JULY 2008

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The usual obstacle race. . . .

This is late and transitional being half way between the last blog of the old regime and the first, I hope, of the new. I am writing it in Microsoft Word and sending one copy to the old webmaster and one to the new. In the old days which stretch back five years or so I sent the regular report to John who posted it up on the site for me; my impression is that Matt is going to expect me to do it for myself. New technology makes this easier and I am well aware that some notably technophobic friends of mine post regular, even daily blogs on their sites with no visible assistance. Conversely I still have friends who I thought were at the cutting edge of the new technology who seem to be utterly blog-proof and sometimes still living in the age of pen and ink. I rather admire this resistance to “progress” but don’t, for various reasons, feel disposed to join them.

The transition is another appropriate moment for reflection and the whole question of why do a regular blog and have a web-site to which the answers still seem blithely uncertain. One of the friends we stayed with recently in the south of France resolutely eschews any internet use at all – he has the advantage rather like Penny of a loving spouse who acts as an intermediary and prints stuff out on demand (Incidentally for those few who don’t yet know Penny now has her own laptop and email address which naturally I can’t remember. Should you feel so inclined send her a message and I will forward it). It doesn’t appear to damage his business which is one which I would have thought demands an internet facility but there you go. I feel I’m wedded to the whole system but oddly enough I am less convinced by it than I used to be. There seems to be an increased incidence of spam and messages seem to be lost or ignored in a way they used not to be. I find that I am increasingly inclined to use paper and the post office if I have an important message which simply has to get through. It is also, incidentally, slightly galling to find that the blogs that get turned into best-selling books are by people who have never previously published a word in their lives. And also don’t seem to have anything tremendously unusual to say.

But I suspect it was ever thus. Also I must not at any price appear to be whingeing. I’m not. Really

We’re just back from a couple of weeks away. This was the usual obstacle race. Great fun but gruelling. Here is a quick summary: train to London and an experimental cheap hotel in Paddington area – interesting as their computer crashed and we were shunted from one of their hotels to another, AGM of the Royal Society of Literature which was fun and where it was great to see a lot of old friends; lunch with old friends and fellow mourners at the National Portrait Gallery and then across to St. Martin’s in the Fields for Miles Kington’s two-hour memorial service which was full of Miles-written nuggets some very funny and some beautifully performed notably a rendition of the Franglais Lieutenant’s Woman by Joanna Lumley and how to carry a double bass around London by his old music master from Glenalmond – a cheerfully agnostic occasion which never quite disguised a depressingly early death of a genuinely life-enhancing figure; jolly dinner with sons and daughter-in-law; early trip – taxi booking lost, so what’s new, to St. Pancras to catch the train for Sete via Lille; this was the usual combo of high-speed sleek, environment-friendly travel with over-luggaged ill-temper and queue-bargeing by families hot foot for Paris Disney world; trudge through the streets of Sete in amazing heat (around 35 degrees) to find that we were not booked in to the hotel, unlike everyone else. They found us a room but it was sweltering and without air-con so we went back to the marginally more expensive but air conned Best Western we’d passed on our trudge and checked in there. Three mornings were spent in earnest(ish) confabulation a bus-ride away in Frontignan. I have written it all up for the new Spectator Business Monthly and for the journal of the British Crime Writers. “It” was a conference of AIEP which stands for something along the lines of Associacion Internationales Escritores Policianos. I made the mistake of saying in conference that the name was a no-no in polite western society but this felt on pretty stoney ground for the perfectly reasonable historic reason that it was established by a Russian and two Spanish-speaking writers as a counterweight to the prevailing Anglo hegemony of crime writing. Can’t say that it’s achieved a great deal in its two decades or so of existence but it is a worthy cause and the meetings are on the whole jolly if ineffectual occasions. This, sparsely attended function was no exception.

As usual the cliché about the most enjoyable and important conference occasions taking place in the interstices was more or less correct. Sete itself was a revelation, especially the jousting on the canal which seemed to take place on Saturdays and Sundays. There was a cacophonous mediaeval band reminiscent of Fowey, two men with lances on the gantries attached to sturdy rowing boats and dressed in white who behaved like knights in armour even to the extent of the Real Tennis-style salute which preceded the actual contest. Like our own gig racing here in Cornwall it’s ancient and indigenous. We saw hardly another foreigners and it clearly attracted a lot of local support.

The French writers – general – were also meeting in Frontignan and we spent a couple of evenings in their company most notably at a beach BBQ with two terrific bands most notably a group dressed as Franciscan friars who featured a wonderful trombonist who kept leaping on top of the tressle tables and belting stuff out. As always there seemed a sui-generis, non-commercial quality to life on the European mainland which appears much more elusive than on the mainland.

My old acquaintance Professor Jim Madison Davis of Oklahoma University was elected President nem con; I have written it up for the Spectator Business Monthly. The next meeting is supposed to be in Iceland though the alleged organizer from Reykjavik managed to get lost this year and never showed, which is sort of ominous. Anyway, I was glad to have gone even if the practical benefits are minimal or illusory.

