Tim Heald's Blog

            Ended the month with a visit to my mother who celebrates her ninetieth birthday in November. I know I shouldn’t intrude on her privacy but it was a sad few days in many ways, not least because it confirmed for me the essential selfishness of the society in which we live. My Ma and I have a running joke (mine and feeble but there you go!) about how she is not as old as she thinks or claims. She has ten years to go before she qualifies for a telegram from the Queen and even then she has to ask. Everyone is living much longer. She is no longer unusual just one of an increasing number.

            In a number of respects she is lucky and well-off and in lucid moments she realizes this and is grateful. She is still able to live in her lovely home in glorious countryside where she has lived since the 1960s. One way and another she is provided with food and comfort and I see her as often as I can.

            Not so long ago she would have been a difficult presence surrounded by several generations of family who would no doubt be mutually maddening. Now she has pensions, a variety of paid help and relations who live mainly in London or even further. She had a stroke a year or two ago which left her with worsening speech problems which make her difficult to understand and means that even her old friends are reluctant to spend a lot of time with her. Two of her grand-children live abroad (the States and New Zealand) most of the  rest live in London and since my brother died unexpectedly at the end of 2008 there’s me but I still work and live many miles away in darkest Cornwall.

            Of course everything could be much much worse. You see people on TV every day whose lives have been blighted by famine, flood, fear and everything but even so it’s not a lot of fun being old and increasingly alone. Which is just one of the reasons the house in Fowey is on the market and we’re hoping to move East. The plot is somewhere in a triangle of which the main points are Crewkerne, Sherborne and Beaminster. There are other reasons – the Real Tennis Court at Walditch is one, my history of Sherborne School another.It is sad and a wrench but there you go. We’ve been here for fifteen years and it’s been wonderful but it’s time for a move.

            Mind you, it’s easier said than done. We have put the house on the market with Fowey River after Penny had had a spat with one rival agent. Two people have viewed so far but we haven’t yet had a nibble. As far as purchase is concerned I have seen a house in one town which was not suitable; the other day we looked at three in another place, discarded two quite easily and agreed that the third,though lovely, just needed too much work. We are attracted by one in a third place but it’s not perfect and the vendor refuses to let the agent have a key and Penny’s first attempt to view was on an inconvenient day. We shall, however, persist and I am encouraged because I think there are houses of a suitable sort within our price range. We want a dining room; I work from home; we go away a lot and don’t therefore want a huge garden; we’d like to be near shops and a railway station. This makes us unusual. Most people who move to West Dorset seem to want a modern bungalow in an enormous field. Not us. We shall see. Watch this space.

            I began last month with a visit to my Mama and more or less concluded it with another. There was house hunting. Professionally I chugged along and the biggest successes were the sale of two short stories – one to a CWA anthology which is being published by Severn House in the autumn and the other (Bognor goes to Basel) to be published in German for the next AIEP, international crime writers conference in Zurich next summer.  “What does Bognor sound like in German?” asked my literary agent thoughtfully. And then there is the Connaught House Reunion in September 2011 – see the attached letter at the end of this post.

            Ah, the Connaught House reunion. Absurd you might think to be nostalgic about a prep school which folded many years ago and has given way to a Health Farm (Cedar Falls) which itself is in to the celebration of anniversaries. Only its 25^th but even so; Connaught House which was all too briefly at Watts House, Bishop’s Lydeard near Taunton is history and maybe that’s as it should be. The Waughs (Evelyn, Auberon and so on) were neighbours at Combe Florey and when Connaught House had folded and before Cedar Falls bought the house Alexander, Bron’s son, used to break in and smoke in the Music Room pretending that, Toad-like, he was Lord of all he surveyed. I find the idea rather captivating.

            Anyway Guy Knapton who was head boy there and won a scholarship to Downside turns out to be a beadily efficient academic businessman living near Brussels and he has set in motion a reunion at Pembroke College, Cambridge. This is  the third oldest college in the city and is his alma mater. He rowed in the same boat as Roger, the ill-fated son of Randall Hoyle who was also at the college (and had an oar proudly displayed in the drawing room at Watts House by way of proof). Randall owned the school when I was there and was the headmaster. We called him Pecker; his wife Grizel called him Bun. Guy is the grandson of a Mr. Morgan who founded the original school in Weymouth some time in the 1880s. Evidently it was modelled on Oundle where Morgan was a boy. So there will be a final final reunion lunch on – provisionally – September 14^th 2011 in the Old Library at Pembroke. Watch this space. Tell your friends. We even have a committee. I am amazed and rather impressed. As I told Guy I’d be quite happy to spend a couple of quiet days in Cambridge with just the wife, so in a sense we have a quorum already. I don’t mind attending a contemplative memorial evensong on my own if necessary. However I don’t think it will be.

            Otherwise it has been very much the mixture as usual. I spent a day at the Pakistan Test match which was almost entirely obliterated by rain. Foul play came later. Had an agreeable and unexpected lunch with the Marchwoods and a racing friend from Yorkshire; bumped into Winlaw in the Long Room, David Webb-Carter queuing for money at the hole in the wall, and sundry buffs in the top of Q.  Before that ="on">Dorset with the Wagstaffes and Broadwindsor, Cerne, Poundbury and other attractions. I’m afraid I like Dorset and regard the move as a sort of homecoming. So it’s relatively easy for me.

            On the home front we had Regatta Week but stayed home and watched from the house. It rained quite hard on the Thursday so the Red Arrows only put in a token appearance. Never mind. We had a less than usually extravagant lunch and entertained the Hans-Hamiltons, the Owens and Marcia and her nephew (?) Jeff. Gavin H-H celebrated a significant birthday on the Friday. We had a jolly lunch with Julia, the daughter of my dear departed Godma one day in her converted cottage outside Beaminster.

            Otherwise it’s been head down and scribbling. Scribblers always scribble and never retire. No pension schemes for most scribblers but they don’t really anticipate such luxuries and expect to be condemned to a lifetime of scribbling and no retirement. Never mind, we enjoy it and it essentially serves us right. Lucky to be doing it

            It reminds me of the reaction I seem to have had to practically everything at all different or dangerous that I have ever attempted. I am nearly always confronted with a sharp intake of breath, a sucking of teeth and words to the effect that “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, old boy”. (Everyone who counsels inactivity is always masquerading as a great friend). The advice always seems to be that it’s better by far to remain at home, take no risks, maintain a low profile and do as little as possible. Whenever I disregard this my course of action usually (though by no means always) works out. When I meet the person who advised me to stay at home and  not on any account to raise my head above the parapet, they listen to my mildly truculent tale of success and then shake their head and opine wisely and unanswerably “It’s different for you.” I invariably protest “How?” I ask. “Why?” But they just shake their head a tad sadly and say “Just is”.

            Story of my life. It’s different for me. Just is.

*****

Connaught House School
Old Boys Reunion

To mark the first year of Connaught House School in 1885/1886, in Weymouth, a 125th anniversary reunion of all Old Boys and staff members of the School is being planned for 13th and 14th September 2011, at Pembroke College, Cambridge by courtesy of the Master and Fellows.

We are writing to you in the hope that you will be able to attend the reunion, and to ask you to spread the word far and wide, among as many Old Boys and staff members as you know or know of, and to ask them all to do likewise.

At 6 o’clock on Tuesday, 13th September 2011, by courtesy of the Dean of the College, there will be a Service of Thanksgiving in the College Chapel for all Old Boys and Staff, and especially for those who fell in the two world wars. It is hoped that at least one Old Boy in holy orders will agree to be a celebrant. The Service will be followed by drinks, after which we shall make our own arrangements for the evening.

On Wednesday, 14th September 2011 drinks will be served at noon followed by lunch in the Old Library of the College. The price for the two functions will be about £50 per person, and it is hoped there will be enough room for wives and partners to attend.

Accommodation, including breakfast, will be available in College for those wishing to stay overnight. The modest charge for this is not included in the price above.

To help with the organization of the anniversary reunion, please send as soon as possible to one or other of the addresses below, and this no later than 31st October 2010, notice in writing of your intention to attend the reunion and whether you expect to be accompanied. 

Payment will only be due on 30th June 2011.

We are very fortunate in being able to hold this reunion at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Randall Hoyle, whom so many of us knew as Headmaster, was an undergraduate there from 1923 to 1926. Roger, his only son who sadly died in 1999, went up in 1961. Guy Knapton, the last surviving direct descendant of the school’s founder, J. R. Morgan, who
was also a pupil, went up in 1960.

Pembroke is the third oldest college in Cambridge, founded in 1347. The Old Library replaced the first College Chapel in the late 17th century. Pembroke was the first college to have its own chapel, and the present Chapel is the first building of Christopher Wren, dating from 1665.

