A five-hour schlepp around the souk reminds me that a souk is a souk is a souk. And I am persuaded not to waste my money on a de luxe camel leather bag, and that the difference between £9.10 and £101 is a rather hefty £91.90

Morocco – Day Three: Fes

In May I was in Israel for a week and spent a day in Jerusalem, where after visiting the Wailing Wall, I headed into the souk. It was my first visit to any souk anywhere. A few days later, after driving into Jaffa and realising that it wasn’t really the city for simply following your nose and wandering around, I took of to Acre, about 14 miles to the north, and after eating a tasty lunch right on the waterside, I headed back to the car via Acre’s souk.

Today our battalion of tourists jumped onto our coach and after a brief stop at some palace or other, we headed for Fes’s old city and spent the next four hours trailing around its souk. And I have to say, risking accusations of being an old philistine, it seems to me that once you have seen one souk, you have pretty much seen them all. My sister, who lived in Istanbul for several years, tells me that the souk there is something else, and I don’t doubt it. But that not withstanding, I don’t think I shall be rushing to join the queue to visit yet another. If you haven’t been to a souk, by all means take yourself off and inspect one, and I’m sure your first will impress you. Your second less so. This was my third.

Fes’s souk has the usual rundown of tiny butchers, tiny ‘shops’ selling olives or spices or vegetables. There were tradesman galore, working in wood, in copper, in leather, in this and in that, there was more than any number of men young and old hawking leather wallets, purses, bracelets and caps, though it occurs to me as I write that I didn’t see any shops selling electrical equipment, irons, sound systems, that kind of thing. The one in Jerusalem did (plus and extraordinary amount of cheap religious tat being offered as severely high prices

We spent some time a rather large leather tannery, gazing down from the windows of one of the showrooms in to a large courtyard of any number of vats where the hides of animals were stripped of their hair, treated with quicklime and pigeon poo to soften them up, washed, dyed, then worked into various items, bags, jackets, satchels, trousers and I don’t know what else. On the way in we were each hand a sprig of mint to help us overcome the smell, but to be honest it wasn’t at all bad. Anyone who has taken a leak in any rural British pub, pissing into a shallow trough caked in urea crystals will know the smell, and in terms of offensiveness, the pub gents were often far worse. Sadly, for visitors to Old Blighty wanting to gain an authentic impression of Olde England, especially its traditional smells, you will hardly find such a gents (US ‘rest room) anymore now that health and safety have taken hold and insisted – against tough opposition it must be said – on better hygiene. And let’s thank them for that.

Ever since the man bag I had bought myself in a street market in Mallorca was stolen from my car two weeks later in a London square (and don’t knock them, for the convenience of carrying various items you seem to want to need while on holiday, a man bag takes some beating. Sod machismo), I have wanted another, so my sister and I wandered off to one of the many showrooms at the tannery to inspect those intended for men.

We were immediately given the hard sell, the plain unadorned one which caught my eye being lauded to high heaven as the best quality camel leather money could buy. ‘How much,’ I asked. ‘130,’ the man replied. ‘100,’ I said. ‘115,’ I replied, thinking that I could probably beat him down further, but what the hell. At that point my sister took me to one side and insisted it was far too much. What I had not realised was that the price was in euros, not Moroccan Dirham, so not the £9.10 my bargain might have been, but £101. ‘You can get them for much less,’ she assured me. But more hard sell ensued and it took a while to persuade the guy that there would be no sell. Oh, and barely ten minutes later when the showroom’s main man gave a general talk about the leather used and so on, he proudly told us that they only used lamb, pig and sheep skin, never camel.

Once we had left the tannery and its showrooms, it was on to the workshops of other craftsmen and it slowly became apparent – well, slowly to me – that we were not being guided here and there to admire the skill of the various Moroccan craftsmen, but to buy stuff. I’m not against buying stuff in the slightest, but I’m the boring sort that has come to mistrust the impulse purchases which were so much a feature of my younger days.

