Me, in fragments

FOR TWO months in the USA I lodged in the YMCA. My own room for $13 a week. Old men, presumably retired, lurked in other rooms, avoiding eye-contact in the corridors. I wrote copious airmail letters back to VR in the UK and read into the small hours. At nearby Riggs Lounge, where I’d gone for a beer, I fell into conversation with a scrawny guy, querulous in tone, looking for an argument. I said something in German and he snarled my accent was “bad”.

A dish of fat prawns graced the bar counter, I ate them absently, imagining they were free. Abruptly Querulous Man said, “Yuh know, yuh gotta pay for them.” He must have seen from my face I was ignorant of this. Still grumbling QM fished out his wallet and paid the barman for my prawns, as if obeying some ancient law of hospitality extended to foreigners, however unlikeable. Then he left.

NEVER BUY underpants in batches. The elastic in all will fail during the same week a year hence. The sensation is one of unease, as if the pants were about to slip down inside one’s trouser leg and lie like a guilty secret on the sidewalk. This can’t happen but the belief persists.

BEFORE responding to a question posed in French by a foreigner, a Frenchman will first correct the speaker’s grammar. Not always but enough to generate what is known as Urban Myth.

DURING six years in the USA I ate no more than half-a-dozen hot-dogs. Not because I disliked them, rather they would have reduced my social status had I been in the UK. Which I wasn’t.

ONCE my life depended on libraries. I haven’t used one for ten years. Instead, I buy books, often second-hand. I have no idea why.

Anyone seen Winston Smith?

Eighty-four, is it significant? Well yes. Orwell saw to that. When it rolled round most people said things weren't as bad as he predicted. But what's a decade here or there? Is Big Brother more or less evident now? Might he already be present? I leave it to you for answers.

Eighty-four is easily divisible. But does that make forty-two more important? For me times were happier. After many stupid, almost accidental, detours and one big geographical transplantation I was on the verge of my first editorship. Ahead lay a magazine with all its pages blank; it would be up to me to fill them. Wasn't that mildly horrific? Might I run out of ideas? The answer was no. This was what I was born to do.

And half of forty-two is 21. Three sevens, said to be highly significant, some kind of transition from childishness to adulthood. Chance would be a fine thing! I lay on a hospital bed, steadily reading my way through the sparse library, unimpressed by Malaya's mountains which surrounded me. The night before I'd played bingo for the first and last time; won a can of fifty cigarettes (Hospital attitudes have changed since then.) which I gave away since I didn't smoke. Why was I in hospital? Because the space between the fourth and fifth toe on my right foot was sore.

Time like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away,
They fly forgotten as the breeze,
Dies at the op'ning day.

Hid by early-morning mist, but only four hundred yards away, is the gorgeous River Wye. Might I ever have foreseen such propinquity?

Remembrance

Getting old means looking backwards not forwards. After all the past is full of completed stories, whereas the future is both incomplete yet gloomily predictable. This must irritate readers, certainly it irritates me.

And yet, and yet... I lie on the newly made bed, unwilling to take off my dressing gown, wearied with the prospect of shaving (for the 28,820th time, I've just calculated) and my mind slides ineluctably back to 1959, a year when an awful past ended and a new future began. Annus mirabilis! The North of England was behind me, London was my new home, and anything might happen. Many things - in different parts of the globe - did happen.

I was sharing a flat just off Clapham Common with a senior journalist on The Times and an American jazz drummer and his wife. The conversation was wide-ranging, musical and allusive, the atmosphere one of daring. Finally I was living the life I reckoned I was equipped for: my own version of the Left Bank, of Greenwich Village.

I had just met VR, then VT, and I showed her photograph (see above) to the drummer: he was a scoundrel but well-read and understood Europe. "It looks like Saint-Sulpice," he said. Would anyone in Bradford, the city I'd left behind, have drawn a parallel with that Parisian church? Never.

Elder daughter, Professional Bleeder, is visiting and asked to sort through our jumbled up box of photos. The one above saw the light of day again. The location is actually the Clock Tower in St Albans, but it's exotic enough. I am strengthened enough to get off the bed and start shaving, re-invigorated by the past.

