You ain’t seen nothing yet, sunshine, so do me a favour and fuck nostalgia

I’ve not posted here for a while and feel my crown slipping, so I thought I might add a few anecdotes about newspapers and folk I have known on newspapers to keep the pot boiling.

While I was working in Birmingham, I was working as a sub-editor on the Evening Mail, but I made a friend of a guy I met while working subbing shifts on the morning newspaper, the Birmingham Post, which as it appears in the morning is subbed and produced the night before. (The Mail, an evening paper, is subbed and produced during the day — please keep up.)

Nigel had a friend who I later met and about whom I remember little except his ancestry and the short tale I am about to relate. The friend, who I now seem to remember was called Ben Travers, was the grandson of another Ben Travers, a playwright known for writing farces.

Nigel and Ben (the younger Travers) had worked together as reporters on a weekly in (I think) Cheshire and were there when a Daily Express reporter was killed in an IRA. I don’t know which one and a brief web search, a brief and superficial web search, as thrown up nothing. Ben somehow got wind that the Express reporter was not just a general news reporter but worked on the paper’s gossip column, still known in those days as William Hickey. So he rang them up.

‘I hear one of your reporters has been killed and you have a vacancy,’ he asked when he got through to the William Hickey editor, one (again I think) Ross Benson. Wikipedia says Benson was ‘a reporter for William Hickey’ not the editor, but as we used to say (or rather as I heard rather than said myself) don’t let a couple of facts stand in the way of a good story.

Benson (or whoever was the editor at the time) said, yes, you’r right and when Ben informed him he would like to be considered to fill the vacancy, asked him go down to London for interview. That interview consisted of a night on the piss and just one question: ‘Tell, me Ben,’ said Benson (or whoever was the William Hickey editor at the time), ‘would you be prepared to do the dirty on your friends?’.

‘Yes,’ Ben told him. And it was the right answer, because Ben was given the job. Whether or not he really would have been prepared to do the dirty on any friends or, more to the point, whether he actually did do the dirty on friends I have no idea. But it was the right answer.

I met Ben once, perhaps twice, in the early 1990s while I was living in London working shifts wherever I got find shifts, which wasn’t difficult. I was quite organised and used to ring around until my weekly diary was filled, and it was my proud boast then that I never had a day off I didn’t want. Mind unless you totally screwed up — and I never totally screwed up — and papers liked the cut of your jib, in time you became ‘a regular’ which helped a lot.

(I was in London working shifts for the nationals for five years — when I married and moved to Cornwall in 1995, I only worked shifts for the Daily Mail and the Sunday Express — that I finally learned the wisdom of keeping your mouth shut, as in ‘you don’t always have to speak your mind’. I was never shy about speaking out, ever, but I now learned that you weren’t always obliged to speak out. Sometimes it was useful to adopt a lower profile.

. . .

My second anecdote involves on Jeff S. I shan’t give his full name — see above where I allude to the virtue of occasional discretion — but I have, in a way nominally, known Jeff for about almost 40 years. When I first worked on the Evening Mail as a news sub-editor, Jeff was working as a sub-editor on, I think, the Sunday Mercury.

I didn’t quite know him well then, but I bumped into him again when I started working shifts on the Daily Mail features sub-editing desk and knew him for many years after. By the way, I should add, because I hate to give the wrong impression, that I was almost 41 when I worked my first shift on the Mail and was far too old (and possibly not a good enough sub) to be considered for a full-time job on the desk. And although I subsequently went on to work for the Mail on that same desk for the next 28 years, every day when I turned up I was ‘a casual’ and a sub hired by the day — literally ‘hack’ derived from a ‘hackney carriage’ a vehicle hire by the day.

That might not sound too complimentary but given that as ‘a casual’ you were hired and worked one night on The Times, the next on the Mail, the next on the Independent, the next on the Sun etc and had to be able to sub in the style of that paper, and furthermore if being ‘a hack’ means you were versatile enough to carry it off, I would be proud to be described as ‘a hack’. Sadly, as far as I know no one has done so. Oh well. Perhaps they were out of compliments.

Anyway, Jeff

. . .

While Jeff was beavering away on the Sunday Mercury, he, like many of his colleagues was hoping to land ‘a job in London’ and had arranged to work a week’s worth of shifts somewhere or other in London to land such a job. London money was always better as in higher, though I assume kids from ‘the provinces’ never realised that London prices and rents were also always higher which might have accounted for the higher wages.

Anyway Jeff landed his week’s worth of shifts and booked a week off of annual leave, telling his boss — in the odd belief that his boss would not be too chuffed to know he was working shifts in London with a view to getting a

better job (why did we ever think that, Pete, they didn’t give a fuck?) — that he was off for a week in Saudi Arabia where his father, then working for the RAF, was currently stationed.

He worked wherever he worked in London for a week, then returned to Birmingham at the weekend. At some point it occurred to him that as he was supposed to have been in sunny Saudi Arabia for a week he would be expected to show a slight tan.

The trouble was that he was still as pale as a lump of Cheshire cheese. So he went to a chemist’s and bought himself some tanning lotion which he then applied. But the following morning the lotion did not seem to have done the trick and he panicked a little and decided to apply the lotion again. He did, and he woke up the morning he was due back at work a bright orange colour. And that was how he went to work. What they said when they saw him I don’t know.

. . .

Eventually, Jeff moved to London in the 1980s to work shifts much as I did in the 1990s. Before Fleet Street got digital, efficient, binary and I don’t know what else and pretty much all the papers were based in Fleet Street, some casuals (as those working casual shifts were called) managed a trick of working parallel shifts, that is working a shift on one paper while working a shift on another paper just up the road (the Mail, the Express, the Sun and the Telegraph were all within a stone’s throw of each other).

The trick was to turn up at one paper, make your presence known, sling your jacket over chair (presumably as far away from the main desk as possible), then pretty smartish leave the premises — the jacket staying behind, of course — to turn up to your other shift. Then for the next six or seven hours it was just a question of commuting between the two papers for whom you were working shifts. No one will have noticed because if you weren’t at your desk, it would have been assumed you had gone to the loo or the library or the canteen. I never tried it and here I am simply retelling the story of what Jeff did.

. . .

I know the rules of nostalgia oblige us to pretend that ‘fings ain’t what they used to be’ but that is nonsense. Eccentricity is not only not a purely British trait but is universal, but it is also timeless and you will find as many examples of outright eccentricity in 2020 as you would have found 20 or 30 or 50 years ago. There will never be a shortage of nutters.

I get very impatient with all folk who regard the past through rose-tinted spectacles, and when, for example, they bemoan the passing of ‘the good old days’, I always ask whether those would be ‘the good old days’ when you could be sacked and thus penniless at a moment’s notice, when if you didn’t have any money illness spelled complete penury, when catching tuberculosis was a daily risk and when being forced to sell you brother into male prostitution was not such a bad idea if it helped save a family of 12 from starvation.

So further examples of tragic deprivation in the past and why we must can be found on The Official Labour Party Guide To 100 Years Of Tory Inhumanity.

So to cut a long story short future generations can look forward to any number of extraordinarily funny comedians, very talented actors, writers, directors, footballers and painters and, of course, outrageously eccentric hacks.

Does Britain want to die of liver cancer or bowel cancer? Neither, as it happens, but that is our choice tomorrow when we go to the polls

It will be of little interest to anyone living outside the Western Hemisphere because many living there have other concerns (and however much we Westerners like to think we are at the centre of the world, the message has still to get to the further reaches of the globe) but tomorrow we here in Old Blighty will troop to our nearest polling station to cast our vote as to who should be in the next government.

We don’t actually vote for a party but a local chap or chappess under an antiquated system called ‘first past the post’ with which most of you will be familiar if you ever watch horse racing on television or athletics. In these and other sports (is horse racing a sport?) whoever passes the winning post soonest after the starting pistol has been fired has won the race. That makes sense of course if you are racing your horse against other horses or yourself against other athletes. But to the way of thinking of some of us — and that obviously includes me — it makes no sense whatsoever if you are trying to put in place a parliament which broadly represents the mood of the country.

This is where I might get a little muddled if I’m not careful but you need not: the parliament is made of all those who win the election in their constituency, that is who metaphorically care ‘first past the post’. So if A wins 10 votes, B wins 9 votes and C wins 3 votes, A is elected to parliament. More realistically if A wins 10,002 votes, B wins 10,001 and C (usually a Lib Dem) wins 3 votes, A is elected. He might have won only 1 vote more than B, but that’s first past the post. And it is a shite system. Complete cack.

I’m rather stupidly talking about a system with which you might all be familiar, although the chances are that you live in a country which long ago left the 17th century and has adopted a system of proportional representation. But it is often worthwhile going back to basics, especially if, like me, you are trying to demonstrate quite how unfair a long-accepted process is.

Under our system — the first past the post system — if the party to which A belongs sees its more of its candidates win in more constituencies than the party to which B belongs, it will have the most members of parliament and can form the government. That is true whether or not its candidates beat their opponents hollow or whether in each constituency each A candidate won merely 1 vote more than B. That is, of course, theoretical, but it does highlight the basic flaw in the whole system.

