Woodstock? Just more proof, if proof were needed, of mankind's infallible tendency to delude itself (and then some)

The not-so-astounding news I have just read on the BBC News website is that tickets for Glastonbury 2014 have already sold out and have done so in record time. This item caught my eye because a night or two ago I watched Taking Woodstock (here, one of several such sites in which you can watch films completely illegally but, crucially, without spending a penny (U.S ‘cent’), but this is the one I almost always use (and remember to install some kind of ad-block to stop all those malware infected ads popping up).

Taking Woodstock was directed by by Ang Lee and distinctly underwhelmed the critics, and I can see why. I should imagine that most of those critics are under 50, immune to all that hippy-dippy love-and-peace man bollocks and none of them are the hippy bores whose interminable reminiscences and memoirs of the ‘peace era’ made reading the Sunday papers in the Seventies and Eighties such a dull and dispiriting experience.

Thankfully, quite a few of that generation of ageing hippies are now dead, although every so often one will pop up on TV and drone on about ‘how we all started it, man’ until someone has the good sense to shut him up. And it was always a ‘him’ - the much-vaunted free love at the time wasn’t so much the liberation of women but the liberation of men from any kind of responsibility and respect for the female gender. Of course women have sexual urges just as strong as men - and I wished to God I had realised that rather earlier in my life - but with ‘the pill’ still not widely available at the time, they were always the ones left to carry the can when they found themselves up the duff, and the prospect and fear of that will have meant they couldn’t act on those urges quite as often a they might have liked. The trouble was the ‘free love’ doctrine was simply an extra strategy to persuade ‘a chick’ to get her knickers off and spread her legs. As for the peace, well up to a point Lord Copper.

The ‘Sixties generation’ was remarkably, often violently, uncharitable to their parents’ generation, and I don’t think it occurred to any of them for a second that their mums and dads (US ‘moms’ and ‘pops’) were just like them though, except that they were two decades older, and as young lads and lasses wanted just what they wanted. The trouble was that after World War II - especially here in Europe - in which many family and friends had died, they wanted nothing but a quiet life, the quieter the better and, if at all possible, without unplanned death of any kind. Of course, when you are 18 and bursting with hormones a quiet life is that last thing you want, but then nor did their parents then they were that age 20 to 30 years earlier.

Unfortunately at that age, just when I was desperately growing my hair as long as possible and making sure I always had a lump of dope in my matchbox, the boys were being marched off to war and possible death. Ironically, the war perhaps brought greater freedoms for women, who had to man (Lord, I can’t believe I just used that word, but I shall leave it in for the sake of the irony) the factories and offices vacated by all the cannon fodder being shipped to Europe and tasted greater independence. But this is all a long way from Woodstock and the supposedly great cultural event it was.

. . .

I have never been to Glastonbury and, in theory, never will. I say ‘in theory’ because I am now 63 and I can’t imagine the young folk rolling around in the rain and mud and paying extortionate prices for goddam-awful burgers while listening to music of which the major constituent is a booming bass would want a cynical, dyspeptic old

A rare picture of me at 14. Note especially the joint I’m smoking and the V sign on my chest

fart like me hanging around. Which is fine by me because even if they did, I really wouldn’t want to go. And if Ang Lee’s portrayal of Woodstock is anything like the real thing, I’m bloody glad I didn’t get to go there, either.

When it comes to listening to music or, as once I did, going clubbing, give me a small, intimate club. I dislike gangs and crowds at the best of times, and the idea of spending more than a minute in the company of ten thousand other people, many of whom can’t wait to wallow in mud, strikes me as simply bizarre.

Then there’s a music. Many bands are great live, but many are not. Many need the resources of studio technology to sound even halfway decent and die a pitiful death when asked to perform in public, often reduced to a boring two-chord riff to a mid-tempo 4-4 beat. And even if they are half-decent playing live, the conditions of a festival, the distance you might be from the stage, the fact that bass notes carry, but treble notes do not, a badly balanced sound scheme, the vagaries of the weather, and - believe it or not - out-of-tune instruments can all add up to a pretty piss-poor performance.

