Roast cygnet, guffawing farmers, a lodge dinner, thwarted evasion and three main courses – my night rubbing shoulders with the great and good of the City of Lincoln (before later retreating downhill to my rented room in a two-up, two-down)

While ‘researching’ – the posh word for ‘googling’ – all and any info I can get on the Lincolnshire Standard Group (in Britain), I came across a newspaper archive. I was working as a reporter on one of its papers, the Lincolnshire Chronicle in Lincoln, from June (the 10th, I think) of 1974 until mid-October 1975 and wanted to remind myself of several things.

Specifying that I was working ‘in Lincoln’ is not a bit of stupidity – the owners, the LSG (which no longer exists), published several papers in Lincolnshire of which one, the Lincolnshire Standard, was published in Boston, a town which the more astute among you will realise is not Lincoln.

Sadly, the archive had nothing on the Lincolnshire Chronicle, but they had these cuttings from the Lincolnshire Echo, which was the local evening paper when I was in Lincoln. The Chron has long since vanished and the Echo is now the local weekly. I doubt either of these stories would have made the nationals, not even at the time.

The Lincolnshire Standard Group (LSG) was taken over several times, thought the name was retained, but according to the UK Government’s Companies House was wound up in 2016.

. . . 

I was ‘researching’ in connection with a new project I am preparing for, and while doing so, I recalled one night getting an evening job which on the face of it would not seem to be the most onerous assignment. In the event I did find it oddly challenging.

Lincoln had a ‘lodge’. It probably also had – and still has – a Freemasons’ Lodge, but this lodge was purely local, and sadly I can’t remember what it was called.

Like all such outfits, its membership consisted of the great and good and the powerful of the city – Lincoln, though not very big – it has a population of just under 104,000 – is a ‘city’ because it has a cathedral – as well as many local farmer and landowners from the county.

Lincolnshire is largely agricultural and in some ways it is something of a mirror image of The Netherlands around 120 miles across the English channel to East-South-East. It is just as flat and featureless, though the county is split in two by the ‘Lincoln ridge’ and the whole county is on two levels.

The Lincoln ridge runs right through the city, dividing it into ‘Uphill’ and ‘Downhill’ with a very steep climb from ‘Downhill’ to the castle and cathedral. Pictured on the right is Steep Hill, named for obvious reasons which 

pedestrians have to climb from the commercial city centre if they want to visit the cathedral.

The medieval – and thus picturesque parts of the city – are ranged around the cathedral ‘uphill’, so this is largely middle-class territory. Downhill, where I lodged, is made up of street upon street of terrace of ‘two-up, two-down’ terrace house, which are a feature of most English towns over the past 100 years.

. . .

One day I was told that I would be ‘reporting’ on the annual dinner of this particular lodge and on the face of it, that sounded like quite a nice number – who doesn’t like a free meal. All it would entail would be to go along, eat a pleasant – though English – dinner, then write about 500 words the following day, pretty much about nothing in particular except who was there and what we were served.

This lodge’s annual dinner was notable in that it was just one of, I’m told three, such events in all of Britain at which roast cygnet – young swan – could legally be eaten. The then ‘Queen’ of England (so now the ‘King’ of England) owned all the country’s swans, and catching, killing and eating one was in times past a capital offence. That is if you were caught, you were executed.

One suggestion I’ve just come across is that centuries ago they were hunted almost to extinction and to preserved them, they were made the property of the ‘crown’, although somehow I don’t buy that explanation.

It casts England’s ‘royalty’ in the role of conservationist and although Brian, our current ‘king’ is something of a green freak, I doubt even 100 years ago a family and their mates which took, and still takes, great delight in massacring grouse and other ‘game birds’ in their thousands very autumn (fall) are much bothered.

The only way they would agree to ‘preserve’ an animal is to ensure it was still available for killing in perpetuity. There is also some scepticism about the claim that all the swans belong to the ‘crown’.

I can’t remember where the annual dinner was being held – possibly the Guildhall, but I am just speculating and really have no idea. But I can still picture the inside of the venue in my mind’s eye.

There were rows and rows of long tables at which members sat with a ‘top table’ on a dais – this was not a classy event where guests sat six or eight to a table around a nicely decked spread with fine china.

The top table guests included the Dean of Lincoln Cathedral but as to the other guests I can only speculate that the Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire as well as the Lord Mayor of Lincoln will have washed up for their supper .

The ‘hoi polloi’, as it were, seemed to me to consist, apart from me, of most of Lincolnshire’s farmers. Ruddy-face, large and jovial and increasingly drunk, they were all gratifyingly coarse. I add ‘gratifyingly’ because otherwise you, dear reader, might assume I was rather disparaging of their behaviour. I wasn’t at all.

My first mistake, being then still something of a ‘southern jessie’ despite the four years I had spent at university in Dundee, was once to refer to Lincolnshire as ‘northern’. The first time I did this – long before that lodge dinner, I should add – I caused outrage: ‘Do you mind! We’re the East Midlands!’ And, of course, Linconshire was, but my knowledge of my rather small home country – ‘Old Blighty’ (and I have no idea where that name originated) – was then very limited.

Yet to my then untutored ears the Lincolnshire accent was distinctly ’northern’. It does, in fact resemble the South and East Yorkshire accents, unsurprisingly as South and East Yorkshire border Lincolnshire to the North-West and North, but it is a distinctly ‘Midlands’ way of speaking. Like the Lincolnshire countryside, the accent is very, very, very flat, and, as in most rural areas, from where my fellow guests at the dinner came, it is very, very, very broad.

