Ain’t nothing going to do it except doing it. So why am I still pfaffing around?

OK, I know exactly what I should be doing but I’m not doing it. It’s not rocket science. There is not great shakes about it: I should be getting up - not early, doesn’t have to be at the crack of dawn - and sitting down in my ‘shed’, which is what this place has been called, and doing nothing until I am so bloody bored I start writing.

It doesn’t matter what I fucking write, but as long as I write, that is fine. Jesus there’s enough shite out there as it is and a little more, courtesy of me, isn’t going to bring the world to its end. But I don’t. I have no idea was stops me. Laziness isn’t the word, because it isn’t laziness. I mean if it were laziness I wouldn’t even be writing these bloody words which, so far, these included, make up 745.

It’s not even ‘dread of failure’ because I don’t give a flying fuck whether or not I ‘fail’. But for some reason when I wake up I am in a kind of torpor which lasts until 10.30 in the morning.

BUT - I am going do it! So far in my life I have three times been disciplined enough to sit down and write something over a prolonged period. The real irony is that ONCE you sit down, you wonder what all the agony is about. I did it with one ‘novel’, which was not a bad idea and could be re-written though what I did produce (which is the Lord knows where) I don’t imagine was very good. That was in Birmingham while I was still working for the CEGB staff newspaper.

The routine was simple: get a litre of Strongbow (or whatever) from around the corner, a packet of ‘skins’, ten ciggies, then get back home and write for four hours until I was so knackered I slumped off to bed. That routine, at least, produced a novel, however shite that novel was (and I think I still have it, but if I don’t, oh well, not the world’s greatest loss).

Later, while living and working in London but staying down here in St Breward at Terry’s, I used to get up early, about 6am and type away for several hours, this time sustained by nothing more dangerous than tea and fags. And I did get something done.

And even though I say so myself, it was possibly a cut above what I had previously produced at Norlan Drive (which, as of writing, I still have somewhere).

Most recently there was ‘Love: A Fiction’, previously called ‘Letters Never Sent’ which I wrote in two stints in London in the early 1990s. Pertinently the same ‘secret’ was applied: just get if fucking done! In - as I say - two stints, I sat down regularly twice a week at 7pm to write after telling myself that I had no other choice but to fucking do it. And do you know, sweethearts, it worked a treat. And THAT is the one piece of work so far I would not in the slightest be ashamed of showing anyone.

It might not be ‘what people want’ at present but who gives a fuck. I’m almost 70. If not I were still to care about ‘being accepted’ and producing ‘what people want’, I am pretty much dead. Getting older, not being able to get it up - not that I have had any know that in practice, though after two heart attacks and the occasional wank I’ve to a pretty good idea - does have it’s compensations, not to say rewards. Not giving a fuck about what ‘I’m supposed to be doing’ is one of them.

To be blunt, I’m not going to starve, so fuck money from now on and fuck ‘playing the game’ (which I rather think I never did anyway, though I’m sure when I was younger I wasn’t quite as cocky or sanguine about not doing so.

Pip, pip

PS I have been indulging in a rather lovely concoction: brandy and alcoholic lovage, 50/50. I can recommend it. Helps to let you shout your mouth off (‘shoot off your mouth’? Subs please check).

PPS This is going both in my official blog and my unofficial blog (which you can find here).

Sorry about this, but — completely unplanned — I began jotting down a few comments and being the sort who really can’t shut up . . .

Oh, what have I let myself in for? Just read the introduction to a book of five essays on Hemingway’s ‘first’ novel (it was his second, in fact, but like much about the man, nothing is straightforward) called New Essays On The Sun Also Rises in a series called The American Novel, and despite the hi-falutin’ talk of ‘New Critics’, ‘new criticism’ and modern perspectives and modernism, I still think the guy is a nine-bob note who had the luck of old nick.

But — a huge ‘but’ — is it really likely that yours truly, a snotty-nosed cynic cast aside in deepest North Cornwall is right and an assortment of academics and critical literary types are wrong? Really? Come on, let’s get real. And yet, and yet...

