Tim Heald's Blog

            Let’s start with some unequivocally good news. We are, to echo the words of Mrs. Thatcher, a grandfather. Henry Heald arrived in the early hours of November 25^th. Mother, father and Henry all appear to be doing well and last Saturday, the morning before flying away to Singapore, Australia and New Zealand, Penny and I went over to Ealing, bearing gifts, to say hello. I am pleased to report that Henry seemed fine, slept throughout our visit, twitching slightly, not being sick or difficult in any way and is obviously destined to score 100 before lunch at Lord’s in roughly two decades time as well as winning a Nobel Prize later, becoming Prime Minister, Pope,a national treasure and much else besides His two cousins in Florida are already rubbing their hands in gleeful anticipation of a third member of a gang to come and I am extremely pleased to be able to pass on news which seems to be to be good without reservation. I don’t wish to tempt fate nor to be unduly triumphalist so meanwhile, this is what I had to write before the happy event.

            I’m sorry. I hate sounding old and grumpy but…

            Last week I ordered a Royal Horticultural Desk Diary from Amazon, for my mother’s 89^th birthday. There should have been a saving though the charge for p and p lifted it more than somewhat. Anyway I ordered it and was told that thanks to the marvels of modern science I could “track” my parcel’s progress using my special Royal Mail 13 character tracking number, It actually specified 13 characters and I duly put in my number and counted the characters which came to 13. However when I sent it I got the response “Sorry. Your tracking number is too long”. Twice. I gave up.

            Earlier that day I had had a letter from some outfit in Preston saying that my aged Ma was getting a winter fuel allowance of £275. There was an asterisk next to the amount and underneath in parentheses the information that the amount was affected by the fact that according to their records there had until recently been someone living with my mother. This person had recently left and my mother’s handout was consequently  being reduced. I thought this slightly peculiar as my mother has been living on her own since my father was killed in a car crash in 1972. I rang the people in Preston and the woman who answered was charm itself but could not alas help as this sort of thing was dealt with by someone else. After three different calls to three different numbers I got a charming man who said that he could do absolutely nothing without my mother’s National Insurance Number which at that stage I did not have at my fingertips. I found it in the file and rang back. Another charming person answered, female this time, and from somewhere near Doncaster. She checked everything, took every conceivable sort of detail in the interests of efficiency, security and heaven knows what else and then said that she could find no record of my mother whatever. This, despite the fact that my mother’s 89^th birthday is next week and she has, to the best of my knowledge, been drawing a pension for decades.

            I’m sorry, I really am, and I don’t mean to sound old and grumpy, but there are times when I don’t seem to be able to help myself. Meanwhile we flew off in a smart new Qantas airbus, sitting at the back of the plane in Tourist, me between Penny and a mercifully small woman. The video system was fantastically sophisticated and I was able to watch take-off and landing on screen as well as see Julie and Julia. A thirteen hour flight though so when we got to Singapore and went straight to the Tanglin Club without passing go we checked into our room (Number 14 aka Bouganvilla) and crashed out. Then after a short stay in an uber-Christmassy city – so many carols and lights and trees amid such stifling humidity, we embarked on another Qantas flight which was mercifully shorter though with a less sophisticated video system and marginally better food and service which wasn’t saying much as the food on the first flight was disgusting and the service slow and charmless. Almost non-existent actually.

            And so to the Adelaide Oval for the whole of the Test match between Australia and the West Indies. Also, on the day, of our arrival, the annual, Lord’s Taverners’ “Sundowner” as guests of John Bannon, a former premier of the State, prominent South Australia cricket person into whom we had bumped at a party for the Australian cricket team at the London High Commission on the eve of the Lord’s Test, My leg is playing up. But more a little later.

            More death I fear. Geoffrey Moorhouse, the former Guardian hack and author. Communications are fantastic. I was able to read poor Geoffrey’s obits in Wiltshire and London, then compose a brief note for the Guardian, transmit it from the Tanglin in Singapore, read it on the internet and have a chat with Geoff Trew on Skype. Geoff said he would scan it and sent a copy asap. I had spent the previous Saturday afternoon with Geoff and Nicolas, son of the late great Arnold Ridley, freezing to death nostalgically while watching a one-sided rugby match at Rosslyn Park. I was also able to send a couple of “Royal Blogs” to the Telegraph and to read them as well. Unfortunately the Adelaide Hilton, aka 27 William Street, didn’t have the relevant password which was with the Singing Professor in China and he didn’t return until the Sunday, which meant that I was less communicado in Oz than in Singapore, at least to start with.

            The Guardian ran my recollections of a walk with Geoffrey in Yorkshire when he revealed that his real name was Heald, but that he lived his life as Moorhouse because his Ma left home v early and remarried. The death of those most intimately concerned meant that he could reveal this. What the Guardian didn’t say was that I had read his latest elegiac column in the Oldie and had written to him saying that I, like him, was visiting New Zealand to see rellies and sugges
ting we might meet down under. Sadly Geoffrey wouldn’t be making the trip as planned (and foretold in the Oldie) and his elder son Andrew emailed giving me the news as he had found my letter among his father’s papers. Forward planning is God’s idea of a joke: discuss.

