Tim Heald's Blog

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.

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.

            Most people would probably say that our move from Cornwall to Bower Hinton in Somerset was the most significant event of recent weeks but I persist in being perverse and thinking that my not particularly significant birthday took pride of place. The highlight was dinner at Joes Stone Crab in Miami and being serenaded by three waiters who looked as if they would extract stens from their violin cases and finish off their rendition in a blaze of terminal gun-fire. Alas it was no more than a candle in a slab of their signature Lime Key pie and a hand-held video on Leonel’s cell-phone. A fine culmination to a good day and the crab claws were delicious. I do like Joe’s which is paradoxically far more effectively old-fashioned and traditional than anything we have in the UK. To which I have been anyway.

            Emma dropped us off in a state of the art urban car park in Miami beach which has won prizes but gave me the creeps and we wandered down the Lincoln Mall, had lunch (more singing waiters) at a posh Italian where we began with a glass of Alfred Gratien to begin a delicious meal. Saw the King’s Speech for which all should have Oscars. Incidentally there are obvious historical inaccuracies but the essentials are correct and, while C Hitchens is basically right about Churchill, he is wrong about the King and Queen and Hitler. Part of their dislike was based on Bowes-Lyon snobbery. It was like Mannheim, the Finnish boss, who said sniffily as Hitler ran towards him “Only other ranks run.” The point as far as the K and Q were concerned is that he was a common other rank even if he did make the trains run on time and spoke fluently. Besides, he was a foreigner and declared war on Britain which was very bad indeed. On such simplicities are great events founded, alas. But then Hitchens didn’t read Modern History even though he was at Balliol!

            So I had my birthday in Florida where it was warm enough to sit out and we really ought to be home shivering amid the cardboard boxes. Actually though it was a month late the move went pretty well. The delay was one of those tiresome things and it was probably a touch optimistic to expect the new beds to arrive when they were supposed to. Or for the man from Sky to do what he said he had done. Or for me to have uninterrupted wi-fi. Essentially it was OK, thanks in part to terrific movers (removalists in Ozspeak) from Newquay. They struggled up and down the footpath in Fowey in a howling gale. Admitted that they never wanted to see another book (4,500 at their estimate). Packed anything that lay in their path including things we meant to throw out but were generally wonderful. If you intend moving just let us know.

            The other huge plus was the White Hart in downtown Martock. This was the local pub where we were forced to bed down on account of the non-arrival of the sleeping stuff. The pub had been an almost next door favourite of my grandfather many years ago and was now obviously very different but they were incredibly welcoming and we felt instantly at home.

            Gradually we started getting to know our new surroundings, aided, of course, by the fact that so many of my family are crowded into the church-yard – my father on one side; my aunt and uncle, Betty and Basil, and their son, my cousin David on the other; with sundry Vaughans including grandparents and great grandparents in the middle. Naturally I paid visits on both Sundays to the glorious church of All Saints, second largest in all Somerset and for years the place where my mother’s family all worshipped. In a very real sense I felt as if I was coming home.

            This was assisted, naturally, by our quick two-hour trip from the car park in Wincanton to Hammersmith bus station. One of the benefits of my talk to the annual dinner of the Belgian Cambridge Society was the chance to try the London trip. This was by Berry’s bus. When I was at Connaught House school. Bishop’s Lydeard, many years ago Berry’s used to take us to swimming in Taunton, up to the Quantocks and to away matches against St. Dunstan’s and Perrot Hill in their buses of which there were two. Old Mr. Berry drove the elder bus which could barely make it up Cothelstone Hill; young Mr. Berry who had Brylcreem-black hair drove the new bus – a mighty, throbbing behemoth, which did Cothelstone Hill with ease.Now old Mr. Berry is long gone and young Mr. Berry has become old Mr. Berry and the company has masses of buses which speed up and  down the A303 to and from London bearing OAPs who pay astoundingly little for the privilege.

            A quick digression on the marvels of modern science. I couldn’t find the “Write Entry” button  in orange/red. I needed this to post my latest blog entry (this!) on-line. I asked Matt in far-off Fowey what to do and he said could he come on line and fix it. This he did in a matter of moments even though he is many thousands of miles away Magic!   Like brain surgery, only by remote control and computer. 

            So we have moved to Bower Hinton and the best of many pluses is that it takes under an hour for me to reach my Mama and between the 12^th when we moved and the 25^th when we flew to Florida I saw her three times. Each visit was an hour or so whereas in the past I was going for two or three days about once a month. More visits less time seems the prerequisite. And preferable all round.

            On the work front I am beavering away on my Queen book and sending regular missives to London. Hope and believe it’s OK. Have made corrections and additions to “Death in the Opening Chapter” which is scheduled for March 31^st. Apparently that’s the same day as Methuen are now going to publish my account of Douglas Jardine’s tour in India. Hope so, not least because I have arranged the first of what I hope will be many talks about it some time in April. In September Severn House say they will be publishing “Poison at the Pueblo” though I must make revisions and additions before the end of March. Murray should do my Queen in the autumn and Frances Lincoln my Richard Cobb letters. Which makes five books. Plus my work for “The Lady” with a Royal Wedding and the Duke’s 90^th both looming. And Sue at the Tablet has just emailed about a review. In addition I have arranged talks in St. Ives, Fowey, Bournemouth; I am keen to see cricket in Taunton in July maybe with family and I have booked for the Indians at Lord’s.

