Tim Heald's Blog

I must stop going on about death and yet hardly a month passes without part of my world passing. This time it was Nigel Napier. Because he was “posh” he did not rate an obituary in the Guardian but he got one in the Telegraph which  I was accused, wrongly,  of writing. He was Lord Napier and Ettrick, Eton and Scots Guards, and he was invaluable over my biography of his erstwhile boss, Princess Margaret. He lived near my old Ma in Wylye Wiltshire, and he was courteous, well-mannered and helpful. He helped me a great deal and I enjoyed his company. Sorry.

I see that two years ago I was able to report that I was busy on “Yet another death in Venice” and that Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson had just sold my Jubilee Book to Murray. Now alas Murray has cancelled the royal book and Severn House don’t want the Venetian whodunnit. I should be cursing and in a way I am. I also feel that it’s the world not me that is out of step. And I don’t care enough. Critics have always said I am too honest for my own good  and that I am indifferent to other people and to the idea of audience. I accept that. Succesful authors nurture their readers and care about them a lot. I’m afraid I do not care enough and it shows.

To Bath for another day of learning at the Bertinet cookery school. Fascinating. Penny was sceptical when I showed her the recipes and it’s true that the recipes themselves  are quite basic – it’s the tips that count. This time it was the microplane grater – a brilliant gadget that I will acquire at once. I was shown how to sharpen a knife with a steel – 17% or 22% though? And much else besides.

One of the questions the blogmaster asks is whether in effect I want to indulge in dialogue. I don’t much but occasionally I get a reaction which suggests a misapprehension. One is that I don’t write for money. I do. But equally if money were the only point I’d do something else. That is what I am trying to say about writing. It’s not a job like most jobs. Some people – maybe a majority – earn because that is all their job consists of. For relatively few earning is only part of the game. I am lucky enough to earn a living doing something I enjoy. That is not – emphatically not – the same as saying one should not be paid.

I protest too much but what really riles me is not the idea that I might not be right – anyone can make mistakes – but the idea that I have not given the matter thought. The whole of my life has been spent being a writer. I have lived and breathed the idea and I repeat that I may get everything wrong but to suggest that I have given it no thought is…No, I must not succumb to hostility and malice. Suffice it to say that…but no. One of the most important decisions I ever made about blogging is not to discuss it. That way lie tea-parties in Wisconsin. That’s another story. I once subscribed to a likely sounding crime writing site only to find that it consisted mainly of fans advertising tea-parties at which they would bang on about their current obsessions. It didn’t seem to me that this was likely either to be enjoyable or lead to increased income so I abandoned it. So please let me hear no suggestions that I am not a dedicated full-time writer and think about it most of the time. Part of the problem lies in the fact that the internet has made it possible for everyone to have a voice whereas it used to be a closed profession. Now everyone thinks they are entitled to a hearing and this is widely regarded as a good thing. I am not so sure. In the past I read for my improvement and I would not write unless for some reason I knew more than my readers. For all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of ways that is gone and anyone can clamber on to a soapbox.  This does not mean that the message is in any way worth hearing. I belong to an old school which thinks part of the point of journalism, books and writing generally is that it is done by  trained specialists.

Rant over. I remain determinedly elitist, and, for my sins, a writer. Sometimes I wish I were something else and had the benefit of comparative security. Alas, no.These are tough times for writers but certain areas proliferate and I have been signed up for two festivals. The first is the inaugural Sherborne one in October where I think I am conducting a workshop  and the second is the first e-book festival in the world. It is being held at Kidwelly in Wales which reminds me of the verse;

“If ever you go the Dolgelley

Don’t stay at the ********* hotel.

There’s nothing to put in your belly -

And no-one to answer the bell.”

Only you don’t apparently  pronounce Kidwelly like that. It’s in Wales but a different part. The Kidwellefestival is being organized by Julian Ruck, a distant relation of Berta’s. Berta lived on the front in Aberdyfi, near Breeze’s milk bar, with her husband, Oliver Onions. Berta swam every morning until she was seriously old and she wrote romantic novels.  In some ways she was Wales’ answer to Barbara Cartland, whose biography I later wrote. Berta had no pink about her but boasted fierce black hair and wrote kindly about some juvenile poem I sent to the Cambrian News in Aberystwyth.  It rhymed and we both liked that. The Cambrian did not print it. Anyway Julian is a relation but only distant. He has also got Martin Edwards, which is good, and he is putting me up in a splendid sounding pub. I am looking forward to both and yes, they pay, sensibly and professionally. You don’t get rich droning but you should not starve.

I suppose I should be twittering  rather than blogging, Everyone but the Luddites is. There is a piece about following world class twitterers in today’s colour mag and the latest Red Herrings has advice on how to twitter. I don’t like it though – too short and too democratic. However I have joined Linkedin groups for various different kinds of pro writers who on balance enjoy their work, Meanwhile in real life various Gurkhas and ex-Hong Kong lunchers came, we heard the organ this morning in Sherborne Abbey and Patrick Palmer came to inspect the Test Bed. On Saturday the post brought…and so onward, onward…

I had a bit removed under local anaesthetic at the Yeatman Hospital in Sherborne. As Prince Philip (and he is older than me), said, “ I have reached the age when bits keep falling off”. Or words to that effect. Anyway, as usual, I was amazingly impressed by the NHS as is so often the case when one cuts through the red tape and encounters small places like the Yeatman.

It was from my cheek/neck below the right ear and the hope is that it’s benign. Hugh – we stayed with the Archers at Charleton Horethorne since I wasn’t allowed to drive and Penny can’t because of immigration and licence formalities – quipped that he hoped they removed the right bit and not a leg or two and as far as I could see they did. The bloke who did it was from Ulster, had done two years on secondment at the Royal Marsden and came up from Exeter. Seemed exemplary and a nurse brought me tea and a couple of bikkies afterwards. Just like the movies!

The letter just arrived. He is happy and seems to have cut it all out and it appears to have been a benign one. Keep an eye out though!

I’ve been waking in the small hours wondering how to spell Harodinourquy, the French Basque Number Eight and also about Umpire Buller. I used  to have a mantra which went something like “Umpire Bartlett wore a big top hat and Umpire Buller wore a bowler”. Sid Buller wore a long white coat and a trilby I think. He was famous for no balling Griffin, kept wicket for Worcester in a previous life and stood in 33 Tests but never with an umpire called Bartlett who didn’t exist. Lee, Chester but no Bartlett. Sid died during the tea interval of a county match in which he was umpiring aged only 61. But what about the other umpire? My memory is obviously wrong but…

Bad news from Hong Kong. Penny says that Diane Stormont died. Cervical cancer. Diane always seemed to me to genuinely up for anything, gung ho, a proper journalist and so on. Very sad but what can one say? I wish I’d known her better. Norman Luck died. He was a reporter on the Express, best known as the man who broke the story of the Queen and Fagan, the interloper who made it in to the Queen’s bedroom. Latterly he had written the Express newsletter and organized the old alumni lunch to which I went last year.And Mervyn Davies, the great Welsh Number Eight forward, universally known (though not by me) as “Merv the Swerve”. I recall, instead, a Max Boyce song celebrating a famous Welsh victory which ran, “Mervyn Davies, very big man. No have like him in Japan”. I thought they had those enormous wrestlers in Japan but I was obviously wrong. All three in their vastly different ways were part of my mental furniture. Now all have gone and I feel that much older.

Anyway. I did a piece about the Queen for the Express. Reminded me of the old days and I agree that the money is not what it was but it seems fair enough to me. I suppose one is cashing in on a life time of experience but even so. It made a full page and Julia picked up a copy in Beaminster en route to Yandle’s on her way to coffee. Yandle’s sounds great but we have never been. New Cross Farm promise asparagus soon, so spring really is here. Apart from the Express very little professionally. The Tablet used my review and I did an interview for BBC TV about Prince Philip and the Eccentrics Club outside the Palace but was moved on by a man in police uniform who claimed, improbably, to be a real policeman and asked Gary for his permit. We obligingly moved to the other side of the road but the Parks police about whom we had been warned never came. Oh well. Peter Hughes and Christopher Braun saw me and I was able to have lunch with Tristram who came for the weekend bringing wife and daughter a fortnight later.

