Old farts and why they are best avoided (at any age)

NB I’ve noticed when later reading through a blog entry I have posted that there are literals and that sometimes a thread of thought goes awry. When I read through it later, I do my best to correct it. It has occurred to me that I could always not immediately post an entry but give it a few days and then revise it. But I have decided against it, for many reasons. So if you read this bear that in mind.

Given that the readership of this blog is growing, although very, very slowly, and given that readers now happen upon these ramblings from all over the world, I fell to wondering whether there are several phrases I use, common here in Britain and Australia and possibly the US, strike some readers as baffling. By the way, I know a little about how many read this and where they live because of the stats supplied by Google. And - forgive me, please, but we are all human - I look at them pretty regularly, usually to see who has been reading the most recent entry.

That’s why I know that this blog’s readership is not necessarily restricted to family, friends and neighbours keeping a close eye on whether or not I am being indiscreet (‘What the fuck’s he been saying now? For Christ’s sakes! You’d think he could keep his trap shut just once in a while!’)

So apart from folk in the United Kingdom, the US and the usual suspects in Europe - Germany and France - who tune in (assumedly because they have little else better to do), there have also been readers - or possibly just one very enthusiastic reader - who have visited from Hungary 43 times and the Ukraine 30 times (though I should strictly call the country simply Ukraine as I understand the description ‘the Ukraine’ began life as an overly dismissive name given it by Russians).

That, to be honest, is odd enough, although given that over these past few years I have mentioned affairs in those two countries, perhaps they googled some term or other and washed up here. But even odder is that in the past week, i.e. in the past seven days, readers, or again one very enthusiastic reader, in South Korea and Turkey has come along. And not just once or twice but apparently, respectively 129 and 128 times. There were also visitors from Australia and Canada

That visitors arrive from Turkey I can somehow understand in that once or twice I have commented on the democratic principles, or, better, the increasing lack of them, of Recep Tayyip Ergdogan. But why to goodness would this blog or any of its entries be of any interest to folk in South Korea? The stats also list what particular entries have proved most popular, and they tell me that visitors have been reading entries about the former French president Francois Hollande and his complicated love life, and in the past an entry about the film and novel The Leopard and the stories and life of Somerset Maugham.

About ten months ago and for several weeks, there was extraordinary interest in this blog from Russia. Well, I am vain - aren’t we all if we are honest - but it did occur to me that it wasn’t so much Anglophiles in the depths of Siberia who were happening along but rather some bot or other had somehow latched onto my URL. I know that because the stats also give ‘traffic sources’ and ‘referring sites’, and when I clicked on them, they were, invariably, porn sites and sites promising to introduce the visitor to wholesome lasses keen to make my - or yours or anyone’s - acquaintance with a view to marriage (and, I assume, a shot at getting a Western European passport).

The pertinent thing is that Google then changed its something or other which meant bots could no longer latch on, and the visits from Russia stopped sharpish. That might indicate that the visits from South Korea, Hungary and Ukraine are bona fide arrivals. Odd. But none of that has much to do with ‘old farts’ and why it is best to avoid them, except that I was wondering what a visitor from South Korea, Hungary or Ukraine would make of the many Anglo-Saxons phrases I use.

. . .

Even if a visitor is not quite as au fait (as we Brits say, we Brits who regularly refer to a cul de sac, coup de foudre, coup d’etat and all the other French and pseudo-French phrases we have made our own) with English as she is spoken rather than as she is taught in language schools, I’m reasonably sure they can guess what I mean by an ‘old fart’. And I mention it because, strictly, I could be easily numbered in their ranks, given that I am no spring chicken and am even less likely to see 25 again than 35, 45 and, sadly even 65. But there is more to being an ‘old fart’ than age, thank goodness, which means with luck and effort those who might qualify can still do their best to delay the onset of ‘old fartdom’. I have met ‘old farts’ are barely over 40 and who would be horrified to be regarded as one. But sadly pretty much everything about them shouts out the fact.

They are the kind of people who are increasingly liable to start a sentence with ‘what really irritates me these days’, ‘what I really hate these days’ and, in extremis, ‘I despair, I really do!’ They are the kind of people who will declare when an esteemed actor, comedian, football player, politician or all-round wit or whoever dies ‘well, we’ll never see his/her like again!’ But the thing is we will most certainly see their like again, and what they say is complete

cobblers (translation ‘rubbish/bullshit’). Because every esteemed actor, comedian, football player, politician and all-round wit or whoever was once young and most certainly went through a phase of not at all being esteemed. And there will be among us today a great many such who, though not yet esteemed, will grow in stature and when they die be declared ‘a one-off’.

But there is far more to old farts than that. Old farts are forever decrying the present and extolling the past. Music, writers, films, sportsmen and woman, cars, food and, I should imagine, even cat food ‘just isn’t what it used to be’. The world for them is a far nastier place far more dangerous place today, and the number of people who can be trusted is diminishing by the hour. To be frank, and even though I say so, to my credit I have long been aware of old farts and the crap they almost always talk. But of late it has become even more disconcerting. When I was young, folk would declare about contemporary music ‘why can’t they write a decent tune any more!’

Well, I took no notice. But what really disconcerted me, and still does, is that in the Eighties those who said that would hark back to Sixties’s music. In the Nineties, they would hark back to Seventies and Eighties music, thoroughly convinced that the music ‘the younger generation’ was listening to - in the Nineties - was just so much crap. But now, dear folk, now - in 2017 - our new crop of old farts are moaning that ‘music these days is just awful. Why can’t they produce songs as they did in the Nineties!’ Give me a break, or rather, give me a fucking break! I have no doubt whatsoever that in 2027 and 2037 and 2047 music, films, fiction and the rest will be produced which will be just as interesting and just as satisfying as what has been produced and appreciated by then contemporary generations for the past 400 years.

But there is a point to all my ranting.

. . .

