Tim Heald's Blog

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

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

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

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 There were also a number of unpublished words which was also, I suppose, bad.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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Meanwhile…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, hey ho, “One more step…”

I always know if I’m in trouble with the immediate past when I have to consult my diary to find out where I was last month. I have just had to do this and feel as if I don’t know whether I’m coming or going. I am only mildly reassured by the old friend who said that he had read one of my blogs and had to go and lie down for a while in order to recover. I feel like old man with memory loss but maybe I’m simply trying to do too much as at least one of my publishers undoubtedly thinks. I persevere however and am only mildly surprised to find that I was in the United States until the 22^nd. Now that I am reminded I remember perfectly…well all right, not perfectly but pretty well. And I do like shrimp and grits, and the Ringling Circus Museum  and even the Amtrak from Charleston to Miami and the Greyhound Bus to Naples not to mention Donovan driving Penny and me to Sarasota. Ah yes, I remember it well…

Part of the reason was seeing Emma and Leo plus their two little boys and Beggar, the dog, in Coral Gables but I also spoke to English Speaking Union Branches in Coral Gables, Naples and Savannah, Georgia. I have also negotiated a piece for the Telegraph about Savannah so one way and another I was pretty busy. When I wasn’t trying to shake off a persistent cough I spent a lot of time wrestling with a book about the Queen for her 60^th anniversary. Her father died in February 1952 and he is commemorated in the movie, the King’s Speech, which garnered four Oscars, which some historians thought inaccurate and which we saw on my birthday at a matinee in Miami Beach. At the Coral Gables lunch one member of the ESU claimed to have seen the film fifteen times. This could, perhaps, have been a slight exaggeration but I found an extraordinary level of interest in the Royal Family wherever we went in the States, from the comparatively well-to-do including those who are making a lavish-sounding trip (based on the Rubens Hotel in London) for the wedding to a cabbie in South Carolina (black) who was anxious that we would be home in plenty of time for the nuptials. In Britain we seem, by contrast, to be comparatively bored or even hostile. Compare, contrast but above all discuss. There are certain things that the Brits are still believed to do quite well- traditional ceremony as epitomized by the monarchy is one;   higher education especially Oxford and Cambridge is another; and Crime Fiction most notably Baroness James and Ian Rankin, is another. Forget politicians, soldiers, diplomats and even Andy Murray and our golfers. Royalty, Oxbridge and crime writing is what we do best and we need to remember this.

As always on our visits to North America we learned a great deal and had at least some of our sense of perspective restored. In the UK we tend to think that we live in the centre of the universe, that the world revolves around us and that the map is still mainly pink. It needs a trip overseas to remind us that we are in many respects a second rate power on our way down-hill. The fact that we are still able to punch above our weight has to do with the kindness of our dwindling number of friends and  our continuing ability in certain areas. Sadly  we don’t always realize what we are good at and continue to ignore them while encouraging things at which we are alas now mediocre.

Anyway we are home again and despite the cold and the grey, the gloom and the cricket, it’s good to be back. Actually even being beaten by Ireland at what used to be our national game has its  compensations especially for those with an affection for the Irish and for the game of cricket. Some of us even feel quite optimistic. For instance I adored the Ryanair ad which invited us all to fly to Ireland “the home of cricket”! Chortle, chortle. After all Penny has a joke about who the England cricket team stay with when they are touring SouthAfrica to which the answer is Mum and Dad. And that true, died-in-the-wool, ex-England Yorkshire fast bowler, Matthew Hoggard, evidently tweeted the other day to say that in the game against, I think, the Dutch, there hadn’t been an Englishman on the pitch for thirty overs. In fairness many on both sides were Afrikaaners!

Anyway a couple of my favourite crime writers came to lunch, clocked the house and adjourned to the excellent White Hart and last Friday we swooped up to London where we spent the weekend with an old Cornish friend at the Tooting Hilton (joke).I had lunch in the Groucho with my grandson Henry who had brought along his parents and on Sunday morning we took in a newly arrived grand-daughter, Ella. Ella is the first girl, there being two boys in Florida, and West London boasts Henry (who grinned throughout the meal eliciting a response in kind from the entire staff). Ella spent most of the time asleep and is NOT a strawberry blonde but an out and out red-head. In between visits we ate very well and watched England beat France at rugby. A good weekend!

Back in Somerset there was a lot of post on which to catch up and Colin came from Stoke or Norton sub Hampden (I forget which)  and succeeded in getting us up and running on the computer. So I can sit in solitary splendour at the bottom of the garden and commune with the outsode world.   On Thursday I had to travel to London unexpectedly in order to have a business talk with a publisher.I must not and therefore will not say more but it was a chance to check out the train service from Crewkerne. Much more expensive than the bus; you have to pay to park the car; and the time is comparable. Pretty full but still less cramped than a road-bound double decker and therefore more conducive to work.

The day before, I went to a Connaught House related lunch near Wellington and then saw my old Ma who is 90 plus. The Connaught House lunch was generous and enjoyable and I must write about it because I am keen that as many people as possible know about our plans for September. Basically we have booked lunch on September 14^th at Pembroke College, Cambridge and there will be prayers in chapel the preceding evening. Pembroke is Randall Hoyle’s alma mater and indeed almost everyone who had anything to do with the school seems to have been there except for those lucky few who went to Oxford! Details are on Friends Reunited and my co-organiser is Guy Knapton who lives in Brussels and (unlike me) is terribly efficient. We are attempting to organize a Berry’s bus from Taunton and numerous ancillary junkets – Guy is keen to do something with Jesus where his ancestor Johnny Morgan, Connaught House’s original founder, was an undergraduate. If you google him you should find him or if interested write to me at Roselands, Blind Lane, Bower Hinton, Martock, Somerset, TA12 6LG or better still phone me on (01935)  826059. Camilla Hoyle, (Lady Cowie!), the daughter of the Hoyles who ran the school when Guy and I were there in the 50s was there and our hosts were Tony Pyman and his wife. The school folded many years ago and is now Cedar Falls Health Farm. The Health Farm recently celebrated its 25^th anniversary which is just another way of saying that life moves on. My Ma, incidentally,came to the last reunion many years ago and she is the main reason we moved East from Cornwall. Alas she won’t make the next. Anyway if you have or had anything to do with Connaught House do get in touch. I’d love to hear from you.

And finally the birds. Penny got a bird feeder the other day and it has been loaded with various nuts. We now have pigeons, rooks, blackbirds and some smaller tits, finches and such like, all fighting, eating and generally strutting about. It’s not the same as the view of the Fowey estuary but I love them and I can see myself becoming a really boring old twitcher in years to come. So beware. I never expected ornithology but already some of my best friends are birds!

            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.