Thursday to the Malt House and sold Ma’s dining chairs to good friend who will guarantee a good class of bottom on them (very important) and yesterday accompanied the horticultural group to Knightshayes where I read Jeremy Archer in the sun while the gardeners looked at the plants . Meanwhile we lost a cricket match to Sri Lanka and Yeovil were beaten by Hartlepool.  Consequent gloom all round. Have still booked to see Yeovil play Chesterfield in the last match of the season and my tickets for Lord’s arrived from MCC. So hope defies expectation!

Increasingly I find though that I am happiest with a routine that sees me leave the house, walk to the bottom of the garden and spend the day in the office writing. I care less and less about the audience. For instance I have embarked on unsolicited memoirs. Christopher, my long-suffering agent, has warned me that these may be hard to sell even if they are really good.  I nod sagely and understand but the truth is that I don’t really care. It’s enough just to be writing.

In any case I feel I have a duty to record certain salient facts if only because of events at the Malt House.  Years ago I had a one-way conversation with a cousin in Australia at the end of which she said, revealingly, that she had known next to nothing of what I had told her. Thus the arrival of the Ras from the Wirral, our not going to Bob’s funeral, the discovery of an alternative source of Ras (and much else besides – thank you Barts) in Crewkerne, pail into insignificance alongside simple writing. I kid myself that I owe it to kith and kin who come after but in the end writing is a disease. Without it I am bereft; with it I am content.

To-day is April Fool’s Day and Palm Sunday. I went to church and joined the congregation in the churchyard with my palm cross. Joining in is a sacrifice and I felt a proper Charlie. If I am religious at all I am a natural Quaker – a solitary, man at the end of the pew. Church is good for me though. The building is beautiful and historic and it is good to feel or at least to watch community at work.  It does exist and it is very chastening to witness. Home for lunch and Newcastle on Sky Sports. Simple pleasures. Good lunch,  Newcastle won. Happy.

As I said: “simple pleasures”. Perhaps that’s one of the reactions to relative old age. The consuming  ambition, the anxiety to impress, the need for activity at all costs – these have vanished replaced by what? Simplicity. Discuss… I do hope I never lose the curiosity…I woke in the small hours and had a profound thought with which to finish this blog. Alas it had gone by the time I made it to the keyboard. Another sign of age!

I heard by chance that Hugh Faulkner died last year. He made more than 80 and had the proverbial “good innings” but even so. Years ago Hugh, a retired RN Commander, was Secretary of the Royal Warrant Holders’ Association and I was commissioned by them to write a book. From time to time Hugh and I drove off to inspect warrant holders deeply shocked if there was no food or drink and vaguely hoping, roguishly, for loot. Hugh was a keen smoker, an enthusiastic drinker and golfer and a bit of a bounder who ran the RWHA as if it was a personal plaything. In retirement he went to the Borders and played even more golf. Hadn’t seen him for years but we had some good times together. He was part of my world for a time and I hope they do a good malt at the 19^th wherever he has gone.

And John Moynihan too. He was hit by a car which seems a bit rough when you are in your late seventies. John was a keen Arsenal fan and as such helped me with a biography of Denis Compton – John knew far more about Denis than Denis who was, oh well… John also helped me with a biography of Princess Margaret. He had once, as I recall, shared a girl friend with Lord Snowdon. He was also night club correspondent of the London Evening Standard. Ah those were the days. John told me he had never seen Margaret drunk. She sank a lot of Scotch but somehow remained more or less upright.

This is part of the penalty, I suppose, for having started young.  Your fixtures die. Oh, incidentally, I was up in the night considering  the kerfuffler question and I found myself wondering what would have happened  if JFK had looked out over the divided city and said “Ich bin ein kerfuffler” rather than “Berliner”. And how about Washing Up? Oop Waschen but that sounds Dutch rather than German. I am obviously going mad.

Anyway I took  the bus to London the other Thursday and was joined by Penny on the Saturday. I did lunch with the literary agent at the Rag, lunch with a Literary Editor at the Groucho; dinner at the Society of Bookmen, where James Daunt spoke, a couple of Chinese lunches, a recital at the Fan Museum,(counter-tenor, lute and reading) a disappointing exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, (Arctic convoys) a better but dispiriting one at Buckingham Palace ((Scott’s polar pictures), and a riveting Hockney one at the Royal Academy. Two theatres – Warhorse and an Ayckbourn at the renamed Harold Pinter Theatre in Panton Street and a movie (Alan Clark’s brother and Marilyn Monroe).  A final lunch at the Swan in Hammersmith with Steve Dobell and a couple of difficult nights at the Army and Navy – snoring did not help and meant a couple of pointless hours on the floor of the corridor outside our room. Oh and a meeting at the Royal Warrant Holders’ Association. No wonder I felt knackered by the time I got home. I feel tired just reading it through.

Somerset was quiet by contrast. Yesterday we went to the Malt House which is strangely depressing. It’s not just that it brings back memories but that  there is so much stuff which must have meant so much at the time but now means little or nothing. For instance we have found what I think is a football medal won by grandfather when he was in G Coy of the 2^nd Leinsters in 1906.I wrote to the Leinster Regimental organization and heard back from a bloke in Deal telling me that the 2^nd Battalion were in Mauritius in 1906. That would explain one of the ‘M’s. And father’s letter to his mother after his brother, my uncle, was killed at Anzio. My father is concerned, consoling, had long chats with Howard when they were last together and both “knew” he was going to die; and H’s confirmation crucifix and a protestation of my father who was then destined for the priesthood saying that he couldn’t in conscience take up arms. This from a man who later won an MC at Salerno and an immediate DSO on the Gothic Line. Well you could never accuse my father of consistency! But it all seems so futile, so transitory, so here today gone tomorrow, so important once so unknown now. That’s life I suppose. Hobbes was right – nasty and short. Oh well. Bit depressing though. And James Whitaker, the royal “expert” is dead. Didn’t much like him, thought he was phony and ignorant, but world-famous one moment and unknown the next.Hobbes and his aphorism tend to  make the Malt House tough.

Another weekend I drove at crack of dawn to Bath to experience Penny’s Christmas present, a one day course in “one pot cooking” at the Bertinet school. Brilliant. We did stifado, seafood romesco, daube and chicken chermoula. All great but I was useless and had obviously been doing everything all wrong all my life – using the wrong sort of wooden spoon, small knives and not being able to crush garlic properly. And I had never heard of Vic or Ras el Hanout. All very salutary. In the evening we went to the Artist which we enjoyed and the Hole in the Wall which we didn’t. And our room at the cheap not very cheerful hotel was freezing until in the morning Penny mastered the controls of the heater. Bath is lovely though and in a month or so I return to Bertinet for French country cooking!

The day before I heard John Wilsey (General Sir John!) reading from the books of remembrance at the  inaugural thanksgiving service in the Abbey at Sherborne. Later we had lunch at the Eastbury. John was interesting, thoughtful and useful about the school. I can’t get rid of the question over its greatness and whether this is important or not. My problem!

Last night I woke in kerfuffler mode and found the Percy French tune involving the fight to the death of the Russian and the Persian. I could remember Ivan’s name but not until later the name of Abdul Amir. Maddening. I then  moved quickly to casting and decided that Ras-el-hanout should be played by Omar Sharif in moustache twirling mode and Piment d’espalette by a sexy ingénue as yet undiscovered. In fact Jenny Chandler told us the other day that ras is a sort of Moroccan Garam Masala and the Piment is French pimento from somewhere in the Landes south of Biarritz. Never mind they are both good characters. Thus I tossed and turned and occupied my brain.Pathetic but never mind…Oh, the girl in the Trading Post  had never heard of either. This makes me feel marginally better.

Nor had the staff at the Tesco in Hammersmith or at the Marks and Sparks Food Hall in King Stree. Ras in on the web site of Melbury and Appleton, the Islington on-line deli and Bart the spice people from Bristol. I have however being perverse ordered a sachet of Ras from some people on the Wirral. It is on its way. Fingers crossed.