Here in Britain we have 650 odd constituencies. It is theoretically possible (though this would never happen) that in each constituency the candidate belonging to party A could win just 1 vote more than the candidate belonging to party B. So, overall, the A party candidates would win a national total of (650 x 10,002) 6,501,300 votes and, overall, the B party candidates would win ‘just’ (650 x 10,001) 6,500,650 votes — just 650 fewer votes. That means the parliament would be made up of 650 A party candidates and no B party candidates, even though overall the A party was supported by just 650 more voters out of a total of 13,001,950. That is just 0.005% of the total number of voters.

OK, these are hypothetical figures and the reality is very different, but crucially and importantly the principles underpinning them still stand. And party A would have complete freedom to bring in what ever laws it wanted and there would be fuck all party B could do about it.

Party A might, for example, have stood on a manifesto that ‘as times are hard, couples can have only two children and if a third child is born to a couple, it will be killed at birth. (NB If you think that is far too way out an example, a similar principle existed in China until about 40 years ago. To stem overpopulation because of then scant resources, couples were only allowed to have one child. Because male children were economically ‘more valuable’, female babies were somehow discarded at birth. The upshot was, of course, that for many years China began to have far fewer women than men. In practice it wasn’t quite as simple, and there were ways to get around the policy, but broadly that is what was happening.)

So — in theory — party A could bring in a law ensuring that all third children born were killed at birth even though just under half of all voters might be dead against it.

But I think by now you get my point. In sum: first past the post has never, does never and will never help to elect a parliament which is in any way representative of what the a country’s voters want. But it is what we are still stuck with here in Britain.

. . .

That aside, of course, things are looking really, really dire. Although several parties are putting up candidates, the choice is still between a moron on one side and an idiot on the other. And this isn’t just me sounding off: Britain — what’s the cliche? ‘The cradle of democracy’ — really is faced with Hobson’s choice. And the country really does

not know what to do. We are stymied. It’s like being asked whether you would prefer to die of liver cancer or bowel cancer.

I have place several bets with Ladbrokes and hope and pray we will get a hung parliament. The problem with that, though, is that hung parliaments are trouble. If it did come about — which I’m bloody hoping for! — this country is faced with weeks, possibly months, of horse trading as the parties try to get together to form a coalition government.

If the Tories don’t get a majority — and here’s hoping they don’t, did you get that? — they are right out of the window as no-one, not even the tarts from the DUP would choose to get into bed with them. The next alternative would be a Labour/Lib Dem/SNP coalition or, at least, attempts to form one.

The hurdle that venture would have to overcome is that Labour, which would have by far the most MPs elected and would thus insist it is the senior party in any coalition, is lead by the idiot (or moron — I’ve lost track) and the Lib Dems and SNP would refuse point-blank to have him as PM. So if Labour did want to get into government as part of the coalition they would have to ditch that leader. And would that happen without a hitch? Is the Pope getting married next week?

There would be chaos, chaos, chaos — and this is what I am hoping for! Christ, things are bad here in ‘the cradle of democracy’, which come to think of it is not Britain but Greece. Britain had the ‘mother of all parliaments’. Sorry about that, but I can’t be arsed to correct the reference above, so (it’s time for the Champions League football on television) go hang. If, later, I have time and the inclination, I shall correct it. if not, still go hang.

Letter (email) to my daughter

By chance, I came across this, a ‘letter’ (actually an email) to my daughter when she was at the end of her first year at university and unhappy in the course she was in. Because she was born in August, she was young for her year. At the time (about May, 2014) I was on holiday in Mallorca and had stopped off for a lager and a cigar at a café somewhere or other of the inland towns. I had with me my works laptop (I can’t think why but I did). My daughter messaged me because she was in a complete tizzy about whether even to carry on with her uni course or not and was very unhappy. About 1,300 miles away I was trying to advise her and cheer her up. This is the email I sent.

Quite why I am posting it here and why I think it would be OK to do so, I don’t know (although I know none of my family reads this blog) but it does occur to me that what I have to say is in some ways also generally true.

I have not altered it except where indicated in [square brackets]. I feel it would be dishonest to do so, but again I don’t know why or why that would even matter. But there you go.

Sweetheart,

It occurred to me that if I told you a bit about my troubles at college, it might help give perspective to your thinking and in some way make it a little easier for you.

But first I have to tell you that I believe we inherit one or two traits from both our parents but also have some of our very own. Mum, as I told you, also tends to bottle things up and you might well have got that from her. She is also a curious mixture of a great deal of confidence in some areas – farming, local life - and a troubling, for her, lack in others, i.e. she would hate to have to drive up to Bristol. But then we all have our oddities and curious aspects of behaviour. I know I have mine.

You, too, seem to be a bit like that (though not necessarily in farming – you will have your own areas of confidence and a lack of it). But believe me, please, and you will only realise I was right when I am long gone and you remember me just as that cranky old sod who used to shout at people on the phone and sit outside smoking cigars when everyone else had retreated from the chill outside and was warm and comfortable inside.

I’ve told you this before, but I’ll repeat it so you believe me: when we are young, before we become three or four and still lack self-consciousness, many of our most fundamental characteristics are already apparent. And you were always a confident lass, determined and at times a bit stroppy, with a tendency to cut off your nose to spite your face.

Whatever else happens to us in later life, these things rarely change. Obviously, they can manifest themselves in different ways depending on what happens to us and how our lives go, so self-confidence sometimes becomes an arrogance which doesn’t take the feelings of others into consideration. But that will be the exception rather than the rule.

This might also be the point where I should tell give you my take on ‘intelligence’. It has nothing to do with education or academic achievement. And we can be intelligent and bright in some ways and shit-stupid in others. It has nothing to do with profession, job, ‘class’, who your parents were, your family or anything else. It is something all our very own. I think you are both bright and determined – the way you conscientiously set about doing your essays is a case in point. If at the moment you feel ‘uni isn’t for you’, well, I suggest you look at it and tell yourself ‘this course isn’t necessarily for me’, not uni. You sound more enthusiastic about this new course, for which I am glad.

You also mentioned that you decided you wanted to become a teacher after others said ‘you would make a good teacher, Elsie’, but that in practice it is a harder than you thought. Nothing wrong with that, either. In fact, look on the bright side: you now know that you are not necessarily cut out for working with children by teaching them in class, but you still, I think, would like to work with children and in education in some other capacity. My point: look at the positive – you have gained a little from experience.

As I am talking about experience, let me tell you that gaining a little experience in whatever way – it could be in work, driving a car, dealing with your taxes, in your personal, in relationships, in our dealings with the opposite sex, the different circumstances are endless - is very useful. The bright person takes from it what is useful and tries not to make a similar mistake (and not always successfully, but that doesn’t alter the point I am making). The stupid person doesn’t and repeats a mistake again and again and again. On the other hand, don’t be afraid of making a mistake, but if you do, take stock and try not to do the same thing again. As I say, the bright person learns from mistakes, the dumbo doesn’t.

. . .

I went to boarding school. In my first term I was very, very, very unhappy and homesick. Without exaggeration, I was completely and utterly miserable 24 hours a day, seven days a week throughout that first term. I ran away from school to go home three times, though as we only live eight miles away it wasn’t that difficult. Then I had a stroke of luck: my parents couldn’t really afford the fees any more, so for the next two terms and the three terms of my second year I was a day boy, cycling to school every day. Then – as I saw it then – disaster. My father was posted to Paris by the BBC and I was told I would have to be a boarder again. I was heartbroken and, remembering how miserable I was, I was dreading the next few months until September. Then something odd happened: on my first day – as boarder – I met up with some friends, made them laugh and it suddenly dawned on me that it wasn’t going to be half as bad as I had feared. In fact, I enjoyed the next three years. And I learned a lesson: keep an open mind.

At school I didn’t fit into any of the three main groups. There were the sporty ones, the swots and the dumbos. I was none of those: for one thing I could make people laugh, and I wasn’t all that stupid (he says carefully, so as not to be thought self-satisfied). But I didn’t really work hard at all. I got by but that was it.

So when it came to applying to uni (though we didn’t call it that in those days) and [I] had decided I wanted to study philosophy (because I was intrigued that we could talk about ideas and concepts) and English [that was] (because I had written a poem, showed it to an English teacher, he told me to ‘carry on’ and so there and then I decided I was going to ‘be a writer’. I though that by telling me to ‘carry on’, he was saying ‘look, you’re rather good at this’, but he wasn’t. It only occurred to me years and years later that all he was doing was what any good adult should do for a child: encourage them. Another lesson learnt, though many, many years later. And to this day, until today, and into the future, I still want to ‘be a writer’.)

But applying to uni, I got nowhere. My [UCCA] application spiel was laughably naïve and childish. So I stayed on to retake my chemistry A level and do German S level. (German was always easy – I wonder why). But the second time around I got nowhere. No offers from anyone. And all the time there was the threat from my father that if I didn’t ‘buckle down at school’, he would take me away an ‘put me in an office in Reading’ (the school was near Reading). Well, that did it: there was no way I wanted to work, especially not in ‘an office in Reading’ which frightened me beyond measure. That was the only reason – the only reason – I was desperate to go to university. I should add that, unfortunately, neither of my parents seemed to take any interest in my education, really, although I do know it wasn’t quite as simple as that. For one thing, they both had confidence that I would somehow do reasonably well in life and, anyway, were far more concerned with my brother Ian who was already showing distinct signs of his mental illness. But also, their marriage wasn’t at all happy and hadn’t been for many years. (For that reason, while we were living in Paris, from 1965 until 1972, I only went home about five times for a couple of weeks at time, because it was a miserable household. Instead I stayed with friends from school.)