. . .
To be honest, the whole souk tour rather swiftly became something of a schlepp, and I was glad when finally, about seven hours later (with a one-hour break) we returned to our hotel. It was also a bit dispiriting to realise that whatever benefits tourists – I have to say under the circumstances ‘we tourists’ as I was part of one of several gangs trooping around the souk and getting in the way of Moroccans doing their shopping, coming home from school and trying to deliver goods through the narrow alleyways – that we are not quite as welcome was we affluent northern Europeans (and a troop of South Korean tourists) seem to imagine.

As I have already remarked, I am really not one for going around in organised groups, but prefer, as on my visit to Israel in May, to be on my own. For one thing, and there is no other way I can put this although it might be too harsh a description, there seems to be something essentially voyeuristic about this kind of tourism, rather like 18th century Londoners enjoyed trips to Bedlam – the Bethlehem hospital for the ‘mad’ – to gawp and laugh at the loonies. Yes, I know I am overegging the cake a little, but I can’t deny I feel that way. When I go abroad, I like to visit a country and see it as it is and perhaps meet some of its people. Yet these organised tourist trips seem almost to achieve the opposite: to see less well-off tourist countries as better-off countries would like them to be. Not for me, chums.

The same kind of sensitivity affects my picture taking. I just don’t like pointing my camera at people and snapping away as though they were merely some kind of exhibit. The upshot is that I tend mainly to take pictures of objects and buildings, and when I do take a picture of someone, I ask them first. Fair enough, but then they tend to pose and the resulting picture is not much good at all and is nowhere near the picture you would like to take. So far I can’t see a way around it.

Tomorrow, it’s off somewhere else, but I can’t say off hand. I know that Rabat, Casablance and a place called Meknes are on the itinerary but which we will head for first I really don’t know. I know I could do with one or two rest days, doing fuck-all for as long as I feel like it, but that isn’t part of the plan. So I shall be a brave soldier and carry on. Still, no Champions League tonight, so it can be an early bath and bed before 9pm (or something like that).

. . .

Since writing the above, I have just found more information about Morocco on the web, following a Google search, and it seemed to confirm an impression I got while trooping around the souk. It was that for every friendly Moroccan, there seemed to be two or three who, although not necessarily unfriendly, did not seem at all pleased by the rabble of tourists choking up the souk. What at first seemed an unimportant impression, possibly a misleading impression, gained a little more of my attention when I was apparently barged into by a teenage Moroccan girl who was coming towards me arm-in-arm with her mother.

This was in the crowded souk, so I thought no more about it. I turned and apologised, but did not get a reciprocal acknowledgment, rather more of a sullen one, as in ‘you should be more careful’. Later, no longer in the souk and walking towards our coach chatting to our tour guide on a less than crowded street, I again bumped into someone, a man in a green djellababa or asleham. Again I turned around to apologise, but the man did not turn around and just walked on. Then I realised that the incident had not been my fault, for although I was turned to the tour guide while talking to him and was not looking ahead of me, there was more than ample room for the guy to walk past without a slight collision. Yet a slight collision there was, and I could only assume it was intentional.

. . .

One last thing: it is bloody cold here in Fes. OK, not as cold as the unimaginably appalling Arctic conditions our gutter press are rather gleefully predicting will afflict Britain over the coming days – temperatures plummeting to -1C and commuters being warned to expect contending with at least 2cm of snow on their roads to work – but distinctly chilly. I opted to bring a pullover with me, expecting the others in my party to subject me to a barrage of ribaldry over my wimpishness.

Well, that hasn’t happened as they are just as chilled as I am and have retreated to their rooms for a little warmth. I am now wearing it. Writing this, fully aware of my duty to acquaint the world with very trivial detail of the minutiae of my life and intent on fulfilling that duty come what may, I am sitting in the large lobby cum TV room cum bar cum Lord knows what else of the hotel and am grateful that about 20 minutes ago a wood fire was started.