The other day I was chatting to my son, who turned 18 on May 25 and I told him that I believe his and his sister’s lives - she turns 21 on August 7 - will in some ways be a lot less easy than mine has been. And that is when it occurred to me that I was perhaps in danger of becoming an old fart. But bear with me.

Years ago, many yeas ago I remember talk of ‘the Baghdad Pact’ and I had - and till have - no idea what it was about or what it entailed. A little later I became aware of ‘Colonel Grivas’ and EOKA and a good deal of bloodshed in Cyprus. I didn’t regularly listen to the news - Christ, I wasn’t even ten - but I would overhear things on the radio and later TV. Then there was the financial crisis Britain found itself in when the pound was devalued, the Vietnam War and the social angst US conservatives went through when their sons and daughters (now in their late sixties and, ironically, themselves old farts), the emergence of the Islamic Republic of Iran and all the rest. And that is just

in the Western world. We didn’t have the internet then, we didn’t have live TV reports from the other side of the world, and so we - here in the Western world - had little idea of the fears and political upheavals in South America and the Far East. Yes, there were newspaper and broadcast reports, but none of it was immediate as it is now. There was then as now plenty to worry about, for everyone.

But the other day I found myself telling my son that I believed his and his sister’s lives would be rather less settled than mine had been.

For us here in Britain things really are looking rather bleak economically, and it won’t be in the short term. And I stress I am not making a political point about the rights or wrongs of Brexit and Britain’s likely departure from the European Union. The point I am making is that a Europe-wide arrangement which for better or worse and whether or not you agreed with it did bring economic stability and prosperity to many here in Europe will end.

Things are really not looking very good at all, not just for Britain but arguably also for the rest of the EU. As far as I can see it is highly unlikely any deal which will benefit Britain will be done by March 2019 and our economy will suffer. But the EU also faces its problems, not least the very odd reversal of democracy in Poland where the ruling Law and Justice party is most definitely no longer towing the liberal line which has been so prevalent so far. But there’s more to it than that, far more.

There is the problem of several hundreds of thousands of migrants from North Africa arriving in Europe, initially in Italy, but who want to get further north to taste the good life they have heard about and, I must say, who on earth in his or her right mind can blame. You and I would most certainly be doing the same thing if we found ourselves in their predicament, and bugger the rights and wrongs of ‘illegal immigration’. But that migration is not going to stop. It will slow down come the autumn and winter, but next year and the year after and the year after that it will carry on as before.

In Turkey it seems pretty obvious to me that Erdogan is shaping up to becoming an old-fashioned dictator. The US has as a president a man who, whatever his other talents (whatever they might be) is quite obviously utterly unsuited to leading his country and, to use that horrible cliche, acting as ‘the leader of the free world’. He seems to have no political talents and absolutely no ideas about what to do and, most damningly, seems uninterested in his position except in what a dash he can play around the world. And Russia and China know that.

China itself is in many ways far, far beyond the comprehension of most of us here in the West, and most certainly far, far beyond my comprehension. But crucially as under Trump the US could possibly lose its influence, China might choose try to take over its role. And unlike the US, which for all its myriad flaws (a tendency to elect the richest man in the country as president being not the least of them) is still observes the rule of law and will do so for many years to come) China has no such scruples. I think that in the 21st century and being fully aware of the benefits to itself of global trade - and mindful that it must keep its new middle class onside - it is unlikely to resort to any kind of widespread warfare, but it is really not above any indulging in any other mischief which might further its fortunes.

Incidentally, I know little about China’s history except in very broad outline, but I am sure nothing but nothing has change very much and that the period under Mao Tse Tung was nothing but an aberration, a tiny blip in history. Its leader might no longer be called the emperor, but he is there by consent and must always play his cards right to ensure his survival, as every other emperor was obliged to do.

. . .

But back to my point about ‘old farts’ and why they must always be discounted: when I write that I feel life will be a tad less comfortable for my children and their generation, or possibly worse, am I simply falling into the old trap which we late sixtysomethings are prone to do, to view the future as bleak merely because we are on the wrong side of history? I don’t know. I hope so. But am I? Certainly, I might be very wrong about many things outlined above, but I don’t think I am wrong about the very uncertain future Britain now faces.

My father was born in 1923 and will have lived through what we call the Depression. It affected many, though I don’t think it much affected him and his parents (both primary school teachers). The way things look at the moment - today, for example, Sunday, July 23 - the outlook for Britain economically is not looking at all great. Maybe the good times have rolled, at least for the next 20 years. Who knows, but don’t ask an old fart.

There can be no going back now (or at least not without looking extremely bloody stupid)

Just under a month ago, I began digging myself a hole – and did so in the full knowledge of what I was doing - by publicly declaring in this blog (the entry is here) that I wanted finally to discover whether or not I was just another of life’s bullshitters, one who, furthermore, was doing something far worse than kidding on the world – kidding himself on.

I won’t go back over old ground, but in sum I have all my life – that is for the past 51 years – declared ‘I am going to be a writer’ and I wanted to prove to myself that, yes, I am a writer, and, no, I am not just another of life’s bullshitters. Well, the day of reckoning has moved far closer.

But before I get into that, I must admit that I have, in one sense, been a little harder on myself than was absolutely necessary. I announced, shamelessly, that for a guy who ‘wanted to be a writer’ I had, all things being equal and measured against others ‘who wanted to be a write’, written precious little indeed. Well, as it turns out that isn’t quite true.

Certainly, I am and was not one of those who would work a double-shift down on the marshalling yard, then a third manning an late-night dustcart, before returning home at 4 in the morning to sit down at the kitchen table at an ancient Remington typewriter (it had to be an ancient Remington typewriter) and hammering out yet another short story in the event no one wanted to buy, before the necessary shit and a shave and clocking on once again at the marshalling yard. But I have discovered that I have written rather more than I imagined.

