Tim Heald's Blog

I heard by chance that Hugh Faulkner died last year. He made more than 80 and had the proverbial “good innings” but even so. Years ago Hugh, a retired RN Commander, was Secretary of the Royal Warrant Holders’ Association and I was commissioned by them to write a book. From time to time Hugh and I drove off to inspect warrant holders deeply shocked if there was no food or drink and vaguely hoping, roguishly, for loot. Hugh was a keen smoker, an enthusiastic drinker and golfer and a bit of a bounder who ran the RWHA as if it was a personal plaything. In retirement he went to the Borders and played even more golf. Hadn’t seen him for years but we had some good times together. He was part of my world for a time and I hope they do a good malt at the 19^th wherever he has gone.

And John Moynihan too. He was hit by a car which seems a bit rough when you are in your late seventies. John was a keen Arsenal fan and as such helped me with a biography of Denis Compton – John knew far more about Denis than Denis who was, oh well… John also helped me with a biography of Princess Margaret. He had once, as I recall, shared a girl friend with Lord Snowdon. He was also night club correspondent of the London Evening Standard. Ah those were the days. John told me he had never seen Margaret drunk. She sank a lot of Scotch but somehow remained more or less upright.

This is part of the penalty, I suppose, for having started young.  Your fixtures die. Oh, incidentally, I was up in the night considering  the kerfuffler question and I found myself wondering what would have happened  if JFK had looked out over the divided city and said “Ich bin ein kerfuffler” rather than “Berliner”. And how about Washing Up? Oop Waschen but that sounds Dutch rather than German. I am obviously going mad.

Anyway I took  the bus to London the other Thursday and was joined by Penny on the Saturday. I did lunch with the literary agent at the Rag, lunch with a Literary Editor at the Groucho; dinner at the Society of Bookmen, where James Daunt spoke, a couple of Chinese lunches, a recital at the Fan Museum,(counter-tenor, lute and reading) a disappointing exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, (Arctic convoys) a better but dispiriting one at Buckingham Palace ((Scott’s polar pictures), and a riveting Hockney one at the Royal Academy. Two theatres – Warhorse and an Ayckbourn at the renamed Harold Pinter Theatre in Panton Street and a movie (Alan Clark’s brother and Marilyn Monroe).  A final lunch at the Swan in Hammersmith with Steve Dobell and a couple of difficult nights at the Army and Navy – snoring did not help and meant a couple of pointless hours on the floor of the corridor outside our room. Oh and a meeting at the Royal Warrant Holders’ Association. No wonder I felt knackered by the time I got home. I feel tired just reading it through.

Somerset was quiet by contrast. Yesterday we went to the Malt House which is strangely depressing. It’s not just that it brings back memories but that  there is so much stuff which must have meant so much at the time but now means little or nothing. For instance we have found what I think is a football medal won by grandfather when he was in G Coy of the 2^nd Leinsters in 1906.I wrote to the Leinster Regimental organization and heard back from a bloke in Deal telling me that the 2^nd Battalion were in Mauritius in 1906. That would explain one of the ‘M’s. And father’s letter to his mother after his brother, my uncle, was killed at Anzio. My father is concerned, consoling, had long chats with Howard when they were last together and both “knew” he was going to die; and H’s confirmation crucifix and a protestation of my father who was then destined for the priesthood saying that he couldn’t in conscience take up arms. This from a man who later won an MC at Salerno and an immediate DSO on the Gothic Line. Well you could never accuse my father of consistency! But it all seems so futile, so transitory, so here today gone tomorrow, so important once so unknown now. That’s life I suppose. Hobbes was right – nasty and short. Oh well. Bit depressing though. And James Whitaker, the royal “expert” is dead. Didn’t much like him, thought he was phony and ignorant, but world-famous one moment and unknown the next.Hobbes and his aphorism tend to  make the Malt House tough.

Another weekend I drove at crack of dawn to Bath to experience Penny’s Christmas present, a one day course in “one pot cooking” at the Bertinet school. Brilliant. We did stifado, seafood romesco, daube and chicken chermoula. All great but I was useless and had obviously been doing everything all wrong all my life – using the wrong sort of wooden spoon, small knives and not being able to crush garlic properly. And I had never heard of Vic or Ras el Hanout. All very salutary. In the evening we went to the Artist which we enjoyed and the Hole in the Wall which we didn’t. And our room at the cheap not very cheerful hotel was freezing until in the morning Penny mastered the controls of the heater. Bath is lovely though and in a month or so I return to Bertinet for French country cooking!