I’ve just finished the introduction and will continue with the rest of the essays tomorrow, but let me cite just one passage which makes me wonder whether, however unlikely it might be, the world really is capable of disappearing up it own arse. Remember: my background is in newspapers, mainly as a sub, and I know — I know! — the kind of bullshit which can be produced to make white seem black and black seem like a stroll in the park. So let me cite this, from the end of Ms Linda Wagner-Martin’s introduction:

‘As full of disjuncture as a picture puzzle, The Sun Also Rises still presents a story whole, its fragments necessarily scattered throughout the narrative, and readers accept the fragmentation as one of the marks of Hemingway’s truth. They [the readers] seize on the purity of Pedro Romero, the wit of the bemused Mike Campbell, the flip bravado of Brett Ashley s the symbols of the characters who survive the onslaught of real life.’

Sounds real doesn’t it? But is it? This is the same novel about which Hemingway’s sometime friend and fellow novelist John Dos Passos wrote (in a review of the novel when it came out):

‘Instead of being the epic of the sun also rising on a lost generation, [the novel] is a cock-and-bull story about a whole lot of tourists getting drunk.’

He also noted in that review that ‘it had been a mistake to quote the Bible at the beginning of the book: doing so only raised readers’ expectation which were not met by the story that followed’. He is referring to the quote from Ecclesiastes which is used as a second epigraph to Gertrude Stein’s ‘lost generation’ quote.

Then there’s the verdict of Donald Ogden Stewart, who was of the party in the visit to Pamplona in 1925 who along with Hemingway’s boyhood friend Bill Smith, Hemingway based the fictioal character of Bill Gorton. Stewart was also no opinionated snotty-nosed cynic: he had published several books by the time he got to know Hemingway in Paris, had hinterland and became an Oscar-winning screenwriter (he wrote the script for The Philadelphia Story). After reading the novel, Stewart commented that ‘It was so absolutely accurate that it seemed little more than a skilfully done travelogue’ and added that ‘it didn’t make much of an impression on me, certainly not as an artistic work of genius.’

So might be going in?

. . .

Putting forward my explanation — OK, putting forward a possible explanation — lays me wide open. I am no academic, not literary critic, no published author or poet, in fact, I have no obvious qualification at all for adding my two ha’porth worth. But I’m going to do so anyway (which is partly what writing this whole bloody thing — the ‘thing’ being how The Sun is not a masterpiece and Hemingway is not ‘a writer of genius’ — is all about). I think what happened is quite simple: Hemingway’s initial success and his subsequent reputation was the result of the confluence of a variety of often quite disparate factors: there was Hemingway himself, a complex man who believed himself to be something of a literary genius, who was ruthlessly ambitious bordering on being a sociopath, and who believed his own bullshit.

There were his various champions, who promoted him at difference times and for very different reasons and who each in some way or other furthered his career: Sherwood Anderson, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, most notably Scott Fitzgerald (who almost hero-worshipped Hemingway) and eventually his editor at his publishers Scribner’s Sons, Maxwell Perkins. Pertinently, Perkins had entered publishing through Scribner’s advertising department and seems to have had a healthy commercial instinct. That is a vital part of the Hemingway success story.

Then there was the time at which Hemingway (born in 1899) appeared on the literary scene: the post-World War I era (not, of course, then known as World War I — I thought I might alert one or two younger readers to that fact) when pretty much everything was up in the air and ‘modernism’ was all the rage. The ‘Great War’ (which, kiddiwinks, is what it was called at the time) was a watershed, possibly the mother of all watersheds to adopt a current cliche, and what folk wanted was ‘something different’. And they wanted it desperately.

The established authors — Henry James, John Galsworthy, DH Lawrence, Edith Wharton (who didn’t in fact pop her clogs until 1937) were very much ‘out’ and what the young folk wanted — as always — something ‘new’ and ‘different’. And Hemingway was certainly that. Different? Try reading some of his ‘lean, muscular prose’. It’s different all right, though — in my very humble view — not at all very good.

