Tim Heald's Blog

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 There were also a number of unpublished words which was also, I suppose, bad.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.

This autumn I have agreed to speak at two festivals (Cheltenham and Hemstock), the Dorset Cricket Society in Bournemouth and the Oxford Society in Cornwall. All deeply wonderful but completely unco-ordinated. I have been trying for ages to get some semblance of co-ordination in to this side of my life but it hasn’t worked. After endless alarums and excursions I think I may have a nearly perfect literary agent but apart from the fact that Christopher won’t touch e-mail he doesn’t organize speakers. I don’t want to find someone who will tout for work. Mercifully I have enough speaking work and in any case I no longer want – even if I did – my own helicopter earned by many thousands of pounds speaking to rugby clubs. However I would like to be able to say when offered an agreeable speaking engagement “Have a word with my agent”. It seems a small thing to ask but it’s proving impossible. If anyone has any bright ideas, suggestions or best of all is a nice speaker’s agent looking for a harmless drone then why not send me an email on tim@timheald.com. Meanwhile I apologise for the double-bookings, the no-shows and the misunderstandings. None as bad as the late Auberon Waugh who once gave an Oriental audience half an hour or so on breast-feeding and was then surprised to be asked questions about press-freedom, but bad all the same. I need an agent who not only understands the difference but can handle dates and demands. Please.

Increasingly I find that the things one does for pleasure are more interesting than the relatively lucrative tasks. Take the Connaught House prep school reunion. Ridiculous. Takes up a lot of time and brings no financial reward but even fielding phone calls is fun. This morning, for instance, I took one from a Balliol acquaintance, Robin Somerset, and later it was Tim Mundy who features on “my” Honours Board as one of the mantra which went “Sworder,Carver, Mundy, Joynt”. Tim got a scholarship to Dartmouth the year I was born. That makes him…but no that would be ungallant but I think he and Robin must have been contemporaries. In any case he sounded amazingly chipper. Connaught House was his second such school, the first being St. Bede’s Eastbourne who were evacuated to Oxford during WW2 and where the food was so dreadful that it was feared poor Mundy would waste away and not even pass into the Royal Navy. Instead he was sent to Connaught House where the food was good and he got a scholarship. Utter chiz.

Besides this enterprise most of the other stuff  seems futile and insignificant. Perhaps it is only in old age that you acquire a taste for organized nostalgia. Or not. Discuss. Anyway it is more entertaining than writing stuff for the popular press or even books. Perhaps Lucy, who makes her living organizing special events in New Zealand knows something I don’t. This morning I got an email from Tiffy Gould who won a scholarship to Haileybury in 1956. I haven’t seen him since then but his message gave me a ludicrous spasm of something or other.  Needless to say this is a totally non profit-making enterprise. Perhaps that is what makes it even more enjoyable.

On the supposed money-making front I have three books out any minute and another due in January. The first, I hope available before the Indian cricket team finish their tour, is my account of Douglas Jardine’s last tour which was to the land of his birth, India, AFTER his better known “Bodyline” tour of Australia. This is published by Methuen. Early in October Frances Lincoln publish my collected letters of my former history tutor, Richard Cobb, to Hugh Trevor-Roper among others. Later that month I am supposed to have a second whodunit, “Poison at the Pueblo” out from Severn House. In January I hope to see my appraisal of the Queen and her reign to coincide with her sixty years on the throne, in the shops. In addition I am the Royal Correspondent of the Lady and I review books regularly for the Tablet. This adds up to a spectacular success but it doesn’t seem to translate into an embarras de richesse. Writing is a silly way to make a living and one would be better off financially doing almost anything else.

This is the story of most writer’s lives. J.K. Rowling and a handful of best-selling words are the exceptions that prove this rule of relevant penury. I heard today from an old friend who is a well known and highly regarded writer. He says he feels as if he is working with leather tyres shortly after the invention of the rubber variety. I know what he means!

One curious irony is that my maternal grandfather once owned a glove factory nearby in down town Martock. Around the 1930s most English people stopped wearing gloves. At the time of his death in 1972 my father was working for W.D.and H.O. Wills, the cigarette manufacturers and the largest single employer in Bristol. Most people seem now to have given up smoking. Meanwhile I have spent my entire working life producing words for the print industry. Now print, that nice Mr. Murdoch etc etc.  Ironic eh?