How does he know all this, I hear you ask, if he has never been to a festival? Quite simply because I’ve quite often caught festival performances on TV. Well, isn’t it a fact that television rarely does justice to live music? Perhaps, but I’m not going to risk goddam-awful burgers, portaloos overflowing with shit and crap, and the combined body odour of a hundred thousand people just to find out.

. . .

As for new direction the Love Generation apparently took and which, in that vacuous phrase often employed by TV and the press, ‘changed the course of history’, again up to a point, Lord Copper. Sadly, the new direction was just the old direction in longer hair. The relevant cliche here is plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

As the love generation itself found out here in Britain at the end of the Seventies when the punks stuck two fingers up at their hippy-dippy older brothers and sisters, and gobbed at them to boot in case they had missed the point, there’s nothing a new generation loves better than to put as much distance as possible between itself and the older generation. You like white? Well, we’ll like black. You want love ’n peace? Well, we’ll like violence and abrasion. You like slow, dreamy, meandering ballads? Well, here’s a two-minute piece of cacophonous noise you can stick up your arse and then fuck off!

Ironically, as an excellent BBC Four series chronicled a few months ago, the principle of plus ça change, c’est plus la même chose still held true and, it seemed, within a matter of months the lure of big bucks got many a gobbing, spitting, pogoing punk band to see the light, sign on the dotted line and ensure that the gobbing, spitting and pogoing became safe enough for public consumption and ensure you were still home before midnight for a mug of cocoa and a good night’s sleep.

Further, not even within a matter of months but, it seemed, within a matter of hours, the safe punk music had metamorphasised into something entirely different. And how the hippies hated it. Now in their early thirties, desperate to persuade themselves that the mortgage, house, pension plan and station wagon (UK ‘shooting brake’) are just a passing phase, man, I’m still a rebel at heart, they could not believe and could not accept that they were nothing more than history, taken seriously be no one but themselves and their peers.

Good Lord, life is cruel.

. . .

Why this rant, you must be asking yourselves (and I am most certainly asking myself)? Well, the answers are both highly personal and very straightforward. I shall save the highly personal answer, perhaps, for another time, but the straightforward answer is this: when I turned 18 and was released from my public school with nothing but a posh accent and a set of illusions as long as your arm, it was 1968. The Vietnam War was well underway, as were ‘student politics’ (and whatever happened to them?), and the Sixties, with barely two more years to go, was getting into its stride. All I wanted to do was grow my hair, lose my cherry, and smoke dope (and to tell the truth, I hadn’t even thought about that last half as much as mentioning it here might make it seem).

For some reason, I found all the hippy-dippy stuff, all the peace-and-love routine and the we’re-going-to-change-the-world fantasy wholly and utterly unconvincing. All that interested me was the dope (cannabis, hash, not heroin) and acid. That was it. And to complicate it just a little further, I didn’t hang out with the ‘druggies’ because the druggies were dull, dull, dull. All they wanted to talk about was drugs. I remember walking into the students union one afternoon to find a table of druggies who had all dropped downers, all sitting around motionless and all as boring as fuck. If this is what drugs downers do to you, I remember thinking, well fuck downers. Dull, dull, dull, dull, dull!

It wasn’t that I didn’t get it. I did get it, and because I got it, I couldn’t help asking myself ‘who the hell do they think they are kidding?’ and others ‘who the hell do you think you are kidding?’ This wasn’t some great intellectual insight, it was nothing more than a gut feeling. And, dear friends, whether you agree with me or not, it’s a gut feeling I still have: who the hell do we think we are kidding except ourselves?

So when I see film’s such as Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock, and when I read, as I did today, that tickets for Glastonbury 2014 are already ‘sold out’ - Glastonbury 2014 being, of course, the successor to Glastonbury 2013 and Glastonbury 2009 and Glastonbury 1998 and the rest where it is now necessary to hire security firms to patrol the ‘perimeter fence’, where corporations can now block-book the prime sites, where keen young cunts appear on TV, the radio and in the press to laud the ‘business opportunities’ Glastonbury has brought and can still bring, where Glastonbury is now as much a part of the Establishment social calendar as Wimbledon, Ascot, the Mojos and the birth of a new royal baby - I am again reminded that individually some are quite bright, but as a gang, a crowd, an electorate, an audience, a congregation, a market we are all as thick as shit.

