My cars: a short guide. Part VIII - a third 2CV, two Volvos, two Austins and more Rovers than you could shake a stick at

Working and living in London I didn’t need a car, so once I had rid myself of my very awful Vauxhall Chevette - and discovered that since I had last got rid of a car, I now had to pay someone to scrap it - that was it for a while, no more cars, and I can’t say I missed them. Finally, in 1995 once I had become engaged and knew I would be moving to Cornwall, I agreed to buy a former flatmate’s 2CV, a white Charleston with blue stripesm, which was still in good condition, both mechanically and cosmetically.
There was something attractive but deeply daft about how Citroen released the same car over and over again with each model being identical in every detail except that it had differently themed paintwork. I think the last techinical change made was when the engine capacity was doubled from 300cc to 600cc, and that was at some time towards the end of the 19th century.
The 2CV you got was still a great car to drive - if you like that quirky sort of thing and didn’t mind slowing down considerably when driving up hills - but it was a dog to deal with when something went wrong. So ‘theming’ them in the hope that this would somehow make the car different was, frankly, quite daffy. In essence the design hadn’t changed in years. Furthermore, Citroen desperately wanted to stop making them - they had, after all, been designed as a farm vehicle in for post-war use and didn’t fit Cirtoen’s new high-tech innovative company image - but just as they were on the brink of being retired, hippies of all shades, German greens, French revolutionaries, British Liberals and vegetarians, and assorted Dutch and Danes suddenly decided it was cool to drive one and that it made ‘a statement’ about their individuality. And, incidentally, no one - except cynical ad men - seems to have cottoned on that more than one person being ‘individual’ in a certain specific way, such as driving a 2CV, makes it impressively less of an ‘individual’ act, and that ‘being alternative’ can quite rapidly become a mainstream activity. There are few sillier sights than a whole gang of more or less identically dressed and styled alternatives all convinced that they are a one-off. But then the world seems to abound in silliness. But what the hell, it’s been going on now for several thousand years.
Certainly, Citroen must, at first, have been rather pleased that an old design had a new lease of life and that it would be reflected in the sales figure, and they even designed a ‘new’ 2CV, the Dyanne, to cash in. The Dyanne got a new shape and superficial makeover, but it was otherwise the old 2CV with a new name.
I had agreed to buy Andy Penman’s old 2CV - he only wanted £100 for it, but I insisted on giving him £200 because it was worth more than £100 and I didn’t want there to be any bad blood later on. As it happened, I needed it sooner than we had planned because my wife-to-be had had a miscarriage and I had to get to Cornwall very quickly, so I picked it up from outside his house in Kennington and drove down to Cornwall in it, getting lost around Southampton looking for a petrol station.
That 2CV was a good little car and I drove down to Cornwall and back several times before I finally left London. It was still nice looking and drove well. Later, it developed a habit of not starting in the damp cold of Exeter St Davids, but I got a great deal of good mileage out of it.
However, my wife insisted, when our daughter was born, that we needed a safer car, and she also insisted that a Volvo like the one her father had, a 340, was what she wanted. So we looked at two or three, but none was worth the asking price. Then we discovered that a dealer in Summercourt on the Truro road was selling one, and that it had belonged to the dealership manager, no less. Our thinking was that if the manager had driven it, it most certainly would have been kept in tip-top condition. But that was rubbish. I paid way over the odds for it - £2,000, £1,000 more than I had ever before spent on a car - and as soon as we got it, we realised the electrics were all to cock. Yes, it was fast - it was the 360 GTE (whatever that means) and, yes, it looked quite nice, but it needed a lot of work to be done before I was happy with it. Celie, my wife, used it as her car, and I carried on with the 2CV to drive to Exeter to get the train to London.
By 1999 it was giving me far too much trouble. I had discovered a garage at Wainhouse Corner on the road to Bude which ‘specialised’ in 2CV, but all that meant was that they had a yard full of wrecks in various states of degeneration which were useful for picking up parts (such as a rear indicator lens which I needed after I had reversed my car into a gate). The garage was run by three old brothers who all seemed a bit daffy. The final days of my 2CV came when I had dropped it off for a service. When I picked it up, it was obvious something was serious wrong: the driver’s door would not shut properly, the steering was all to cock and the car was simply assumetrically out of alignment. Then I realised: it had been on the ramp and fallen off. The brothers, of course, denied any such thing but they would, wouldn’t they. There was no way I could prove that the negligence was to blame, so I had to lump it and sold the car for a pittance to a 2CV enthusiast.
I should add that a year or two early, I had twice crashed the Volvo, first demolishing one wing, and once it came back repaired, on the very same day, demolishing the other wing. There was a joke between my father and my brother Mark that as far as cars are concerned I am accident-prone, and I am bound to admit that there is a great degree of truth in the claim.
But now it is past midnight, I am tired and I am going to sleep. I shall continue this - rivetting is the only word I can use - account another time.

Idle time at work . . .

Apropos nothing at all, a few definitions which have been bandied about these past few minutes here at work:

"A pessimist sees his glass half-empty. An optimist drains it, then hands it over for a refill."

"A pessimist is a man who puts All Bran on his prunes."

And my favourite:
"Definition of a pessimist: a well-informed optimist."

And just for the craic, here's a quote from Gore Vidal in which there is more than an element of truth:
"It's not enough to win - others must lose."