Perkins, he at Scribner’s with the commercial head who had already championed Fitzgerald by publishing Scott’s first novel This Side Of Paradise and his subsequent work (which, believe it or not were at the time regarded as ‘shocking’ — this was, remember, in only the second decade after the end of the Victorian Age and whatever it is called in the US) was more than ready to take a punt on Hemingway, and boy did it take off.

The Sun Also Rises sold steadily more and more copies, not least because Hemingway was marketed by Scribner’s as a new kind of author, a writer who was not some airy-fairy pale artistic pansy (the mention of which allows me

to post a picture of Reginald Bunthorne) but who was a wholesome he-man who could not only write (so the story went) but who also boxed, enjoyed bullfighting and eventually shot big game and all the other things which get you wondering what the hell he thought he was trying to prove. In marketing terms it was genius: his style and the writer were new, and new sells, sells, sells, and then sells, sells, sells some more (until something newer comes along, of course).

Here’s another taste of the kind of bull The Sun Also Rises elicited — this is from a review of the book in the New York Times in 1926:

No amount of analysis can convey the quality of The Sun Also Rises. It is a truly gripping story, told in a lean, hard, athletic narrative prose that puts more literary English to shame.

Surely after reading that, which on the face of it seems, well, fair enough, it is legitimate to ask: what exactly does ‘more literary English’ have to feel ashamed about? Well, nothing, really. That quote is just a snippet of the acres of newspaper bullshit churned out daily which, in Hemingway’s case, did him a great favour.

Three years later Hemingway published his second (third) novel, A Farewell To Arms and that, too, sold like hotcakes. But although he carried on selling stories to some magazines, to be blunt that was the sum of his novelistic output. What about To Have And Have Not? you ask, and For Whom The Bell Tolls? Well, yes and no. To Have And Have Not (1937) was more a novella, a short story on steroids and didn’t sell particularly well at all. For Whom The Bell Tolls (1940) was done a favour by Hollywood who turned it into a film starring Gary Cooper and I would bet my bottom dollar that those who still remember the work, remember the film not the novel.

Then, again to be blunt, Hemingway really dried up. In fact he had pretty much dried up at the beginning of the 1930s after A Farewell To Arms. Much of his work published in that decade was collections of previously published

short stories, but he kept his name aflame by using his reputation and ‘name’ and negotiating a deal with a US magazine group to ‘cover the Spanish Civil War. As Amanda Vaill makes clear in her book Hotel Florida, Hemingway was getting a little desperate to keep his name in the lights. Here is a taste of his ‘war reporting’:

‘It was a lovely false spring day when we started for the front this morning. Last night, coming into Barcelona, it had been grey, foggy, dirty and sad, but today it was bright and warm, and pink almond blossoms coloured the grey hills and brightened the dusty green rows of olive trees.’

Hmm. Doesn’t quite do it for me.

Ten years later, in 1950, he published another novel, Across The River And Into The Trees which — I haven’t myself read it and really don’t want to — was pretty much panned and is today, I imagine, only read by keen Phd students and nerds. Then, two year later, came The Old Man And The Sea, another ‘short novel’ — long short story is more accurate, but that, too, I haven’t read and really — well, you’re ahead of me.

And that, dear friends, was it. Oh, there’s the matter of his ‘Nobel Prize for Literature’, which is pretty inexplicable until you remember that one Bob Dylan was also awarded a ‘Nobel Prize of Literature’ which might indicate that the whole Nobel Prize thing is something of a racket.

NB I fully believe Dylan is a true one-off and deserves a Nobel Prize or equivalent, but what makes his award so farcical is that it should be ‘for Literature’. I suspect Dylan was equally bemused which, for me, explains his initial silence on the matter and his decision not to fuck off to Stockholm to receive it in person. I think — I believe he is an honest man — he was just downright embarrassed but was buggered that he would play the game. Me, if they offer me one, I’m refusing.

. . .

But what about all the acres of academic and literary criticism? Well, first of all I should point out that Hemingway is now old hat. The collection of essays I am reading is quite recent in terms of Hemigway research, but it is more than 32 years old. There are now plenty of other ‘new’ things to be getting on with. I mean even bad boy Bret Easton Ellis is old hat in 2019. And, no, I have read his work either and don’t want to. My policy is that there is plenty of good stuff which has stood the test of time which is there for me to read, more than enough of it, in fact, to last me until well after I am dead (though I did try Oliver Twist a while back and, er, wasn’t that fussed, though it was an early work and maybe later stuff is not quite as irritating).

