I haven’t posted here for some time, and I am conscious of it. There’s no reason at all, except that I have nothing much to record here, and as all too often my posts lately have been nothing more than a round-up on current affairs on what I have been reading in the more ‘serious’ newspapers and journals (all things are comparative so ‘serious’ means ‘not quite as fucking daft’), I felt it was a tad artificial and pretentious to post here - though saying nothing - simply because I hadn’t posted here for a while. I have been posting on my ‘secret’ blog, but the entries are far shorter and where I can let my hair down.
I am on a ten-day visit to see my aunt in Illats, with whom you might be familiar from previous entries over these past few years. For about seven or eight year, I would visit in July to accompany her to several of the concerts put on at that time as part of a series of three. The last time was, I think, in 2017, the year before I retired, but the visits stopped when she became too frail to go out much, and not at all in the evenings when the concerts were being held.
She has been in even poorer health this past year. She is now 91, the sight in one eye has gone (though it still itches and irritates irrespective of that), she has one (or possibly even two) new knees, and has fallen badly several times. We kept in touch by email and I was going to visit here in the autumn, but my wife suggested I should make it earlier than that in case - well, in case. So here I am.
. . .
I arrived last Wednesday, and as always it takes a day or two of acclimatising. I was going to be staying for a little over two weeks, but of her older son announced that he and his wife would be coming this Saturday for the weekend and could not make it at any other time, so I had to re-arrange my flight. So far the routine has been the same - breakfast, lunch (nothing grand but far longer than the usual 13 minutes most Brits or, I suppose, Yanks give over for that meal) and supper.
Well, my routine at home is vastly different: a mug of tea at 9.30 for breakfast, two mugs of cafe au lait (or call it what you will, at 11.20/12, then nothing to eat until supper (tea in rural North Cornwall, but we middle-class lads are addicted to ‘standards’ so it’s ‘supper’ as far as this blog is concerned) which could be at between 5.30 and 7 if not a little later.
The upshot is that I, who eats not a great deal at the best of times, although I love food, felt bloated, fat and just didn’t want so much booze. The crunch came yesterday: we were due to have a good lunch at a local very good, and not very cheap restaurant.
So I had no breakfast and later skipped the early evening aperitif - gin and tonic for me and whisky for my aunt - and then skipped supper. I also had a relatively early night. I slept for ten hours which shows just how much I needed it.
So today I took a day off and went to visit a local 13th century castle, Chateau de Roquetillaide (I think I got the spelling right) which was interesting - I like castles - but might have been even more so if the guide’s commentary had not been entirely in French.
As it happens, the guy on the ticket desk who spoke perfect English (courtesy of an English mother and and education at a Surrey private school) gave me a guide in English which pretty much covered what she was telling all the other, presumably French or French-speaking visitors, about eight of them. When I got there, I realised I had visited before, but that didn’t matte because I could remember nothing about it (except that I had been there before).
. . .
Apart from that? Well, nothing. That murderous moron Putin is still destroying parts of south-east Ukraine and killing willy-nilly, but there is nothing I can helpfully add. I suspect this is really not the end of of something very unsettling to the ‘world order’, but the beginning, but quite how it will all work out I am not stupid enough to suggest.
The Hemingway bollocks is still on track and thank fully I can see the end of the tunnel. I still enjoy the reading, thinking and writing, but I shall be glad when I can finally get on with something else (and have long had my thoughts about that). The central irony of it all is that this is not about Hemingway at all or about ‘literature’ or writing (about which so many declare themselves to be ‘passionate’) or anything like that.
The prime reasons for undertaking what has proved to be a far greater and longer task than I anticipate were very simple: ‘to do something and complete it as best I could’ and ‘to do something and complete it as best I could’. Secondary reasons were ‘to learn to think clearly’ and ‘not to rush anything’.
Whether it was about just how (as is the subtitle ‘how did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame’ or ‘do sqirrels dream?’ was irrelevant. It was ‘completing it and not cutting corners’ which drove me on’. And I have to say it could not have been done before I had retired which, oddly, removed an imperative to rush which had not just blighted my life but - ‘he laughed’ - my ‘careeer’.
NB Many and latterly most of those I worked with on ‘Fleet Street’ had ambitions to make a ‘good career’ (are you reading this Andrew Morrod?). I never did. Career? What the fuck are they talking about?
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