I don’t mean it as a snooty gibe but as a compliment when I say that rural Lincolnshire folk, like most farmers, are also distinctly unsophisticated. I long ago discovered I prefer the company of men and women who call a spade a bloody shovel.

There were no women guests – this was in the mid-1970s, after all – and once my guests found out that ‘the Chronicle’s reporter’ had never before attended one of their lodge annual dinners, they were very amused and looked forward to what I would make of it all.

England (and Lincolnshire) are not renown for their culinary expertise, despite what many now claim – you certainly can eat very well in Britain if you can spare something like £150 a head with wine, but if you cannot, your options are very limited. My tastes do incline more to French, Italian and Spanish food, but having said that, I do like a good, un-fancy steak and kidney pie with chips.

So on our menu that night was to a standard English dinner – roasted meat with roasted potatoes and ‘two veg’. And, I assumed, that the roast of the first course would be the swan.

After, I suppose, a soup of some kind as our first course, we were served our main course and my new farming friends were very generous, piling my plate high and encouraging me to take ‘seconds’, which I, of course, I did.

Then once the main course plates had been cleared away and I anticipated pudding came the shock: my friends announced that we would now be enjoying or second ‘main course’ – another roast with potatoes and two veg.

But I was full. I could not eat any more. I tried to excuse myself and announced that I would be sitting out this second main course, but they – guffawing with delight, I realised, at some private joke – would have none of it and again piled my plate high. This course, too, I managed to finish, though quite how I did I really don’t know.

Then our plates were again cleared away and my farming friends revealed what had been amusing them so much: there was a third ‘main course’. I said I could not eat another morsel. Nonsense, they said, but I informed them I was going outside for a cigarette.

Well, smoking that cigarette would normally have taken no more than six or seven minutes, but I made sure it took far, far longer, and I lingered outside to allow my friends each to finish their third ‘main course’ and for the dishes to be cleared away before I re-joined them. But when I did . . .

‘Ah, there you are,’ they said, ‘you weren’t here when the food was served, so we filled your plate for you.’

And they had: there in front of me was my third main course. Somehow I managed to finish it, but how?

Then came speeches from the toffs at the top table, with the Dean of Lincoln making a surprisingly filthy speech, and it is a measure of my then unworldliness – I might even already have been 25 – that I was mildly shocked by it. What, a man of the cloth! Good Lord. I suppose it takes all sorts.

I only wish I could find out which ‘lodge’ that was.

Er, more writing (to prove I am as good as my word)

Well, there you are, a man as good as his word and you can’t often say that. As I am sitting in the Costa Coffee branch on the Old Brompton Road, Earls Court, London (the A3218 for those who need to know these things, though I can’t think why) and killing time, I might as well make good on my intention to ‘write every day’ to ‘keep my hand in’.

I’m killing time because I’m waiting to go to London Paddington to catch my train home to North Cornwall. That is at 12.03 and it is now 9.58. I stayed the night at my brother’s just around the corner, the nearest Tube station – Earls Court for those who need to know these things (and I use the entrance on the Warwick Road, A3220) – is just a few minutes walk away from his flat (US apartment) and if I leave there at just after 11am, I should get to Paddington in very good time (and shall, in fact, be obliged to kill a little more time).

Then it is a trip of just under four hours – quite long by British standards a mere trippette for those of you living in the US or Brazil, India, Russia or China, of course – and then from tomorrow it will be back to the old routine, which, though, no longer exists now that I have pretty much dotted every I and crossed every T of my ‘Hemingway bollocks’ and must now set about establishing a new routine. And that might not be easy.

I have long had something else in mind to attempt. In fact, I have long had several things in mind to attempt, but its best to do things one at a time or risk doing none of them as well as they might deserve.

I shan’t say what it is because for some time I’ve believed that the more you talk about ‘what you are going to do’, the less ‘you are likely to do it’. And frankly – to my certain knowledge to my late father’s increasing irritation – I spent rather to much of my life talking about what I was going to do and doing absolutely fuck all about it.

OK, I know why I did fuck all about it (though I shan’t bother explaining here because it is not only irrelevant but rather uninteresting), but the salient fact is that I did fuck all. I still have, somewhere, pretty much every short story I’ve written, an attempted novel and a novella, but it really does not amount to very much at all.

That I have kept them is for one reason only: I had no very good reason to get rid of it all. If I did, if someone did come up with a good reason which convinced me, into the trash it would all go (and no tears shed by me or anyone else).

The thing I have planned is superficially quite straightforward, but what I should like to try to do is a little more subtle. And there’s the rub. Because I have now – at 74 – got to the stage that I am just writing to ‘amuse’ myself and the chances that any of it will ever be published are as close to non-existent as they might ever be, I want to take the more difficult route, and that requires quite a bit of thinking.

Well, actually not that much thinking, just thinking of the right kind, and frankly I’m not much of a thinker. I can bullshit as well as the best of them and better than many. But thinking?

I keep plugging ‘my novel’, the only one I have so far written, and I might as well admit that it is a good example that we should never judge a book by its cover. Here’s the cover, back and front. Don’t judge.

It, too, is not – or rather, I hope it is not – as straightforward as it might appear to be and I do believe I have succeeded in doing what I tried to do. Whether anyone else will agree – would agree (the will/would are crucial here) is another matter.

But what I attempted with that gave me the idea for what I might attempt with the next one. I’ve had ‘the story’, ‘what it’s about’, for some time, but I came to realise that if it was to be worthwhile in any way, it will need an added dimension. I know what that dimension is – a safer way to put it is ‘might be’ – but what I don’t yet know is how to create it. Hence the thinking.

Savvy?

Two and a half hours later . . .

I should have published these links, US Amazon and UK Amazon. Happy reading (as if).