As for the reputation, my, admittedly left-field explanation, is that it’s all rather like the Emperor’s New Clothes. Rather as there are precious few research grants available for anyone suggesting a project to show climate change is a load of old cack, for many years after World War II there was no kudos to be had be outlining why one Ernest Miller Hemingway, star of the modernist movement, stylistic innovator, mainstay for American literature, ‘one of the greats’ (John O’Hara who could write even called him the best writer since Shakespeare) was actually a man of straw and a nine-bob note.

Let me ask of you a favour: remind yourself of the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes and while it is fresh in your mind, read this paragraph again from the introduction to the book of essays. And when you have finished allow step to one side, as it were, and not take this literary guff at face value. Perhaps you might then see what I am getting at:

‘As full of disjuncture as a picture puzzle, The Sun Also Rises still presents a story whole, its fragments necessarily scattered throughout the narrative, and readers accept the fragmentation as one of the marks of Hemingway’s truth. They [the readers] seize on the purity of Pedro Romero, the wit of the bemused Mike Campbell, the flip bravado of Brett Ashley s the symbols of the characters who survive the onslaught of real life.’

Another damned thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble, eh, Mr Wolfe?

Well, as I’m serious about getting this Hemingway bollocks completed, and as I want to prove to myself that the reading this, that and t’other isn’t just displacement activity (about which I’ve already written a blog entry, so I can’t procrastinate any more — actually that’s unfair), I got down to adding a few more words. Mainly they were based on a few more thoughts I had after reading a book of a collection of essays by a guy called Malcolm Cowley, who knew Hemingway in Paris.

He wasn’t part of Hemingway’s crowd really, mainly because he and his wife (he tells us in his in the first piece in the book about Hemingway) live in ‘a painters’ colony’ in Giverny about 50 miles from Paris and only visited ‘the crowd’ in Montparnasse once a week. He and his wife lived off a $5,000 fellowship (which was renewed for a second year) and which, because of the fabulously cheap franc the dollar could buy, was more than enough for them to get by on.

The book of essays is called A Second Flowering and was published in 1973. I mention that in particular because by then Hemingway had only been dead for 12 years and even though he hadn’t published anything of any consequence since The Old Man And The Sea (which I haven’t read and neither intend to read or even want to and which I gather is more of a novella than a novel and when it was published Hemingway hadn’t published anything of any consequence since For Whom The Bell Tolls 11 years earlier in 1940) his reputation, courtesy of his 1954 Nobel Prize no doubt was still undented.

From my limited reading — limited because there could be an awful lot more to read if I had the stomach for it — I have gathered that since Cowley wrote his book that reputation has slowly been declining, although any number of spotty-faced adolescents — of all ages — still cream themselves over his ‘style’.

Cowley can write, however, so it didn’t surprise me that although he rated Hemingway and I get the impression seems to have quite like the man, Hemingway was something of a shit to him (or at least behind his back). In my noodling around the net I came across something or other in which Hemingway refers to Cowley along the lines of ‘that moon-face idiot’.

The other authors Cowley covers in his book are Scott Fitzgerald, Faulkner, a poet I had not before heard of called Hart Crane, e e cummings (apparently the lower-case spelling is compulsory and in some of the more backward and remoter US states where they do quite a bit of reading for want of anything much else to do you can still be jailed for up to a year for ignoring that convention, so I’m playing if safe in case this blog is happened upon by some busybody in Alaska, Wyoming or Montana), Thornton Wilder and — another guy I hadn’t heard of, Thomas Wolfe.

Actually, whenever I heard about ’the American novelist Wolfe’, I always thought of the Bonfires Of The Vanities chappie (I’ll look up his name in a minute and add it if I can be bothered). In fact they are two different guys. (The one I mistake him for is Tom Wolfe, so the confusion is understandable).

