to realize that there's hardly anyone left. However in fiction everyone knows exactly where the Questura or police HQ is and the city has become a bit like the quintessential Miss Marple village. Everyone knows that it's as safe as houses used to be in real life but that when it comes to fiction it doesn't even matter if you walk very softly and carry a ginormous stick you're still at permanent risk.

 

Anyway in deference to all this I have resuscitated the notion of my own murder story set in the Serenissima. I embarked on the story so many years ago that I was able to christen it  quite reasonably "Another Death in Venice". Now, time has moved on so remorselessly, that I have inserted another word so that it is to be called "Yet Another Death in Venice." I shall dedicate it to Michael Dibdin and his widow, K.K. Beck, and it will be another triumph for Tim Herald of the wrong fixed abode.

 

Meanwhile we struggle on. We now have a "new" car, a venerable Renault Clio to replace the written-off Rover that was, apparently terminally injured in the morning shunt in Salisbury some weeks ago. I am appalled at the process by which an apparently minimal, indeed cosmetic, injury to car results in it being "written-off" and the erstwhile owner being presented with a derisory cheque by way of compensation., Luckily it seems to be a "buyers' market" and one even hears extraordinary tales of people being offered two cars for the price of one. What intrigues me is why anyone should buy a new car for many thousands of pounds when one can purchase the same car, apparently quite serviceable though "used" and a few years older, for a fraction of the cost. I find it deeply perplexing, but then I don't really like cars and would much prefer to travel everywhere by train.

 

Except that trains don't work. Yesterday, Sunday, we went in to Plymouth by train to see a showing of Buster Keaton's the Navigator at the Jill Craigie Theatre in the Roland Lewinsky building in the theatre. The film was charming and we had a relaxed and enjoyable lunch overlooking Sutton Harbour in a nice Iranian-Italian restaurant called Zucca. But on the way back we discovered that the trains had been "rescheduled". This actually meant that the advertised Paddington train was running an hour or so late but because of the alleged "rescheduling", First Great Western could claim it was "on time". So we didn't get home till after eight in time to discover that Andrew Castle had been eliminated from Strictly Come Dancing and Lewis Hamilton had won the World Motor Racing Championship.

 

Talking of the awfulness but inevitability of cars brings me to my friend Tom Braun, the brilliant and erudite Oxford ancient historian who died recently and whose obituary I have penned for the Guardian. Tom didn't drive. He didn't publish either. He knew the whole of Herodotus off by heart and at least half a dozen languages ancient and modern but he was gloriously old-fashioned. From time to time however kind friends took him out for a drive. On one of these treats the vehicle was apparently sideswiped by a lorry near Coventry and Tom received serious injuries. He was rushed to the local hospital where, evidently, he was in intensive care for 33 days. When he finally died it was not, I am told, as the direct result of the injuries he received in the crash but of infections picked up in the hospital.

 

            The story is a dreadful tale of our times and almost the only consolation is that Tom would have enjoyed telling it, chortling throughout and quite possibly rendering it in verse. There is a Quaker funeral this week which I can't attend and a memorial at Merton, his Oxford college at the end of January. I shall try to go and hope that there aren't too many other deaths in the interim.

 

            Meanwhile life in the word factory continues. I sit here working on new crime novels, the Jardine book and the collection of Richard Cobb letters. Other ideas are in the pipeline. We went to Dorset to stay with the lovely Cleveleys and to go to the annual dinner of the Society of Dorset Men in what used to be the school gym at Sherborne and is now the central school dining room. It was great to see the Cleveleys but I fear we didn't enjoy the dinner much. Nor our attempt to stop off for lunch at the new "acclaimed" Mark Hix fish restaurant in Lyme Regis. Tiddly, widdly, no lunch, no lunch. A pie and a pasty and a sorrowful letter to Mr. Hix instead. Seeing Cleeves Palmer from Palmers, Brewery in Bridport was better. Cleeves had the page proofs of the company history which I helped write and it's going to appear along with a fulsome intro by Prince Edward. It's only a tiny thing but good, nonetheless.

