I confess... sort of

It is said most male Brits would rather reveal the intimacies of their sex life than their earnings. Tone Deaf is currently shouting down an unresponsive well so perhaps I should talk cash. Sex, if I become desperate.

Note: All conversions represent relative values in the year cited.

● I started work on Monday August 19, 1951, aged 15 years and 360 days. My weekly pay (cash in a small brown envelope) was £1-10 shillings ($1.95).

● Emerging from RAF national service in 1957 my weekly pay was £5 ($6.55).

● Leaving the UK for work in the USA in late 1965 my annual pay was (I think) £1250 ($3488). In Pittsburgh it zoomed up to $6000 (£2150).

● I left the USA in 1972 when my annual pay was (nominally – I didn’t see all of it at the end; the company was slowly dying) $14,000 (£5479).

● I returned to the UK in 1972 and an annual salary of £2500 ($6388).

● Between 1972 and 1995 I worked for the same company and enjoyed progressive rises, retiring on £31,000 pa ($48,447).

● It’s at this point I become a little shy. The pension scheme I belonged to between 1972 – 1995 was generous though I, like many people still working, was ignorant of this. When it came it was – putting it genteelly – a pleasant surprise. I was unbelievably lucky, luckier still as the ‘oughties rolled on and pensions elsewhere became meaner and qualification periods grew longer. Mustn’t gloat. Our lives changed.

● Between 1995 and 1998, pensioned off, waiting for VR to retire, I wrote freelance, earning annually £12,000 ($20,394). All tax paid.

● Six years in the USA led to a Trump mini-pension: presently £3000 ($3961).

There’s more (regarding investments), but now I feel I need my undies.

Quote from VR: "I read your (ie, this) post. It was quite interesting. But what readers would really like to know is your financial situation. now."
Tis true! An unexpected and gigantic tsunami. Keep on refusing to comment on Tone Deaf and I may feel compelled to tell all.

Heartfelt

Plague  Post 3

SPEAKING IN TONGUES “Vox. pop.” – mainly a TV practice - is lazy, useless journalism. Send cameras on to the streets and get the public to bulk out the news broadcasts. Its futility became apparent during Brexit; clearly these random victims – from both sides – had no idea about the increasingly complex issues and could only burble banalities.

The Plague has changed all that. Touched to the core, people speak clearly, factually and often with great originality. I should have jotted some quotes but I was transfixed by the new articulacy. Except for the one: a nurse in tears, having finished a 48-hour shift, arrived late at the supermarket and found nothing to eat. Those shelf strippers might end up needing my services, she said, crying softly.

HEY, BIG SPENDER On Friday we had a celebration; dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant famed for its front-of-house welcome. That at least was the plan. Instead I called in at Majestic and bought a 2006 vintage bottle of Moet plus an extreme shiraz from Australia. Not looking at the prices. The check-out guy said, “Unfortunately that will be…”

I trawled history. More than twice what I paid for my first motorbike. A single seat at the ludicrously over-priced Royal Opera House. Four times the cost of the suit I got married in. Much more than the engagement ring. Couldn’t have invited the tearful interviewee; we were self-isolating. Lacerated by guilt.

WE NEED SOMETHING FUNNY A wicked back-blast of wind as he mounted the stairway to Air Force One proved Trump was absolutely right to adopt the weird hairstyle he flaunts. Covering a multitude of sins.

Where was he going? To buy some golf-balls, said someone. Even presidents need time off from the burdens of state.

Literary ton

Here are a hundred works of fiction (novels, poems, stage and TV plays) which have satisfied me at one time or another. Many were re-read or re-experienced. 

These items are not necessarily “the greatest” - whatever that means - since that would lead to arguments. Nor perhaps the profoundest (Otherwise I might have included Proust’s A la recherche..). Nor the best-written (How about W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz?) Nor even the most original (Say, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces?).

“When I say “satisfied” I mean works which have entertained me and left me with something to chew on. I took a nightmarish decision to restrict myself to one title per author (other than trilogies, tetralogies, etc).

