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The Heald Report . . .
Number 9
DECEMBER 2003
Just back from a week as "celebrity lecturer" on the Cunarder
Caronia. I found it fascinating as ever. The ship itself is to be sold to Saga next November so
there is a slightly end-of-term atmosphere on board. On the other hand she is small
enough to be friendly and intimate, we went to some beautiful places, especially
Honfleur and Amsterdam, and I had large and enthusiastic audiences, sold a respectable
number of books and met the usual unexpected passengers including the North London
Coroner, the owners of a mediaeval castle in Scotland and the proprietors of Jock's
Café in the main street of Lostwithiel about five miles from where we live in Cornwall.
The other "celebrity lecturer", Sir David Nicholas, the former boss of ITN, failed to
show for some reason which was a pity as I'd like to have met him. Penny also had a
bad dose of flu, luckily not passed on to me, and spend an Amsterdam day in bed on
board. Not like her!
I spoke on "Writing about Royalty", "A Life of Crime" and "The After Dinner Speech". Forty-five minutes a session on the stage in the ballroom. I did
it sitting in an armchair which I find makes for a much more relaxing atmosphere and spoke
pretty much without notes which some people seem to find astonishing though if you
can't manage without notes when you're basically talking about your own life and
work then I think you're in trouble. Basically though I find that the less like a formal lecture the presentation is the more passengers seem to enjoy it. But it's very far
from being a precise science and I know that I'm learning all the time.
I managed to make some inroads into the second Tudor Cornwall (Death and the
Durbervilles) before boarding ship and also wrote a "Letter from Cornwall" for
High Life, the British Airways in-flight magazine. But the most difficult and time-consuming job was doing the final edit on "Village Cricket" with Steve
Dobell, who you can find on the Cricket page of this web-site watching cricket at
Lord's when we launched the biography of Denis Compton which he also edited. Working
with Steve is always demanding but great fun and splendidly creative. As a result of his suggestions I made several thousand words of additions to set alongside his
subtractions. Steve is also meticulous and knowledgeable enough to catch a number of howlers. He said eventually that it was my "oddest" book yet. This
sounds a bit double-edged but I think it's a compliment and that "Village Cricket"
deserves a quirky, eccentric approach. We delivered the typescript to Steve Guise, the
production editor at Little Brown, after a final run-through at the Groucho and he
took us both off to a very jolly debriefing lunch at Joe Allan's.
I also got to the Literary Review's annual "Bad Sex Awards" party. This was held, slightly eccentrically, at the Naval and Military Club ("The In and Out") in St.
James' Square. Sting presented first prize to a rather bemused Indian writer who had
flown especially from Delhi. There were various old friends and acquaintances there
and I was glad I'd turned up even though I got a fair bit of the incredulity I seem to
encounter ever since I moved to Cornwall. "How nice to see you", said Lynn Barber, the demon newspaper interviewer whom I've known since university, "But I
thought you were in Cornwall". This maddening London belief that if you live in Cornwall you can't visit the capital is part of what I've written about in the
letter in High Life. It's a deeply mysterious prejudice!
Back in England after the cruise I managed to have lunch with Richard Morgan who is (subject to the democratic formality of an election) to succeed me as President of the Sherborne School Old Boys' Association. I'm pleased about this as Richard is not only very nice, he is also a former headmaster of Cheltenham and Radley. As I took over from an Admiral I feel I'm in the company of the great and the good, sandwiched between an Old Salt and Mr. Chips - not the usual place for a freelance journalist and writer!
There was the usual raft of e-mails (139 in all) when I turned the computer back on , as well as a large mixed post-bag. The news on both next year's books is promising at the moment. The jacket on the cricket book is looking good and Paul Cox has sent in a couple of enchanting pictorial drafts for "Death and the Visiting Fellow". There was a move to publish the cricket book as an original paperback but I'm relieved that we've gone back to hard-back. The local book shops in Fowey made the point that it's the sort of book that a significant number of serious
cricket fans would like to have in a durable and attractive form to sit alongside the Wisdens on the shelf.
Am off to London at the end of next week for a friend's sixtieth birthday party and to have a working session with publishers. Then back to Cornwall where Penny and I will pull up the draw-bridge and enjoy a quiet Christmas
before an invasion of children - three out of the four plus the first grand-child -in time for New Year. I bought an extraordinary looking bottle of 51 degree proof Calvados in Normandy to set alongside the cigars and Penny invested in a large quantity of exotic looking Belgian chocolates in Blankenberge..
So Happy Christmas and New Year! Keep on reading the good work and bear in mind that this self-employed writer, journalist, guest-speaker and occasional "Visiting Fellow" is always open to attractive and lucrative offers! I await 2004 with the usual mixture of trepidation and optimism. I hope it's a good one for all of us.
Tim Heald
December 2003
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