But there I was, 18, two very poor A levels, biology and chemistry and one very good one, German, as well as S level German, and no university had offered me a place through the UCCA (now UCAS) system. And I didn’t get anywhere on the clearing system. I was down in the dumps big time.

My mother’s distant cousin in Germany owned a shipyard (in Papenburg), ) so it was arranged that I should [go] to [sic] and work there. And about the same time I got the advice simply to write to individual universities simply asking for a place. I did. I wrote to Liverpool, Dundee, Kings College London, Bradford and one or two others I can no longer recall asking for a place on their English and philosophy course. I got an interview with Kings College, came back from Germany for a few days, fucked the interview and that was that with Kings. But Liverpool, Dundee and Bradford all offered me place. Well, stupid little public school snob that I was, I turned down Bradford – ‘who wants to live in working-class Bradford’ I thought. But I accepted the offer from Dundee.

Then, just a few days later came the Liverpool offer, but being, as I thought ‘gentlemanly and upright’ I believed that as I had already accepted the Dundee offer, I couldn’t turn around and say no, so I turned Liverpool down. (This business of simply asking for a place at a university which seemed make a complete nonsense of the whole UCCA (UCAS) scheme puzzled me for many years, until I heard that as universities were at the time fully funded by the government, they tried to ensure they completely filled their available places so they would get as much money per student as they could. So that’s why I got to college: they wanted their money from the government. It has bugger all to do with me. But at least I got to go to college.)

So there I was, my parents in Paris, me living in North Germany and I had to organise getting to Dundee, all in a matter of weeks. And I did, but I have no idea how. None.

Dundee is miles away from anywhere I had been used to. It seemed like the back of beyond. I eventually went to Kings Cross station and caught a train to Edinburgh. We got to York and I thought ‘well, not far to go now’. But it was. Newcastle is 100 miles north of York, but at the time I didn’t know – my knowledge of British geography was pitiful. So when we got to Newcastle, I panicked. I thought ‘isn’t Newcastle south of York? Bloody hell, I got on the wrong train’. But someone put me right. Edinburgh is another 100 miles north of Newcastle and it took ages to get there. But once we did, I looked up a train for Dundee and got on. Now that train was the same kind which took us from Henley to Twyford, a ten-minute journey, where we could then catch the train to London. So I thought ‘I won’t even bother sitting down, we’ll be there in ten minutes.’ We weren’t – the journey, on a slower train, took two hours.

Dundee was desolate. I arrived in October at about 3.30pm. It was pissing with rain, it gets dark far earlier that far north and not only was Dundee desolate, but so was I. I found my digs (I had called the college accommodation bureau who gave me an address) and was confronted by Mr and Mrs Scottish Incomprehensible Accent, both of them only about five foot four. They told me I was just in time ‘for tea’. Teas [sic] was high tea, i.e. a fry-up with chips. Nothing wrong with that except that when I asked for vinegar, I was handed a bottle with clear liquid and it was called ‘condiment’. I was totally and utterly at sea. And desolate. What the fuck was going on?

But I’m a sociable sort and made a few friends (and felt very guilty eventually ditching some of the early ones). I went to my lectures on time for the first few weeks, then got into the habit of sleeping in till noon. My room was on the top floor and it was so damp, my jeans were always – always – wet when I put them on in the morning. We were allowed on bath a week, but there was never enough water for more than – I am not bullshitting you – about four inches. I carried on, in my private moments, being very desolate indeed.

At the end of my first year, and after not attending any lectures at all, I failed all five of my foundation year subjects – methodology, economics, political science, history and psychology. It seemed like the end of the road and that ‘office in Reading’ or, worse, Bradford beckoned with all the miserable boredom I thought ‘working in an office’ entailed. But we had ‘resits’, a chance to take the same exams again in September, and I had just one thought in mind: make damn sure I was able to stay on at college and get that bloody grant cheque.

So I went to a bookshop, bought as [many] teach yourself history/economics/political science and psychology – the thinner, the better - and spent the summer months living in Dundeed [sic] – no one, but no one was around, the place seemed dead as a doornail - preparing for those all-important ‘re-sits’. How I managed to learn all about ‘methodology’ I really can’t remember, but I took my exams and past [sic] four out of five. I failed psychology (but passed [well, if I could get it right a few words on, why not the first time?] later that year) and my university course could continue. That all-important grant cheque was mine and the nightmare of starting work ‘in an office in Reading’ had been postponed. Phew!

More important problems started in my second year. Like you, but not like you, I, too, have a habit – some might call it a facility – of bottling things up. And out of the blue I had a panic attack. And, dear Elsie, panic attacks are awful, quite awful. They arrive completely unannounced and, for the first one or two at least, are utterly bewildering. (I have had a second bout of them, years later in London, which went on for about two years, and they were still bloody awful.) No one knows what causes them, except most probably unresolved stress. Which is why I insist: never bottle things up. Don’t postpone problems, deal with them now. Tackle them head on.

I went to the college doctor who put my [sic] on – well, I don’t know what they were back in 1969, but they ‘solved’ the problem by more or less zombifying you. When I returned home to Paris that Christmas, having taken the pills for a few months, my mother was horrified. But then that was almost 50 years ago. Science has moved on, though I am still very, very dubious about putting young children with attention deficit disorder on drugs. (In fact, as far as I am concerned western society relies on psycho drugs far too much. They merely mask a problem and make it seem to go away, but we don’t look at underlying causes as much as we might, though things are a lot, lot better. I rather suspect the pharma industry which makes fabulous sums flogging the bloody things is not being quite as responsible as it might and encourages their use for its own shabby ends.)

This is the point where what I am writing might be relevant to you. Everyone has problems and difficulties - there are no exceptions and sadly some get more than their fair share - and we deal with them or not according to our personal resources, attitudes, character and wisdom. If you had ever had a panic attack, Mum and I would most certainly know about it, and I doubt very much that you have. But if you do, don’t suffer in silence. But the other side of the coin is that: we all have problems and difficulties and we all find ways to deal with them.

From the day I was born until I left university, I had moved – was moved when I was younger – seven times, and especially when a child is young that can be disconcerting. I didn’t have my first bout of appalling homsickness [sic] at school, but years earlier when we had been in Berlin for a few months. Suddenly, all I could think of was to go back to Henley. So I am eternally grateful that you and Wes were born, have grown up and will eventually leave to start your own independent lives in the same place, the same house, the same environment. All things being equal it gives you an inner stability which is invaluable. I believe you have that inner stability, Elsie, apart from being bright, determined and resourceful – yes, that, too, even though you might not think so. Don’t sell yourself short.

Mum is a very good woman and very good mother. It might not have been, as I once told you recently, Romeo and Juliet between us (and, to be frank it is hardly ever the case between any married couple), and we have had and will always have our moments. Both of us love you in a way you will never understand until you have your own children. There is no other live [love] like it. In some ways a love for one’s own children is the only real love, utterly pure and utterly selfless. We want nothing from you but your happiness, contentment, health and fulfilment and my heart goes out to those children (Daisy, possibly?) who are sold short in that respect [Daisy was not my niece in the farm, but a former flatmate of my daughter’s drank, smoked a lot of dope, slept around]. You owe us nothing, nothing at all. And if you feel you do, don’t repay us, repay it to your children by giving the [sic] unconditional love.

I know you understand every word I have written. You are now on the cusp of womanhood, but please try to understand that both Mum and I have known you at very stage in your life from newborn baby, to toddler, you [to] young child, to growing child, you [to] adolescent teenager, to the woman you are now. And we don’t just see you now as Elsie 18 going on 19, but as ALL those Elsies.

If there is anything – and I mean anything – you want to talk to me about, don’t feel shy. (I told you yesterday that I am shy. Well, deep, deep, deep down I am, far deeper than anyone could ever imagine, so I know what shyness is, though no one, but no one believes that loudmouth Pat – as I am at work – is shy. But I am.)

Now, chill out, take a long deep breath, don’t rush things – you might well have inherited ‘rushing things’ from me if you do – chill out and look forward to the future with confidence. You might sometimes not think so, bout you are one of Life’s lucky ones. I hope all this has helped.

Dad, xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

On the road again, again

Travelodge – Hellingly Eastbourne, East Sussex

It’s a bit of a stretch entitling this entry ‘On the road again’ as it involves neither amphetamines, superhcharged sports cars, long straight roads stretching into far distance or me escaping life and a futile existence. In fact, I have only taken off from deepest, darkest North Cornwall to visit more civilised East Sussex for a funeral. And rather than spend days and weeks on the road, hooking up with equally disillusioned young women and sparked out, druggy lunatics, the journey from St Breward to my Travelogdge here near Hailsham took only - only – six hours (a little longer than usual as I spent the usual hour hunting down an Asda, this time to get a white shirt).