Ten days in France, now back home again

Illats, SW France

Not so long ago, I reported that I had finally finished ‘My Hemingway bollocks’, officially ‘The Hemingway enigma’, and that at present not having anything to get on with and thus be able to stick to what had become my routine of writing for four or five hours every afternoon, I would do a little writing about whatever occurred to me every day, just to keep my hand in.

Well, one of the cliches with which we are all acquainted is ‘the road to Hell is paved with good intentions’, and so I’ve discovered: I’ve got fuck-all writing done as in ‘fuck-all keeping my had in’.

I did start what was to be an entry for this blog – where all the other ‘daily writing’ was to be placed – but after about 30 minutes of totally inconsequential scribbling (that is, tapping away on my laptop keyboard) I realised just how tediously dull what I had so far written was and that I was thoroughly bored with it.

As it is a universal truth that ‘if the writer is bored with what she or he has written, you can bet the reader was doubly bored and had long given up’, I junked what I had.

By the way, have any of you read – or, better, attempted to read – ‘a classic’ and become so utterly uninterested that you would to anything else just for a good excuse to stop reading? Yet all the time there lurks in the back of 

your mind the admonition ‘don’t be such a hopeless, dumb and simple sod – this is “a classic” and although you think it is as dull as ditchwater, that is your fault, sonny. Get on with it’.

You do, however, throw in the towel, and such a spineless capitulation is inevitably followed by hours and often days of guilt when you castigate yourself for being that hopeless, dumb and simple sod who doesn’t even have the wherewithal to ‘read a classic’.

Along those lines, though, I have to add that there are some classics which have I haver read (or am reading) and which do repay that effort. One such is George Eliot’s Middlemarch. I’d already over the years read several of her, shorter, novels and I like her slightly ironic take on most things.

‘Oh’, write all the bods ‘passionate about literature’, ‘but you must, must, must read Middlemarch! It’s probably the best English novel ever written!’ And they thereby confirm that shameless hyperbole is not restricted to ads for Hollywood films and weekend book section reviews. In the latter my favourite piece of bollocks is when a novel is described as ‘an important new work from . . .’.

To cut a long story a short, I have written fuck all of anything since I completed My Hemingway bollocks, not even a shopping list (although I have not doubt at all it would have been a rattling good shopping list). Well, at least now I am.

. . .

I am on my way back to rainy, cold and miserable North Cornwall from rainy, not quite as cold but just as miserable, south-west France where I have been keeping my aunt company. She turned 93 a few weeks ago and her husband died several years ago and lives on her own in a rather large, in part a little decrepit house where the wiring is the very definition of ‘death trap’.

She is now quite infirm, although she can very slowly get about with a zimmer frame, but does so only when necessary.

Our routine has been very simple: I appear downstairs at 10am where she has just finished her breakfast and I drink a bowl or two of milky coffee. In recent years she has taken to eating ready-made meals from the supermarket, so for the past ten days I have cooked her lunch, partly because I enjoy cooking and get no chance to do so at home. What I cooked has included roast chicken (though this time not as successful as the last time, because I didn’t roast it enough – time was getting on and my aunt likes to eat by 1.30pm and it was by then already gone 2pm), pan-fried salmon, home-made burgers (a lot nicer than any ready-made burgers I have ever eaten), mushroom omelette (simple, but a nice one is very tasty).

Our lunches are always last for at least two hours, what with crudite – which my aunt insists should be eaten ‘for health reasons’ –, terrine, main course, cheese and coffee, and also because there really is no rush. Although my aunt is Irish, although born in Bodmin, she married a Corsican Frenchman – not contradiction there, I trust – and spent the past 65 years living in French culture, including Algeria before the war there.

Her wine cellar (established by her husband who, though, had to give up alcohol in the last 15 years of his life, had continued buying wine) is large, and we had wine at lunch for every meal, I followed that with a glass or three of calvados, then poire William when the calvados was finished with my coffee.

Sadly, drinking at lunchtime these days knocks me semi-sideways, so while my aunt had her nap I settled down aimlessly to surf the net and catch up on YouTube what that moron Trump is up to. Does anyone think he won’t go to jail? I’m curious.

It is jaw-dropping that anyone in the US is able to take him and his silly claims seriously. But some – rather too many – do, although those I’ve seen interviewed do not seem to be the brightest by a long chalk.

On this visit as well as my last visit I have skipped supper at 8pm, to the consternation of my aunt, but I really prefer having an empty stomach to be filled at lunch the following day rather than eat because ‘it is what one does’. My aunt is perpetually baffled that I don’t eat breakfast or supper, which, she says, is unhealthy.

. . .

In 40 minutes as I write – though this entry will probably not be posted until I am in Merignac airport – a taxi is arriving to take me to Bordeaux’s airport. So far I have always simply taken a taxi to Cerons station, about six kilometres away, but for some very odd reason all the local taxi companies are on strike (and I have no idea why *).

Finally, we managed to scare up a firm on the net – I don’t know where they are based or why they are not on strike, perhaps the strike is purely local – which could have taken me to Cerons but as the cab is coming all the way from somewhere, he suggested taking me straight to the airport. Pricey, but fuck it, I was just glad to find a cab.

Now I must stop and can carry on once I am safely in the cafeteria at Merignac’s Billi terminal, having passed through security (which is always such colossal fun).

Later, Merignac Airport, Bordeaux

Two hours later and €105 down I am now sitting with a cappuccino at the airport thinking of ways to kill the next three hours. Finishing this blog entry will soak up some of that time but there is not a great deal to do at an airport and there is only a certain number of coffees you can drink.

