Tim Heald's Blog

I must stop going on about death and yet hardly a month passes without part of my world passing. This time it was Nigel Napier. Because he was “posh” he did not rate an obituary in the Guardian but he got one in the Telegraph which  I was accused, wrongly,  of writing. He was Lord Napier and Ettrick, Eton and Scots Guards, and he was invaluable over my biography of his erstwhile boss, Princess Margaret. He lived near my old Ma in Wylye Wiltshire, and he was courteous, well-mannered and helpful. He helped me a great deal and I enjoyed his company. Sorry.

I see that two years ago I was able to report that I was busy on “Yet another death in Venice” and that Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson had just sold my Jubilee Book to Murray. Now alas Murray has cancelled the royal book and Severn House don’t want the Venetian whodunnit. I should be cursing and in a way I am. I also feel that it’s the world not me that is out of step. And I don’t care enough. Critics have always said I am too honest for my own good  and that I am indifferent to other people and to the idea of audience. I accept that. Succesful authors nurture their readers and care about them a lot. I’m afraid I do not care enough and it shows.

To Bath for another day of learning at the Bertinet cookery school. Fascinating. Penny was sceptical when I showed her the recipes and it’s true that the recipes themselves  are quite basic – it’s the tips that count. This time it was the microplane grater – a brilliant gadget that I will acquire at once. I was shown how to sharpen a knife with a steel – 17% or 22% though? And much else besides.

One of the questions the blogmaster asks is whether in effect I want to indulge in dialogue. I don’t much but occasionally I get a reaction which suggests a misapprehension. One is that I don’t write for money. I do. But equally if money were the only point I’d do something else. That is what I am trying to say about writing. It’s not a job like most jobs. Some people – maybe a majority – earn because that is all their job consists of. For relatively few earning is only part of the game. I am lucky enough to earn a living doing something I enjoy. That is not – emphatically not – the same as saying one should not be paid.

I protest too much but what really riles me is not the idea that I might not be right – anyone can make mistakes – but the idea that I have not given the matter thought. The whole of my life has been spent being a writer. I have lived and breathed the idea and I repeat that I may get everything wrong but to suggest that I have given it no thought is…No, I must not succumb to hostility and malice. Suffice it to say that…but no. One of the most important decisions I ever made about blogging is not to discuss it. That way lie tea-parties in Wisconsin. That’s another story. I once subscribed to a likely sounding crime writing site only to find that it consisted mainly of fans advertising tea-parties at which they would bang on about their current obsessions. It didn’t seem to me that this was likely either to be enjoyable or lead to increased income so I abandoned it. So please let me hear no suggestions that I am not a dedicated full-time writer and think about it most of the time. Part of the problem lies in the fact that the internet has made it possible for everyone to have a voice whereas it used to be a closed profession. Now everyone thinks they are entitled to a hearing and this is widely regarded as a good thing. I am not so sure. In the past I read for my improvement and I would not write unless for some reason I knew more than my readers. For all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of ways that is gone and anyone can clamber on to a soapbox.  This does not mean that the message is in any way worth hearing. I belong to an old school which thinks part of the point of journalism, books and writing generally is that it is done by  trained specialists.

Rant over. I remain determinedly elitist, and, for my sins, a writer. Sometimes I wish I were something else and had the benefit of comparative security. Alas, no.These are tough times for writers but certain areas proliferate and I have been signed up for two festivals. The first is the inaugural Sherborne one in October where I think I am conducting a workshop  and the second is the first e-book festival in the world. It is being held at Kidwelly in Wales which reminds me of the verse;

“If ever you go the Dolgelley

Don’t stay at the ********* hotel.

There’s nothing to put in your belly -

And no-one to answer the bell.”

Only you don’t apparently  pronounce Kidwelly like that. It’s in Wales but a different part. The Kidwellefestival is being organized by Julian Ruck, a distant relation of Berta’s. Berta lived on the front in Aberdyfi, near Breeze’s milk bar, with her husband, Oliver Onions. Berta swam every morning until she was seriously old and she wrote romantic novels.  In some ways she was Wales’ answer to Barbara Cartland, whose biography I later wrote. Berta had no pink about her but boasted fierce black hair and wrote kindly about some juvenile poem I sent to the Cambrian News in Aberystwyth.  It rhymed and we both liked that. The Cambrian did not print it. Anyway Julian is a relation but only distant. He has also got Martin Edwards, which is good, and he is putting me up in a splendid sounding pub. I am looking forward to both and yes, they pay, sensibly and professionally. You don’t get rich droning but you should not starve.

I suppose I should be twittering  rather than blogging, Everyone but the Luddites is. There is a piece about following world class twitterers in today’s colour mag and the latest Red Herrings has advice on how to twitter. I don’t like it though – too short and too democratic. However I have joined Linkedin groups for various different kinds of pro writers who on balance enjoy their work, Meanwhile in real life various Gurkhas and ex-Hong Kong lunchers came, we heard the organ this morning in Sherborne Abbey and Patrick Palmer came to inspect the Test Bed. On Saturday the post brought…and so onward, onward…

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!!

Much family history is predicated on the grounds of the youngest’s inability to pronounce the names of their seniors. Thus my grandson Henry. He seems not to be able to manage “Grandpa” or anything similar, preferring “Crapper”.  Actually I also much prefer this though I am told I mustn’t encourage him. In years to come however I hope “Crapper Tim” will be a family name and a private joke between Henry and myself. “Crapper Tim” has a resonance and a meaning denied to its near namesake.