But it is good to get out and about. The funeral is for the widow of one of my stepmother’s former friends from the BBC, one of her more acceptable friends I have to add, because some of them can be a pain in the arse (not that I tell them – I can be as two-faced as the you).

My stepmother is now in a home as she kept falling over and is slowly losing it, so her cottage is empty, but last Sunday, I happened, just happened to be there watching a couple of football matches, when the niece of the woman who has died rang to tell my stepmother. As I liked the dead woman and her husband (who was Anglo Irish and had much of the charm the Irish often have) I said I would come along to the funeral. So here I am.

Staying at Travelodge’s has become something of a habit, and for good reason. They might be basic – i.e. no flunkies schmoozing up to you in the hope of a tip to supplement his pitiful wage – but they have everything I want: clean sheets, hot water and they are warm. And they are not expensive. I have now got to the age when a price rise for a Mars bar from nine to tne pence (and that is old pence, so 9d to 10d) is shocking, but a more modern part of me is fully aware that prices are rising all the time.

So, for example, the £40 I am paying for one night here is, according to my inflation calculator app, the equivalent of £26.95 20 years ago and just £16.96 in 1986, a year chosen because that’s when I began on the South Wales Echo in Cardiff. And in 1974, when I started my first job, as reporter on the Lincoln Chronicle, it was just what might seem an astonishing £4.77, though that isn’t astonishing at all because in them ol’ days most folk were still paid in washers.

The big news hereabouts – well in the whole of Britain – is next week’s general election, exactly seven days from now. I have spent the past few months bending the ear of anyone patient enough not to punch me up the bracket that ‘it will be another hung parliament with the Lib Dems doing rather better than expected, winning at least 60 seats’. Well, I have had to revise my predictions rather as the Lib Dem leader, Jo Swinson, has proved to be a – though in keeping with Lib Dem tradition – as useful as a chocolate teapot and is, it seems inspiring no one.

The Lib Dems polling figures are just not shifting from the 15% mark, though mention of ‘polling’ obliges me to give the usual health warning that the polls these days are as useless as Jo Swinson. For two weeks they had the Tories in the lead by about 16%, but that lead is now being cut. But bear in mind that in the election in 2017, known colloquially as ‘Mrs May’s finest hour’, she was way ahead in the poll, but on the night did not manage to get a majority and came out with fewer MPs than she had before she called the election.

I still think it will be a hung parliament, however, and so much the better. Nothing would please me better than to see both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn end up with egg on their faces. Corbyn will most certainly be out after the election, but I doubt he will resign. There will probably be some kind of palace coup. Johnson will hang on, though he influence will be much diminished, and, of course, we will be in for a few more months of ‘Brexit? What the fuck is going on?’

In other news, this Hemingway bollocks is proceeding, though slowly, as there is a lot of reading to do. And, dear friends, I have finally admitted to myself that to do it justice I shall have to – I have no choice – re-read A Farewell To Arms. I read it years ago (at the end of the 16th century I think) and can remember nothing about it. But as everything about Hemingway, from his style to the man himself, irritates the hell out of me, I am not looking forward to it. File this under ‘poor chap, he’s suffering for his art’.

Pip, pip.

To publish posthumously and squeeze a bit more money for the estate of the writer and his publisher (even though the work might be crap) or not? Decisions, decisions, though as it turned out not a difficult one for Charles Scribner’s Sons, of New York, publishers to the gentry

Below are around 400 words from Joan Didion’s piece — the opening — on the practice of publishing Hemingway’s work posthumously. It appeared in the November 9, 1998, issue of the New Yorker. NB I had never heard of Joan Didion, either, but I gather she is — she is now 85 — a journalist, essayist and writer who is well-known in the United States.

I should preface this by saying — and this is relevant — that literary criticism is and cannot be a science. In fact, that is true of all art criticism. Well, that’s obvious, you might counter, of course it isn’t, how can it be? But hang on: even those who agree with me often inadvertently behave as if it were a science; or if not exactly ‘a science’, a discipline akin to a science which commands — rightly, many would insist — the respect we pay to science; and that just as the various sciences have their acknowledged experts who know more than you and I about their field, so criticism has folk akin to such experts who know more about their field than ordinary joes like you and I.

Well, if that is your view, there is your first piece of nonsense. And when I seem to diss literary and art criticism and pooh-pooh the expertise of critics, I am, at least, in good company: Virginia Woolf was equally unimpressed by the airs and graces acquired by such criticism.

If we acknowledge the fundamental dichotomy between ‘objectivity’ and ‘subjectivity’ and accept — not that you can do otherwise — that they are mutually exclusive, literary (and art) criticism falls squarely in the ‘subjectivity’ camp — there can be no ‘objective’ literary or artistic judgment.

Yet, as Woolf points out when writing about literary critics in her review (New York Herald Tribune, Oct 9, 1927) of Hemingway’s volume of short stories, Men Without Women (first published in 1927) something odd happens when the ‘ordinary’ reading public is confronted with the views of a literary critic. It is worth reading her full essay (which you can find here), but one pertinent bit is this, another opening paragraph:

‘There may be good reasons for believing in a King or a Judge or a Lord Mayor. When we see them go sweeping by in their robes and their wigs, with their heralds and their outriders, our knees begin to shake and our looks to falter. But what reason there is for believing in critics it is impossible to say. They have neither wigs nor outriders. They differ in no way from other people if one sees them in the flesh. Yet these insignificant fellow creatures have only to shut themselves up in a room, dip a pen in the ink, and call themselves ‘we’, for the rest of us to believe that they are somehow exalted, inspired, infallible. Wigs grow on their heads. Robes cover their limbs.
No greater miracle was ever performed by the power of human credulity. And, like most miracles, this one, too, has had a weakening effect upon the mind of the believer. He begins to think that critics, because they call themselves so, must be right. He begins to suppose that something actually happens to a book when it has been praised or denounced in print. He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees.’

Let me extrapolate from what Woolf writes: because at first the ordinary reader ‘begins to think that critics . . . must be right. . . He begins to doubt and conceal his own sensitive, hesitating apprehensions when they conflict with the critics’ decrees’, hey presto, by some obscure alchemy the critic’s subjective opinion — that this writer is ‘good’ but this writer isn’t (or in the world of art criticism, that this picture ‘is art’ but that picture isn’t) — mysteriously and almost unobtrusively crosses the divide between ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’.

Very soon those judgments are ‘facts’: in many people’s minds it becomes a ‘fact’ that Picasso, Klee, Stravinsky, Epstein, Joyce, Beckett are geniuses. Teenage students are taught as much and so the ‘fact’ is passed from generation to generation. A corollary is — the first of many circular arguments which bedevil much talk about ‘art’ — that the work they produced (and are producing if they are still alive) are ‘masterpieces’. And why is it a ‘masterpiece’? Why, because so-and-so who write/painted/composed it is really great! And why is he really great? Well, just look at this, the novel/painting/piece of music he/she has produced (though, as is the way of the world, it is usually a ‘he’)! Etc.

By now there is also a tacit implication: if you disagree with these judgments by men and women — though, as is the way of the world, mainly men — you don’t know what you are talking about and you are a fool. And because few of us care to look foolish in the eyes of our peers, we find ourselves beaten into acquiescent silence, take care to watch our p’s and q’s and might even be cowed enough by the mighty critics into echoing their judgments.

One odd consequence of this canonisation of various composers, painters and writers is that their work, when it goes up for sale, begins to command fabulous prices. At this point I would briefly like to point out, but not spend too much time on doing so, that the ‘value’ of a work of art is essentially what someone who wants to own it is prepared to pay for it. So when you hear that in 1990 at Sotheby’s in London Paul Klee’s Der Künftige (pictured)

sold for $3,717,600 all you know with any certainty is that someone or some institution wanted the pictures enough to cough up $3,717,600. (I must say I do like it and would certainly tolerate it in my living room but that’s because I like it as an image, a picture, not because it is ‘a Paul Klee’ and I rather like the idea of folk thinking I have taste because I own and have on my wall ‘a Paul Klee’.

Casting around the net for an example of ‘value’ in art, I just happened upon that particular painting, and until about eight minutes ago I had no idea it is ‘a perfect example of Paul Klee’s politically engaged art. This painting was a response to the call of totalitarian pseudo-utopian ideologies in the 1930s for the evolution of a New Man. This is addressed of course to the fascist and Nazi dictators Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, as well as to Stalin’. I’ve got to say looking at it, I’d have never guessed that. The things you learn.

Oddly enough — I’ve done a little more casting about on the net and this is somehow relevant to discussing the ‘value’ of a work of art — 20 years on after that sale, whoever bought it at Sothebys in 1990 sold it again at Christie’s in New York and got $387,100 less for it than she/he paid for it. That makes my point rather well: surely the ‘artistic ’ of Klee’s Der Künftige hasn’t declined? Surely if it was a great painting in 1990, it is still a great paining now?

All we can say from the drop in price that for whatever reason — the whim of potential buyers, the global banking crisis (this was in 2010) or just the weather being so bad in New York on Tuesday, May 4 of that year that Christie’s had fewer bods at that particular auction that it did not make the price expected.