My aunt and I only went for one meal out this time, but it was a great meal, in Sauternes. Sadly, my aunt is now in the age where ‘everything has come down a bit’ or its soulmate ‘nothing is quite as it was’.

So the restaurant itself (which I have previously visited many years ago but was then not paying, either) had been shut for a year or two, renovated then reopened, but sadly, according to my aunt it wasn’t what it had been. Well, to my, admittedly untutored Anglo-Saxon, eyes it was find. We began, as we always do, with foie gras and a glass of Sauternes and this, too, was not quite has good was it might have been, and – well, you are way ahead of me, no doubt – to my, admittedly untutored Anglo-Saxon taste – was more than fine.

Then I had chicken breast, which might not sound very special but it as. I’ve managed to track down the menu for the restaurant, Le Cercle Guirard (Le Saprien before it closed for renovation) and I had Volaille fermière étuvée au vin jaune, champignons sauvages, sauce suprême perlée à l’huile de piment fumé. One for the French speakers who cannot count me in their number. I was very nice indeed. Oh, and with it I had a second glass of Sauternes which the restaurant patron assured me was traditional.

I hope to visit my aunt again in the new year at some point, but that will depend on her health. It is not the best.

* Taxi strike: my driver who was on strike a little earlier today but wasn’t now – I’m sure he explained why, but I didn’t quite cotton on – told me it was a result of new rules laid down by the insurance companies.

I can only repeat what he told me, but it seems one of the income streams for taxis is to take bods to hospital for appointments. The insurance companies are now insisting that unless unless a taxi conveys more than one passenger, it will only pay 50% of any claim.

They say it is in the interests of ecologie (being more green) but he and his fellow drivers are certain they just want to make more moolah by saving themselves a little. I suspect he’s right, too. When companies explain an innovation – which invariably costs the punters more – is in favour of ‘saving the planet’, scepticism is not just warranted by wholly advisable.

. . . so the dogs bark and the caravan moves on

The other day I posted that I had finally completed all the work on a book I’m calling The Hemingway Enigma and that it is available to be bought on Amazon worldwide (and if the country you are in doesn’t have its own dedicated Amazon website, but you still want a copy, I should try Amazon in a nearby country. Mind, you have probably thought of that already).

I’m glad I’ve finally finished the work, but the book is certainly not identical to the website I have been plugging in this blog for what seems like that past 350 years. (You didn’t know the internet was up and running in the 1670s, did you? No, nor did I until I made up that ‘fact’).

I have to say, and I hope none of you see this as boasting, that a lot of work went into getting that book published (courtesy of Amazon KDP’s service so don’t set to much store by the word ‘published’ – ‘printed’ would be a far closer description) and I am proud of it.

The Hemingway Enigma website was launched on – I’ve just checked the date – November 3, 202o, but by then I had been beavering away writing the blog entries for some time.

At some point I decided to have it printed in book form, and a little later I realised that I would have to re-write the website copy substantially as there was a great deal of repetition overall on the website pages: the nature of the web means that you might hit upon a random page and it is every unlikely that will be on the ‘first’ page.

So what was written on each page needed a certain context so that the punter had a reasonable chance of knowing what the hell was going on. But as a book is almost always read from start – the first page – to end – the last page, such repetitions would look silly, so I had to get rid of them.

I also realised on re-reading it that some of the ‘thought’ (I like to think there is a little in it) could, perhaps, be expressed more clearly. So once the website was out of the way, I set about re-writing the copy.

Then came designing and formatting the book, but I enjoy that kind of work. I used Indesign to do it all, the software we used on the Mail feature subs’ desk, and it is very, very useful

I have to say, I was increasingly conscientious about the work, latterly – pretty much the past year or so – sitting down and writing for at least four to five hours a day. And it was not a chore, as I enjoy writing. But therein lies the problem: I’ve done it and, in a sense, now have nothing more to write.

. . .

My usual routine was to be downstairs by about 10am – I am now retired and see little point in getting up early – and then more or less piss about doing fuck-all for the next two to three hours: a bit of this, a bit of that, Wordle, reading the newspapers online, watching a YouTube video or ten – you know what I mean because we have all been there – and then, around 1pm getting stuck into ‘work’.

Well, frankly, it wasn’t ‘work’ at all because, as I say, I enjoyed and enjoy it. I think it only becomes ‘work’ when you don’t enjoy doing it and it becomes a chore. One of the few pieces of advice I’ve given my son is when I come to ‘finding a job/work’, don’t chase money, find something you like doing.

(NB Other advice I have given him and my daughter is to make sure they realise ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’. That last can be taken as you want – there are several interpretations – but the way I understand it, and the way I hoped they would understand it, is that when push comes to shove every ‘favour’ has to be paid for, so beware of ‘favours’. That’s worth knowing as when we are young and have less life experience we might not realise quite how tricky some favours can become.)

After I had finished re-writing all my copy and had produced and Indesign manuscript, I had a proof copy printed up, read through it all again, found and corrected quite a few literals, then went through it again on screen.

All that took a few weeks, but finally I thought the time had come to bite the bullet and get the fucker printed. I don’t doubt there are still little literals still lurking here and there, silly little things such as ‘their’ when it should in context be ‘there’ etc, but I suspected I was putting off finalising it all. A lot of the tiny errors are down to slightly tweaking a sentence and thereby introducing another tiny error – what was correctly ‘is’ should now be ‘are’ because of the bloody tweak I made, that kind of thing.

Well, enough was enough – as they say in all the hooey Hollywood films about newspapers ‘publish and be damned’.