 

            I am writing this on a bleak, cold November day. We had the annual dinner of the cricket club on Saturday. Seemed to go OK. I am the President and on Wednesday I see the local school to try to reforge links. I have been trying to print up some Mandarin greetings for PEN writers in prison out in China to whom I am writing. The machine, unaccountably, seems not to work. Maybe it can't cope with Mandarin.

 

            Oh well. I saw son Alexander for lunch in Plymouth the other day with his wife Kirsten; son Tristram should be coming down soon; Lucy has announced a date for her wedding in New Zealand in January 2010; must write to daughter Emma in Miami. Life could be so much worse. It is criminal, in the great scheme of things, to be complaining about the loss of an identity or the death of a friend. One could, after all, be languishing in a Chinese prison and I shall now make another serious attempt to print out season's greetings in Mandarin. Meanwhile, as my friend Philip Howard says, when signing off: "KOB".

An aborted charity cricket match, a significant drone, an enjoyably desultory game of  Real Tennis, a tiresome shunt when someone drove into the back of my stationery car in Salisbury, a brief London visit to see the agent, an editor and my sons travelling on a stunningly reasonable advance deal train ticket - all this played out against a background of glorious Indian summer and the incomprehensibly glum collapse of the Western banking system. Not to mention the dispiriting use of the word "veteran" to entice people in to listen to the drone and a passing remark from a university contemporary that I am "an old and tired man". In other words September was a mildly humdrum mixture of pluses and minuses, pleasures and annoyances and a month when one was constantly being reminded that one is not as young as one was. An invitation to have a free flu injection was just one such  gesture which, though perfectly well-intentioned was still something one would, on balance, have preferred to have done without.

 

I have written about the cricket match and am still trying to place my immortal words so I won't bang on for too long in the hope that I will be able to direct you to some publication which will have my considered thoughts on the matter. I have one rejection so far and it bears out my firm belief that writing is the easy part. Marketing the words is a real hassle and the freelance, self-employed individual is completely powerless. This was something on which I touched at the significant drone of which more later.

 

Basically the charity cricket match was in aid of Marie Curie Cancer and it was a victim of the weather. Not a ball was bowled but all was not lost and somehow we managed to raise over £1100 for a thoroughly deserving charity. I have a feeling that Sod's Law, in which I believe profoundly, dictates that next year when we attempt a rerun we will manage a game of cricket but make less money. I do hope that's not the case. The match should have been played on the ground at Fowey, Cornwall where I am President and it was to have been against the Cornish Crusaders. Marie Curie, the Fowey Cricket Club and the Cornish Crusaders all have web-sites which should have some sort of corroborative evidence of our foiled intentions.

 

Nothing more to say except that the potential is tremendous. The ground is at the top of one of the most attractive seaside towns in the Kingdom and sandwiched between a large, thriving school and a smart hotel. The club already has two successful sides in the Cornish leagues but I'd like to see it build a strong local base with regular matches played for pleasure and charity. I would, wouldn't I? And I am entirely sympathetic to those stalwarts who have given time, energy, expertise and enthusiasm and see some clod-hopping incomer trampling in and thinking he knows best. I really don't but I'd like to be slightly more than a cipher and I'd like to raise the club's profile in the town and outside. Oh, and have fun while doing so. I don't think that's a lot to ask.

 

I'm just back now from the quick trip to London. Train was great. I got a very cheap old person's long-time-in-advance ticket which meant I had a big first-class table for four all to myself and a plug for the computer, plus a trolley service with free biscuits and hot chocolate. On the way back I was on the newly refurbished - well it's a million or so spent on mere titivating if you ask me - the loos didn't flush, the buffet still seemed archaic only better lit and so on. At about 3.45 there was a mild commotion, pounding of feet, cries of 'Help!' and a subsequent knock on the door and an inspection of the communication chord to see if I'd pulled it (I hadn't). After a while we trundled on and I got my tea and biscuits as we crossed the Tamar Bridge and we reached Par on time. I like the train and when it works it's wonderful. I got a lot of work done and had a good night's sleep.