So, yet again, that circular argument is very simple. Actually, I can even — I think — legitimately use the word simplistic (one that increasingly of late is used to mean ‘simple’ although both words have distinct meanings). It goes: this novel/poem/painting/piece of music is great/a masterpiece. Why? Because it is by so-and-so, and so-and-so is an artistic genius. Why do you claim he is a genius? Because he [it’s usually a bloody he, I don’t know if you have noticed] produces work like this.

Collapse of stout party.

. . .

I’ve mentioned several times before that I am ‘working’ on a piece about Hemingway and how, in my view, he was certainly far from being the literary genius he is often claimed to be, and how, in my view, his ‘debut’ novel (i.e. it wasn’t he debut novel but is often regarded as such) The Sun Also Rises is far from being the masterpiece it is often claimed to be.

My project is slowly acquiring the characteristic of ‘interminable’, mainly because I keep coming across more books relevant to the subject, which I buy, read and which in some ways obliged me to reshape the piece (as in ‘re-write’) will eventually produce.

As I shall post it here, I don’t want to say too much more, but I strongly suspect something similar to that circular argument took place when Hemingway first ‘burst upon the literary scene’. When his work began to be published, first a collection of short stories (In Our Time in 1925, then The Sun Also Rises in 1926) his work — the then unique style in which is was written, his subject matter and his treatment of it — was so utterly different to what else was on sale that it caused a sensation.

His publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, with both eyes on the bottom line, came up with great marketing and advertising strategy, selling Hemingway as a writer quite unlike his peers, an ‘action man writer’, and the public, as always eager for novelty, took him up with gusto. The myth of Hemingway the ‘literary genius’ took root.

A year later came Men Without Women, his second collection of short stories, but both he and Scribner’s knew he had to produce a follow-up novel to sustain the success, and in 1929 he published A Farewell To Arms. It was in the same style, contained more ‘obscene’ language — horribly lame ‘obscene language’ by contemporary standards, but that isn’t the point — and that reputation was established. Hemingway, the young turk and literature’s latest sensation, had arrived.

It helped that the man himself was a bombastic, duplicitous, attention-seeking self-publicising narcissist who, perversely insisted point-blank that he wasn't interested in celebrity and just wanted to write. That was a ludicrous claim, given that he subscribed to two news cuttings service which kept him informed on the growth of the celebrity he certainly did not want, but more of that when I post my piece (at some point).

In 1932 published Death In The Afternoon (1932), an odd amalgam of a guide to bullfighting and writing which sold badly in Depression-era America (and didn’t much please his publisher who were urging Hemingway to write a third bloody novel). A year later came Winner Take Nothing [sic], his third final collection of original short

stories; and in 1935 came The Green Hills Of Africa, an account of his safari in Africa, which also failed to set Depression-era America alight (many of whose potential readers could not afford to put food on the table let alone gallivant Africa slaughtering wildlife).

Two years later came the novella To Have And Have Not, cobbled together from several short stories, which yet again failed to enthuse the reading public. And if you are thinking ‘but wasn’t that a huge success?’ you will actually be thinking of the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall film which had almost nothing in common with Hemingway’s novella, except the name of the main protagonist and the first chapter.

In 1938 came The Fifth Column And The First 49 Stories. The stories were simply those which had appeared in his first two volumes, In Our Time and Men With Women. The Fifth Column was a silly play,  written when Hemingway was holed up (with his third wife-to-be, the blonde journalist Martha Gellhorn) in Madrid’s Hotel Florida under contract to report on the Spanish Civil War about a cynical, hard-drinking journalist who has an affair with a blonde colleague and is working undercover as a spy. It was never staged as Hemingway had written it.

After that came nothing until in 1950 when Hemingway wrote Across The River And Into The Trees, and embarrassing tale of a 50-year-old war hero reminiscing about an affair he had with an 18-year-old Italian teenager. At the time Hemingway, also 50, was infatuated with an 19-year-old Italian teenager. In 1952 came The Old Man And The Sea, another novella which sold brilliantly but which also brought the charge that Hemingway was parodying his own style. And until he died in July 1961, Hemingway published nothing more, though he had been working intermittently on several projects.

In 1970 came Islands In The Stream, edited by someone or other somewhere from reams and reams of prose he had been writing; then, in 1986, Scribner’s published a novel called The Garden Of Eden, an odd sexual fantasy about, ahem, a successful writer and his second wife, he had been working on intermittently for 30 years, which was again boiled down from what he had written. Finally, in 1999, came a book about his second African safari, which appeared as True At First Light, boiled down to a quarter its length from the 250,000 words Hemingway had written.

Despite brave claims by Hemingway champions along the lines that all three books are ‘important additions’ to ‘the Hemingway oeuvre’, all three got bad to lukewarm reviews and sold badly. One biographer, Matthew Brucolli, summed up that oeuvre neatly: ‘. . . Hemingway did not progress from strength to strength. His best work was done before he was thirty, and he produced only one major novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — after 1929. . . Everything he did, everything he wrote, became important because he was Ernest Hemingway.’ That makes my point quite well.

. . .

In what follows Didion provides an analysis of the opening paragraph to A Farewell To Arms which is, to my mind, ludicrous. That the paragraph is somehow ‘brilliant’ is a given as far as Didion is concerned. I, on the other hand, would like to point out that any number of writers, whether they are fictionalists or working hacks (journalists) can and very often do produce prose which is often far better.

This passage is possibly now too well-known, but were I to show it to someone who was unfamiliar with the novel and asked for a judgment, I suggest that judgment would be ’it’s OK, nice enough’ and would then I might be ask ‘where’s it from’. Well, I suggest it could well be from the travel diary of a recent graduate taking a year off before starting her/his career. Bear that in mind when you read what Didion has to say.

That first paragraph of the novel reads:

‘In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.’

Then comes Didion’s take on it [new paragraphs inserted by me to make what she wrote it easier to read]:

‘So goes the famous first paragraph of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ which I was moved to reread by the recent announcement that what was said to be Hemingway’s last novel would be published posthumously next year. That paragraph, which was published in 1929, bears examination: four deceptively simple sentences, one hundred and twenty-six words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them, at twelve or thirteen, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange one hundred and twenty-six such words myself.

Only one of the words has three syllables. Twenty-two have two. The other hundred and three have one. Twenty-four of the words are ‘the,’ fifteen are ‘and.’ There are are four commas. The liturgical cadence of the paragraph derives in part from the placement of the commas (their presence in the second and fourth sentences, their absence in the first and third), but also from that repetition of ‘the’ and of ‘and,’ creating a rhythm so pronounced that the omission of ‘the’ before the word ‘leaves’ in the fourth sentence (‘and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling’) casts exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition, a foreshadowing of the story to come, the awareness that the author has already shifted his attention from late summer to a darker season. 

The power of the paragraph, offering as it does the illusion but not the fact of specificity, derives precisely from this kind of deliberate omission, from the tension of withheld information. In the late summer of what year? What river, what mountains, what troops?

I think it is pertinent that Didion first came across the novel and it’s opening paragraph at an impressionable age — she says she was 12 or 13 — and to illuminate why I think it is pertinent, I should like to quote Vladimir Nabokov’s judgment of Hemingway’s work.

In an interview with the ‘futurist’ Alvin Toffler in 1964 published in Playboy, he agreed he had once described Hemingway (and Joseph Conrad) as ‘writers of books for boys’ and added: ‘In neither of these two writers can I find anything that I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, they are hopelessly juvenile . . .’ Sums it all up rather well, although if push came to shove I would defend Conrad’s writing long after I had given up defending anything by Hemingway.

What is ‘mysterious’ and ‘thrilling’ about it? I’m blowed if I know, but then you might counter along the lines that I am quite ’obviously to stupid/biased/contrary to see it’. And there is no response to that.

As for the ‘liturgical cadence’ of the paragraphs with so enthrals Didion (thanks to ‘the placement of commas’) I really do think she should get out a bit more. I have personally come across any number of feature writers in my time in newspaper who could turn out paragraphs like that seven times before tea, but who didn’t and don’t make a song and dance about ‘the writer’ writing ‘truly’.

’The irony — the Hemingway story is full of ironies — is that his style did influence how English literature evolved throughout the 20th century. Many respected writers cite Hemingway and his style as ‘an influence’. But that doesn’t mean it was necessarily good. Many jazz guitarists will happily admit that when they were ten and becoming interested in the instrument, they were strongly influenced by the playing Bill Hailey and Buddy Holly or even Old Blighty’s very own Bert Weedon.

I must stop here because I could go on for ages and would simply be repeating what I have so far written elsewhere and what I intend to write. But let me leave you with this: read (or re-read) Hemingway’s story — sorry, his ‘celebrated’ story — The Killers (you can find it here). As far as I am concerned it is a rather poor attempt by Hemingway to emulate the ‘hard-boiled style becoming popular at the time, eventually leading to the work of Dashiell Hammett.

Again if you were unfamiliar with it and didn’t recognise it as Hemingway’s ‘celebrated’ story and I instead told you I had written it, I suspect it would no longer be ‘celebrated’ and you would cast about for a way politely telling me ’nice try but no cigar’. Ah, but as it is by Hemingway . . .

Please, Ms Didion, let’s all try and calm down and stay a little more sober.