That is not the tack taken these days, and I suspect never was: when the paper’s balls are truly on the line, the whole story has been through several briefs with a fine tooth comb to spot anything before the word goes out to print. But, ssshh, don’t tell your friends, as a rule we prefer the romantic bullshit fiction to the prosaic fact.

. . .

So what is this entry all about? Well, for the past year or so, I have woken up and known what I would be doing that day: writing My Hemingway Bollocks (and I have had one or two identical copies printed with just that title to give away to friends with a few spoof plugs – I’ve never been able to resist a cheap joke, it’s what will ensure I never win the Nobel Prize).

And I did, as I say conscientiously. But now . . .

Now I’m at a loose end. Yes, I do have things planned, but it’s one thing to spend a great deal of time on a project that has already started and is underway, quite another actually to start a project.

I shan’t say what it is, but I’ve been thinking about it and – sort of – planning it in tandem for many, many months.

But now is the time to put my money where my mouth is and, er, I’m a bit (as we used to say at school) windy. I have no doubt at all that I can do it, none at all, none whatsoever, not question! (But I’m a bit, er, windy. Did I tell you that?)

There is still a lot of thinking to be done, but I also find – I have found in the past and it’s true of the tracks I record (there are two below) that, oddly, in the process much takes a shape and comes together. It’s naturally stupid to rely on that to happen. But it is equally silly to ignore serendipity.

Getting all that down on paper is helping. In fact, writing this entry is already helping. I haven’t written many regular blog entries for some time, and one plan is to write a short entry every morning (or every day to get back in the swing of doing some kind of writing which isn’t sodding Hemingway).

Ironically, doing exactly that is what first gave me the idea for ‘keeping a diary’ and which was not really ‘a diary’ at all. For 15 years, from about 1980 on, I ‘kept a diary’ in hard-back A4 lined ledgers after I had read in the preface to East Of Eden by John Steinbeck (and a remember exactly nothing about the novel) that Steinbeck confessed to his editor that he had writer’s block.

Simple, said the editor, I’ll send you a ledger and you can start the day by writing any old shite on the left-hand page just to get your juices flowing and once they are flowing, start writing whatever fiction you have in mind.

I have about ten of those A4 ledgers now (and they will never be written because no cunt, least of all me, can read my sodding handwriting) and only stopped writing in it when I got married and thought it more diplomatic not to record my private thoughts. These, when discovered by a snooping person, possibly a wife, can be hugely misinterpreted.

That did happen to me once: I was going out with one Sian V. (who I think might have dodged a bullet when it all ended – I might in the past have written about it) and was living with her in Birmingham, when on a visit to my parents in Henley-on-Thames for not reason at all I wondered what had happened to an old girlfriend, Annette B.

When I knew her, she was working the warehouse in Henley of the publisher Routledge, and Kegan Paul, and on spec I rang up: ‘Is Annette B. there?’

Well yes, she was, and we met up in her lunch break. And my visit was just in time: now married and expecting here first child she was leaving the following week.

I recorded all this in my ‘diary’, Sian read it and was upset. Don’t blame her.

So I stopped writing that ‘diary’ when I married in 1995, and this blog was its continuation when I started it on February 6, 2009. Or rather – if you read that day’s entry – I had started it a week or two earlier, but committed some kind of technical boo-boo and had to start again.

. . .

In short: just to get back in the swing (and do at least some writing every day) I shall try to post an entry every day from now on. The first will probably be tomorrow as I am off to France again to see my elderly aunt in Illats on Thursday (train to London tomorrow, flight to Bordeaux from Gatwick on Thursday.

Pip, pip.

By the way, I have also printed up a revised copy of Love: A Fiction. I’ve plugged it so many times here with zero response that I’m giving up. Oh well, maybe check it out. Remember the wise advice: never judge a book by its cover.

Six In The Morning

They Want My Money
(And Soon They'll Want My Soul)

You’re Dying Of Love

If you like those, there are more here.

Now published and available on Amazon

The book I’ve been slaving away on for the past few years, The Hemingway enigma: How did a middling writer achieve such global literary fame? is now published and available to buy.

I have in the past linked to my website of the same name, but I found that converting the text of the website into a book was not as straightforward as it might seem.

For one thing the website consists of 46 different webpages and a random visitor will land on any of them.

For that reason each page, to a certain extent, needed some context, and so there is overall quite a lot of repetition in those 46 pages.

It is also unlikely that a visitor would start at ‘Page one’, the Preface, and read the following pages in sequence.

Thus for the book I pretty much had to re-write the lot, to mainly to get rid of repetition but also to streamline my thoughts a little more.

I printed it using Amazon’s very good KDP service and as part of that – free – service it is listed on Amazon sites globally. Here are some of them: United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Japan, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Poland and Sweden.

If you think you might be interested, why not buy a copy?

A schlepp and a half to a wedding in Hamburg, one which some might take in their stride. Me, I’d rather not too often, thank you very much. Too many early mornings

It was off to Germany last Wednesday, for my youngest nephew’s wedding, and here are a few of the piccies I took. The journey was a tad tortuous: after waking at 1.30am and not sleeping any more till I got up, it was off to Newquay – ‘Cornwall’ Airport’ and I don’t know why I’m sneering so forgive me please, Cornwall, but it is tiny, tiny, tiny – for a flight to Manchester – bigger by a factor of about 1,000 if not more – then a three-hour wait, before catching a plane to Amsterdam in The Netherlands – bigger by a factor of about 10,000 if not more.

Then after queueing for well over an hour to get through passport control – thanks, Brexit – caught a train for a three and a half hour journey to the Dutch-German border where my sister lives. Arrived at just for 11pm knackered (a good old British expression which intends to convey ‘totally fucked’).