Maybe this is why I seem not to care so much about money and to take less and less pleasure in writing for money and more and more in doing things which have no commercial value. I suppose I am lucky in that my pleasures are relatively modest and my needs quite easily satisfied. It does seem odd, however, that one can  enjoy a modicum of  success and at the same time be a bit of a commercial failure. I know, I know. I am very lucky to have spent my life doing effectively what I wanted to do but it still seems peculiar that success and even perhaps a modicum of minor celebrity can be rewarded by such a financial pittance. There are plenty of more vital things wrong with the world but it does seem strange that so often financial rewards are concentrated in the hands of those who, dare I say such a thing, don’t really deserve it.

I sound as if I am complaining, and I suppose I am. I have no right to do so and I accept that. I have been lucky in a number of respects. I just sense an imbalance. I feel I stand for a certain sort of honest toil and success but other much less deserving cases make much more money. This may not matter in my case but I think it matters in  a broader sense. The wrong people are rich; the wrong people are poor. This may be a Pooterism but it is still true and all the worse for being so.

As a backdrop my aged Ma – 90 plus – is chronically unwell; my grandson was on the wrong side of an argument with a cup of hot tea; a son-in-law was diagnosed with tonsilitis and found that he was alarmingly allergic to the prescribed treatment; my elder daughter’s mother-in-law died prematurely after a horrible illness. So what possible business have I got to complain about not being better rewarded for my otherwise successful work. After all, as so many publishers have told me all my life, ‘no-one asked you to be a professional writer”.

So we are not down-hearted just rather irritated. My much-missed brother, who suffered a fatal stroke when he was just sixty, used to visit us in Cornwall. If you gave him a good book, a glass of Irish whiskey and a comfortable chair, he was happy. In between sips and chapters he would look at the view and sigh. There is a lesson here, struggling as ever, to find a way out. Reasonable expectation is a reasonable expectation but it seems to be too often unfulfilled. Maybe that’s the message. I suppose I wish I knew!

Some years  ago I took part in a literary event with another writer of crime fiction. After we had both droned on we got to the usual question time and a member of the audience, who had obviously (and unusually) read books by both of us wanted to know why the main character in my colleague’s books was always so glum. “No, no” protested my friend, “He’s not glum, he’s amazingly chirpy and happy-go-lucky”. “Oh no he’s not.”persisted the reader, “He’s a real miseriguts. Not like Tim’s character who is  really relaxed and happy.”

Well, not unnaturally my colleague took umbrage while I  purred. The difference in perception was real and complete. My colleague was convinced he had produced one sort of character, our reader however saw it quite differently. My wife, who does not approve of blogging is always urging me to put myself in other people’s position and yet I am not so sure. For a start I am not at all sure about what that might be; I also believe that one is more use to the world as a whole maintaining one’s own position than by scratching around feverishly for those of other people. I accept that this is not necessarily a majority position. I would like to see it debated. Quite. Basically though I allow everyone the right to hold their individual position, providing also that I am accorded the same privilege.

These thoughts were prompted by the observation that “I’ve been reading your blog” by someone to whom I was quite recently a complete stranger. If a blog means anything it is I think, an expression of a point of view. As such it is necessarily quirky, sui generis and “wrong” in  the sense  that it is both these things. Other people will mercifully have different experiences and different points of view. Such variety makes life interesting.

A blog is also a source of information and one of the effects of the inter-net revolution is the big change in the gathering and dissemination of information. On Sunday I was at Lord’s cricket ground for the One Day International between England and Sri Lanka. My host for the day said when we met for the first time that he too had been reading my blog and knew a lot about me and my connections with cricket, the books I had written on the subject and so on. In this way we cut out a whole lot of  information-gathering conversation and were able to, as they say, cut to the quick. Not everyone likes this. Some partners complain when relatively new or unknown acquaintances exhibit a disconcerting knowledge gleaned from the blog, website or  social networking site of their nearest and dearest. I appreciate these concerns but on the whole I like the change and like so many recent changes there is no point in fighting. It is unavailable.

I seem to have been even more than usually busy these last few weeks and I have been up and down to London like a yo-yo. These excursions are now possible and relatively easy but they do require everyone sticking to the rules of engagement. I was completely thrown when the taxi driver on Sunday phoned in sick and his boss was not answering his phone. I don’t recall this ever happening in fifteen years of Ray and Graham in Cornwall and it doesn’t half make a mess of one’s plans. I am thrown, confused and don’t know what to do.