Cowley’s book is very good reading and after reading the two piece he has on Hemingway (and the introduction, of course) I have now started the chapter on Thomas Wolfe. And what an odd guy he was.

Like it seems rather a lot of Yankee writers Wolfe went in for writing long, long tomes. I have not read anything by him so I can’t comment on his work — sound off might be closer tot the truth — but I can’t say I am initially enthused after reading that the first book he submitted to Scribner’s, where his editor was Maxwell Perkins who did the same job for Fitzgerald and Hemingway was an astonishing 330,000 words long. Perkins edited it back to manageable form, presumably after reading the bloody lot, and there must have been something in the original manuscript which persuaded Perkins that it was worth the effort.

Wolfe had started his ‘literary life’ as a playwright, but apparently despite high praise from his tutor at Harvard, no one on Broadway wanted to buy them off him to stage one because they were just too bloody long. Apparently all Wolfe’s work was about Wolfe (pictured).

The polite way of saying that is that Wolfe was a trailblazer in ‘autobiographical fiction’. And it was when I read in Cowley’s book about how it put himself centre stage in bloody all his fiction that I decided to write this entry (‘compelled to put my thoughts to paper’).

Cowley quotes from a letter Wolfe wrote to his mother which made me shudder a little. Here is the extract: ‘I intend to wreak out my soul on paper and express it all. This is what my life means to me: I am at the mercy of this thing and I will do it or die.’

Cowley goes on: ‘The next sentence reveals the nature of the “all” that he was going to express at the risk of his life.’

‘I never forget, I have never forgotten. I have tried to make myself conscious of the whole of my life since first the baby in the basket became conscious of the warm sunlight on the porch, and saw his sister go up the hill to the girl’s school on the corner (the first thing I remember).’

This is all recorded in his first novel which, edited down by — surely a very patient and benign — Maxwell Perkins became Look Homeward, Angel.

I mention all this not to make a few snide remarks about Yank writers who can’t shut up, but to wonder what it was that Perkins saw in those 330,000 first on 1,100 pages of handwritten text which landed on his desk. For he must have seen something which persuaded him doing a mammoth job of editing — apparently the task took for ever — was worth a candle. But he did.

Perkins and Wolfe are said to have got on well and (I’ve read that Wolfe saw in Perkins a father figure, although he did have his own father) and Perkins, the father of five daughters, saw in Wolfe the son he never had. Be that as it may, apparently once the book was published and sold well, Wolfe became a bit paranoid and felt he wasn’t getting the kudos he deserved as the writer because Perkins was getting a great deal of kudos as the editor who had knocked it all into shape. So Wolfe then jumped ship and went to another publisher.

. . .

Don’t imagine that the irony isn’t lost on me that I am being a tad critical about some writer bod who wrote solely about himself in — er my blog. But whatever my failings, I do like to think that egomania or even obsessive introspection is not one of them. But, and her I must confess to a possible failing, for all my huffing and puffing about how Hemingway is not, in my view, anything close to ‘a writer of genius’, I can’t shake of the fear that possibly, perhaps possibly my judgment is at fault. That perhaps Hemingway is rather good and I’m just to thick to appreciate it. Believe me that horrible thought crosses my mind more than twice a day.

So for example, I am both reading The Sun Also Rises for the third time just in case there is something in it which eludes me and might dawn on me in this third reading. And, almost from a sense of duty because I want to do this thing properly, I have also bought and have started reading A Moveable Feast. Every now and then you come across a rather good turn of phrase in Hemingway (in both books) but invariably he fucks it up within seconds by something so hamfisted that you wonder ‘where did this idiot get his reputation from’.

That question I hope to answer in the longer piece I am writing but briefly what I shall say is: his style was different, in fact very different, at exactly the right time: when the ‘literary world’ wanted something different. In a sense Hemingway scored not because he was Hemingway, but because he wasn’t Henry James or Edith Wharton or and not even Scott Fitzgerald who had a far more conventional style.