Just outside our cottage in North Cornwall stands a small, granite building. When I first married and moved here, it was derelict, and only four walls were standing. But my wife then got her brother David, who is a builder, to

renovate it, install electricity and light, and let our daughter (21 just over a week but then just a toddler) use it as a playhouse. But as sadly always happens with young sons and daughters, the playhouse was used less and less as a playhouse as they grew older ans swapped toy kitchens and playing shop for tamagotchis and laptops, and more and more as a junkyard, the final restoing place for all kinds of crap we no longer used or had use for.

It had everything: her old toys, a gradually rotting kiddies sofa, several large plastic boxes of my junk, two bicycles, a gymansts rower (donated to us by my sister-in-law who also had no more use for it), tools, a ‘director’s chair’ used in the summer months to sit outside in the sun. It was crammed so full of crap that you could hardly get in the door. It stank of mould and damp, and was all in all a crying shame.

Several years ago, I hit upon the idea of clearing out that little cottage (above) and converting it into a den where I could – I can – retreat and, well, write, get down to it and solve the mystery which had haunted me all my life: am I, as I suspected (and, to be honest, still suspect) just another of life’s bullshitters or was there – is there – still a glimmer of hope.

The clearing out began about three weeks ago (as I am still working in London four days a week, it could only be done when I was home). Then I cleaned the walls and gave them several coats of white paint. That always took a time to dry before the next coat could be applied, so it wasn’t until last week that the decorating was completed. I then furnished it, though sparsely, and – best of all – had space to hang some of my photos.

Well, so far, so good. (Bizarrely, my wife, who is, to put it as kindly as I am able, ‘singular’ in many way, immediately, when I announced I was going to hang up some photos, declared in that way she has: ‘No you’re not!’ ‘Why not?’ I asked. ‘Because that will bring in damp.’ Well, perhaps as a scion of one of the many farming families here in North Cornwall she is privy to some arcane secrets of life and damp which yours truly and his kind are not. But bugger it. The photos have gone up.)

While I was clearing out and also clearing out a space in my stepmothe’s just down the road, I came across several folders of stories, some completed, some not, and several plays, none completed. And I had forgotten about these. (I also came across about ten A4 hardback ledgers of a diary I used to keep, written in longhand. I might – might – take a look through them at some point even though I find my handwriting just as difficult to decipher as everyone else, but I have to say doing so is most certainly nowhere close to the top of my to do list.

I am writing this in my little den and it is the first thing I have written here. As I explained earlier, I am a firm believer that genius (or the far more modest description I shall claim as my own) is, as the man said, ‘99pc perspiration and 1pc inspiration’, so the plan is to emulate one Somerset Maugham and sit down every day for at least four or five hours every morning and write. Oddly giving yourself no choice in the matter, as I have already discovered, works.

Well, it works in as far as you tend to get something done, however poor to mediocre that work might be. But you will never know whether it will be poor to mediocre, or possibly just a little bit better than that if you don’t fucking get it done in the first place.

So there you have it: the den is ready and I have no more excuses. Here are two pics (and only two are possibly 'cos it isn't very big. One pic is taken from one end, the other from the other.

. . .

I’ve just been online to look up examples of all those dedicated writers who worked 24 hours a day non-stop, then spent another few hours writing because they were so utterly dedicated. And I came across this, from a writer’s blog. Give it a look, it makes interesting reading. And the blogger has been published so she knows what she is talking about.

Even the exceptionally little I know chimes in with what she says. (And, by the way, when next you read your favourite novelist and think ‘Christ, what a good writer’, spare a thought for his or her editor. These are people, experienced people, who have seen a lot of writing, both fiction and non-fiction, and who, it has to be said, often improve what they are given to edit.) The blogger makes eight points, each preceded by a relevant quote.

Here are those eight quote:

Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead. (Gene Fowler)

There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write. (Mignon McLaughlin)

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. (Anne Lamott)

Art is never finished, only abandoned. (Leonardo da Vinci)

An incurable itch for scribbling takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breasts. (Juvenal)

Nobody but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. (Samuel Johnson)

This is what I’ve been thinking lately: I’m getting worse. My writing just isn’t as good as it used to be. With every new story I write I believe I’ve lost something—the spark, the raw energy, the ability to see the scene, to tell the truth, to imagine. I look at my stories and feel like they could be so much better. (Jessie Morrison)

Incidentally, I have never heard of Gene Fowler, Mignon McLaughlin, Anne Lamot or Jessie Morrison, but if someone informs you that ‘water is wet’, you don’t discount the information just because you have never heard of whoever passes it on.

Pip, pip (and wish me well).

NB The regime won’t start in earnest until I finally knock work on the head, but that really has to be soon now. I shall be 68 on November 21, and I could have retired on my birthday in 2014. But I carried on – I tell myself – 

because ‘I want to build up my pension’, ‘I shall have a substantially smaller weekly income when I do knock it on the head’, ‘I like the work, and I enjoy the company of my colleagues’ and ‘it’s good to get variety – part of the week in London, the rest of it down here in rural North Cornwall’.
All those excuses are true, but they are just excuses. The main thing which is holding me back is fear that I shall drizzle away my time and prove myself to be exactly that bullshitter I so vehemently hope I am not. Wish me well.

PS I have just uploaded the three pictures and looking at the two interior shots, I wonder whether I shouldn’t put the desk at the other end? Decisions, decisions.

PPS Black and white versions of the above pics are available on request.

There’s we Brits, all dull, common or garden Anglo-Saxon empiricism, and there’s the exciting adventurous French, all chic away-with-the-fairies rationalism (‘I think, therefore I shall tell you all about it a great incomprehensible length, my intellectual life, my unusual sex life, the bearing it has on my intellectual life . . .’) and when a certain kind meets another certain kind, the outcome is rarely fruitful or happy

Years ago - 28 if you’re asking - I went with the film critic (and education correspondent) of the South Wales Echo, a film producer friend of his and another friend to spend a week in Roscoff, in Brittany, at the Celtic Film Festival. The film critic was Dave Berry. At first I couldn’t remember his name and googled ‘South Wales Echo film critic’ which led me to an obituary in the Independent. Dave, it seems, died seven years ago.