I was in London for a Detection Club Dinner which went OK and it was nice to see lots of old friends. Older, much older… Stayed at the Groucho, had a severe hair cut atd a newish place called Groovy (which made Penny laugh), went to the  Post Office, had photo taken for bus pass, and had lunch at the Swan with favourite former editor. Felt old though. Death in all directions and though I was recognized I felt very decrepit and surprised to be so often correctly identified! Back to find TV request and a college piece on crime writers in which I feature flatteringly. Bus home though was stopped for an hour and a half near Bagshot as a result of an accident – helicopters, sirens, flashing lights and a combination of concern and muttering.

Davey Jones of the Monkees died; and Rory Tierney who had been associated with the London Oratory since the early seventies. Both younger than me. Kate Mortimer’s husband, Bob, who wasn’t, also perished and is being buried in Sampford Courtenay at the weekend. We intend going. This afternoon I shall cook stifado with cubed lamb from South Petherton; will the Ras have arrived from the Wirral; does it matter? Discuss!!

Much family history is predicated on the grounds of the youngest’s inability to pronounce the names of their seniors. Thus my grandson Henry. He seems not to be able to manage “Grandpa” or anything similar, preferring “Crapper”.  Actually I also much prefer this though I am told I mustn’t encourage him. In years to come however I hope “Crapper Tim” will be a family name and a private joke between Henry and myself. “Crapper Tim” has a resonance and a meaning denied to its near namesake.

Mispronunciation, misapprehension, bile, prejudice continue to be part of the price for sticking one’s head above the proverbial parapet. Take Amazon. I have one review for “Death in the opening chapter”. Just the one but it earns me five stars for that book whereas the two for Jardine earn me just one star. I wrote the “Death” review myself, and make no bones about it. God knows who wrote the Jardine opinions which I have not read. Probably someone I despise, probably someone who would like to have written the book themselves. Too busy being grand. Or someone who thought it too short. Should I care?

Drove to South Petherton for a Penny consultation at the surgery; arrived in plenty of time to discover the nurse was in Martock. The computer was blamed. In the last analysis it’s always the computer’s fault. Sometimes I think the computer was invented solely as an excuse for human error.

Over to the Malt House last week to start sorting through my mother’s things. A nightmare. Fifty years of buttons, fifty years of zip fasteners, fifty years of unsorted photographs, fifty years of unwanted presents. As one son said ruefully – I thought I knew the house inside out but obviously not. Intriguing sometimes. For example I came across a suitcase with a label on which were the words “Betty’s notes for Timothy”. First I knew of it or I thought I knew nothing. Maybe I am going mad. Evidently my darling aunt was paying out money for people to research family history, She never told me. There are letters from long lost, long dead (?) cousins in such places as Wanganui.             But nobody told me and now it is too late. Maybe. Maybe not. A failure of communication? Shades of Crapper Tim. Grisel, grisel, grump. grump. Was tut der kerfuffler? Is there a relationship between kartoffel and kerfuffler? If not there should be!

Anyway I refuse to be down-hearted. I have had a further communication from the lawyer re my mother’s inheritance tax, will and so on. Seems to me that it is all a more or less macabre game. It all seems to depend on whether you died in a certain year or managed to hang on for more than seven. But who decides when you die? Or whether it is significant? Some say the government. Others say just them. But does it matter? In the long run it’s just money and in the long run we are all dead anyway. I increasingly take the view that it doesn’t matter. But then a little voice says ‘ You Balfour, you.’

Talking of communication, well we WERE talking about communication weren’t we? I heard from Cyril Aynsley’s daughter the other day. Cyril was one of several voices of experience on the Express when I was a young feature writer and I was slightly in awe of him. Of several memories I have of him the most vivid are of the proprietors of the hotel in 1969 Caernarvon trying to get the Express contingent slung out of their place in the middle of the night and a weary Cyril, blearily – he was freshly woken – trying to explain to the Welsh police inspector why this was a bad idea. The other memory was being ordered down to Blackfriars station one morning to greet Cyril on his way to the office with the words “Don’t worry Cyril but the IRA have just phoned to say they are going to shoot you so I have been sent down to bring you in the back.” Those were the days. If we had the ability to hack phones would we have done so? I doubt it. In those days we wouldn’t have recognized a celebrity, the editor banned us from watching TV and the best investigative line was ‘Mine’s a pint’. I miss Cyril and those like him. And talking of communication it was very primitive in those days. Now it is much improved, if seldom as funny. Life is like that. Discuss. I have an email from the new literary editor at the Tablet asking if I would be interested in reviewing a book on the internet.I would but even though I thought the new technology filed everything I cannot find the request or my response. As for BT! But that way lies madness. One of the intriguing things about the new technology is the way it makes the old redundant. Like Kodak. Nothing wrong with Kodak but what is the point in the changed world? Discuss.

It was my birthday on January 28^th. I made the Guardian along with John Tavener,Sarkozy and Acker Bilk but not the Telegraph. Does that mean that I exist in a Guardian world but not a Telegraph one. If so why? If not why not? I  could analyse those who remembered and those who forgot but would there be a point? The Culvers came for the weekend and on my birthday I drove them to Temperley’s cider farm, the smokery at Brown and Forest and the Leach pottery. There’s a lot happening around here. We ate and drank too much – smoked salmon, salt marsh lamb, panettone and Coriole and an unexpected but nice sweet Greek red. Murray, England cricket team and Newcastle United lost but Yeovil beat Preston North End so all is not entirely bad. We didn’t see the murmuration of starlings nor the church and Penny absorbed Maggie’s hints on gardening. I was remembered by Bernie Shepherd and St. Austell Rugby Football Club. Odd weekend and an odd anniversary.

And now it is snowing on Monday morning  and Maggie and Michael left early for fear of bad weather on Salisbury Plain and I am reflecting on another year. I wish I could make sense and predict with certainty but one of life’s lessons is that one never can predict accurately or only by chance. As the man said cheerfully, in the long run we’re all dead. And at a moment in life one is likely to know more people dead than alive. That is a point I must have passed some time ago. Better parties elsewhere than in the here and now.

For some reason playing kerfuffler in the small hours the other night I thought of my dear great-aunt , Auntie Tim, who lived in Somerset at Creech St,. Michael in a dark house called Langaller where she served home reared chicken with milk gravy for Sunday lunch and taught me Monopoly and ping-pong. When I was little she used to give me a birthday present of a book of stamps valued at say 3 shillings and six pence. When I was a small boy this was very generous but when I was older it seemed less so. Yet that was always Auntie Tim’s present. Now I feel a little like her and at last understand.

Playing kerfuffler I was reminded of the Barosss hymn which I heard in a huge shed in Tanunda. It went “Ein Barossa Zwei Barossa Drei” and I remember hundreds of good old boys joining in and my pinching myself and wondering if I was in Munich. So, inevitably, I substituted kerfuffler for Barossa. Then I thought of Daisy and her bicycle made for two and the rhymes that went with it, such as all of a love for you and give me your answer do and I immediately thought kerfuffler must not be a motor-bike but a tandem pusher. Discuss as they say. Going mad perhaps. Or maybe just old…

And in any case who needs words? Lord Chandos, Oliver Lyttleton, whom I interviewed many years ago told me that an Englishman only needed an intonation to his indeterminate grunt or groan to indicate something quite sophisticated. Thus “AH” with a certain inflexion might indicate concurrence when you said that you were recommending a candidate for a particular job whereas another inflexion coupled with much the same noise might mean something completely different. So who really needs kerfuffler or even Crapper Tim? I am tempted to add “discuss”. But I won’t. Why not? D…no,no, no…

Some do Sudoku, some sundry crosswords, some simply lie awake and worry. I tend to play games of my own invention. Thus, at roughly two in the morning,  add an “r” to the end of “kerfuffle” and the word goes from being truly English to being echt German. Ein kerfuffler means either a cabbage out of which one makes sauerkraut though more properly a bulb such as celeriac or radish; or a noisy antique motorbike probably a  Velocette of the kind Geoff Dodkin was always renovating behind his shop, though cf Boanerges. Was that the bike on which Ralph Richardson used to roar on his way every Friday to play Real Tennis against Henry Johns at Lord’s? Or is a “kerfuffler” a locket of silver worn around the neck,  containing teeth, preferably wisdom?