 

London was interesting and I hope productive. Supper with the two sons and my niece Rebcecca was at a new (to all of us) cheap and cheerful Spanish in Old Compton Street. It was cheap and cheerful and incredibly crammed and crowded. Beforehand we had a drink or three at the Groucho with Lindsay Fulcher from the Lady, for whom I have just written a piece to mark Prince Charles' birthday. Who would have thought it? I mean Prince Charles sixty (that gawky little boy who got into trouble over cherry brandy) and me writing for the Lady. Oh well, Time.

 

The real purpose of the visit was seeing Caroline Michel, the new(ish) agent at Peters, Fraser, Dunlop. I think, hope, it was useful. The royal idea is frustrating because I know that in the end there will be at least one book to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the Queen's accession and at least one will make a lot of money. It seems to me that I should be the author of at least one book but already we have wasted an entire year while publishers have, not to put too fine a point on it, dithered. Authors tend, as a rule, to be too scared to criticize other parts of the industry in which they are involved but it does sometimes - quite often actually - seem to me that there is a conspiracy of "experts" whose main job consists of obstructing communication between the author and his or her readers. I absolutely accept that this is a simplistic view and that expert opinion would disagree. My views on "expert opinion" become rattier and less repeatable the older I get. However we shall get there in the end and the same goes for my whodunit(s). I write the sort of book in this field which "expert opinion" doesn't like. Basically "expert opinion" believes crime novels should be gorier, more disgusting and much wordier. I write short, sharp and intelligent. At least that's what I think, but then I would, wouldn't I? Some critics say pejoratively and ludicrously tdhat I write "cosy".Others agree with me but maybe I won't be vindicated until I'm long dead. This happens!

 

Anyway I am not downhearted and I keep being told that I must not seem negative. Nevertheless I feel, as increasingly often, that I am swimming against the tide and if one can't say this on a blog where, I would like to say, can one say it?!

 

The drone was also interesting and I think enjoyable. At least when droning there is absolutely no-one between you and the audience which is salutary, useful and, on the whole, refreshing. My experience, generally, is that even though there is always at least one person in the audience who knows more than the speaker about what the speaker is saying (even when the speaker's subject is ones' self) it's an entertaining, though challenging, exercise.. On the whole, and with rare exceptions, even dissenters express themselves mildly and politely and there is seldom blood on the floor. Most of the audience this time were, I think, the governors of the University College Falmouth and the similar organization at Dartington with which Falmouth recently "merged". These were almost all new to me but I also had a quartet who go back a really long way: two men were at prep school with me in the early to mid 1950s; another has been a friend since we met in the youth hostel in Rome in 1961 and the newest is the widow of an inspirational history master who taught me at Sherborne. So I was bolstered by very long-standing friends, which was reassuring.

I wanted to sandwich my life story between the reaction of an old General at the Rag when I first worked on the Daily Mirror and my latest news. It would have been nice to have been able to adduce some neat and learned conclusion but, alas, I couldn't. In the end I think all I was able to say was that most lives were a bit of a shambles and especially that of the self-employed writer. Enjoyable, very, but academically pretty unhelpful It occurs to me that the role of the academic and particularly the historian is to try to make sense of the senseless, impose a shape to the shapeless and so on. Unfortunately life isn't like that.