One London trip was mainly to contribute to a television obituary of Prince Philip, another involved cricket, a son and a dinner with an old friend, and a third was lunch with an editor and an office party. Business or pleasure? Hard to be certain and I have always been very fortunate to so often experience a blurring of the usual edges between the two.

On the work front I have now fielded page proofs for Jardine’s last tour as well as Richard Cobb’s collected letters. I have also clocked the blurb and cover for a new crime novel. All three are due later in the year and Christopher, my esteemed literary agent seems to have negotiated a deal for my back-list to be published in e-book form.

Cleverest of all he appears to have pulled the irons from the royal fire and resold a completed royal book over which there had been profound disagreement. I had better say no more but watch this space – 2012 is the 60^th anniversary of the Queen’s accession and I am not being particularly prescient when I say that it is likely to prove a significant and prosperous year for the Royal Family and those of us who write about them.

I have also been, with Penny, to two days of the Beaminster Literary Festival nearby. On the first day we heard Edmund de Vaal the potter and author of the Hare with Amber Eyes; on the second we heard a local gardening whizz (a new obsession and we have already harvested the first courgettes), Anna Pavord. That evening we attended a choral evensong by the choir of Wells Cathedral . All three events were in the local parish church which I first visited a lifetime ago when I was a page at my Godma’s wedding along with Bill Dupont who still lives locally and who I saw recently in a tent at our old school. All three festival events were memorable. All very different but all remarkable.

I greatly admire writers who are able to captivate large audiences and who seem to be able to speak spontaneously and without recourse to notes. On that subject I badly need some planning and co-ordination in my own speaking career. I heard recently from Charlie Campbell at Ed Victor. He is running a new section of the Literary Agency for those authors who speak as well as write. Again, watch this space.

I am also trying to organize the welfare of my aged Mama who was ninety in November, had a stroke a year or so ago, found my brother dead on the bathroom floor and now has a malignant tumour which is being treated by radio-therapists in Poole. Everyone is being wonderfully supportive and I think we are doing as well as can be expected. Alas, however, that’s not really as well as one would like. Seems a bit hard to stagger through to ninety plus and then have breast cancer but there you go…

So basically we muddle through or not and change is inevitable. Francis King died the other day aged 88 and the actress Anna Massey was in the paper this morning. She died of cancer. I knew them both. So, what can one say?

Change is nearly always difficult and it gets more difficult as one gets older. We seem to be living through a period of often gratuitous austerity. On the whole  though thank God for the internet, for blogs and email. Without them life would be even more difficult. It’s often extremely tough but on the whole and as a very general rule I think the present is an improvement on the past. We all think differently and that too is good. Change is happening, people are well-disposed. Such generalisations are , well, generalisations, and in the long run we are all dead. On which happy note I’ll sign off. More next month, keep buggering on and, by the way,Nigel Molesworth wants me to be linked in with him. Hem, hem; chiz, chiz. St. Custard’s lives and life therefore cannot be entirely bad.

They say you should never go back but one Sunday I did just that and subjected myself to an interview at the du Maurier Festival in Fowey, Cornwall. I don’t have any problem with nostalgia believing that one lives firmly in the present, that the past is an important part of this and everything else and the future is a dodgy prospect: enjoyable to anticipate but impossible to plan.

So I thought it fun to be back, to see some familiar faces, meet a few new ones, catch up on the gossip and, in my case, congratulate myself softly for having moved on to the next stage. The Festival has changed and  in the interests of economy they seem to have done away with the smaller of the two tented auditoria. I thought this was rather a pity and the fifty or so people who had bearded the morning to hear me and my interviewer, Julie Skentlebury, did rattle around a bit but as they were invisible for the most part it hardly mattered. One person, unknown to me, took issue with my cautious defence of the press and another asked a searching question about the eponymous Daphne whom I never met and who would I think (and said) have seen me coming a mile off and dismissed me with a languid and characteristic “I dare say”. Anyway, mission accomplished. One more step.