Discuss. Except that when I mentioned this to the wife she asked not unreasonably, when I was going to cease talking rubbish. So, it’s the end of the year and a time, I suppose, for taking stock. An excuse I fear for talking yet more rubbish. And yet, and yet…

I suppose that in family and personal terms 2011 will inevitably go down as the year my mother died.She had a “good innings”, being in her ninety-first year when she went, but I don’t think, with respect, that the judgement is, despite much use, helpful. Life is not a matter of those sorts of statistic and in the end I think quality not quantity is what matters. Lot of death about during the year though most , but not all, was the logical end of interesting chapters.

On a professional level it was four books published which must represent a success, especially at my age, though reviews were mixed or sometimes non-existent which was almost worse. There were also a number of unpublished words which was also, I suppose, bad. One of the unhappy things about writing is that writers have to depend on publishers. It is some consolation that the new technology threatens conventional publishing more than it threatens writing and writers. I am still the Royal Correspondent of the Lady. Chiz!

Anyway. I went to church this morning and then did a shop. God followed closely by Mammon. Got home to discover that Penny is doing a Nigel Slater recipe involving ginger and five star anis, so I’d like to drink the New Year in and then from Monday on tighten belts, give things up and confront the undoubted horrors 2012 will bring.

I find that as time goes on my ambitions are less commercial and more altruistic so I would like to see Conan Doyle’s old house near Hindhead saved and I would like to help get a PEN imprisoned writer released. At some stage I would like to finish my update of the Sherborne School history which I am afraid I am enjoying despite the many strictures from contemporaries whose opinions I respect. I don’t regard the project as a sell-out and I will argue the toss about it with anyone who wishes to do so. And I hope I will write more crime novels. One, “Yet another death in Venice” is virtually finished and the one set in a home for elderly writers is under weigh. Sherborne is, perhaps, the most important, not least because it is regarded by so many as a sell-out

I think this is one of my texts. Disapproval will not make things vanish. I loathed much of school, but there were good things about it. Some of the teaching was brilliant and sympathetic; it was a beautiful place in beautiful countryside; it was changing so some of the aspects  I hated – compulsory corps, beating, fagging – have vanished. I continue to have a problem with paying for privilege but I am by no means certain that it helps to have one’s head in the sand. I believe that it will benefit everyone to improve the education open to all but I don’t see that this is best served by discriminating against individual schools. One of my favourite teachers used to maintain that there were only two sorts of school – the good and the bad. I think he was over-simplifying  and would counter anyway by saying that this is a gross over-simplification of his position. Nevertheless he is or was surely right. It behoves all of us to fight for better wherever we are.

Anyway the revered teacher is dead. Practically all those who taught me are the same. Likewise many of my friends and contemporaries – my parents, my younger brother, Charlo whose sponsor I was in the Miss Oxford competition, Charles the smiling fellow-editor at Weekend Magazine in Toronto, Kate with whom I walked on Dartmoor, Alan and Miles who once entertained each other across our Cornish dinner table, Jeffrey onelie begetter of Rayner Tours, Mary my godma, Rosemary my surrogate Gran whom I adored, David her brother, John Thomson the fascist leader-writer on the Daily Express, the mad but stimulating Richard Cobb, his marginally more conventional colleague Christopher Hill, our lawyer David, our neighbour Jim, the grand such as Beryl and Hugh, and the not-so-grand such as  Ray and my mothers-in-law.

To-day an ex-Dean of Windsor who helped over my biography of Prince Philip is dead at 87and David Bailey is alive and 74. It is his birthday and I wish him many returns but with respect Bailey is not supposed to be 74. He is essentially a sixties figure, young and exciting and disrespectful. Oh well, such are my musings at the turn of the year. A grandson is coming later, a grand-daughter is just departed. David Hockney is a new member of the Order of Merit, Bailey is 74 and time marches on.

I was thinking something similar in church yesterday. It was Plough Sunday. Patrick Palmer whose family have farmed in Bower Hinton for more than two centuries had brought in a plough which was at the back of the building under the tree. We sang a hymn of praise for ploughmen to the tune of Brother James’ air (I was much struck by a couplet which said in effect that ploughmen expected an honest wage for a decent day’s work but  no more). The vicar blessed the plough and presumably it isn’t mentioned again until harvest and we all sing “We plough the field and scatter…” It was relevant because it occurred to me that the blessing of the plough had been going on for centuries and would be going on for hundreds of years in the future. We however…

I really also hope that we will be better integrated in this place over the next few months. With this in mind I have enrolled Penny for a day of potting at Barrington and for a weekly course of gardening at East Lambrook Manor. She gave me a one-pot cooking day in Bath.

Meanwhile I went on Boxing Day to see Yeovil Town play Charlton Athletic. The Addicks won 3-2 in extra time which was sad but it was a good day and there were almost 5,000 there. I also had my hair cut in Yeovil and saw the dermatology department at the hospital who diagnosed a (benign) cancerous growth which they will excise under a local anaesthetic.

Even London involved a day of Sherborne interview interspersed with such smart metropolitan delights as a piano recital at St. James’ Piccadilly and a Christmas drinks party in Putney where we were staying. On the Monday lunched with one son and had drinks with the other in the evening. I see that at the beginning of the month we were trundling to Salzburg on the train and that on the 17^th I went to the Farmer’s Market at Montacute, bought a couple of pasties, couldn’t start the car, called the AA whose man started it first time but said (charitably) that the Renault Clio was fantabulous except for the catalytic something which used to be notorious but had now been improved and a new one was a good idea and would cost “only” about £40.  Last night Benedict Cumberbatch starred in the new Sherlock Holmes.This morning’s paper describes him as the new heart throb. I remember playing his Dad’s wife in an Agatha Christie at school. Matron told me ladies sat with their knees together!

So.  Back to games of kerfuffler in the small hours.  Am much struck as ever by how Pooterish I am and this is. Nothing, as usual, in the Honours List! Happy New Year.

Someone once said…even as I type those  words I find myself repeating the mantra “Look it up, look it up”. Well I have tried the Dictionary of Quotations and I can’t find it so, a Mars Bar or a small cigar for the person who can identify the  author. Meanwhile “someone” will have to do. What someone once said was that “Nothing matters much, and very little matters at all” or words to that effect. I was thinking something along those lines as my mother’s ashes were lowered into the family plot at Martock Church the other day. I googled the author and Wikipedia says it was the Prime Minister, Balfour, who was a bit of a philosopher too.

Anyway I tried the quote out on my niece Rebecca over breakfast the other day and she seemed to prefer one of the subsidiary attributes of a journalist according to the late great Nicholas Tomalin who said that the ability to believe passionately in second rate projects was important. I prefer the Balfourism myself and thought of it when my mother’s ashes were buried and again when I was abused in a review in one of the newspapers the other day. One event matters a bit, the other not at all. And it is worth remembering what Balfour said.

It was a busy month. The third and fourth were devoted to my Ma. On the third she was cremated at Yeovil crematorium. Penny and I went to metaphorically hold her hand and the following day she was remembered in a service at St. Leonard’s Semley; there was a wake at the Benett Arms and we finally buried her ashes in Martock churchyard. It would be entirely wrong to say that everything went well but there were very few hiccups, the two (female) Revs did the business and we all thought Maurice from the undertakers was a star. We all have memories, of course, but her going represents the final closing of a chapter. Sad, of course, but many memories mostly good and she was able to stay in the house that she loved  from 1966 almost to the end. Part of me wishes that she could have finally gone like my Godma’s mother, bending down to smell her roses at home and never getting up. Still we can’t have everything and she lived to be over 90 and saw four great-grandchildren. I think she deserves a rest.

Besides the end of that chapter everything else seems oddly insignificant. I have had some stinking reviews for my Richard Cobb letters – everyone seemed to approve of the letters but one or two people were rude about me though not for the first time I was depressed not by the bile but the incompetence. If I were reviewing the book I hope I would have been critical but not for the reasons offered. Besides which anyone who thinks that Basildon Bond blue was bright when the whole point is that it was (still is I guess), a sort of sludgy, turgid non-event  misses the point. And the sad thing is that the reviewer’s verdict is probably cast in stone and Basildon Bond blue will go down in history as bright.