Oh, the shunt. Even now at least a fortnight after the "accident" occurred we are waiting for someone to come and take the car away in order to repair it.. Or maybe even write it off which is apparently an option even though my aged mother and I agreed that we could make it as good as new in five minutes with a pair of pliers. The shunt came after the Real Tennis game - relaxed, slightly sad, but at least I could hit the ball some times and my opponent who is older, wiser and still plays once a week living as he does within a twenty minute drive of the court at Walditch and it was nice to see Ben Ronaldson after all these years and he now has a beard and a wife anmd is no longer the little boy I remember from Hampton Court, enough said I think . Anyway we had a weekend in Salisbury, went to the cathedral and the Playhouse (Alan Ayckbourn since you ask, which it always is in provincial reps but there you go) and stayed in a dreadful over-priced apology for an hotel. I put Penny on a train to London and was growling through stationery traffic when a car went in to the back of me as I was sitting minding my own business and waiting for the vehicle in front to turn left. Suddenly, bang, I was hit from behind.

The driver was called Jade Mitchell; she was extremely apologetic. So were her three girl-friends. One offered me a cup of tea. I declined. We exchanged details and I drove on. Since then there has been a series of phone calls from strangers in far away places, few of whom seem to talk to anybody else. Much waiting, as described above. In the end a cheery figure drove from Redruth in a Ford Fiesta which I am now driving while the poor, barely damaged Rover is being "assessed". The general opinion seems to be that although everything is still working and I have been driving it for a couple of weeks or so and covering several hundred miles it will still be declared a "write-off". Seems crazy to me.

 

The other day the printer Penny bought from a discount warehouse went on the blink and the nice computer king took a look at it and said that it should go the way of the Rover. It could be repaired but it would be cheaper to buy a new one. I am left with a whole lot of useless (and expensive) ink cartridge and a duff printer. Surrounded, as we seem to be, by the crashing down of the whole edifice of the society in which we have been living these last few years I am struck, not for the first time, by a slight feeling of "told-you-so-ism". It seems to me that for years (since the advent of Murdoch and Thatcher) we have been a spiv society in which money is virtually the only thing that matters and certainly the thing that matters most. I'm not saying that things didn't need fixing but the society which seems to be collapsing was surely as unpleasant, and ephemeral, as the South Sea Bubble which in some ways it resembles. Down here in Cornwall we are surrounded by the extremes which characterize this society; extreme poverty living cheek by jowel with extreme wealth. The wealth is characterized by greed based on nothing much and the poverty by a failure to pay a decent wage for a decent job.

It's interesting to me that whereas knowledgeable analysts and experts have been predicting this collapse for years no-one however expert seems to have the foggiest idea of what's going to happen next. I really hope that we come out of this disaster as a saner, fairer world characterized by compassion, care, belonging and all the old-fashioned ideas and concepts which went with the "society" which we were told in the seventies or eighties no longer existed.

 

We shall see. The car shunt and the dead printer seem to me to be small private symbols of a bigger national mess. Part of me is saying smugly I'm afraid: "serves us right".

Anyway, end of lesson. On Friday I drove, in the borrowed Ford, to the north coast, to have lunch with Peter Dimmock, the old BBC hack who used to front TV sports, produced the Coronation and was closely involved in the story of the post-war BBC. His second wife's daughter Lucy Scott read Princess Margaret for the talking book. Hence the meeting. He seemed wonderfully chipper and we reminisced about the old days, the long dead, the legends in lunchtimes and so on, while the gale whipped the Atlantic up and sent it crashing against the shores and the local hotelier was said to be on the point of selling a penthouse to some Russian oligarch for a couple of million.

 

Heigh-ho. On the TV Andrew Marr is talking to Vince Cable and George Osborne. I have a feeling I used to play Real Tennis with Osborn's father. I think he was a baronet who made a fortune from wall-paper.

 

 I think I shall go and have a cup of tea.

 

 

 

            My daughter Lucy, the event-organiser in Auckland, is to marry Simon, the marine biologist. When Lucy rang her grandmother in Wiltshire Granny said, fondly, "About time" which is what someone from a war-time generation which married young and rapidly would be expected to say. My mother was only twenty three when she married my father and not yet twenty four when I was born. Lucy and I are, well, older. Simon rang earlier in the week very properly and sweetly to ask my permission. I probably shouldn't divulge such personal details but it suggests that not all younger people are so disdainful of tradition and their elders. Or maybe it's just that they do things differently in New Zealand., Anyway Lucy is getting married; Simon will become a son-in-law. This will follow on from Tristram and Beth's wedding next summer and will mean that all four children will be married. I already have the Mexican son-in-law in Miami and the Scottish-ish daughter-in-law in London. Now I shall have an English daughter-in-law in London and an an Anglo-New Zealand son-in-law in Auckland. Is this a record?