          &nb
sp; All in all, especially bearing in mind the last birthday, I am now an old man in a hurry. Brrmm, brrmmm. Scribble, scribble, drone, drone, Stirling Moss eat your heart out!

It’s probably batty to say that the highspot of one’s month was a conference at Bournemouth University‘s Business Centre but I honestly believe this to be so. “Oh”, I hear a strangled cry, (as satirists use to write in the dim and distant)”Get a life”, but it’s true, honestly, strike a light, it’s true guv. The conference was the second annual do of the UK Speechwriters’ Guild which, I concede sounds pretty dire. It’s a terrifically cumbersome title and I am amazed that some PR agency hasn’t got hold of the Guild and renamed it “Alert!” or “Gozo” or “Beezer” or something equally meaningless but the organization and it’s conference remain gloriously unequivocal and old-fashioned. What you see is what you get.

            What we got the other day was shop.Like John Buchan, who once described it with a shrug as experts talking about their area of expertise,I rather like shop. There seem, to me, to be two sorts of people at the Guild’s meetings – those who teach, coach and win prizes and those who have fallen into speech-writing almost by accident. I’m afraid I prefer the latter category, in which I place a number if those present, viz Charles Crawford, Edward Mortimer, Martin Broughton, Ryan Heath and Phil Collins. Crawford was a diplomat and Ambassador to such places as Poland; Broughton is Chairman of Liverpool FC and British Airways; Mortimer wrote for Kofi Annan, Heath for Neelie Koes, a glamorous Dutch eurocrat and Collins for Tony Blair.

I don’t mean to seem unpleasant about the professional coaches and theorists but I’m afraid I didn’t find them as interesting as those who actually did the job. I got a real sense of what it was like to be at the UN or the European Commission and I loved Martin Broughton’s story of a phone call from the Prime Minister. Years ago I was lucky enough to moderate a discussion between Phyllis James and Simon Brett on the subject of crime writing. They know each other well but they obviously hadn’t seen each other for a long time so they indulged in a gentle but intimate game of catch-up which required little or no prompting from me. The audience was given the unusual sense of eavesdropping on a private conversation. That’s what I felt I was getting from the practitioners at the Bournemouth conference. They were letting us into their world, treating us as equals, as confidants, as real flies on real walls. I loved it.

Incidentally Edward Mortimer who I’ve known since we both read history together almost half a century ago at Oxford more or less accused me of not being a speech-writer. This is true in the sense that, like him, I think of myself fundamentally as a writer and a hack but I did write speeches for the first ever non-Englishman to be president of the Royal Warrant Holders Association. He was a French count who ran a champagne house and the fee which was generous did not involve anything as vulgar or commonplace as money. I also ghost-wrote an auto-biography of a peer of the realm who went to prison many years ago for homosexual “offences” which wouldn’t carry any penalties today. He had kept the transcripts of his trial but couldn’t bring himself to read them. I had to do it and then pretend that I was the prisoner in the dock. Not easy but the absolute acme of ghost writing and therefore, I think, of speech writing too.

Otherwise busy as usual. We have accepted an offer on our house. Cash. The asking price. The other day we looked at a number of other possibilities in the South Somerset area. I think I am less concerned about where we go than my wife. I know what I am in favour of and though we would like more money, many mansions and so on I feel comfortable with the possibilities and in any case “nothing matters much and very little matters at all” or words to that effect. It’s sad to be going but we’ve had 15 wonderful years here and now it is time for new adventures while we still have time. I think that has to be the attitude. I heard the other day, by the way, that this decade is known in the medical profession as “Snipers’ Alley” on the grounds presumably that anyone can be picked off when least expecting it. On the other hand if you make it through to 70 you can breathe a sigh of relief and skip through some broad pastures. I wish. The time for skipping is long gone, alas. Oh, life has moved fast and we’ve made an offer on the house in Bower Hinton and had it accepted. Watch this space and remember that in my end is my beginning. Or something.

            Anyway the opening of my new royal book seems to have found favour with my smart new publisher and my ditto literary agent so I feel encouraged and will press on. Next stop the Lord Lieutenant of Cornwall, no less. My snla has also sold a couple of crime novels to Severn House/Crème de la Crime which is good. The first one (“Death in the opening chapter”) is out next year so let us pray. It features the return  of Simon Bognor. He is knighted and running his department so his wife is Lady B. Such, for some of us, (though not me I hasten to add) appears to be life. And the short story in which he deals with expenses and fiddling thereof is out any moment. Again watch space, cross fingers, chiz chiz as Molesworth say.

Meanwhile we went to Sherborne for the 70^th anniversary of the Luftwaffe bombing which killed 18 townspeople but despite several direct hits to the Courts no-one from the school. An impressive turn-out and some good lines. I particularly liked the man who questioned the veracity of Lord Haw-Haw because he claimed that the German Air Force had destroyed half the British fleet at Milborne Port. I have also been seeing people about the 60^th anniversary of the Queen’s accession which is fascinating. Little new to report on the planned Connaught House reunion though Guy Knapton and I are in a stew over numbers. The Berry‘s bus takes around 50 and the Old Library in Pembroke does 64 for a meal but will we be short or over-subscribed. We’re trying to find out but easy it isn’t.