The Grip

I'm now far too old for London but that doesn't stop me reflecting on its embrace. For over thirty years I lived in and around the capital, seeing it mostly as a privilege.

Of course it was love/hate but even the hatred had a sense of uniqueness.  Crowds forcing themselves into trains had an uncaring vigour, unduplicated elsewhere; a vigour that transfused me. The events I was unable to book (because smart-asses knew ways and means of getting in first) reminded me of London's elitism. And the nightmare of finding a flat was proof that others were maddened by the city's unholy appeal.

When I needed to resolve things between Clare and Hatch in Gorgon Times I had them walk from Blackfriars Bridge along the river to Chelsea; I saw them vividly every step they took. And to their left the heaving, black, amphibious monster that is the Thames. That gluey flow that bars the north from the south and forces you to look at it - whoever you are - and contemplate time's threat. The river has been there and seen everything.

Several years were spent in Clerkenwell where narrow winding streets evoked the clattering metal wheel-rims of horse-drawn vehicles, assuming you allowed yourself a little imagination. And how could you not? On the skyline the dome of St Pauls cathedral, and closer at hand, in Farringdon Road, a building emblazoned in red with THE DAILY WORKER, a daily newspaper for communists. God and Mammon in co-existence.

Walk west to the tourists - bemused by history adjacent to history. Up front the National Gallery, yes, but what about that building to the right? Big and important? A slight disappointment to discover it was the South African embassy.

London, full of disappointment yet full of power.

The life that late I led

Saturday I gave money to a good cause and re-lived my youth.

Each year The Guardian supports a charity. You call to donate and one of the editorial staff takes your details. You chat. You might draw the editor Katherine Viner, the social care specialist Polly Toynbee, or that arch-subversive, John Crace, the political sketch writer. A Scottish voice answered me, twas McCaskill (I missed his first name), with the paper 25 years.

Are you an editorial star? I asked. Modestly he said no. A foot soldier then? He agreed to that.

I told him I was encouraged the lines had been busy today. Unlike earlier years, said McC incautiously. When journos sat around waiting, scrambling for what few calls came in.

McC carefully checked my humdrum surname and credit card number. I applauded, said I'd once interviewed a trim young maid called Barker and in an adolescent flush of confusion I'd written it as Parker. "Many's the time..." said McC.

I told him these days there were so many huge running stories (Brexit, Trump) that it took me ages to get through The Guardian's main section, I read everything. I criticised a TV comedian the previous night who’d described Brexit as "boring" which I found inexplicable. "I saw that," said McC. "Totally wrong."

I apologised for not using the official code (Alfa, Foxtrot, Lima, etc) when spelling words for him. Trouble was I'd evolved my own code (B Bertie, P Percy) on a local newspaper and it was now ineradicable. McC recalled how computerisation meant journalists no longer dictated copy by phone to opinionated speed typists. "So much talk," he said. I burst in: "And implied criticism of your literary style." We guffawed.

An old war horse re-smelling gunpowder.

Me and aviculture

Earlyish on Tuesday we leave the house to Julie, our cleaning lady, for breakfast at Tesco's The Cafe. It's better than it sounds, the talk is often wide-ranging. Yesterday, with VR's help, I asked: had I been a good father to my two daughters?

My view tends to be pessimistic. But am I, in fact, equipped to answer? History can be hard to interpret.

I'm about eight, riding my bike on a dirt road past an urban farm. Hens run across the road and one is briefly entangled in my front wheel. I fall off. The farmer is on to me immediately. A fat authoritarian figure in a flat cap, about ten feet tall, laboriously records my address in a tiny notebook, warning me of legal wrath to come. As he writes the hen I hit, minus neck feathers, re-crosses the road with a censorious look. I blubber, out of control.

I ride home, still blubbering, confess all to my father. He's highly amused, says jokingly he'll counter-sue on behalf of my damaged trousers. I'm appalled by his laughter but my terror at this experience of the adult world quickly dissipates. Was that good parenthood?