LATER: Well, that is what I thought it was, but it isn't. An hour or so after writing the above, I had a vague memory of giving the above quote, only to be told I was wrong. A minute ago, I got around to looking it up. The correct quote is:
"It's not enought to succeed. Others must fail", which is even better.
Vidal is also quoted as saying "No good deed goes unpunished", though whether he actually came up with it or was just passing it on, I don't know.

The big ask: keeping up with how language insists on changing (dammit)

Are you managing to stay abreast with how our language keeps changing? If you’re not, I fully understand. It’s a big ask (as people quite apart from sportsmen and women are increasingly saying), and the use of the word 'ask' is just one way language is changing.
In fact, 'ask' is not another rather pointless neologism but has a distinct meaning. It carries elements of 'demand', 'challenge' and 'request', but is distinct from all three. It seems to have started life, for a change, in Britain rather than being an American import as is usually the case, and was first used specifially by sportsmen and women. I suspect 'Big' Ron Atkinson first came up with it, as he often came out with words or phrases which were adopted by others ('early doors' for a player who has to leave the field early, and another very good one which is on the tip of my tongue but which I can't for the life of me recall offhand.)
You never come across a simple 'ask'. It is always a 'big ask'. And although the word and concept started life in sports, you will increasingly come across it elsewhere, for example on Radio 4's Today programme, most probably used by a politician, a breed always very keen to demonstrate how on the ball they are and how modern and aware and how they deserve every penny of their ill-gotten 'expenses'.
When I was young, my family still sat down together to Sunday lunch (something which, I believe is happening less and less - it was more German middle-class than British, and it is not the only thing I miss from the German part of my upbringing) and almost every Sunday the following conversation took place:
Me to my father: ‘Can you pass the salt, please?’
My father: ‘Of course, I can.’ But he wouldn’t pass the salt.
The point was that I should have asked ‘would you please pass the salt’. Once I had done so, I would get the salt, but also the same lecture on speaking correct English. And I would respond by telling my father that language was always changing and that what was once ‘wrong’ might now well be ‘right’.
Generally, it was pointless to try to take on my father at that level, because he knew more than I did and in such a debate could run rings around his son. But I still insist that what I was saying is true: language and its use are always changing and what was yesterday correct might well today slightly affected and old-fashioned. Those such as my father who insist that one usage is ‘correct’ implicitly feel that there was one age whose use of language provided the yardstick for correct usage, a kind of golden age. If there was such a time, it follows that not only is all subsequent use of language which doesn’t match up to that yardstick ‘wrong’, but, nonsensically, all previous use in the centuries leading up to that golden age was also wrong.
As we get older and as younger folk adopt the use of language which, to our ears, sounds alien, inelegant and ‘wrong’, some of us, like my father, are apt to get crusty and make fools of themselves. But unfortunately - some might say unfairly - it is us who must ‘raise our game’ and get use to the changes or risk sounding like old farts. It's a big ‘ask’, I know, but we have no choice.
Usages I don’t like, but no longer claim are ‘wrong’ include how people these days will say something along the lines of ‘there’s cars in the street’, whereas, if there is more than one car, it should be ‘there are ...’. Similarly, and in imitation of the characters from Friends, ask someone under 40 how they are, they will probably respond with ‘good’. This baffles someone like me who will say, and all his life heard other people say, ‘well’ or ‘quite well’. These changes are distinct from contemporary and more ephemeral usages such as beginning a sentence with the word ‘basically’, as in, for example, ‘basically, we are not aware of how language has changed until others laugh at us’, where the ‘basically’ is basically utterly redundant. It does perform a function - it gives the speaker a spurious authority as though he or she knows more than others what they are talking about, that they ‘have an in’. But that will not last. Another fashionable word whose use is more fashionable than marking any real change in language is the use of ‘absolutely’: ‘Did you enjoy your night out?’ ‘Absolutely’. I don’t like it, but then increasingly I belong to a world which is of less consequence, so my likes and dislikes are more and more unimportant. If you, like me, don’t like these changes, all I can say is: ‘Get used to it.’
Incidentally, I was going to record how much I dislike some Americanisms which, so far, have not been adopted in Britain. ‘Awesome’ is one. But then it occurred to me that referring to something as ‘a big ask’ might mean nothing to Americans and that, furthermore, they might feel aggrieved over certain British uses which they feel debases the English language. So I shan't.

My cars: a short guide. Part VII - the Cardiff years, my second 2CV, two Austin Allegros and a bloody awful Vauxhall Chevette