For further information, please get in touch with either Tim Heald or Guy Knapton. Please be sure to let us have your full contact details, whether or not you intend to come to the reunion. Their respective addresses are: 

Tim Heald
66 The Esplanade
Fowey
Cornwall PL23 1JA
tim@timheald.com
Tel: 01726-832781 

Guy Knapton
76 Chemin du Gros Tienne
1380 Lasne
Belgium
guykguard-books@yahoo.com
Tel: +32-2-6538079

            I’ve been thinking about Christianna Brand which I concede is not something I often do. She was a large lady who affected bell tents and hung around Crime Writers’ meetings when I first joined in the seventies. She seemed slightly superannuated even then and vaguely reminiscent of the woman we called “The Red-faced warbler” who enlivened church services in Fulmer when I was a child. She never seemed quite real. Rather like that large woman with the fake vowels on TV. Hyacinth Bucket aka Bouquet. I had to consult my wife over her name, a sure sign of age.

            Anyway Christianna reminded me slightly of her and she died in her eighties almost thirty years ago, However some time in the sixties she wrote three novels with a character called Nurse Matilda based on someone who had looked after her cousin, the illustrator Edward Ardizzone. These novels have now been adapted by Emma Thompson and have become a film which is getting loads of publicity.

            Very occasionally I hear the name of Christianna Brand in this context but it’s nearly all about Emma Thompson who is famous and a flavour of our times whereas Christianna Brand is neither of these things. No fault, as far as I can see, of Miss Thompson who has been scrupulous about naming her source but an indictment of the times and the press. I admit to a certain self-interest, not because I remember Christianna but because I have a dreadful feeling that the same sort of thing will happen to me. A latter day Emma Thompson will “discover” someone I invented such as Dr. Tudor Cornwall.re-invent him for film and stand back to take all the credit. Meanwhile I will be dead, forgotten and ignored.

            Such, I suppose, is life but it does seem a bit unfair.

            I don’t know if this confirms or denies my doctrine of “reasonable expectation” but I had some (to me) interesting examples last week after trying to catch a train from Tisbury the nearest station from my mother in Wiltshire. I booked a cab. This sounds grand but it’s sensible and we’ve been using the same company for ever and they’ve always seemed incredibly reliable. This Monday they failed to show. Consternation. More “unreasonable expectation” followed. First, I encountered a neighbour driving towards me just a few hundred yards from the house as I began to walk the two or three miles to the station. Freddie very kindly told me to hop in the back and drove me to the station. There I was able to catch the next train and get back more or less on schedule. However I was technically on the “wrong” train. When I confessed to the guard he scolded me briefly but did the necessary scribbling on my ticket and didn’t make the extra charge to which he was perfectly entitled.

            So three cases of “unreasonable expectation” aka surprise, in a single morning. The two goods outweighed the bad but on the other hand they should not  have occurred without the first. Oh well. Pooterish, no doubt. But of such Pooterisms is life composed.

            Simon Hoggart had an interesting piece on similar lines in the paper the other day. Basically he was saying that he understood the greed behind the apparent actions of Stephen Byers and Patricia Hewitt and other MPs. That didn’t mean he condoned them but he did understand them. Essentially Hoggart was saying that MPs sweat blood on our behalf and are confronted by quite large numbers of people who have done infinitely less for the common good but have walked off with much greater financial rewards. It’s not surprising if some of them cut corners to secure something similar for themselves.

            I know the feeling. My own instinct is to blame Thatcher and Murdoch who I tend to blame for everything. It was they more than anyone who introduced the idea into Britain that it was not only acceptable to discuss money, it was positively good. Moreover the acquisition of material goods was not only an end in itself, it was the best possible end. Life used not to be like that. I remember a telling remark of Julian Critchley’s to the effect that if the Japanese had won the war all British businessmen would have been like his friend Michael Heseltine. What was rather wonderful about the good old days was that when a businessman had made what he considered enough he bought himself a Georgian rectory, and devoted himself to fly-fishing and Trollope. We, the British, had a well-defined sense of perspective and believed in “hinterland”. It’s like whoever it was who said that he didn’t want a Prime Minister who wished to leave his name in history, make new legislation and so on. He wanted a lazy Prime Minister who was content simply to let things tick along while he read a good book and enjoyed long lunches at his club.

            There is a lot to be said for this approach but nowadays nobody seems to be listening.

            I have been looking back at my diary to see what exactly I have been doing and find that an awful lot has been dispiriting. The weather, which seems to have been uniformly ghastly, hasn’t helped. Nor has work which I mustn’t go on about though I found myself slightly chastened when my elder son remarked that most people of my age had given up and were enjoying their retirement. That is, if they were still alive and well enough to do so. I’m afraid I remain in a hurry with too much to fit into the time available but I sense that this is widely regarded as rather bad form. It’s certainly true that if one were in conventional salaried employment one would have been pensioned off. However I am not in conventional salaried employment and never have been. This is widely regarded as “a bad thing” and there are still lots of people around who want to know what I am going to do when I grow up. Alas, it’s a bit late for that.

            On the work front I can’t pretend that it has been easy though there are signs that the lot of the self-employed writer generally may be improving after a more than usually bleak period. I suppose it is bad that I seem to derive as much if not more pleasure from things that don’t bring financial reward.I hear Roy Jenkins, not someone who had much apparent need to be worried on that score, admonishing the Oxford Society with the words “Let us hear it for the non-acquisitive professions”. I like the idea of the non-acquisitive profession even though I understand the need for food, drink and shelter. On the other hand I have just agreed to do a morning show at Radio St. Austell Bay and to natter at the local library during National Crime Fiction Week.

            Neither is going to make me rich and yet I seem to care about them in a way that I don’t always care about paid employment. I suppose it’s because everything nowadays seems to be about money. I remember, for instance, how, when going to a college re
-union I found more university teachers than I had ever seen before in a single room. Most of them could have made more money, pursued more lucrative careers but they chose not to. When it was my children’s turn I found that most of their contemporaries went on to be bankers and to try to make money because making money was all that mattered. University now seems to be measured almost exclusively in terms of whether or not a degree will lead to more money. Thank you Mrs. Thatcher. I am one of those who believes that there is such a thing as knowledge in the abstract and that it is worth pursuing for its own sake. But then I believe that there is such a thing as society as well.

            Ah well, we live in material times and perhaps it is God’s punishment that we are not very good at it. Serves us right. Oh I have just had an “expression” of interest from a TV production company and have sent them a puff for my “Tudor Cornwall” trilogy. I’d love any forthcoming money; of course I would. But I have a feeling that I’d enjoy everything else about the exercise at least as much. It’s a salutary thought. Money and all that it buys is important but it’s not THAT important.

            And on that Pooterish thought I will sign off thinking about the meaning of life and wishing and hoping that there is more to it all than money.

            An interesting Lithuanian Christmas Eve with Penny’s brother John and his family at their house high in the hills on the New South Wales/Queensland border. John’s wife is originally from Lithuania and likes to keep some old customs one of which is Christmas Eve and involves twelve dishes, all fish or vegetarian, each of which you have to sample and no alcohol. You also wish each other a happy and prosperous new year and break unleavened bread.

            What I found almost most fascinating is that at the end of the year Lithuanians traditionally wipe the slate clean, cancel all debts and generally start afresh. Terrific, of course, but alas life for most of us isn’t like that and we don’t have the luxury of being able to start completely fresh because the accumulated baggage stays with us no matter what.  So even though this is a time for taking stock and making new resolutions there are things which have been done and things left undone and they can’t be changed. I’m all for wiping slates clean but there is, for better or worse, a limit. Our slates can’t be wiped clean if only because much of the writing is indelible.

            On the plus side the arrival of Henry Heald on November 25^th is the best news. The third grandson and the first to carry the family name and a British birthplace. Welcome Henry. In the summer my son, Tristram, got married, and I am now in Auckland in anticipation of the fourth wedding, that of Lucy. When she is joined in holy matrimony next Friday that will make all four children married and still with their spouses. Almost a record.  

            My job on Friday is to “give Lucy away” though the service seems likely to be predictably contemporary and will take place en plein air or under canvas and as far as I can see with minimal religious involvement. My Lithuanian sister-in-law, responsible, of course, for Christmas, eve has urged me not to do what all Australians do which is to make a really insulting speech on such occasions in the belief that this illustrates true devotion. I am further encouraged in this by the words of Gabriel Garcia Marques, the great Colombian novelist, who is retiring from public life because he has lymphatic cancer. His words, accompanied by a chanson and pics of Paris have been sent on by Annie van Es widow of the photographer Hugh, whose wake Penny and I organized at the Frontline Club in London and whose obituary I wrote last year for the Guardian. Marques says we should speak fondly of our nearest and dearest, reminding them at all times of how much we adore them.

            Well, I will do my best, but I am reminded that I was brought up and educated in an old English tradition which thinks tears and expressions of love rather cissy and bad form while encouraging one to go in for stiff upper lips and loads of deprecation and understatement. Old habits die hard and I am wary of too much public display of emotion. On the other hand…Whatever else I do however I shall use Lucy’s mantra about me as a source of constant encouragement. “Dad…you’re so embarrassing.” I feel that’s my role in life, both generally and in particular. Which includes, of course, saying the unexpected and contrary as often as possible. More on all this next month.