Went to the post office this morning and sent just over 100,000 words to my agent. I will email the same to the publishers later before heading off for a rather improbable sounding crime writing conference where I will be reading the opening bars of a new short story in the police station in Zurich. Meanwhile the Sunday Times are supposed to be ringing to talk about Prince Philip’s 90^th birthday, so it is all go in a mildly loopy way. Never let it be said that writers have a life of indolence. Others insist that we do, however. Besides we enjoy what we do and nobody asked us  anyway, so it’s all our fault. That seems to be the mantra. Oh well, can’t be helped. It’s different for me, always has been, always will be, and the fact that I don’t appear to care makes it even worse.

However the really good news is that last week I went to the physio in Crewkerne and she said she was going to try some acupuncture. I’d been suffering from a sciatic pain in my left leg which may or may not be wear and tear or gout or some sort of side effects of the pills I take every morning to keep my blood pressure down. Anyway she apparently learned all there is to know about Chinese medicine in new town Herts (one does,doesn’t one?) and she stuck needles in my lower back, left leg and each hand. Then I lay feeling like a prat for about twenty sceptical minutes. (I do wish the machine wouldn’t “correct” my spelling so that the “c” after my ”s” in skeptical is changed to a k. Then when I change it back the know-all machine underlines the word in red.). Anyway, dear reader, the hedgehog effect seems to have worked. Look no pain. Amazing. I don’t really believe it but all I can say is that before she stuck pins and needles into me I had trouble walking and now I don’t. Don’t ask me. I don’t know. Next stop is pilates in South Petherton. Watch this space. I am the original Doubting Thomas but look, I seem to have picked up my metaphorical bed and walked. I know, I know but the proof,as they say…oh all right, you don’t believe me but…

I tried saving the above under “Blog June 2011” but to my fury and consternation I was told that this already existed. On checking I discovered that I had already begun my Pooter-like wittering for the month but had forgotten having done so. That way lies madness. I am as old as it says on the package or as the physio so obviously thinks. One possible pilates class was ruled out because the people in it are too supple and, wait for it, too young. Old curmudgeonly grumpy men like me belong somewhere more geriatric It would also help if I were female.

So even though I am skipping about like the proverbial spring lamb I am obviously well past my sell-by date and as old as it says in my passport. I was given another, yet another, reminder of this truth in London the other day. It transpired over lunch of past chairmen of the Crime Writers’ Association, that Cartier had finally dropped their annual sponsorship of the Cartier Diamond Dagger. This was formally announced by the current Cartier head honcho Monsieur Bamberger at the annual bash. The really ghastly news, however is that it’s more than 25 years. So it is over a quarter of a century since the then Cartier boss, Anthony Marangos, dreamt up the idea on a bus between Kathmandu and elephant polo. Seems like yesterday but it isn’t. Where on earth did the interim go? I was reporting the event for the Sunday Times Magazine but nowadays I suppose I’d struggle to get on an elephant and everyone would laugh.

Anyway I emailed Anthony and we are slated to meet  and bring ourselves up to date. I see nothing odd about this but I have to accept that a new generation may have other ideas and go on about old fogeys, pensioners, grandfathers and so on. If I am really as old as all that it is apparently time I grew up, but it is too late for that as well. Too late, too late, she cried and waving her wooden leg, she died. Or, in my own attempt at emulating this ancient couplet, alas, alack the chaplain cried, the Reverend Arthur Field has died.

He had too and that was at Sherborne School whence I repaired for the centenary dinner of my old house, Lyon, followed by Old Shirburnian Day. Among other tasks I have been commissioned to write a new history of the school (Thank you, Wendy Hughes, for your nugget about an O.S. benefactor in Melbourne). This makes me the new Gourlay. “Unks” or “Abe” was author of the previous history and good on monks. He was housemaster of school house, immensely scholarly and apparently out of kilter with the prevailing ethic. So was I and many of my school friends think that my apparent nostalgia is a cop-out and I should maintain a disdainful distance.

I’m not so sure though I would say that wouldn’t I? I think the school has changed a lot and shed its old-fashioned image which had a lot to do with caning, compulsion, corps, rugby and general philistinism. Even though I disapproved of much that went on there I could see even then that there were pockets of excellence and teachers of genius. It was at Sherborne after all that I first discovered Thomas Hardy and I was taught by Buchanan and Jarrett, both of whom were in their different ways,amazing.