It is now only 6.45pm (US 6.45pm) and we are all meeting up for supper at 7.30pm (US 7.30pm), but I can’t deny that I am more than keen to get upstairs, enjoy a hot bath, then crawl into bed for a long kip than, quite frankly, is decent in polite society. We Brits are expected to buckle down if need be and cross the North Pole on our hands and knees before breakfast and are rightfully proud that one or two of our national idiots have done just that. But count me out.

Tomorrow we are due to clamber aboard our coach ready to set of for our next destination at 8.30am. That’s the Germans for you. But why does it have to be so early? Finally, a couple of piccies to keep you happy, though sadly not one of the Moroccan gent who barged into me. Perhaps that’s for the best.

Day Two in which I get full permission to let the bile flow freely

Morocco – Day Two: Fes

NB I have been given carte blanche by my sister – I am here with her, her husband, her husband’s sister and my brother – to spout as much bile as I like. The reason I didn’t in my yesterday’s entry was simply diplomacy. I am here at her and my brother-in-law’s invitation to join the party, which with the exception of my sister, my brother and myself, is made up entirely of German pensioners, and if one or two of them aren’t exactly retired, they bloody well behave as though they were. So it occurred to me yesterday that to be catty – and risk upsetting my sister, who reads this blog (though not my first novel, I might add cattily) – did not seem right. But none of it: go to town, she told me this morning as in some ways she feels rather like me.

The thing is that although I am German in many ways, ways which no one meeting me, a chap who speak excellent English with an excellent RP, might suspect, there are also many ways I am not. And one of those ways is that I loathe being organised, lining up meekly to fill in forms, trooping round in gangs and all the rest. Many, though not all Germans, on the other hand, don’t mind. In fact, I rather suspect they like it and would feel rather at a loose end if there wasn’t someone around with a clipboard and a biro reciting the detailed arrangements for the coming two hours. Is that catty enough for you, Marianne?

I must say that this being a holiday, break, call it what you like in a country I have never visited before, I am rather liking it. But Lord there are some oddities about the set-up. I told you yesterday that we were all flown into Agadir in the south of the country and expected to be coached off to our hotel, for a refreshing shower and, in my case, a glass of cold lager and a cigar. But none of it. Once on the coach, we were informed of a ‘change in plan’ – we would not be staying in Agadir and instead spent the next three or four hours driving to Marrakesh. Oh, well. Today, however rather trumped it all.
It was onto the coach at the, for me, unfeasibly early hour of 8am to be taken to Fes. My brother and I (who, much to his displeasure are sharing a room) got up, joined the others for breakfast, then retired to our room to get our stuff together and duly sauntered down at 8am to get on the coach. Silly us. When Germans say be at the coach at 8am, they mean be there in very good time because the coach leave pünktlich at 8am. And as we were not there, a search party was organised to drum us up.
On the coach we were told the journey to Fes would take, oh, about six hours, but that there would be a rest break for those with weak bladders. We would also be stopping off for lunch, or rather lunch for those who had agreed to shell out a few more euros.

Six hours? Including the one hour lunchbreak, and two rest breaks of about 20 minutes each, the journey took ten hours. So, dear hearts, I have been in Morroco for two days now and have seen the back of a coach seat for most of that time, plus what can be viewed from a speeding coach taking the highways and byways of the Kingdom of Morroco.

What could be seen on the first few hours was not particularly interesting: it was all as flat as a pancake and aridly barren. The scenery perked up somewhat when we ventured into the foothills of the Atlas mountains, where the earth was darker and more fertile and the whole landscape was greener. And that was it, really. Tomorrow, it’s a less early start to see something of Fes, though I do bloody hope it is not through the window of a coach. We are staying at this hotel for another night and then it is off somewhere else to see what else we can catch sight of through the window of a coach.