And so we trundle on. In all sorts of ways the move East is the most significant item on the agenda and it is astonishing how many people say that Cornwall was impossibly far but in future we will be within recognized civilization so that we may actually see old friends and family. I rather hope we will end up in Martock where my grandfather once owned a glove factory and where many of my family lie in the churchyard. But who knows? Planning, I have always been told, is God’s idea of a joke; but I like to dream and Martock and environs is rather a good dream. Maybe I will become a fan of Yeovil FC and go to the cricket ground at Taunton like my Great Aunt and Aunty Betty. Maybe not. We shall see and time will doubtless tell. Stop press is that we have made an offer and it’s been accepted, so dream on, dream on. Shades of bananas before ba
tting, of Prebendary Wickham, Archie Maclaren, yew trees and fire brigades.

            Life is seldom dull. Despite God and his jokes.

            A few years ago I was researching a book about the Landmark Trust. This was a doomed enterprise for all sorts of reason but I remember staying in a typical Landmark property in Lancaster (typical buildings seemed to me to be a pineapple, a mill-keeper’s cottage, a mediaeval watch-tower), got up early in the morning walked through beautiful, strange and ancient streets and  found myself humming “one more step along the way we go” and feeling very alone. Not lonely but alone. I was quite optimistic, quite happy, fatalistic, realistic and was on my own contra mundum. Not at all bad but I experienced a strong sense that this was what life was about.

            I sensed this the other day inWiltshire watching my mother. She will celebrate her ninetieth birthday in November and she is having ever greater probems with vocabulary and communication while, as far as I can see,suffering little or no diminution in brain capacity. Because of this, and for other reasons, she is retreating more and more into a world of her own with her own thoughts and where no-one else, even those closest to her, are unable to go. I do feel sad about this but not disconsolate. In the end, I think, we are, however gregarious, however blessed with family and friends, on our own.

            End of solemnity and seriousness. It was just a thought and one which I wanted to share. It may be that the self-employed writer is more prone to such feelings but that doesn’t make me less aware of them, nor, for that matter, dangerously inclined to universalize. Things may be different for others but basically we bring nothing in, we take nothing out, and when chips are down it’s just us.

            It’s been an interesting hard-working few weeks for me with a number of trips down memory lanes which some people think counter-productive but which I rather enjoy. One of the more recent was a day in Sherborne. I am now contracted to write a history of the school, which is sometimes said to date back to the eighth century and to be sandwiched between an interesting trio of royal Old Boys – Alfred at the beginning and the Crown Prince of Qatar and the King of Swaziland more recently. I stayed with John Harden, the Secretary of the Old Boys – thank you John, thank you Caroline – before a morning with Peter Currie and an afternoon with Michael Earls-Davis. I remember them both as masters when I was a boy at the school and it’s strange to meet them again on more or less equal terms even though there is still, inevitably, an urge for me to call them sir and to defer most of the time. Pete taught me French and Michael was in charge of the Combined Cadet Force. I perversely enjoyed ceremonial drill and the Field Day. The former involved thumping military music which I like and the latter meant seeing beautiful rural Dorset and always seemed to end up in a hay wagon with all my section and their ancient bicycles. That must be memory playing tricks. I hated most things about “corps” but I remember a sort of Captain Mainwaring-like lunacy. Storming Portland Bill in eccentric craft and running across the inspecting general’s picnic lunch half way up the hill letting off loud and aimless (literally) explosions from my old 303. That sort of thing.

            Anyway I am determined to enjoy being the new “Unks” Gourlay, the peculiar, scholarly schoolmaster who wrote the last Sherborne School history. My researches are already throwing up endless strange joys. I was talking to Ripert Uloth the Deputy Editor of Country Life the other day and remembered that his brother had been in Lyon House, like me. An odd preparation for buying the Piccadilly tailor, Cordings, with his friend, Eric Clapton. And I remember playing the vicar’s wife in an end of term Agatha Christie in which the vicar was played by Tim Cumberbatch. Tim changed his name to Carlton when he went on stage but it didn’t seem to make a lot of difference except that he met and married an actress named Wanda Ventham and together they begat Benedict who has kept the name Cumberbatch and is famous. Stanley Johnson, whom I remember as a brilliant and progressive head of house (“Please may I clean your rugger boots, Johnson, sir? ” were my first words to the great man as I recall) is now famous chiefly as father of the Mayor of London, the Editor of the Lady and the new Tory MP for Orpington: Boris (Alexander), Rachel and Jo. Sic transit Shirburniensis whether you “hail from Cam or Isis” as John Harden sang not altogether sonorously in the middle of Dorset the other night.

            Anyway from there I took the train to Wiltshire to stay at my mother’s for a few days.One brief excursion was to the Lamb at Hindon for lunch with Michael Dobbs with whom I shared a stage a year or so ago. Thoroughly enjoyable occasion in every way but we should have been at the Beckford Arms at Fonthill Gifford. We had booked but she burned down in the middle of the night. The last time we attempted a meal there she was closed for several months of refurbishment. Sorry Beckford Arms, no jinx intended.         

            One of the big plusses of my stay at the Malt House was the chance to get to know the latest addition to my greater family, Henry, a grandson now eight months old. Henry seems to spend most of his life chortling while not bawling or sleeping, eating or trying a spot of interesting projectile vomit. How enviable to lead a life so uncomplicated by thoughts of mortgage and mortality, but, alas, it is all to come while for people such as his grandfather a descent into a second age of not-so-serene simplicity is getting all too close. But steady on, I must not be maudlin.