My second 2CV gave very good service and saw me through my bleak months of unemployment and landing a job as a sub on the South Wales Echo in Cardiff. When I first bought her, she was in very good condition, despite the bargain price which I paid to make her mine. She first lost a little of her glamour (and why the bloody hell am I referring to her as ‘she’?) on November 1985. I had been unemployed since being forced by a lack of funds to abandon my photography course at the end of the Easter term. I set about applying for jobs as a newspaper photographer, which was not as daft as it sounds. The only major factor not in my favour was my age. Newspapers far prefer paying their staff peanuts and would rather take on an absolute beginner in his or her late teens or early twenties. I was 35, and employers, nor unrealistically, believe that a 35-year-old might be more inclined eventually to complain about low wages and working long hours than an apprentice smudger or reporter in his or her late teens or her early twenties keen to make his or her mark. (One of the scams used by newspapers to justify paying journalistic staff extremely low wages is to claim that working as a journalist is ‘a vocation’ and that anyone who has managed to ‘break into journalism’ should count themselves lucky to be working in such a rarefied profession. It’s complete cobblers, of course, but journalism is one of those profession, like working in the film industry or working for a circus, that has a certain, though utterly spurious, glamour.)
I did, however, get two interviews. One was for a job with a photo agency in Loughborough. I went along, had a chat, showed my ‘portfolio’ and was offered the job. The wage was, however, rather low and as I had also saddled myself with a considerable debt in the CEGB years buying up every last piece of photographic equipment going - such is the expensive nature of most enthusiasms - I decided it simply wasn’t worth it and that if I took it, I would still be in debt by the time I died. So I turned it down. In retrospect, the wage wasn’t all that low at all, just lower than would have been comfortable. Perhaps in my heart I knew that I wasn’t cut out to be a photographer. At about that time I also had an interview with the weekly paper in Yeovil, but was not offered a job.
Apart from applying for jobs as a news photographer, I was also applying for jobs as a reporter, but here I had less luck. I did so because working as a sub on a regional paper is pretty much a question of shovelling as much shit as you can stand - or so it seemed to me - and I didn’t really want to do that again. I got very few interviews - editors understandably ask themselves ‘who is this fly-by-night who is already 35 and hasn’t reported for five years? Do we really want to employ yet another bloody dipso who will probably have his hand in the till the minute he gets here?’ To which the answer is, of course, invariably no: editors might usually be complete shits, but not all of them are stupid. (Incidentally, describing them as ‘complete shits’ might seem gratuitously offensive, but the fact is that the nature of the job demands that the holder is capable of a unpleasantness and duplicity, and, as a rule, certain kinds of people - call them ‘shits’ if you will - are invariably more qualified than others to perform that role successfully.)
The only interview I can actually remember was with the Ox & Bucks news agency which was run by an ex Sun reporter. I went for a day’s trial and was asked to stay on for a second day with the ex Sun reporter offering to put me up for the night. Before we drove to his house we stopped off at a pub for an evening meal and a drink. He told me any number of amusing stories about his time on Fleet Street. One, in particular, amused me a lot: he and a gang of other hacks, both print and television, were in some part of the world or other where the climate was hot. Part of the group was Michael Cole, who was working for BBC television and pissing everyone off with his pretensions and superior manner. While the rest of them were drinking beers and spirits, Cole insisted on drinking white wine and making out he was something of a connoisseur. So they got the waiter to give them a glass, one of the party pissed into it, then it was placed in a fridge for a while until it was chilled. When Cole was due to get his next glass of wine, he was, instead, served up the chilled piss. He took a sip. ‘What’s this one like, Michael?’ they asked. Cole took a second sip and then pronounced it ‘rather dry’.
I remember the ex Sun reporter asking me as we drove to his house, both of us no longer sober: ‘What’s it like driving home with a strange man?’ Hmm, I thought and decided that he was probably a woofter and not in the slightest bit interested in my abilities as a reporter, but rather my attractions as, like him, a member of the male sex. When we got home, I met his wife, stayed the night, worked another day and went back home to Norlan Drive, Birmingham, where I lived. I can’t for the life of me remember whether of not I was offered a job. Perhaps he realised I wasn’t interested in batting for the other side.
I have gone off on something of a tangent here, but this was the life I was leading while I was unemployed between leaving college in April 1985 and starting work on the South Wales Echo in on February 16, 1986. In November 1985, I was in touch with some small cable TV station based in Coventry who were looking for someone to cover for the news producer while he was on holiday. The woman who interviewed heard a tape I had made while on my course (I can no longer remember why), showed me the programme being broadcast live, accepted my assurance that I reckoned I could handle what was involved and me more or less told me I had the job. I knew nothing about that kind of work, but I have to say that it is the kind of thing any reasonably intelligent person should be able to learn quite fast, especially on the job. The woman told me that she just had to have the appointment cleared by the board and would be in touch again in a week’s time. On the strength of that promise I decided I could do with a break and I drove to Edinburgh to spend a few days with a friend. While there I rather spoilt my 2CVs looks. We were driving somewhere in The Meadows near where he lived when in the road ahead of me I saw two 3ft high concrete bollards. I gauged that they were just far enough apart for me to drive in between them. I was wrong. On a 2CV the wheel arches covering the back wheels form a rather pleasing kind of cupola. Driving through the narrow gap between those two bollards, the cupola over each rear wheel was stoved in and thoroughly dented. The best gloss I can put on such a silly incident is that at least the damage to each wheel arch was identical and that the overall impression was, at least, pleasingly symmetrical. When I returned to Birmingham, there was still no word from the woman or the TV station. I waited a few days, fearing the worst, though puzzled as to what might have gone wrong, and then rang up. The woman, I was told, was not longer there and had left rather suddenly. Why, I wasn’t told. But that was the end of that particular opportunity.