Our Moroccan guide, who speaks very good German, filled us in an many details of Morroco, its culture and what else, though on more than one occasion the detail got rather confusing. As though I had some premonition of that, I had brought along with my one of the Very Short Introduction series of slim bookd, in this case a Very Short Introduction to the First World War. Now that was interesting and for the first time in my life I have been able to put together a timeline of what went on and do now have a better understanding of that horrible, horrible conflict. So coming to Morocco for eight days has not been without its charms. .

In many ways, though I should imagine not surprisingly, the landscape, both the barren bits and the rather greener bits, remind me of the part of Spain I have seen when I was visiting Seth Cardew in his potter’s bolthole north of Valencia, and Italy, especially Sicily. And I also know that however scruffy houses and apartments look from the outside, it is a very different story inside. The point is that when you live in a country where the sun beats down relentlessly for most of the year, there’s really bugger all you can do with exteriors. Paint peels and walls dry out and crumble. So best stick to making where your life inside pleasant. .

I have taken hardly any pictures seeing as I have so far seen little to take pictures of, but also because it seems Moroccans, especially their womenfolk, just don’t much like having their pictures taken. Now it’s off to bed.

Marrakesh and that beer and a smoke, but, no, not that because I no longer indulge (though I wouldn’t mind) and although my brother-in-law’s guidebook to Morocco claims pretty much everyone smokes hashish openly (and the country is its biggest producer), it isn’t actually legal and the cops are quite keen to crack down on dope-smoking tourists. Have I learned a little wisdom in my old age?

Morroco – Day One, Marrakesh.

I should actually be titling this entry Agadir, but there was a ‘change of plan’, which didn’t suit me too well. After getting up at 5.30 at my hotel in Dusseldorf to catch the 6am shuttle to the airport, I arrived in very good time, but was knackered. The reason: well, I tried to be wise and get to bed early preparing for the early start and put out my light at 10.30.

Didn’t immediately get to sleep, but then at about 11pm was wide awake when I realised I had forgotten all the sodding paperwork my brother-in-law had sent me – plane e-ticket and all the rest. So it was downstairs to reception to see whether I could print out another, as well as all the rest of the necessary bumf. Yes, they could, and they were very helpful, except that their printer wasn’t working and no one knew quite why. It took them 30 minutes to work out that no only did the their laser printer not have the toner, but it took them another 15 minutes to find a new toner cartridge.

By the time I returned to my room with all the crap I thought I would need, it was way past midnight, and with all the excitement (the polite word for bloody hassle) I didn’t seem to get to sleep at all, except that I must have done because I had a very odd, though interesting dream involving World War II British war veterans barricaded in a church where a memorial service was being held in their honour and a necessary flag was missing. Great dream but part of it entailed that ‘I must get to sleep!’. Then my alarm went. And at the airport, checking in I was assured that the bloody e-ticket wasn’t at necessary as my name was already on the system. And thank the Lord for that because my brother, he who pays great attention to detail, had forgotten to bring along his bumf, too.

The flight was, as pretty much all flights are, uneventful and as pretty much all flights are which last longer than two hours, bloody boring, though I discovered I had stored the film Glengarry Glen Ross on my iPad, so that helped somewhat (and it’s a great and highly recommended film). My one thought was to get to the hotel where we had been booked in in Agadir and settle in with a beer and a smoke. That was where the change of plan came in: we were not anymore going to stay in Agadir but would be driven by coach to Marrakesh, but it’s only a three-hour journey with a ‘rest break’. The journey, though took four and a half hours, and I never manage to sleep on buses, coaches or in cars.

Arriving here, I discovered the beer and the smoke were yet again delayed: there followed a very long-winded process of registration, eventually followed by a ‘talk’ which consisted of the tour company hoping to sell us extras. No dice in my mood. My brother thinks I have developed into a grumpy old git and he might well have a point: all I wanted to do for the past eight hours was to settle quietly into a shady corner and have that beer and smoke, and, as is increasingly likely as the years roll by, I wanted to have no one’s company but my own.