How do you overcome an addiction? Simple: develop another. (But read right to the end to understand just what the fuck I’m talking about)

First there was The Sopranos. Others might care to cite Six Foot Under (or whatever it’s called) and they might well be right. But as this is about my addiction to a recent spate of excellent telly series – with the emphasis on my (and, I must point out, this is my blog you are reading - start your own if you have a problem with that) and as I never saw Six Foot Under (or whatever it’s called) or any of the others, and as The Sopranos was the first of the new breed I saw, you can cite as many ‘others’ for all you like, but for me The Sopranos was the daddy of them all. Capice?

This is not, and never will be, the place where description is reduced to such vacuous terms as ‘amazing’ and ‘awesome’, and it would be ironic if such intelligent and excellent series such as The Sopranos, Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire, Deadwood, The Wire, Damages and Ray Donovan were reduced to being lauded in such playground language (and whenever anything is described to me by anyone as ‘amazing’ and ‘awesome’ I immediately know full well that it isn’t at all anything of the kind). But anyone who has been watching television in the past 43 and has taken in such standards as Kojak, Hawaii Five O, Columbo, Dynasty (which I never saw), Dallas (which I also didn’t see) and the rest and then progressed to The Sopranos and the rest will realise (of I hope has realised) that much of TV has undergone a seachange in terms of quality writing, acting, story and direction.

Ironically, it was the development of cable TV and other forms of subscription TV which allowed the change to happen. Without the need, because of the all-powerful advertiser’s demands, to play it safe, to follow a formula and write to schedule with a mini cliffhanger every five minutes just before the ad break (of which there were and are only four and hour here in Britain on commercial TV, but of which there are far, far more in the good ole’ US of A and elsewhere) quality could at last take over. The cable and subscriber channels made their money from subscribers, and although they, too, were and are ultimately subject to viewing figures, they and the various creators of the series they produced had much more freedom simply to try to be excellent. They could reflect life far more truthfully by allowing their characters to cuss and swear and say fuck and call others a cunt. They could show people who were having sex as actually doing so in the altogether. But that was and is trivial in comparison to the real artistic freedoms working for an ad-less cable and subscriber channel gave them.

They were no longer constrained to the 60-minute format, which because of the ad breaks meant, in fact, just 40 minutes of drama. But there was more. Granted that their audiences were smaller, counted in their one and one and half millions as compared to the tens of millions a mainstream network attracted, that audience was by and large – ahem – a little more intelligent and artistically receptive. That new audience didn’t necessarily want everything to be spelled out, to follow a formula and to be neatly wrapped up in 60 – i.e. 40 – minutes of predictable drama. They were prepared to take on trust – when initially presented with quality writing, acting and direction – that what came next would be up to scratch and thus did not mind there not being a formula.

This new freedom attracted the talent. And the talent which made its way to such series attracted even more talent – actors, directors and writers certainly, but also the backroom folk without whom actors, directors and writers could not function. A ‘story’ could be expounded, at the very least, over 13 hours of broadcast time (that is 13 one-hour episodes per series. The Sopranos ran to six/seven series, The Wire to five, of which the last was not a patch on the first four, Deadwood to three – and then inexplicably cancelled – and Damages to five).

This allowed the writers far, far greater freedom to develop character, to allow plot to evolve from character, to do the kind of thing they must surely always have wanted to do but which the constraints of the 60/40-minute format simply didn’t allow them to do. There are many such series, quite apart from Six Foot Under, I didn’t see. Everyone raved about The West Wing, but I found it a tad irritating. For one thing all the characters were so bloody hip and cool I often, in the few episodes I did see, didn’t have a bloody clue as to what they were talking about. And I also got rather pissed off with a kind of mannered direction where characters would talk to each other briefly while walking past each other in a corridor.

. . .

I started with The Sopranos, although, ironically, I didn’t get it until series two, and only saw series one in retrospect. Here in Britain it had been initially trailed, rather unfortunately, as a ‘comedy drama’. Well, it was at times very, very funny (in one episode, directed my Steve Buscemi, who also had a part later on as a cousin of Tony Soprano, a Russian gangster who proves to be very difficult to kill is described as a having been a former member of Russia’s Interior Ministry (i.e. I should imagine a member of Russia domestic secret service). This eventually becomes convoluted in a phone call to a character who is none too bright as having been an ‘interior decorator’ which strikes his oppo as odd as ‘his apartment was shit’), but it wasn’t by a long chalk primarily a comedy. I got round the problem of occasionally not understanding both the argot and the New Jersey accents by videoing – this was, after all the end of the 20th century – each episode and simply re-running a part I didn’t catch.