The day before I heard John Wilsey (General Sir John!) reading from the books of remembrance at the  inaugural thanksgiving service in the Abbey at Sherborne. Later we had lunch at the Eastbury. John was interesting, thoughtful and useful about the school. I can’t get rid of the question over its greatness and whether this is important or not. My problem!

Last night I woke in kerfuffler mode and found the Percy French tune involving the fight to the death of the Russian and the Persian. I could remember Ivan’s name but not until later the name of Abdul Amir. Maddening. I then  moved quickly to casting and decided that Ras-el-hanout should be played by Omar Sharif in moustache twirling mode and Piment d’espalette by a sexy ingénue as yet undiscovered. In fact Jenny Chandler told us the other day that ras is a sort of Moroccan Garam Masala and the Piment is French pimento from somewhere in the Landes south of Biarritz. Never mind they are both good characters. Thus I tossed and turned and occupied my brain.Pathetic but never mind…Oh, the girl in the Trading Post  had never heard of either. This makes me feel marginally better.

Nor had the staff at the Tesco in Hammersmith or at the Marks and Sparks Food Hall in King Stree. Ras in on the web site of Melbury and Appleton, the Islington on-line deli and Bart the spice people from Bristol. I have however being perverse ordered a sachet of Ras from some people on the Wirral. It is on its way. Fingers crossed.

I was in London for a Detection Club Dinner which went OK and it was nice to see lots of old friends. Older, much older… Stayed at the Groucho, had a severe hair cut atd a newish place called Groovy (which made Penny laugh), went to the  Post Office, had photo taken for bus pass, and had lunch at the Swan with favourite former editor. Felt old though. Death in all directions and though I was recognized I felt very decrepit and surprised to be so often correctly identified! Back to find TV request and a college piece on crime writers in which I feature flatteringly. Bus home though was stopped for an hour and a half near Bagshot as a result of an accident – helicopters, sirens, flashing lights and a combination of concern and muttering.

Davey Jones of the Monkees died; and Rory Tierney who had been associated with the London Oratory since the early seventies. Both younger than me. Kate Mortimer’s husband, Bob, who wasn’t, also perished and is being buried in Sampford Courtenay at the weekend. We intend going. This afternoon I shall cook stifado with cubed lamb from South Petherton; will the Ras have arrived from the Wirral; does it matter? Discuss!!

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.

Someone once said…even as I type those  words I find myself repeating the mantra “Look it up, look it up”. Well I have tried the Dictionary of Quotations and I can’t find it so, a Mars Bar or a small cigar for the person who can identify the  author. Meanwhile “someone” will have to do. What someone once said was that “Nothing matters much, and very little matters at all” or words to that effect. I was thinking something along those lines as my mother’s ashes were lowered into the family plot at Martock Church the other day. I googled the author and Wikipedia says it was the Prime Minister, Balfour, who was a bit of a philosopher too.

Anyway I tried the quote out on my niece Rebecca over breakfast the other day and she seemed to prefer one of the subsidiary attributes of a journalist according to the late great Nicholas Tomalin who said that the ability to believe passionately in second rate projects was important. I prefer the Balfourism myself and thought of it when my mother’s ashes were buried and again when I was abused in a review in one of the newspapers the other day. One event matters a bit, the other not at all. And it is worth remembering what Balfour said.

It was a busy month. The third and fourth were devoted to my Ma. On the third she was cremated at Yeovil crematorium. Penny and I went to metaphorically hold her hand and the following day she was remembered in a service at St. Leonard’s Semley; there was a wake at the Benett Arms and we finally buried her ashes in Martock churchyard. It would be entirely wrong to say that everything went well but there were very few hiccups, the two (female) Revs did the business and we all thought Maurice from the undertakers was a star. We all have memories, of course, but her going represents the final closing of a chapter. Sad, of course, but many memories mostly good and she was able to stay in the house that she loved  from 1966 almost to the end. Part of me wishes that she could have finally gone like my Godma’s mother, bending down to smell her roses at home and never getting up. Still we can’t have everything and she lived to be over 90 and saw four great-grandchildren. I think she deserves a rest.

Besides the end of that chapter everything else seems oddly insignificant. I have had some stinking reviews for my Richard Cobb letters – everyone seemed to approve of the letters but one or two people were rude about me though not for the first time I was depressed not by the bile but the incompetence. If I were reviewing the book I hope I would have been critical but not for the reasons offered. Besides which anyone who thinks that Basildon Bond blue was bright when the whole point is that it was (still is I guess), a sort of sludgy, turgid non-event  misses the point. And the sad thing is that the reviewer’s verdict is probably cast in stone and Basildon Bond blue will go down in history as bright.

