In which I drop the pose and ask: Marriage? Is your’s pretty shitty too? Read on

I have sometimes complained in the past that in this ’ere blog I have painted myself into a corner, that after I started it as a kind of digital update to my ‘written diary’ - which, as I said was as much a commonplace book as a diary - it became, not rather quickly, just another platform for just another pub bore to sound off. It is now less of a ‘diary’ and far, far more of just another cunt sounding off. And why do I feel I have painted myself into a corner? Because I am no longer writing ‘for myself’.

It’s quite simple: whereas, to my almost certain knowledge, no one, but no one, ever read the diary, this blog is, according to ‘the stats’ read - or rather individual entries are read - by about 30 folk a day. So where before I was able, in private, to let it all hang out, to bemoan my lot, to rant and rave about the fortune life had decided to give me, now I am far more inhibited. Here everything I say is public, but how could anyone have been able to read my previous private diary? Unless someone had broken into my home and decided to make a point of searching out out a diary rather than making off - in that quaint phrase still used by newspapers, although only by newspapers - with whatever goodies and chattels they might come across, my diary would have forever remained unread. Good Lord, even I didn’t bother reading it after a particular itch had been thoroughly scratched.

On the other hand, and ironically, a blog such as this can be - and is, in fact, according to the statistics - read, by complete strangers the world over, many of whom, I’m certain, are quite content with browsing through my ramblings and have no intention whatsoever of taking any interest in my woes, let along stealing anything from me. In fact, even if they did decide to rob me blind, such an enterprise would, logistically, be not just difficult, but pretty bloody pointless. The vast majority of those who tune in live several thousand miles away: in Russia - increasingly, which is something of a mystery to me, but quite gratifying - in the United States, in the ‘Far East’ (a quaint concept that the ‘Far East’: do our cousins in Indonesia, China and Japan see us as her in the smug Western World as the ‘Far West’? I rather doubt it. I rather suspect they increasingly don’t really give a shit about what we here in the ‘Far West’ are up to).

So even if some reader or other in Turkey or India or South Africa or wherever they lay their heads at night did wake up one morning, find they had nothing better to do for a while and did tell themselves: ‘That chap whose blog I sometimes read, I wonder whether he’s got anything worth nicking?’ would they really follow it through? Answers, please, on the customary postcard. Ever so often - as now - I do rather wish that this were more of the ‘private diary’ I once kept and that I could speak personally. I do rather wish I could moan. But I am inhibited: who, except for perhaps the morons who are all so keen to perform on prime-time TV with several million watching, is all that keen to bare their soul? Not me. I am the private kind.

The point is that because my ‘private diary’ would never be read by anyone, I could step out from behind the disguise, facade, call it what you will, and record what was on my mind, what was upsetting me. Here, in this blog, I have never really felt I cold. But now I will. I have in past entries hinted that my marriage is not the best. It is not the happiest. In the best world of all possible worlds I would have hoped for better. But I also know that no marriage, and I stress ‘no marriage’ is ever trouble-free. But in a good marriage I suspect there is willing, their is a desire to improve things. That, sadly, is not unilaterally the case in my marriage.

I am, of course, very, very aware, that there are two sides to every coin, that should my wife also be writing a blog, she would quite possibly give a slightly different account of our troubles. Let me put it this way: I am not ‘a Christian’ but I do believe that what Christ said, or what he is reported to have said, is often quite wise. And one of his observations is that - I am obliged to paraphrase - we should be rather less critical of the mote in the other’s eye and rather more aware of the beam in our own eye, because all too often we are not. So please bear that in mind when you read what follows, and please bear in mind that I am very aware that I am no saint.

My wife - how do I put this? - more or less treats me as a stranger. I am, more or less invisible to her. And that’s how she likes it. She doesn’t want to know any more. She doesn’t talk to me. She discusses nothing. To sum up: we don’t have a marriage in more or less every sense of the word.

I have described, in past entries, how our marriage came about, and it was not - on my part at least - the most romantic of couplings. I discovered after we were married that long before we got to know each other, though after she had first set eyes on my, she had developed a crush on me. The trouble was that, as is almost always the case, what she imagined would come true was nothing like what did come true. The problem was, and is, that she is utterly inflexible and has been unable to adapt.

