Tim Heald's Blog

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.

            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…

            A friend said the latest adventure read like a musical and I suppose it does really. We’re in Oklahoma City and I quite expect to step outside the hotel and to find myself caught up in a chorus line of people singing about cowboys and farmers and snapping their braces as they jig about to the strains of a man playing a fiddle. Actually it’s not a bit like that but I still feel as if I’m about to learn about poor Jud being dead or the corn being as high as an elephant’s eye.

            We voted an eternity ago in the public library in Fowey where I am due to return to normality in a few days talking about crime-writing over a pasty lunch and we were in Miami when the new coalition government was announced. The Sara Ferguson debacle took place while we were somewhere in Georgia and everyone wanted to know what really happened. I hadn’t much more of a clue than those who asked though I couldn’t help feeling that “investigative journalism” had come to a pretty pass when it consisted simply of dressing up as a sheikh and conning some poor simple girl who happened to marry a prince. “Investigative journalism” used to mean what it said, he says, sounding grumpy and ancient.

            Anyway we voted and flew round volcanic ash to Miami where Leo (my son-in-law) met us. We were only a couple of hours late unlike the next day when flights were delayed by some fifteen hours. Anyway Coconut Grove/Coral Gables was a treat. Emma and Leo, Leonel and Daniel, live in a  large, cool (in every sense) house and the few days we were with them flew past. We went to Joe’s Stone Crab place downtown and had a wonderful seafood meal served by a mildly grumpy old French waiter; I went and chatted to Leo Jr. and his classmates for half an hour one day – “Hi Guys – Let me know how you are and if you have any more questions”; had supper with Carter Parsley who had been in charge of flags and anthems at the Atlanta Olympics and was an an old friend of Penny’s from Hong Kong; and generally chilled out and caught up.

            All too soon Leo drove us to the Amtrak Station and we got on the train for Savannah. The station is miles from the city centre and everyone looked rather shocked when we said we were making the journey in such an impossible, old-fashioned, slow and dangerous way. Actually it was enchanting, spacious, friendly and dignified by a nice dining car where we had breakfast and lunch. The only drawback was that the Savannah Station had also been moved to the town outskirts. 

            We loved Savannah almost without reservation.

            After a few days on our own Frank Rizzla picked us up and drove us to his huge and comfortable house in mid-town We had already clocked him at an exhibition of silver because much of the exhibition seemed to be his! Frank was charming and hospitable and that evening drove us to the Chatham Club where we had dinner with Bob and Frankie Vinyard and their friend Chloe. The “event” (my drone) was held on Sunday afternoon in a hall next to the Episcopal Church which we attended that morning with the Vinyards. It was followed by an informal reception to which members contributed plates. A well-informed and enthusiastic audience, I thought. Well I would, wouldn’t I? Frank hosted a small “brunch” at the Oglethorpe Club beforehand. Apart from the Vinyards the only other person there was the sister of one of the main characters in the book about Savannah by a New York journalist and about which we sensed a slightly mixed reaction.

            From Savannah we went to Atlanta, handed on by one branch of the English Speaking Union like a relay baton, illegal immigrants or something.Pace our new host was much younger than most ESU officials, (46), and put us up in his smart modern town house. On our first night they gave a very enjoyable drinks party for us with a lot of interesting people many of whom turned up at the black tie dinner the following night. This was fine though Penny put up a mild black for asking NOT to be seated next to me. I spoke from a rostrum with a lapel mike. Not everyone wore a tux which seemed to be a source of some confusion. The club was smart and the atmosphere formal but friendly.

We sat next to a fascinating German couple and one guest, present at both functions, knew an alarming amount about Neville Shute.

            From Atlanta we were driven to Chattanooga where  Chet, the branch President was an old acquaintance of Penny from Hong Kong days. Dale Harrison met us half way and deposited us in our room at the Chatanooga Cho Choo Hotel (a former carriage) before taking us off to a jolly and convivial lunch at a local seafood place. That evening the three of us had a BBQ dinner at Chet’s with Chet and his girl friend.Next day Chet showed us around and took us to a sandwich lunch. I spoke after supper – uniquely on crime fiction – in the Roosevelt Room at the hotel. Next day Chet drove us to the university at Sewannee where we had a brief tour before being handed on to Donna from the Nashville Centre.

