Pins and needles
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 90th 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 90th 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…