 

            Whatever else, it's remarkably ageing. I had lunch with Andrew and Sarah Duncan at the Old Thatch Inn in Cheriton Bishop the other day. They were baby-sitting their little grand-daughter. Needless to say they are exemplary grand-parents and the grand-daughter is enchanting. However when they took the child out in Exeter where they were staying no-one for an instant thought that they were anything other than fond grand-parents. It's a bit like not being asked for one's senior rail-pass. We all know that we're old, that we are ancient enough to have grand-children and to qualify for geriatric concessions on public transport but it would still be nice if people pretended. I have to deliver a speech to the annual governors' shenanigans at the University College of Falmouth in a few weeks and we have agreed that the word "veteran" should be included in the description of me. I seem to be the only person who questions this. It makes me sound old and grumpy. I certainly wouldn't waste good time and money giving up an evening to listen to a "veteran".

 

            Discuss.

 

            Enough of this. I had intended to devote much of this report to the question of stageing a charity cricket match. This I shall now do. It's taken up a lot of my time this last month and the incessant rain is dampening expectations. All the same... I went up to the cricket ground yesterday (Sunday) to check out Matty Bailey's mobile bar. There was a pub competition going on and there was a modest barbecue and Matty was doing the drinks. It seemed an exemplary trailer with spirits (which we won't need), freezers, beer taps and all the stuff one could possibly need. Matty has a wedding in Newquay so bar duties will be taken on by the landlord of the Safe Harbour who has, like Matty, played cricket for the Crusaders. I hadn't met Matty before but he introduced himself on Tuesday in church at a well-attended but more than usually sad funeral service. Ed Leverton who is also playing and together with Phil Johns - he's playing too - helped resuscitate the club in the seventies found it extremely entertaining to think of Matty and me discussing booze at the back of the Fowey Church and I agree but on the other hand this is how small towns operate and I confess to rather liking it. By the same token Richard Kittow will do the BBQ and do pig rolls taken off a pig leg. He is our friendly local butcher. Oh and James Staughton who used to be a neighbour and is the MD of St. Austell Brewery is supplying us with a quantity of free "Tribute", their ace ale. And so on. "My" team now includes Keith Parsons newly retired from Somerset, a formidable all-rounder, and Chris Hunkin who is ditto though less well-known; plus five Fowey boys - they've done well in the league this summer; Phil's young cousin from Gorran; James Turpin son of Karen of Fowey Fish whio is captain of Cornwall Under Twelves; and Ed and Phil if they can still struggle into their whites. I think "we" look pretty good.

            With the conspicuous exception of the Restormel Council Music Licensing Department everyone has been wonderfully supportive and encouraging so we just pray there is no rain and we have a jolly afternoon. John Thomlinson who was to have played his keyboard accompanied by friends on drums and guitar says you need a licence now just to sing happy birthday in a pub. You'd think the council would bend over backwards to help a charity event but apparently not. Surprise, surprise. And then bureaucrats are surprised that we don't like them. We're bound to get things wrong but we've already got several hundred pounds in advance donations and sponsorships and I'm hoping the raffle will make a few bob together with admissions and cream teas and and... It HAS taken up a lot of time but on the other hand it's a very good cause and we shall have fun raising the cash. And, in the last analysis, what are we here for anyway?

Cue for further discussion I'm afraid.