            In some ways this was the most impressive branch: numerous, well organized and enthusiastic. We stayed with Joan who was enchanting and of serious Scottish descent. Dinner was a black tie event with a good crowd many of whom we had already met at a pretty swagger cocktail party before a concert by the Nashville Symphony with Bartok’s Bluebeard illuminated by glass by Dale Chihuley, the artist from Seattle about whom we should have known much more than we did (nothing!)

            From Nashville we flew to Birmingham Alabama where we stayed with an unexpectedly simpatico couple Bert and Elizabeth Nettles. She came from Canada and had worked forMichael Ignatieff, leader of the Federal Liberal Party and possibly Canada‘s next Premier, whom I had known when we were both employed by the Observer. I spoke that evening as well and this dinner too was at an
amazingly smart country club with an echt-immaculate golf course outside the French windows. From Birmingham we took the Greyhound bus – again against most native advice – up to our last port of call, Memphis. We paused briefly at Elvis Presley’s birthplace, Tupelo, and were unsurprised to learn that his parents were keen to escape.

            In Memphis we stayed in a condominium owned by our hostess and we did all the trippery things such as the Peabody Hotel and resident ducks, B.B. King’s place in Beale Street and Graceland where Elvis lived and which is now the most visited house in the States after the White House. My speech in Memphis was in a private house with, basically, too many in the audience and a hand-held mike which I hate. I also found it difficult to speak to an audience, some of which was behind me and staring at the back of my head. I got through it OK and thank-you Debbie for taking care of the acoustics and being within earshot in case of disasters. As it happened there weren’t any and we managed OK but I found it slightly disconcerting to be constantly worried about such peripherals as whether or not I could be heard and whether my flies were undone. (They weren’t!) It passed off OK but I wasn’t as relaxed as I’d have liked.     

            Next day we celebrated a significant birthday for Penny with a ritual mint julep at the Peabody Hotel and a BBQ supper at the Rendezvous where a local doctor came up saying he had been at the ESU the previous night. And so in three hops, via Little Rock and Dallas to Oklahoma City where the corn is as high as the elephant’s eye and so on. It took all day thanks to such “British” disasters as a failure to alert the ground staff of a change in schedule and a nail through a tire in Arkansas. We longed for the slow pleasures of the Greyhound or Amtrak.

            Meanwhile the laptop continues to bring news of home and I have been sending out royal letters to potential helpers on the next big book. Penny has been blogging and writing postcards and it is now early morning in Oklahoma and we are about to enplane for the last stop on this magical mystery tour: Chicago. This time next month I hope to be at Lord’s for England v Australia at cricket. There are some things that the English still do quite well. In theory anyway. Meanwhile, however, the musical continues and if I seem a bit like a transatlantic version of Jennifer writing her diary I apologise. Sanity and a straight bat await!

            My new friend the Earl of Belmont suggested recently that I might perhaps write something in my blog about royalty so yes I think I will. I should perhaps explain that Belmont is not an Earl in the accepted sense but he rather fancied the idea, so, why not?

My piece about the Duchess of Cornwall is due in the next issue but more importantly Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson has sold my idea for a new book to mark the 60^th anniversary of the Queen’s accession to John Murray. Well played John Murray; well played  Christopher; well played me. I first came up with the idea years ago and in a sense my worst fears have been realised because I am aware of at least four other books which were signed up ages ago and to which I have notionally lost ground. I remain, however, quietly confident. This is probably silly and arrogant but I feel I have been working and preparing for this book most of my life. If I can’t write this I can’t write anything.