There are interesting things about the letters. Why did we have to wait more than a decade after Cobb’s death? Why were they published by a relatively small press and not one associated with academic life? Was he a good letter writer? Why do we major on letters to Trevor-Roper when he wrote better letters to people such as John Bromley? What happened to the cache of wartime letters to Christopher Lee? Did the editor not know that Simon Schama got his first undergraduate degree at Cambridge where he was tutored by Jack Plumb?Or  did  the same editor  not know perfectly well that Goronwy Rees is dead and that there is no “e” on the end of Corpus Christi? Editorial lapses seem much more frequent than heretofore and are often ascribed to economies and to the wholesale sacking of editors and fact checkers. Is new technology an improvement? Above all, I suppose, does any of this matter? In comparison to life and death, not a lot. What would Balfour have thought? Discuss. My own view is that the letters are of interest but in the long march of history not especially important. Their editing even less so.

Oh well, Richard was a flawed genius. Deeply flawed but still a genius and at least we have some of his letters two of which are works that deserve to be remembered for a long time and are models, as they say, of their kind. They were not – and here is a clue – written to Hugh Trevor-Roper but they are wonderful. Anyway if I know Richard he would be amused at the fuss but pleased that I am able to laugh however wryly.

My Sherborne book continues to chuff along. The research is fun if often maddening. Every time I think an interview is going to be straightforward it turns out to be the reverse and one ends up with more questions than answers. The best history of a school that I have read so far is Brian Rees on Stowe but I am told that the governors suppressed it. I think I may see why but they lacked guts and were plain wrong. Silly governors.

We have just returned from a weekend in Salzburg with an old university chum who is finishing a five year stint in a local schloss once owned by Max Rheinhardt. We travelled by train, via two nights in Munich, one in Cologne and another on a night train from Paris. I would recommend everything but the train from Paris which was dire. We ended up having no sleep, and eating sausage and potato salad in a minute box and staring at the wall as we trundled south-east. But the rest was marvelous – no snow but markets everywhere and in Munich one of the world’s great art galleries virtually empty. Compare with the Leonardo exhibition at London’s National Gallery. My dear the people. Will the Lady with the ermine ever be left in peace again? We saw her in Krakow is an empty room at the Czartoryski but from now on everyone will be flocking to see her and she will need a body guard. She was, I think, better off relatively undiscovered.

So. Maybe nothing matters very much and hardly anything matters at all. Was Balfour right? Or Nick Tomalin? Or neither? Or both? Some things obviously matter more than others and my mother’s death matters much more than my editing of Richard’s letters. Neither has a lot to do with money; nor celebrity; nor with anything that the modern world thinks important. But then nor does blogging per se. I suppose I like blogging because it is a way of getting even and making oneself heard. And the best thing I heard all month was the man who said that one or two of Tom Braun’s translations reduced him to tears. If it weren’t for me and Tom’s brother the world and our friend might not have read them.

And the publication thereof had nothing whatever to do with fame or money. Incidentally my friend Matthew Melliar-Smith, a former Balliol College Brakenbury Scholar, said that the point about Richard Cobb for us who knew him originally as a teacher was that he expanded rather than contracted our horizons. He was a man of the world; he spent a lot of time in France; he was dangerous and as such emphatically unlike the teachers to whom many us were used. He was much more than a regular at the King’s Arms. Another old friend reminded me of the word “kerfuffle”. According to one of my dictionaries, though not the shorter Oxford which omits it altogether, the word has Scottish antecedents and means something like to ruffle or cast into disarray. I was brought up to think that it implied storm in a teacup. At all events I am grateful for the reminder and for the letter which accompanied it. Makes a change from worrying about the brightness of Basildon Bond blue.

Oh revenge. Silly idea and the idea that it is best cold has always struck me as ridiculous. Hot or not at all. At university I was told by the chairman of examiners, a New Zealander who knew everything about the Duke of Newcastle,that never before had they encountered a candidate who wrote so much so fluently about so little. I told Nick Tomalin by whom I was then employed and he said it sounded a good story and why not ring up the don concerned. I did so, told him the Sunday Times was concerned that he and his colleagues had made a pig’s ear of the exam results and that Sunday we carried the definitive piece, complete with graph, under the heading “a first class row”.

Very satisfactory.

What is a blog for if not moments such as this? Here is the address I gave at St. Leonard’s Semley yesterday, Friday 4th Nov, 2011.

House keeping first.

Thank you all for coming.

The family would be pleased if you could join us at the Benett for a wake immediately after the service.

The order of the service follows the traditions of the Church in which my mother was brought up. We have tried to be conventional and to accord with what I think my mother’s wishes would be. Where possible we have followed the precedents of my father’s service. That however is four decades ago and while some things don’t change I can hear the priest in charge – a stranger – saying  “it’s supposed to be a sad occasion not a celebration”. I’m not sure a priest would say the same today.

I’ll try to thank all concerned but if I leave anyone out it’s my fault and you must not feel in anyway overlooked. While I remember, by the way, I hope you agree that the flowers are terrific. My mother would have approved not least because she was on the roster for years, her friend and neighbour Julia is in charge this month, and much of the greenery is from the garden of the Malt House. So thanks Julia and your team. And while I am on the subject I know that my mother valued the friendship of good neighbours and  several members of the family have asked me to express our gratitude to Julia and Freddy. I am pleased to join them and to say that I wish all of us were blessed with such neighbours.

I know some people say that on occasions such as this they would rather be in the casket than the pulpit. I think that’s taking things a little far though I have to concede that if my much loved brother James were still with us, I would tell him to speak about our mother. Alas he is not here but no doubt sharing a family cloud somewhere. I was always the one left behind and so you’ll have to put up with me. It isn’t, alas,the first time.

I remember my father telling a family O group after my parents sold their house in Buckinghamshire  that we were not under any circumstances moving west of Salisbury. My uncle Tom says he doesn’t know what an O Group is nor that it will mean anything to the modern generation. My father, however, was always having O groups – even if it was mainly bluff. He spoke with the authority of a  man who had won the Military Cross and a Distinguished Service Order in the Italian campaign. And so it was after the typical O group in which he said that we were not moving West of Salisbury  that my mother and I were driving up Barker’s Hill,a few days later, more than 15 miles west of Salisbury. Househunting. It must have been 1966.

Michael Lodge, who still I am delighted to say, was doing logs and lawns at the Malt House more than forty years on was on the roof of the farm on the right doing whatever people do on roofs, and my mother looked at the Malt House on our left and clocked the beautiful and inimitable very English view through the drawing room window. She turned to me immediately and said “I think it’s empty”.

And so it was. Martin and Diana de Satge had farmed it but moved out recently to a house in East Knoyle and the Malt House was not technically even on the market. Nevertheless my parents bought it within days and my mother stayed there until she finally went to Hays House in September. Thank you, Sara Vaughan, for making that move possible and relatively painless. And thank you, James and Sara, for the love and affection you have demonstrated over the years and especially in the last few months.

The house on Barker’s Hill defined Jean’s long life and she achieved two things there. First she became an important figure in the community.

It was a very different world in those days – opposite the Malt House where there is now a hard tennis court and a pool was a working farm; there was a village shop where Ernie boasted one of the finest displays of gumboots in the country. Squadron –Leader Steiger-Lewis ran the Benett and Canon Rogers was the vicar. When Anthony and Anne Johnson took over the parish they made some additions to the Rectory and my mother, on viewing them, said characteristically that it now looked like Soweto.Into this scheme of things and tapestry of people my mother fitted admirably. She became a big cheese in the local conservatives – Denis Walters was the MP -; she was a key player  in the parochial church council run by Ollie Patch, who had  destroyed the Italian fleet at Taranto and whose family my parents had first met in Malta in the 1940s;  she distributed poppies, laid on meals for the elderly, many of whom were latterly much younger than she was. Lucy, my daughter, her grand-daughter, who is alas in New Zealand, remembers Jean and Mrs. Patch trying to thread cherry tomatoes on to liquorice sticks as part of a Women’s Institute project.They were hopeless but hysterical. Above all, London was much further away than it feels to day. She was always a traditional countrywoman and she became a working part of the local countryside.