Thankfully, I finally got there.

The evening was, to my delight, rounded off with a great game of Champions League football, Bayern Munich v Paris St Germain which was only spoilt by PSG, who for some reason I found myself supporting, playing like prize dicks. With all their talent – Neymar and Dani Alves once of Barcelona are now part of their side – they still don’t have realised that the best way to win matches is not to spend as much time in their own half making dodgy passes to each other. Bayern were 2-0 quite soon, and a goal for PSG soon into the second half didn’t improve their play, and when Bayern scored an easy goal – in fact, all their goals were easy, to be frank – and won 3-1 my mood was only improved by my team, Manchester United, who were 0-1 down in Moscow against CSKA, ending their game 2-1 and conclusively top of their table. (NB Very early late correction: the game was at Old Trafford.)

Tomorrow it’s off – by coach, natch – to Fes, a journey on A roads rather than motorways, but which, we are assured will be worth it as we will be travelling through the Atlas mountains, which are said to be colourful. I hope so because the countryside we drove through from Agadir was remorselessly barren.

No piccies yet because piccies of the inside of hotels pretty much anywhere and the inside of coaches (however long the journey) don’t make for scintillating or even interesting images. But here’s a picture of some rocky in case you have forgotten.

And just for the craic, one of Lukaku scoring his first in we don’t know how long. And may he score many, many more.

Like Webster’s dictionary I’m Morocco-bound

Off to Morocco tomorrow for what is pretty much a buckshee holiday. Not quite buckshee, but £263 for seven nights in pleasant hotels, flights there and back from Düsseldorf to Agadir, then a guided tour of ‘royal palaces’ is as buckshee was you are likely to get this side of Brexit. My brother-in-law organised it after coming across a package deal which looks good value. He and my sister, his sister and my brother and I are going.

I must admit that I didn’t quite get the details right when I was first invited to join the gang – last summer – and have spent the past few months looking forward to a week of ligging, camping out by a nice pool supping an inexhaustible supply of Moroccan gin and tonics, but it was not to be. My brother alerted me to the tour element of it all a few weeks ago, and when I expressed my surprise, he chided me, in the way younger brothers can have glad to get their own back for some long-forgotten slight – well, obviously only long-forgotten by me – for ‘not paying attention to the details’. Well, I can take it.

Quite apart from having a rhino’s skin, developed by necessity I should add, my brother is the lad who, though more generous than many, spends little on himself and always has an eye out for a bargain. So not spending much of his pay working for some odd little outfit in Old Moulton St (or Great Moulton St or some such. NB Later: South Moulton St - I remembered this morning) central London, he saved enough and, crucially, invested in various shares in the early 1990s and struck gold.

For a while he thought as himself as something of a dab hand with finances and picking stocks even though I pointed out again and again that in the years he was buying the market rose and rose and rose, and pretty much everyone was quids in. Luck is more the case than skill. But the wheels came off the cart when he lent his employer, a charming Indian semi-crook called Vidia, £10,000 of the money he had made (and to this day I am astonished by the sum: he must have invested quite a bit in order to have the amount lying around waiting to be lent out. (Vidia, and I don’t know his surname or else I would give it here, also owned several old peoples’ homes – sorry, retirement communities – along the South Coast). Came the time my brother wanted his money back so he could buy a flat at auction (you can get bargains, apparently, though most need quite a bit of work), charming Vidia asked innocently: ‘What £10,000?’ Mr Attention-to-Detail had not got anything down on paper at all and was fucked big time. He never got his money back.

Still we live and learn, and we are all ill-advised to crow. I, myself, have most probably been rooked to the tune of £76 by a gang of Chinese (I would write ‘Chinks’ but I understand doing so might well land my in prison for up to five years of hard labour for racial intolerance, though the temptation is great, but wisdom will here prevail) after answering one of those many ads which seemed to be taking over Facebook. On offer was a Zoom R24 digital recorder for just £76, but with a recommended retail price of around £250. Too good to be true? Most certainly, but I went for it anyway.