            So that’s the royal story, specially for the belted earl. It bears out my theory of ‘reasonable expectation” which says, broadly speaking, that if you come to a bend in the road and you can’t see more than a few yards ahead it is reasonable to suppose that the road continues around the corner and you continue to drive in the same manner as before. There have been moments in this latest royal saga when those who don’t share my belief have despaired. I, however, have urged doubters to tighten their belts, hold on to their seats and all will be well in the end. And so, however, belatedly, it came to pass. And no I am not crowing.On the other hand I wish everyone had shared my confidence.

            I am about to write letters to as many royal contacts, experts and so on as I can think of but if anyone reading this feels they have something to contribute do please letg me know. My email address is tim@timheald.com and I look forward to hearing from you. I’ve also made the cover of “The Lady” magazine with my story on the Duchess of Cornwall. I hope that my role as the magazine’s “Royal Correspondent”  will help with the book.

            Thursday is election day and Penny and I aim to vote first thing and then whiz to Par station. I’m not sure either of us know how we’re going to vote. I have voted Liberal at every election for which I’ve had the vote. After all I was on the candidates’ list when Thos D.Nudds was in charge of us. He really had known Lloyd George and the great Garth Pratt was the party’s candidate in Rochdale when Cyril Smith was still mayor and a member of the Labour Party. Strange to see the Prime Minister commit a classic gaffe after a confrontation with a voter who was originally full of pro-Brown intentions. I am torn because I don’t particularly care for the local Lib-Dem candidate and even less for the campaign which has been waged on his behalf, gloating about the fact that he is a ‘local’ whereas his Conservative opponent is some sort of interloper. God knows what this has to do with suitability for government. Rather the reverse. Besides I like our Tory candidate whose original selection meeting I attended. I told her I would do anything for her except vote. I might yet do even that. We shall see.

            Meanwhile I have been carrying on with “Yet another Death in Venice“, the third of my crime novels featuring the return of Simon Bognor, now knighted and head of SIDBOT, aka the Specials Investigation Department of the Board of Trade.    Tomorrow I am due to have lunch with Christopher S-S to talk, among other things, about Bognor. I do hope he likes them. I’m sorry but I intend writing more. I want to know what he’s up to. If, for some reason Christopher doesn’t share my enthusiasm and interest, then… There is no trade quite so dependent on the opinions of others.           

            As always when I feel slightly disoriented I have been going through my diary to find out what I have been doing. A problem I find with advancing years is not such amnesia as a related problem which concerns fitting events into a time frame. I seem to be reasonably good at recalling things that have happened over a reasonably catholic period but I do have the greatest difficulty putting a time to such events. In my case I am also increasingly bad at recognizing “celebrities” and am not much the wiser when this is painstakingly explained. And I have increasing difficulty remembering my passwords. As for “security” questions I have increasing trouble remembering my mother’s maiden name nor the fourth letter of my password (especially when I can’t remember my password.) It might help if remembering such things made me feel more secure but I feel as threatened as ever.

            On Friday 9^th I see that I met Gage Williams and Tim House at Fowey Hall Hotel. The former is a retired Brigadier, the latter C.O. of the 6^th Battalion of the Rifles, and a man of Dorset who like me was born in Dorchester.We met to discuss the charity cricket match we are (or were) to play in aid of the Army Benevolent Fund. Apart from the cricket a highlight was the Salamanca Band which was to play and beat retreat. I had been looking forward to this for over a year. Anyway, suffice it to say, that the Rifles have withdrawn and I have resigned as President of  the Fowey Club. End of story which I am sure has many sides of which mine is less than one. I’m sad but, well, as I say ‘end of story’ and time to move on. This doesn’t make me any the less sad but crying over spilt milk won’t refill the bottle. Goodness, how philosophical!

   Or defeatist?