Mispronunciation, misapprehension, bile, prejudice continue to be part of the price for sticking one’s head above the proverbial parapet. Take Amazon. I have one review for “Death in the opening chapter”. Just the one but it earns me five stars for that book whereas the two for Jardine earn me just one star. I wrote the “Death” review myself, and make no bones about it. God knows who wrote the Jardine opinions which I have not read. Probably someone I despise, probably someone who would like to have written the book themselves. Too busy being grand. Or someone who thought it too short. Should I care?

Drove to South Petherton for a Penny consultation at the surgery; arrived in plenty of time to discover the nurse was in Martock. The computer was blamed. In the last analysis it’s always the computer’s fault. Sometimes I think the computer was invented solely as an excuse for human error.

Over to the Malt House last week to start sorting through my mother’s things. A nightmare. Fifty years of buttons, fifty years of zip fasteners, fifty years of unsorted photographs, fifty years of unwanted presents. As one son said ruefully – I thought I knew the house inside out but obviously not. Intriguing sometimes. For example I came across a suitcase with a label on which were the words “Betty’s notes for Timothy”. First I knew of it or I thought I knew nothing. Maybe I am going mad. Evidently my darling aunt was paying out money for people to research family history, She never told me. There are letters from long lost, long dead (?) cousins in such places as Wanganui.             But nobody told me and now it is too late. Maybe. Maybe not. A failure of communication? Shades of Crapper Tim. Grisel, grisel, grump. grump. Was tut der kerfuffler? Is there a relationship between kartoffel and kerfuffler? If not there should be!

Anyway I refuse to be down-hearted. I have had a further communication from the lawyer re my mother’s inheritance tax, will and so on. Seems to me that it is all a more or less macabre game. It all seems to depend on whether you died in a certain year or managed to hang on for more than seven. But who decides when you die? Or whether it is significant? Some say the government. Others say just them. But does it matter? In the long run it’s just money and in the long run we are all dead anyway. I increasingly take the view that it doesn’t matter. But then a little voice says ‘ You Balfour, you.’

Talking of communication, well we WERE talking about communication weren’t we? I heard from Cyril Aynsley’s daughter the other day. Cyril was one of several voices of experience on the Express when I was a young feature writer and I was slightly in awe of him. Of several memories I have of him the most vivid are of the proprietors of the hotel in 1969 Caernarvon trying to get the Express contingent slung out of their place in the middle of the night and a weary Cyril, blearily – he was freshly woken – trying to explain to the Welsh police inspector why this was a bad idea. The other memory was being ordered down to Blackfriars station one morning to greet Cyril on his way to the office with the words “Don’t worry Cyril but the IRA have just phoned to say they are going to shoot you so I have been sent down to bring you in the back.” Those were the days. If we had the ability to hack phones would we have done so? I doubt it. In those days we wouldn’t have recognized a celebrity, the editor banned us from watching TV and the best investigative line was ‘Mine’s a pint’. I miss Cyril and those like him. And talking of communication it was very primitive in those days. Now it is much improved, if seldom as funny. Life is like that. Discuss. I have an email from the new literary editor at the Tablet asking if I would be interested in reviewing a book on the internet.I would but even though I thought the new technology filed everything I cannot find the request or my response. As for BT! But that way lies madness. One of the intriguing things about the new technology is the way it makes the old redundant. Like Kodak. Nothing wrong with Kodak but what is the point in the changed world? Discuss.

It was my birthday on January 28^th. I made the Guardian along with John Tavener,Sarkozy and Acker Bilk but not the Telegraph. Does that mean that I exist in a Guardian world but not a Telegraph one. If so why? If not why not? I  could analyse those who remembered and those who forgot but would there be a point? The Culvers came for the weekend and on my birthday I drove them to Temperley’s cider farm, the smokery at Brown and Forest and the Leach pottery. There’s a lot happening around here. We ate and drank too much – smoked salmon, salt marsh lamb, panettone and Coriole and an unexpected but nice sweet Greek red. Murray, England cricket team and Newcastle United lost but Yeovil beat Preston North End so all is not entirely bad. We didn’t see the murmuration of starlings nor the church and Penny absorbed Maggie’s hints on gardening. I was remembered by Bernie Shepherd and St. Austell Rugby Football Club. Odd weekend and an odd anniversary.

And now it is snowing on Monday morning  and Maggie and Michael left early for fear of bad weather on Salisbury Plain and I am reflecting on another year. I wish I could make sense and predict with certainty but one of life’s lessons is that one never can predict accurately or only by chance. As the man said cheerfully, in the long run we’re all dead. And at a moment in life one is likely to know more people dead than alive. That is a point I must have passed some time ago. Better parties elsewhere than in the here and now.

For some reason playing kerfuffler in the small hours the other night I thought of my dear great-aunt , Auntie Tim, who lived in Somerset at Creech St,. Michael in a dark house called Langaller where she served home reared chicken with milk gravy for Sunday lunch and taught me Monopoly and ping-pong. When I was little she used to give me a birthday present of a book of stamps valued at say 3 shillings and six pence. When I was a small boy this was very generous but when I was older it seemed less so. Yet that was always Auntie Tim’s present. Now I feel a little like her and at last understand.