At least I got a day off travelling, except that from the Dutch border we were due in Hamburg for 8.3oam so it was up at 5.30am and yet again I hardly slept. What is it with me and travelling. Following the register office ceremony, I slipped off as soon as I decently could from a small gathering for a glass or ten of Sekt in my nephew’s flat to get to a bed as soon as possible, if not sooner.

The wedding itself was the following afternoon at 2am, though one of those new non-religious ceremonies, followed by more Sekt before we all took off by ferry – Hamburg is, I’m sure you know a port, so ships, boats and ferries are a part of daily life – for the wedding feast. Pretty knackered by this time, I like my Sekt, but at least I had only one glass of wine that night.

As luck would have it, the venue was just a five-minute walk where I and my other nephew and nieces were staying with their families, so I was back in bed by 8.30pm in time for the Ireland v Scotland game.

Slept rather better that night, but it was another early start, up at 6.15am to catch a ferry ride to the nearest S-Bahn station to get to Hamburg Airport, not quite as big but still about 1,000 bigger than Newquay.

From Hamburg it was off to Dublin, got there by 11am, then another five-hour wait for the last leg back to Newquay. Home by 5.30pm, and a good night’s sleep. A hell of a schlepp altogether and not one I want to repeat for some time. Mind, my son (based in Bolivia) is knocking around the Middle East at the moment, but then he is bloody 49 years younger than me.

Oh, and a few photos, the last one taken on Sunday morning while I was waiting for my ferry to town.

Pip, pip.

PS The seven little ones, I suppose they might be called my grand-nephews and grand-nieces (though, frankly, I am not really in the picture) had the time of their lives, running riot everywhere, as children should always do. The oldest is five and the youngest two just two.

Me, the complete bastard (and that is not intended as some kind of ironic joke)

Today, on August 29, 1976, thus 47 years ago, I did one of the most selfish things I’ve ever done and about which to this day I feel ashamed.

I was working in the Lincolnshire Chronicle, based in Lincoln – I mention that because its owners, the then Lincolnshire Standard Group, had several papers in different towns and cities in Lincolnshire, including the Lincolnshire Standard which I think became the Boston Standard, the Louth Chronicle, the Sleaford Standard, the Skegness Standard, the Grantham Journal and the Horncastle News; I might be wrong on these, but none now exist.

I had got to know a young girl of 17 – was then 26 – and I got her pregnant. I can’t remember us ‘going out’ for long or even for more than one date. But I got her pregnant. I remember two things when she told me she was pregant: in more or less one and the same breath she said ‘I’m pregnant’ and ‘I’m going to have an abortion’.

The first thing I remembered was being immensely grateful that she had decided to have an abortion and that, crucially, brave old me would not be called upon to make a decision about anything either way.

Secondly, I became aware of a vague feeling that I wasn’t all that keen on abortion. In a sense I’m still not, but I shall say straight out that on the question of ‘pro-choice/pro-life’ I am firmly in the pro-choice camp. This had nothing to do with being brought up a Roman Catholic or anything of that kind for I had long been ‘lapsed’ (or as I see it no longer in thrall). It was just that I did not feel comfortable with the ending of life.

I’m familiar with the arguments pro and con, and frankly I can find fault with both lines of argument. But for me, at the end of the day, a woman has responsibility for and control over her body and thus it is and must always be her choice as to how to proceed.

Incidentally, I also believe that contraception should be available to all and rather dislike the idea a few women seem to have that they can ignore conventional methods of contraception because, hey, there’s always the get-out of having an abortion. However, here is not the place to debate it all.

At the time I was ‘going out with a girl’ from near Henley-on-Thames where I had grown up and where my parents lived. And her birthday was on August 29. The girl I got pregnant had arranged having the abortion herself.

It was to be in Leamington Spa where the British Pregnancy Advisory Service undertook them (I suppose rather giving the lie to being an ‘advisory service’). The operation was also to be on August 29.

Before she had made the arrangement, Annette and I had agreed that I should travel south from Lincoln to Henley to take her out for her birthday. The girl I had made pregnant – whose name I was once able to remember, but can no longer do so – was due to take a train to Leamington, have the pregnancy terminated, then take a train back to Lincoln.

She asked only one thing: would I meet her at Lincoln station when she came back. I said, no I wouldn’t.

I can’t remember whether or not I told here what my plans for that weekend were and being an unthinking, callous cunt I wouldn’t be surprised if I did. But it must have been awful for her.

And to this day every day since, on August 29, I remember my selfishness and callousness, and shudder.

NB That was in 1976. Ten years later I was working as a sub-editor on the South Wales Echo in Cardiff and doing a lot of photography. Relevant to what I write above is this picture of pro-choice protesters and pro-life arrivees at an anti-abortion meeting.

Also relevant is a remark made a few months ago on the radio when the US Republican-heavy Supreme Court made is updated ruling on Roe v Wade allowing states to decide for themselves whether abortion should be legal or not:

They won’t be banning abortion, they will only be banning legal abortion.

That sums it up: women in need – or for whatever reason – who have no recourse to a safe abortion will simply be forced to got to a ‘backstreet’ abortionist, with all the dangers that brings

OFFICIAL Private Eye is slowing dying of respectability: a nation mourns. A warning to all – never, but never, become ‘respectable’

WARNING! THIS ENTRY MIGHT DISTRESS READERS WHO
PRIDE THEMSELVES ON ‘BEING ENLIGHTENED’, ‘HAVING
A SENSE OF HUMOUR’ AND FOR WHOM ‘BEING PART OF
THE CROWD’ IS IMPORTANT.

THIS entry might, and most probably will, mean very little to nothing to most readers from outside the United Kingdom. But - well, OK, fair enough. It’s not my probably but yours, frankly.