Notwithstanding the series I didn’t see, to which I must now add NYPD Blues, which I also understand was very good and predated The Sopranos (and one of whose writers, David Milch, went on to create Deadwood) I generally accept until someone emails to inform me otherwise that The Sopranos set the standard and set the bar very high.

. . .

The most recent complete series I have watched was Damages, and I have to say I was blown away. I must at this point come clean and admit that as I, a little earlier, castigated Seventies and Eighties television series as being formulaic, it is only fair to admit that the essential schtick of Damages and the device which allowed the tension and expectations to be ratcheted up ever higher becomes pretty damn obvious pretty damn soon.

The flashback and flash forward technique is pretty much a con, yet the whole thing is done with such astounding aplomb that you really don’t care. It’s rather like how on the one hand we find it very easy to forgive without a second thought those irritating habits of family and friends we like and are fond of, yet on the other hand ruthlessly and without mercy (which is what ‘ruthlessly’ actually means, but never mind) condemn the slightest flaw in those we dislike and whom we wish evil.

Damages ran to five series (and was taken over by a second cable/subscription channel for series four and five). Central to its success and sheer enjoyment are surely Glenn Close as Patty Hewes and Rose Byrne as Ellen Parsons, but having said that Glenn Close is astounding. I would particularly single out as evidence of her talent the scene in series five where she confronts her father, who is on his deathbed, and resolutely refuses to do what the rest of us wimps might regard as the right thing, which would be to forgive him. All I can do here is to urge you to try to catch that scene. I cannot describe just how good Close is. The scene lasted for around five minutes and was done in one take and was not (as far as I can tell, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t) edited. Watch it. The proof of the pudding is always in the eating.

The Kessler brothers and Daniel Zelman first managed to get Damages accepted for a first series, but at that point they really cannot have known for how many series it might run. In the event it ran for five. Each series is distinct in as far as there is a distinct ‘story’ (i.e. legal case) in each. And each series could well be seen in isolation and not just thoroughly entertain, but also succeed. So it is really quite remarkable how, over the five series, they have managed to make a whole of the thing.

You don’t really need to know the back story to appreciate any of them, although it would help. What is so satisfying about the whole five series in toto is who it rounds of the story of two woman, Patty Hewes and Ellen Parsons, who are very alike, yet individual, and which portrays and conveys their relationship as well as their peculiar personal character traits in extraordinary fashion. I stress that the talent and vision of the Kesslers and Zelman is such that they could not have know how many series Damages would run to. Yet when series five concludes, it rounds of the story in an extraordinarily honest way. There is no pat conclusion, no happy ending. Each – by which I should say both characters, Hewes and Parsons – are true to themselves. Hewes, a complex, ruthless, yet vulnerable woman carries on as only she could and would carry one. Parsons, also complex, does something similar, but she is not Hewes and does, we assume, find happiness.

A measure of how good the series is – and how it is so adept at manipulating the views (and it is my dying contention that in all its forms ‘art’ is nothing, and I mean nothing, more than successful manipulation of the viewer, reader and listener. The more successful the manipulation, the better the art. Basta. An unfashionable description, perhaps, but true) was one of the – or possibly the - final scenes in the last episode of the last series. We are first given the acceptable, accessible, wished-for conclusion, a happy ending in which Hewes and Parsons are reconciled after all their difficulties. Ahhhh. But this is then shown to have been nothing more than Hewes’s wish fulfilment, showing just how deep into herself she has sunk.

We then get the real, the true ending, the kind of thing which happens in real life (or, I am bound to say, usually happens in real life. Perhaps the Tooth Fairy does exist, who am I to say it doesn’t). No reconciliation. None. That would not have been Patty Hewes. Patty Hewes will die alone, unmourned and in obscurity.

. . .