            The title for the veteran's drone at Falmouth College is "writing as a job" or something along similar lines. It ties in with what the college is trying to do in its journalism and writing sections. In other words it is trying to teach students about nuts and bolts and the way these things actually work rather than a sort of ffotherington-thomas, hello birds, hello sky, dilettante approach to the creative process. I am broadly in sympathy with this except for the very necessary proviso that we do need what the late, great Nicholas Tomalin, one of my principal mentors, once referred to a "a little literary ability". You don't want too much because that gets in the way of "rat-like cunning" and the ability to believe passionately in second rate projects but it IS actually essential for survival in this odd little world. I think. There may not be very much of it and other things may be more or at least just as important but there is an essential part of one's make-up as a writer however humble which is ultimately mysterious and even, if you are that way inclined, God-given. Yet again this is a cue for discussion.

            Looking through my diary I am, as always, struck by how much I have forgotten, how much empty space there has been and, forgive the cliché, how time flies. We returned from a busy few days in London on Saturday 2^nd and went over to  Truro for a convivial lunch with friends. One day the following week we took the train to Exeter for lunch with Janet Laurence at the Michael Caine place on the Cathedral close - criminal shop and other more general natter and chatter; I droned at the St. Ives' library the following week and drove up to my Ma's in Wiltshire stopping off on my return a few days later to buy salt cod in a Portuguese place in Chard. There is a significant Portuguese/Brazilian community in Chard which is not what you expect in rural Somerset! I found the cod which went into an ethnic salad for a lunch the following Thursday. This followed what is now an oldish tradition of entertaining out of towners to a meal on the day the Red Arrows Display team fly in a daredevil way up and down and round about the harbour, apparently for our exclusive benefit. They execute wizard prangs immediately in front of our little terrace. Before then my friend Martin Hesp and his wife came along to do an interview for his paper, the Western Morning News. A week later their photographer came to do his business on the said terrace in front of the same, once more, mercifully sunny, view.

            Last week my friend Sue Bradbury of the Folio Society came down from London on the railway sleeper for a lunch-time meeting with Tim Smit of the Eden Project and his Publishing Director, Mike Petty. We met at the Marina Hotel and all went, as far as I could see, extremely well. We were even able to sit outside and overlook the harbour. This place is magical when it's like this but alas it quite often isn't. This is a thought which occurs to this afternoon. It was quite fine this morning but now it has greyed over, the winds have risen and the rain is sweeping in from the sea. It is nothing like as bad however as New Orleans which is just beginning to take the force of hurricane Gustave brought straight into my study here in Cornwall thanks to Sky TV.

 

            This is salutary stuff. This morning the Independent ran my obituary of Jim Orr, former secretary to Prince Philip. Some time this week the new Spectator Business Magazine is supposed to be publishing my thoughts on crime fiction. I have to re-write my article on Barbara Cartland to mark the new TV docudrama for the Daily Mail; I am working away on my Indian cricket tour of 1933/4 for Methuen; and the same on the next Simon Bognor mystery novel.

 

            So it's work pretty much as normal except for the looming charity cricket match. I have picked up my last outstanding raffle prize - a signed copy and DVD of "Vanishing Cornwall" for which Kits Bowning took the pictures to complement the text by his mother Daphne du Maurier. Kiuts has given us this and I bumped into him down town and got the news that Penny's beloved Manchester City has been sold by a Thai billionaire to a sheikh from Dubai.

 

            Oh well. I've just heard that the Republican Vice-Presidential Candidate's unmarried seventeen year old daughter, the one with the silly name, is pregnant. I am supposed to take this seriously, More so than the charity cricket match. Which suggests that someone has their priorities wrong.

 

END

Death seems to have been depressingly evident over the last few weeks.

I was in the train on the way to London the other day and all seemed to be going smoothly when we suddenly came to a juddering halt about two miles west of Exeter St. David's. Five minutes later the train manager came on the Tannoy to tell us that there had been an "incident" as a result of which there had been a fatality. I presume it was a suicide. The railway police came on the scene, cups of tea were dispatched to the drivers, we all sat tight in a very British fashion until we finally limped into the station and eventually left for London on another train past the chilling sight of our abandoned one with a large hole immediately under the driver's cab. It had presumably been caused by the fatal impact.