In my defence I should add that I did have my suspicions and rather than paying by debit card, with the money irretrievably taken out of my bank account, I opted of using a credit card, knowing that under rather useful financial legislation here in the UK, if one is subject to fraud – which I rather think I was – I can claim the money back from the credit card company, and the hassle of getting the money from the crooks is all down to them. I discovered the seller was Chinese when I went on the credit cared company website to look at my account and spotted AIP*YUHNZJ CO of Shenzen, China. ‘Not good news,’ I distinctly remember myself thinking. ‘Thank God I listened to myself and paid by credit card.’ But, as I say, here is not the time to crow, in fact, to be frank never it the time to crow (though £76 to a gang of Chinese crooks is easier to take than £10,000 to an Indian crook. Get my drift?

. . .

The flight to Agadir leaves Düsseldorf at 08.15 on Tuesday (December 5), so I am obliged to get my arse over to Düsseldorf tomorrow and am taking the 15.50 BA flight from Heathrow. And that’s another story. It seems BA have taken to heart the lessons taught by Ryanair and passengers now pretty much have to pay for everything. ‘Will you be wanting a seat, sir? That will be another £11. Oh, and because of rising costs [funny how costs never fall] we are now obliged to charge you for the air you breathe while in flight, at £1 minute of oxygen used. And didn’t we tell you about renting the upholstery on your seat? Sorry, we should have done, and we’re sorry to inform you that the use of an upholstered seat is now a Air Transportation Agency safety requirement, so that will be another £20.’ And so it goes on. ‘Do think you might want to relieve yourself in flight, sir? Because if you do, we are now sadly obliged to charge for the use of our toilets, safety again I’m afraid. But never mind, I’m sure you will enjoy one of sandwiches from our in-flight menu, very tasty they are, too, and at just £15 for a cheese n’ pickle de luxe special well worth the price, even though we say so ourselves.’
To make sure passengers shell out for as much as possible, you can now only check in 24 hours before your flight is due to leave. Bastards.

In Germany I have booked myself into a hotel barely a stone’s throw form the airport, close as I could get seeing as I shall have to be in the terminal at least two hours early to the various instructions the Germans like to give passengers. But still, a week in a place rather less damp and cold than Old Blighty is for ten months of the year, so mustn’t grumble.

. . .

After that it will be just two weeks to Christmas with all the trimmings (my wife and I are currently negotiating what we can fall out about. At the moment, it is the ‘cordless hedge trimmer’ she told me she would like when I asked her what she wanted. Fair enough, I thought, and looked up various models. You can get very good ones for about £90, but you can also push the boat out and get some for £130/150.

Shit, I thought, it is Christmas and decided to be a little more generous. Then she informed me of the one she wanted: one with an ‘extendible’ reach which will deal with all those hard to get to corners of hedges. Made by some outfit called Stihl, apparently the Rolls Royce of hedge trimmer makers, the one she has set her heart on comes in at a cool £385 – without Vat. Well, fuck me, I’m a spendthrift, but surely not that much of a spendthrift. So, in parallel to the tortuous Brexit negotiations we have reached stalemate. I’ll keep you informed.

. . .

After Christmas it will be a gentle rundown until the beginning of April when I shall finally hang up my pen and hand back my Oxford Book of Cliches and call it a day. I must admit that I am still apprehensive, despite my ambitions to keep myself out of harms way by writing the Great Cornish Novel, because push will most certainly then really come to shove.

Incidentally, my cherished den which I bragged about in the summer is now not quite as much mine as I should like as it has cunningly already been filled with prams and cots and all the rest of the paraphernalia demanded by women when they are about due to give birth to their first child.

The woman in question is my daughter, just 21, and the baby was not planned, but happily she is in a steady relationship with a pleasant and hardworking lad who is successfully setting himself up in business as a tree surgeon. But more, quite probably much more of that, another time.