Both my housemasters are now dead though and I  first went there more than fifty years ago. Maybe I should not have gone back, maybe others are right and one should be resolute in never facing the past.  Naturally I regret the passing of time, yet in many ways I do not feel wearied let alone condemned by the years and I can not feel that history did not happen. I have regrets. We all do. What is past is past. That much is true also. And yet it happened, long ago, when we were much younger. Provided we don’t spend out entire time wallowing the past I think the occasional excursion into the world of nostalgia is excusable, Sometimes quite fun actually but one should always be open to acupuncture as well.

Oh, I was reading my March 2009 blog and I see that I was attempting to engineer a return for Simon Bognor the central character of my crime fiction. In order to do this I had sent a copy of my Spanish story to my friend Jeremy Paul and fixed to spend a night at his place in Swanage. Jeremy died the other day, from cancer, and had a lead obituary in the Guardian penned by Michael Coveney. Very sad. But Severn House plan to publish that Bognor in October. There is a moral in all this but I’m not sure what it is. Oh well, onward, onward…

They say you should never go back but one Sunday I did just that and subjected myself to an interview at the du Maurier Festival in Fowey, Cornwall. I don’t have any problem with nostalgia believing that one lives firmly in the present, that the past is an important part of this and everything else and the future is a dodgy prospect: enjoyable to anticipate but impossible to plan.

So I thought it fun to be back, to see some familiar faces, meet a few new ones, catch up on the gossip and, in my case, congratulate myself softly for having moved on to the next stage. The Festival has changed and  in the interests of economy they seem to have done away with the smaller of the two tented auditoria. I thought this was rather a pity and the fifty or so people who had bearded the morning to hear me and my interviewer, Julie Skentlebury, did rattle around a bit but as they were invisible for the most part it hardly mattered. One person, unknown to me, took issue with my cautious defence of the press and another asked a searching question about the eponymous Daphne whom I never met and who would I think (and said) have seen me coming a mile off and dismissed me with a languid and characteristic “I dare say”. Anyway, mission accomplished. One more step.

Went to the post office this morning and sent just over 100,000 words to my agent. I will email the same to the publishers later before heading off for a rather improbable sounding crime writing conference where I will be reading the opening bars of a new short story in the police station in Zurich. Meanwhile the Sunday Times are supposed to be ringing to talk about Prince Philip’s 90^th birthday, so it is all go in a mildly loopy way. Never let it be said that writers have a life of indolence. Others insist that we do, however. Besides we enjoy what we do and nobody asked us  anyway, so it’s all our fault. That seems to be the mantra. Oh well, can’t be helped. It’s different for me, always has been, always will be, and the fact that I don’t appear to care makes it even worse.

However the really good news is that last week I went to the physio in Crewkerne and she said she was going to try some acupuncture. I’d been suffering from a sciatic pain in my left leg which may or may not be wear and tear or gout or some sort of side effects of the pills I take every morning to keep my blood pressure down. Anyway she apparently learned all there is to know about Chinese medicine in new town Herts (one does,doesn’t one?) and she stuck needles in my lower back, left leg and each hand. Then I lay feeling like a prat for about twenty sceptical minutes. (I do wish the machine wouldn’t “correct” my spelling so that the “c” after my ”s” in skeptical is changed to a k. Then when I change it back the know-all machine underlines the word in red.). Anyway, dear reader, the hedgehog effect seems to have worked. Look no pain. Amazing. I don’t really believe it but all I can say is that before she stuck pins and needles into me I had trouble walking and now I don’t. Don’t ask me. I don’t know. Next stop is pilates in South Petherton. Watch this space. I am the original Doubting Thomas but look, I seem to have picked up my metaphorical bed and walked. I know, I know but the proof,as they say…oh all right, you don’t believe me but…

I tried saving the above under “Blog June 2011” but to my fury and consternation I was told that this already existed. On checking I discovered that I had already begun my Pooter-like wittering for the month but had forgotten having done so. That way lies madness. I am as old as it says on the package or as the physio so obviously thinks. One possible pilates class was ruled out because the people in it are too supple and, wait for it, too young. Old curmudgeonly grumpy men like me belong somewhere more geriatric It would also help if I were female.