            A week later I went to see Ma in Wiltshire. Tristram and Beth came on Saturday and left after lunch on the Sunday. Afterwards we went to the new bungalow of her old friend Conti and had tea. Somewhere along the line she lost her handbag. Vanished into thin air. A minor miracle. On Monday Penny and I looked at a house in Crewkerne, lunched at a pub in Bradford Abbas and I dropped her in Sherborne. It’s pretty Sherborne but there is lot of skewed history there: Mould and Edwards is no longer an old-fashioned grocer’s; the Three Wishes is stripped pine and baguettes not linen table cloths and scones; the Abbey Bookshop has no caxtonian printer in the attic let

alone Bert Chamberlain to operate it. Next day I drove to Dorchester to see father’s medals in the military museum at the Keep. Then publishers’ lunch; publisher’s tea;Christopher Braun for work on his brother’s book. Next day two GCVOs and the Dame at the Palace and an ex Presidential lunch to say goodbye to Charles Collingwood and hello to Stanley Johnson. And so the weary traveler wound his way by train to Cornwall.

            Bog standard month. Fatigued very; election looms; volcanoes back; flooding in Tennessee; so-called England cricket team lucky to beat the Irish at rounders. And somewhere taking part or looking on: me. Time passes. Pluc ca change…

    I’ve been thinking more about my doctrine of “reasonable expectation” in the light of my re-entry into “normal life” in the UK. I understood, of course, that the journey home from Auckland would be long and not much fun . This was true: three hours at Auckland Airport, three hours twenty to Melbourne, around two hours wait in Melbourne, and then six or so to Singapore. The Tanglin Club was the usual wonderful sanctuary but in about forty-eight hours we were off again with thirteen and a half hours after a three hour wait. The Customs shed was a nightmare and so in a different (and over-priced way) was the Heathrow Express. The Oyster Card to Waterloo worked but the man issuing a ticket to Tisbury spoke no known language and appeared to have started his job about five minutes earlier. The bag for my hot chocolate was too weak  and collapsed. All this was depressing if predictable.
    However I really hadn’t expected to get to the barrier and be met by a jobsworth obviously transferred from duty on the East German side of the Old Berlin Wall who told me firmly that I had the “wrong” ticket  and she could not let me on to the train. I’m afraid I was unamused and got on the train nonetheless, had a word with the very civilized guard who said the whole thing was ludicrous, I had paid quite enough already (over £36)and I was not to worry.
    So she was contrary to “reasonable expectation” whereas everybody and everything else came within my definition. The only moral seems to me that you have to meet unreasonable expectation with equally unreasonable (though scrupulously polite) ingenuity. This time it worked. Apart from anything else I have a real loathing of mindless bureaucracy. Which this was.
    Anyone I’m home and I wish I could say it was great. Sadly it’s not much. In fact it’s pretty dire. The Ray Gosling story depressed me enormously. It wasn’t so much the core of the perceived story – Gosling’s apparent “confession” that he had assisted the death of a gay lover. In any case this is sub judice so I can’t comment even if I wanted to. What really saddened me was the uncontested observation that Gosling, now 70, had been declared bankrupt about a decade ago and was living in some sort of sheltered home in Nottingham. This is a man who brought pleasure to lots of us during his radio career and this is how he is rewarded. Compare and contrast the umber of out and out spivs who have tried to make our lives as miserable as possible and you have the reason for my depression. It’s not right and just makes me want a nasty old corrupt communist regime whereby entertainers were rewarded with vodka, dancing girls and dachas and being an entrepreneur was a crime. I think there’s a lot to be said for it and I’m only half joking.  I don’t feel Gosling has enjoyed “reasonable expectation”.
    I sent quite a lot of this blog, which now goes back seven years, to a friend in the writing business and he read it and said that at times it seemed slightly “Pooterish”. Naturally, I have been pondering this, not least because he also said that this might be deliberate. He was referring, of course, to the humorous classic first serialized in Punch towards the end of the nineteenth century by George and Weedon Grossmith and later published in volume form as the “Diary of a Nobody.”
    At first I was mildly offended by the verdict not least because the most important feature of Mr. Pooter’s diary is described in “Wikipedia” as “a tendency to take oneself excessively seriously”. Another definition I found on the internet says “somewhat pompous, unintellectual and unimaginative (but basically well-meaning) traditionally with an unexciting lifestyle; probably derogatory if used by a Guardian reader, more sympathetic if by a Telegraph reader”.
    On reflection, however, I have decided to take it as a compliment on the grounds that the original was predicated on the notion that there were far too many diaries of “somebodies” and not nearly enough, ie none, by nobodies. Let’s hear it for nobodies, is therefore the distinctive cry of the Pooter. In an age of celebrities and bankers I’m inclined to think this rather a good thing. Yes, of course, Pooter is self-important (though who is to pontificate on what’s important and what not, besides which if you yourself aren’t important to you then who on earth is?) and he is snobbish and right-wing and probably a Telegraph reader. On the other hand he hasn’t done anyone any harm and his values , though conservative, are, on the whole, admirable. A friend rang this morning and said we all should have been bankers: the more you screw up the greater your rewardz. Pretty true. More so in the UK than most places and the net result is to persuade the majority to pay no attention to rewards, money and so on. No matter how hard you work, how worthwhile the things you do, it makes no difference. I’m afraid that breeds indifference and cynicism not to mention a complete distrust of the alleged system.