Finally, realising that I would probably have no luck at all getting a job as either a photographer or reporter, I applied for a job as a sub on the South Wales Echo, got it on the spot - newspapers find it difficult to get subs and my experience on the Evening Mail in Birmingham helped. So I packed my bags, loaded up my 2CV and moved to Cardiff.
I can’t really remember what happened next, but I finally got rid of the 2CV. I think it needed quite a bit of work done to it to pass its MoT, and what with paying off my debts, I was rather on my uppers in the early days in Cardiff.
For a while I did without a car and I can’t say it made much difference to my life. But eventually I bought an Austin Allegro, although I can’t, offhand, remember why I decided to buy another car. I certainly didn’t need one. Allegros are widely, and
I think justifiably, regarded by most British drivers as ‘naff’. The word is in common parlance these days but was said to have originated as an gay acronym to describe someone who was not gay and would no be interested in a spot of rumpy-pumpy: not available for fucking. Whether that is true or not, I don’t know, but it is plausible. These days, in British English, it is used to describe something which is the opposite of cool. And Allegros were remorselessly uncool, and therefore not too expensive.
They were produced by British Leyland (or whatever the firm was calling itself in that year. Leyland was in terminable decline, but took a very long time to go bust and in the process kept changing its name as though to stave off its destiny). To indicate just how desperate the firm was, here’s a snippet about the Allegro: when it was launched, its unique selling point was that it had a square steering wheel. Now if the best your designers can come up with to make your new car more attractive to the public is to make the steering wheel square, it really is time to shut up shop and take early retirement. In fact, Leyland stumbled on for another 20 years.
The Allegro served my purpose (whatever that was - I didn’t need a car and can’t for the life of me remember why I bought one) but it had one very niggling fault. The cylinder head gasket went at some point, so the cylinders filled with water. So every morning before I drove to work and every evening before I drove home again, I had to unscrew all four plug and dry them. This was always very inconvenient, but I did it - had to do it - every morning.
In September 1989, I was sacked by the Echo for dropping one bollock too many and decided to set myself up as a freelance photographer. I did get enough work here and there to survive - a local newspaper group was setting up a string of freesheets and I took their pictures and I also took pictures in South Wales for one of the Catholic papers. I also wrote features for the Wales on Sunday and for a while even worked subbing shifts. It was at this time that the Allegro became an ex Allegro when I had a crash with a speeding driver in the backstreets of Roath (a part of Cardiff). I was looking for the address of the woman I was seeing and was not looking where I was driving. A car, driving far to fast came out of nowhere and I went into the side of him. If anything the crash was my fault: I had been looking over my shoulder to try to read street signs and did not see him because I was not paying any attention whatsoever to my driving. But I had a stroke of luck. When the police arrived, he pleaded that as a Muslim he had not been drinking but he had and was over the limit. I got off scot-free. In fact, it never occurred to the coppers that I might have contributed to the accident. I simply made a statement saying that ‘he had come from nowhere, driving too fast, and that, and the fact that he was over the limit, cooked his goose and saved my bacon. The Allegro, however, was a write-off.
I bought another, but that one too, wasn’t in very good condition and a few months later, while on my way to visit a friend in the Valleys, the chassis snapped so that driving became more or less impossible. It was possible, just, by tugging very hard on the steering wheel because the left side of the car was where the chassis had gone was lower than the right, but in truth the car was undrivable, and after a week or so, I admitted as much to myself and got rid of it.
My problem now was that I was working as a freelance photographer and still needed wheels. My landlady put me onto her son-in-law who ‘did up cars and sold them’. He had a light-blue Vauxhall Chevette for sale. I bought it. It was a complete wreck and the MoT, as I discovered, was fake. The
particular trouble was twofold. First, was starting the bloody thing. There were no problems starting it in the morning. Problems only started when the engine was hot. Then it wouldn’t start at all until the engine was a little cooler. So every time I stopped, I had to wait for around 20 minutes before I could move on. The other, more serious, problem was that the whole left front wing more or less didn’t exist. It was completely rusted through. In my eagerness to get a car to get around in, I had given it only a cursory examination and had not even bothered to lift the bonnet.
My relationship with the Chevette lasted only a few months, for come the turn of the financial year, everyone had battened down the hatches and work dried up. So I rang up the Daily Express and landed myself four subbing shifts. That was in June 1990. For the first few weeks, I travelled to London from Cardiff, stayed for several nights, returned to South Wales to doing my washing and pick up some fresh clothes, then returned to London. By this time the differential on the Chevette had gone and - this is no exaggeration - it sounded like a tank. The noise it made was deafening, and driving the 120 miles or so between Cardiff and London was no fun. There was also the problem of finding somewhere to park in London, and once, while parked on single yellow lines outside the Times offices at Wapping, my Chevette was towed away to a police pound in Kings Cross. Getting it back cost me £120 plus £70 for the parking fine, so getting rid of it was the obvious thing to do. To add insult to injury I actually had to pay a scrap merchant £20 to pick it up. That bloody Chevette marked the nadir of my driving career. I didn’t have another car for several years, but from then on, however, ratty subsequent cars were, the only way was up.
Still to come, if I haven’t bored you rigid, is my third 2CV, two Austin Maestros, two Volvos and four Rovers. Once that account is out of the way, you’re dismissed and your time is your own.