I gather, in fact, that Hemingway’s ‘new style’ wasn’t all that different to that of Ring Lardner and a one-time mentor Sherwood Anderson. But where Hemingway scored was with his almost sociopathic ambition. The man was ruthless about becoming famous and — I suspect — lived in a fantasy of his own even before he was published and became a bestseller as a ‘world-famous author’. He wouldn’t be the only one, although before the pop psychologists among you lay me down on the couch, I gave up that fantasy years and years ago. But as they say, it takes one to know one.

As for Wolfe, well the Lord knows what made him tick and why his huge tomes actually sold enough for his publisher not to boot him out of the door. I know if I were in any way ‘serious’, I would get one of his novels and read it. However, I shall be 7o in just over four months time and with a bit of luck I’ll have another 20 years on this earth, so to be frank I don’t really think I can spare the time.

Pip, pip.

Joe Bitter writes: the Golden Goose has flown

Well, the golden goose has fucked off. The puzzles work is no more. For the past ten years I have been earning extra from the Daily Mail by ‘placing their puzzles’, and it has been very handy money helping to ensure the bills were paid, especially when I started and the ‘casual rates’ at the Mail were still at Victorian levels.

Although I worked at the Mail for 28 years, I was never ‘on staff’ but ‘a casual’, one ‘employed by the day’. The ‘casual rate’ went up at some point by for many years was whittled away by inflation and by the time I began dong the puzzles - and thus earning the extra money - it was getting quite hard making ends meet, what with the extra expense of shelling out quite a bit to travel to and stay in London for four days a week.

Most recently, given the pitiful salary the Mail has taken to paying its junior employees, I was doing rather well compared to them, though not as well as several of those who were ‘on staff’ and in the case of one had been since the dawn of time. For many years staff received a percentage raise each year and that had a cumulative effect, year in, year out, so that salaries were, for many, quiet handsome. In fact for many years the ‘national papers’ were extremely generous employees, especially compared with their penny-pinching cousins in the ‘provincial press’.

(Around the time my son was born in 1999 and under pressure from my wife to ‘get a local job’, I worked as a sub-editor at the Plymouth Evening Herald and although I was paid peanuts, I was still the highest paid sub except for the chief sub and his deputy. There were two girls there who had been taken on from art school, and so were about 22/23 who were paid an abysmal £6,000 a year, but with the promise that the amount ‘would be reviewed after six months’. The promise was kept, the amount they were paid was reviewed and it was decided ‘not to pay them any more because they had never been reporters’.

It’s that kind of shit behaviour which gives newspapers a bad name. I’ve even heard the argument put forward that wages are low in the provinces ‘because working as journalist is a vocation’. The thing is when you are young, keen and impressionable and, for some odd reason, working as a reporter/for a newspaper/call it what you will is seen as the acme of a glamorous job, you can easily be persuaded to accept crap wages. A part of that hoary old ploy is the phrase ‘breaking into journalism’ which implies it is a difficult thing to do but you, my son/girl, had the wherewithal to achieve it. Congratulations, you are now part of an elite band of idiots who will now work for peanuts because what you do is ‘a vocation’. Every heard of anyone ‘breaking into accountancy’ or ‘breaking into civil engineering’? No, thought not. But don’t listen to me, I’m mad old Pat, the indiscreet cunt, a bit of a loose cannon. But back to the puzzles.

I shan’t give the amounts, but a few months ago and out of curiosity I went online to the thisismoney inflation calculator to find out what the weekly fee for doing the puzzles I had agreed with the managing editor in spring 2009 was worth now. And I was astonished - under the circumstances a very apt word - to discover its value had fallen by 25%. So I emailed the managing editor and told him so and informed him I would be charging a new few, the sum we had agreed with inflation taken into account. A day or two later he responded saying he ‘would look into it’, but then I heard nothing more. I waited for two weeks, delaying submitting my latest invoice (charging the new amount) but when I hadn’t heard anything, I submitted it and it was paid. I assumed the new fee had been accepted.

The work is not at all hard, but a bit fiddly - files have to be processed so that they are optimal for printing etc - and since I started I have done a little often (and very soon discovered the benefits of being organised) and this helped me stay on top of it. So last week as usual I logged on remotely (i.e. over the internet) to my PC at work every day to get a little bit more done. Everything was fine until the Wednesday morning when I was informed ‘your primary account has been disabled’.