Playing kerfuffler I was reminded of the Barosss hymn which I heard in a huge shed in Tanunda. It went “Ein Barossa Zwei Barossa Drei” and I remember hundreds of good old boys joining in and my pinching myself and wondering if I was in Munich. So, inevitably, I substituted kerfuffler for Barossa. Then I thought of Daisy and her bicycle made for two and the rhymes that went with it, such as all of a love for you and give me your answer do and I immediately thought kerfuffler must not be a motor-bike but a tandem pusher. Discuss as they say. Going mad perhaps. Or maybe just old…

And in any case who needs words? Lord Chandos, Oliver Lyttleton, whom I interviewed many years ago told me that an Englishman only needed an intonation to his indeterminate grunt or groan to indicate something quite sophisticated. Thus “AH” with a certain inflexion might indicate concurrence when you said that you were recommending a candidate for a particular job whereas another inflexion coupled with much the same noise might mean something completely different. So who really needs kerfuffler or even Crapper Tim? I am tempted to add “discuss”. But I won’t. Why not? D…no,no, no…

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.

What is a blog for if not moments such as this? Here is the address I gave at St. Leonard’s Semley yesterday, Friday 4th Nov, 2011.

House keeping first.

Thank you all for coming.

The family would be pleased if you could join us at the Benett for a wake immediately after the service.

The order of the service follows the traditions of the Church in which my mother was brought up. We have tried to be conventional and to accord with what I think my mother’s wishes would be. Where possible we have followed the precedents of my father’s service. That however is four decades ago and while some things don’t change I can hear the priest in charge – a stranger – saying  “it’s supposed to be a sad occasion not a celebration”. I’m not sure a priest would say the same today.

I’ll try to thank all concerned but if I leave anyone out it’s my fault and you must not feel in anyway overlooked. While I remember, by the way, I hope you agree that the flowers are terrific. My mother would have approved not least because she was on the roster for years, her friend and neighbour Julia is in charge this month, and much of the greenery is from the garden of the Malt House. So thanks Julia and your team. And while I am on the subject I know that my mother valued the friendship of good neighbours and  several members of the family have asked me to express our gratitude to Julia and Freddy. I am pleased to join them and to say that I wish all of us were blessed with such neighbours.

I know some people say that on occasions such as this they would rather be in the casket than the pulpit. I think that’s taking things a little far though I have to concede that if my much loved brother James were still with us, I would tell him to speak about our mother. Alas he is not here but no doubt sharing a family cloud somewhere. I was always the one left behind and so you’ll have to put up with me. It isn’t, alas,the first time.

I remember my father telling a family O group after my parents sold their house in Buckinghamshire  that we were not under any circumstances moving west of Salisbury. My uncle Tom says he doesn’t know what an O Group is nor that it will mean anything to the modern generation. My father, however, was always having O groups – even if it was mainly bluff. He spoke with the authority of a  man who had won the Military Cross and a Distinguished Service Order in the Italian campaign. And so it was after the typical O group in which he said that we were not moving West of Salisbury  that my mother and I were driving up Barker’s Hill,a few days later, more than 15 miles west of Salisbury. Househunting. It must have been 1966.

Michael Lodge, who still I am delighted to say, was doing logs and lawns at the Malt House more than forty years on was on the roof of the farm on the right doing whatever people do on roofs, and my mother looked at the Malt House on our left and clocked the beautiful and inimitable very English view through the drawing room window. She turned to me immediately and said “I think it’s empty”.

And so it was. Martin and Diana de Satge had farmed it but moved out recently to a house in East Knoyle and the Malt House was not technically even on the market. Nevertheless my parents bought it within days and my mother stayed there until she finally went to Hays House in September. Thank you, Sara Vaughan, for making that move possible and relatively painless. And thank you, James and Sara, for the love and affection you have demonstrated over the years and especially in the last few months.

The house on Barker’s Hill defined Jean’s long life and she achieved two things there. First she became an important figure in the community.

It was a very different world in those days – opposite the Malt House where there is now a hard tennis court and a pool was a working farm; there was a village shop where Ernie boasted one of the finest displays of gumboots in the country. Squadron –Leader Steiger-Lewis ran the Benett and Canon Rogers was the vicar. When Anthony and Anne Johnson took over the parish they made some additions to the Rectory and my mother, on viewing them, said characteristically that it now looked like Soweto.Into this scheme of things and tapestry of people my mother fitted admirably. She became a big cheese in the local conservatives – Denis Walters was the MP -; she was a key player  in the parochial church council run by Ollie Patch, who had  destroyed the Italian fleet at Taranto and whose family my parents had first met in Malta in the 1940s;  she distributed poppies, laid on meals for the elderly, many of whom were latterly much younger than she was. Lucy, my daughter, her grand-daughter, who is alas in New Zealand, remembers Jean and Mrs. Patch trying to thread cherry tomatoes on to liquorice sticks as part of a Women’s Institute project.They were hopeless but hysterical. Above all, London was much further away than it feels to day. She was always a traditional countrywoman and she became a working part of the local countryside.

Just as important she became a focal point for her family. When she first moved to the area this was essentially a small nuclear one but gradually she went from being a sprightly young forty something to a venerable 90 plus. In the course of this she garnered daughters-in-law, six grandchildren and four great grandchildren. She was always a source of common-sense and reassurance for the family and a refuge from the often antagonistic world.