PS to 'Isn't noise great?'

Yesterday, I heard a Radio 4 programme by Alastair Campbell waxing lyrical about Jacques Brel. I don't speak French, and although I know Brel's songs are something of an institution in France, it is one form of 'noise' which has never really rattled my cage. There were contributions from a range of French folk who had known Brel, man of whom had worked with him, and they all remembered him with affection. Many commented on his double life: rather conservative and upright paterfamilias in Belgium, where his wife and children lived, and principal shagger about town when living and working in Paris. Fair enough, and it was his many affairs which fueled his romantic songs. But one observation, repeated by several contributors, rather struck me: for all his charm and 'niceness' - 'nice' was one word used to describe Brel - he was 'harsh with his kids'. And that, curiously, makes it very easy for me almost to rule the chap out of court. I say 'almost' because I really can't know the ins and outs of his relationship with his wife and there might be circumstances which justify his 'harshness' although I can't imagine what they might be. But on the face of it, I am not a fan of anyone who is 'harsh' with his or her children, especially when they are young and especially when, otherwise, he finds he makes an effort to charm the pants off the world. Sounds a bit like a self-centred cunt to me.

Schnittke and Scriabin and my fondness for the noise they make.

Sir Thomas Beecham is said to have remarked that ‘the English don’t understand music, but they like the noise it makes’. Before googling that quotation to track down where it had originated, I had assumed it was by some foreigner putting the boot into Old Blighty and its culture. Beecham was a bit of a card, but given that what he said, however true, was not intended to be complimentary, I am rather puzzled by it. However, I didn’t start this entry to write about Beecham, the English or left-handed compliments. I use the quotation as an introduction because it describes my relationship with music almost exactly.
I know little about music except the obvious and trivial things one picks up, especially if, like me, you have been knocking around with a guitar for more than 40 years (and have very little to show for it). I know chords, I know how I should be able to read music (although I can’t actually read music), I know about keys (and, incidentally, I am rather fascinated at how different keys, no one knows quite why, convey different moods). I know that what most people in the West regard as music is but a fraction of the music being made worldwide and I know there is a variety of different scales. When I was 12 and we were living in Berlin, I had a year’s worth of piano tuition but finally gave up because ‘I wanted to play jazz’ - not that, at 12, I had the slightest idea what jazz was. But I don’t ‘understand’ music in the sense others claim or are said to ‘understand’ music.
Once, a little facetiously but also, in a rather conceited fashion because I thought it was rather a good analogy, I asked someone: say you went to a very good restaurant and ate a very good meal. You enjoyed much about the meal, not just the taste of the food, but the texture, how much care had gone into it’s preparation, the service at the restaurant, the company and the wine you drank. Later - that night at home, or a few days later - you might well find yourself recalling the meal and discussing it. But were you to be asked: ‘But did you understand the food?’, you would be rather nonplussed. It would simply not be an appropriate question. Food is eaten and enjoyed, wine is drunk and enjoyed, a good company, service and ambience are also enjoyed and valued. There would seem to be nothing which might be ‘understood’ about any of them in any accepted sense of ‘understood’. (Yes, I know much faux intellectual noise could be made about the elastic character of the notion of ‘understanding’ were this a Guardian or Independent seminar, but it following that line of discussion would only take us down a rather dull alley, so let’s drop that angle sooner rather than later.)
That’s how I feel about music: I don’t ‘understand’ it at all. I can’t even see what there is to understand of even conceive of what there might be to understand. But I very much like and enjoy the noise it makes. And except for mainstream Grand Ole Opry C&W and all that finger-in-the-ear ersatz English folk which was spawned in the late Sixties, I seem to like virtually everything I hear.
Most recently I have become a fan of a chap called Schnittke. I heard a reference to him on Radio 4’s Front Row in which it was said he claimed the Devil had dictated music to him. Intrigued I turned to Spotify, which is very useful in hearing composers, songs or artists you hadn’t heard before, and listened to some. And I like it a great deal.
I am sure it is not, or would not be, to everyone tastes. I don’t ‘understand’ it. But I love ‘the noise it makes’. Try some yourself and see. If you find you do like it, then there’s Scriabin, too, another composer of enjoyable noise you might like to try. If you want to try some ‘noise’ at the jazz/rock end of the scale, listen to some Dave Fiuczynski, a guitarist who is always interesting and enjoyable. And, no, I don’t ‘understand’ a single second of it.
To my list of C&W and finger-in-ear folk (with added vitamin-enriched sincerity) include some, by no no means all, of the mid-19th century Romantic music, of which a little, for these ears, goes one hell of a long way. If there is a spectrum with romanticism at one end and classicism at the over, sign me up with the classicist. For some reason, romanticism reminds me of a lesser well-known saying by Oscar Wilde: ‘Sentimentality is a bank holiday from cynicism.’ Bear that in mind when you next read of how Nazi concentration camp governors used to organise choirs of inmates singing German carols for their children at Christmas.