You, who is reading this, don’t know me. You don’t know my wife. All you have to go on is what I record here, but I must ask you to believe me, to trust me. I have my faults, as we all do, but I also have my virtues. I am usually quite easygoing. Yes, I can lose my rag, and, yes, I have a sharp tongue and, yes, I can be ratty. But at the end of the day I like to get on with people, I will compromise, I will make allowances, I will give way, I will start again, I won’t hold a grudge, if for no other reason that it helps to make life easier and more pleasant all round. Quite simply I like life to proceed as smoothly as possible.

My wife is - and I remind you again that this is my account, not hers, so at least be aware that I am aware of that - is more or less the opposite. To put it prosaically, choose to regard a glass as half full, she far prefers to see it as half empty: perhaps that will make some sense to you reading this. A few years ago her father fell out with his daughter-in-law and - I almost wrote ‘in a very Cornish way’ but, in fact, such thing happenings are universal - what I can only describe as a family feud developed and my wife cut her father out of her life and chose to side with her sister-in-law. He, too, became a non-person. I was astounded at her attitude. There was no compromise, no meeting halfway, nothing. The odd thing was that it wasn’t even her fight. It was just that she had aligned herself with the side he wasn’t on. Something similar has happened to me.

Whereas I was once, from afar, the apple of her eye, I am now a zero. As far as I can see my one role in her life is to pay the household bills, no more. I have, every so often, tried to discuss it with her, but that was never successful. I don’t deny that I have said some hurtful things - I have already admitted that I can have a sharp tongue - but then so has she. I shall try to describe her objectively to, perhaps, give you a fuller picture.

She is not stupid, but she is not the brightest, either, in the sense that some people have an ability to evaluate situations and see them from a variety of points of view. She can’t, or, at least, doesn’t seem to want to see anything through the other’s eyes. She is very confident in her own narrow world, supremely confident, in fact; but outside that extremely narrow world she goes to pieces. Put her in a situation in which she is unfamiliar or at a loss and she goes to pieces. People like that can, I think, develop in two ways: some become timid and cower, afraid of what might happen next. Others, and I think she is one, prefer to keep an iron grip on everything to ensure that nothing changes. She wants to make every decision to that she is certain of what is what and will have no discussion on any matter. It so happens that I - and I must again remind you that this is my account, that I am describing the mote in her eye and am quite possibly utterly unaware of the beam in mine - will choose to give way to keep the peace. I can’t pretend that situations don’t rankle, but I also really don’t want - for my own sake as much as anyone else’s - to live in a perpetually poisonous atmosphere.

. . .

This is pretty irrelevant (even though I haven’t had sex in 14 years - an invitation, girls or what!) but I have always liked these seaside pictures, both Donald McGill and Bamford.

This one is a Bamford. And if you like that one, here’s a few more:

‘Arab Spring’ still working its tortuous way to disaster. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better (he said hopefully). And RIP JJ Cale

The usual story: Sunday shift finished, I am sitting in a pub supping my pint of cider and drawing on a cigar (which, I must swiftly add, I try as often as possible to buy when in Europe, where they are a damn sight cheaper – no plutcrat me, oh no). The choice of pubs is limited to two, in both of which I can sit outside and smoke and should it rain – not unknown in Britain – I am reasonably sheltered. Here, tonight, I am at the Scarsdale Arms. The other one I sometimes go to is the Devonshire Arms not – a rather hefty – stone’s throw away. In both the cider is excruciatingly expensive, but were I to try to find a cheaper pint, I should have to travel at least 10 miles, and for a cheaper pint of cider I can’t really be bothered.

Both pubs are patronised by loads of foreigners (a breed increasingly dear to a British heart in that, again increasingly, we have no choice in the matter). Foreigners, despite the goddam awful food traditionally served up in Britain, are attracted to our country. If you want to know why, you must ask one of them. Were I to be flippant – a useful ruse to say something you believe but want to disguise in case someone takes offence – is that you seem to get a better class of foreigner in the Scarsdale. That’s not why I come here, of course, and it’s just an observation. I am writing this because almost always I have an itch to write. The problem is that I rarely have much to write about, so I am bound to restrict myself to inconsequential rubbish. So here goes.

. . .