            And so to Balham where my younger son Tristram and his wife Beth celebrated a happy harbinger with dinner in a brasserie in which the ubiquitous Rick Stein appears to have a stake. He’s everywhere. Inescapable.Balham is no longer Peter Sellars’ famous “Gateway to the south” distinguished only by the ever-changing traffic lights. It has become trendy – a place of suits, ladies who lunch, salsa bars and yes, the ever-present Rick Stein. Next day I spent brow furrowed over the collected Tom or Thomas or TFRG Braun and all his works which his brother Christopher and I are trying to edit into acceptable volume form. A labour of love in which Tristram came galloping like the US cavalry to a rescue late in the action. Or appeared to. Fingers crossed!

            In the meantime the letters of Richard Cobb where the cast-list of characters has risen to almost 10,000 words and the proposed jacket of my book on Douglas Jardine’s tour of India in 1933 and 4 which Methuen are to publish this autumn: all muscular Christianity, pith helmet and a posthumously maddening sense of missionary zeal, lesser breeds and Gandhi in the distance rattling his bed of nails.

            So I’m exhausted and yet can’t sleep.. It is the middle of the night and I should be in bed but am instead at the keyboard. Perhaps this is the punishment God has in store, a sort of Sisyphus substitute where the self-employed writer is bound to an eternal QERTY and forced to rap out ceaseless drivel for an illusory audience. Oh well. Scribble, scribble. Could be worse. And there is the Connaught House reunion to look forward to. Autumn 2011. Pembroke College, Cambridge. Maybe, maybe not. We shall see. Watch this space. 

            The one day international between England and Australia at Lord’s was probably top. The cricket is slightly incidental though anything involving those two sides is always good even with pyjamas, a relative failure by Ponting, the wrong result and overly cautious captaincy by Strauss. (I’d have brought on Broad and Swann much earlier!) And the only familiar face was the general in the champagne bar of the Tennis Court which was deeply wonderful but more would have been better still. We were also very conscious of the wedding cricket at Worcester College, Oxford, which turned out to be stylish and enjoyable and blessed with good weather when we had supper at Quod in Oxford with Rick and Judi the following evening. It seemed bizarre that only a month earlier we had been at the crime writer’s conference in Oklahoma City before jetting eventfully to Chicago where, incidentally, I see that the sinister policeman and alleged torturer whose trial I attended has been found guilty and is to be sentenced in November when he could face as long as 45 years in prison. As he’s not well and in his sixties it seems unlikely that he will ever come out which is probably right and proper. Bit late in the day but reassuring in a way.

            Anyway it seems extraordinary to be back in the United Kingdom dealing with everyday problems after a period of exoticism – not, I hasten to add, a holiday. To apply the chronological approach which is more logical and sensible we began June in Oklahoma City which was fascinating. We had a few days on our own before the conference began and, as usual were struck by the money, the space and the difference as well as the similarity. There is a well-established belief that we are, as Churchill (?) said, united and yet divided by a common tongue. This is true but it’s a common yet different culture as well. The university which was at the centre of our exchanges was modeled on Oxford and Cambridge and yet, although there are similarities it is the differences that strike one. There is a reading room which is obviously derived from the Bodleian or something but it is ten times as big, ten times cleaner and empty. The University has the best, well most expensive, private art collection ever given to a university in the USA. Gaylord College which is endowed by a man called Gaylord is, I think, the journalism faculty and yet it has a state of the art newsroom we can only dream of in England. The sofas and armchairs are of a leatheriness, depth, comfort and, yes, emptiness, that we can only dream of. Gaylord’s main claim to fame seems to be that he or the family own the Oklahoman. I can’t imagine a similar endowment on the back of say the Western Morning News and while I am sure that the Oklahoman is at the cutting edge of modern journalism I can’t help thinking…

            Oh what? It’s certainly different though. In some respects  it is the similarity with what we know which is striking. Thus the best thing to come out of the conference for me, personally, is being commissioned to write a short story for a German language anthology to be published for next year’s conference in Zurich. I have already begun it, urged on by the energetic and indefatigable Dr. Jutta Motz, who was of our number in Oklahoma. 

            The best things at conferences A LWAYS happen in the interstices,; over the breakfast table, in the corridors but seldom on stage. There were exceptions, of course. I loved the lecture by a former Dean of Journalism, an ex White House correspondent called David Dary, one of whose books I have since acquired from Bookends of Fowey, which is generally unobtainable on this side of the Atlantic and is called Cowboy Culture. It’s very good indeed – rigorous, readable and about a subject on which we are parochially ignorant.

            Despite this and such incidental public pleasures as a man and a dog describing policework among the Indians and a baseball game between the Oklahoma team and their Memphis counterpart it was moments of natter and chatter with the likes of Jutta which were most memorable. It is ever thus.

            Don’t incidentally fly all over the States. Americans do and they always tell you that the train and the bus don’t operate but Greyhound and Amtrak still exist and while we were told by all and sundry that they are dangerous, unpunctual or had simply passed on we used both  and were well satisfied. I suppose a failure to tell the baggage handlers that our departure gate had changed, the nail through the tire and the failure to find the only man allowed to change said tire were par for the course. The emergency landing in North West Arkansas because a nearby passenger had thrown a fit was bad luck (a lot worse for him than for us) but I’d still pass on planes and stick to buses and trains – even in the States. Maybe it is a risk but you see a lot more and we enjoyed them. Flying involves wandering around without a jacket or shoes and is a pain.

            Anyway we ended up for a couple of days in Chicago which seemed like the centre of the universe and was amazingly cool after the extreme heat of the old south and then headed home getting  into Heathrow early in the morning sleepless and having watched a surfeit of. Still, we made it, so thank-you Virgin and the volcano in Iceland.