    Incidentally I suppose I began blogging because I thought it was the correct thing to do and also because publishers seemed to be turning so many blogs into lucrative books. I now realise, however, that most of these were the work of people who had not previously written anything and certainly nothing commercial. I also realise that part of the essence of the true blog is to engage in conversation which I don’t wish to do. Also that the true bloggers- see Richard Dawkins and others – are amazingly angry. I am not yet angry enough. Just Pooterish.

    Anyway I have almost finished a second crime novel; I await response to various ideas and pieces of work; I went on behalf of  “The lady” magazine to see the Duchess of Cornwall in action at Helston,, friends have been to see us.other friends are coming; I have booked tickets for the States in May; it is very cold and the wind is blowing. Oh, and the computer is on the blink and with the expert’s brother. The expert is in Bali. I wish I were there as well.

    I cannot think how people got through this long,long abject winter and I am incredibly relieved that I was able to spend so much of it away. I can’t think how so many survived and seem optimistic and cheerful. It’s very salutary.

            Lucy’s wedding was the high spot of the month; an informal affair in a garden with a view overlooking the Matakana coastline in New Zealand, presided over by a Kiwi celebrant called Sykes (female), followed by speeches and supper and skyped home to the bride’s brother in a frosty West London. I spoke, before supper, and tried to be mildly embarrassing for the last time, recalling the occasion that Lucy had been confronted by her brother, now a teacher at St. Benedict’s, and asked to remove the pin from his nose which he had inserted with huge sartorial enthusiasm a few hours previously.He had since repented of this but could not remove it unaided. Lucy did the trick.         

            Penny and I flew to Auckland from Brisbane on New Year’s Day and have spent the entire month in New Zealand. Australians, including my dear wife, tend to be odd about New Zealanders and New Zealand; the British less so. It is incredibly beautiful and on the whole attractively empty. I am becoming slightly bored with people telling me that the top of the north island is as far from the bottom of the south as Canada from Mexico but when you remember that the country only has just over four million inhabitants roughly a third of whom are in or around Auckland it makes one think. It is also almost ludicrously benign – devoid of the  killer crocs, lethal spiders, dodgy dingoes and above all the crippling drought which make Australia slightly problematic. Australians tend to be patronizing about Kiwis and the funny way they talk. To a Brit , however, they don’t talk any funnier than the Australians (of whom I am incidentally very fond – he says patronisingly . After all I married one) Nevertheless Australian attitudes to its smaller neighbour across the Tasman seem similar and no more justified than Spanish condescension towards Portugal or American to Canada. It’s just big brother syndrome.