What the bloody hell is going on in Egypt? A few days ago an estimated 100 folk were gunned down in Cairo while demonstrating in support of the now deposed president Morsi. In case any you reading this entry have forgotten, Morsi was duly and democratically elected. There were no suggestions whatsoever that his election was in any way rigged. His supporters were apparently shot dead – and a great many more were wounded – by the army.

I don’t yet know, that is I haven’t yet heard, how the Egyptian army is explaining its actions and the deaths. In one of those excessively odd and, furthermore under the circumstances highly embarrassing, turns of fate, the army which killed all those folk – a more honest way of describing it would be ‘gunned down in cold blood’ – has the support – an ‘apparently’ is necessary here – of the liberal elite, the ‘burgeoning middle class’, all those folk who like to see themselves on the side of progress, literacy, democracy and the rest. So what is going on? The most recent piece of news I’ve heard is that the current prime minister has granted the army powers to arrest at will anyone they want to arrest. So that’s OK then. It’s all legal and above board.

Actually, I think what is going on is quite simple: the army had a nice thing going under Mubarak, but dumped him when the time seemed right. It then simply bided its time and they had more to lose by sticking up for their man. Then came the ‘popular uprising’ against Morsi, which suited the army’s purpose and cause rather well: they were able to steam in there, remove all those they wanted to remove, but do it all under the spurious cloak of ‘fighting for the people’ or whatever bullshit phrase they have chosen. Plus ca change...

Egypt seems to be split down the centre, which does not bode well for peace. Meanwhile, Turkey, which had its own problems a month or two ago, has rather gone quite (though in a stange sideshow Erdogan has threatened to launch a libel action against The Times here in Britain, claiming that – hold on a minute while I look this up – he was defamed in an open letter The Times published which criticised his handling of the recent protests). But most certainly the trouble there has not been settled.

In neighbouring Syria things are still going from bad to worse, with Assad’s forces now getting more of the upper hand. Obama is, true to form, humming and haahing about what America should do next. It would be easy to slag him off at this point, but he really does find himself between a rock and a hard place, and, I should imagine, his prime concerns are what domestic impact there is as a result of what he chooses to do. He is on record as laying down a ‘red line’ and says the U.S. will act if that red line is crossed. The red line was crossed when he had very good evidence that Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons.

Unfortunately, there is also evidence that the ‘rebels’ had also used chemical weapons and are generally behaving equally as brutally as Assad. Up a bit and to the left (if you are looking at a map of North Africa) the puported ‘success story’ which was Tunisia is beginning to look rather less successful now that a leading opposition leader has been killed. . . .

On more domestic matters, my children are unfortunately growing up. My daughter Elsie will turn 17 in nine days and her younger brother Wesley turned 14 in May. And it seems like only yesterday that they were babes in arms, keen to listen to a story in bed or accompany me ‘to town’ because in their then very limited world it was something of an adventure. Oh well.

I mention them because what with the fuck up the ‘Arab Spring’ is becoming I rather feel that the next few years will be hotter rather than colder and not just for the good folk living in North Africa and the Middle East. Earlier on today driving up from Cornwall I was listening to Desert Island Discs whose guest today was Mary Robinson, the former president of the Irish Republic and – in my view – and all-round good egg. One of the tracks she choose was Dylan’s The Times They Are A’Changing. Well, they certainly are. . . .

 JJ Cale — and without looking it up, I couldn’t even tell you his Christian name — has kicked the bucket and is now pushing up daisies. Cale was another of my faves, although again I can’t tell you when or how I first came across him and his music. It will have been in the Seventies, although if truth be told I didn’t really, really get to like it until I was older by at least 20 years. It’s like jazz and classical music: bit by bit you grow into it. Bit by bit the heroes of your younger years and the music they made begin to sound a little thin and you find yourself looking for something a little meatier. And despite his laid-back style Cale was meatier.

Orchard Dene and Lower Assendon revisited – I go on an unexpected and unplanned sentimental journey

Lower Assendon will mean very little to almost everyone reading this blog, unless you live in Henley-on-Thames or nearby – Watlingon, Bix, Fawley, Middle Assendon or, obviously, Lower Assendon. But it means something to me because it was where I grew up, by which I mean where I lived from the age of three to eight. It is at the end of the Fair Mile, the road leading out of Henley to Oxford, and is just beyond the junction where one road will take you to Watlington and the other onto Oxford, via Nettlebed and Nuffield.