These two aspects of her life – the community and her family, allied to a strong sense of place and of rightness and wrongness, were fundamental. She was flawed,funny, cutting and cuddly, giggled a lot, boasted a well-turned ankle and thanks toYoga remained enviably supple , fond of fudge and fire-lighting–she was  a decent, complex individual who didn’t apparently change much, who didn’t suffer fools but was always there when needed.

She was born in 1920 at the Green in Martock, South Somerset, where her father my grandfather, had a glove factory. Penny and I recently moved to Bower Hinton, one of the village’s suburbs, and we are within walking distance of the farm house in which her great childhood friend, Diana Palmer once lived  It was a solace to my mother that the family had, in a sense, “come home” and she recently had lunch in Bower Hinton once or twice with Caroline, who latterly co-ordinated her care. Caroline was recommended by Dr. Carter at the Tisbury surgery and I owe her a huge debt.After my grand-father’s premature death in the 1930s the family went into exile  Jean was educated at Ashford High School in Kent and later taught Pamela Digby later Pam Harriman. La Harriman had a reputation as one of the grandes horizontelles of her time but my mother apparently taught Pamela Gym. That, at any rate, is the story.

During the war Jean served in the ATS and at the Keep in Dorchester where she formed two important, vital associations, that shaped her life. The first was with Fan. My godmother, as she became was always Fan, my mother Loo. When Loo first saw Fan, she was peeling spuds. “That’s Lake” said my mother’s guide, “I think you’ll like Lake”. Lake was tall; my mother short. It was a rule of those times that ATS could only dance with officers but they were nearly all too short for Lake. Consequently Fan and Loo used to skyve off in the evenings to Askerswell and to a camp near Piddlehinton where the Guards were stationed. There they danced the nights away with six foot other ranks. There is some dispute about where exactly the Guards were stationed but none about the fact that when walking home in their great coats my shortish mother always felt safe with the much taller Fan. They looked like  an officer escorting his girl-friend after an evening on the tiles. No-one would dare to attack them.

The other person she met in Dorchester was my father, who at that stage was the weapon training officer. When the Regimental Sergeant Major was interviewing my mother there was a loud bang somewhere off-stage. My mother jumped and looked incredulous. “That’s that shocker Heald”, said the RSM without blinking an eye-lid and coining a family nickname which lasted years. A few days later my father was fitting gasmasks. When he got to my mother she winked at him; they married in 1943.

From that moment on my mother was dutiful and seemed subservient. That meant Malta, Austria, Hong Kong, and Canada, followed by the presentation of countless cups and other awards as the wife of one of the Founding Fathers of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and of the Special Events Manager of W.D.and H.O. Wills, tobacco manufacturers.

Then in 1972 my father was tragically and  unexpectedly killed in a motor accident. From then on my mother to the apparent surprise of the world at large, though never to her nearest and dearest, emerged to become the substantial and significant figure I have already described.

I can only speak for myself but I am proud to have known her and pleased that God chose her to be my mother. I would like to say thanks to Him and thanks too to her, for the strength she was and the example she set.There is a line of Thomas Hardy’s which describes the sort of person she was. It is deceptively simple and it runs “You was a good man and you did good things.” This was true of my mother too. She was a good woman and she did good things and I have reason to be profoundly grateful for both.

END

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…

This autumn I have agreed to speak at two festivals (Cheltenham and Hemstock), the Dorset Cricket Society in Bournemouth and the Oxford Society in Cornwall. All deeply wonderful but completely unco-ordinated. I have been trying for ages to get some semblance of co-ordination in to this side of my life but it hasn’t worked. After endless alarums and excursions I think I may have a nearly perfect literary agent but apart from the fact that Christopher won’t touch e-mail he doesn’t organize speakers. I don’t want to find someone who will tout for work. Mercifully I have enough speaking work and in any case I no longer want – even if I did – my own helicopter earned by many thousands of pounds speaking to rugby clubs. However I would like to be able to say when offered an agreeable speaking engagement “Have a word with my agent”. It seems a small thing to ask but it’s proving impossible. If anyone has any bright ideas, suggestions or best of all is a nice speaker’s agent looking for a harmless drone then why not send me an email on tim@timheald.com. Meanwhile I apologise for the double-bookings, the no-shows and the misunderstandings. None as bad as the late Auberon Waugh who once gave an Oriental audience half an hour or so on breast-feeding and was then surprised to be asked questions about press-freedom, but bad all the same. I need an agent who not only understands the difference but can handle dates and demands. Please.

Increasingly I find that the things one does for pleasure are more interesting than the relatively lucrative tasks. Take the Connaught House prep school reunion. Ridiculous. Takes up a lot of time and brings no financial reward but even fielding phone calls is fun. This morning, for instance, I took one from a Balliol acquaintance, Robin Somerset, and later it was Tim Mundy who features on “my” Honours Board as one of the mantra which went “Sworder,Carver, Mundy, Joynt”. Tim got a scholarship to Dartmouth the year I was born. That makes him…but no that would be ungallant but I think he and Robin must have been contemporaries. In any case he sounded amazingly chipper. Connaught House was his second such school, the first being St. Bede’s Eastbourne who were evacuated to Oxford during WW2 and where the food was so dreadful that it was feared poor Mundy would waste away and not even pass into the Royal Navy. Instead he was sent to Connaught House where the food was good and he got a scholarship. Utter chiz.