            The down side began with my younger brother’s funeral in Wells Cathedral. He actually died at the very end of  2008 but his departure has cast a shadow over the whole of my 2009 and will I am afraid be part of the rest of my life. This is very un-Lithuanian but a mark of what I mean. There are certain things which can’t be eradicated and which are part of one’s life however one comes to terms with them.

            I suppose that the sudden death of a close and younger relation always has a significant effect – you’d have to be pretty bloodless to be unaffected. The most obvious lesson is probably “Carpe Diem”. For example on this trip to New Zealand I was quite keen to explore the South Island where I have never been. My wife who is naturally more sensible and cautious said that we had neither time nor money and we would be much better leaving the south to “Next time”. I protested that there might not be a “next time” but I lost as usual and I have a horrible feeling that I will never see the South Island.

            Death seems to have that effect and there seems to have been an increasing number of them in 2009. Some of them were contemporaries, some a little bit older, a very few younger. People’s passing inevitably changes one’s mental furniture and I find that this means many of one’s assumptions alter as well. If life is just one clattering carousel there is no escaping the fact that one is getting to the moment when one falls off, or is taken off, that new people are arriving and that the balance of power has shifted. My elder daughter, Emma, will be forty next year, and will hate me for telling everyone but it’s as big a landmark in my life as it is in hers. A man with a forty year old daughter is a senior citizen, a pensioner, a grandfather and will, if he gets into trouble, be described as such in the morning paper – if there is such a thing.

            So, suddenly, this is where one is at: old man in a hurry. Much advice has, as always, been of the sit tight, hunker down, take no risks variety and while I am, contrary to much general perception, very sensitive about advice especially from experts. all my life I have been  counselled to be cautious and then when a calculated risk works out I am told that “it’s different for you”. Such is life and if I have advice it is to listen to everything that is on offer and then to take the decision oneself erring on the side of risk. That way life is interesting, rewarding and relatively free of “if only”. There are an awful lot of sad people around who will never know what they might have achieved if they had only taken what seemed at the time to be an unacceptable risk. Carpe Diem.

            I have undertaken two speaking engagements to interesting foreign parts in the last year. One was a trip north of the border to speak to the Scottish Cricket Society in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Know-all Sassenachs and even some Scots assured me that there was no such thing but there was and Penny and I had a thoroughly enjoyable and unorthodox visit to both cities. We also spent a few days in Antwerp where I conducted a crime-writing workshop to some daunting Flemings. I enjoyed the whole business even though I found my audience suitably daunting and Antwerp itself was every bit as remarkable and wonderful as I had hoped. Our B and B, overlooking the cloister of the St. Paulus Church was quite one of the most special either of us have ever experienced.

            We also spent a week in Krakow and almost three in the Veneto where I interviewed the American crime writer, Donna Leon for the Daily Telegraph. In a different (and better) world I would have written lucratively and publicly about both these places but the world has changed and though I wrote about them here, with enthusiasm, I couldn’t generate interest from traditional outlets on which I used to feel I could rely. The same has been true of the latest long visit to Australia and New Zealand which has taken in all five days of a fascinating cricket Test between the West Indies and Australia at the Adelaide Oval, a tour of Manning Clark’s old house in Canberra, weddings in Sydney and outside Auckland, and much much else besides. But there you go. There is a widespread saying voiced by today’s young Turks that says the days when you could do a deal over lunch at the Garrick Club are long gone. I’m afraid I belong to a generation which believed in the efficacy of such lunches. It reminds me of the great Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson’s response when I proposed writing him a proposal to bolster my notion of writing him a biography of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland. I explained that such proposals were now very much the vogue. Christopher looked perplexed and said that he wanted no such thing on the grounds that “I know who you are; I know who Barbara Cartland is; and I know what a biography is.” We did the deal; I wrote the book,; it was a critical and commercial success.

            Anyway from a commercial and creative point of view my 2009 was an absolute shocker. I use the word advisedly because when my mother was startled by a loud explosion shortly after arriving at the military HQ in Dorchester, Dorset, in World War Two the Regimental Sergeant Major, said, by way of explanation, “It’s that shocker Heald”. It was my father who was, at the time, the Weapons Training Officer, and who amused himself by removing the pins from hand-grenades and then throwing them after the longest possible interval. This earned him the family sobriquet of “Shocker” which was generally pretty well justified.

            Anyway from a professional point of view my 2009 was an absolute shocker. I could go into more painful detail but I have already used up 1500 or so words and I don’t want to seem unduly grumpy. I’m told it’s bad for business and I hope that from this point of view as well as many others 2010 will be a huge improvement on its predecessor. Not that 2009 was consistently dreadful. It wasn’t. There was much to enjoy. But professionally speaking it was an absolute shocker.

            And I see no sense in pretending otherwise.      

            Travelled up to London on the 2^nd of the month and returned by a prolonged journey on train and bus (engineering work silly) on Sunday 20^th. So a hectic period doing all sorts of things including trying to drum up work but, on the whole, away from the humdrum tapping away in front of the screen which is essential but boring to write about – and I presume to read. The charging around is tiring and challenging but more fun for both reader and writer. I think.

            So to London for an interview with Renegade TV who have 3D footage of the Queen’s Coronation in 1953. We watched the two DVDs at home first and were amazed at how incredibly ancient and dated they seemed. The commentary in particular seemed impossibly deferential and fruity; the Queen impossibly young and the soldiers impossibly numerous. Never seen so many chaps in khaki. I suppose it was all more than half a century ago but I remember it myself which is unnerving. To so many people it’s history but for people such as myself it’s part of one’s life. Inevitable and obvious but salutary even so.

            The filming was in the old Breakfast TV studios where, once upon a time, Anna Ford poured a glass of wine over Jonathan Aitken. I felt an ass pontificating away to camera while wearing a pair of cardboard 3D glasses which come mid-November will be given away free in Tesco and with copies of the Sun and News of the World. It was surprisingly hard work and seemed to go on for ever, most of it destined presumably for the cutting room floor.

            Afterwards Renegade laid on a car to take me to Alexander’s house in Ealing. It was the first time I had been there and we made the journey courtesy of Satnav which was something of a revelation. I simply gave the driver the Post Code and he  drove to the front door without a single query pulling up outside the correct terrace house in the suburbs apparently effortlessly. I felt like a High Court judge who had never heard of the Beatles. Modern technology?! Jolly clever, these science fellows!

            Kirsten, Alexander and I went out for a very adequate Indian meal at a modest restaurant within walking distance of the house; Alexander lent me a novel by David Peace about Brian Clough; we talked a lot about everything and I had a very enjoyable brief stay. The only depressing thing was that the perfectly nice but essentially small terrace house would probably have cost at least £250,000 to buy. (They rent).Property prices particularly in the capital are absolutely scandalous and show little or no sign of coming down, any more than bankers’ salaries which are, equally scandalous, though whether they are cause or effect of our present discontents remains mysterious to me at least.

            From Ealing I tubed back into central London before checking in to the Army and Navy Club for a single night and an evening at the Society of Bookmen which meets once a month at the Savile Club and which I hadn’t attended for ages. It was particularly good to see Sue Bradbury, formerly editorial director of the Folio Society and an old friend with whom I had done many enjoyable jobs. The  speaker was the CEO of Atlantic Books and sitting almost opposite me at the top table was the son of Anthony Cheetham who was almost a contemporary of mine at Oxford. Disconcerting as always to find one’s contemporaries’ children grown up and being taken seriously. Perfectly understandable but disconcerting nonetheless.

            Penny came up on the Friday and I met her at the Frontline Club before staggering off to Tooting where we were staying with our friend Marcia. Tooting is a relatively mixed community – as is Ealing which has a lot of Poles as well as Indians. Living in places such as this means, among other things, some fascinating new taste sensations in exotic restaurants. That evening we went to a vegetarian South Indian which was spectacular. In particular we started with some wonderful puff pastry bombs full of chili and coriander which you bunged in your mouth and which then almost literally exploded with an amazing combination of heat and flavour.            

            The following day we went to the National Theatre for “The Pitmen Painters” a drama about worker-education between the wars. I thought it was funny and thought-provoking and made me think, inevitably, about Sandy Lindsay who was Master of Balliol, a leading light in the WEA and I think the first Vice-Chancellor at Keele. On the Sunday Penny and I were at Lord’s in a packed house for a slightly anti-climactic and one-sided Australian victory in the one-day match. Australia won the series 6-1. It was nice to see Brett Lee back and we sat in reserved seats where I met a disarmingly keen prep-school cricketer called Toby who asked me all sorts of tricky questions. I later sent him my book on Denis Compton.

            I found all this salutary not least because it was so unlike life in Cornwall. Cornwall is fantastic and I love it but it IS rural and, in a way, remote. In a number of ways it is every bit as sophisticated as the metropolis but we don’t do state-of-the-art South Indian vegetarians, or international cricket. We do have some goodish theatre but we can’t match the National and we certainly can’t do so on a day-to-day basis. Kneehigh Theatre, the native Cornish theatre company, is world-class but seem to be relatively unappreciated here.