In which I admit to slightly odd behaviour (and later in the day put the boot in Honest Ernest yet again)

It really is bloody odd. Every day since I’ve retired I’ve been conscious of ‘using my time’ and not wasting it. The silly thing is, though, that no one, but no one gives a flying fuck whether or not I do ‘use my time’ except me. And the only thing which will satisfy my conscience and allow me to accept honestly that I have ‘used my time today’ is writing something. Usually it is a few hundred words more of this Hemingway bollocks.

Sometimes (I’ve signed up to a website run from South Africa which I’ve found useful: every month it give you a prompt for a short story and a poem and the discipline of getting it done is worthwhile) it might be editing and honing the brief poem or short story I shall be submitting. (You have to write the story to strict length).

I have plenty of other things to be getting on with, and the lessons with Paul in Padstow are now really paying off, so there’s all the practising and laying out all the scales and modes in Indesign as a way of learning them and understanding them.

Tomorrow I’ve got to arrange the Skype chat for Ann in France with Paddy, then it’s drop of the car to get the exhaust fixe. But everything — everything — except writing is just ‘something to do’. It is, at the end of the day of no consequence. And I really don’t know why.

This isn’t something I tell myself, some adolescent pose (I doubt I could be mistaken for a silly adolescent except in some of my behaviour), and I’m not going to get phoney and precious about it and talk in vague terms about ‘inner life’ and all the other claptrap you come across (OK, that is a bit broadbrush, but you know what I mean). Which leads me to another odd thing about: I don’t know nor care why I feel like that. I just do and that’s good enough for me.

Earlier today when I was grumbling that ‘this Hemingway bollocks is taking up too much time’ — I keep coming across more reviews, essays etc which I read and many of which I format into PDFs and post on my website ready to be linked to when I finally post this pied. And each of the essays etc subtly changes the dimensions of it all just a little, but a crucial 'just a little', so I have to slightly rethink things, and know, of course, that tomorrow and the next day and the one after that I shan’t for the life of me remember the ‘new shape’.

And, no, writing notes (which I do on a useful app called Scapple) doesn’t help because once written I never look at the notes, well very, very rarely. So there I was grumbling away and my wife asked ‘who’s going to read it?’ And I answered, truthfully, ‘no one’, adding ‘well, I’ll post it on my blog and some people might read it, but that will just be a bonus.’

‘So it’s a bit pointless, then, isn’t it.’

No, I said, it isn’t.

‘But if no one is going to read it, why are you doing it?’

I told I’m doing it to do it, but she just didn’t understand that point. I tried to illuminated: musicians will play their instruments, alone or together, because they like playing their instruments. It’s like that. But she still didn’t get it.

I told her I had to get it out of the way, properly, and done as best I could because if I didn’t or did but cut corners, I would never be able to relax completely as it would always be at the back of my mind. She didn’t get that point either.

Then she said why didn’t I do something else, something which would sell? I said no one sells anything except a very few lucky bods, but that wasn’t the point, either. But there were things I am planning on doing, though not until this is done and dusted, properly, and out of the way. She didn’t get that, either.

The silly thing is that shifting myself from here to my little ‘shed’ outside (actually a warm and comfortable granite outhouse where my guitars are and where I can play loudly) is the hardest thing I have to do. BUT once in there and started, I wonder what all the fuss was about. Odd.

And not that’s out of the way, I must persuade myself writing it wasn’t just a form of displacement activity to avoid getting started today (today? It’s already bloody 3.30 you pillock).

. . .

PS LATER Here is a case in point. I am just reading yet another essay in the New Yorker about Hemingway by Joan Didion (or rather more truthfully ‘a Joan Didion’ because although I understand she is famous, possibly even world-famous, I’d never heard of her before) about the publication after his death, edited and substantially boiled down from the several hundred thousand words he left behind, of The Garden Of Eden and True At First Light. I’ve got to the bit where the title True At First Light, awarded to the bloody novel by someone or other, was taken from this sentence in the text:

‘In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain’.

Now call me a philistine old fool, but although that sentence sounds just fine and dandy and even a bit literary if that is the kind of thing you like, in pretty much every way you approach it is meaningless and pointless. It is false and that is notable for a writer who insisted — who truly insisted — that everything should be true. In Hemingwayese it’s a fine and good piece of crap.

Hemingway might have meant the ‘and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain’ ironically, i.e. you actually do have a great deal of respect for it, but in that case ‘the thing’ [sic — ‘thing’ is not, I suspect, a word one might expect ‘a wordsmith’ blah-blah of the kind Hemingway kept insisting to us and the world he was would care to use] would certainly be at odds with it being a ‘lie at noon’.

And what does the writer of ‘athletic, taut, muscular, lean, declarative’ prose (© Hemingway nerds passim) mean by ‘a thing is true at first light’? It is quite a striking and suggestive sentence, but not one which can be given some kind of ‘meaning’. If anything it is more in keeping with the kind of images of Dylan’s early songs. A Hard Rain Is Gonna Fall is a good example — ‘I've stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains / I’ve walked and I've crawled on six crooked highways / I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests’ doesn’t mean fuck all, but they are great lyrics and carry on with you long after the song has finished. Or how about jokers talking to thieves etc. Dylan can carry that off with aplomb whereas others fall flat on their faces. And that would include Hemingway.

But that wasn’t and never was Hemingway’s approach. He made a fetish out of being ‘true’. Well, Ernie dear heart, you can’t have it both ways, although I’ve read enough about you to know you always did. (He must be the only ‘publicity-shy’ ‘I only want to write’ bod who honed his skills at PR and made sure the world knew about him, from a very young age. He gave a series of talks about his ‘war experiences’ in Oak Park, Chicago, and up in Michigan, exhibiting the medal or medals he had been awarded. He had actually only been working at the front, delivering ciggies and chocs to Italian soldiers for five weeks before he was blown up. As for fighting and serving with the Italian Arditi as he later claimed he had . . .)

Quite apart from that maybe I, now no longer a philistine but something of a snob in snob mode, dare admit that Hemingway’s ‘In Africa a thing is true at first light and a lie by noon and you have no more respect for it than for the lovely, perfect weed-fringed lake you see across the sun-baked salt plain’ is distinctly middlebrow. What, for the sake of God, is a ‘perfect’ weed-fringed lake? And would you really be able to spot a flat lake (however weed-fringed) some distance away across a sun-baked salt plain? And in land so salty would weeds really thrive? Obviously it all depends on the kind of writing you want to produce, but all the above is really not in the ‘hard, declarative style’ the old fraud is famous for. And unlike Ernie I am not inclined to lay down the law of what writing should  ‘truly’ be. Me, I’m more laissez faire. If it works, it works, but for me pretty much all of Hemingway except his journalistic turns of phrase do not. Sorry.

Elsewhere in her piece Didion makes great play over how Hemingway cared about punctuation. Well, that ‘care’ is news to me, and given that as far as I am concerned the sole purpose of punctation is a tool to help you to convey what you want to convey as best you can (a comma, for example, briefly pausing the reader, a semi-colon doing so for just a little longer), time and again you have to re-read Hemingway’s prose just to get the drift. A little more punctuation might have helped. So in the above sentence, I suggest a comma might be appropriate here — ‘noon, and you’. Just a thought.

Crisis? What crisis? This one, matey, this one!

We here in Britain are stuck in a truly bizarre age: for once the observation that ‘the country is split’ isn’t actually just a silly, self-important middle-class exaggeration describing, for example, the fact that Wilf next door really thinks English rugby is in for a golden age and can look forward to great things whereas John and William down at the club think that’s nonsense. It is far more serious than that: the country is well and truly split down the middle and it’s not going to end well because there is no way it can end well. And that worries me.

I’m not just talking about Brexit, either, although that is the root cause.

At the moment the government wants to call a general election, and the Opposition is buggered if it is going to commit suicide on national scale. The government is having a lot of trouble getting its ‘deal’ through Parliament (the initial withdrawal agreement between it and the EU outlining what is what, for example how much Britain should contribute to the EU budget to help pay for items agree upon when it was still a member).

Part of it problem is that before Johnson became PM it had a small majority, essentially because under the premiership of his predecessor, Theresa May, the Tory government had bought off the DUP with a £3 billion bung and the Northern Irish party agreed to support it in the Commons. Recently, Johnson took way the whip from 21 MPs because they voted against him on a Commons motion, thereby flushing his small majority down the pan. Whether that was plain incompetence or real stupidity doesn’t even matter any more.

The fact is that Johnson cannot and will not command a majority in the Commons on any motion except perhaps one granting all MPs a huge pay rise. His government is, at present quite impotent and he believes if held an election, he might get a working majority in the Commons. But getting that election is proving very tricky indeed. And he is trying to come up with various ruses to get his election, not least ensuring his government loses a vote of no confidence.

If some gifted satirist were to dream up a plot for a novel in which a government considers calling such a motion of no confidence in itself (and urges supporting MPs to vote in favour of the motion in a tacit admission that they and the government are useless twats), the resulting novel might, if well-written, prove to be quite amusing. In essence such a plot would recall all those Ealing comedies of the 1950s when Britain was assured it had ‘never had it so good’.

Fleshing out that plot to have the main Opposition party voting against the motion (that ‘this House has no confidence that Her Majesty’s Government could even organise an orgy in a brothel’ — essentially that it has every confidence in Her Majesty’s Governments and wishes it only well) would add a great deal more spice.