It isn’t even a hamlet, let alone a village. It has no shop, and not even a proper pub. What was once a proper pub, The Golden Ball, is now a little more than a gastro-pub and a little less than a restaurant: if you eat there, you’ll not get away with spending at least, with drinks – who eats without drinking? - £40 a head and as you didn’t go on your own and are either a guest or a host, that can for many be something of a dent in your wallet, though not much of a dent for the good people of Henley and environs (which, I understand, is French for ‘the surrounding area’ - no slouch, me). I was there yesterday and could well have counted the houses there, but I didn’t, so all I can say is that Lower Assendon is made up of around ten or eleven houses, none near each other.

I got back from France on Friday afternoon, and as it seemed rather pointless to drive 240 miles home to Cornwall, only to drive the same 240 miles back up to London to get to work this morning, I decided to stay in London. I had planned to take Susan Wharton, Michael ‘Peter Simple’ wife, out for lunch, but just after she said yes, she rang back and told me she had looked at her diary and was promised to a party in Kent to celebrate the 90th birthday of a friend. It might sound like the bum’s rush, but I know Susan and it wasn’t.

So my next plan was to take Mark to The Golden Ball (it might just be the Golden Ball with a lower case ‘t’ – sub please check as all the really well-paid columnists are apt to say) for lunch. That was before we got there and discovered our local pub – local implies more than a hamlet, so if I tell you that when you are in Lower Assendon, it will take you more than three or four minutes to get to your neighbours house, you’ll understand why I say it is less than a hamlet – had transformed itself into what it is now. (If on the very, very rare occasion I am prepared to spend more than £40 a head on a meal, I shan’t do so in what was once a pub and should still be a pub.) So we had a pint of Brakspear’s bitter – the brewery as such no longer exists and has been bought out by some big brewing conglomerate or other though I have to say whoever brews Brakspear’s bitter has managed to keep it as good as ever – and after looking through the menu we decided we wouldn’t eat there. ‘Delightful Cornish scallops’ and ‘friendly, humanely slaughtered local pork’ really aren’t my thing, so knowing that the Rainbow Inn was a two-minute drive up the road, we ‘dined’ there. That wasn’t particularly brilliant, but substantially cheaper. Then we did what I had come to do which was to roam a little and to visit my haunts of – well, I must be honest – 60 years ago.

Nothing had changed, except that it all, naturally, looked rather smaller. I should say that I loved growing up there. There were about seven or eight of us who lived locally and we did all the things lads and lasses of six, seven and eight do. We built fires and tried to roast apples, which were, of course, inedible, rode our bikes here and there – I learnt to ride a bike on the gravel outside the Golden Ball (I’ve settle for the lower case ‘t’) – roamed the nearby woods and generally had a good time.

Here are the names of my companions in case any of them happen upon this blog: Ann Gibbons (of whom a little more later), Lindsay and Mandy Cooper, John Valentine, John Lovejoy, Richard Bryant, and myself and my older brother Ian. I had my first kiss with Mandy. She was about five and I was about six. The big house there was Orchard Dene, which consisted of the owner’s house, and around the back three flats, of which ours was by far the smallest. The owner was Jim Gibbons and his wife (whose name I can’t remember. Ann was their daughter.

We lived at 3 Orchard Dene, up a green, cast-iron set of stairs. Curious, I left my brother Mark in the car – which was his decision as he is somewhat ‘shy’ (odd for a man who is now 55) and didn’t want to come, and went to the big house and knocked on the door. A woman in her late 60s answered and I asked her whether she was Ann Gibbons. She was. I had similarly visited with my older brother Ian (who is now mentally ill) several years ago, but this time the visit was longer. We chatted for a while and were soon joined by her husband Peter, who asked me whether I would like to look inside 3 Orchard Dene. The present tenant, he said, was a very pleasant, very amenable man, who wouldn’t mind at all, and so I did. The tenant was on his way out to work, so he told us to let ourselves in.