            Once home we spent a night with friends just outside Salisbury and then stopped off in Sherborne for lunch with friends and a night with the headmaster who I like to count as a friend too. Simon is retiring and he and his wife, Olivia, are moving to Bath. One of his final acts however is to commission me to write a new history of the school. I am going to enjoy this. They have found someone who shared a study with Alan Turiung, Simon has all the relevant papers involving the doomed reign of a distinguished predecessor, there are some old masters to interview, the manuscript of Alec Waugh’s Loom of Youth to consult and much else besides.   

<
p class="MsoNormal">            I have a marginal quandary about Sherborne because when I was a boy there in the fifties and sixties I was a serious rebel, helped to start an allegedly subversive national magazine, disliked many activities such as compulsory boxing and the Combined Cadet Force. Since then, however, the school has changed in some ways quite dramatically. In any case, like so many institutions, there was stuff I disliked but other things such as the quality of some of the teaching and the beauty and history of the place which I enjoyed and still do. I disapprove of the basic notion of fee-paying education but I don’t see why people should be discriminated against just because they have rich parents besides which I am attracted by the notions of my late (and great) English teacher there, John Buchanan, who said there were only two sorts of school, good and bad and presumably I wished to make them all better. I’m not sure I agree but I see what he meant.

            In any case I think I’m probably the best person for the job and I will enjoy it. I don’t think that means I have “sold out” or betrayed my original beliefs. Not everyone will agree but I think Sherborne, for better or worse, is part of me. After all I spent five years there and I can’t deny it.. Not everyone will agree but there you go! If I do nothing else I shall work in an approving mention of the world’s greatest biscuit: the Dorset Knob. Let’s hear it for Dorset Knobs everywhere.

            So home at last . Bank manager, a Cornish pasty lunch plus crime fiction at the local library, alfresco lunch in a friend’s beautiful garden. Rugby (better than usual from a crummy England), World Cup Soccer (abysmal from another crummy England), Wimbledon Tennis (not even a crummy England but a half decent if surly Scot) all available on terrestrial TV and the only half-decent “England” is cricket which you can only get (like rugby come to think of it) on Murdoch’s Sky and which relies heavily on the South Africans and Irish. Maybe the English should abandon any attempt at playing top-whack sport. Foreigners do it so much better.

            Anyway back to earth with a vengeance and at the end of the month off to see my aged Mama (she will be 90 next birthday). It’s normally four hours from our local station, Par, to Tisbury, hers. On this day, however, there had been a derailment so my train was nonchalantly cancelled; I was an hour late and almost missed the butcher. On Tuesday, after among other excitements, a merry session with Bishop Bickersteth (who claims to be the only Bishop to have gone shooting with Prince Philip at Sandringham), I travelled on to London (the normally trusty taxi failed to show but luckily Dave who is even trustier came to the rescue and I caught my scheduled train  before embarking on the usual hectic London schedule involving lunch with friends, supper with my younger son, Tristram, a visit to Buckingham Palace (no that was the day after), another to Sally Soames’ terrific exhibition of photos including one of Clement Attlee for which I did the interview, maps at the British Library, a chat with a former royal policy chief, breakfast with an old friend and favourite editor who was put out and late because his bath overflowed and so to bed at the Frontline Club.

            That was the month, that was. Busy, busy; a bit of a roller-coaster. Such, I think is life. A matter of hanging in sometimes by one’s finger tips. It can be frustrating; often fascinating; sometimes fun. But it IS, like it or not and another month has passed. It’s foggy outside and I can’t even see Polruan. The Dutch are in the final of the world cup. I’ve almost finished reading the history of New Zealand. A literary friend of friends has just rung to say she has moved in to Bodinnick.  Must rush, more next time…

            The Masterclass in Antwerp was probably the high-spot of a busy month. I talked on character in crime fiction following in the footsteps of Professor Jim Madison Davis of the University of Oklahoma who spoke last year on plot. We started at 8 in the theatre of the Literature Centre, had one coffee break and were still going strong at 11.30 when Mieke who organized the whole affair said we had to leave the hall because the staff had to get home A small group of us adjourned to a nearby bar and I stayed until 1.30 when Rene Boers, Mieke’s husband, walked me home to our digs where a worried Penny – she’s heard me droning on professionally a million times before and had stayed in with a good book – was waiting anxiously. Next day we heard that the really hard core had stayed in the bar until five.

            Antwerp was everything I had hoped for and more. It used to be one of the world’s most important cities and it’s still Europe‘s second biggest port and home to what is arguably the centre of the world’s diamond trade. Perhaps most significantly it is the home of Rubens and his most famous pupil van Dyck. I associated the former with blousy naked women and the latter with small men with pointed beards sitting astride vast horses but in Antwerp the best examples of their work seem to be religious pictures of one kind and another. Our brilliantly stylish accommodation, run by the equally brilliant Monika, was just opposite the Paulus Church and we went there for Mass on Sunday which was, for me, almost the best moment of a fascinating visit. Stunning pictures, architecture and atmosphere.

            Otherwise we did a lot of walking, visited Rubens’ house, had lunch with Georgina and Nigel – moules and frites opposite the cathedral -, watched Rene lead a demo against a proposed bridge (and were delighted when the referendum that Sunday won the day with 60% of the popular vote), went to the fabulous print museum, attended a concert at a hall a tram drive away from the centre, had a smart dinner in a converted pumping station, loved Monika’s breakfasts with the most scrumptious boiled eggs and generally had a great time savouring a seriously civilized city with relatively few tourists. It’s so easy and cheap to do Flanders. You can go anywhere in Belgium for no extra charge if you take the Eurostar to Brussels. Next time I want to go to Mechelin, HQ of Cummins Diesels where the fascist green-shirts shot at Richard Cobb and his Poles during the war. And missed.