Anyone interested in what ‘Private Eye’ might is very welcome pull their finger out (as we say in Britain) and do a bit of digging. Hint: it’s not published by the Vatican.

My reason for publishing it on my blog? I’ve published so very little, many of you might be forgetting what a fabulous guy I am. I really can’t think of a better reason.

Anyone agree with me that under Ian Hislop the Eye had become increasingly dreary, unfunny and rather prim and - whisper it - fucking bloody boring? Hislop’s been there now since 1774 and it shows.

The cartoons rarely raise a laugh (unlike one of my favourites from some years ago: picture a young mustachioed German squaddie standing to attention in a WWI trench while his superior officer informs and even high-ranking officer ‘Sir, the corporal here has a great idea for a sequel’).

Now? Well, as I pointed out a few weeks ago one cartoon about a supposed foreign football player coming to the Premier League had been recycled - I suspect inadvertently - from an earlier PE cartoon whose caption then ran: ‘Ebola coming to Europe? Who’s signed him then?’

I wrote to Lord Gnome about it, but there were, it seemed, too many other and better letters that demanded to be published and mine didn’t make the cut. Nor have several letters I’ve written to the good Lord to tell us in his

‘Number Crunching’ feature how much he rakes in every year - PE salary, HIGNFY, BBC TV documentaries and Radio 4 programmes. His lordship is a tad shy about telling us.

OK, there’s no denying the Eye does a lot of reporting on and uncovering skullduggery in government, in our local authorities, in the City etc, but it’s all a little earnest, all a little too worthy, all a little too ‘well done, Hislop! You’ve won the Founder’s Prize for Zeal, Integrity and Hard Work! Keep it up, lad!’

The Street of Shame was once somewhere where you - we - read about the drunken and appalling (and often funny) shenanigans of folk you knew, almost knew, had heard of, or who were known by people you knew - Fleet Street was and - now metaphorically - is quite narrow These days The Street of Shame is all about ‘how awful and hypocritical and horrid our press barons are!’

Fair enough, but being reminded very fortnight that water is wet doesn’t much do it for me. I know it’s wet, as do all other Eye readers - they were told two weeks ago, and two weeks before that, and a fortnight before that.

Ironically, given that a vital member of ‘the Establishment’ is the anti-Establishment figure, the Eye is very much ‘the Establishment’. I told Lord Gnome that in my letter and reminded him that Punch, once the scourge of the nation in 19th-century Britain eventually died of respectability.

Arise, Sir Ian for ‘services to satire’. The trouble is that in cosy Old Blighty ‘satire’ is nothing more dangerous than being rude to folk. The worst Hislop will face is being snubbed in the Groucho. In Russia, China, Singapore, Zimbabwe, Iran and rather too many other countries engaging in satire can cost earn you a decade or more in jail and if you are unlucky lose you your life.

OK, PE was founded but a gang of privileged public school boys but frankly (though I’m sure we all now realise that ‘background’, ‘heritage’, colour, class, religion and to which side you dress have no bearing on you a person *).

And going by the ads at the front and rear of the mag in some ways not much has changed - ‘No Ordinary Reading Light’ - ergonomically designed on the outside, inside it’s one of the most advance reading lights in the world’ And yours for just £249.99 for the HD Table Light or £299.99 for the Floor Light!

What’s wrong with Argos’ Home Morlie Floor Lamp - Matt Black , yours for just £30? Nothing, except it doesn’t impress Jules and Simon next door half as much as telling them you’ve blown £249.99 on an ergonomically designed most advance light.

Now I feel a headache coming on and must go and lie down with a soothing glass of Campari and tonic.

* I shall though, admit, that I am still defeated by the undeniably true statistic that a disproportionately high number of men and women in our ‘top jobs’ were privately educated compared to the number who were not. And there has to be a reason (though it was fuck all use for me, I have to add).

Well, hello Singapore, so unexpected!

Hello Singapore!

Someone there – or perhaps 3,590 odd people there – like me. At at least that’s what the stats tell me. It could of course be just one person visiting my blog 3,590 in the past seven days, in which case seek help.

 

Or it could be a bot of some kind, though why a bot would think it worthwhile to visit my blog I cannot think.

Oh, well.

If the visitors are individuals and you are reading this, the latest instalment of my bollocks: Hi, and have a nice day. And maybe get in touch and tell me how and why you found this blog, why you are coming back (that is assuming you are not a bot. Bots, don’t bother).

Oh, and if you have come across references to ‘My Hemingway bollocks’, I am just giving the print version one last read-through before getting Amazon KDP to print it up. Here’s the cover, front (left in image) and back.

Bugger Trump, he is now in many ways the sideshow. It is the dangers to US democracy which must now be considered (though Trump set the ball rolling)

In the past I have often joked about my age, ‘humorously’ exaggerating it. I suspect that was more a kind of double-bluff, in some ways feeling a little uncomfortable with growing older – turning 60, then 65, then 70 – but trying to make out I wasn’t. Or that, at least might be an armchair trick cyclist’s analysis.

I am, in fact, 73 – and shall turn 74 on November 21 later in the year – and I can confirm that getting older is not all downside. You do, oddly, feel a little happier with yourself, you seem to worry a little less, at least you worry less about trivialities.

Those downsides are there, though: your body slowly gives way, it aches more, your hearing goes, for a guy peeing takes longer (every night the very last thing I do is have a pee, even if I don’t feel I need one, and I rarely wake in the night and never to have a pee). Woman could list their own downsides – the menopause, bones becoming brittle and so on.