There are interesting things about the letters. Why did we have to wait more than a decade after Cobb’s death? Why were they published by a relatively small press and not one associated with academic life? Was he a good letter writer? Why do we major on letters to Trevor-Roper when he wrote better letters to people such as John Bromley? What happened to the cache of wartime letters to Christopher Lee? Did the editor not know that Simon Schama got his first undergraduate degree at Cambridge where he was tutored by Jack Plumb?Or  did  the same editor  not know perfectly well that Goronwy Rees is dead and that there is no “e” on the end of Corpus Christi? Editorial lapses seem much more frequent than heretofore and are often ascribed to economies and to the wholesale sacking of editors and fact checkers. Is new technology an improvement? Above all, I suppose, does any of this matter? In comparison to life and death, not a lot. What would Balfour have thought? Discuss. My own view is that the letters are of interest but in the long march of history not especially important. Their editing even less so.

Oh well, Richard was a flawed genius. Deeply flawed but still a genius and at least we have some of his letters two of which are works that deserve to be remembered for a long time and are models, as they say, of their kind. They were not – and here is a clue – written to Hugh Trevor-Roper but they are wonderful. Anyway if I know Richard he would be amused at the fuss but pleased that I am able to laugh however wryly.

My Sherborne book continues to chuff along. The research is fun if often maddening. Every time I think an interview is going to be straightforward it turns out to be the reverse and one ends up with more questions than answers. The best history of a school that I have read so far is Brian Rees on Stowe but I am told that the governors suppressed it. I think I may see why but they lacked guts and were plain wrong. Silly governors.

We have just returned from a weekend in Salzburg with an old university chum who is finishing a five year stint in a local schloss once owned by Max Rheinhardt. We travelled by train, via two nights in Munich, one in Cologne and another on a night train from Paris. I would recommend everything but the train from Paris which was dire. We ended up having no sleep, and eating sausage and potato salad in a minute box and staring at the wall as we trundled south-east. But the rest was marvelous – no snow but markets everywhere and in Munich one of the world’s great art galleries virtually empty. Compare with the Leonardo exhibition at London’s National Gallery. My dear the people. Will the Lady with the ermine ever be left in peace again? We saw her in Krakow is an empty room at the Czartoryski but from now on everyone will be flocking to see her and she will need a body guard. She was, I think, better off relatively undiscovered.

So. Maybe nothing matters very much and hardly anything matters at all. Was Balfour right? Or Nick Tomalin? Or neither? Or both? Some things obviously matter more than others and my mother’s death matters much more than my editing of Richard’s letters. Neither has a lot to do with money; nor celebrity; nor with anything that the modern world thinks important. But then nor does blogging per se. I suppose I like blogging because it is a way of getting even and making oneself heard. And the best thing I heard all month was the man who said that one or two of Tom Braun’s translations reduced him to tears. If it weren’t for me and Tom’s brother the world and our friend might not have read them.

And the publication thereof had nothing whatever to do with fame or money. Incidentally my friend Matthew Melliar-Smith, a former Balliol College Brakenbury Scholar, said that the point about Richard Cobb for us who knew him originally as a teacher was that he expanded rather than contracted our horizons. He was a man of the world; he spent a lot of time in France; he was dangerous and as such emphatically unlike the teachers to whom many us were used. He was much more than a regular at the King’s Arms. Another old friend reminded me of the word “kerfuffle”. According to one of my dictionaries, though not the shorter Oxford which omits it altogether, the word has Scottish antecedents and means something like to ruffle or cast into disarray. I was brought up to think that it implied storm in a teacup. At all events I am grateful for the reminder and for the letter which accompanied it. Makes a change from worrying about the brightness of Basildon Bond blue.

Oh revenge. Silly idea and the idea that it is best cold has always struck me as ridiculous. Hot or not at all. At university I was told by the chairman of examiners, a New Zealander who knew everything about the Duke of Newcastle,that never before had they encountered a candidate who wrote so much so fluently about so little. I told Nick Tomalin by whom I was then employed and he said it sounded a good story and why not ring up the don concerned. I did so, told him the Sunday Times was concerned that he and his colleagues had made a pig’s ear of the exam results and that Sunday we carried the definitive piece, complete with graph, under the heading “a first class row”.

Very satisfactory.

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.

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!

            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…

            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!