My suspicions are it's the sort of parenthood I practised. Excluding my mother I grew up in a male environment with two brothers. I wasn't prepared for daughters and I sense my reaction was rough and ready. We're good friends now (I think) but is this despite those earlier years? Did I depend heavily on VR to smooth things out.

I don't know, I'll never know. When fathers describe the bond they had with their daughters I close my eyes and ears. Are some male embryos endowed with good fatherly instincts? I doubt I'm the one to ask.

Getting from then to now

In a month Britain's political landscape will (sez me) change radically and for the worse. In two years, far worse. In ten years, I can't bear to think. But will I be thinking at all in 2027?

The rate of change is terrifying given my lumbering evolution:

Age 0 - 5: A world-view confined to the space beneath our kitchen table.

Age 6 - 10. Subsequently reduced to a single policy: hating a man with an unlikely moustache.

Age 11 - 16. I recall only impenetrable arguments between adults. My parents read Daily Mail (I blush!); by osmosis I learned to sneer at the unhandsome members of Labour government who were (I discovered much later) working a social revolution in Britain.

Age 17 - 20. Low-grade employment on newspapers. Sought to become a cynic in all things other than the opposite sex. Succeeded, perhaps even over-achieved. Unloved.

Age 21 - 23. National Service in RAF. As a tool of the government I was forbidden to even contemplate politics. Sneered at all uprisings: Suez Canal, Cyprus, Kenya, Malaya and (Not sure about either of these) Aden and Belize.

Age 23 - 25. Magazine work in London. Membership of National Union of Journalists led to leftwards tilt.

Age 25 - 32. Magazine work in USA. Became temporary if inactive Democrat.

Age 32 - 60. Magazine work in SE England. Read Times (pre-Murdoch) then Guardian. In a watershed moment I took out a mortgage. Involved passively in NUJ industrial action. Voted Lib-Dem since Labour hadn’t a prayer where I lived. As life got easier, theory became more attractive than practice.

Aged 60 to present. Retired to sparsely populated county. Now a mere fulminator.

Boxes ticked and unticked

Most of the things I wanted to do, I did.

Toured much of Britain by bike and by hitch-hiking in my youth. Entered journalism. Moved from Yorkshire to London. Married and the marriage endured. Regularly and intentionally changed jobs in London. Worked in the USA. Got job back in London; acquired a house. Became magazine editor. Became francophile and bought French holiday home. Retired early, financially comfortable. Found the stamina to write novels. Discovered singing. Kept hair.

Things left undone

Rock climbing. Wish I'd been better at it.

University. Might I have profited? Unrealistic, really, like wishing I'd been handsomer. In terms of formal education I was - and am - subnormal.

Would have appreciated a girlfriend while living in Yorkshire. A few months no more, providing social reassurance there was nothing wrong with me. London proved (to me at least) there wasn't but it's as if Yorkshire defeated me.

Finishing The Brothers Karamazov. Four goes, last one foundering on page 360. Yet I've read and re-read Proust and Joyce.

Conversational intolerance. But might a cure cost too much? Might I now be quieter (=moribund)?

Introspection. An ever-present addiction?

Writing verse. Could I improve or would that be (as I fear) self-delusion? 

Awake my soul and with the sun...

The digital clock winks 06.17; in eight minutes another day of retirement will begin. I doze on beyond 06.25, my usual getting-up time, to be wakened at 06.55 by rain on the roof, plinking on the metal roof vent.

Retirement has occupied 21 years of my lengthy life: getting up at will, comfortable about money, doing mostly what I want, wasting time on Solitaire. Writing as now, singing musical phrases repeatedly to get them right, devoting an hour a month to ordering wine.

Between April 1951 and August 1995 I messed about in journalism because it was all I ever wanted to do, all I was equipped to do. But on retirement I was glad to go. Last night I dreamed of Stockholm, a lovely city; my work took me to Sweden quite frequently. The dreamed detail of the city – static and dynamic – was pleasingly sharp and coherent. I wish I was there with VR but celebration looms, a moderately ambitious project in a remote part of what may soon be the dis-United Kingdom.