Besides this enterprise most of the other stuff  seems futile and insignificant. Perhaps it is only in old age that you acquire a taste for organized nostalgia. Or not. Discuss. Anyway it is more entertaining than writing stuff for the popular press or even books. Perhaps Lucy, who makes her living organizing special events in New Zealand knows something I don’t. This morning I got an email from Tiffy Gould who won a scholarship to Haileybury in 1956. I haven’t seen him since then but his message gave me a ludicrous spasm of something or other.  Needless to say this is a totally non profit-making enterprise. Perhaps that is what makes it even more enjoyable.

On the supposed money-making front I have three books out any minute and another due in January. The first, I hope available before the Indian cricket team finish their tour, is my account of Douglas Jardine’s last tour which was to the land of his birth, India, AFTER his better known “Bodyline” tour of Australia. This is published by Methuen. Early in October Frances Lincoln publish my collected letters of my former history tutor, Richard Cobb, to Hugh Trevor-Roper among others. Later that month I am supposed to have a second whodunit, “Poison at the Pueblo” out from Severn House. In January I hope to see my appraisal of the Queen and her reign to coincide with her sixty years on the throne, in the shops. In addition I am the Royal Correspondent of the Lady and I review books regularly for the Tablet. This adds up to a spectacular success but it doesn’t seem to translate into an embarras de richesse. Writing is a silly way to make a living and one would be better off financially doing almost anything else.

This is the story of most writer’s lives. J.K. Rowling and a handful of best-selling words are the exceptions that prove this rule of relevant penury. I heard today from an old friend who is a well known and highly regarded writer. He says he feels as if he is working with leather tyres shortly after the invention of the rubber variety. I know what he means!

One curious irony is that my maternal grandfather once owned a glove factory nearby in down town Martock. Around the 1930s most English people stopped wearing gloves. At the time of his death in 1972 my father was working for W.D.and H.O. Wills, the cigarette manufacturers and the largest single employer in Bristol. Most people seem now to have given up smoking. Meanwhile I have spent my entire working life producing words for the print industry. Now print, that nice Mr. Murdoch etc etc.  Ironic eh?

Maybe this is why I seem not to care so much about money and to take less and less pleasure in writing for money and more and more in doing things which have no commercial value. I suppose I am lucky in that my pleasures are relatively modest and my needs quite easily satisfied. It does seem odd, however, that one can  enjoy a modicum of  success and at the same time be a bit of a commercial failure. I know, I know. I am very lucky to have spent my life doing effectively what I wanted to do but it still seems peculiar that success and even perhaps a modicum of minor celebrity can be rewarded by such a financial pittance. There are plenty of more vital things wrong with the world but it does seem strange that so often financial rewards are concentrated in the hands of those who, dare I say such a thing, don’t really deserve it.

I sound as if I am complaining, and I suppose I am. I have no right to do so and I accept that. I have been lucky in a number of respects. I just sense an imbalance. I feel I stand for a certain sort of honest toil and success but other much less deserving cases make much more money. This may not matter in my case but I think it matters in  a broader sense. The wrong people are rich; the wrong people are poor. This may be a Pooterism but it is still true and all the worse for being so.

As a backdrop my aged Ma – 90 plus – is chronically unwell; my grandson was on the wrong side of an argument with a cup of hot tea; a son-in-law was diagnosed with tonsilitis and found that he was alarmingly allergic to the prescribed treatment; my elder daughter’s mother-in-law died prematurely after a horrible illness. So what possible business have I got to complain about not being better rewarded for my otherwise successful work. After all, as so many publishers have told me all my life, ‘no-one asked you to be a professional writer”.

So we are not down-hearted just rather irritated. My much-missed brother, who suffered a fatal stroke when he was just sixty, used to visit us in Cornwall. If you gave him a good book, a glass of Irish whiskey and a comfortable chair, he was happy. In between sips and chapters he would look at the view and sigh. There is a lesson here, struggling as ever, to find a way out. Reasonable expectation is a reasonable expectation but it seems to be too often unfulfilled. Maybe that’s the message. I suppose I wish I knew!

`           Harry died.

Harry was H,R.F. Keating and he was 84 years old and earned significant and lengthy obituaries in the important dailies. He was best known as the creator of Inspector Ghote but he had written a whole lot of other crime novels, been the crime critic of the Times, a pundit of note, winner of prizes and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was a fixture in my life, reviewed my first crime novels favourably, was always kind to me, and generally gentle and erudite in an agreeably modest way.

He would like to have continued reviewing fiction for the Times, would like to have gone on being President of the Detection Club and would like (this IS conjecture) to have sold more copies of his books and been published by bigger names. I suppose he would like to have been more of a celebrity. He called my first whodunit “a steel-clawed butterfly” and thereafter became agreeably trapped by quirky metaphors on insect lines.

I suppose I am saying that Harry will be missed by his friends but that the world as a whole will remember him, if at all, as a fulfilled man of letters who lived to a reasonably ripe old age. Good innings. Time up. I am lucky to remember a droll, different individual.

I was thinking along these and similar lines on a series of beautiful blossom-filled days in the garden quad of Balliol College, Oxford where I paid truant from the serious museum-visiting of my friends in the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. In between reading the second volume of the trilogy written by the Hungarian Miklos Banffy (terrific  though I have a terrible urge to insert a vowel into the middle of his surname which would turn him into a pudding.).I spent a lot of time when not reading, contemplating a beautiful cherry a ditto magnolia and reflecting that it was almost fifty years since I had first come to the college as a first year history undergraduate and how lucky I had been.