Just as important she became a focal point for her family. When she first moved to the area this was essentially a small nuclear one but gradually she went from being a sprightly young forty something to a venerable 90 plus. In the course of this she garnered daughters-in-law, six grandchildren and four great grandchildren. She was always a source of common-sense and reassurance for the family and a refuge from the often antagonistic world.

These two aspects of her life – the community and her family, allied to a strong sense of place and of rightness and wrongness, were fundamental. She was flawed,funny, cutting and cuddly, giggled a lot, boasted a well-turned ankle and thanks toYoga remained enviably supple , fond of fudge and fire-lighting–she was  a decent, complex individual who didn’t apparently change much, who didn’t suffer fools but was always there when needed.

She was born in 1920 at the Green in Martock, South Somerset, where her father my grandfather, had a glove factory. Penny and I recently moved to Bower Hinton, one of the village’s suburbs, and we are within walking distance of the farm house in which her great childhood friend, Diana Palmer once lived  It was a solace to my mother that the family had, in a sense, “come home” and she recently had lunch in Bower Hinton once or twice with Caroline, who latterly co-ordinated her care. Caroline was recommended by Dr. Carter at the Tisbury surgery and I owe her a huge debt.After my grand-father’s premature death in the 1930s the family went into exile  Jean was educated at Ashford High School in Kent and later taught Pamela Digby later Pam Harriman. La Harriman had a reputation as one of the grandes horizontelles of her time but my mother apparently taught Pamela Gym. That, at any rate, is the story.

During the war Jean served in the ATS and at the Keep in Dorchester where she formed two important, vital associations, that shaped her life. The first was with Fan. My godmother, as she became was always Fan, my mother Loo. When Loo first saw Fan, she was peeling spuds. “That’s Lake” said my mother’s guide, “I think you’ll like Lake”. Lake was tall; my mother short. It was a rule of those times that ATS could only dance with officers but they were nearly all too short for Lake. Consequently Fan and Loo used to skyve off in the evenings to Askerswell and to a camp near Piddlehinton where the Guards were stationed. There they danced the nights away with six foot other ranks. There is some dispute about where exactly the Guards were stationed but none about the fact that when walking home in their great coats my shortish mother always felt safe with the much taller Fan. They looked like  an officer escorting his girl-friend after an evening on the tiles. No-one would dare to attack them.

The other person she met in Dorchester was my father, who at that stage was the weapon training officer. When the Regimental Sergeant Major was interviewing my mother there was a loud bang somewhere off-stage. My mother jumped and looked incredulous. “That’s that shocker Heald”, said the RSM without blinking an eye-lid and coining a family nickname which lasted years. A few days later my father was fitting gasmasks. When he got to my mother she winked at him; they married in 1943.

From that moment on my mother was dutiful and seemed subservient. That meant Malta, Austria, Hong Kong, and Canada, followed by the presentation of countless cups and other awards as the wife of one of the Founding Fathers of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and of the Special Events Manager of W.D.and H.O. Wills, tobacco manufacturers.

Then in 1972 my father was tragically and  unexpectedly killed in a motor accident. From then on my mother to the apparent surprise of the world at large, though never to her nearest and dearest, emerged to become the substantial and significant figure I have already described.

I can only speak for myself but I am proud to have known her and pleased that God chose her to be my mother. I would like to say thanks to Him and thanks too to her, for the strength she was and the example she set.There is a line of Thomas Hardy’s which describes the sort of person she was. It is deceptively simple and it runs “You was a good man and you did good things.” This was true of my mother too. She was a good woman and she did good things and I have reason to be profoundly grateful for both.

END

Well my ancient Mama finally left this mortal coil. I had just left on a travel assignment and was stumbling about the Aracena area on the Portuguese border of Spain. I spoke to my cousin who broke the bad news just before a delicious lunch of sweetbreads in a restaurant in Linares which is widely said to have a Michelin star but which its owner/chef/ patron hotly  denies. Oh dear. On the one hand she is better off out of it but on the other I already miss her terribly and reproach myself constantly for not doing more. And for quite enjoying lunch.

At the moment I am scurrying about organizing cremations, memorials, burials, trying to make everyone feel happy and wanted, and generally being useless. When the dust has settled I may make more sense but at the moment I am mainly confused. The travel trip was organized by Julia Spence and Inn Travel. I can recommend both and we had a good time which in the circumstances was pretty amazing. Lucy and Angel run a hotel in Alajar which is a small white town in Andalucia. It felt much like staying with very understanding old friends. Lucy is English and comes from Bolton; Angel is Spanish and once taught in Hull. They met in upstate New York, are green and do everything themselves which sounds like open toed sandles and nut cutlets but isn’t at all like that. Breakfast is home made which means pate, another pate, butter, honey and home-made peach jam; at least two sorts of home baked bread and a hundred and one sorts of olive oil. Outside there is a lawn, herbs,  a trampoline (mainly for the angelic small daughter of the house), a brisk pool and views to die for. All this in the middle of Iberian pig country. And cork. And acorns, pigs for fattening.

We went for walks in the countryside and saw pigs – sleek,pointy-toed, running around, happy-seeming animals. I have always liked pigs and never thought of them as slothful,indolent let alone dirty. The pigs bore out my prejudice. I liked them. We also saw the donkeys who heralded breakfast with their braying, mules, horses – grey and motionless apart from the odd flicker of the tail, sheep and belligerent dogs guarding them along with wethers with real bells at their necks. And cows and shepherds in vans or on quad-bikes. All this wild-life in empty countryside with oak (quercus) and olive  not to mention views. Everywhere there were stunning views the only serious drawback being that the tracks along which we were walking were often as not old river beds with rocks to match, so that you had to watch your feet and could not always enjoy the spectacular scenery.

The people were good too. Really spitty old men in bars or playing dominoes while wearing check tweed caps firmly planted in the middle of the head and at no angle rakish or otherwise.. There was a pervading sense of timelessness or maybe history. The moors were here, and the Romans. Not many, of course, for it seems an almost empty landscape even in Aracena at a fair devoted to the Iberian pig where men and women drank wine and ate various sorts of jamon and lomo. Penny bought some and Lucy laughed when we showed  her because it came from far away places such as Cordoba.The area was remote and no-one spoke English – except for Lucy and Angel. Despite everything we loved it.

Back home I went to see a former headmaster near Haywards Heath the other day and didn’t go to the loo on the grounds that there was bound to be one at the railway station on my return journey. Predictably, however, the loo was out of order when I needed it and the one on the train was also “out of order”. I therefore had to hang on, cross-legged and stiff-upper-lipped to Clapham Junction where, thank God, the men’s WC, was functioning.

On another day I was very much looking forward to dinner at a strange house near Wiveliscombe in Somerset. We set off in plenty of time but failed to find it; the mobile phone did not function; the only visible human being in the South West spoke no known language and did not know where we were heading for; and my wife and I returned home, chastened and disappointed.

I know, I know, both were idiotic. One should always take every opportunity to have a pee; one should always have a map and a land-line when invited to dinner in an unknown place. I know, I know. And I wish I could say that I have learned my lesson and that it won’t happen again. On the other hand the lesson of life is that one never learns and is constantly surprised by the non-functioning loo and the elusive destination.

Fact of life. On a more dramatic and important level the lesson is the same. Take Liam Fox. History always repeats itself. People never learn. And in any case God and his little helpers are in business to have a jolly good laugh at mankind’s expense.  We all repeat our mistakes while muttering the nonsensical mantra about having learnt one’s lesson. Rubbish. One seldom if ever learns and it serves us right.

As I keep saying, I have a lot of books out this year. I wish one could regulate such things but authors are the last people in the world to lead organized well regulated lives. It is so much easier to do almost anything else. There is a tendency, of course, to think someone who basically approves is amazingly sage and experienced and that people who differ are just silly, but I am struck, as always, by how self obsessed most people are.