In fact, that is exactly the situation our House of Commons finds itself in: the Tories, under Boris Johnson’s leadership are aching to go to the country in the hope they will be voted back into power, and Labour, under the leadership — I use the word as loosely as I am able to without it becoming thoroughly meaningless — of Jeremy Corbyn are desperate to avoid a general election.

But the government can no longer simply call an election. Complicating it all is what is known as the ‘fixed-term parliament legislation: whereas until 2015 when the Tories had to form a coalition with the Lib Dems if they

wanted to retain power, the sitting government could call an election when it damn well wanted — usually, and quite obviously when it thought it had the best chance of winning (as it now does), now an election can only be called if two-thirds of the MPs in the House of Commons want one. Well, the Tories want one, and the SNP want one and the Lib Dems want one but Labour is buggered if it wants to go to the country to get on its way to oblivion sooner than most expect. The latest opinion poll figures will explain why:

According to them, the Tories have the highest support among British voters (around 35% tell all those from the polling firms who knock on the door or ring up to ask that they would vote for the Tories). Labour, on the other hand are preferred by far fewer (around 25%). The Lib Dems aren’t doing badly, though, up to around 18% from their very low (although not historically low) 8%.

What is so odd about these figures is that usually the incumbent government (whether Tory or Labour) is not at all popular with the electorate and the Opposition will be rather well off in the polling figures. Not this time — Jeremy Bernard Corbyn is the fly in Labour’s ointment: apart from a few scruffy herberts of all ages and genders who consider themselves to be ‘socialists’, no one, but no one likes him. And apart from the scrappy band of Dave Sparts, they would rather go blind than vote him into office and see him as Prime Minister.

But all that is not even half the story.

Both parties are split — although neither is split exactly down the middle — into those who support Brexit (or, at least, support the implementation of the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum) and those who want Britain to remain as a member of the European Union.

Broadly, the Tories are split into two-thirds who support Leave and one third (those Tories Mrs Thatcher would have regarded as ‘wet’) who think Britain’s best interests are served by remaining an EU member. Labour is some kind of mirror image: two-thirds support Remain and one-third support Leave. But it’s not even that simple: a great many of those in Labour-voting constituencies in the North of England voted Leave. So their MP, who most probably is a Remainer, is fearful she or he might be out of a job if they don’t go against their own convictions and support Leave in House of Commons motions.

The Tories have a slightly different problem: now that Ukip has gone the way of all flesh and is rotting on the bone and about as relevant as a four-year-old bus ticket, their one-time leader Nigel Farage has come up with a new party, the Brexit Party. And rather too many Tory voters, terminally pissed off that more than three years after the Brexit referendum Britain still hasn’t left the EU, are more than mindful to give the Brexit Party their support. Thus Tory high command has decided that to see off the electoral threat from the Brexit Party it must be more hardline on Brexit than even Farage. The strategy has worked to a certain extent, except that it has alienated the minority of ‘wet’ Tories who believe Britain’s future would be better served if it remained a member of the EU.

I don’t doubt that thus outlined the situation isn’t quite as troublesome as I seem to have made out. Anyone familiar with Italy, even superficially, will insists that many of the political dilemmas it faces are just as bad and often worse. Then there is Belgium which for many years didn’t even have a government and was run by its civil service. But I suggest this is different.

For better of worse Britain is a undramatic country. Certainly of all the European countries you might associate, were you asked, with the concept of ‘compromise’, ‘working things out’, ‘settling things amicably’ Britain would most probably top the list. Quite simply we British are essentially too lazy and comfortable to get worked up about much. Yes, we get angry and, yes, we sometimes take to the streets, but we only march in protest and cause disruption if the weather outlook is reasonably good, and even then the prospects of heavy showers on the day in question is more than enough to dampen most revolutionary moods. But this is different.

My knowledge of history is quite patchy and mainly garnered from the back of cereal packets, but I do know of several instances in the past 110 years when Britain faced a crisis. One was in 1910 when the Liberals abolished the veto the House of Lords had on the Budget. Then came the Abdication Crisis in 1936 although however ‘critical’

it seemed at the time, I can’t think it posed much of a threat to the stability of the United Kingdom. Far, far more serious and far closer in spirit to the current crisis we are facing was the situation in England in the 1640s which eventually led to our bloody civil war.

I am not suggesting that a civil war will break out in 2019/20, the situation we have now, as then, seems to suggest no immediate solution which might be acceptable all round.

Say there were an election. My view is — and I am often quite wrong — that the Tories would not get the majority they are hoping for. Although they are doing better in the polls since Johnson took over as prime minister, many will not forgive him for his rash pledge to ‘leave they EU by October 31 no if, no buts’ and, disillusioned, vote for the Brexit Party.

That doesn’t mean the Brexit Party will get any seats at all (we still have an ante-deluvian ‘first-past-the-post electoral system here in Britain), but losing votes to the Brexit might mean the Tories losing seats to the Lib Dems. There are six seats where the Tory majority is under 10% and the Lib Dems are in second place. This last suggests that Tory electorate there is composed of quite a few ‘wets’ who might well go over to the Lib Dems.

There seem to be fewer Labour seats at risk to the Lib Dems, but I do think many Leave-supporting Labour voters will opt to vote Brexit rather than Labour to register their irritation.

My main point is that the result of the coming general election need only be a ‘hung parliament’, that is one in which no party has a majority for this chaos to continue. Brexit supporters can only get down on their knees and pray that the Tories will get a majority and will get be able to get their deal through the Commons, but even if that were to happen our current crisis would be far from over.



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The Brexit farce continues and it’s not going to end well . . .

I am conscious that I haven’t posted here for a while and there’s reason: the only thing I would like to write about at present (not having bought a new laptop for a week or two, or come up with any more trivia about my father’s life — possibly — as 007 both of which topics usually make for scintillating blog posts) is the sheer farce that Brexit has become. And for many reasons it is quite pointless making any comments.

For one thing what is happening is changing daily, but for another this is one of those issues in which you are firmly on one side or that other, with both sides becoming more polarised by the hour. And in the nature of things in such punch-ups the one side will never listen to the other: but more pertinently they don’t want to listen. The name of the game is not seeing whether you might persuade the other side that they are wrong and you are right. It is seeing who can shout loudest and drown out the other. Well, I’m not interested in that at all.

(As it was I voted Remain that ‘on balance’ remaining a member of the EU was by far not just in Britain’s best interests but better for Europe as a whole. I do feel the EU must be careful how it evolves and, vitally, must ensure it carries the vast majority of those who live in EU member states with it when it does make changes. Not doing that, proceeding on a de haut en bas basis, will cause a great deal of trouble in the future.

It would be pointless to write much more about the Brexit debacle and the state it is in, if I’m honest, because whatever is recorded here will be out of date within hours. But there’s one aspect of all this which I do think is worth commenting on but which in nothing I have read I have seen commented on. It is simply that there is something going on — in Britain, in Europe, in the US, in the world — of which Brexit, the continual bizarre behaviour and decisions of Donald Trump, the situation in both Russia and China where ‘a hard man’, and the protests in Hong Kong, are just aspects and symptoms.

I think I have alluded to it before (and can’t be arsed to go and check) but it is as though the force of enlightenment which has been growing over the past 70 years is now encountering resistance. I don’t want to come across as some semi-illiterate part-time autodidact, but from the intellectual bits and bobs I have scavenged over the years there seems to me to be a distant echo in the developments of the past ten to 15 years (and I would really not want to push this one too far) of Hegel’s notion of ‘thesis, antithesis and synthesis’, later adopted and adapted by Marx.

In fact, it is quite possible to sidestep any heavy philosophical notions and not quote Hegel (useful if you haven’t read a word of Hegel and don’t want to look like a prize prune by misrepresenting him) and simply mention the Chinese notion of yin and yang the (that night follows day as day follows night) and the Tao, or the long-acknowledged realisation that ‘everything carries the seed of its own destruction’.

In order to give a little more detail on that last idea, I’ve just looked up quotes to see ‘who said that’ and it would be faster to list all those who didn’t say something along those lines, but here’s one from Mark Twain with which you’ll have to make do:

‘Every civilisation carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.’

Yes, there have been problems but looking back over the past 70 years in Europe, one might be forgiven for thinking that overall the general direction of social and political sensibility was towards greater liberalism — in the non-political sense — and, for want of a better word, enlightenment. Certainly, it might seem to be two steps forward, then one back, but ‘progress’ was made. But using that word ‘progress’ draws attention to the essence of one problem: that one man or woman’s ‘progress’ is another man or woman’s ‘abomination’. And it is not a question here of deciding who is right and who is wrong — a debate as futile as trying to agree which is the better football club, United or City? — but of the attitude of each side to the other.

Sometimes part of the difficulty is as basic as that the one side does not even care to acknowledge that however abhorrent it might think the attitude of the other is, it is — because in a democracy it must be regarded as — equally valid.

But ironically that attitude — my attitude — is essentially a liberal one and others (though not necessarily you) might say ‘stuff and nonsense, you lily-livered pinko!’ (followed by, possibly, ‘no surrender!’)

. . .