On the front gate there was a note to say that Barry Blumberg had died. Barry was Master of the College when my son Alexander was up and he got a Nobel prize for his work on the liver. The college flag flew at half-mast. I liked Barry but Alexander didn’t. When I asked for elaboration Alexander replied with a classic undergraduate response which was “The trouble with Barry is, he’s not very bright.” I’m afraid my response to Alexander was not to shriek in outrage but to grin ruefully and think that life didn’t change much.

In the Sunley building which is a sort of home for the Fellows there are pen and pencil representations of the teachers of my past – Christopher Hill, Richard Cobb, Robert Ogilvie. Maurice Keen, Jasper Griffin. The last two are the only ones still alive and they are long-retired. Carl Schmidt who was my contemporary as an undergraduate is still teaching I think but generally it’s all past tense. Our guest of honour at dinner on Friday night was Chris Patten, now impossibly grand and the Chancellor of Oxford University but in those far off days, a tutorial partner who wore a CND badge in the lapel of his corduroy jacket and made the ball fizz when he bowled military medium for the College XI   Later he said that when he was Minister for something or other the opposition shadow and the Liberal spokesman (Bryan Gould and Alan Beith) had both lived on the same staircase. Balliol was a bit like that.

Anyway it was sunny, the book was good and the quad was beautiful. It was all in the past tense though and not only was I past retirement age but I had what I think was a trapped sciatic nerve which made me limp. I felt Pooterish, pathetic and redundant. Not glum exactly but, oh well. Snap out of it, pull yourself together.

I suppose part of this is prompted by the apparent collapse of one of my projects. I’d like to go on about this but my wife insists that such negative wittering is counter-productive and I must remain confident, chirpy and optimistic because it is good for PR and what is a blog for if not for good PR.

I disagree on a number of points but one of them is the purpose of the blog whch some of the time is the re-establishing of lost contacts. One such was Colin Bonner who suddenly emerged from the past. I last saw him more than half a century ago when we flew out to join our families in Canada clutching cricket bats. We flew by Stratocruiser and the airline was BOAC. I hope to see Colin in the autumn. Colin was browsing the internet and came across my blog by accident. I think the best thing about the blog is that it has introduced a new element of serendipity.

For the last month or so I have been working. Actually I have been working my socks off but I realize that this is essentially a pointless exercise. Or rather that doing the work that the world seems to want is a pointless exercise. I have always thought conformity a dim aspiration even though the world seems to value convention and set store by doing competent things competently.

Thank God I have been allowed to spend much of my life doing peculiar things in a peculiar way. Next June  for instance, I shall be reading a short story in the central police station in Zurich. This is the first time for forty years that a writer will have  read his work there. This is an odd achievement but I value it not least because it is unusual. And leaving on the same note on which I embarked I value Harry’s memory not because he was a dull dog who performed dull tasks with a dull competence but because he was unusual. Obituarists and others will attempt to make him fit into a neat box or compartment where he will lie filed under “K” for Keating. Much easier that way.

Luckily though, for those who had the privilege of knowing him, he was blissfully unusual and what made him uniquely memorable were the quirks not the conventions. Harry leaves a gap but the gap is all the greater because, in the end, fundamentally, he was quite odd. He was not as other men are and that made him incomparably more worthwhile.

A “Steel clawed butterfly indeed. Hurrah for Harry who was different.!

It’s been a tough year. That’s what I’m told though it doesn’t always feel like that. I’ve got through it, I’m alive, and even if all isn’t right with the world it isn’t as bad as all that.  We should, by now, be in our new house in Somerset but, for various reasons, we aren’t; I should be the author of a published work on Douglas Jardine in India but I’m not; I should this and I should that and life is full of stupid reverses but at the end of the day we stagger on. Silly to make plans but somehow I’ll never learn and occasionally things work out the way you meant and even when they don’t… I’m reminded of the old adage to the effect that nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all. In the long run we’re all dead. (He says cheerfully).

Talking of death, Anthony Howard snuffed it the other day. In the Guardian Peter Wilby said in his obit that Tony had perhaps never achieved what he should have done if he had performed according to his merits. What Wilby really meant, I think, was that despite editing the Listener and the New Statesman he had never edited a national newspaper. Does that mean that Donald Trelford, who edited the Observer when Howard was deputy, was more successful. Maybe so, but thank God, real success is not determined by such things. Thomas Hardy at the end of the Mayor of Casterbridge says of Michael Henchard “He was a good man and did good things”, which I’ve always thought as fine an accolade as one could wish for even though in conventional worldly terms Henchard was a bit of a flop. I was also reminded of a tutorial with Jasper Griffin who picked me up when I said that something should be judged “on its merits” and quizzed me mercilessly. “What did you just say?Oh ‘merits’. And how precisely would you define these merits?” I felt small beyond belief but Jasper had said nothing hostile, just asked questions. Good technique but an alpha mind and I knew then that I barely rated a gamma. Oh, the humiliation!