            I am now sitting in a state of maximum e-frustration. On the one hand I keep getting little messages saying that my connection with the wi-fi thing is terrific, no worries. On the other every time I try to actually send messages I get another couple of messages saying that I have failed to connect with server, have failed at this, failed at that and am stuck, stymied. Any moment I expect the thought police to turn up and charge me with some unidentifiable Kafka-like offence. Being very simple I can’t understand why something which is so wonderfully simple in darkest Wiltshire and cutting-edge Singapore is apparently not possible here. I have put my blogs for the Telegraph on to a memory stick which I am assured will work perfectly. Meanwhile I shall do the same with this and hope for the best. But I feel I would be better off like someone in Scoop, relying on cleft sticks, pigeons, paper and pencil. Ah progress!

            So, for now, I will cease and have a shower instead. An ancillary problem -  no not a problem  but a fact of internet life is that whenever anything fails to work everyone  else assumes it’s your fault and that you are an imbecile, a Luddite, don’t know anything, are too old to be alive at all. You think the reverse but don’t dare say so. Everyone apart from me and sundry cats and dogs are out. The wife and the hostess are doing a girlie supper; the Prof is at choir practice; the boys are doing whatever boys do these days and I have spent a few happy hours trying to make sense of communications. I sense I may have managed a passable stitch up and sent cricket blogs to the Telegraph from the lovely Adelaide Oval where we have been every day of the Test. Lucky us. And it’s enthrallingly and surprisingly two-sided. Gayle spent all day all day making a big hundred, I had lunch with John and Catrine Clay whose daughter lives in the hills at Mount Barker, our dinner host from a few nights back was there and came over to congratulate me on not looking quite so Pom(egranate) pink, and there are oysters and Aussie meat pies and pretend Cornish pasties with carrots in them – an amazing culinary solecism!

            I fielded a reassuring email from Caroline, my Ma’s main minder – thank you Caroline – and another from my niece telling me she was finalizing her plans for a Wiltshire Christmas. So, in a frazzled way, all is right with the world. In fact, better than all right. Hurrah for Henry. Penny bought him an Australian cricketing teddy bear at the Oval and I like to think that in twenty years or so he will be rampaging through Australian cricketers, ursine or human. Meanwhile we’re lucky to be here and welcome to the team. Good to have you batting at three or opening the bowling or whatever.                   

            Which reminds me. August 8^th. 2010. Fowey. A great cricket match. A band. The Army. Something to put in your diary and look forward to. I’ll bore you about my leg some other time. I hear voices off – the ladies are back. The possums are at play on the roof. The West Indies are about three hundred ahead with three wickets left and a full day to play. So tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…Next stop the Barossa.  

I was going to do a Carpe Diem piece about being in Verona, noticing that a production of “La Traviata” was coming up, booking a couple of cheap seats in the Gods and thanking our lucky stars, God or whatever. However when we came back a week later and checked in to our (cheap!) hotel the clerk met us with a solemn face and said that the production had been cancelled owing to a national strike. Well, only in Italy, could an evening of pleasure be cancelled because of a national opera strike but nonetheless it was a warning of a different sort: making plans is God’s invitation to practical jokes. Or something.

Anyway we went and had an expensive meal instead and I felt suitably chastised. I have to say, incidentally, that when the doleful concierge told us the news Penny immediately burst into tears whereas I’m afraid I laughed. I suppose I’m just punch drunk. Nevertheless whatever one’s attempts at making the best of all possible worlds God has a strange habit of moving the goal posts when one is least expecting it. So Carpe Diem makes perfect sense but don’t expect to have the same success rate seizing tomorrow, let alone the day after. They may never happen.

One of many enjoyable days in the Veneto was at Sirmione, where Tennyson and Ezra Pound both visited and about which they both wrote. It’s a resort on the southernmost tip of Lake Garda and on a Sunday in March sunny, crisp and crowded. We had lunch with Kate, my god-daughter, her husband James and their two small children. Come to think of it Sirmione is probably not, technically, part of the Veneto. Also, God, playing an unexpected hand, caused the cancellation of our train – a trans Europe express to Basel – but I outwitted him by nipping on the next one to Torino instead. It means getting out at Peschiera del Garda rather than Denzeuela or whatever which I rechristened Desdemona but we still made it to Sirmione. Pause for thunderbolt.

Anyway Kate who has lived in Milan for a while wanted some recommendations for places to visit and although I’ll send her separate recommendations I thought I’d rehearse the idea here first. Equal first and completely different would be Bassano del Grappa and Padova, aka Padua. I’d never even heard of Bassano which is about an hour by bus from Vicenza where we stayed for the first fortnight and on the main train line from Venice to the Brenner pass. It was here that I ate my first baccala with polenta – a rather elegant variation on a Norwegian salt cod with local maize porridge staple or, as in the posh-ish hotel by the river, the said porridge dried and rolled then grilled. Bassano was also where Penny bought me a ludicrously over-priced but wonderfully authentic black Borsolino hat which goes perfectly with the Magee Donegal tweed overcoat she bought me in Dublin the other year. Old friends and others will be as amused as me by the idea of Heald as a walking sartorial statement but the coat and hat plus the Williams boots, the cords, the tweed jacket well, eat your heart out Teasy-Weasy. No better than that. I actually look almost smart. Great packaging, pity about the product.