            All of which is a way of saying that much though I love living in Cornwall and having a view of the Fowey estuary  and being able to walk out on to the cliffs without having to get in a car and drive anywhere I do need a fix of town-life from time to time. That’s not at all the same as saying I want to live in London. Done that, been there and I don’t fancy the constant hassle, noise, dirt and, my dear, the people. When I did live in town I was pretty happy spending time there and only fairly occasionally venturing out to the countryside though I confess that for most of my time in London I lived near Richmond Park and the river. Latterly I lived so close to Palewell Common that one could walk out of the back gate, in to the common and be in Richmond Park in moments, so it wasn’t very urban living.

            I know people in Fowey who haven’t been to London in years and don’t even venture across the Tamar.I don’t think I could do that. I need a regular fix of the big smoke but I’m more than happy now to reverse the norm and to be based here in the relative wilderness while making occasional forays into what passes for urban sophistication. Perhaps it’s a function of age. Maybe it also has something to do with the sophistication of modern communications. In any event I like living down here but I need to be able to go up there from time to time.

            On the Monday I had a working lunch with Christopher Braun brother of Thomas whose collected writings we are engaged in putting together. Then, that evening I saw Ion again and by chance. I’d had breakfast with him at Roast in Borough Market. And Tracey, the aspiring writer who we had met at the Australian High Commission, came to the Groucho for a chat before we returned for a jolly dinner with Marcia and friends where I banged on at length about how I longed for curry goat. Wait a mo though. Maybe I had breakfast with Ion on the Tuesday because that was the day I was encumbered with luggage and temporarily lost my credit cards and valuables at Tooting Bec station. In any event I had lunch at the old Brasserie St, Quentin with Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson before heading off to Wiltshire and my Mama where on Wednesday Julia, the daughter of Ma’s oldest friend, my Godma who died last year, came to lunch and the following day I drove Ma over to Anne and Anthony Johnston’s for tea before heading back to London where we had lunch with Shakey from Hong Kong and went to see David Fellows, the lawyer, to discuss wills before I met Emma Hartley from the Telegraph to discuss royal blogging.

            And on the Saturday there was another ODI at Lord’s, won again by Australia quite easily, with Ricky Ponting back from a break in Australia and then supper with the Australian High Commissioner, John Dauth, whom I had  known in an earlier life when he was seconded to the Royal Family with the job of looking after Prince Charles and the press.

            So all in all that was quite a busy week and it’s not altogether surprising that I can’t remember whether I had breakfast with Ion on the Monday or the Tuesday. Not over yet though. On the Sunday Marcia, Penny and I drove to Paddington, put Penny on a train back to Cornwall, went home and read the Sunday papers before venturing out to the neighbours for delicious curry goat (they had taken me at my word!). The first half of the week included a working lunch with one editor, John Nicoll, to discuss the Richard Cobb letters; another working lunch with another editor this time from the Mail on Sunday; a party given by a former Jardine bigwig from Hong Kong; another brilliant Tooting curry with my son Tristram and Beth; a book launch at the Garrick for my friend Ion Trewin’s biography of Alan Clark; and so late to my Ma’s;a hair cut at Odette; the first ever annual Guild of Speechwriters’ conference in Bournemouth; a very old friend of the family from Vienna days for a cup of tea and finally on Sunday home allegedly by train but actually because it was Sunday partly by a trundling bus through much of  West Somerset and East Devon on account of the traditional Engineering works.

            Back home I should have put my feet up but there was a piece about Willy Shawcross and his new book on the Queen Mum for the Lady who also asked me to become their Royal Correspondent; much blogging for the Telegraph made more difficult by having to grapple with new IT challenges; reviews for the Tablet; plans for my workshop in Antwerp; lunch for ten held, thanks to a lovely Indian summer, out of doors and overlooking Fowey harbour; this diary/blog; bits of books and now I am tapping away at the keyboard while keeping one eye on the screen which is showing England against Australia at cricket yet again, though this time in South Africa.

            So, gentle reader, behold an old man in a hurry. Now we have something approaching a respite before heading off across the Tamar again on Wednesday. I wouldn’t have it any other way and I think I much prefer to be based in darkest Cornwall with forays up country. Much better that than the other way round.

            I think.

            Up to a point.

            Perhaps.

            Anyway, carpe direm, scribble, scribble, hurry, hurry…

One of  the many problems of the internet – though I don’t fully understand the connection – is the growth in anonymous bile. I quite understand that if you write you place yourself in the firing line and become a potential victim of abuse. Reviewers can be extremely rude and I write as a  some-time reviewer. On one occasion J.B. Priestley tried to get me fired from the Daily Telegraph team. He failed; I was right; but I was quite rude. Basically I have no problem with signed articles and reviews or opinions expressed by audible or visible people who have an identity. I am enjoying the spat between “Lord” Sugar and Quentin Letts – I am very definitely in the Letts camp on this one and one of the reasons I am on his side is that he was rude under his own name. I have no sympathy with people, usually, on the net who are vituperative but hide under a pseudonym.

            There is an odd paradox here because when I started in journalism the first person pronoun was at a premium and you were expected to report “facts” as if they were objective. “I” was not allowed to intrude. This was difficult, possibly impossible, but the point is that we had to try to be as dispassionate as possible in what we reported and to tell it as it was. This is now, quite dramatically, not the case. Everything is about “personality” and the writer intrudes in a way that would not have been countenanced in the dim and distant. 

            Anyway I resent the idiotic bile served up under a cloak of anonymity that sometimes appears on the net. I know that what I write is not necessarily to everyone’s taste but I have qualifications of various pretty unassailable kinds and whatever one thinks of publishers one has to go through a variety of professional qualifications before getting published. I don’t really see why I should have to be vilified by people who don’t even have the guts to say who they really are. Also let’s be real about this. I know that my books reach a certain sort of professional standard. They are literate, well-researched and generally adequate. If a reader doesn’t like one of them that’s their privilege (or Problem) but don’t tell me they are illiterate or ungrammatical or ill-researched. And don’t skulk behind a made-up name. At least have the courage of your apparent convictions.

            I suppose it is tempting to use the opportunities presented by the web to have an intemperate rant at anyone who appears to be more privileged than you but the extent of this secret anger is, to me, perplexing and worrying. I remember Lady Antonia in her period as Chairman of the Crime Writers Association, looking around at her apparently beaming and friendly members and telling me not to be fooled. Under that smiling and affable exterior there was a collective seethe. I am not sure I believed her at the time but I begin to think that she was right and not just in the limited context of the CWA. There seems to be an awful lot of pent-up anger in the world. And much of it is expressed in anonymous “reviews” on the internet. I think you have somehow to ignore these when they are directed at you but it isn’t always easy.

            I find it bothering not just because I don’t enjoy being vilified but because I am depressed to feel that so many people are apparently nursing such furious resentments. Still, I suppose it’s better to vent them on Amazon or Tripadviser than to cause actual bodily harm. It’s still unnerving though.

End of grump.. The highlights of the month have probably been the charity cricket match between “my” team and the Cornish Crusaders and Regatta Week and the visit of the Red Arrows RAF aerobatic team. I also attended a Driver Awareness session in Dorset. And worked away on my books about Jardine in India and the collected letters of Richard Cobb.  England have won the Ashes and I watched on TV. Now a busy month looms with a lot of London and I feel oddly flat.

We raised about £500 for Marie Curie. Interesting in that it was less than half of what we got last year and we had a full day of cricket whereas last year we were rained out.and got about £1100. It was extraordinarily difficult getting a team together and the ground , while beautiful, seemed to have deteriorated in some important respects. The sightscreens were dilapidated, the nets had vanished and there was no paper in the ladies’ loo. The Crusaders won comfortably and boasted one batsman and at least one bowler who seemed too good. More to the point we only had two players from the club teams.

There is obviously much to do before the Salamanca Band arrive with an Army team on behalf of the Army Benevolent Fund next year. I am keen to build up a modest programme of charity matches against the likes of the Crusaders and the Choughs but there is no financial reward and there are a lot of people who say I shouldn’t even try. That, unfortunately, isn’t my style. We had to admit defeat over the Real Tennis Court for Cornwall which I still think is a terrific idea. Likewise successful charity cricket matches at the Fowey Club. Watch this space!

And so to Regatta Week with the Red Arrows performing on the Thursday and a rather scary lunch with all our male guests being serious yachties who had sailed single-handed across the Atlantic three times (Mervyn) or done innumerable Fastnets (Geoff). I, needless to say, was terrified, being a total dry-bob and not knowing port from starboard and having no idea whatsoever about how or when to scandalise the mainsail. Anyway everyone seemed wonderfully tolerant and although the rain came just as the Red Arrows appeared we got a spectacular rainbow with photographs of ditto in all the national papers. Also an impressive V formation fly past by Canada geese who were as impressively disciplined in their way as the boys (and one girl) in blue. It all made me think of Richard Cobb who loathed the RAF and particularly Hillary with whom he was at school and Cheshire who was a Merton contemporary at Oxford.