After the conference was over we took a crowded train one stop down the coast to Agde where we were met by Peter Glyn-Smith in his open BMW. Peter is an interior designer who we met on a clipper trip with the late great Jeffrey Rayner. A few years ago he moved to a beautiful villa outside the ancient town of Pezenas where he grows cabernet sauvignon, olives, apricots and generally seems to enjoy the life expat with his charming French wife Dominique. Years ago – 2002 I think - off the coast of Honduras or thereabouts Peter promised to show me a Cathar castle or two and this, finally, was it. There were many other memorable moments but in a way the best was sweltering up to the eerily remote mountain-top fortress of Queribus an hour or so down the road from Pezenas. It was an impossible place and not for the first and I hope not the last time I wished I knew about something – in this case mediaeval history and the Cathars heresy. I had a factual book which struck me as fair drivel and I dimly remembered Laurence Durrell’s quartet but really I know nothing about this fascinating movement and their extraordinary fortified dwellings. Afterwards we found a restaurant in a charming village and sat on the terrace eating a pigs trotter while devouring a view of vineyards and crags over which peeped the very top of the Cathar castle we had just climbed. It looked like the tower of Lanteglos Church jutting out of the landscape unexpectedly like a mediaeval but much more sympathetic wind-turbine (of which there were all too many).

After the Glyn-Smiths we had a night in Montpellier. We took the tram down to the end of the new city and paid a quick call to the Olympic piscine and the state-of-the-art bibliotheque but despite the obvious money and ingenuity which had gone into planning Montpellier New Town we much preferred the seductive old city in whose heart we were staying – with views of the cathedral across Mediterranean gardens. If I could really get the crime writing going on a sensible commercial basis Montpellier would be just the sort of place for a writing hide-away in rented accommodation for a month or two. I have finished the return of “Sir” Simon Bognor novel – “Poison at the Pueblo” and have the ideas for at least three new ones in a new series. And there are long legs in Tudor Cornwall too. Persuading publishers of the truth of this seems to be an uphill struggle. I know this is a constant refrain or bleat of mine but in my case at least the marketing is infinitely more difficult than the writing. If anyone reading this has bright and serious ideas about how one might get the crime-writing back on a modest commercial track I’d be delighted to hear.

Meanwhile we caught an early afternoon TGV from Montpellier and hurtled across the glorious but showery French countryside, changing at Lille and getting back to St. Pancras around 9pm and heading off for our penultimate resting place at the Groucho. Next morning a script of the Barbara Cartland screenplay which has been given a green light by the BBC was waiting in my pigeon hole though the more unwelcome news was that my latest agent was canceling our meeting at 11 am. One of the problems of living in Cornwall several hours away from the big smoke is that opportunities for such meetings are relatively rare which means that cancellations wreak much greater havoc than they did in the days when I lived in London. Still, I enjoyed the Cartland material, and was able to read it and write (well-received) notes on the lap top while on longisg train journeys home via a significant birthday held, disconcertingly, at a prep school in the Cotswolds.

Before that we went to the National to see Jeremy Irons do Harold Macmillan in Howard Brenton’s new play about the old ham. It was disconcerting to see people one had thought of as part of one’s own life transmogrified into theatrical/historical figures. I never met Macmillan but observed him from afar and relatively close up when he came as Oxford Chancellor to speak at Balliol, his old college, when I was an undergraduate there. I also met Eisenhower and interviewed Boothby for the Express, getting to know him quite well. I thought Irons was terrific but then he was a contemporary of my brother James at Sherborne. He also played in the same band as Nicholas Harris, son of Skeets and Diana, old friends of my parents. Diana was my brother’s godmother. So no wonder Irons was good!

And so to Marcia’s birthday party. Alas, after a rare sunny snap it poured with rain, and we had to stay indoors, peering out through steamy windows at the tantalizing grounds outside and round which we should have been wandering in a convivial haze. Indoors was still convivial but, inevitably, more cramped and restricted and Penny and I both felt we should have circulated more among the strangers from the various exotic parts – notably Oman – of Marcia’s life. We stayed on a farm in newly converted self-catering accomodation and spent an afternoon watching tennis from Wimbledon. It was still going on when we finally arrived home on the Sunday and we caught up on a fortnight’s post while watching Nadal finally beat Federer in that amazing five-set final.

So here we are, home again, in darkest deepest Cornwall. It’s wonderful to get away but just as wonderful to come home. There were the usual tiresome routine letters to do mainly with money in one form or another but also welcome notes from old friends.

Perhaps the most poignant was one from Juliet Moorhead in Colombia. She was responding to my funeral address for my Godmother which Julia, my Godma’s daughter had sent her. Juliet Moorhead wrote a wonderful memoir of life in World War Two which, scandalously, never found a publisher. She was also one of my Godmother’s oldest and closest friends. They had met in Beaminster when they were in their early teens and though they hadn’t seen as much of each other as they would have liked they continued to write regular letters until my Godmother’s death earlier this year, in her late eighties.

Juliet Moorhead liked what I said and as a result I had a long catch-up chat with Julia and thought even more about life, love and Godmothers, carpe diem, compromise and cliché. Which seems an appropriate note on which to end. My accountant has just rung with some stuff about the annual returns and being, of a literary bent, he mentioned that he had come across the name of S.P.B. Mais in Antony Powell’s diaries. Mais was a brilliant young maverick schoolmaster at Sherborne and was a model for a similar character in Alec Waugh’s “Loom of Youth”. He went on to be a prolific writer and broadcaster and my accountant – older than me – remembered him very well. Yet Mais ended his days broke and neglected and who remembers him now? On which salutary and transitional note I really will come to a close.

Normal, if slightly different, service will be resumed in a week or two.
 

Tim Heald

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