But both men and women will confirm that one facet of getting older is that it becomes ever rarer that you come across a novelty, are told something you had never heard before, find yourself in a situation which is new to you (in which the advantage is that you are not quite at a loss as to how to handle it as once you might have been). Oh, and my son assures me that I am a lot ‘calmer’ since I retired five years ago.

In short, I do believe that the phrase plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). But I am, obviously, speaking from the perspective of a man looking back over the past 73 years (or rather over the last 50 years.

I doubt I very much took an interest in ‘life’ and her manifestations when I was still attached to my mother’s breast or later at college where this dilettante was far, far, far more concerned with growing his hair long, chasing still all-too-elusive nookie and scoring dope (which in those days was cannabis not heroin).

Thus as I was born in 1949, I had no ‘direct’ experience of the rise of fascism in Germany, Italy and Spain in the early decades of the 20th century, the consequences of the Russian revolution, the General Strike in Britain and the Great Depression in the US. If there were again to be a rise of fascism – a real one, not a development putting assorted readers of the West’s liberal press into a tizzy – it would be one of the few things I had not before experienced.

Getting older, as it is I get rather bored when I hear trotted out on the radio (I am more of a radio listener than a TV viewer) yet again phrases such as ‘today’s ever faster lifestyle’, ‘an unprecedented rise in house prices’, ‘the ever-greater pressures of modern life’, ‘the increasing pressures on today’s young people’ and so on.

I have heard those and similar phrases trotted out for the past 50 years, and I do wonder how ‘fast’ a lifestyle must be by now as it has been ‘ever faster’ for so long, at what point the ‘pressures of modern life’ will become so intolerable that en masse throw ourselves off Beachy Head (or wherever good Americans go to top themselves). My point is that at the end of the day ‘very little changes’.

However, I am now experiencing a novel situation which is not trivial and might become a worry.

It is taking place in both the US and the UK, where one Donald Trump and ‘Boris’ Johnson are behaving in a way which could – I’ll say ‘could’ because I dislike hyperbole and sensationalism – have quite a deep effect on the democracies of those two countries. Both men are, ironically perhaps almost inadvertently, doing quite a bit of damage to the ‘trust’ of ‘the people’ in their democratic institutions.

In the US – and this is certainly not news – Trump has claimed and still is claiming that the 2020 presidential election was rigged to ensure he would not be re-elected as US president. It was, he says, ‘stolen’ from him.

I shan’t and don’t want here go into the details of his claims and the details of why they are denied, because for what I am writing here the claims and denials are not relevant. What is relevant is that a substantial number of US voters – and I am talking of several million US voters – who believe him and convinced that what he says is true.

Over the past few months Trump has found himself in legal trouble of different kinds and most recently faces federal charges which carry a jail sentence if he is found guilty of them. But he is insisting – and those millions also believe him on this claim – that it is all simply an establishment plot to neutralise him and ensure he cannot regain the US presidency.

Yet Trump is actually irrelevant; and equally irrelevant is whether what he is claiming is true or not. If it were true it would be very, very serious but for any number of reasons, not least that a conspiracy of that scale would be impossible to organise, I think we can be certain it is not true.

What is relevant – and potentially very worrying – is those several million Americans who now believe that their system has become corrupted, quite possibly beyond repair. And if that is the case, they will conclude that all bets are off: if the other side is not playing by the rules, why should they?

If the other side can drive a coach and four through the conventions which govern their democracy, why shouldn’t they? In sum, they no longer trust their democracy, and thinking along those lines will have encouraged many to invade Congress on January 6, 2021.

This development is new in my life, in the 50-odd years I have been aware of ‘grown-ups’ and the shenanigans they can get up to. And as the global financial crisis of 2008 reminded us ’trust’ is not only a crucial part of our dealings with one another, but very, very fragile. Once it has been damaged and lost, it is very hard to re-establish.

Here in Britain our own Trump lite, Boris Johnson, is now involving himself in similar matters, though at the outset I must concede that he does not pose ‘a danger’. In fact, although both Trump and Johnson are buffoons, Trump is a dangerous buffoon, but Johnson is pretty much a joke.

Yet again he is in a sense also irrelevant: it is the effect and consequence of his buffoonery which are relevant, though democracy and its institutions are in no danger of breaking down here in cosy Old Blighty (so cosy, in fact, where a copper will run off and fetch you a glass of water if you ask nicely).

Things don’t look quite as rosy in the US. For one thing consider the numbers: those who might decide, if and when, to think ‘to hell with our democracy’ are in their millions. And many of them are not averse to resorting to violence and, legitimately, carry weapons.

I am not being alarmist and declaring ‘woe is us!’ I am merely pointing out that the US might – might – find itself in very uncharted waters in 2024 at the next presidential election.

If Trump is the GOP candidate and loses, how will those millions react if he again insists he had won but ‘they’, the establishment, have again stolen the election? And if he wins and is re-elected US president – and given his previous very high-handed behaviour exercising ‘his presidential powers’ – how will the his opponents react?

That last point is also worth considering: so far it has been Trump supporters and those ‘on the right’ who have declared themselves ready to give democracy and its institutions the finger (in Britain ‘two fingers’ shaped like a V).

But what if a sizeable number of Democrats, dismayed that Trump is back as president, decide that what is good for the goose is good for the gander and also embark on measures they would previously have believed to be beyond the pale?

That is merely a question, and I concede again to straying just a little too close to alarmism. But my central point stands: the US might find itself in a situation it has rarely found itself in. One of the last times one side was at odds with the other, they went to war for four years.

Thus mentioning ‘civil war’ is again, perhaps, straying too close to alarmism. But on many issues the various US states are now further apart than they have been for many years, and that is something novel in my 73 years.