            I was almost, but not quite, late for my talk at the English Speaking Union's HQ in Mayfair and found myself battling with the conflicting emotions and sentiments which I guess one always feels on occasions such as this. On the one hand I was exasperated and concerned about being late, worried about whether or not I should call ahead on my mobile (I decided against), wondering how many people would turn up and how far they would have come and generally I was feeling irritated. On the other hand I was sad by the death and by the depth of the depression which had, I presumed, provoked it. So I managed, at the same time, to be trivial and selfish and also concerned and upset. I suppose it's always like this.

            I was much less ambiguous about the death from lung cancer of my friend Kate Mortimer. You can read my obituary in the Independent of July 21^st. I hadn't seen Kate for a few months but had known her since first meeting her in Oxford in the sixties. Her brother, Edward, was a friend and contemporary. I helped out with the obits and was glad that the Guardian ran a lead by Kate's old friend Emma Rothschild together with a wonderful Jane Bown photograph which Jane took at my behest when, in 1990, I was writing the Pendennis Column for the Observer. Other obits were less personal but Geoffrey Wheatcroft devoted his entire Spectator diary to some glum reflections on the relatively early deaths of friends and acquaintances. Kate was 62.

            The funeral was at Sampford Courtenay where Kate was a churchwarden. The service was simple and straightforward in a robust C of E sort of way with readings by her son and nephew, an address by Edward and also the vicar. We finished with "The Day Thou Gavest Lord is Ended" which I remember Mrs. Hoyle, wife of the Connaught House School headmaster, belting out on the organ in the Music Room at the end of Going-out weekends. Not many dry eyes, then or now. Kate was buried in the churchyard and there was tea for the mourners in the church hall. The sun shone and it was very sad.

            My obituary provoked a number of responses. Some were from shocked strangers who hadn't heard the news and who had known Kate in an earlier life at N.M. Rothschild and Sons or the Know How Funds. At least one was from an old university friend I hadn't been in touch with for the proverbial forty years.

            I would like to think there was some moral to be derived from Kate's death and from that of the person who threw himself under the train but I can't think of one and I certainly can't think of anything original. I suppose that in the overall scheme of things making it into one's sixties is an example of longevity and it is a sign of the times that 62 nowadays seems tragically early. A lot of people will miss her for she really was life-enhancing and had a rare capacity for cheering one up. As for the suicide who knows but in what is for me a quite different way that too was sad.

            Meanwhile we chunter on. A number of local friends came to dinner and Edward Oakley, the carpet-maker from Mirzapur and his cousin Sally, whom we met while I was lecturing on the high seas for Cunard, came to lunch one Sunday with cousins from Tavistock and we all sat outside and gazed at the harbour. We felt rather smug.

            The month began, I realize, in France, where I was attending the annual conference of AIEP, aka the International Crime Writers Association. I have written it up for the Crime Writers' (UK) magazine, Red Herrings and this has already appeared. I have also done it for the Spectator's new Business Monthly in a more general way. You should be able to clock it on their web site soon. If that doesn't work it's susceptible to googling. After the conference which felt depressingly rump-like, it being so sparsely attended, we took the train down to Agde where were picked up by Peter Glyn Smith whom we had met on one of Jeffrey Rayner's Star Clipper jaunts sailing around central America. He and his French wife, Dominique, live in a fabulous place just outside the beautiful small Languedoc town of Pezenas so we spent a brief time with them and made an excursion into Cathars country to suss out at least one castle. We did the very last Cathar strongold, - Queribus, an impossibly craggy fortress on top of a mountain. Peter had promised to show us something of the Cathars when we were in Honduras or Belize clocking Mayan stuff. And here at last we were. It was suitably awesome and afterwards we found the perfect village with the perfect terraced restaurant with the perfect view and I ate the perfect stuffed pig's trotter.