I rang the IT Helpdesk but they were oddly unhelpful. I must have rung for or five times (and was simply left hanging on once or twice) when suddenly I got a call from the managing editor who had rung to give me ‘a double apology’. The first was that someone ‘had jumped the gun’ and ordered my account to be disabled prematurely so that I had not received his email asking me to call him. The second apology was for the fact that ‘doing the puzzles’ was being taken back in-house.

I assume that he expects this to be cheaper but I can’t see the chief sub and her desk being particularly happy about the new arrangement, especially when they find out all the backroom work that has to be done. Because I worked ahead, several weeks worth of puzzle pages were partly completed by by the middle of July the full extent of the task will become apparent and by the end of July when a new batch of puzzles arrive to be processed it will become even more apparent.

I must confess that it did occur to me that all this might happen once I charged a new fee to reflect how inflation had devalued the sum I was being paid weekly and wondered whether I should do so or just take it on the chin and settle for, in real terms, getting less money. Well, I decided not to. I’m not a serf and have always been bad at tugging my forelock and expressing gratitude for the scraps I am allowed from the rich man’s table and despite the inconvenience - to put it mildly - of my annual income being pretty much slashed by a third, I decided that I had no choice.

Perhaps I should have negotiated a little but even that would have been pretty much like tugging a forelock because Alex, the managing editor, would most certainly have done his best to minimise the rise to take account of inflation. So I would still have been settling for a pay cut. And who in his right mind does that?

The managing editor has held out the possibility that the new arrangement, in his words, might ‘crash and burn’ and that he might at some point be back in touch with me to get me to do it again, and as I say I don’t think the chief features sub will have been too happy being landed with the work, but to be frank I’m not holding my breath. And possibly, being such cheapskates, they might find some other sucker to do the work for less (the name Roger Wilkinson occurs to me, Pete).

Still, it was good while it lasted and life down here on the farm - so to speak - is not expensive: as long as we have enough twigs for the kitchen fire, enough candles to see us through the winter (once it arrives), frost doesn’t hit the

vegetable patch and Denzil doesn’t blow himself up making the potato spirit (he’s come close to that several times) life is tolerable even without the extra gelt I got from ‘doing the puzzles’.

To be the whole ‘penny-wise, pound-foolish’ mentality of the nationals into context, the Mail will think nothing of paying some rancid old cunt (like Richard Littlejohn) a million a year to, as the phrase does, fart on paper. Michael Gove’s wifey Sarah Vine is another Mail columnist who will be rolling in it and although the rates they pay ‘name contributors’ has come down a little in these past few years, it will still be around a grand for 1,000 words, though that figure is an estimate. Yet agreeing to my fee rise would only have cost the Mail another £2,600 a year.

Bitter? Me?

. . .

I have now also started a daily diary which will be easier to write because I shan’t fanny around with discretion. But that one is not public, and anyway as general reading is concerned and as it is just be a record of what I have done during the day it will be dull, dull, dull for the general reader.

Oh, and just for the crack. . .

Four short videos to keep the pot boiling . . .

One of the little things I enjoy doing is taking a track I like, then hunting down images to add to the music to make a short video.

Here are two I have done recently and two others knocked up a few years ago. The first, Motel Blues by Loudon Wainwright III (probably now known to most of you as ‘Rufus Wainwright’s dad’) put together on May 25 (coincidentally my son’s 20th birthday); the second, Magic Mirror by Leon Russell was completed today.

Then there’s my tribute to the gallant guys and gals beavering away keeping Putin safe from democrats and finally a piece of nonsense done to pass the time.

All four benefit from going full-screen — click the little ‘square’ thing on the bottom right.

Here they are:

Motel Blues by Loudon Wainwright III

Magic Mirror by Leon Russell

Back And Forth by Cameo

And a piece of nonsense knocked together using Pinnacle Pro on my iPhone on my

trip back home from the Bordeaux region to Cornwall. Shot in France and on the

plane. Steglitz is in the south-west of Berlin (but then you knew that). The piece of music

is Emotional Shirt by Bill Bruford