Recently in The USA Category

    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.

            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!