Anyway, here we all are at the end of another year and this is almost certainly the last time I shall be writing from Fowey. Next year, d etc v, we will be in Bower Hinton, Somerset which is a suburb of Martock, which is, as every fule kno, the centre of the universe. Meanwhile the sun is shining, the view of the harbour is Mediterranean but it’s bloody cold, there is snow everywhere and we have cancelled our trip East to be near my aged Ma at Christmas. I have just had a message from the Millses who are buying our house to say they have bought several books that I wrote here and which they want me to sign as a sort of memento. I shan’t be best pleased if they turn up in a local Oxfam shop (hint, hint) but it’s a good augury. We have been fifteen years in Cornwall and we will both miss it. Time, though, for a change and for fresh challenges. And the new place has parking and is on the flat. Also there is a mature walnut tree in the garden and the address is 1 Roselands but there is no number two, nor has ever been. I am a sucker for that sort of mystery.

We spent New Year’s eve in Newton Ferrers, Devon, with an old study-mate from school. Strange so many years on to be having supper in the yacht club as a pensioner with someone one once shared a study with many years ago.. Really we have very little in common except the school and the study and slightly peculiar fathers who were in the same regiment and both got immediate Distinguished Service Orders which meant, I think, that they fought the enemy with amazing gallantry and must have (we both think) lost their tempers. No sane, cool individual would have behaved quite like that. But my father (aka “Shocker”) was certainly not sane in the accepted sense. Got home knackered to have a sad message from my elder son saying that his wife’s much-loved brother had just been killed in a car crash in Canada and he was flying away in buckets of tears to the funeral. Couldn’t think of anything helpful or indeed sensible to say. Life is a bugger at times and the longer you live the more of a bugger it becomes. Death again. He is always lurking around the corner, ready , apparently, to scythe you down when you are least expecting it.

In the morning of New year’s Eve I saw the bank manager. I am very lucky to have such a person in this day of press-buttons, passwords and pin-numbers. He has been translated to Tavistock but seems dv etc to be taking me with him despite the fact that I am technically “out of area”. He was busy clearing his desk and whereas he has hitherto invariably been dark-suited he was in mufti, a fact which obviously bothered him. As I am a resolutely casual dresser this didn’t worry me. Besides I am greatly flattered to be going with him and rather like Tavistock. Heigh ho!

Meanwhile work in between the play. I have been making corrections to the new crime novel and wondering how to explain “emets” to my editor (Cornish grockles?) as well as wondering whether or not there is any significance to my introduction of Tim Tams or Cherry Ripes. I’ve also been fiddling around with the Coronation of 1953 and wondering  why Norman Hartnell and Bernard, Duke of Norfolk, had a disagreement about leeks, what exactly a Court of Claims was, and why the Lord of the Manor of Worksop wasn’t at Her Majesty’s elbow as he had been since the Coronation of George IV. Maybe earlier. I keep getting side-tracked. My editor thinks I should play down the royal hat-trick apparently achieved by George VI at Windsor when he had three monarchs in successive deliveries (Grandpa, Pa and elder brother). The ball is supposed to be preserved at Dartmouth but the archivist there says no and what’s more she has no record of it. Good story though!

I digress. This is probably a sign of age but digression is the better part of everything really and if you only attempt things which have a point or a purpose you’ll go mad. I simply don’t understand the question “why” and can never answer it.

Nevertheless the turn of the year is a time for taking stock, and for looking forward and back. I did this literally the other day, riffling through the pages of my diary to see what I had been doing in the last few weeks since I last did a blog. To my surprise I found that the launch party in the Massey Room at Balliol College, Oxford, was a culprit. Not a lot to say except that it seems a lifetime ago. There were a number of SNAFUs not least the  weather which was embarking on its very cold snap. Nevertheless around fifty people braved the cold and the books were there too.

A brief recap. Tom was a brilliant and funny don who was a classical scholar at Balliol before decamping to Merton. His death about two years ago was not only tragic but ironic. Tom was a lifelong automophobe who never passed his driving test. Once a week, however, kind driving friends took him out to spend the day wandering round appropriate antiquities.

On the day in question Tom was on his way to see the Spencer tombs at Althorp minding his own business in the back if the car with the relevant volume of Pevsner when a lorry ran out of control somewhere around Banbury and ploughed into the back of the car. Tom lingered on in intensive care at a hospital in Coventry but finally died. I went to his memorial service in  Merton chapel and said I’d help
his brother Christopher edit an anthology of Tom’s “occasional writing”. The Massey Room was the spiritual home of the Arnold and Brakenbury Society and therefore, up to a point, and in a manner of speaking of Tom himself. You can get the book from Amazon or good bookshops and something of a flavor of one of our great pasticheurs from the beginning of Tom’s Romantic Poem which I read out to the assembled company the other day before proposing a toast to the poet. Of course I lament his passing but I am unusually grateful to have known him.           

            “I must go back to the A and B

                        To the lamp-lit |Massey Room.

            Where the speeches rise like the surge of the sea.         

                        And jokes fall like the knell of doom.”

            Tom liked to end his graceful celebratory speeches with the words of another Balliol poet, Hilaire Belloc. As the old year slides away and we contemplate its successor it seems peculiarly apt to agree that “There’s nothing worth the wear of winning, but laughter and the love of friends.”

`           I first met Brian in one of the Rome Youth Hostels in 1961 and he and his friend Simon were arguing noisily about Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the meaning of life. Matthew and I joined in, and Brian and I, at least, have been arguing in a similar fashion ever since. Maybe that is the true meaning of life: discuss. I was reminded of this the other day when Andrew Marr whom I usually regard apart from that absurd duck-egg-blue superannuated, oversized Dinky toy in which he drives to work every Sunday before his eponymous show, as almost sensible. Anyway he said something really silly about blogs and bloggers which seemed to me to have about as much sense as someone complaining about pencils or biros and those who use them to write words. Blogs are means of expression; bloggers are those who use them. A blogger isn’t one who writes in a particular way about a particular subject. A blogger is one who writes and places his words on the net. You might as well have a rant about paper.