The flat is small, just two bedrooms, one for Ian and myself and one for my parents. It has been thoroughly modernised, so the open fire in the living room and the coke burner in our room have gone and it is now centrally heated. What was once our larder now has a washing machine. The windows are now all modern. I spent some time chatting with Ann and her husband, and she reminded me of what I had forgotten and I reminded her of what she had forgotten. If you carry on up the lane, which leads to Bix, you’ll soon go passed what was once a diary farm run by – the name is not made up up – Farmer Smallbones. She said he taught her how to milk a cow. He didn’t teach me, but I do remember tumbling around in his hay loft and once, after learning the red was a colour bulls hated, parading up and down the other side of a gate to the yard which contained his bull, in a pair of red socks.

The Coopers lived in a small cottage at the end of the drive, but that has now been substantially gentrified and the owners run a B&B business. I have to say that this was not really a sentimental journey at all. I didn’t experience some kind of heaving in my breast or anything like that, but – the sun was out and it was a glorious day, I realised how lucky I was to have spent the early part of my childhood in such a lovely part of the country. Henley was not close for a young lad and although Ian and I went to primary school there, the Sacred Heart School, we had to catch a bus every morning to get there and then again at night to get home.

Ann has grandchildren who come and stay – they live in Bristol and so a visit to the countryside is always welcome – and these days they are not allowed to roam: it’s the increased traffic, she said, nothing else. But 60 years ago we roamed everywhere. In the holidays we had breakfast and then buggered off for the morning, came back home for lunch, and then buggered off again for the rest of the afternoon. In those days, as we all know, it was perpetual summer and I can’t, after all these years, remember one single drop of rain.

I now live in rural North Cornwall and am very grateful that my own two children, now 17 in two weeks and 14 a month or two ago, living next to their uncle’s beef farm and have several cousins, are also able to grow up in a very pleasant part of the country. It’s luck really. Many children cannot, but then children being children, until they are ten or eleven, most all things are an adventure whether you grow up in the country or a city.

Thank the Lord for small mercies.

PS ‘Lower Assendon’ – look it up on Google maps and switch to whatever the function is to allow you to go down the roads and byways.

Come on, Kate, do me a real favour and get a move on!

Just a quick word before the day is out: please, please, please God make that bloody royal baby (who is to be called ‘Kevin’, I understand, as Princess Kate has always had a thing about Kevin Keegan) be born today. I am not the slightest bit interested in any of the hoo-ha, but if he – bound to be a boy – isn’t born today, he’ll be born next week and work will be murder, sheer hell. So, you bloody Windsors, if you want me to remain on your side: get that baby born!

More concerts in France, and I open my big mouth to diss - slightly - the World’s Greatest Novelist

I’ve been here in Illats, south of Bordeaux, for a week and it is hot. Yes, I know it is also hot in Old Blighty, but it is a little hotter here. The heatwave in Britain is most probably something of an aberration – in several years time folk will be talking about ‘the summer of 2013’ as we still talk about ‘the summer of 1976’ when we were all encouraged to stop pissing and pooing to save water, eat off palm leaves to save on the washing up and to recycle our G&T ice-cubes (sounds impossible, I know, but you would be surprised what skills you can acquire quite rapidly when needs must).

Not that there will be any ‘water-saving measures this summer, however dire it gets and however burnt to a cinder lawns throughout Sussex, Surrey, Kent and Hampshire become. The government would simply not dare after all the floods and rain we had until three weeks ago. There must be enough water down there in our acquifers (or whatever the technical term is) to last us two or three scorching summers, so a hosepipe ban is surely oompletely out of the question.

I am staying, as I have been for, I think, the past three years with my stepmother’s aunt and accompanying her to concerts. Her husband isn’t interested (and, anyway, he has been ill these past few days, although he is slowly recovering – according to the doctor ‘there’s a lot of what he’s got about among old people in these temperatures’). Because my aunt stayed home to keep an eye on here husband last week, I went to the first concert, on Thursday evening, on my own. It given by a group of seven singers who call themselves Scandicus and sing late 15th, early 16th music a cappella. It’s not to everyone’s taste but I like that kind of music a great deal. The next concert was by Maxim Vengerov and a pianist called Itamar Golan (I looks rather like what I should imagine a Mossad field agent would look like – he looks liked the kind of toughie you wouldn’t want to mix it with).

They played duos by Beethoven, Schubert, Franck and Saint-Saens, followed by two encore pieces by Brahms, both thoroughly rousing, designed, I suspect, to get the audience to demand a third encore, which we got. It was a gentle piece by Faure designed to calm us all down again and indeed we did and afterwards all went quietly. My aunt commented that she though Vengerov had gained weight and that his fingers seemed thicker, especially around the joints, and as she had a sister who developed appalling arthritis and gained a great deal of weight because of the steroids she had to take, was wondering whether Vengerov, too, is developing arthritis.