I have spent the past few weeks watching one episode a night. Then it ended, and, dear reader, I felt an emptiness. I needed something to fill the gap. And that’s when, almost by chance I came across Ray Donovan. I first heard of it when proof-reading the TV pages of the paper I work for. So, looking for something else to watch, I looked it up. And it is good. Different to Damages, and different to The Sopranos, although it has be called a Sopranos lookalike. Bollocks. It is its own series and very good it is, too. I look forward to watching the rest of series one and series two, which, I’m assured has been commissioned.

. . .

Finally, doesn’t young Bridget Donovan (Kerris Dorsey) look uncannily, and unfortunately, like that arch fraud Quentin Taratino?

Sorry Kerris, but that's life. I'm not picture book either (any more).

Reunited after all these years, though sadly not with the girl, but the song which consoled me

It was 1983 or 1984 (almost 30 years ago I realise to my horror as I write this), and I had just moved into my own house, a small two-bedroom house in a small close of 33 houses in Kings Heath, Birmingham, and was coming to terms with splitting up with my girlfriend (Sian, Pete, though I’m sure you already guessed), the first I should have married. I was living alone in the sparsely furnished house and generally feeling down in the dumps, smoking quite a bit of dope (though I now realise that as I wasn’t officially ‘a smoker’, I was regularly lighting up joints as much if not more for the nicotine rush as anything else) and drinking quite a bit of cider.

Every Sunday I used to tune in to Robbie Vincent’s soul show on Radio 1 as he was the only DJ on Radio 1 playing the kind of music I liked, and that’s where I heard for the first time a lot of the singers and bands I came to like: The S.O.S band, Cameo, Freddie Jackson and a lot of others. One night, I heard a song which was just great, which hooked me immediately. I didn’t hear the title but just caught that it was by someone (or as I first thought some band) called J Blackfoot. And I heard if only once. But once was enough. Years later when we got the internet and you could look up such things, I tried to track it down by googling one or two of the lines I remembered from the song but got nowhere.

Once, a few years ago going through a bin of old cassettes in Trago Mills, near Liskeard, I came across City Slickers by J Blackfoot, bought it and found out it wasn’t a band but he was a guy, though not a singer who also played guitar, but just a singer. One of the songs on it was his hit Taxi, but that elusive song wasn’t on it. Damn. Two days ago, I found it, and as I had got through the best part of a bottle of port (horribly moreish, is port), I can’t even remember how. But we were reunited after all those years. And here it is, a great, great song.

 

Then there’s Taxi, J Blackfoot’s hit. See if you like it.



Around about the same time I got to hear Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson and bought several of his albums. He did a lot of touring in Europe, but I don’t think he was well-known in Britain. But he should have been. He is one of the best unknown guitar players I know. He also has a wicked sense of humour and a great voice and died in some style: suffered a heart attack on stage in Japan (so up yours, John Lennon).

I might well have heard him for the first time on Robbie Vincent show, but I really can’t remember (too much dope and cider?) But like him I did. I had about four or five of his albums but they got lost over the years and I have no idea where they are. You can still get one or two of them on CD, but not all. See if you like this track. And listen to the guitar at the end of the song: it’s not for nothing that this guy’s reckoned to be one of the great guitarists. Blues or straight pop guitar it ain’t.

Telephone Bill


 First Timothy Six

Who wants to buy a new motor? Not me, though I might well have done by now when I tot up the dough my cars have cost me in just under a month

It is a standing joke in my family that I have a fatal attraction for duff motors (as in cars). There is a some truth in that, but I would like to plead mitigation. Admittedly I don’t have much of a track record with cars, and, as I shall soon reveal, the little escapade of a several weeks ago when the starter motor on my ‘good’ car failed while I was in Germany and I was trapped for several days in a Bierkeller (or something like that) is not, in fact the end of the story.

Perhaps it would soften the rather critical view you might have of my facility with cars if I tell you that the world is firmly divided into two camps: those who will mortgage themselves up to the hilt, then borrow some more just to be able to buy the latest flash motor and cut a dash in town; and those who regard a car as merely a means to get from A to B in reasonable comfort, who always buy secondhand (which usually means fourth hand, of course) and who regard those in the first camp as living proof that fools and their money are always parted at the first opportunity.