            So I take the view that there are bad bloggers and good bloggers. Most of  us think in similar terms. My favourite blogs are by Martin Edwards and the self-styled Earl of Belmont. I wrote down the e-addresses but seem to have lost them. Google works well though and I slightly incline to the view that there should be an easy search engine which gets you there. I also have betes-noirs bloggers. They seem – as Marr suggests – to be in a permanent state of rage. They also seem to be stupid and ill-informed. But I don’t like anything Jeffrey Archer writes and it doesn’t seem to matter whether it’s a novel or a blog.It’s still dreadful! It’s not the medium I detest but the message and the messenger.

Google should get you there but the internet is seldom as simple as it should be. My dear younger son, who is something of an expert and works in the business says that he has had to create a special file for his PINS and passwords. Otherwise he can’t possibly remember them all! I think that from the point of view of communications we are going through a period of swift and messy transition. Those who live by the means of communication – publishers especially – may find the transition difficult but those who produce the raw material, particularly writers should be OK. We need to be savvy and on our guard but the demand for words won’t vanish overnight. And contrary to what most people thing monkeys can’t even write sentences let alone novels, biographies or company reports! Some writers write like moneys but that is another matter and nothing to do with blogs.

            I should be getting tremendously agitated about our impending move.Is this a subject on which I should shine a blogging light? This is one of several areas on which my wife and I take completely different views.Penny thinks we shouldn’t even mention our move until it actually happens. We’re both superstitious but whereas she believes that the merest hint of counting chickens leads to disappointment and disaster I believe that if you don’t count chickens in advance you may never have the opportunity. On this basis I have been firmly – if only mentally – ensconced in an ancient Hine house in Beaminster,Dorset, a similar place in Crewkerne, Somerset and a cottage conversion in Long Street, Sherborne, the town where I spent five years at school in the late fifties and early sixties. Needless to say we are still in Cornwall but we have accepted an offer on our house and had ours accepted on a place in Bower Hinton, a hamlet near Martock just off the A303.

I’m there already in my mind, scribbling away under the walnut tree, attending matins in All Saint’s Church, Martock, speeding to London in the Berry‘s bus and ambling up to the Palmers’ farm shop round the corner. It’s fantasy, of course, but if it doesn’t happen I will have wasted all these opportunities for day-dreaming. And blogging about it. It’s part of a whole philosophy which is basically about qualified risk-taking, indulging fancies and fantasies and leading what I believe is a fascinating life. For those who take a more prosaic view of our time on earth this is frivolous and irresponsible. I’m sure, incidentally, that I have misrepresented my case. All I know is that many people think of me as frivolous and irresponsible and I care less and less as I get older. However I shan’t say more about Bower Hinton until we’re there. Or not.

So what happened in the last month? Well, I attended the tenth Sherborne School media lunch. Basically Sherborne does majors and bankers and not, pace such journalists as Sir Michael Hogg, Bt, once of the Daily Telegraph and Nigel Dempster most famously of the Daily Mail, people like Hogg, Dempster and yours truly. We were all there, though, and ten years ago when I was an improbable President of the Old Shirburnian Society, Peter Moeller, volunteered to stage a media lunch at the Groucho Club in London. It’s taken place every year, the least likely people in the world attend and after we’ve all eaten and drunk a fair bit a member of the chorus from Les Miserables or some such, lurches to his feet and leads about fifty perfectly grown up men in two verses of the School Carmen. In Latin. Bats, British and charming. Well that’s my view anyway.

I then spent a few days with my mother who will celebrate her ninetieth on the 25^th of this month and will be much more accessible if and when we are living in Bower Hinton. There we go again… shush…it may never happen. We’ll end up in Stornoway or South Australia and serve me right for having not just had thoughts but blogged about them to an astonished world.

What else? Oh Jardine. Amazon say my book about Douglas Jardine’s last MCC tour (to India just after the much more famous “Bodyline” tour of Australia) will be available from November 4^th. Typically and preposterously I told as many friends as possible but the agent who did the deal with Methuen now says that the publishers will have finished copies at the end of the month, not before. Silly me. Never believe a publication date until you have the finished book in your hands.

By the same token I have a short story in the latest Crime Writers’ Association anthology and another in a German-Swiss production next summer. We are supposed to be launching an anthology of posthumous writings by my friend Tom Braun, sometime Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, (very funny, utterly eclectic) on December 4^th. And my complete new crime novel is due in the spring of 2011. However none of this may happen and given the usual sod’s law, probably never will.

   Incidentally I’ve just been looking at my diary to see what I actually did, as distinct from what I thought I did, and I see that our second visit to Bower Hinton was only at the beginning of October with our offer being made a day or so later. I am chronically impatient, the classic old man in a hurry, but actually we have progressed quite fast and many are incredulous that we have done as much as we have in a relatively short time.

Almost the only outside visit/work was a few hours in mid-month talking to our estimable Lord Lieutenant about her job. V useful for the book I’m working on about the Queen’s reign. Otherwise it’s mainly been scribble, scribble as usual; not to mention blog, blog which comes to much the same thing. And in the rare interstices wondering why..