            Anyway I like it here and people – including some transplanted Brits and Australians – couldn’t have been kinder and friendlier. I have written lots of the latest novel (“Death in the opening Chapter”), a successful piece for the Lady about the visit of Prince William and another piece about the wines and other attractions of the Matakana country for Country Life. On Saturday we are going to drive over to Wally’s (Wally is a lost Australian bird called a galah – a sort of noisy budgerigar) on the Wharf at Whakatane for fish and chips (fush and chups in the vernacular) and maybe on Sunday we hope to go to an amazing sounding estate nearby for clay pigeon shooting. Depends on our new friend Virginia. I have the use of a lovely old Land Rover from Yeovil but Penny doesn’t like my driving and keeps complaining that it is very wide and the roads very narrow. We didn’t hit anything on the way to and from Rotorua the other day and the Land Rover reminds me of driving Cecil round North Africa with Martin and Bill many years ago. Unfortunately I told Penny about the time I almost backed Cecil over the side of the Rock of Gibraltar and she holds it against me. Silly me. I should know better. And maybe have known better in 1963 on Gibraltar.

             Last night we had a scary electric storm but generally the views of Lake Tarawera are spectacular and everything grows and flourishes.No wonder Cook christened this area the Bay of Plenty. I had a birthday on the 28^th and am feeling incredibly old. The spuds, though, came from the garden. As did the leeks and carrots.

            I shouldn’t be here, of course. There is a school of thought which says I should be back in the UK, suffering, but …All my life I have taken a modicum of risk but this doesn’t necessarily win friends. For instance Alison and I often took the children abroad, most dramatically to Toronto and to Santa Fe, New Mexico. On both occasions I was warned that to spend a year away from home would severely interfere with their education, would be generally disruptive and contrary to decency and common sense. On our return after, on both occasions, a thoroughly enjoyable and productive time away (I think) I was told by a number of people that it was “different for you”. Quite how was never very satisfactorily explained. Maybe it runs in the family. My father who, in my opinion, erred slightly on the risky side of life, was, as a young man in World War Two sent to Naples to get hold of lifejackets for the members of his battalion to wear on the perilous crossing of the River Garigliano. Bye-passing the usual channels he went directly to the Royal Navy and was given the requisite number of Mae Wests which were otherwise surplus to requirements. He returned to the line with his trophies, the men crossed the Garigliano without anyone drowning, and my father obviously thought he had done good. Not a bit of it. There were regulations to cover that sort of thing and any number of jobsworths to complain about that shocker Heald who had broken them. No matter that lives were saved. My father had broken the rules and used his initiative. Bad show.

            I know I am going to get flak for applauding this and saying that, to a certain extent and within obvious limitations, one has to ignore rules, other people and even what passes for common sense, but I nevertheless believe it quite passionately. It may end in tears but it’s important to be able to say, in the words of the Sinatra song, that you did it your way.

            So here I sit on the shores of Lake Tarawera tapping away at a crime novel set in an English Literary Festival. I have no agent, no publisher and quite possibly no audience. Tant pis. I shall revolve in, well I won’t be able to revolve, since I have every intention of being cremated but if the book is published posthumously and becomes a huge success I shall be jolly cross. However we shall see. I like it. In fact I know it’s rather good but unfortunately that won’t make any difference. Good books don’t get published; bad books do; good books remain unread; bad ones become best-sellers. Fact of life. And proper writing is a disease which afflicts proper writers. We can’t stop. Some of us end up revered, awa
rd-winning and prosperous. Others don’t. It doesn’t, alas, have an awful lot to do with talent or hard work and I don’t think one has any alternative but to plug away. Pity about the people who get in the way but don’t, please, think that any commercial failure is the result of indolence or lack of foresight.

            I see that the Grim Reaper continues to scythe away. He got Michael Mavor, ex headmaster of Loretto, Gordonstoun and  Rugby aged only sixty two on holiday in Peru and he reeled in Geoffrey Van Hay who used to be a suave, pin-stripe trousered presence behind the bar at El Vino in London. Not to mention the mother of our hostess in New Zealand who was in her nineties but even so…