My slippers should be beneath the bedroom chair, ready to slide into without fuss. But the cleaner has slightly displaced them and this irritates the Hell out of me. I wear my heavy dressing gown suspecting it will be unnecessary. It is, I’m already sweating.

Downstairs I use a Supranettes wipe to remove eyelid guck; swig chilled fizzy water from the fridge. Gain old-age relief from peeing in the downstairs loo.

And now here I am, staring at the expensive Ilyama monitor, daydreaming in words. Apart from close family, nobody depends on me; I am not needed; I am retired and thus in a state of mild recklessness. I may do anything but will probably end up doing not much.

Son of Satanic Mills snuffs it

Passion’s overrated, detachment makes better reading. Try writing one’s own obit.

ALTHOUGH tall, RR seemed inauspicious. Sideways he was S-shaped; stooping shoulders down to convex derrière. He ruined the effects of a magnificent nose - long, straight and Romanic – by constantly fingering it. Uncut grey hair, aimed at aping Byron, was rarely washed. Worn once, his clothes immediately looked secondhand.

Many thought him sociable. Not so! He asked questions, remembered answers, then divulged what he’d learned to embarrass the questionee. He sold writing as a form of morality but was a fraud. Unbefriended he wrote to disguise an existence that was no more than shouting down a dry well.

RR's sporting interests (rock-climbing, ski-ing, swimming) were inevitably solitary. During National Service with the RAF he attached a line by Horace to his foot-locker: Odi profanum vulgus et arceo (I loathe the profane mass and spurn them). In an unexpectedly long life he drank wine and memorised many bottle labels; alas he imposed this knowledge on those he dined with and frequently ate alone.

Impatience and assertion were at odds with his left-wing politics. His few achievements were tainted: non-idiomatic, if inventive, French allowed him to avoid monoglot English tourists in France; the lengthy difficult novels he’d read discouraged bookish conversation in his presence. He married well and some were “astonished”.  There was polite applause when he took up singing late in life but suspicions grew when he refused to release recordings of his progress.

That he was tolerated says more about those who did the tolerating; residents of North America in particular treated him as a once menacing animal, now tamed and harmless: a scorpion perhaps. In an uncharacteristic burst of irony one asked: “Whence comes such another?” A short answer suffices: From West Yorkshire.

Scared stranger

L. P. Hartley, an underrated, very English novelist, wrote The Go-Between, a beautifully observed story of corruption. Most good novels make mediocre movies but not here. The movie is even better; watch Michael Gough in a terrific supporting role.

Those who have not experienced book or movie may, nevertheless, be familiar with the novel's over-exposed first sentence: "The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there."

The foreign country called youth. Old age allows us to buy a return ticket to that destination, to wander briefly and to reflect on Hartley's truth. I discovered I was not merely younger, but someone else.

I believed I would die if I were tickled relentlessly enough. A quaint thought? I was an asthmatic child and asthma’s breathlessness seemed to prefigure a fatal, pulmonary implosion from tickling.

I believed adults were not only inexplicable but that they weren't interested. Within their ambit I might have been a toad, perhaps a slug - a small, unexceptional creature that didn't, by definition, deserve attention. I assumed this state of affairs would continue for ever.

I was told, probably by a teacher, I would eventually marry. I decided as a small act of rebellion I would not do so. A means of saying: you see, I can be different. The victory would be pyrrhic but a small price to pay.

I suspected all my thoughts – not just about sex – were impure and probably deserved punishment.

Terrified of the future I knelt at my bedside and prayed to an Obscure Being.

Eventually this over-sensitive shred of gristle withered and was reborn as someone else. One good thing – I no longer fear death by tickling. What I do fear deserves another post. Perhaps.

Counterpoint to decay/death

Sugar Loaf, near Abergavenny

Useful source of opera DVDs

Quaint street, quaint pub in Ledbury

Somewhere in this Llanarmon DC jumble is The Hand pub

Antelope, Poole: our room had the bay window

Guildhall Tavern, Poole, on right: champagne and cairanne

Writing works best when there's a sub-theme. And while A Small Death was unintentionally spreading alarm and despondency we were engaged in a prolonged celebration of our wedding anniversary - the fifty-fifth.