            Antwerp was in the middle of a longish trip away from home which began with a gastro-pub lunch with Peter and Jenny Hughes, continued with a wake for van Es at the Frontline Club and continued frenetically until I came home on a crowded train after the 8^th fully subscribed Old Shirburnian Media lunch. I never cease to be amazed when thirty or so grown-up and slightly bolshy men solemnly rise and sing two verses of the school song in Latin. At the Groucho Club in the middle of Soho after a good and prolonged lunch. Apparently it’s the only Old Boys’ event which is in the official school calendar. And this year they even had to turn people away because they were over-subscribed. Van Es, by the way, was the Dutch photographer who lived in Hong Kong and took the photo of the last Americans piling up a rope ladder into a helicopter as they tried to get out of a lost Vietnam. A successful evening I thought and made odder yet when a man came up and introduced himself as Simon Pike whose father was once Chaplain-General to the Forces and later Bishop of Sherborne. Simon had arrived at Lyon House the same term as my brother James and for a while the two were “best friends”. He didn’t, unsurprisingly, know that James had died.

            The  day beforfe the Media affair I had lunch at the Fire Station in Waterloo with Christopher Braun to discuss the anthology of his brother Thomas’ work. We both think we are progressing and I hope we are. Christopher has amassed some 400 possible entries, mainly light verse both published and unpublished. Tom, as I always knew him – the family always called him Thomas – was a genius in his own inimitable way.

            Otherwise. Well, I had lunch with Lindsay Fulcher, basic, nice Thai round the corner from “The Lady” which is now edited by Stanley Johnson’s daughter, Rachel, sister of Alexander aka Boris. We had a chat before lunch and as far as I can see I am now the Royal Correspondent of the “The Lady”. Arise Dame Tim! Who would have thought it but, hey, why not?! I am pursuing potential interviewees, preferably Royal Ladies.Heard Colin Amery give a lecture on Nicholas Hawksmoor at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street. Fascinating and a good subsequent debate about how redundant or semi-redundant churches should re-invent themselves. Colin was on the Orient Express to Venice with Gavin Stamp many years ago and the two did a wonderful drone round Venice. I remember embarking, improbably, at Ealing Broadway.That lunchtime  I., but I will be accused of name-dropping. It was good to see old friends including Rachel’s Dad who I realize I have known for more than half a century. My first words to him, as far as I can remember, were “Please Johnson sir may I clean your rugger boots”. I’m not certain about the sir” but otherwise true. If I didn’t clean his boots I’d be beaten for not having enough signatures on my “fag chit”. To his credit Stanley was amazed and appalled.

            Met up with niece Becky and had a family do to celebrate Tristram and Beth completing a half marathon through the royal parks – Tristram did it in 1 hr 42 which is an improvement of ten minutes on his previous best. Then last weekend I went up to London and stayed with Alexander and Kirsten. A and I went to see London Welsh beaten by Doncaster and afterwards listened to a wonderful sounding male voice choir wearing blazers and looking like massed bank clerks of a certain age. Alexander cooked biryani and dhal that evening. We were accosted at Old Deer Park by Mr. Hartigan who had taught Alexander at the Oratory. And on the Sunday I had lunch at Simpson’s in the Strand courtesy of the Mugar Memorial Library in Boston, Mass, which collects my stuff. More old friends and acquaintances.

            Anyway am now back looking out at grey drizzle. I finished my book on Jardine in India and have sent it off electronically to Methuen. And, in a way most interestingly, I have been “blogging” regularly for the Daily Telegraph about royalty. I’m rather enjoying this and we’ve had lots of hits and some comments. Odd that the one that really seems to excite people is Prince Philip and his alleged “gaffes” which seem to polarize opinions amazingly. Some people think he’s terrific and saying what we’d all like to and other people say he’s appalling, Neanderthal, never done a day’s work in his life and so on.

            As before I am depressed at the angry, brown paper bag semi-literate quality of some of the responses. And people are astonishingly lacking in self awareness. One correspondent complained bitterly about the laziness and awfulness of various members of the royal family, failing to make a plausible case – I didn’t say there wasn’t such a case, only that the frothing complainant failed to make it. Check out the comment on the www.blogs.telegraph.co.uk site (I think) and see if you agree. The most bizarre moment was, I thought, when he banged on about our obsession with PC and non PC remarks and then commented that if being PC meant tolerating someone who is offensive then you could count him in. What he didn’t seem to realize was that he was the one being offensive and       people like me who didn’t agree with him but said so in an inoffensive way were the ones being tolerant.

            But I suppose I would say that, wouldn’t I? Check the site and see if you agree.           

It would be wrong to suggest that the sudden and totally unexpected death of my younger brother James was anything other than the most significant event of the last few weeks. It was indeed one of the most significant events of life so far and very uncomfortable for all of us especially I would imagine for those of us who claim to be orthodox Christians. It seemed, and still does, to be gratuitously cruel. Bad enough if you think it was an accident of fate, worse still if you have to accept that it was done by God, on purpose.