I last spoke to him in the 1990s and promised to drive to Cardiff to meet up again, but, as almost always happens with such promises, it was never kept. Dave was a one-off, one of the nicest guys I’ve known in and out of the business, and he was always good company. May he rest in peace. But all that is by the by.

The film producer was a Richard Staniforth who was visiting the festival on business, trying, as it seems film producers always are, to drum up money for whatever production he and his company at the time (Teliesyn) wanted money for and to network. And I should add that Richard was - is - most certainly no film industry wannabe and has made an interesting career for himself.

When I was working for the South Wales Echo (as a sub-editor from February 1986 till halfway through 1989) in Cardiff, the city was growing a vibrant film industry which, as far as I know is thriving. The BBC makes many of its productions there and the city has been the birthplace of many films, although I’m not sure whether its long-hoped-for role as Hollywood on the Taff ever really came to anything. But it wasn’t for want of talent or trying.

Sadly, I can’t remember the name of our fourth companion, but I do recall he was, I think, the Echo’s district reporter in Porthcawl. He and I just went along for the ride, French food, a drink or three and to see some films.

The Celtic Film Festival now calls itself the Celtic Media Festival - the name is sexier, I suppose - and this year held its 38th festival at the beginning of May on the Isle of Man. It’s first festival was held in 1980 in the Western Isles (it says on the website - I didn’t happen to know that) and the one I attended with Dave, Richard and Mr X was its 10th.

The four of us took off from Cardiff and headed for Plymouth in my reasonably beat-up Austin Allegro which sounded as though it were on the brink of falling apart because the bearings in one of the front wheels had disintegrated, but I had been assured that despite the alarming racket it made, it wasn’t dangerous and the wheel was in no danger of falling off. From Plymouth it was just a short six-hour hop across the channel to Roscoff.

In those days the festival was still true to its principle of providing a platform of ‘Celtic’ films, although even then money was making itself felt and the qualification of somehow being ‘Celtic’ was already being stretched. At the festival the following year in Gweedore, Donegal, which I also attended, there were already rumblings from some that admittance to showing a film which was ‘Celtic’ was already being stretched beyond what many thought was acceptable, and I don’t doubt that last May on the Isle of Man films and whatever was deemed to come under the catch-all term ‘media’ had strayed pretty far from the original ideal.

Accommodation was available at three prices - 50 francs for the week, 40 francs and 30 francs if I remember - and I opted for the cheapest level and rather think I stayed in a more interesting hotel than did Dave and Richard who found themselves in some anonymous Euro hotel. My hotel, on the other hand, was old and sported pipes and staircases going everywhere. I prefer asymmetrical houses which have staircases, both long and short, going everywhere and I have not objection whatsoever to naked pipes, even ones which bang a little when you turn the shower on or flush the lavatory. There was, of course, none of that in the Euro hotel.

We all pretty much went our own way after an evening meal together on the first night in the restaurant of the Euro hotel, but it was memorable for me because it was the first time I had eaten monkfish, and boy was it nice. You might not know it, but the French have a way with cooking and long may it be so.

I can’t remember which films I saw, except one called, I think Elephant, which was a rather mystifying Northern Irish production. It consisted of quite a few shorts one after another, all showing the same thing: a man would meet up as though by appointment with another man and would then be taken somewhere and shot dead, apparently willingly and compliantly.

It was all very puzzling and, I suppose deep, and most certainly was some kind of commentary on the number of IRA killings going on at the time. I remember that I, for some reason, took to timing each segment of film and discovered each was exactly 30 seconds long. Why I really don’t know. And I also remember that a swimming pool featured in it, though again why I have not idea.

Another film I remember was also in another sense odd. Well, at least, I thought it a bit odd, and it most certainly baffled me. It was quite short, about 20 minutes, and consisted of nothing but shots of sailing dinghies and small yachts tooing and frooing on a lake. Some were in long shot, some in medium shot. And that was it. What it was all about, I can’t say, although I think I can say it was probably not some subtle commentary on the number of IRA killings (and I am bound to admit that other terror groups were available, notably Loyalist paramilitary groups who could match the Provos killing for killing no bother).

I’m sure I saw other films, but certainly no others now come to mind. And as I was neither attending the festival as a producer (like Richard Staniforth) networking and, I suppose, hoping to make deals, or as a film critic (like Dave Berry, who apart from being a dead nice, very down-to-earth guy - he was from Lancashire - had an encylopaedic knowledge of film and wrote a respected book, Wales and Cinema: The First Hundred Years), I just spent every day of the week mooching around.

My day would probably start getting up late, finding a bar for a late-morning cafe au lait, deciding which offering of film I would watch, chatting to whoever I fell into conversation with, then, I suppose - I suppose, because I really can’t remember a great many details - meeting up with one or two of the others, having a meal, then boozing the night away till 2am. As the week

A Frenchman or a Brit? You decide

went, we would find ourselves in someone’s hotel room or other, often mine in the old creaky building I had found myself in, chatting some more and drinking some more. Once, I remember, some old Scot, who must have been at least in his 70s came along to my room with several others and we enjoyed a 60 per cent proof malt he had brought along.

On the last night a gang of people were again in my room and I found myself semi-flirting with a very attractive Frenchwoman. I am one of those guys who is not particularly shy with women, especially after a drink - which is certainly not uncommon - and as dawn broke we were - I think, this is supposition, though I have no reason to doubt it - the last two there and were necking. (I love necking, though again that doesn’t distinguish me in any particular way.)

Everyone was leaving that day, so at about 7am I walked her back to her hotel - again, I think - and told her I would like to see her again. She said she would like to see me again, too, so I asked her for her phone number. She gave it to me. It looked a little unusual, so I asked her where she lived. New York, she said. And, dear reader, I did see her again a few months later.