There was to be a concert on Saturday, but that was cancelled, so our next concert is tonight. Apart from attending those concerts I have been doing very little (which suits me well). Yesterday, we went off to Bordeaux and called in on a 92-year-old former colleague of my aunt’s, a Liverpudlian woman who met and married a Frenchman just after the war and has been living in France for the past 62 years, but still hasn’t lost he Scally accents. She also rates in my book because she can still laugh at the silly jokes I sometimes hear and pass on to her which my aunt will treat with sheer and disdain. (An example: a chap went to the doctor and asked him whether he could give him anything for persistent wind. The doctor gave him a kite.)

My aunt, who is 82-years-old, is rather crotchety these days and anything not being exactly in the place she is accustomed to it being has been earning me a stern rebuke on each occasion, even though I have no idea I had done wrong. There are several things I always look out for and have done so for the past three years – ensuring the lavatory seat is down if I take a leak during the night, for example, and not overfilling the kettle (a bad one, that), but even though I say so myself, I am a considerate guest, never take anything for granted and am getting just a tad cheesed off at being treated like a naughty, rather dense schoolboy. But she is 82, after all, and naturally I say nothing. Lord knows what I shall be like at that age, if I ever actually get there.

. . .

I have just finished reading The Human Stain by Philip Roth. I bought the novel after seeing the film and was rather taken by it. And I only saw the film because I had watched Bad Company with Jeff Bridges, which was rather good, and was looking for other films by its director, Robert Benton. His film stars Anthony Hookins, Ed Harris and Nicole Kidman and is a reasonably entertaining potboiler. Actually, that’s unfair. Hopkins and Harris are both good actors and give great performances. Kidman was thoroughly miscast, but I didn’t realise that until I had read the novel.

As for that novel, well I should say straight off that it is more complex than the film. Indeed, like many films ‘of the book’ it is more a film based on material presented in the book. One character, in particular is wholly excised from the film’s version, a young female and highly ambitious French professor called Delphine Roux. Oddly, although she is well-realised in the novel, she did strike me as being something to close to a plot device for comfort, and doesn’t really even make an appearance in the novel until the last quarter. And dare I say this? After all Roth is now regarded as one of America’s ‘great’ novelist hand has been ‘awarded prizes’, not least the Kellogg’s Golden Wheatflake for producing literary masterpiece after literary masterpiece while starting each working day on a bowl of cornflakes.

But in my extremely humble, though it has to be said, firmly held opinion, The Human Stain is rather overwritten. It has to be said that given Roth’s talent for the telling phrase what he does supply in excess paragraph after paragraph is very readable and very entertaining, but I sincerely feel his novel would have gained by being trimmed by a third and perhaps even a half. The trouble is that for the past 40 years, it seems, novels in America are sold by weight, so there is no reason for a writer to limit himself. And given all ‘the prizes’ Roth and others have received, I dare say there is a tad too much deference in his publisher’s office when Phil (or one of their other star novelists) turns up with his or her latest manuscript. (‘Do you know, Philip, I hardly thought that it could even be possible, but, by God, I do think this is even better than your last novel!’) Anyone reading this might or, more probably, might not have read The Human Stain, but I would love to be able to hear another’s point of view.

Anyway, what do I know?

. . .

Yesterday, I took a little time out and made my own way home from Bordeaux. I was looking for a pleasant bar with a shady courtyard where I might sit quietly on my own and enjoy a cigar or two and a glass of lager or six. As it turned out, and despite meandering through the countryside as I mad safe, I couldn’t find any, so I settled for a small bar in Podensac, the slightly bigger town near where I am staying. The Tour de France was on the telly, but inside the bar was empty. Outside, on the street, were four tables, and I can confirm that

1) the French also have the chavs (‘les chavées’, perhaps), and

2) that the bloody awful love affair the Westen world now has with getting a tattoos all over your body is doing exceptionally well here in the corner of south-western France. The pic below, in keeping with the bar

(though I did still manage to enjoy my cigars and lager) was taken on the way back from ‘la toilette’ at the back to my table.