As I become more and more of an agnostic if not atheist I tend to be more phlegmatic about the bloodiness of life. On the whole actually and with reservations I have to concede that I’ve been very lucky and privileged but on balance life is pretty unpleasant but why should one expect it to be anything else? I suppose that what one comes back to and what any unexpected and premature death elicits is a sense of “Carpe Diem”. Jim got just over sixty years which, in the present British climate, is a pretty good knock. It was good that when I last spoke to him some 48 hours before his death he sounded relaxed and happy. When we tidied up his effects we found walking boots, a new volume of the collected poems of RS Thomas which he had obviously been reading, a bottle of Irish whiskey into which decent inroads had been made and notebooks and a laptop. All this suggested a well-rounded, hard-working, individual who was enjoying life and living it to its full.

It was incredibly tough on my mother who found his body; tough on his widow and children; tough on his relations; tough on his friends. Not too bad for him, perhaps but pretty ghastly for the rest of us. Suddenly a life which still had endless possibilities and potential has come to an end. Jim’s got a birth date and a death date  and his chapter is closed. The funeral in Wells Cathedral was very well-attended (we reckoned on more than 300 mourners), dignified, moving and vastly improved by all the participants – priest, speakers and readers, being people who really knew him so that we all had a real sense of a personal tribute. Afterwards I had a word with the priest who had run the service and he said that he had introduced James to the American mystic and writer, Thomas Merton, and also remarked that James had been a regular at Sunday morning services but had never once stayed for the coffee session afterwards. In other words he had a strong interest in the religious but was essentially quite a solitary person. Or words to that effect.

I went to see my GP this morning to have my fairly regular blood pressure test. It was up which is scarcely surprising though slightly depressing. We may have to treat it slightly “more aggressively” if it stays high. I suppose one of the several thoughts provoked by my brother’s death is that once we reach 60 we are well and truly in the drop-off zone. If we keel over at this age there is perhaps a marginal sense of a premature demise but not a lot. Younger people and even our contemporaries will say that we had a “good innings” which in a historical sense is probably true though it’s not exactly cheerful.

Still, as one of our fellow-lunchers remarked the other day, “It makes a welcome change to be discussing death and not poverty”. Which is, perhaps, true. The poverty news is depressing, not least because it appears to be self-inflicted or at least man-made, and in some instances at least forces regrettable changes in career as well as circumstance. It’s sad, for example, to hear of good travel-writers who are forced to sell up and turn to something completely different because the market has dried up. One gets the impression that most publications have a longish back-list of commissioned articles and are not commissioning anything fresh for the foreseeable future.

It was my birthday on the 28^th, a seminal one, noted with a photograph in the Times and provoked some fascinating messages, the most unexpected being, I think, the one from Tim Mason with whom I had been at pre-prep school, Danesfield in Walton-on-Thames circa 1950. Amazing and rather wonderful. For the first time in my life I feel rather proud of Danesfield which I’m afraid I barely remember. Do I feel a re-union coming on. Are there other Old Danesfieldians out there? Did we do all right? Would the school be proud of us? Does it matter?

Tomorrow, God, cut-price-airline and weather permitting we go to Edinburgh so that I can drone away to the Cricket Society of Scotland in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Penny says I mustn’t use words like “drone” because people may believe I mean it. I explain that it is all part of the Englishman’s disturbing  tic of self-deprecation which is actually a thinnish disguise for extreme arrogance. Never mind, the Scottish trip is an interesting exercise in Ancient and Modern.

I am having lunch on Monday with David Cairns once the star photographer on the Daily Express. That’s ancient. So is coffee with Camilla Cowie whose parents owned and ran the wonderful Connaught House, at Bishop’s Lydeard outside Taunton, where I was at prep school . I suppose that’s ancient too. So, in a slightly more up to date way, is my wonderful former agent Richard Simon with whom we are having supper on Sunday. David Gilmour – Sunday lunch – is Balliol (ancient) and Richard Cobb (ancient but shading into modern). On Wednesday we are having supper with Merryn, Sandy and their children and they are definitely Cornish and modern. The cricket talks are about books that are in print and to a brand new audience, so they’re modern. Shepherd and Wedderburn, the lawyers are modern whereas maybe Ivor Guild WS is ancient.

I don’t really know if these are meaningful definitions and distinctions. Oh, during the month we went to Cracow, using up air-miles., It was wonderful but fantastically cold. I have been invited to give a paper at the University of Antwerp in October. Jeremy Paul and I are going to work together an a TV adaptation of the new return of Simon Bognor.

In other words “und so weiter” and the mixture as usual, a judicious mixture I feel, of past, present and future. Overshadowing everything however is  the death of my brother James. It’s affected everything. I miss him a lot. I am still trying to work out what it means. Above all I suppose I feel RIP. He was much loved and much appreciated and he had many joyful moments giving them out as well. But it was a tough little life in many ways and RIP seems a meaningful and apt sentiment. RIP James – you deserve it and we miss you.

On Remembrance Sunday I discovered that we had no garlic or anchovies in the house. Shock, horror. I mean how can one live without staples such as this? I went down town early for the War Memorial Service and mentioned our plight to one onlooker-wife who said that she too was out of garlic and if I was going to replenish stocks at the Spar which was open even on Remembrance Sunday then could I bring her a bulb too. Which I did. I got back just as the parade was shuffling to its position holding, as it were, a collective wreath of poppies. I had two small tins of anchovy fillets in the pocket of my smart Donegal tweed overcoat and two garlic bulbs one of which I presented to my friend.

Now, come on. The experienced blogger/columnist can surely make words out of such a credit-crunch predicament. Did hundreds of thousands of our ancestors die in order that we should have garlic and anchovies? Does it matter? Is this fair? Discuss.