But the high spot of Bassano is the bridge, a wonderful, unique wooden edifice with a cover and cobbles, designed by the ubiquitous Palladio. At one end there is a Grappa bar and museum and the other another bar and a museum to the mountain troops or Bersaglieri of whom the locals are very proud but about whom Brits tend to laugh. We disparage them with jokes about North Africa but never, I think, fought them face-to-face on their own terrain in the Dolomites and Italian Alps. They wear large feathers in their hats, sing wonderfully, drink a lot of grappa and have turned the bridge into a personal shrine. Anyway we both loved Bassano and it joins that select band of places where in an ideal world I would like to rent a garret and write a book or two.

Padua is another and much better known story. We decamped from Vicenza for a final week based on the Albergo Verdi which was a nice newly renovated boutique job in the old university quarter marred only the pigeons which began cooing on our window-sill very early in the morning. The other refrain, mercifully confined to non-sleeping hours, was “Dottore…Dottore…” It seemed that a lot of students had graduated recently and there were little groups all over the University area serenading semi-naked people, often covered in foam or soap, and chanting “Dottore…Dottore” in honour of their new qualification.I’ve heard it said that everyone in Italy is a Dottore.

This was good and there were wonderful things to do and see – notably the Giotto murals in the chapel by the old Roman amphitheatre, the huge hall above the shops in the Piazza de Erbe, the massed angels in the dome of the Duomo Baptistry. As so often I loved the strange and quirky. In the top floor of the museum near the Giottos there is a coin museum, the Bottacin. It leaves me pretty cold but Mr. Bottocin lived in Trieste where he made friends with Maximilian, the Hapsburg who built Miramare and went to be Emperor of Mexico only to be executed by the soldiers of Benito Juarez, a scene inaccurately commemorated in Manet’s picture in the National Gallery. All Bottocin’s amazing numismatical cabinets are there along with some sad pieces of Maximiliania. There is the hat – a sort of white, feminine Ascot job which he apparently wore on the day of his execution. There is also a lugubrious portrait of a foppish general who was shot at the same time. I also enjoyed seeing Saint Antony’s bottom teeth preserved in a chapel in his eponymous basilica. You couldn’t help wondering whose teeth they really were. Also why so many people venerated such absurdities and why there were people clutching on to the side of his tomb elsewhere in church and apparently holding intimate conversations with the deceased. Sometimes I really dislike the Church. St. Antony, the city’s patron saint, seems to have been a dab hand at rescuing infants from cauldrons of boiling water and sewing on severed limbs. Oh well. I enjoyed the teeth though.

Seriously though Padova , as the city is locally known, struck me, us, as being wonderful, not least because in a tourist sense it is eclipsed by Venice which is very close and full of tourists. Padova seemed not to be and yet it had loads of wonderful things to gawp at.

I went to Venice for one day and interviewed the American crime writer, Donna Leon, who has been setting crime novels in her adopted city for almost two decades. Also present was her friend Toni Sepeda who has written a companion volume of Commissario Brunetti’s walks and backs it up with guided pedestrian tours of the city. So after a coffee-fuelled natter I accompanied Toni and two Chicagoannes on an hour or so of chilly trudge past the Guggenheim, down to the Salute and back up the Zattere. Penny and I had lunch in the Antico Dolo, recommended by Richard, my former literary agent and a haunt of Guildo’s. I had the tripe. Very good and very typical.Then we stopped for just the one at Saraceno by the Rialto. This is touristy but is also a haunt of Brunetti and of her creator. Penny dropped Donna’s name to our waiter which provoked much enthusiasm but no cut in costs. And so back to Padova on the train, feeling like real Italian commuters and rather superior to the tourists stuck in the Serenissima. She is gorgeous but she is over-priced.

And so back to reality. There was a copy of the Tablet with my piece on the trans-Siberian railway, waiting at home. Good old Tablet. It seemed reassuringly literate and intelligent – elitist you might even say – and none the worse for that. I sent my piece on Donna Leon and Venice to the Telegraph and my man there pronounced it “lovely”. So that was good.

A day or so later I took the train to Wiltshire to see my old Mum. Coming back we were delayed because of a wipe-out of the signalling system near Taunton. No trains int
o Cornwall for hours and when there was it was standing room only. I was about to make unfavourable comparisons with Mussolini and trains running on time and then I remembered the morning we had arrived at Vicenza station to find a brusque “Cancellato” against the name of the trans-European express to Basel on which we had booked. So it isn’t better in continental Europe.

It just SEEMS better.