I transcribed endless letters of Richard’s. amalgamated them, and then edited mercilessly. Well, it seemed merciless to me. The idea is to concentrate on his letters to Hugh Trevor-Roper but to include the best of the rest. The working title (rather good though I say it myself) is “My dear Hugh” and I have just sent o
ff a draft to John Nicoll, the publisher. Fingers crossed. I really feel we have a book now and potentially a very good one. In a better world it might even be a best-seller but (he says bitterly) I am no chef nor super-model and only celebrities sell books. Richard was many things but not a celebrity!

Anyway we shall see. I am amazed by the volume of his correspondence never mind  the quality, which is remarkable. It’s a cliché to say that no-one writes letters today but I’m afraid it is nonetheless true for being a cliché. Richard and his contemporaries wrote long and very entertaining letters and I think someone like Richard (not that there was anyone quite like him as he was sui generis) was among the last of the great letter writers. Diarists are different and bloggers are a new phenomenon but letter writers seem to me a dying breed.

Likewise cricketers such as Douglas Jardine. I have promised Metheun they will have a finished book about his tour of India bu the end of October so that they can publish next year. I will keep my word.

I was at all five days of the Lord’s Test and I am going to be at the two Lord’s ODIs. I was absorbed by the wonderful Test and I hope to be greatly entertained by the two games to come but I  agree with Mike Atherton who said the other day that the advent of the helmet had changed the game more than anything else. The other day at the charity cricket our captain batted in a cap – all right it was an Eton Rambler cap, but there is no doubt that the protective headgear makes a huge difference. Peter Lever, the ex England fast bowler, came to our game (he now lives at Okehampton). It was he who once felled the New Zealand number eleven with a bumper and was terrified that he had killed him.. I remember listening to Denis Compton talk about being knocked over by Ray Lindwall, having stitches in the wound and coming out to bat again. He went on to make a huge hundred but the point is that at the back of one’s mind in pre-helmet days there was real fear. You really did feel you might be killed. That’s gone and there’s no doubt the world is different.

Same with letter-writing and, the internet, and the anonymous bile that appears to go with it. The world is a different place and many of the changes are also improvements. Not all, however. In some ways it is a nastier, more threatening place and we should be allowed to say so. Yes yes. We are all living longer and are better off but a world in which we don’t write letters, in which we play games in protective clothing and have a licence to be anonymously angry is not necessarily better than the world we have lost.

End of lesson. Tomorrow I head for London to be interviewed about film from the 1950s. It depicts a lost world that seems in many respects absurd. The movie was sent to me on a DVD but my laptop can’t decode it and all the efforts of my tame, university qualified expert, have failed to make it accessible. There is a moral here. Plus ca change…but that’s not quite it. More like two steps forward, one step back. But that’s not right either.

I think that for me the most interesting fact is that as one’s life stretches out one realises that all change is not necessarily for the better; but one cannot possibly say so because to complain is to show one’s age. And above all, one mustn’t be seen to seethe. You must grin, you must bear it, you must maintain a stiff upper lip. At all times and at all costs. But part of me regrets the past and wants to seethe even as I smile.

Four potentially memorable events and three triumphs with one failure brought on by God and foul weather. That’s pretty good, particularly given that two of the successes took place out of doors and were therefore susceptible to rain. For the most part, however, God was kind and the rain didn’t fall. It did last Wednesday. In fact it was coming down so hard that it bounced back up as if we were in the tropics. If the doom-mongers are right that’s where climate change is taking us anyway so this was just a taste of things to come.

Anyway the cricket match here in Fowey was rained off and we are going to try to reschedule it for later in the season. It’s a bore in all sorts of ways not least because one of my star players was Tom Kendall’s son, James, who played at Bradfield and Durham University and was obviously good. Quite by chance I sat next to Tom one day at Lord’s. More of that later. Anyway, it bucketed down and we called it off. I phoned or e-mailed as many people as I could think of and went up to the pavilion and stuck up a couple of notices. The main bore in a way was the raffle which was good – a night at the Marina, a painting by Charles’ wife, a package from Tim Smit including a family ticket for Eden, a signed book by Rick Stein, two by me (Denis Compton and Village Cricket). For Marie Curie we have some of the same but also a coupon from the Old Quay House, a terrific print of a lion from David Parry.  So fingers crossed for third time lucky and booze, BBQ, PA system and, of course the team. On the one hand the Cornish Crusaders and I definitely have James Turpin of this parish and Phil Johns, once a demon fast bowler for Cornwall and now of the HSBC. But watch this space…

The first of the triumphs was the presentation of my father’s medals and other stuff to the Regimental Museum at the Keep in Dorchester. He had a CVO,DSO, MBE, and MC plus campaign medals, though typically one of the latter turned out to be missing. John and Lizzie Wilsey came, and John accepted the gongs. In public life they are General Sir John and Lady Wilsey which sounds amazingly grand. We also had Dick Hargreaves who is a sprightly ninety and had known my father in Greece in 1945 when he, Dick, was Brigade Major with the Paras and my father was 2 1/c of the 2^nd Battalion, Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry. After the war Dick became a Director of the Savoy Group and the two of them had lunch together in the hotel quite often. When I mentioned this to Kits Browning, he said that “everyone” was a Director of the Savoy Group and his father, who belonged to this club, used to walk across the park from Buckingham Palace or Clarence House and lunch at the Berkeley which was his particular favourite and also part of the group. Anyhow we all thought the Museum was terrific, the chaps in charge had been to a lot of trouble to make us feel welcome and well fed and watered, and generally speaking everyone, at least on the Heald side, left with a warm glow. It was a particular hit with the two small great-grandsons from Miami (and they with everyone else).  When the medals have been rehung and the missing CVO (mislaid in a motel on an American trip!) I will take my mother over on a quiet, private visit. She was pleased by what we reported when we all got back to the Malt House but felt too iffy about actually attending.

From this I went up to London in time for a party at the Australian High Commission on Tuesday evening. John Dauth, the High Commissioner, and Ricky Ponting both spoke (amusingly) and we chatted to both. As Penny says, Ricky will remember every word!! And so, on Thursday, to Lord’s for the Test. The first day of an England versus Australia Test at Lord’s is one of those stunning moments no matter what. I missed my brother James who would normally have been there but, alas, stabs of nostalgia such as this, are increasingly part of life. I thought of Denis Compton and Brian Johsnton, whose lives I write, and who were utterly linked to this place and felt sad but the present was wonderful too. I bumped into Charlie Collingwood and we stood for a while inside the Grace gates waiting for our wives while the world and his wife came past. There was Ronnie Harwood and David and Sylva Marchwood – Charlie and Sylva both opened the bowling for their respective Sherborne schools. Eventually Penny turned up and we somehow managed to find seats in the top of the Tavern Stand. Strauss and Cook had a big opening stand, the Australians bowled like drains but they bounced back and one of the things that helped make the match such fun was the result was in doubt until the final morning. They may not be the best sides in the world but they are competitive.

After that I went on every day and it all merges into an agreeable blur made even more pleasurable by the fact that  that England won after a fantastic final morning with Freddie Flintoff firing on all cylinders and the last five Australian wickets falling before lunch. In between there was much to savour. The Lord’s Test is the prefect combination, as far as I’m concerned, of the social and the sporting. I was on my own on the Friday; with Penny on the Thursday and Saturday; with Alexander and Tristram on the Sunday and with Geoff Trew on the Monday morning. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. There was a lot wrong with the “organization!, unfortunately. At least one member I know went home and watched on TV because he couldn’t find a viewpoint at the ground. Charlie Collingwood joined the queue at just after seven but his wife wasn’t able to get in to the ground until after ten. There is much evidence of corporate greed, of overcrowding, of a general failure to understand the complicated often contrary equation of private club and public arena. Despite this it was a privilege to be there and I hugely enjoyed it.

And so, the following weekend to the final jolly of the trio, which was the wedding of Tristram, the youngest of my children and Beth, his long-term partner, at Hampton Court. There was no rain; bride and groom looked suitably radiant; all four children were present; ceremony went without hitch – even though the driver lost the bride and her father on the way -, speeches were exemplary; and we ended with a thoroughly satisfactory voyage to Richmond and back on the good ship Yarmouth Belle. The only snag was that as we docked at midnight Penny decided to make a speedy get away and was the only person standing as we docked. This manoeuvre was not executed the way Tosh does it on the Fowey Ferry and there was a significant clunk which sent Penny flying through the air and led via excellent and sympathetic medical students and paramedics, to an expensive taxi back into ce
ntral London, and a visit to Dr. Cockshott. He said there was nothing broken but all the connective tissues were torn , there would be extensive bruising, a sling would be a good idea and Penny wouldn’t be right for months rather than weeks. Since then there has been a lot of moaning and yelping.

By and large though we had a wonderful Test, a wonderful wedding and a wonderful medal ceremony. Pity about the charity cricket but three out of four represents a more than acceptable strike rate.