Prolonged because brother Sir Hugh, having just finished one of his mammoth walks (Boston to Barmouth), was staying a few days and we tried to pack in a mort of entertainment. Mort, by the way, is "a great number or quantity".

We started by encircling Sugar Loaf (Welsh: Mynydd Pen-y-Fal), a 1955 ft hump in Monmouthshire, in SH's Yeti 4WD, after which I dragged him to Abergavenny Music, forcing him to buy a Don Giovanni DVD with Bryn Terfel.

Then BY BUS! to Ledbury to a quaint pub, Prince of Wales, in an even quainter ginnel, Church Street, to eat steak ale pie and drink various forms of real ale.

Then an exhilarating, remote and greatly varied 2hr 30min drive to Llanarmon-Dyffryn-Ceiriog, North Wales, for lunch at The Hand Inn. Sir Hugh's comment: "I've never travelled so far just for a meal."

Finally an overnight stay at The Antelope (more quaintness) with dinner at the Guildhall Tavern in Poole, Dorset, approached through yet another of Britain's glories, the rolling magnificence of Hardy's Wessex.

Yes I did feel somewhat odd breaking off to comment on decay and death while enjoying the fruits of long life but I didn't seek to deceive you. The post and the tourism simply overlapped and, in any case, you were all at your marvellous best. And much appreciated.

Pennsylvania: the job market

Working in publishing in the USA between 1966 and 1972 I wrote regularly to my mother.

August 17, 1966. M, editorial director with my then employer, leaves to launch his own magazine; wants me to join him:

□ M approaches me, saying that the secretary and editorial assistant have agreed to join him, and that he is prepared to pay me $8000 (my present salary is $6600). I say I'll think about it

I decide not to go.

That evening M rings up and I tell him. M says he thinks I am a better editor than L (the present editor he tried to poach) and that he will offer me $10,500. I hedge.

I ring L and he laughs: "Hold him off until tomorrow and it'll probably be up to $15,000."□

For reasons I now forget I turn M down. Had all this not happened the big news would have been I'd got myself a car:

□ ... a 1963 Volvo 122S... twin carburettors... radiator blind.... two speed wipers... white-wall tyres (!)...  Nobody at the office can understand why I chose the car although all admit it looks well.□

My mother wants to know what I’d like for my birthday:

□ I’d like something swankily English but can’t think what. Yes I know: a new pocket address book with leather back... The basic article is fairly cheap so it should be possible to have a totally luxurious one, one of the sort I could never afford if I were buying it for myself. Don’t hurry – it must ooze quality.□

The end of the letter is characteristic:

□ Time to stop now - it's the Pirates vs the NY Mets on TV and the Pirates are still heading the National League.□

Minor anti-climax

Finally it is my birthday. The cards and the brickbats, the kisses and the cuffs, the snarls and the provocative whispers are out of the way and I may reflect, not on the event but on the assumption of great age.

Did I expect to become old, very old? Frankly I didn't. I've always drunk too much (like my Dad but not quite to his extremes) and I expected to be cut off twenty years ago. Cirrhosis of the liver seemed fashionable and I've always lacked fashion.

Failing drink, breathing was often difficult, perhaps from being brought up in the industrial North. Having had one or two hints I found it hard to be philosophical about that but we don't get to choose the door marked Exit.

Words are more fun. I expatiated on "curmudgeon" and accepted it as a single-word label, provided it didn't include the extra softening qualities not covered in the precise definition. But a new word, "caustic", recently cropped up, outside the purlieus of Tone Deaf. Is that me? "Sarcastic in a scathing and bitter way." Probably.

But it's the synonyms for caustic that are so fascinating. I offer these for future reference: cutting, biting, mordant (That's a good one!), derisive, sardonic, scornful, trenchant, acerbic... There's more.

But here’s the diagnosis. In my seventies I suddenly felt the urge to write as well as I could. Whether I achieved this is immaterial, I’m content to die trying. But writing is claustrophobic, selfish, and monomaniacal, and incompatible with the felicities of normal life. One’s always at it, ignoring human politenesses. Obviously I shouldn’t blog but blogging is writing. The tide of generosity ebbs and flows and people get irritated. My gratitude to those still staggering along in support. Roger wilco.