Take Richard Cobb whose letters I have recently edited. The publishers are Frances Lincoln and reaction has been genuinely mixed..What seems to be a common thread, however, is a relative failure to assess Cobb as a letter writer at the expense of concern about whether or not one’s own letters have been included and whether one has treated the recipients with sufficient respect. I think there is a tendency in the book to play up his correspondence with Hugh Trevor Roper and to down play his letters (often better) to people of whom few people have heard. Like it or not, Trevor-Roper is box-office whereas John Bromley formerly Fellow of Keble College is not. Two of the finest letters in the collection are lengthy epistles to Bromley. One describes Cobb’s stay in the Royal Free Hospital, the other is an account of his first visit to India. I think these are classics and deserve to be remembered and anthologized. By contrast one or two of his “My dear Hugh “ letters are sycophantic and pedestrian. But the important thing is Richard.

Anyhow if you can’t stand the heat… and who cares about hostile reviews? It’s just sad when the reviewer is only interested in “me” and also when someone who you always thought of as well-disposed turns out to have been an enemy all along. Yet another example of lessons not being learned. I can hear my dear father warning me off the affable and Uriah Heap figures who were permanently and unconvincingly ingratiating. But one never learns.

Meanwhile I see that at the beginning of the month I attended a memorial in Oxford. And then that I attempted a couple of come-back games of Real Tennis at the Hyde. A nightmare. A combination of rust, stiffness and senility. My opponents in both cases were patient and understanding. If I were them I should have been neither but Real Tennis people are immensely nice and civilized.

The day after the first Tennis debacle I spoke in Cornwall and we stayed with an old friend. Seemed odd to be back in the Delectable Duchy. Lunch in Lostwithiel was enjoyable even though the acoustics were dire, one man had left his hearing aid at home and I insisted on reading from various books. It is always misleading when one or two people even in far corners laugh at one’s jokes and there was muttering from those who found me inaudible. Once again I am afraid I will never learn and I am far too old to be taught new tricks. Maybe one should invest in a travelling mike. Seems pretentious and I shall probably go on being unheard.

No such worries at the Cheltenham Literary Festival where I did a panel chaired by Ion Trewin and alongside Penny Junor and Valentine Low of the Times. We had 111 (lucky for some but an ominous number for Australian cricketers) and they could hear more than enough thanks to the usual sophisticated Cheltenham sound system. Everything seemed well organized in a typical Cheltenham fashion. We had dinner with the poet Wendy Cope and the Coldstreams – John was Literary Editor of the Telegraph and wrote about Dirk Bogarde. Oh, a gratifying number of royal “experts” came to hear us discuss “The Palace and the Press” including Robert Hardman whose book I had looked myself up in beforehand. Evidently I am quoted on page 72 but even though I read the page several times searching for myself I could find no sign. Hardman seemed upset when I pointed this out but I guess it served me right. Prima donna!

The other pleasant occasion was lunch given by Kate Lyall Grant and Edwin Buckhalter of Severn House to mark the simultaneous publication of whodunits by me and Simon Brett. Simon is a very old friend and when we both lived in East Sheen we were the Crime Writing Squash Players or maybe the Squash Playing Crime Writers. We were pretty bad but the main reason was the beer afterwards at the Victoria where we compared notes and griped about publishers. Later I introduced Simon to Real Tennis. We had no complaints about Severn House (though Simon courted disaster by boasting of his ‘other’ publisher, believed to be Constable)  who took us to the Gay Hussar. Earlier I signed copies of Richard Cobb at Hatchards where the manager said he too had once been to the Gay Hussar with a famous author. The alcohol must have flowed freely since he was able to say little about it. We on the other hand had a thoroughly memorable time.

Anyway, a busy month. At the end of the week I enter the pulpit at St. Leonard’s Semley in eulogizing mode. I hope I get through it. The congregation will be watching, of course, but also heavenly hordes on clouds if you believe that sort of thing. There are almost as many people I know up there now as down here. It’s a salutary thought. Recent deaths include Geoffrey Lee-Martin an old New Zealand hack and in the Guardian today civilized green Jeremy Faull who ran the bookshop at Wadebridge in Cornwall. They were both in their eighties,  my Ma in her nineties. The pages turn inexorably…

Well we did it. The school gave up in 1968 or thereabouts but some 54 Old Boys, Girls, partners, spouses or simply friends sat down for lunch in Pembroke College, Cambridge the day after about thirty of us celebrated evensong in Jesus College chapel. It was absurd and also rather wonderful in roughly equal parts. I am doing a fuller account for Guy Knapton who was billed as my “co-organiser” but did a prodigious amount of work and far more than me . All I will say here is that such things appear to give a lot of pleasure and certainly give me a lot of the stuff and that I don’t feel I am constantly looking or going back but that I have the past in proper perspective. Anyway Pembroke and Jesus did us proud and so did all those who turned up. (Even the Oxford men of whom there were a lot conceded that Cambridge was prettier. I however was always taught that there were three universities in the world – Balliol, Oxford and Cambridge. I am afraid I said this and was greeted with some boos even though there were half a dozen Balliol men present!)

Meanwhile…

A day or so beforehand Penny and I went to see the ODI between England and India at Lord’s. I signed 50 copies of my Jardine book, brilliantly reviewed by Philip Bowring in Asia Sentinel (see website!) and we  heard  that my aged Mama had passed out when her niece by marriage, Sara Vaughan, was with her. Sara couldn’t lift her and summoned an ambulance. This meant that my mother, not best pleased, was transported to Salisbury General where she spent a few days before being moved into Hays House, the nearest home from home as it were. This was what Caroline her main carer and I had tried to manage a few days earlier. We had met with a spectacular failure but now when Caroline was taking a well deserved holiday and I was away on work this had happened. In a sense it was utterly bloody but at least it meant that my Ma was being properly looked after twenty fours around the clock.

It’s not right though. On the one hand she is physically alive and in her 91st year but on the other she is very old, very confused, very frightened and very hard to understand. Something is desperately wrong and, alas, the problem is not uncommon . On the one hand medicine and other aspects of modern life mean that extreme old age is relatively common but on the other we seem to be bad at coping with this and with the ailments which often seem to accompany it. So, many of us are living longer than before but the very old are often very unhappy.  I am certainly not in the business of exploiting her but something is terribly wrong and anything I can do to help put it right! I am not for one instant criticizing her home which seems to be doing its best under difficult circumstances but the balance between length and quality of life seems to have been disturbed.  The problem is, I fear, quite common but evidently insoluble.

I spoke at the Hemstock Festival to a very small crowd in a tent and on a foul day in the middle of a field in Dorset. Actually I rather enjoyed the event. It was all agreeably chaotic and British and I would rather have that than well-organised precision and a huge audience. I remember once talking to a man and a dog who had heard me speak to a much larger audience the week before. The man said he much preferred being the only listener along with the dog and I know what he means. There is a significant part of me which says that small is beautiful. One of the rock bands had a quibble about the acoustics and the tickets were widely thought extortionate (it was in aid of sound charities) but I thought it augured well for the future and was charming in a very British way.

I also had a Real Tennis lesson from Ben Ronaldson whose father Chris was one of my first teachers – salutary and very necessary – at the Hyde court and went to the launch of Jeremy Archer’s new book on the West Country regiments at the Keep in Dorchester. Had some fascinating sessions about and in Sherborne and an enjoyable West Country Crime Writers’ lunch at the Pilgrim’s Rest in Lovington.

Early on in the month I saw Roger from Nat West. It was the first time in an age I had seen him and in the interim we have moved East and he had changed base to Tavistock.  In this day and age I am really lucky to have a real person in the bank. Most people have disembodied voices in foreign parts. I also had an interview about the Queen and next year’s Jubilee for ITN. Penny had put out a pair of ludicrous American trousers designed for barrel-tummied southerners. As a result I spent a lot of time wandering along the Thames embankment holding up my slipping pants and feeling amazingly oafish. Hard work too. That evening I had supper at the Frontline with Ben Holt who now lives in Geneva and who was Head of School the term after I left. Quite surreal to think that we knew each other quite well half a century or so ago. His father taught at Sherborne and was a friend of Bishop Bickersteth.

Another anniversary plot was hatched with Gary Blisset whose company of book people have just been granted a Royal Warrant. His friend Hugh Hastings who has a close association with Chelsea FC and who appears to know everything about pictures came up from Falmouth where he lives. Together we had lunch at the White Hart and plotted a royal book to end all royal books with a special special copy for Her Majesty. One always feels euphoric after such meetings and time may yet put a damper on our plans. At the moment however we expect the best.