Today as I write this it is overcast, gray and rainy outside, I am transcribing Richard Cobb’s letters to Hugh Trevor-Roper – time-consuming but necessary; fingers are crossed for the next charity match against the Cornish Crusaders on Sunday August 16^th in aid of Marie Curie.Next week I take the train to Wiltshire to see Mama, there are emails, Australia look as if they are going to make a draw of the match at Edgbaston, and life is almost back to normal. Flintoff is coming back on. It’s the last gasp. 61 overs left. A china clay ship has just chugged in to harbour. I must phone Boxclever and hope there is someone there to answer the phone. Clarke is thirty two not out. The lead is ninety…What about Swan going over the wicket?

Over the last few weeks I have been sending out the following letter in my exalted capacity as President of the Fowey Cricket Club:

“This is just to let you know that we are planning two charity cricket matches here this summer.

The first is set for Wednesday July 29^th and will be the President of Fowey’s XI v the Cornish Choughs. This one will be in aid of the Cornish Association for the Blind.

The second is to take place on Sunday August 16^th and will be the President of Fowey’s XI v the Cornish Crusaders. This will be in aid of  Marie Curie Cancer Care. This is at the very beginning of Regatta Week.

We’d love to see you at either or both of these games. Admission this year is free. We hope to open around noon and start play at 2pm continuing till we have a result which we hope will be about 7pm. We’re hoping to have a BBQ, drinks and music before play and a really interesting raffle during the (cream!) tea break. Last year, incidentally, we managed to raise over £1100 for Marie Curie without a ball being bowled. (I have a ghastly vision of managing a game this year but raising less money).

That’s it really. There should be more, regular info on various web-sites, in the press and so on. I’d love to see you but if you can’t make it a cheque to either or each charity would be great.”

It’s raining as I look out across the river and I am filled with dread that our games will be rained on. On TV I have just been watching a singularly unconvincing schools minister saying that all school leavers who want to will be able to attend university and the experience will be affordable and meaningful. Now a reporter is talking about BT’s new scheme to lay off workers on a temporary basis on massively reduced wages. I think of last week when I rang a BT line and spent several minutes answering auomatically generated questions (recorded queries which are apparently not the fault of an identifiable person).  At the end of a series of absurd games involving multiple choice – “If you require X press one; if you require Y press two…” and so on, I was given a new phone number to call. I eventually got a human being who spent an age asking me to unplug everything and take it to bits. In the end I gave up and fled to a meeting for which I was now running late.

So yes I seem to have become quintessentially grumpy and I feel I am assailed at almost every turn by incompetence masquerading as new, high, cutting-edge technology. Meanwhile I am sending out old fashioned letters about old-fashioned cricket matches. Rather fun actually. The idea of raising money for worthwhile causes while doing something enjoyable seems excellent.

Mind you, it doesn’t just happen. This morning I had a session with Charles Whitehead, a keen cricket man, and the treasurer of the Blind. He had had some eye-catching posters printed and I said I would try to distribute them round town; I think and hope Matty will do the drink and Daniel the BBQ; Charles’ wife and friends will do tea with help from Penny; the raffle looks in good shape; do we have a public address system? And so on. I rather enjoy it all but I suppose I should be working on books and/ or reviews- or even, heaven forfend, putting my feet up. I must email Mark Bennetts, the secretary of the club; we need a scorer and two umpires; and balls. As, I say, it doesn’t just happen, but it’s very rewarding to help MAKE it happen.We think we have covered all the bases but, alas, God can easily get in the way: rain, sprained ankles are obvious unpredictables but there are others. I don’t know what they are but I’m pretty sure I will find out.

Last week I was at the Malt House visiting my aged Mama. On Monday we drove over to Wells Cathedral to see the place my brother loved so much and to have a brief word with his friend, the Precentor Patrick Woodhouse. It was a hot day and my Ma found it physically gruelling as well as mentally traumatic. She is, as she reminds me, from time to time, very old (88) and still living on her own in her own house. This is made possible by squads of well-disposed paid and unpaid helpers but there are as many unpredictables as there are in organizing charity cricket matches. I was reminded of this when she asked if I could get some Brillopads when I went shopping. The terrific village shop in Ludwell was able to provide a pack of these things which strike me as dated in the same way as Brylcreem or Grapenuts. I associate the, wrongly obviously, with the fifties.For the uninitiated they are wire-wool briquettes impregnated with some kind of soap. I paid cash while also buying some food for our lunch but I didn’t ask for a receipt. I was suddenly reminded of the furore over MP’s expenses and the fuss over moat-cleaning, duck-house purchase and so on. “MP claims for Brillopads”, I fantasized, “No receipts provided.” I know this is silly but I can’t help feeling that much of this long-running story is also fantastically silly and possibly wholly unfair. There but for the grace of God go me and my Mum’s Brillopads.

I also saw the accountant on my visit East of the Tamar. This was, as always, personally agreeable but professionally chastening. We didn’t get down to as much detail as Brillopads though I did have to explain some expenses from the Scottish cricket association as well as what exactly I was doing in some foreign part on a now distant and half-forgotten day. More worryingly I was told how much I had earned in the past year and despite feeling that I had been working harder than ever I discovered, as I had feared, that my income was significantly lower than it had been in earlier years. I’m afraid this is a not uncommon experience in these difficult times. It was still salutary though and none the less for being, I suspect, quite widespread. Interesting. If you are going to hell in a handcart does it make any difference if the handcart is packed with other people?  Is it hell that one dreads – or loneliness? Discuss.

Enough of such maudlin thoughts. I got a letter from the Biographical Centre in whichever Carolina
does these things and the welcome news is that I have been awarded a Gold Medal for Wales. I don’t really understand this. Gold Medals, well, why not? But Wales? I have no Welsh blood despite my mother’s maiden name (Vaughan). Some of my best friends are Welsh but even so.

And cricket. Not just the charity stuff which is likely to prove nerve-wracking, but an Ashes Test Match at Lord’s. Bliss. I am still a member of MCC and I will go every day. I shall take Penny on the first day and the Saturday. I shall take my two sons on the Sunday and my friend Geoff on the final day. Oh frabjous days! Maybe we’ll even win. Do I care? Not as much as perhaps I should. England‘s best player is a South African which diminishes any pleasure I might get from an “English” victory though it might improve the occasion and particularly the play. My daughters are coming over from the USA and New Zealand. A son is getting married at the end of the month. In circumstances such as these how can one be concerned about Brillopads?

Meanwhile I intend to go to the International Crime Writers Conference in Oklahoma next June; and before that I have been asked to speak in such elusive but alluring sounding places as Savannah and Chatanooga. This prospect reduces the spectre of Brillopads even more. There is a lot to be glum about but even more reason for congratulating oneself on one’s luck.

I don’t dream much or if I do I don’t remember them but the other night I dreamt I was back on a national paper, probably the old broadsheet Daily Express and I was instructed by the features editor to go to some high street somewhere and investigate a new pub which had just opened. It was called the Obama.

            I don’t know whether or not it replaced The Garibaldi or the Duke of York and I’m afraid I woke up before I got there but it was interestingly vivid and set me thinking in all sorts of ways. First of all, of course, there is, as far as I know, no such pub. I think this is a pity because the name has a certain resonance about it and I like the idea of saying to someone. “See you in the snug at the Obama for just the one” or something similar.

            Anyway it was just a dream and as far as I know there is no pub opening called the Obama. On the whole, in real life,  it seems pubs are closing, and for a variety of reasons this particular aspect of our national life is diminishing. If there were to be such a pub-opening the Daily Express wouldn’t have any feature writers to go out and report on it. Nor any reporters. The days when the editor, Derek Marks, said “There is no finer thing for a man to be than a reporter on the Daily Express”  (note the sexism also unacceptable today) are long gone. Today’s papers would have endless commentators ready to tell us what to think about the Obama. But no-one to tell us what was actually happening on the spot. Of this I was reminded by the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of the Guardian’s media page which looked back on the quaint 1980s when there were hardly any columnists and papers wasted a lot of time on reporting something called news. Nowadays a PR agency would issue a press release and that would be the basis of the column.

            As I said, it was just a dream and I am certainly not going to say that newspapers were better in the old days. On the other hand they were very different. Very different. Likewise life. I am certainly not going to fall into the trap of shaking my head and saying in a fogeyish way that the old days were better but no-one can deny they were not the same. I am told, incidentally, by Simon Hoggart in my paper, that the minute I am tempted to say that the old days were better I should say the single word “dentistry”. To which I would only respond that in the last year or so I have twice had excruciating tooth-ache but can’t remember having such a thing in the past. Age, I suppose, but I’m not so convinced that dentistry has improved as much as Simon would have us believe.

            I suppose I don’t need dreams to convince myself or anyone else that everything has changed. Life is not the same. Everything is different. Even dentistry. This is a given, although I think the pace of change has been extraordinarily fast recently. I’m more intrigued by the question of whether or not life has improved. Age naturally makes us conservative because we are nervous of unfamiliarity and we become increasingly bad at dealing with innovation. Novelty tends to perplex us. I didn’t particularly like nor sympathise with the pipe-smoking, tweed-jacketed, essentially male dominated, deferential, unquestioning world in which I grew up, but it IS the world in which I grew up and if only for that reason I feel/felt  comfortable with it. The food was revolting, the religion-filled but otherwise empty Sunday was pretty grim, the pervasive attitudes were smug and old-fashioned but they were what I was used to and for that reason I felt and feel safe with them.