            Peter had also waxed enthusiastic about Montpellier so after our stay with Peter and Dominique we took the train back up to the city and booked into a quiet hotel in the old town and enjoyed a final twenty four hours in what seemed like a perfect French mixture of ancient and modern, charming shuttered, plane-treed squares and modern cutting-edge trams, public libraries and Olympic swimming pools. Then after a sybaritic saunter around we caught the TGV and thundered home across the countryside punctually, speedily, comfortably and affordably. O Beeching! O Mores! Or whatever. It very emphatically did not make you proud to be British.

            The following evening however we went to the National Theatre to see Jeremy Irons starring as Harold Macmillan in the Howard Brenton play Never Had it So Good. Almost as strange as death to see one's own past transmuted into theatre. I saw quite a lot of Macmillan at one not so enormous remove and I interviewed and got to know quite well his wife's lover, Bob Boothby. It was an oddly old-fashioned play and surprisingly sympathetic to a Conservative Prime Minister coming as it did from a left-wing playwright. But we enjoyed it even though, for me at least, it had a curiously personal poignancy.

 

            Home at last, by train, pausing in the Cotswolds for a friend's significant birthday party in a prep school which was also peculiarly nostalgic. Honours boards, games pitches - sadly out of bounds because of the perpetual downpour - and a vague sense of chalk, Kennedy's Latin Primer, French irregular verbs and headmaster looming. Enjoyable party though.

 

            Then it was head down on the work front. The return of Simon Bognor is done and dusted and safely delivered to Caroline Michel at Peters, Fraser, Dunlop. Fingers crossed. Ditto the proposal for an amazing royal book to mark a significant anniversary. It is taking years to find a publisher for this and it fills me with foreboding. I know there is a huge book to be written and a lot of money made but I also have the sinking feeling of a boat being missed and of someone else scooping and/or pre-empting me, doing something less good, and leaving me beached and stranded. Oh well, don't complain. I finsished an interim Richard Cobb letters. A lot of edited link and footnote and although there is still stuff to be done there was enough for me to take up to London and deliver by hand to John Nicoll, the publisher over a delicious lunch of grilled eel at Pan e Vino, the Sardinian restaurant opposite Kentish Town tube. I am now embarked on another Bognor crime adventure - set in a literary festival this time and I have been sweating some blood on the Jardine Tour of India 75 years ago which I am doing for Methuen.I could do it now but it would still be a - very superior of course - cuttings job. I am determined to get to India to tread in DRJ's footsteps, smell the smells, see the sights and so on. But financing it is a problem. The trouble is that it's a chicken and egg situation. However I have applied for a grant/scholarship so fingers crossed. I feel certain it will be worth the delay.

 

            And, er, that's it for now. The Barbara Cartland TV production with me as a consultant is going ahead for the BBC. Watch this space. I have accepted invitations to talk about cricket in Glasgow and Edinburgh next year which is mildly surprising and about "Writing as a job" to the Governors of the putative university in Falmouth. I have updated a radio obituary of Prince Philip - don't tell him, he'd be furious! - and I have been going through some of Plum Warner's papers at his grand-daughter's. And now I must go up to the cricket ground for a meeting about the amazing Marie Curie charity match I'm helping organize. It's on Saturday September 6^th. Come along: terrific raffle prizes; music; cricket; a good cause.

           

Which I suppose brings me back to the melancholy business of death. Oh well. Carpe Diem!

            

Hello All,

The more observant amongst you will have detected a slight change visually and technically as we embrace new technology and all that - Tim's blog is now using the brilliant "Moveable Type" blogging platform, which means that he will now be posting up his blog entries directly, and much more easily than before.

But don't worry! All the old blog entries are still available at the same addresses as before, so you don't need to do anything. If you want to look through the old blog and entries, please click here.

One cool new feature is that the blog now has a feed - this means you can be the first to know when Tim posts a new entry - just click the link on the right. Tou can also search through the blog, or browse entries by "tag" - i.e. Royalty,