60 is looming (and other less trivial matters)

At midnight, in ten days, I shall be 60. Curiously, I don’t care, but I must admit that I can hardly believe it. It seems like only last week that I was 30 or 40 or 50, but suddenly I am the age I once considered to be ‘old’. But I shall play it for all its worth. I shall be entitled to a ‘senior railcard’ which, for example, brings down the cheapest ticket from Exeter St Davids to London Paddington from £12 to £7.90, so I have already bought 12 tickets (six there, six back). What with petrol now costing around £1.06 a litre, the journey by car from home in St Breward to work in London, then back again, would cost £63.50. The journey from St Breward to Exeter and then to London by train then back would cost £31. That’s £32 less, or £1,664 less a year. Guess what I shall be doing.
Question: do all 60-year-olds spend their time celebrating small victories like having discovered a café where the tea is not quite as nice but you get free sugar? I rather fear they do. Shit.
I shall, of course, prepare myself for a welter of platitudes along the lines of 'you're only as old as you feel' and 'good God, man, 60? That's nothing! I'm 79 next birthday and still wipe my own arse!'
I must record, however, that ever since knocking those bloody statins on the head, I feel a lot better than I have for a long time. I have also knocked the Ramipril on the head, and feel rather as I did before my heart attack but before I started feeling exhausted which began a few months before the attack.
I know 'wisdom' dictates that I should 'listen to medical advice' and down as many bloody bills as the pharmaceutical industry can persuade them to prescribe. But I don't want to. I should like to keep my pill-popping to a minimum. I'm sure in time I shall be taking as many as Ann (my stepmother's sister who is now 80) and that my bedside cabinet will slowly transform itself into looking like a branch of Boots the Chemist, but I'll limp over that bridge when I get to it. But I can say that, the bug I had for about two weeks notwithstanding, I feel better now than I have for years. For one thing, I'm hardly drinking (after many years of polishing off at least a bottle or red wine a night on the three nights I was at home) and more or less eat a vegetarian diet, although that is more because I rather like it than for any philosophical reasons.

An interesting book was discussed on Andrew Marr's Start The Week. An Israeli historian, Shlomo Sand, has come up with the idea that the Jews weren't dispersed by the Romans after the revolt in AD70, but that the number of Jews around the world had their origins in people who had converted to Judaism. And he said that, given, of course, that there will have been quite a bit of intermingling in these past 2,000 years, the true descendants of the people who were living in Palestine, Gallili and Judea are the Palestinians. And he made the telling point: who is more entitled to the land there? The people who say they have not lived there for 2,000 years, or the people who have lived there for 1,000? I have probably rather trivialised his account, unfortunately, but what he had to say was interesting and, it must be said, not in the slightest anti-semitic.

Blogging, the ontology of blogs and why I would rather keep a commonplace book than write some interminable, boring account of the . . .

A longwinded resume of the cars I have owned and crashed is not of interest to everyone. I realise that, and it also occurred to me that if the word ‘blog’ is derived from ‘web log’, accounts of what happened 20 years ago might, at first, not seem to qualify. Well, in that case I shall stop calling this a blog. I once kept a diary, from the early Eighties until the mid-Nineties, and it was not just an account of my daily life, in fact it was hardly that at all, but more of a commonplace book. The blog performs a similar function, though not quite the same. There’s also the point to be made that there are really no rules on blogging and every blogger should be able to do what he or she likes.
Were it a diary, today would be described thus:
Woke early at about 4.30am, which I rarely do, but decided to surf the net, read some reviews in the heavier journals of Selina Hastings’ biography of Somerset Maugham and continue writing Part Whatever of my Guide To Cars I Have Crashed. Mark, my brother, with whom I lodge when here in London, got up at 6am because he does a weekly stock take on Mondays at the Troubadour where he works. I dozed and listened to the radio (Today on Radio 4) between 7am and 9am, latterly dozing more than listening, then I got up, brushed my teeth and walked work. It is only a 25-minute walk from Earls Court Sq. to Derry Street, just off High St. Kensington where the Mail has its offices. Listened to Start The Week while walking there. Bought a tea and a bowl of fruit in the canteen, then went to my desk, picking up today’s edition of the paper on the way. Leafed through the paper, with especial though superficial attention to the pages I worked on yesterday to make sure there were no monumental cock-ups, then logged into this, my blog, to finish off the car guide. At 10.25am, almost an hour later than usual, I finally got my arse together to take the lift down to the gym, which seems to be in the bowels of the building, but is, in fact, on the ground floor. Ten minutes on the exercise bike, 20 minutes on various weights, then warmed up, then ran a mile on the treadmill. I was flying solo today, so I could be 30 minutes late with impunity. Back at my desk by 11.30am, pissed around doing very little, looking up stuff on the net, gossiping with whoever was available to gossip with (and suggested that Sue, Chris and I should have a Word Of The Day which we would try to work into everything we said. Today’s word was ‘plangent’, but the challenge never got off the ground except for Sue observing tonight that as the editor has taken the week off, we were all denied the ‘plangent’ sound of his complaints.
Etc. This is getting tedious, and is boring me to write just a little more than it is boring you to read. So now you know why I have decided to redefine the word ‘blog’ to suit myself and bugger convention.
By the way, when I first thought of writing an entry such as this, I thought I might try to come up with some jokes about ‘investigating the ontology of blogging’. But doesn’t really come off, so I have used the word only in the title.