So even though I am skipping about like the proverbial spring lamb I am obviously well past my sell-by date and as old as it says in my passport. I was given another, yet another, reminder of this truth in London the other day. It transpired over lunch of past chairmen of the Crime Writers’ Association, that Cartier had finally dropped their annual sponsorship of the Cartier Diamond Dagger. This was formally announced by the current Cartier head honcho Monsieur Bamberger at the annual bash. The really ghastly news, however is that it’s more than 25 years. So it is over a quarter of a century since the then Cartier boss, Anthony Marangos, dreamt up the idea on a bus between Kathmandu and elephant polo. Seems like yesterday but it isn’t. Where on earth did the interim go? I was reporting the event for the Sunday Times Magazine but nowadays I suppose I’d struggle to get on an elephant and everyone would laugh.

Anyway I emailed Anthony and we are slated to meet  and bring ourselves up to date. I see nothing odd about this but I have to accept that a new generation may have other ideas and go on about old fogeys, pensioners, grandfathers and so on. If I am really as old as all that it is apparently time I grew up, but it is too late for that as well. Too late, too late, she cried and waving her wooden leg, she died. Or, in my own attempt at emulating this ancient couplet, alas, alack the chaplain cried, the Reverend Arthur Field has died.

He had too and that was at Sherborne School whence I repaired for the centenary dinner of my old house, Lyon, followed by Old Shirburnian Day. Among other tasks I have been commissioned to write a new history of the school (Thank you, Wendy Hughes, for your nugget about an O.S. benefactor in Melbourne). This makes me the new Gourlay. “Unks” or “Abe” was author of the previous history and good on monks. He was housemaster of school house, immensely scholarly and apparently out of kilter with the prevailing ethic. So was I and many of my school friends think that my apparent nostalgia is a cop-out and I should maintain a disdainful distance.

I’m not so sure though I would say that wouldn’t I? I think the school has changed a lot and shed its old-fashioned image which had a lot to do with caning, compulsion, corps, rugby and general philistinism. Even though I disapproved of much that went on there I could see even then that there were pockets of excellence and teachers of genius. It was at Sherborne after all that I first discovered Thomas Hardy and I was taught by Buchanan and Jarrett, both of whom were in their different ways,amazing.

Both my housemasters are now dead though and I  first went there more than fifty years ago. Maybe I should not have gone back, maybe others are right and one should be resolute in never facing the past.  Naturally I regret the passing of time, yet in many ways I do not feel wearied let alone condemned by the years and I can not feel that history did not happen. I have regrets. We all do. What is past is past. That much is true also. And yet it happened, long ago, when we were much younger. Provided we don’t spend out entire time wallowing the past I think the occasional excursion into the world of nostalgia is excusable, Sometimes quite fun actually but one should always be open to acupuncture as well.

Oh, I was reading my March 2009 blog and I see that I was attempting to engineer a return for Simon Bognor the central character of my crime fiction. In order to do this I had sent a copy of my Spanish story to my friend Jeremy Paul and fixed to spend a night at his place in Swanage. Jeremy died the other day, from cancer, and had a lead obituary in the Guardian penned by Michael Coveney. Very sad. But Severn House plan to publish that Bognor in October. There is a moral in all this but I’m not sure what it is. Oh well, onward, onward…

I like the garden. I enjoy sitting outside under the walnut tree and reading a book for review. I enjoy the birds, have grown fond of the two blackbirds, hate the jackdaws, don’t much care for the pigeons. Andy, who is helping us, more as a guide and mentor than anything else, used to work at Margery Fish’s place over at East Lambrook and does amazing things with dandelions involving a sharp knife and table salt. The answer, I am beginning to believe, lies in the soil and if you do shake a Martock man you do hear the beans rattle. Age, I suppose. Who would have thought I’d become a gardener however vicarious?

Meanwhile in another part of the jungle there has been a wedding. I am too young to remember the wedding of Prince William’s grandparents in 1947  but I was on the street for the Telegraph magazine when his father, Prince Charles, married his mother, Lady Diana Spencer. Seems like yesterday.It isn’t, of course. It is thirty years give or take a few months; the bride is dead; the groom is remarried and their little boy is a balding helicopter pilot who is getting married himself with an alleged 140 outside broadcast vans in attendance.

It makes me think. Do I care? Naturally I wish them well. It would be churlish not to wish any young couple well on their wedding day and I hope they do better than his parents and his uncle Andrew and his aunt Anne. But do I care? If the truth be told I probably do not care enough for someone who has spend much of his professional life writing about his family. We live in a monarchy so, for better or worse, the Queen matters and so do close members of her family. But do they matter a lot?The answer is, surely, that we need a head of state and we need someone to dress up, send telegrams, wave, smile, plant things, appear on bank notes and postage stamps and generally perform a royal role in the botched up democracy in which we live. On the whole I feel no such need and I resent the fact that so many people apparently feel differently.But they do which is, I suppose why we have a royal family.