            Anyway I had this dream. Much more mundane than Martin Luther King’s but, in a way, more interesting. Quite apart from all the other issues raised I am simply not aware of a pub called The Obama. I think there should be such a thing. I’d like to see it debated. In my dreams…

            In real life I suppose the most interesting achievement was seeing a double-page spread under my bye-line in the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph. It was about Donna Leon, the American crime novelist I interviewed in Venice.  I also had an obit of Hugh van Es in the Guardian. And a book review in the Tablet. And I think we’re going to do Richard Cobb’s letters to Hugh Trevor-Roper as a single volume; and I plug on with Jardine and with Tom Braun. I am determined to see the return of Bognor in hard covers. So busy, busy, but in a slightly depressing way my heart isn’t in it as much as it was. I would like to say it’s because I think the contemporary conventional media has lost the plot. This, I am told, I must not say even if I believe it to be true.

Earlier this week I took the train up to Wiltshire to see my Mama, oversee the delivery of the “new” car and generally take stock. On the way home I thought, somewhere around Newton Abbot at about 6.30 pm that I might have a glass of wine and a peanut or two. I was travelling on a Cross Country train from Glasgow and there was no announcement about catering. However I asked the “train manager” if there was a buffet on board and he smiled sweetly and said it was in the next coach. I walked through and was confronted by locked doors. However my new friend was close behind so he got out his keys and opened up to reveal a rather sheepish individual who was taking stock or whatever but in any case closing down. I asked if they would be re-opening and was told, rather truculently I thought, that they no longer provided food and drink in Cornwall.

            This seemed a powerful metaphor for our condition. No food and drink in Cornwall. There is a widespread school of metropolitan thought that believes that Cornwall is beyond civilization and doesn’t DESERVE food and drink. This is sometimes echoed by the Cornish. When I mentioned my dispiriting experience to one local he said ‘Good’. As far as he was concerned the more cut off we are the better.

            n>For me, of course, it’s slightly different. I need to work and counter the idea that because I live in Cornwall it doesn’t mean that I am dead or retired. This is a depressingly widespread assumption and even people who have lived here and are well-disposed emphasise the problems. In fact it is possible to go to and from London quite cheaply by train and the sleeper leaves at midnight and gets in, in time for breakfast. There is also the usual problem with people who have regular and predictable incomes. Someone actually said that I should be rigorous about London visits and not go unless the resulting income doesn’t at least match the outgoings. However, as only freelances really understand, it doesn’t work like that. For instance I have just received invitations to the AGM and summer party of the Royal Society of Literature and a books and arts party from the Editor of the Tablet. Neither will guarantee income but I really ought to show my face. Conversely if I don’t go there will be those who shrug and say that I am retired or dead as I obviously live in Cornwall and don’t cross the Tamar. Which I’m afraid is why so many people live in or much nearer London.

            Anyway this morning I walked down to Readymoney Cove, up through the woods and along the cliffs. It was a beautiful sunny day, sky was blue, sea likewise and all in all another timely reminder of why one lives in Cornwall and why one is lucky to do so. Then on Bank Holiday, Penny and I went to Plymouth and sailed out into the sound on a rackety old ferry (well she FELT like a rackety old ferry even if she was at the cutting edge of ferrydom) in order to see off Mervyn Wheatley and his fellow-competitors on the Solo Transatlantic Yacht Race to Newport, Rhode Island. Mervyn and I once shared a study at school and here we were half a century on in our respective vessels on Plymouth Sound, attended by the Duke of Edinburgh no less, and celebrating an exercise of sublime pointlessness. I confess I was consumed with admiration. I remember Mervyn boxing for the school. He admitted the other day that he had never actually won a match, though he had never lost one either. His technique was simple. He simply stood in the ring and looked terrifying. His opponent danced around in a poncey way ducking and weaving while Mervyn remained motionless. If someone was foolish enough to get within range he hit them and they fell over. Few were that stupid.

            I mentioned this to a fellow passenger on the boat who gave the impression that he had served in the Royal Marines with Mervyn and he looked thoughtful and said he got the impression that Mervyn could still look after himself. Indeed he did, standing at the back of his yacht, much as he done in the school boxing ring all those years ago as the band played Colonel Bogey on his loudspeaker system. He has a bath on his yacht – a fact I noted with further admiration. Anyway the whole apparition and in particular my one-time study-mate filled me with ludicrous pride and elation.

Daft bugger, but rather magnificent.

Not enough of that around these days of MP’s expenses and credit crunch. I am delighted to say that in mid-October, however, I will be delivering a long paper on crime writing at the University of Antwerp. I am much looking forward to it, indeed I regard the challenge as rather wonderful and my equivalent, in its much quieter but perhaps more cerebral way, of taking part in the single-handed transatlantic sailing race. The prospect cheers me up no end. Life in the old thing yet, carpe diem and all that. As the CO said in Beyond the Fringe , we need gestures like this.

Futile maybe, but essential, admirable and above all enormous fun.

            The woods on my walk the other day were an absolute riot of primroses, bluebells and wild garlic and made my feel positively fotherington-thomas-like. Hello flowers, hello, sun, hello spring! I don’t know really why one bothers to go anywhere else especially at this time of year when everything except the morning paper seems to be full of blossom and hope. The organic vegetable people who send us boxes of delicious, muddy food, say that this is a better-than-usual spring but they have also just acquired a French farm in order to bridge the apparently usual six week hiatus in the British organic vedgie scene. This comes around now and represents the gap between the last of year’s sowing and the first of next. Real-life green shoots all round and maybe it’s OK to feel a bit like fotherington-thomas.

            I spent a week of the most glorious weather in the beautiful city of Oxford which was looking particularly resplendent – all glowing burnished yellow walls and luscious green lawns. Unfortunately, however, much of my time was passed in libraries of one sort or another. These, while admirable in their way, are not the most appropriate places to while away some of the few bright days of the British year. My main objectives were the letters of my friend and former tutor Richard Cobb. At their best these are wonderful. My favourites on this visit were ones in the Merton College Library to two other historians of the French Revolution, John Roberts who was Warden of Merton (and once when Master of the Postmasters at a party of his threw me over his shoulder when I questioned his qualifications for a Judo black belt) and John Bromley, who was Roberts’ tutor at Keble College. John Roberts is dead now but has written a glowing encomium about the Bromley papers. My favourites among these caches were a short one recalling the visit of Cosmo Gordon Lang when college visitor and Archbishop of Canterbury – the two go together! – which he wrote to John Roberts and two to Bromley, one describing Richard’s first visit to India, which he adored, and the other about a stay in a public ward at the Royal Free Hospital following an alcohol-assisted fall and limb breakage. All three are, I believe, classics.

            My other task was to meet Thomas/Tom Braun’s brother, Christopher, to further our plans for a collection of  T’s writings, particularly his verses, some of which appeared in the Oxford Magazine. These too are wonderful. The light stuff strikes me as similar and just as good as A.P. Herbert and the translations particularly from German and Greek strike me as very fine and, of course, a lot more serious. I was very fond of the writer, who died tragically after a car crash last year, as well as being in some awe of his erudition and scholarship. He could evidently be an uncomfortable colleague – he was a Fellow of Merton College for most of his adult life – and sadly never published a book, but he always struck me as being a quintessential Oxbridge don of the very best sort. I fear people like him, if there are any, are going to become the victims of progress and efficiency. But then I have just been reading the autobiography of a Corinthian scholar and cricketer, R.C. Robertson-Glasgow who expressed similar apprehensions more than six decades ago. I suspect elderly fuddy-duddies have been similarly worried for centuries and mercifully the fears are never entirely realized.

            I was, however, depressed to read a piece in Saturday’s Guardian by Ian Jack saying, in effect, that the days of the professional writer were over. According to him it had been a relatively short period in any case and historically authors were amateurs or at least part-time professionals. Nowadays the internet (and blogs such as this) are the prerogative of all and the days when people like him and me could base their whole lives on writing  are over.

            I was reminded of a piece I wrote about Bristol in the Spectator a few months ago. I recalled that in the 1970s my father’s last job was working with WD and HO Wills, the Bristol based tobacco company. They were immense and apparently indestructible. Now, however, although they still pay my  mother a pension from their Imperial Tobacco office people in England have virtually kicked the smoking habit and the firm which once permeated the whole of Bristol society has ceased to exist in any recognizable sense. A few decades earlier my mother’s family owned a company based in the small Somerset town of Martock – maybe it’s a large village, I’m not sure. Then quite suddenly people in this country stopped wearing gloves. The company no longer exists.