Ungreetings

Items on cake: French grammar and dictionary, cup of coffee, Gorgon Times with pages, Ilyama monitor, keyboard, cup for pens/pencils, portable phone, mouse, Tone Deaf print-out, stapler

On birthdays otherwise intelligent, articulate and attractive people wish you happy birthday, thereby discharging some dim obligation. A worn-out end to conversation; invention and wit out of the window.

But why on earth celebrate birthdays anyway? On the day I was born worldwide tyranny was getting into its stride and a UK male could expect to live to sixty. Far better to celebrate the events, acts and decisions which helped lengthen my life.

1948 M&B tablets taken for meningitis.
1945 End of WW2.
1953 Last long-distance bike ride.
1957 End of RAF national service.
1957 First novel (about national service) written.
1958 Sale of last motorbike.
1959 Final rock-climb.
1960 Start of married life.
1965 Move to centrally-heated accommodation (in USA).
1966 Enthusiasm for asparagus and globe artichokes revealed.
1972 Allopurinol prescribed life-long for gout.
1978 First of two ops for varicose veins.
1993 Huge redundancy payment following sale of mag I edited.
1995 Retirement from journalism.
1998 Move to detached house with three lavs.
2007 Final ski-ing holiday.
2010 Last long-distance swim.
2011 Love of Brahms consummated.  

Mind you there are pluses. In my case a special meal, a special cake, a basket of veggies, with more to come on the real date. Oh, yes, plus lots of empty bottles and dinner at Thai On Wye to follow tonight. All in the company of those best equipped to tolerate my extreme quiddity.

And then you'll be a man, my son

Received wisdom - often a synonym for bullshit - says we become adult when (a) we assume a mortgage, or (b) when the final living parent dies.

If so, my adulthood came pretty late: 1972 (at age 37) and 1985 (age 50). My most adamantine enemies maintain it hasn't yet happened and I can't disagree with them. I still get attacks of seeing myself in short trousers, railing against an authoritarian world and incapable of making even basic decisions.

I distrust these prescriptions and look elsewhere. Freedom to wander came quite early, age 13. I was allowed to go on a cycling holiday for several days in the Lake District, staying at youth hostels, accompanied by a single school friend.

I read my first adult book at 10 or 11. By which I mean a book from the adult part of the library. It was very bad and concerned a test pilot and his wife who lost her sight, regained it briefly, then lost it for good. Certainly that was the year I became a critic.

Frying a sausage proves I saw the advantages of cooking as opposed to food based on bread and butter. The date is obscure, say 12.

National service in the RAF reversed my development. Military life encourages childishness.

I left home for good in 1959 (age 24), my mother weeping. But life in London was hardly adult; more as if I'd joined secular angels in a secular paradise.

Marriage at 25 (Note cause and effect by re-reading the previous para) may be the single most important step, or should be. But it's a long process, learning to think in stereo rather than mono. Fatherhood is unequivocally adult but not in a nice way at first.

Generation gap

 Me? I've been putting in my post-op eye drops. Writing a long short story about "the Forest". Watching the TdF on telly. Fetching The Guardian from the filling station. Watering the garden (Oh joy of joys!). Washing up. Sleeping intermittently. Dozing after lunch and dozing late afternoon. The usual pursuits of an aged, self-proclaimed intellectual.

While younger daughter (Occasional Speeder) has been...

No pic for this, alas

This mini-event is mere daydream, raw material gathered by a sex-yearning sixteen-year-old and stirred about many decades later.

We were leaving Bradford Civic cinema where I saw many foreign movies in my youth. Was it Le Salaire de la Peur? Un Condamné à Mort S’est Echappé?

Whatever. Outside, on the pavement, G uttered an unmistakable sound of approval about the movie (Whooo! Sheesh!) turned and said. “C’mon, gi me a kiss.”

Strange. She’s G but I never knew her name. She was two or three years older – a woman, virtually adult, addressing a desperate adolescent. In real life I saw her only on the bus home, always on the upper deck, often appearing grubby, staring blankly ahead, alone. She got off before me at the scruffy end of the suburb.