. . .

The woman was a Rozenn Milin and one aspect of her character is really what brought me to write this entry.

The other night I started watching the film The Moderns by Alan Rudolph. I have seen it before, years ago, and I have seen other of Rudolphs films, although by no means all, and enjoyed each one immensely. He has a very sly, dry somewhat satirical humour and it is no surprise that his career began working as an assistant director for Robert Altman. So how does Rozenn Milin fit in? Well, I was thinking ‘I like Alan Rudolph’s films’ and then Rozenn came to mind.

I didn’t ‘go out’ with her for very long at all, although our association lasted pretty much for about 12 months before it petered out, and we saw each other about five times. I went to visit her for a week in New York (and the new tops I had bought for the trip were rather crushingly described by her as ‘making me look like a guy from New Jersey up in the big city’ - I paraphrase only lightly) and I don’t doubt she had a point. Then she twice came to stay with me in Cardiff where I as working. And finally I went to visit her twice in Paris where she was temporarily based. (I think it was twice because we stayed in two different flats. Perhaps we stayed in two different flats on my one trip. Crucial? Er, no, not really.)

In many ways Rozenn was remarkable in that she spoke English and Welsh as well as French and Breton. She spoke English with an American accent, but spoke it very well indeed and I assume she also mastered Welsh well, particularly as it was related to Breton. She turned 30 while we were ‘seeing each other’, and I use the quotes because to be frank it never really got off the ground as ‘a relationship’.

The reason I mention her here is not to ramble on about yet another ‘relationship’ which led nowhere, but because of a trait Rozenn had which was a tad irritating and which would surely again come to the fore were I to meet up with her and mention that ‘I like Alan Rudolph’s films’. She would then certainly demand to know which of his films I had seen and once I admitted I hadn’t, in fact, seen them all, she would most certainly suggest that I couldn’t then really claim ‘to like Alan Rudolph’s films’.

She had a very high regard for herself, once referring to ‘my (i.e. her) adventurous life’ and, to be honest, she was adventurous. When she left New York, where she had lived for several years, and came to visit me in Cardiff (and dump quite a few of her belongings for safekeeping), she took off again, on her own, for several months in Pakistan. It was the high self-regard I didn’t

If I bloody catch you thinking, you little toerag, there will be hell to play

and don’t much like, in her or anyone else. I was about to write that she suffered from a certain kind of French intellectual arrogance. I’m sure such arrogance is not restricted to the French. especially a certain kind of intellectual arrogance, is not restricted to the French, but they do seem keen on making it their very own. There seems to be the general feeling that only the French are capable of thinking and that if any Englishman manages it, well, it was basically a fluke, one not to be repeated at any time soon.

On another occasion I happened to observe that all too often translations don't, can't even, work, however good they are. ‘Lieu commun’, she countered, which piqued me (and you are well entitled to point out that just how much it must have piqued me can be gauged that I mention it now, 28 years later. You would, though, be wrong, because by then I had already realised I was dealing with a ‘French mind’ and that kind of dismissal was only to be expected).

So there you have it: I like Alan Rudolph’s films, but if you take Rozenn’s hardline approach and insist that no one can make that claim unless and until they had seen all his films . . .

. . .

I must confess that if one of the reasons why that particular relationship went nowhere, it was because I realise, in hindsight, that we were not a good match in many ways, and that probably puts it mildly. She always insisted that all I wanted out of life was to meet a good woman, settle down and have a family.

Well, there was a little truth in that, certainly, and however piss-poor my marriage is (it is piss-poor, though I have to say, that is largely not my fault, but I’ll leave that for another time, if I even write about it at all), in one way I feel happier than I did in that I now again have a home after close on 30 years when I felt horribly rootless and didn’t feel at home anywhere. But that was not the whole truth, and it did irritate me considerably.

I also disliked a certain competitive element in her make-up, a tendency to try to trump the whole time. Still, all that is now history. What, me like Alan Rudolph’s films? Get away!

. . .

I don’t mean to belittle Rozenn’s achievements which are certainly greater than mine. She had begun her life after graduating as a presenter of French regional television in Britanny, then decided she wanted to be an actor which is why she went to New York. Later she helped to set up and ran a Breton language television company, though I gather it didn’t thrive and finally folded, by then reduced to screening loads of important US television films.

I was in touch with her again briefly about eight of nine years ago after I came across her Facebook page and left a message asking her to get in touch. She did, many months later, and I gathered that her life is still adventurous and that she had, I think, just returned from a stint at the French embassy in Tokyo where she had worked as some kind of artistic attache.

We exchanged emails and I then asked her to read my novel - the one and only one, so far, I know, and I’m always banging on about it, but I do actually rate it - and give me her opinion. What’s it about, she asked. I responded that I couldn’t really tell (and still find it difficult to put it into words). Try, she said. I told her that I couldn’t really be expected to say in a few short sentences what had taken my more than 60,000 to write.

She didn’t respond.

How many self-delusional bullshiters populate Mother Earth? Well, I’m hoping there will soon be one fewer

Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, I am about to dig myself a huge hole, and if I’m not careful I shall fall into it. And if I do, apart from possibly lying at the bottom of it for ever and a day - or until I die, whichever comes sooner - I shall also look very silly indeed. And even if you don’t know anything about it - which, or course, you won’t - I shall, and that will be shame enough for me.

Many, many years ago when I was about 15 or 16 I decided I was going to become ‘a writer’. And from then on I thought of myself as ‘a writer’ who happened to be doing other things, anything and everything, in fact, that is except actually ‘write’. Why?

Well, when I was about nine I had translated a long German poem into English. I can’t even remember what it was, but I wrote it out carefully and produced, using a needle and thread, a little booklet and one morning, I think on a Christmas Day I read out my translation to my family at breakfast. So far, so unimpressive and, I now know, so pretty usual.