            At the time of my father’s death I had just left the Daily Express and had my first book published by Hutchinson. Both the paper and the publisher still exist but they have changed beyond real recognition and Ian Jack is writing an article saying that the trade or profession that I entered all those years ago as an optimistic young graduate has in effect become no longer cable of supporting life.

            Well, I suppose life changes all the time and this is part of its appeal. It is extraordinary, however, that my family have been intimately involved in three facets of British life that have declined so absolutely. Glove-wearing, and smoking cigarettes, and producing words on paper have all gone, are going or, depending on one’s point of view, about to go. It is also a fact of life, I believe, that as one gets older one is less comfortable with change and unfamiliarity. So I feel uneasy and threatened for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the alleged credit crunch or pig flu.

            Looking back over the last month I see that it began with a few days in London, a coffee with the re-incarnated books supreme at the Daily Telegraph, a tour of Godolphin House with the local branch of the Art Fund and a visit from friends from Australia. I am keen to make a little pilgrimage in my father’s foot-steps  during World War Two when he won a Military Cross in the landings at Salerno and fought his way up Italy until being halted on the Gothic Line where he won an immediate Distinguished Service Order. Life was rather different then and maybe one shouldn’t look back to distant days. I feel, however, that this is something that should be done. I have started planning; have a reading list; am talking to Raleigh Trevelyan who was at Anzio where my uncle was killed and who wrote about it all; am about to write to Professor Amedeo Montemaggi, the leading authority on the battles of those days. And so on.

            So watch this space.

            Meanwhile I shall go for a walk and enjoy the wild garlic and the wrong sort of blue-bell which looks, from a distance, much the same as the right sort, and has the desired effect of lifting the spirits no end.

            And Krystian Zimerman is playing Schubert as I type.

            Life can’t be wholly horrible.

            Outside, yachts are sailing out to sea and inside I shall now proceed to the relevant web-site and try to post this blog.

            Visiting Scotland was probably the high spot of the last two weeks. The purpose of the visit was to address the Cricket Society of Scotland’s branches in Edinburgh and Glasgow. This occasioned much mirth among my Sassenach friends although my researches in to the life of Douglas Jardine for my Methuen book on his MCC tour of India in 1933/4 suggests that the Scot may have been the best captain England ever had.

            We flew up from Exeter by Flybe which was incredibly quick and painless and far cheaper than the train which trundles all the way from Par, ten minutes from home, and ends up in Waverley Station within walking distance of the New Club where we stayed. I don’t see how we can possibly reduce carbon emissions and so on when flying is so cheap and convenient and rail travel so uncomfortable and expensive.

            Edinburgh was warm and almost balmy compared with the frozen south but that changed on the Sunday night when the snow fell and the city was carpeted in white stuff. As before I was struck by the difference between the two places. We spent the Monday in Glasgow, arriving later than hoped because two trains were cancelled because of unexpected and apparently unaccustomed cold. The first time I visited I was walking down a street when a completely strange woman at a bus-stop handed me the baby she was carrying, lit a fag took two deep sucks and accepted the baby back with a smile and thank-you. Edinburgh by contrast has always seemed polite but even though I understand more of what people say, slightly more distant.

            Anyway we saw a lot of old friends in Edinburgh, visited a rather unsatisfactory Jean Muir exhibition in the Museum and went to the wonderful Art Galleries which used to be run by Sir Timothy Clifford whom I remember as a not very impressive member of my platoon struggling across the Mendips during a blizzard while he and a future banker called Jonathan Long tried unsuccessfully to open a tin of spam. As always I was struck by the profusion of beautiful late Georgian or early Victorian terraces, crescents and circuses. How on earth can there be so many elegant residences in such a moderately small city?

            The talks both seemed to go fine. The audiences seemed friendly and knowledgeable in both places and in Glasgow we sold so many books that we actually ran out of “Village Cricket” which was gratifying. I have a sort of theory that there is always someone in an audience who knows more about your subject than you do yourself, no matter what it is. My prime example was talking to the scarily erudite Hampshire Cricket Society some years ago and thinking I would give them some Italian cricket as I had just returned from reporting the finals of the Italian six-a-side cricket competition in Cesenatico and I thought that even the HCS would be relatively ignorant about this. They clapped dutifully when I’d finished but the first questioner began his remarks with “When I was keeping wicket for Bologna last year…” Much the same happened in Glasgow. I had said how one wartime England team was the best ever as it had Denis Compton on one wing and Stanley Matthews on the other. One of the audience got up and admitted that it wasn’t a bad team but not as good as the Scottish team they played at Hampden Park and which beat them. He added, for good measure, that he knew because he was there. Collapse, in my case of stout party.   He was extremely nice about it but I felt suitably deflated, as nearly always, and it just goes to prove my point. Moral; never assume!

            The whole brief excursion was a wonderful opportunity to renew old acquaintances of all kinds as well as making new ones. I had a jolly lunch in Glasgow with an ex-Daily Express photographer, and suggested in a vague way, that we should collaborate (presumptuously in my case) on a Glasgow/Edinburgh picture book called “A Tale of Two Cities” which Canongate could publish for a vast fortune. I somehow know it will never happen and that it will be done instead by someone like Ian Rankin or Alexander McCall Smith. Nevertheless it was a very merry lunch and we agreed that we had been very lucky to work together on Fleet Street in the last of the glory days. We then went and looked at the once magnificent Black Lubianka which had once housed the Scottish Daily Express and was just up the road from the Café Gandolfi. It looked abandoned and neglected and we felt both sad and triumphant. Well, I did.

            Actually we seem to have been away a lot and I haven’t had my nose at the keyboard/grindstone in the way I should. Age and the promise of a pension perhaps. The month began in London immediately after Tom Braun’s memorial and a lecture by the Chichele Professor of War in Oxford. As a result I seem to be helping Tom’s brother Christopher with a slim volume which should include Tom’s brilliantly witty occasional verses. The first Monday of the month I was in Putney and it snowed completely crippling the capital. Even the local cinema was closed. Next day we were stuck for about half an hour on Putney Bridge in a tube but still managed an enjoyable lunch at the Frontline Club with the travel writer, Peter Hughes. We agreed, quaffing wine and contemplating the death of friends and relations, that spending our way out of the recession was the way to go.

After Edinburgh there was a trip to stay with my Mama punctuated in the middle with a weekend in London and an overnight in Swanage to discuss the return of Simon Bognor with the writer, Jeremy Paul. Bognor’s return got an airing in the Times, together with my plans for a royal anniversary book, on my birthday in January and I sent Jeremy my newish Bognor short story, Harry’s Beard (in honour of the great HRF Keating) and my complete Spain-based novel. It was an enjoyable visit and productive too, I think. The on-dit is that nobody wants crime novels such as my Bognor’s return but we both agreed that the on-dit was mistaken and ridiculous. At least I think we did. We shall see but my view, shared I think by Jeremy, is that wit, style and a waspish sense of “contra mundum” are exactly what is needed in these dumbed-down, credit-crunched times.

London was interesting as always. I saw “Doubt” which I enjoyed very much, and the new Woody Allen which I also enjoyed and “Slumdog Millionaire” in which I was disappointed perhaps due in part to the hype. We also tried “Terroirs” and Thomasina Mier’s Mexican place in Covent Garden, Wahaca. I thought both were really good.  The proprietor at Terroirs had an MBA from Montpellier and was brilliant at dealing with Penny when she sent her Prosecco back because it was cloudy. He brought a new glass without argument but explained that the cloudy glass was perfectly OK but due to the fact that the wine was organic it looked a little murky That was all. In other words he accepted that as the customer she was entitled to change things but that didn’t mean to say that he was in any way at fault. Admirable I thought.

The last blog was a bit late being posted because I keep getting it all wrong and the instructions are in my view gratuitously misleading. Apparently I should use “Write Entry” not “Create New Blog”. As the computer whiz is in India for six weeks it was difficult to get right though he was able to sort it out from his hammock slung between a couple of palm trees in Kerala or something like that. Then it was back to P.G. Wodehouse. Good for him. Admirably unlike Sir Fred the pension and his fellow garagistes.

The confusion made me wonder not for the first time why I do this blog. The only real answer is that it – or the opportunity – exists, and most people, though not all, seem to quite like it. My own belief (not shared by everyone) is that the more honest the better. And if in the process you seem to be whingeing then tant pis. Which is why I finish by saying that I have complained to as many people as possible because on returning to Tisbury station and paying £9 in parking fees to a ticket office man who was very much not there  when I left on Saturday morning I found a parking ticket and a demand for £50. Evidently my explanatory note left on the windscreen counted for nothing; nor the fact that the station was unmanned when I left .

In my letter of protest I said that I thought this was evidence of incompetence and greed. As it happens I believe that these two things are now pervasive and endemic – vide Sir Fred and others. Saying so is evidence of grumpy old mannishness and my chronic pensionability. Bad PR, very. To which I’m inclined to shrug and say that I feel like that and if I feel like that I don’t see why I shouldn’t say so. I do feel assailled by incompetence and greed and if that makes me a grumpy old man I think I’m grumpy and old enough to say what I like.

Besides which I think I’m right.