Yes, I know the rationale that a brand-new motor, or one that is only a year of two old is less likely to break down, but I am certain that if one were to analyse the breakdown figures (assuming, of course, that you are bored shitless and really have nothing better to do), you’ll find that just as many new or nearly new cars break down as do the kind of jalopies I prefer to buy. OK, my kind of motor is perhaps more likely to suffer from the effects of old age, but how many times has a friend bought at top dollar, then been hit with some ongoing niggle or other which sees his car ‘in the garage being sorted out’ for longer than he or she has had the joy of driving it. But what I am about to relate does rather undermine my argument.

At present I have three cars. My own, a V –reg (1999/2000) Rover 45 bought for £800 from Rob Gibbons of Davidstow (and at the time a bargain – he could have got a lot more for it); the car my wife drives, a 2005 Chevrolet Matiz which cost £1,600 and was paid for with ‘Ken’s money’ (and the tale of ‘Ken’s money’ can be told another time); and my ‘good car’, Ken’s old car, an automatic Vauxhall Astra Club, which might be a 1998 model, but which only had 38,000 on the clock when I took it over – and still only has 47,000 on the clock – but, more to the point, was ‘tidy’ as the good folk of South Wales say. It is in remarkably good condition, that duff starter motor notwithstanding. Ken had left it to my brother when he died and as my brother lives in deepest London and decided he had no use for it, he gave it to me. Nice brother.

The ‘good’ car is my back-up and will be my ‘first car’ when the Rover – already more than 150,000 miles on the clock – finally gives up the ghost. But that moment is, as you will agree in a minute or two, I hope still a while off. About six weeks ago it was obvious she needed attention (cars, like ships, are always she. Why, I don’t know). Starting was becoming difficult and for the first four or five miles of any journey one cylinder was not firing.

It was off to the garage with her (though not Rob Gibbons, I have to say, because the last time he did something to her, he or one of his men, didn’t tighten the nuts on the nearside rear wheel enough so that when I was driving at 60mph down the M3 the wheel came off. It was partly my fault in that it had been making a hell of a racket but I assumed it was simply a

duff bearing and postponed having it seen to. It wasn’t a duff bearing.) Time was once when replacing spark plugs and possibly the coil was a simple matter which could be undertaken by most idiots in an afternoon, usually a Saturday. But no longer. Now cars are so fucking ‘sophisticated’ that such simple tasks are impossible.

So it was off to the garage, Atlantic Motors in Camelford, who did the job while I waited, which rather impressed me, but which set me back £172. While I was there, Alan, the proprietor and the guy who did the job – replacing all four spark plugs and installing the new-fangled coils the Rover 45 uses – told me that it was high time the cambelt was replaced. It should really be replaced every 50,000: mine hadn’t been replaced for 100,000 and was showing signs of fraying. And if it did break, it was curtains for the car. So I had it replaced. It cost the best part of almost £300.

When a few days later I again broke down, checked the cooling system and found I was out of water, I knew, though I dared not admit it to myself at the time, that I had blown my head gasket. An expensive job, getting a head gasket done. But after spending more or less £450 in a matter of days and for one other reason I shan’t go into here, I decided to go ahead and have the work done. In for a penny, in for a pound. All I’ll say is that the car is back on the road, but getting it there has cost me more than I paid for the car in the first place.

So you might now understand what the phrase ‘fools and their money are soon parted’ doesn’t necessarily just apply to folk who get into goddam awful deep debt to cut a dash in the latest model. It might also apply to dicks like me. Only time will tell whether or not it does.

An unexpected but very, very pleasant sentimental journey. I won’t say ‘to my roots’ because that would be bollocks, but there was something of that about it. And a rather odd tale as to why my father was nicknamed The Spy (Der Spion) by my many relatives in that part of the woods.

I don’t think I’ve yet really done justice to my trip to Germany in what I’ve written. OK, so my stay there was extended from just three days to eight days through a piece of expensive bad luck (and what cost me a total of €573 to have put right would have cost me here in Cornwall around £180, according to my friendly Vauxhall dealer. I told him I like to think - I prefer to think that costs are just higher in Germany, which is why I paid more. Don’t you believe it, he said, they knew you were a visitor and upped their prices accordingly. Surely not, I said. Well, he replied, I could give you the names of ten garages here in Cornwall who do just that whenever a holidaymaker breaks down and needs emergency work done.)