Then, at school, I wrote a poem and showed it to Mr Hinds, an English teacher - I say ‘an’ because he wasn’t mine. Mine was Mr Walsh. But Mr Hinds, or Hinds was we called him, was far younger, and I possibly felt he would appreciate my poem rather more than Walsh, who was very ill and off sick for much of the time he took us for English (or, I suppose, didn’t take us for English).

I can’t remember exactly what Hinds said, but it was something along the lines of ‘very good effort, keep it up’. That is, he did what any paedagogue would do: he encouraged me. I, however, in that rather silly and self-absorbed way common to pretty much all adolescents, I decided he had told me something entirely different. Hinds, I believed, had told me that I was pretty much something of a literary genius and, in common with all literary geniuses, I had a brilliant future ahead of me. And so, as far as I was concerned, the die was cast.

It was, of course, entirely delusional.

That was - I am 68 in November - roughly 53 years ago, and, sad to report, this literary genius has produced almost nothing and, more to the point absolutely nothing at all which might allow him to be described as a literary genius.

What have I produced? Well, about five or six short stories, five or six poems, and two-and-a-half novels. If I were pretentious I could always claim that I have produce ‘two novels and a novella’, but to be frank at 67 I have rather less time left than I have at any point in my life and most certainly no time at all for pretension and, far more to the point, delusions. As an ‘output’ it is thoroughly pitiful, and as an ‘oeuvre’ fantastically non-existent. But that must change, if only for my self-respect, and, dear friends it will change.

. . .

It so happens that I ended up working for newspapers, as a reporter for six years, and then as a sub-editor (US copy editor) for a further 43 years, and still am working as a sub-editor. I could have retired in November 2015, but for very simple reasons - I enjoy my work, I enjoy the company of people I work with, the work is by no stretch of the imagination ‘hard’, I feel I am paid reasonably well and I enjoy spending half the week in London and half the week down here in Cornwall.

My career was by no means stellar, but if I gained one thing from working as a newspaper hack, especially as a sub-editor, it is that I am familiar with words and handling them. They don’t frighten me as I understand they frighten some. The example I always give is that if you and I were presented with a pile of bricks and a load of mortar and told to build a wall, that wall would be a pretty awful wall. But give those bricks and mortar to an experienced bricklayer, and a wall, a very good wall most probably, would take shape in no time. The bricklayer is used to working with bricks and mortar. We are not. But I am used to working with words and am not frightened by them. I don’t agonise over them.

But being able to put words down on paper with reasonable ease - pretty much all sub-editors acquire that gift - most certainly does not make you ‘a writer’. That is where I come up short for a chap who a lifetime ago persuaded himself he was ‘a writer’. I can’t tell a story, or at least I don’t think I can in the conventional sense. I can bullshit, most certainly, and let’s be clear, there’s a great deal of ‘bullshit’ in writing and even more broadly, art. And, let’s again be clear, that word ‘bullshit’ is unfair, what with its connotations of ‘bollocks’, ‘nonsense’, ‘dishonesty’ and I don’t know what else.

I would argue, in fact, I do argue, that in one way all art is a certain kind of legerdemain: from virtually nothing a writer, a musician, a painter, using only words, sound and pigment creates something over and above that jumble of words, sound and pigment with which we are presented. If nothing else he or she holds our attention for just a little longer than a less successful jumble of words, sound and pigment might achieve. But just as all Athenians are Greeks, not all bullshitters are writer. Not by a long chalk.

Here’s a second hurdle (as though ‘not being able to tell a story’ were not sufficiently discouraging): I am no great thinker. I am reasonably articulate (and I mention that because all too often folk just aren’t) and I have finally learned over the years not to go off at a tangent, to stick to my train of thought. But I am no great thinker.

On the other hand, I would again argue, nor is pretty much anyone else, and that might, for me, be a certain saving grace. So I don’t want to write novels about ‘how awful families are’, how badly - this is very modern and has won many a mediocre writer the attention of a publisher - we are ‘treating the environment’. To cut to the chase, I don’t at all want yet again to observe, as has been observed so often over the years, that water is wet, that all farts stink except our own and that you should never trust anyone, least of all yourself. All I now want to do is entertain.

. . .

I have learned one or two things about writing along the way, and I don’t just mean ‘writing’ as this blog is ‘writing’ or a committee report is ‘writing’, or that a manifesto or a PR handout is ‘writing’: I mean what - Christ I really do hate the word - is known as ‘creative’ writing. (NB There is only one - only one - response to anyone who, when asked that they would like to be,

‘ . . . and then in one bound he was free!

replies ‘I want to be creative’ and then waits for general approval and schmooze: tell them ‘well, fuck off and be creative’. That is by far the kindest thing you can do.)

I have learned this: writing is work. I know. I learned that by ‘writing’ my ‘two novels and one novella’. Both the novels took several months and the novella two weeks. But each time I followed the same routine: I sat down two or three times a week and wrote and didn’t get up again until a substantial amount had been written. Ironically, starting at a set time, telling yourself you are going to do nothing else but write for the next four or five hours makes it just a little easier. Odd, but true.

That brings me to the second thing I have learned (but which, frankly, I still forget): nothing you write has to be perfect from the off. In that first instance there doesn’t have to be any agonising over a word, a sentence, a paragraph. There is just one objective: to get it bloody down on paper. You then have all the time in the world to edit it, hone, it reshape it, rewrite it. Don’t ever kid yourself: unless you have signed contract and your publisher is waiting for your manuscript, no on, but no one give a flying fuck about ‘your novel’, except you. But unless you first get something down on paper, you are pissing in the wind or, to revert to my personal them, deluding yourself.

Related to that is another truth: don’t talk about it, do it. The more you talk about it, the less likely you are to do it. And you nor do you have to throw it all up and head of for that Greek island ‘to write my novel’. If you can’t find the time and discipline now to do it, you’re never going to do it and you most certainly won’t find it there.