Her hair was memorable. Golden but lifeless, clearly lengthy but piled up into a tall crown held in place by a net. Sometimes grubbiness pervaded her heavily made-up face.

Inexplicably, we’d seen some fancy-schmanzy thing and now she was commanding me. A tense beginner I kissed her lips too hard, imagining  this might suggest the passion she was expecting. Or demanded. The excessive pressure rendered her lips as a car tyre. I was seismically aware of her full, possibly muscular body and carefully avoided contact.

Perhaps it was the grubbiness; people weren’t as obsessional about washing in the fifties. I liked her not caring about that and yet she did make-up. And yes I know what Freud says about dirt.

I used parts of G in a short story West Riding Strange, but thought she deserved this more explicit reference. Conventional teenage erotic? Perhaps. But what's conventional?

The secondary womb

I doubt the windows of the Telegraph and Argus building in Bradford had been cleaned since the thirties. Not surprising. I joined the staff a mere six years after WW2 and there'd been other priorities. Stalagmites of filth rose from the frame bottoms with the rest coloured a yellowy-brown. A hint at what the insides of my lungs presently look like.

"Joined the staff" is misleading; I was employed as a tea-boy. Morning, lunchtime and afternoon four of us brought mugs of tea from the canteen to chair-bound sub-editors and reporters hammering away at thirty-year-old Underwood typewriters. Our trays were ingeniously adapted; they had started life within coat-racks, detachable troughs into which wet umbrellas drained. Tea from the mugs slopped over, eventually turning into sludge since the trays were never cleaned.

Squalor reigned but I'd found my spiritual home. I was among the crass and the cynical, the under-educated and the frequently cantankerous, the shabbily dressed and the eternally cigaretted. All however serving a common purpose - turning events into words and ensuring that those words made sense. The talk was of "intros", "paras" and "heads" and the mood obsessional.

As I key in these words today, sixty-five years later, I am drawing on those impromptu lessons where mistakes in syntax were announced to all in a humiliating bellow and one felt grievously one had let the business down.

Training was mainly on the job. After an exhausting day I travelled by bus to watch the first act of, say, Coward's Present Laughter. Returned to the reporters' room, now much quieter, and banged out two hundred words. For which, if it was published, I was paid a penny a line.

School and its failures forgotten, I was starting to grow up.

Thy greater creation

 Creativity at Robinson Towers is not limited to novels based on woman worship. There are others strands, more inventive, more titillating, more useful. VR is less demonstrative but she gets things done.

Last night she produced a casserole, black with plenitude No name, of course, for she rejects the persiflage of gustation. I forked it in, my chin close to the plate; to waste a scrap would have been a Robinsonian form of blasphemy.

On other occasions, cakes. Especially seed cake, that most adult of flavours, light years away from chocolate-smeared bravado that duller palates rave about.

VR reads hugely (220 titles a year) and summarises each experience in a long long alphabetical list. The first three entries:

Author: Achebe, C. Title: Things fall apart. Date finished: Jun 27 2007. Rating (out of 10): 7.00    Plot: Europeans come to tribal Nigeria. Life of one man and family in lake.
Author: Ackroyd, P. Title: Clerkenwell talkes. Date finished: Mar 10 2005. Plot:  Mystery during deposement of Richard II. Cant. Tales char's. Not sure what was done, by who. Light
Author: Adams, J. Title: Angel eyes. Date finished: Jan 17 2005. Plot: Mystery drugs, disfigured ex-cop. Ghosts. Computers.

Like the other sage, living in Brittany, VR knits. Grandson Zach attends a CofE school and the above will be his Christmas gift to his educators.

GORGON TIMES
".... success tended to be the norm. Marking it wasn’t necessary. But I must mark it now. I’m proud of you. And I…” The sentence tailed off.

Her mother’s eyes shone. Clare could never recall such emotion. Conceivably that final sentence held a confession of love which Mrs Morgan was unable to admit. But it didn’t matter, the admission was tangible. They embraced awkwardly. Through lack of practice, Clare imagined.