Meanwhile books are out or imminent and forty six people are coming to hear me speak after lunch at the Oxford Society of Cornwall who are meeting at Lostwithiel Golf Club. I am to speak on Life After Cornwall which  is widely regarded as akin to life after death. My wife steadfastly believes that no-one East of the Tamar can do her hair and that chiropody only takes place in Redruth.

So.

Just back from a quick dash to London and Oxford. Had lunch with Country Life, dinner with sons, stayed in the Groucho, drink with old friend at the King’s Arms in Oxford, lunch on Ashmolean roof with Sherborne girls’ school contemporary who now runs St. Anthony’s, saw film of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, stayed in College, watched near disastrous rugby in Weatherpoons pub, attended memorial for Tom Bingham, sat at back, chat with Chancellor (we shared tutorials in distant past), ditto drinks and dinner of college society, home by round about train via all known destinations due to rail works and Sunday, nice unexpected Cobb puff in Observer, drive home delayed due to breakdown at Yeovil roundabout. Phew, and so to bed.

Writing it is almost more exhausting than actually doing it. The Bingham service was wonderful; Kilvert, the Master, TS Eliot, the Battle Hymn and much else. It WAS wonderful but I found myself looking around and thinking that he was probably the most distinguished judge of the last few years in Britain, yet in the end he has a handful of elderly people in a church in Oxford for an hour or so. Sic transit, dust to dust…It’s not the whole story by any means but  that was what I was thinking . And of my mother. And the short time we have, and nothing much mattering in the grand scheme of things. Oh well. Onward, onward…one small step along the way…

One of the most enjoyable things about being a writer is that people sometimes emerge from your past. One example was my former English teacher, John Buchanan, who went off to be headmaster of a school in Rutland – he turned it round incidentally – who wrote to me after some piece by me appeared in the Daily Telegraph. He wanted to know if I was the little boy he had once taught in 3A. I said I was, we had lunch and remained friends until his death. I missed his memorial service but was able to write his obituary. I still have his two books, inscribed, and he remains a good and significant memory. Such opportunities are increased by the internet and most significantly the much maligned blog.

The other day I got an email from someone I hadn’t seen for, oh a very long time indeed. He had, however, been tracking me and having read a blog felt moved to communicate all the way from Manila where he has lived for ages. Our families were once very close. Thanks Simon. It means a lot!

I reflected on this when reading the autobiography of Louis Napoleon Parker (what a brilliant name!), “Several of My Lives”. Parker was the driving force behind the great Sherborne Pageant of 1905 which took the country by storm and led to a steady stream of successors up until the outbreak of war in 1914. In his book, Parker writes about the pageant containing elements of past, present and future. “A Pageant”, he wrote “is a Festival of Thanksgiving   , in which a great city or little hamlet celebrates its glorious past, its prosperous present, and its hopes and aspirations for the future.” Ah. At this point I realize that I am in imminent danger of sounding impossibly pooterish like the  Sherborne headmaster, Nowell Smith, the only one who actually published his collected sermons. I am about to read them but I fear they weren’t awfully good. In old age Smith lost his faith and became a militant agnostic. There is a moral here!

Anyway, in sermonizing mood, I often ponder the correct relationship between past, present and future. Unlike some I am rather keen on the past and nostalgia. Two of my impending books are about the past – an account of Douglas Jardine’s cricket tour of India in the early 1930s and a collection of letters from a particularly mesmerising tutor of mine, Richard Cobb. Last year’s book was an anthology of occasional, highly original writing by another old friend Tom Braun. Next month I am helping organize a reunion for those of us who were at school at Connaught House between the ages of about eight and thirteen. And,as you rightly infer I am writing a new history of another old school.

So that is the past. I don’t think I live there but I believe it is a significant part of all of us.I suppose everyone thinks they have the balance right. I  certainly know people (even people who studied history and should know better) who repudiate their own yesterdays but I also know people who always seem to go back and genuinely believe that their schooldays were the happiest of their lives. I am painfully aware that one’s own life history increases as one gets older while the future is, alas, constantly diminishing. The present remains more or  less constant and also, of course, the future is maddeningly unpredictable and elusive. Planning for it is popularly supposed to be God’s idea of a joke!

In the sense that a blog is more about the immediate past than anything else it has been much the same as usual. This involves a constant battle against machinery (the car wouldn’t start the other day in Wincanton, the new toner-cartridges don’t fit the printer) and life in general  which mainly means other people especially bureaucrats who invoke security as a spurious reason for their pettifogging incompetence. I know whereof  I speak having once been ordered to take off my shoes at Newquay Airport and  having a strange pair “returned” to me. I then made the mistake of saying that if that was supposed to make me feel more secure it didn’t. Bad move!

Anyway we are all gearing up for the school reunion at Pembroke College, Cambridge. All will be well on the day (September 14) but oh, my paws and whiskers, the alarums and excursions, chiefly to do with such sillinesses as charabancs, cheese and other charades. Oh and the flag. I passed the school flag to a brewers in West Dorset because the bosses were at school and they owned the only flagpole I could think of. Alas, for protocol reasons we can’t fly it in Cambridge so we’ll have to find an appropriate way of draping it. All good fun but never attempt to organize such a thing especially with a former Professor of Business who lives in Brussels and was, incidentally, head boy two years before one wasn’t. If you know what I mean. Sorry Guy you are completely wonderful and without you this would never happen. I love it actually but I am a great believer in the fine British tradition of muddling through. Which means, I know, that other people pick up the pieces while one continues smiling and waving.

Which brings me to my mother. She is not well, alas, and the fact that she is over ninety means that an awful lot of people shrug and mutter about having a good innings. This is, not, I should judge, much consolation to her. Most of her friends have gone and she suffers from time to time. Even those who love her and wish her well (like me) can seem tiresome. Easy it is not. Oh well. There are many interesting points that need to be made about generally increased longevity. Here probably is not the place to rehearse them but old age is complicated and our attitudes to venerability complex. As I say I believe in muddling through. Nevertheless…

Even “muddling through” is deceptive, however. Last week I checked out the local home which I know Ma will hate as an idea but the room that I have tentatively booked for a trial respite fortnight has French windows leading to a good garden, ensuite loo etc , an amazing electric bed and home made eclairs. It costs a lot (I think) but there are sufficient funds for the short to medium term and we will save by cutting some of the existing care provisions. I know lots of people have a much tougher time  than my Ma and me but all the same easy it sn’t. One of the recurring problems is the amazing amount of confusing form filling. I can’t believe it’s essential.

Meanwhile life goes on. I have finished copies of two books – Jardine’s last tour and the Richard Cobb letters. I struggle on with Yet another Death in Venice and I wrote curious pieces about royal dogs for the Mail and Prince Harry for the Lady. I am booked   for a televised contribution for ITN and have a local festival, an Indian cricket match at Lord’s, and reunions of different kinds in Oxford and Cambridge. So it all continues to be busy, busy. I cancelled a trip to London because my lunch companion had an unexpected viral problem and there was an end of season boules party in a local pub. Life is certainly not dull. Oh,and the car, failed to start in Wincanton – thank God I was in a local car park. The nice man from the AA who fixed it said he’d never seen anything like it which was oddly gratifying as I always assume that my complaint is a fraud and simply the result of my pathetic incomprehension. The AA man turned out to play cricket for Stourhead so we talked about that. And I did a Q and A for an occasional crime magazine and was pictured in Red Herrings,reading to an astonished world in Zurich police station.

Nicholas Shakespeare was helpful about his grandfather S.P.B. Mais who taught at Sherborne, became a friend of Alec Waugh, features in the Loom of Youth as Ferrers , wrote more than 200 books and received about 500 responses to his weekly broadcasts. He died broke and largely forgotten. No less a man than Winston Churchill said contemplation of Mais made him feel tired. I know what he means and I feel some of the same reading my blogs.

I do hope though that I don’t end up like Mais. Come to think of it I have an uneasy sense that was in his nineties when he finally left us. As old as my Ma. Mais is a lesson to all of us and especially to aspiring writers. The lesson, I fear, is: don’t.