Finally, think. Don’t write that sentence on paper, write it in your head first. As I say, you can always rewrite it later.



. . .



So where, you might - or might not - be asking is this hole I am digging for myself? Well, here I go: our cottage is an old and quite small granite building which, I’m told, was built in the 16th century as a small farmhouse. And outside it is a tiny granite building, about 12ft by 8ft which, when I first arrived here was derelict. It was then rebuilt by my brother-in-law David into a small playhouse for my daughter (The posh word is renovate, but David rebuilt it). It has power and a neon light, and although the building is 12ft by about 8ft, inside is even smaller.

When she and my son were young, they used it to play in, but for these past ten years after they got older and became less interested in Lego and dolls, it became used to store all the shite which could not be stored in the cottage (and there was and is a lot of shite - my wife, a farmer’s daughter, hoards everything). For these past four or five years I have been hatching a plan and two weeks ago, that plan began to take shape.

First of all I got rid of all the shite, and for these past few days I have been vacuuming the carpet (it had a carpet) and wiping down windows and the walls. Next week I shall freshen up the walls with two coats of matt white paint and then I shall build for myself a den, a hideaway.

This is the plan, or pitfall if you like - I shall at some point in the next few months crack the whip and start my routine: get in there by 9am every morning to write and stay there for at least four hours. Every day. No excuses. Work. It has to be work. It will be work. What will be done, what I might produce, the good Lord knows, but at the very least I shall finally put my money where my mouth is and do my very best to convince myself that I am not just another of life’s self-delusional bullshitters.

I shan’t go in with no ideas at all. Christ I have several ideas if not more, but ideas count for nothing: they have to become words on paper (so to speak). Somerset Maugham used to do it, tuck himself away in his top-floor eyrie with a view of the sea at his Villa La Mauresque and write, whether or not he was inspired. He, modestly, described himself as - I paraphrase - first among the second rate. Well, even if I only become fifth among the fourth rate, at least I shall know when I finally breath my last that this gadabout, this self-delusional charlatan, this complete wanker at least after all these years he tried.

. . .

The best thing about it all is that of one thing I am certain: when I put my mind to something . . .

In which I descend to thoroughly trivial matters, including the farce which British politics has become in a matter of 24 hours

To be honest, the only reason I am writing this entry is that I was about to revert the ‘Election Special’, photo above for the original artwork, but I can’t: I made a copy of it and saved it to one of my many other laptops (and you think I’m joking: I still have nine, for no very good reason, obviously), but that one, the one I usually use and which is pretty much permanently at home in Cornwall in the kitchen, is as I write about 240 miles away (if you take the A303) or 260 miles away (if you take the M4 and M5).

But tonight, a Sunday night after my single shift at work, I am in London, sitting outside the Scarsdale Tavern in Kensington (motto: No Price Too Steep, But We Know You All Have Cash To Burn), writing on one of two small, but rather neat 11in Lenovo x121e(s). And I’ve just decided that in keeping with the utterly mundane, not to say thoroughly trivial, nature of this entry, I shall add a little more domestic detail (and replace the photo above when I am home again on Thursday).

I was here last Sunday evening, and drank two large glasses of house red. I then drank another, small, glass at La Pappardella around the corner from my brother’s flat in Earls Court where I put my head down. And as is the way of these things, I didn’t then get to sleep until almost 3.30am, watching I don’t know what, so when I woke – early as is the way when you go to bed late – I was feeling distinctly grotty and was bloody tired all day, a double shift. That probably contributed to it. What’s ‘it’? Well, hang on and I’ll tell you.

While at work, deciding what to have for lunch or supper, depending upon whether I eat lunch or supper is always a conundrum. The canteen food is usually pretty rough, and I am getting sick of my usual tuna salad/chicken salad from Pret A Manger in the Tube station. The thing is that I have long ago pretty much knocked bread, pizza and pasta – in fact any other wheat-based on the head, so sandwiches are out. It’s not a health fad or anything like that, it’s just that I find that since I’ve stopped eating wheat (within reason – it’s not an all or nothing thing), I feel less bloated, get less hungry and have lost a small, but distinct rim of flab around my tummy.

But last Sunday, and I gave in and bought two rustic rolls from Marks & Spencer just down the road and crucially a slab of brie. (I warned you this entry would be remorselessly trivial. By all means go and find something better to do, I really shan’t be upset.)

I had one of the rolls and a third of the brie at about three, then the second roll and some more brie at about 8pm. And that’s when it started – yes, that ‘it’. To begin with I seemed to have a belly full of trapped air, but the instinctive action of swallowing even more to build up pressure to release what was already there simply made it all worse. This went on for some time – swallowing air, trying to burp, not managing to, swallowing more air, feeling even fuller, trying again to burp – until about an hour later I began to feel sick.

Now, I’m sure pretty much everyone hear has been through it: you know in your bones you are will sooner or later throw up. At first you ignore it. Then you realise you can’t ignore it. Finally, with minutes to go, you rush to the nearest WC and, with seconds to spare, spew up everything in your stomach. As a rule, you retch several times, until your stomach is clear. And once your stomach is clear, you wretch again, pretty much bringing up nothing. But at least you feel better.

That’s what happened, and I did feel a bit better, though still very tired from the night before. I am usually due off at 10pm, but managed to get off a few minutes earlier, caught a convenient bus, and was at my brother’s within 20 minutes (for someone who works in London, I live very, very close, thank the Lord). There’s was no listening to the ten o’clock news that night or watching something inconsequential on Amazon or Netflix, it was just out with the light and heads down. And for a few brief minutes, knowing that I had a full ten hours of sleep ahead of me, I was in heaven.