Pip, pip.

. . .

BTW There is a very good joke about Noah Webster, he of the famous dictionary. Apparently, he was in his study beavering away at writing his dictionary – or so his wife thought, and decided to bring him a cup of coffee. But when she opened the door, she found him on his sofa rogering his pretty young secretary.

‘Dr Webster,’ his wife exclaimed, ‘I am surprised!’

‘No, dear,’ the good doctor responded, ‘we are surprised, you are astonished.’

Susan’s funeral and her husband’s sense of humour and ‘an aesthetic approach to politics’

A funeral today and my birthday (this entry was started on November 21). There is no particular connection and most certainly no meaningful connection, but I thought I would mention my birthday anyway: 68 and never been kissed, or at least as far as I am concerned not been kissed enough. I should like to do some more kissing, and as for the other, well, however the desire is, the flesh, as other gents of my age and older will agree, gets weaker. Sod it, but there’s no pretending.

The funeral was that of Susan Wharton, nee Moller, a devout Roman Catholic and a lovely woman. I wrote of her death a week or two ago, but I shall repeat that she was one of the nicest and most interesting people I have known. RIP Sue. Her funeral mass, attended by family, friends and members of her church community, was at St Teresa’s, Princes Risborough.

Afterwards, as is customary, there was what the Irish call a wake and the rest of us call a buffet, booze and tea or coffee for those who had arrived by car and intended to depart by car and who didn’t want to risk death or, worse, being nabbed for drink/driving on the journey home. Sadly, I am not one of that wisest of wise groups and enjoyed several glasses of house red wine.

The funeral mass was pretty much as all other funeral masses are, and I can’t really add much detail. Once again as at the wedding of my nephew in Cologne several weeks ago when mass was also celebrated I didn’t – I won’t say couldn’t, just didn’t – take part in any of the liturgy. I’m afraid I and the Roman Catholic church have long since parted company. Susan’s cousin David Moller gave a eulogy, again stressing just what a kind and unassuming women Sue was, and although that kind of thing is par for the course, it was still good to hear, especially as it was so true.

Sue put herself out for others and of how many of our family, friends and acquaintances can we say that we do that? But what did strike me as remarkable (in as far as I am going to remark on it) was that her late husband Michael also featured, quite prominently in that eulogy. And ironically this entry will largely be about Michael, but also his extended family. The irony is furthered in that it must surely be a real pain for some women that they and their lives are still apparently defined by ‘the men in their lives’.

. . .

I have written about Michael Wharton before, here and here, but, briefly, he was a right-wing satirist who wrote a column called The Way Of The World for the Daily Telegraph, using the columnar nom de plume of Peter Simple. I

got to know him and Sue as they were friends of my father’s and regularly came to visit him and my stepmother, Paddy, in North Cornwall for many years.

Usually, probably because they had two Labrador dogs, they stayed in one of the two holiday cottages my stepmother had come to own which abut her own cottage in De Lank (once Lower Lank, and I really can’t remember why or when the name was changed to De Lank. I live just up the road at Higher Lank, and both – well, what do you call them, they are not even hamlets – are just over half a mile from the moorland village of St Breward).

My father, who also liked to call himself ‘right-wing’ – he even once, when I asked him what he was politically, called himself a ‘right-wing radical’ which is pretty much meaningless in as far as it can mean pretty much anything – had, in the early 1970s contacted Michael after being a fan of his Peter Simple column in the Telegraph, and the two met up and became friends. Their friendship endured until my father’s death in 1991 and Michael’s in 2006.

What concerns me a little is that the description of ‘right-wing’ is, at least, in their cases, rather misleading. I shan’t talk about my father here, but pass on what Michael’s son Nicholas said about his father’s politics.