Anyway give me birds any day. My wife thinks we have a siskin but I think it’s a finch because the bird is too big to be a siskin which I’d never even heard of before we moved to Somerset. Everyone has advice; everyone else knows more. We are only beginners but we are very enthusiastic.

Elsewhere I have to be careful because I must not apparently appear anything other than carefree, gung-ho and wildly successful Actually I had better not blog at all. Suffice it to say that relationships between writers and editors do not always run smooth and even after a lifetime of writing books one can encounter problems. That’s all I am going to say here. Life may look easy but in my experience it is seldom as easy as it sometimes appears. That’s all I am going to say. Tantalising I know. I am not complaining just saying that just because one enjoys what one does that doesn’t make it a doddle.

Talking of which (which is another way of saying that I am going to change the subject) I inadvertently pressed a button on my computer keyboard as a result of which I have been getting all kinds of messages from around the globe. Basically these are from those who are on an electronic address book compiled by third parties and effectively outside my control.Most of my correspondents are known to me but some are not. I suppose I may have met the Deputy Foreign Editor of  Pravda but I honestly can’t remember. If he is reading this there is no particular cause for alarm or despondency. I am delighted to be linked to him and who knows where it may lead? Watch this space.

The exercise raises questions about what exactly the internet is for and how we use it. Some of us don’t use it at all; others take to it like the proverbial duck. Aptitude doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with age. Age does, however, sometimes dim enthusiasm. And curiosity. Discuss. Several of my correspondents have written to say that they know my email address and see no need for a social network. I tend to agree and yet the on-dit apparently is that e-mail is yesterday’s story and the future lies with social networks.The other day a friend gave us a lesson in the Kindle which he was recently given and there is no doubt that e-books have taken off and there is a whole raft of new concerns, not least royalty payments. E-books don’t require such old-fashioned commodities as paper and warehouses and yet publishers still seem to expect the same level of payment. And Kindle is only(as far as I can see) for products peculiar to Amazon. And none of my own books whether “in-print” or not are available to Kindle users. All very perplexing and the only thing one can say with a degree of certainty is that we are in a state of flux or transition.

In the real or old-fashioned world we are still surrounded by cardboard about which I care little. This is a source of irritation to others who DO care. Gradually Penny and I are coming to learn about the new neighbourhood in which we now live; we have had someone to stay, been out to dinner, gone racing at a point-to-point at Cothelstone, and so on. And we watched the wedding on TV with friends.

Certain events get closer and the most significant of these is the great Connaught House School reunion lunch in Cambridge this September. I have discovered that our local councillor, Patrick Palmer, was at school there and knew Grizel Hoyle,the headmaster’s widow, well. Recently I came across a letter from Mr. Martin-Smith who once taught the new boys and I correspond regularly by email and skype with Guy Knapton who was a scholar there and at Downside and is much more rigorous and efficient than I am, and is organizing the reunion lunch while I do little more than bleat and applaud and generally get in the way. The wonderful world of the internet is important yet again and the “social network”, Friends Reunited, though flawed is useful. The main flaw incidentally is peculiar to much of the internet in that its efficacy depends on the knowledge  and expertise of those who use it.

So I stagger on. I remember humming “One more step along the way I go” in the past and this seems oddly appropriate nowadays. It sounds Pooterish I know but there is a lot to be said for cliché and the commonplace. The familiar and apparently permanent turns out to be transitory and ephemeral and , in the end, that is possibly the most important fact of all. It teaches one to derive pleasure from the most apparently trivial – birds for instance – and to accept that “One more step along the way I go” is a reasonable source of pride. I have a radio in the office at the bottom of the garden. It is presently belting out that great Welsh hymn, “Guide me O thou Great Redeemer” which was sung last week in Westminster Abbey and also at the morning service in our parish church on Sunday. It always reminds me of my father and Ted Prater at Cardiff Arms Park one day long ago. The Welsh won, as they always seemed to then, and Prater was patronizing and maddeningly polite. Both men are long dead; the Arms Park has made way for a new National Stadium, I think,  the game itself is unrecognizable, and the Welsh now lose quite often .

So, hey ho, “One more step…”