The trouble was that just minutes later I began to suffer from stomach cramps. I turned sides, lay on my back, lay on my tummy, went back on my back turned again, but could I get rid of the cramps and could I get to sleep? Could I buggery. And this went on hour by hour (I kept checking my watch) until just before 4am I once again got that feeling – I knew – I was about to throw up. But I’ve nothing left in my stomach, I thought.

Well, my stomach didn’t seem to know, and it was another rush downstairs to my brother’s WC and once again I was (as the Aussies, who always have an apt phrase for most things, say)

talking to God on the great white telephone. And Lord did I throw up quite a bit. Where it came from I really don’t know and cared even less. Then the cramps faded, but my limbs, every single one of them, ached and ached and ached, the kind of ache you have when you have the ‘flu, and I don’t mean man flu, which is nothing but a bad cold, I mean the real flu.

My mind was pretty much made up that I didn’t want to be anywhere, but anywhere, but home in Cornwall in my own bed. Bugger work, bugger everything. The trouble was it is a drive of between four and four and a half hours and a journey I am increasingly beginning to dislike. Work was out – I wanted to do nothing but stay in bed – but the decision was whether to spend the day in London or bite the bullet and drive to Cornwall. I drove to Cornwall.

I texted my boss and the colleague with whom I was due to be working that I was making myself scarce and took off just before 7am. I was home by midday, after taking it slowly, and went straight to bed and stayed there for two days. I got up last Thursday only because I was due to drop off my car at the garage for a bit of work and to vote. Then it was back to bed. I didn’t really feel myself until yesterday. What was ‘it’? I really don’t know. And I really don’t care. At least ‘it’s’ over.

. . .

If you were to sit down with several imaginative scriptwriters and write a political farce, you could not do better than come up with the current political scenario here in Britain. I rather like politics and have been listening to and watching pretty much all the political programes on  radio and TV, and there is - obviously - just one topic: the total disaster of her own making the prime minister Theresa May and her Conservative Party find themselves in. From pretty much every angle the woman is, to use a word with which I’m sure most of you are familiar, fucked. Truly and utterly fucked. And I must repeat in case the point somehow gets lost:  it was all of her own making.

The Brits being the Brits, pretty much everyone except dyed-in-the-wool Tories are laughing their socks off. I know I am. And it does sound like a farce: The Tories ‘won’ the election, but, in fact, in the real world they have lost it. They had a majority of 17, now they don’t have a majority at all and if they want to hang on to power, their only solution is to throw in their lot with a gang of ten Protestant cutthroats from Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party and rely on their votes to survive each and every House of Commons vote.

Because the DUP is holding every trump card in the pack, their price for cooperation will be high. This lovely gang of thugs oppose same-sex marriage, denounce homosexuality as an abomination, want abortion banned throughout the United Kingdom and have close, though tacit, links with Loyalist paramilitaries. And they are the only friends May now has – she has absolutely none in her own party which is livid with her beyong description.

On paper Labour ‘lost’ the election, but in the topsy-turvy and highly amusing world which is British politics, they pretty much won. Corbyn, the ‘friend of terrorists’, the unelectable Commie-rat leader

(our press assure us) proved exceptionally popular with many voters, to the extent that Labour gained 60-odd seats. Even my plummy-voiced stepmother says she voted Labour. (I voted for a chap representing the ‘Socialist Labour Party’ in North Cornwall. It’s not that I support him, but I couldn’t bring myself to voting for the Tories, the Lib Dems or Labour, and he and some guy from the People’s Christian Alliance, another homophobe, were the only other two options. As I didn’t want to waste my vote, the Socialist Labour Party bod got it. And he got 197 other votes out of something like 45,000.)

The result in Scotland also proved to be a hoot. Whereas two years ago the Scottish Nationalist Party swept the board and hoovered up all but two of the 50-odd seats in Scotland, this time around they lost ten to the Scottish Tories. And Labour grabbed one or two back, as did a sole Lib Dem. I am hazy on all the details, but overall they lost about 20 seats, which pretty much puts paid to a second independence referendum for a decade or two.

. . .

Does any of this matter (apart from the entertainment value)? Well, I suppose it does. May, who has shown herself to have an ego well out of proportion to any talents she might possess, is due to sit down in eight days’ time to spend the next two years hammering out Britain’s divorce deal with the EU. And she hasn’t got a leg to stand on. Not one. But it gets a lot worse: although the Tories now want nothing more than to get rid of her, they can’t.

It’s not that there isn’t any number of Tory politicos who would love the job – and one in particular, that arch-buffoon Alexander Boris ‘Boris’ de Pfeffel Johnson – but who in their right mind wants to take on the job – for which read the impossible task – of getting even a half-decent settlement with the EU. So May, who I should imagine would now prefer nothing better now than crawling into some obscure hole somewhere and forgetting everything, has no choice but to carry on.

There’s a lot of brave talk from Labour about May ‘standing aside/standing down’ and allowing them to cobble together a government, but it’s not going to happen: even with the support of the Lib Dems – who aren’t at all keen – and the Greens, they still couldn’t make up the parliamentary numbers.

Finally, no one but no one wants yet another election. We, Brenda of Bristol and the rest of us have had two general elections and a referendum in two years and that is it: we don’t want one. And the final irony is that even if there were one, it would well end up just as inconclusive as the one last Thursday.

. . .

The EU, of course, is also laughing its socks off. Just like the Democratic Unionist Party in Northern Ireland although in a different context, they hold every trump card in the book. And it’s all very well, as May once trumpeted ‘no deal is better than a bad deal’, but it simply isn’t. We need a deal, even a bad deal. And whichever way you spin it that is all we are going to get.

This latter part was written after Fiona ‘Fi’ and ‘I don’t want to give my name’, her friend came to sit at the table next to me, but I know it is Gillian. They are American visitors (I think. Later: no they weren’t, they were Irish, though one lived in Canada for a while. We were later joined by Clark, an Australian) and have been celebrating something or other for a few hours in the company of booze (it would seem). I mention it only because I said I would mention it.