            And even when it isn’t the finality of a death sentence there are other evidences of passing years. Our latest consignment of mail included an invitation to the farewell party of a friend who had been at the same publishers for forty years. I remember him as a young man when we both  had everything before us. Now we are members of the old guard about whom we used to giggle forty years ago. Incidentally I recall a military friend of mine writing a rather good biography. When I remarked, rudely, that I didn’t know that he could write English he answered that our friend was his editor. This explained the excellence of his prose. My Army friend then looked thoughtful and said that in the military his editor would have been a first-rate fighting man. Unfortunately all soldiers were dogged by a body called HQ Company. It was his philosophy to pare HQ to an absolute minimum but he had noticed that in publishing HQ company was ginormous and fighting men thin on the ground. “I wonder what they all do”, he mused contemplating the dead wood at the heart of the ailing business. Life is dogged by huge HQ companies.

            I remember once speaking at a writers’ conference and the evening before I was due on a highly successful and famous author spoke. I thought he was entertaining and instructive but my friends, mostly unpublished and struggling, were furious and unimpressed. “He made it seem so easy”, they chorused. I don’t think that’s what he meant. He was just trying to emphasise the fact that he had been lucky and good fortune can strike anyone. (Likewise bad). But my new friends didn’t agree. They thought he had failed to suggest that it was amazingly hard work. So, I would venture to suggest (and was very careful to say next morning!) it is.

            I don’t for a moment deny my good luck. It’s been phenomenal and as I sit typing this and looking out across sunny lawns and shrubs to the lake beyond I count my blessings. But I wouldn’t claim that it’s easy. My experience is that if you don’t work you don’t get. And even if you do work you don’t necessarily get. On reflection that’s wrong too. One of the sad and depressing things about life is that many of those who reap the greatest rewards – financial anyway – seem not to do a hand’s turn. But I don’t see the satisfaction of a life spent in HQ company.

            On the other hand there is a school of thought that says that confronted with problems and adversity you pull in your horns, hunker down and do as little as possible. That’s a parody but not far from the truth and it’s emphatically not my style. Confronted with adversity one has two alternatives. One is to go into your shell and give up; the other is to come out swinging. As the late Randolph Churchill said when things are bad you put on your best overcoat, get hold of the most expensive cigar you can, and walk up and down Piccadilly smiling broadly.

            I am of the Churchillian persuasion which is, I think, why I am in New Zealand enjoying the sunshine and working very hard rather than shivering in the cold back home and doing nothing. Not everyone thinks this desirable or right, but it’s the way I am. It’s in the genes. I protest too much.

            That said, I have, I think, arrived at a policy of “reasonable expectation” which sums up my beliefs and actually everyone else’s in a sense, if you see what I mean which you probably don’t. “Most people” are in salaried employment and “reasonable expectation” means that they can expect to be so for the foreseeable future (another interesting concept). This means that they can plan and budget accordingly. Those relatively few of us who are not in salaried employment have also to rely on “reasonable expectation” but we don’t enjoy a regular salary and all we have to go on is past performance. In my case, I think, it was reasonable to expect that I would go on having fiction and non-fiction books published, sometimes serialized, and that this together with more or less regular income from journalism would correspond to a reasonable salary.

            Maybe I should have foreseen a collapse of all this more or less completely and more or less simultaneously. Unfortunately I didn’t. Add in the unexpected death of my younger brother and a semi-debilitating stroke for my mother and you have a pretty bad case scenario which runs, I think, counter to “reasonable expectation”.

            The question now is how do I deal with this? My answer is to fight one’s corner. I can’t change personal disasters but I can strive to get myself back track.

            A case in point though. Next June there is an international crime writers; conference in Oklahoma City. I would like to go. I contacted the English Speaking Union in New York about it and have as a result been asked to undertake a speaking tour of their branches in the American south-east. They don’t pay but they will look after myself and my wife once we get ourselves to Savannah, Georgia. En route I would like to call in on my daughter Emma and her family in Miami.

            I think this is all perfectly reasonable but many won’t and don’t.  Which is, I suppose, another way of saying that I would never have hacked it at headquarters.        

I belong in the trenches with my friend the editor of the last forty years. “Reasonable expectation” is what I look forward to and I am determined to make it come to pass!

            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.