One more step…
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…”