As for Brexit, well, it is not looking good, not for Britain, Ireland or the EU. Everyone will be a loser unless Britain leaving the EU can be sensibly managed and it is not looking as though that will happen. Well, that at least is my view.

Part of the problem is that on the Brexit side there are those who want Britain to leave the EU, but to do so in a managed and orderly way. And there are those gung-ho individuals (many of whom haunt the comment pages of

the Daily Telegraph where I trade insults with them) who take the attitude of ‘let’s have a clean break and make Britain great again’. So even on the Brexit side there is disagreement.

There has been all kinds of shenanigans in Parliament and our Prime Minister — our current Prime Minister, one Boris Johnson — has painted himself into a corner from which there would seem to be no escape. He has vociferously vowed that Britain will leave the EU by October 31 ‘do or die’, i.e. whether a withdrawal agreement has been made with the EU; on the other hand Parliament has made it law (after through his own incomprehensible stupidity Johnson lost his very slim majority in the House of Commons) that Britain cannot leave the EU unless a withdrawal agreement is in place.

Furthermore, Johnson is fighting a rearguard action against a new party founded by Nigel Farage, the Brexit Party, which will hoover up support from the Tories if we don’t leave by October 31 and Britain is forced to ask for ‘an extension’. Everyone expects a general election to be held in November if we have not left the Tories (in my view) are toast. Ironically, given just how unpopular Jeremy Corbyn, the equally hamfisted Labour leader is in the opinion polls, the Conservatives are ahead by, I think, an average six points.

I am pretty certain that Johnson will not manage to get deal by October 31 (in fact, for technical reasons it must be struck by October 19) and that the coming general election, many voters who previously voted Tory will back Farage’s gang of wankers, other ‘one-nation’ Tories — well, some of them — might throw in their lot with the Lib Dems (who will make it a manifesto pledge that they will revoke ‘Article 50’, the clause in the EU constitution (?) which allowed Britain to announce its withdrawal from the EU).

Then because of that manifesto pledge and in view of Corbyn’s half-baked policy on what to do about Brexit, quite a few Labour voters will pitch in with the Lib Dems and the result of the election will be a hung parliament. What happens then is anyone’s guess. And I’m not going to guess because I have to drive into Bodmin for various reasons and time is getting short. And I’m sure I haven’t told you anything much you didn’t already know. But I wanted to get this post entry finished and posted.

On the road . . .

Travelodge - Retford Markham Moor

Off on my travels for a day or two, this time to visit the Jorvik Vikin Centre in York which I did yesterday. I’ve always wanted to. Interesting experience, and the whatever you call them - animatronic’ figures were novel, semi-lifelike humans and animals moving – slightly, doing various things and ‘talking to each’ other – sitting outside reproductions of what their houses must have looked like were useful to covey they kind of life they will have led. Can’t say I learned much, but that wasn’t the point. If I want to learn shite like that, I’ll simply renew my subscription to Look And Learn (not to be mocked - bet I know more about how tyres are made - from the collection of sap from the rubber tree to fitting them to your Ford Consul! - than you do, so take your mockery . . .

It’s also good to get up and about. I was on the point of using the phrase ‘on the road’ but it does sound a little portentous, implying I’ve got a stash of dexies in the glove comparment, a fistful of hot dollars, a small handgun and have just picked up a mysterious brunette. Sadly I’ve done none of these things. But I do like getting away on my own, even though I’m not doing an awful much.

Set off on Tuesday to get to this Travelodge, chosed because it is near Lincoln (where I shall take off to a little later) and York (where the Jorvik Centre is), though at 52 miles away, York was a little further than I thought it might be. When booking a Travelodge - exactly what I want from a hotel, clean sheets and hot water - I had looked for one inbetween Lincoln and York, and came up with Doncaster. Then I noticed this one was about £15 cheaper for two nights but kept thinking is was ‘between Lincoln and York’. (A dull piece of info? Well, pity me not yourselves, I’ve had to think it.)

Went off to a superstore in Retford - eleven miles away - to ‘get something to eat, stocked up on olives, hummus, crackers, tangerines, cheese, a bowl, a tumbler and a ‘pairing knife for my supper but then stayed in Retford anyway for two glasses of red and a bowl of penne arrabiata.

Trying to get out of Retford to get back here was a hoot. Since I had driven in and was now attempting to drive out again, workmen had closed ‘the London Road’ and no amount of following their diversion signs would let me escape sodding Retford town centre. It did get beyond a joke, I kept driving past the same bloody temporary traffic light again and again and again and didn’t have a clue why. The Google Maps directions didn’t help either cos they didn’t know London Road was closed.

It must have taken me almost an hour to get out and the only reason I did that was by setting my Google Maps for York - 50 miles due north - then following the road until I got to the A1. Then it was turn around and drive down the A1 till I reached the Travelodge.

After the Jorvik centre stopped off at a tapas bar and enjoyed three plates of tapas and three different cherries before tasking the ‘Richar III Experience in whatever gate tower (complete with portcullis) it is. Wait, I’ll take a look. Back again: the Monk Bar gatehouse, the tallest of the medieval city’s four gatehouses.

Today, it’s off to Lincoln for a mooch around. The Lincoln Chronicle - long since dead (and the then evening paper the Lincolnshire Echo is now ‘the local weekly’, things ain’t great in the wacky world of hackdom) - was my first paper so I’m off to look at 15 Kirkby St where I lived for about 15 months and the site where the old office was.

I was going to drive straight home tonight but I have since booked a oom at the Travelodge in Devizes (£44 for one night, just £3 cheaper than what I am paying here for two, but fuck it), to break the journey. The drive up from Cornwall was about six hours - though I was going slowly, I mean what’s the rush? More later.

Olivares Tapas Bar, corner of Drury Lane and Castle Hill, Lincoln – Lunch

As luck would have it my trek up Steep Hill took me to this tapas bar, and although I was – and still am – planning another Italian meal tonight in Devizes, I couldn’t resist it. Tapas and Continental food are gorgeous, we Brits – pretty much all of us – love it, bang on about it, can’t wait to go abroad to eat it, yet stick to the kind of shite we are accustomed to when we cook. OK, obviously not all of us and a great many Brits, both men and women can cook and can cook well. And there are some great British dishes and I would be dishonest if I didn’t admit it. Yet if the there is no rocketc science to preparing tapas, your average Brit could do it with his or her eyes closed, yet you rarely come across tapas bars – I have struck lucky twice. Still.

Went to 15 Kirkby St in ‘downhill’ Lincoln where I lived for about 15 months, and it and the area looked drabber and drearier than I could remember. This was, of course, 45 years ago and time is never kind, but haven’t they heard of ‘gentrification’? Really not.

The irony is that when folk think of Lincoln, they probably think of the medieval streets and houses (now shops, of course) up Steep Hill (called Steep Hill – why? Why, Joseph. Correct, because it’s fucking steep). Well, all that, as well as the nice middle-class house in the surrounding area are ‘uphil’. Downhill, meanwhile, are the rows and rows of two-up, two-down terrace houses where those not lucky enough to be related to or to have gone to school with the Bishop of Lincoln are obliged to live. In June 1974, when I moved in as a lodger to Gwynn (I think his name was) I wasn’t.

From Kirkby St to Riverside North where Lincoln Chronicle (not Lincolnshire Chronicle as I have so far been calling it) office and presses were it’s just a short walk, one I undertook every day. Sadly the presses and offices have disappeared, to be replaced by an NCP car park (watch out Buck House!) but as far as I know there are so far no plans to kill the Queen and bury her in the car park, though after listening to the lunchtime news about David Cameron’s interview on Today this morning when he admitted Liz (Brenda) had tipped him the wink and given him to understand in no uncertain terms that she was against ‘all this Scottish independence nonsense’ there might be informal talks about giving ‘that dick Cameron’ a seeing to and ‘he should seriously consider taking Samantha and their brood to the South Island in New Zealand while the going is good’.

The Green Dragon, the up on the other side of the bridge (or the end of the bridge) where the office was is now shut and the building for let and my short stroll up from Waterside North to here, near the cathedral, has made it pretty plain Lincoln has its own contingent of Baltic state EU citizens and asylum seekers as anywhere else.

The flat, horribly flat Lincolnshire drone has also lingered – well, it would – and is just as dull as it always was.

Off to Devizes in a while where I have decided to stay that night and not rush back to St Breward. It’s not that I am an old fart whose energy levels dictate that he is now obliged to interrupt his trip to the downstairs loo and do it in stages, just that I’ve got this travelling bit in my blood and although it’s not quite Maine to New Mexico, it’s still there. The only drawback about doing some more travelling is the cost of staying somewhere and it occurs to me that if I got a small camper van in which I could get my head down, the only other cost would be petrol. Look into that. See you a bit later when I had some more from Devizes.

Travelodge – Devizes.

All together now: who’s a complete prat? Why, I am. I arrived here about 30 minutes ago (now settled in) to discover that when I booked my room here last night, I bloody booked for next week. Dick! So that’s £25 up the swannee or to put it in my terms, just over three bottles of the Rioja I like and buy at whichever supermarket has it on offer. Bollocks. Now I’m off for another does of penne arrabiata. .

Bon nuit. Don’t stay up, I’ll only whinge.