Germany here I come (as, I hope, is the conclusion of this bloody project of mine)

Bodmin to London train:

Off on my travels again, this time to the Fatherland for a spot of nominal housesitting for my sister. She and my brother-in-law are off to El Salvador for three weeks on what seems to have become an annual trip. A former colleague of my brother-in-law decided to stay in El Salvador when he had worked there for a while and was posted away, and he and his wife have a beach house where my sister and her husband will be staying.

The ‘housesitting’ in Germany at Heinitzpolder (I’m going with my younger brother — younger being a relative term, mind, as he won’t see 59 again) simply entails making sure the six or seven chickens our sister has taken to looking after (don’t quite think that is the word, but you know what I man) are tucked up in bed at night and safe from Reynard, the fox. (I was about to write that ‘this being Germany, it is probably Reinhart, der Fuchs, but I bothered to look it up and the Germanys actually well him ‘Reinicke’. Well! I bet that nugget has made your day. It has mine.)

It will be good to get away, because I am still finding it odd getting used to ‘being retired’. I’ve asked other folk who are around my age or a bit younger but retired, and it seems it is rather usual. The feeling is hard to describe, which is why when you do chat to someone who also feels it, it is a relief. I should imagine it simply comes down to the whole structure of your life changing fundamentally. Except for those six silly months when I worked two three-month contracts on the Plymouth Evening Herald), I’d been commuting to London from St Breward for several days a week since January 1995 — 28 bloody years  —  although, as other old codgers will tell you, 28 years at our age doesn’t seem quite as long as it does when you are 30 or 40 years younger (and is a bloody eternity to a teenager), it is still 28 years. So I’m hoping getting away — and for three weeks, no more of these ten-day breaks I’ve been treating myself to while I was still working — will . . . Well, will what? Help me settle into retirement a little more.

It’s not a question ‘of having something to do’, either to ‘keep you busy’. Surely, once you retire the end of that sentence is logically ‘. . . till you die’, though no one says it. There’s plenty I want to do — and shall do — and I have to say this odd feeling abates a little if I have spent the day writing. Why, I really couldn’t tell you, but then I’m not particularly interested in the ‘why’ just the ‘it does’.

I plan (and you know how much God laughs when you tell him your plans) is to break the back of this bloody Hemingway project and finally get it out of the way. The main point of it is to do it, to complete it, to do all the background ‘research’ (which in my case comes down to reading) and to do it as well as I can possibly do it. Ironically, it has nothing to do with Hemingway at all. I don’t much like his work and after reading — what is it? — at least four or five direct biographies of the man as well as several other books, I find him irritating beyond belief. I like to think that he would have hated me on sight because I sure as hell know I would have hated him on sight, the big phoney. I mustn’t, however, allow my feelings to get in the way of what I write.

As it happens (I started writing, though certainly not every day, about July 2018) I had already completed 15,000 but then decided, well, then realised, most of it was bollocks, so I started again, though I am still reading through those 15,000 words, or rather dipping in, to see if there is anything I might salvage. And as I am not doing any ‘original research’, and don’t want to, it seems to me to be rather pointless simply to rehash the biogs I’ve been reading into a kind of Readers Digest version. I now plan to write what will amount to a series of different essays looking at different facets of his rise to literary celebrity and, given my conviction that he isn’t half as good as many still believe, looking at quite how and why he reached such an exalted status.

I’ve just had to resist the temptation to rehearse what I am going to say (none of it particularly astonishing) but it boils down to Hemingway being, as they say, in the right place at the right time and the right kind of personality for the role. That makes it sound as though it were all planned out, and, of course, it wasn’t. He was personally something of a one-off (and it now seems probably bi-polar) and ‘larger than life’ though in recent years I’ve taken the phrase to mean ‘a pain in the arse’. There’s a great quote from Damon Runyon about Hemingway: ‘Few men can stand the strain of relaxing with him over an extended period.’ He really was a handful.

Anyway, I want to and have got to put in the work (though work is never work when you enjoy it) of getting it bloody finished, so I can get on with other things and finally put my money where my mouth is.

. . .

While I am in Germany, I might take off for a day or two to Hamburg to see cousin Sylvia and her nieces (well, I suppose they are also my nieces, too) Maya and Inga. On the other hand I might not. I’ve always found you relax more on holiday if you don’t plan ahead. I mean I can’t get my head around all those folk who write long lists of churches, museums and sites they want to visit. What is the point? Play it by ear. It also occurs to me that talk of ‘relaxing’ might seem a bit odd when discussing the life of someone who is now retired, but I’m sure you get my point.

Wish me a good time.

PS Still getting an unusual number of visitors to this blog from Turkey and, recently, Ukraine. Quite why I don’t know. I suspect, in the case of Turkey, my past less than complimentary comments about would-be hard man Erdogan has attracted the attention of those in Turkey who keep an eye on ‘undesirables’. But it’s probably all done my algorithm, so they aren’t visitors as such.