As it turned out the trip became more than just attending my niece’s wedding and reception and meeting up again with my sister’s family and some of their friends. When I was told that the car (the starter motor needed to be replaced) would not be ready until the following Monday afternoon, I was invited to stay with a distant relative and her family. Her grandfather and my grandmother were cousins. Then, after I had rung the garage and was told - in German, of course - ‘problems, I’m afraid, sir (a sentence with which folk the world over will be familiar), I had to ask whether I could stay another night, and there was no problem at all with that.

The plan was originally that I would pick up my car and drive north to the Emsland, the area my grandmother and grandfather came from. My sister and her husband have bought themselves a renovated farmhouse for his retirement of which my sister is very proud, and she was keen for me to see it. I was hoping to stay for three nights and two days, but what with ‘problems, I’m afraid, sir’, it became just two nights and one day.

There was a second problem when I was taken my my cousin (as I like to think of her although if truth be told be are cousins several times removed) and two of her sons to pick up the car. I handed over my credit card to pay. ‘Is it an EC card?’ they asked. ‘We only take EC cards. It wasn’t as were my other three debit cards. But my cousin kindly offered to pay and get the money back from me. (‘EC cards’ are almost wholly unknown outside Germany and only available in Germany. And a few hours ago I was looking them up on the net - ‘researching’ as they say when they want ‘looking up’ to sound a tad more important - and it seems you can only get one once you have opened a current or savings account with a German bank and then only after showing you are a straight-up sort of guy by making regular deposits for nine months. Daft or what?) Then it was off to the Emsland.

. . .

The farmhouse my sister and brother-in-law have bought was a bargain. It is in a remote area right in the district of Bunde on the west of the Emsland and less than a quarter of a mile from the Dutch frontier. And when I say remote, I do mean remote. There is a small village a mile or two away - it’s called Ditzumerverlaat, and a German village with a Dutch name shows you quite how remote it is - which has a mini supermarket where you can buy most of what you might need in the way of food - particularly fresh Brötchen for breakfast - but otherwise the only surrounding houses are other farms. I don’t know the history of the farmhouse, but I gather it was renovated by an architect and then bought by a Dutchman, a painter and decorator, who eventually sold it to my sister and brother-in-law.

It is big, and I mean big. There are three separate apartments and the downstairs apartment where my sister will live could easily be split into two separate apartments and none of them would be cramped. Then there’s a huge barn at the far end of the building. And bizarrely it also has a sauna. What was astounding about it is that the asking price for somewhere that large was comparatively low, probably because it is remote. I shan’t give figures (I know them, but these things are private and I don’t suppose my sister would be too chuffed it I did), but my brother-in-law offered around 10 per cent less, but this was turned down. A few days later it was accepted.

It is typical of the area. The rooms are large, but have Kachelöfen in them which can keep a room toasty warm. It is surrounded by garden and lawns (though not in the pristine and to my mind rather soulless British sense) and what is especially nice about the whole set-up is that it will be a paradise for young children - as in grandchildren - to visit. And as my sister had just seen her oldest daughter now married and has two sons and another daughter who are likely to have children, she is rather pleased.

The one full day I had there was spent visiting, separately two aunts (and I say ‘aunt’ but they are again several times removed, though that doesn’t bother them and most certainly doesn’t bother me. Their father was the chap I mentioned above who was a first cousin to my grandmother). They are sisters, although one is now 88 and the other 78. However, the 88-year-old could give many a 55-year-old a run for their money. She’s a real livewire.

I spent a few hours with her, then took off from her village to a town a few miles to the north to have Kaffee und Kuchen (although it was, in fact tea as this is the one area of Germany where they drink tea rather than coffee) with my sister’s mother-in-law. And the second aunt, who I had earlier contacted met me there. It was good - Lord, that sounds lame - it was great to see them both again and I am very fond of both, especially the second aunt. After homemade apple Torte and Sahne, I went back to her house where we sat on her balcony and chatted. And then, coincidentally, a cousin - her nephew - also turned up.