My cars: a short guide. Part VI - A massive Vauxhall Victor, a Simca, two 2CVs, naivety and a valuable lesson learned

The Vauxhall Victor, which succeeded my Triumph Toledo after that car’s sudden end, had only one thing in its favour: it was powerful. I can’t now remember how large the engine capacity was, but it must surely have been 2 litres. I bought it within weeks of the Toledo being written off - saying ‘writing off the Toledo’ would be inaccurate and unfair, as, for once, the crash wasn’t my fault - because the only legitimate way of claiming mileage expenses from my oh so generous employers was actually to drive the miles. Driving it, and sitting behind the steering wheel gazing some distance to the far end of the bonnet is the closest I have ever come, and the closest I shall ever come, to driving a Cadillac. If I remember correctly, the engine also made a deeply satisfying ‘vroom’ noise which spoke of power and purpose, and it surged forward slowly but surely and was the antithesis of all those little nippy 1 litre cars which rush around here and there rather like neurotic flies. The Victor, though,
had one failing: the heater didn’t work, and as autumn turned to winter that made travelling on as many trips as I was able to arrange in order to clock up the miles increasingly uncomfortable. It's not much fun spending hour upon hour speeding along the motoway freezing your balls off and no amount of buckshee mileage payments make you feel any warmer. When winter finally turned very cold, as it can do in Birmingham, there also came a disaster: there was not enough anti-freeze in the radiator and with the first frost, the radiator froze solid. And that was that. I can’t remember ever driving the Victor again. It was like the model pictured above, although mine was blue. (I rather like how the photographer has elegantly placed the Victor in a rural setting and given it a certain kind of rustic glamour. In real life, you would not find these cars sitting in a field but usually parked outside some pub in a more downmarket part of Nottingham. Actually, rustic charm is rather over-egging the cake. My first thought on seeing the picture above was why is that abandoned car looking so clean and shiny?)
I must now confess that my memory of the sequence of events and which cars I owned when is curiously hazy. I was still working for the CEGB when I bought the Victor, but I left in the early autumn of 1984 to start my photography course at West Bromwich College in Wednesbury, and the car I used to travel the 20-odd miles from my home in Kings Heath to Wednesbury (up the M5, a detail I add for those readers who like these accounts to have a more technical dimension) was my second Citroen 2CV. But before then I had two other cars, and at one point I owned three cars at once, although only because two of them didn’t run. I think the first car I bought once the Victor froze solid, and because I had to get to Wednesbury every day, was a Simca. This cost around £300 - a lot more in 1984 than at the time of writing this account 25 years later - and I thought I had a bargain. The ad in the newspaper classifieds said ‘no MoT’. No bother, I thought, very naively. I’ll get one, it'll only cost me £30. So I bought the car, took it to the garage and asked for an MoT estimate. £500. The car did not seem so much of a bargain after that, and the chap trying to rid himself of what was a pretty useless car had probably not believed his luck when I came along and handed over my money. So, I decided foolishly, I'll run the car without getting an MoT, but soon decided to scrap the Simca when I realised that the brakes were dodgy. On the long, multi-lane run-up to Spaghetti Junction and on my way to college one morning, I had to brake suddenly and almost crashed into the back of a builder’s merchant van. I realised I could not risk using the Simca. I should also add that I cannot remember transferring the insurance from the Victor to the Simca, so I was probably driving it uninsured, too.
At around this point my brother Mark came to live with me, and Mark was with me when I crashed my first 2CV. This was another wreck of a car but which I was too green to realise was on it last legs. It was also a rust bucket. I'd had it for a just week - and proud as punch not only to be owning a 2CV but because in some circles they had a kind of bohemian cachet - before it, too, was a write-off. Mark and I had gone for a drink and had argued. I was in a bad mood and was not taking the care I might while driving. Coming off a roundabout in Kings Norton - we were coming down the Redditch Rd. and turned into Wharf Rd., info for the techies among you courtesy of Google maps - we were approaching the exit of a pub car park - The Navigation Inn also courtesy of Google maps - when a car came straight out and I went straight into its side. My 2CV crumpled, with the front completely stoved in and the chassis warped. I wanted

to call the police (because technically the accident was the other guy’s fault) but the other driver tried to intimidate me by claiming he had many friends among the police based in Kings Norton and they would take his side and make out the accident was my fault. This annoyed me, and the three pints of cider I had been drinking worked their magic and I got angry. Then the other driver pointed out that we would both be breathalysed, and, for once, I was sensible. I let the matter go.
However, as far as cars were concerned I was still in a bind: three cars were parked outside my house, all of which were useless and I needed a car to get to Wednesbury every day.
This is where this account gets hazy. I bought my next car, another 2CV, but one in far better condition, after spotting it while driving past the forecourt of a Fiat dealer. (Which of my three cars I was driving at the time I cannot recall. It might have been the Victor with the radiator unfrozen, but it is more likely to have been the Simca with me driving uninsured. However, I really can't remember.) It was in a row of cars which had all been taken in in part exchange. The asking price was £999, but after looking it over I did something which, for me at the time was quite extraordinary. I asked the salesman whether it would come with a full MoT. He said it would. Then I thought to myself that I would offer him less than £999 and we would haggle. I calculated that I would at least be able to knock one or two hundred off the asking price. So I was about to offer him £750 when, on a whim and why I simply do not know, I told him I would pay £650 for the car. He told me he would look at the figures involved in taking the car in part exchange. He returned a few minutes later and asked: ‘Would that be with a full Mot’. It seemed to me that he was hoping I would relent on that point in the interest of getting a bargain. But I said: ‘Yes.’ It was not the answer I think he was expecting, but to my surprise he agreed.
I learnt a very valuable lesson there and then: in some situations, go for broke. You never know what might come of it, and often you have nothing to lose. I have never been the shy type (except occasionally with girls, though at my age - 95 in a fortnight’s time - I suppose I should start calling them women), but I do have a timid streak - which will be news to many, but I am not being disingenuous. But on that day, standing on the forecourt of a Fiat dealership on Constitution Hill, I fully understood the value of chutzpah. I trust and hope I will never forget it.