NB I am about to write what might be regarded as ‘personal stuff’ about Michael and his family, and although none of it is in the least contentious or slanderous, I should like their family – his son Nicholas, his daughter Jane, his son Kit and his grandson’s Max and Isaac – to know that if they feel I am stepping on toes (although I don’t think I am), I apologise, as I really don’t mean to. But to be honest I don’t think any of them would object to what I am about to write.

. . .

Michael Wharton wrote two volumes of autobiography, The Missing Will and A Dubious Codicil, and both are good to read although the second is more in the way of memoirs (and if I remember correctly as I haven’t read it in years anecdotes of Fleet Street colleagues and pubs) than autobiography. He was born in Bradford to a German Jewish father and a Yorkshire woman, a gentile. And his birth name was Michael Nathan.

At some point, and this is not talking out of school, he changed his name from the Jewish ‘Nathan’ to the gentile ‘Wharton’, which, I’m told was his mother’s maiden name. Doing such a thing is not at all uncommon among Jews,

or was not earlier in the last century, because their Jewishness was often, though subtly, held against them. Thus a Goldstein might become a Goodman and a Jewish reporter I once worked with, a Pru Philips, came from a Cardiff family who were once known as Pinkas-Levi. And given the almost insufferable and as far as I am concerned inexplicable prejudice against them ‘as Jews’, I can’t say I blame them. In fact, I don’t blame them at all: why let something as ridiculous as prejudice hold you up in life and if a simple change in name takes you out of the line of fire, go for it. I know I would.

Nicholas was his son from his first marriage, ironically to a Jewish woman, born in the early 1940s and as this will have been before Michael changed his surname, he is known as Nathan. Nicholas (with whom I chatted later after the funeral) studied philosophy and then taught it at Liverpool University.

Jane (who wrote in interesting piece for he Daily Telegraph which you can find here) was his daughter by his second marriage, but Michael then went on to bring up two more children, though neither was biologically his, but the result of a long and, as I understand it, open affair his wife was having with a journalist friend and colleague. (I know his name and it would be well-known to those with knowledge of Fleet Street and its papers in the 1960/70s but there’s no very good reason to give it here.)

Michael was a one-off, journalist and satirist who could be very, very funny in a very dry way, so I asked his son Nicholas who of Michael’s children had inherited his father’s sense of humour. ‘None of us,’ he told me. Well, perhaps not, but Jane is – as she will tell you and as she has told me more than once – is very much her father’s daughter, which might well be summed up as having a keen eye for bullshit and no patience with it at all.

But when I say Michael could be – was – very, very funny, he was not one of those life and soul of the party types with a quip and a joke for every occasion and can often rather soon evolve into a distinct irritation. At least, he wasn’t when I knew him, but I am pretty certain he wasn’t either as a younger man. I’ve met several over the years, and if you and I ever meet, I can assure you I am not ‘the life and soul of the party’ and would be mortified ever to be so described. (NB Whenever I hear anyone described as ‘larger than life’ I always take it to mean ‘a complete pain in the arse’.)

As for his ‘right-wing politics’, Michael, Nicholas explained, using a very useful and thoroughly illuminating phrase, had ‘an aesthetic approach to politics’ and was not essentially right-wing at all. Michael, Nicholas told me, disliked Communists and the Left intensely and thus took up a ‘right-wing’ stance on many matters pretty much only because it was in opposition to what the Left might believe. For example, in the post-Tito disintegration of then Yugoslavia he championed Serbia not because he felt any particular sympathy for Yugoslavia but because demonising Serbia was the Left’s cause.

I think I know what Nicholas meant when he said Michael had an ‘aesthetic approach to politics’ because I suspect I do, too, although I like to think I am not in the slightest ‘right-wing’. And nor, Nicholas told me, is he, and he went on to say he had many political disagreements with his father.

And here I will end this entry. As I say above, it was started and more or less completed more than a week ago, and after going through it, dotted i’s and crossing t’s here and there and trying to ensure it isn’t complete gibberish, I can’t really build up steam to carry on. I also can’t remember the point I was hoping to make (if I indeed had one). Sorry.