Both aunts are now widowed and lonely, but you wouldn’t know it. I know it, because we spent a long time chatting and both, in the least dramatic way rather let their hair down. The first aunt keeps herself busy, but really there is not a great deal for her to do. The second aunt is also busy but she, too, finds living alone a pain. As, I should imagine, do many widows and widowers. I don’t feel I am especially romantic and rather loathe a rather overblown way many, both here in Britain and in Germany, but most certainly everywhere else as well, and get rather sentimental and fanciful.

Yet driving up to my sister’s farmhouse, for several miles along dead straight roads surrounded by huge wheat fields, now harvested, I had the oddest feeling of coming home. I have only mentioned it to my sister and mention it here because no one else reading this, with two exceptions, actually knows me. But I did, and I wasn’t pretending or indulging in some silly fanciful fantasy. And I don’t really know why.

The feeling was, and this is the oddest bit, that this is where I belonged and where I should end my days. I almost certainly will not. But I should very much like to. It has as much to do with the kind of people who live up there as the countryside (a word which seems wrong, in fact, and Landschaft would be better, although by using it I might well come across as not a little pretentious and I really don’t want or mean to do so).

In a sense the people are almost as much Dutch as German and most certainly not German in the way many imagine Germans to be. (The cousin in Langenfeld I stayed with told me that when, as a young girl, she went to stay with a family in America, they were very surprised that she didn’t arrive wearing a Dirndl. To explain that, for the folk up there to wear a Dirndl would be as odd, not to say outlandish as for an Italian to wear tartan trews as a matter of course.)

I like, and very much relate to, their more relaxed, laid-back manner, their hospitality, the way they socialise, their sense of family. I look forward to making many more visits to my sister there, hopefully sooner or later surrounded by her grandchildren and their cousins, before I pop my clogs. I took several pictures of the farm but don’t have them with me at present, so here is a picture I dug up on the internet which might give you a flavour of the area. It’s not actually the Emsland (named after the river Ems of telegram notoriety) but of Ostfriesland, but it will do.

Oh, and it is all about three or four metres below sea level: the land was reclaimed several hundred years ago and is surrounded by dykes.

. . .

One very odd story I came across several years ago was that my father was known among my mother’s many relatives in Papenburg and Lathen as Der Spion (the spy). I do happen to know that he did occasionally help out with MI6, although what his relationship was with the good folk in real-life 007 country I have no idea and now no way of finding out. I’ve always thought he was a BBC man first and foremost but that he - well, as I say helped out. There have been suggestions that it was pretty much the other way round, but who knows? I most certainly don’t.

He started his World War II service, after spending two years at Cambridge, in the infantry, but very soon his rather special gift for languages, especially French and German, saw him transferred to Intelligence. (One of the aunts mentioned above assured me that he spoke German completely without an accent. I can’t vouch for that, but merely pass on what she said.)

Once the war ended part of his duties were to seek out Germans untainted by Nazism to build the framework for a potential resistance movement who could be relied upon by the Allies if and when the anticipated Soviet Russian push westwards began. This, most probably through my mother, who he married in 1947, brought him into contact with August Löning, my mother’s mother’s cousin.

August Löning was quite special: he would have nothing to do with the Nazis when having nothing to do with the Nazis was not at all easy and even insisted that his daughters, two of whom were the aunts I mention above, were not allowed to join the Bund Deutsche Mädel (BdM), the girl’s equivalent of the Hitlerjugend (HJ). One aunt, the 88-year-old, born in 1925 was rather upset by this as the BdM was sold as nothing more than an innocent Sportsverein. All her friends were members and she a young nine-year-old, felt rather left out and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t join. But August wouldn’t, he simply wouldn’t, let her.

I have no idea what he did for my father and the British military authorities, but my aunt tells me that every so often - she would by now havebeen around 22 - a mysterious ‘Mr Warner’ (here, left, is the only picture I have been able to find of the man) would turn up for meetings with her father and everyone was told to make themselves scarce while they discussed whatever they discussed. And that, dear reader, is it. I really can’t tell you any more, except to repeat that as no one can keep secrets for long my father was jocularly known as Der Spion. The most curious part is that at my niece’s wedding reception was one very nice (and attractive) woman, a student friend of hers from Peru who spoke impeccable German. And when she was introduced and told who I was, said: Also du bist der Sohn von dem Spion (you’re the son of The Spy). This, from a total stranger, took me aback, to put it mildly.