Footnote for those who cherish footnotes: astute readers, who are usually those who cherish footnotes and who can recite the Footnote and Related Appendices (Necessary) Act 1983 backwards, will have realised that I have not included a picture of a Simca. I haven't done so because I had the car for only a short time and it doesn't really feel as though it belongs in my collection of car. There is not bond. It was a ratty old car anyway and, most pertinently, our relationship being so short, I can't really remember even what it looked like, except that it was dark grey, and so can't find a picture. Sorry.

Now I know why Somerset Maugham had such a bad reputation - rather unfairly, in my view

I heard the final part of the adaptation of Selina Hastings’ biography of Somerset Maugham on Radio 4, and the rancour against him, which I picked up on as a child and which has, apparently, been history’s verdict of the man, is explained.

Once Gerald Haxton died (of alcoholism), Maugham turned to Alan Searle for companionship, and it seems it was Searle who caused all the trouble which led to Maugham’s rift with his daughter Liza and, indirectly, to being ostracised by the English establishment and a very, very unhappy old age. He met Searle, who was more or less simply an upmarket rent boy, in the late Twenties and moved him into the Villa Mauresque after Haxton died, where Searle took over Haxton’s role and acted as companion, secretary and housekeeper. He was said to have none of Haxton’s charm,

sophistication, elegance, wit or presence. He is described at one point as wandering around the villa in garish shirts, ‘his fat thighs bulging out of too small white shorts’, and being so specific, I would hope Hastings will have referenced the quote. According to Hastings (I should point out that what I write here is merely what I heard on Radio 4), by the Sixties, when Maugham had become a very old man, Searle began to worry that he might be left destitute and started whispering in Maugham’s ear that he might not necessarily have been Liza’s father as his wife Syrie had had plenty of lovers at the time (and was, in newspaper parlance ‘a bit of a goer’. Lord how we guys dream of meeting one of those. Is it ineffably crass to say so?) Maugham was then persuaded to write a further volume of autobiography, which was serialised in the Sunday Express (a paper which is more or less the quintessence of middlebrow) and in which he wrote about his marriage in very unflattering terms. This did not go down well, and even old friends turned against him. Hastings points out, by the way, that Maugham was very old, and more or less senile when he did this.

An especially sad incident came when on his annual visit to London, he went to the Garrick Club as usual, but when he entered the first-floor bar, it fell silent and then one or two members ostentatiously walked out. (I would very much like to bet that the behaviour and moral worth of those who walked out would not have survived much close scrutiny, such is the hypocrisy of all too many of those who pass judgment.) Maugham was distraught. Back at the Villa Mauresque he would have bouts of uncontrollable weeping and outbursts of fury. And that little shit Alan Searle began writing to friends and Maugham’s nephew how impossible Maugham had become, although I should add that in later life he was full of remorse at his shit-stirring. So Maugham died an unhappy man.

The readings from Hastings book included recordings of Maugham himself, and he comes across as rather modest and self-effacing and with a generosity of spirit which is wholly lacking in many other self-regarding 'artists'. I’m sure that, like all of us, he had his faults, but his memory does seem to have been very harshly treated. It is so typical of life that, whenever possible, we prefer to take a narrow and vindictive view, and our judgments ignore almost everything which went before if we are given even half the chance to portray someone in a murky light. It is ironic that Maugham himself once observed: 'We know our friends by their defects rather than by their merits.' We should try to see the whole man. Let’s hope the future will value his work and the man a little more.

As I am something of a sentimental old softie, the pictures of Maugham I have chosen to illustrate this entry are neither of those with which we are probably all familiar, Maugham the sour-faced old queen who seems to be sneering at the world, but one from when he was much younger, when he was a charming, good-looking guest at parties in fashionable London and when all the ladies (and, of course, men) fancied the pants off him. It is very odd that those pictures of him in his last years portray a man who is totally at odds with earlier impressions.

Barry, who reads this blog, pointed out that Maugham did himself no favours by writing and somewhat sending up London society. It seems that London society bided its time and took its revenge when it finally got the chance to do so. What I find so admirable about Maugham - I have already said this, but I shall repeat it because it is worth repeating - was his sheer professionalism, that come what may and even on his very bad days, he sat down every morning to write. And he did so even knowing that what he was writing on that particular day was, perhaps, not even very good and would not be used. I do so like that attitude. Shame I don't have it, or better, don't yet have it, because I do know from experience that I can have it.

Incidentally, Liza inherited the Villa Mauresque, but Searle was not left destitute. He died a very wealthy man, thanks to Maugham's generosity. The excerpt I heard did not say so, but Maugham legally adopted him as his son.

NB. Pedant's Corner: there are two accepted spellings of 'judgment'. I choose 'judgment' rather than 'judgement' only because it is Daily Mail house style and the one I am accustomed to using at work, and thus also when not at work.