And while in grumpy-old-man mode I had a note from Santander telling me that I had acquired an amazing two new shares for £6.31 a go. My holding is the tiny legacy of an involvement with Abbey National many years ago and I honestly haven’t the foggiest how much it’s all worth. Not a lot but I’m curious and so I phoned the number at the bottom of Santander‘s  note. Everyone was charm itself and handed me graciously on to other more relevant departments  until after about a quarter of an hour I found myself listening to a frightfully polite recorded message advising me to telephone the number I had initially dialed a quarter of an hour earlier.

When I mentioned this to people I bumped into while out shopping I was met with hollow laughter and the gradual realization that practically everyone had had a similar experience albeit with different organizations. My view is that it almost beggars belief. Almost, but not quite. And part of me believes that the current ridiculous crisis is just as much the result of this sort of incredible incompetence as it is to do with greed. Greed has something to do with it, of course, but it’s beaten out by uselessness and the combination is lethal.

In a sense I suppose that what I seem to be saying is that historians, columnists and other important opinion-makers and shakers go on as if earthquake, wind and fire; birth, marriage and death; with a possible add-on for war, civil unrest, financial implosions and one or two other cosmic events are what really matter whereas the reality is that it’s tins of anchovies, bulbs of garlic and a modest shareholding in a foreign bank of which none-one seems to know or care anything very much though that infinitessimal tiny bit more than nothing is done by machine, recorded for security purposes, in no language readily intelligible to man except for the politeness which borders on the unctuous.

By this token the most important matters of the last few weeks have had to do with cricket and at the end of the day I begin to wonder if being made president of the local cricket club wasn’t the most significant, interesting and rewarding thing that ever happened. Maybe I exaggerate but not, I think, much. Forget real life whatever that may be. Anchovies, garlic and shares in Banco Santander loom much larger but not as large as cricket.

The month began with the cricket club’s annual dinner at the Royal Fowey Yacht Club. One stalwart admitted that he was the oldest player and he was 33. Most were a great deal younger; several brought along wives, girl-friends and partners and the atmosphere was resolutely relaxed and informal although the evening ended with presentations and speeches. I felt more grand-paternal than I think I have ever felt and although the players have done a sterling job in keeping things going, notably on the field of play where they are responsible, I think, for making sure that the club consistently punches above its weight, I felt the need for more pensioners.

Nevertheless, if only in the interests of self-preservation and mutual camaraderie, I felt – and feel – the need for a few more of the gnarled and wrinkled. It has always seemed to me that the most successful societies are those which best manage to mix up differences of all kinds, not least those of age.

One way of doing this is to build up aspects of the club that have little to do with the leagues. The Leagues have been the saving of cricket but they are not perfect and there is a danger that they can create an imbalance. Last year we plotted a charity match in aid of Marie Curie and raised over £1100 even though not a ball was bowled. Next year we will do the same match, playing this time I hope, on Sunday August 16^th. This is the beginning of Fowey’s great regatta week so there should be lots of people around to come and watch and give generously. Michael Williams has accepted our challenge to his inimitable Cornish Crusaders. Only the really sweaty wet-bobs will be on the high seas en-route to Falmouth and it should be a great day. The other charity game is inked in for Tuesday 28^th July and will be played in aid of the Cornwall Blind Association. That’s between the Ashes Tests at Lord’s and Edgbaston. I intend having a private bet to see which game raises the most but in any case please put them in your diary and try to come.

Quite apart from trying to introduce some entertaining, competitive non-league cricket into our season I hope that it will broaden the base of our support and membership. I’m also looking at re-instating some kind of youth scheme. I went up to the local community college for exploratory chats and had a ditto with Chris Biggs who is President of the increasingly successful Lankelly-Fowey Rugby Club which has now got a very strong youth section. I walked past the ground the other Saturday morning on my way to 4 Turnings Garage – the poor old Rover was declared a “write-off” after a risibly un-life-threatening shunt in Salisbury early one morning, but that’s another silly story – and the place was heaving with little boys charging hither and yon, over-excited Dads shouting at them and Mothers talking happily to each other and looking mildly superior though pleased that their menfolk were so sweatily employed. It reminded me of the old days in Richmond at the Old Deer Park where I also found myself recently, watching London Welsh play the Pirates.

That too is another story and there has been lots more going on professionally and socially. Tristram, the younger son, came for a long weekend and we went for long walks on the coastal path; P
enny and I went to Plymouth for a great Beryl Cook exhibition; I have blogged on the agents’ web-site – see Peters Fraser Dunlop on Google and there is, naturally a web-site you can dial up directly.

But nothing quite matches the fun of being President of the Fowey Cricket Club and helping them become ever more broadly-based, part of the community and so on. I’d hate it all to sound goody-two-shoes because it really isn’t like that. And, naturally, I am steaming on with the Richard Cobb letters; the Jardine tour of India; the resurrection of Simon Bognor and his brilliantly eclectic crime novels. And there have been other cricketing triumphs – a whole load of tickets for the Lord’s Test against Australia next year to which I shall be taking Penny on the opening day and Saturday and my two sons on the Sunday. And at the very end of the month I was allowed on to Radio St. Austell Bay where I chose a whole lot of idiosyncratic music and showed off shamelessly.

But cricket, lovely cricket, is the best fun. Meanwhile we have Christmas and I hope everyone has a happy one after which I shall be back for my last blog of 2008. I have a strong feeling that England will lose the two impending tests in India but down here in the grass roots something is stirring. I can’t wait for the summer of 2009 and for some proper Cornish cricket.