I’ve tried to avoid obvious titles where possible. Also pretentiousness. The list is roughly chronological and advances even more roughly towards titles which have influenced me most. The final ten continue to influence me to this day.

This list is in no way complete and should prove conclusively, to those who have been formally educated, that I haven’t been. It exceeds my 300-word limit by a country mile.

100. A. A. Milne. Now We are Six (Poems). With me on her knee my mother recited “Sir Brian had a battleaxe with great big knobs on,” several times. It became mine for life.

99. Kenneth Grahame. Wind in the Willows. Have you ever met such a well-defined quartet of main characters?

98. Arthur Ransome. We Didn’t Mean To Go to Sea. Nominally for teenagers, actually for latent adults.

97. H. Rider Haggard. Alan Quartermain. Colonialism red in tooth and claw. OK then, non-PC now.

96. Hugh Lofting. The Dr Doolittle sequence. Then and now it was the innocence.

95. Gladys Mitchell. The Rising of the Moon. Early “subversive” whodunnit: Christina is a brilliantly realised supporting character. I fell in love with her, me still pre-adolescent.

94. Rudyard Kipling. Jungle Book. Good story inextricably tangled up with the fact I was a Wolf Cub (they’re now called Cub Scouts) at the time I read it.

93. E. Nesbit. The Bastable Family. A group of Victorian children who must look after themselves for long periods. As with the Arthur Ransome book (above) its readership occupies the no-man’s-land between childhood and the dim perceptions of growing up.

92. C. S. Lewis. The Screwtape Letters. Pro devil instructs apprentice devil how to corrupt the human race. It’s true, it’s great fun.

91. George Eliot. Scenes from Clerical Life. Preparation for the magnum opus, Middlemarch.

90. John Masefield. Cargoes (Poem). Why poetic rhythm matters, and sticks.

89. Tom Stoppard. Professional Foul (Play). Philosophy scrambled with soccer.

88. R. L. Stevenson. Kidnapped. Fast-clip adventure; super-memorable Alan Breck.

87. John Steinbeck. Cannery Row. Well-controlled folksiness in California.

86. Dorothy Sayers. Murder Must Advertise. Amateur detective, Peter Wimsey, issues a snob’s guide to high culture

85. Gerald Kersh. Prelude to a Certain Midnight. Gangsterism breaks out in London.

84. Henry Williamson. Dandelion Days. Leaden misery of schooldays transmuted to pure gold.

83. Stella Gibbons. Cold Comfort Farm. You’ll never long for the simple country life again.

82. William Blake. The Mental Traveller (Poem). “For the eye altering, alters all.”

81. Christopher Fry. The Lady’s not for Burning (Verse play). Hero wants to be hanged, heroine faces the stake. Yet it entertains.

80. P. G. Wodehouse. Very Good Jeeves. Class system turned upside down.

79. John Dryden. Fairest Isle (Poem/song.). “Sighs that blow the fire of love.”

78. John Lodwick. Stamp Me Mortal. Forgotten English novelist; forgotten plot; warm glow remembered.

77. T. S. Eliot. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (Verse collection). “McCavity! McCavity! He’s broken every human law, He breaks the law of gravity.”

76. Ian Sansom. A Young Wife’s Tale. Another forgotten English novelist/travel writer. Writes with great tenderness.

75. Oscar Wilde. The Importance of Being Ernest (Play/Movie). Archetypal comedy of manners; never bettered. Two well-brought-up young women at each other’s throats: X: “I call a spade a spade.” Y: “I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade.”

74. George Orwell. Coming up for air. Acutely depressing, physically decaying, overweight, lower-middle-class whinger views onset of WW2.

73. John Galsworthy. The Forsyte Saga. Everyone laughed at JG getting the Nobel Prize. Yet this family tale (several volumes, several generations) is sleekly told. A real page turner.

72. Edmond Rostand. Cyrano de Bergerac (Play). The big nose one. “Greater love hath no man...” yet gloriously told. Cyrano was the hero I wanted to be.

71. Sinclair Lewis. Babbit, Parodies the US conviction that life revolves round the act of selling things.

70. Aldous Huxley. Antic Hay. As funny as its title; pointless “lit” types lollygag in post-WW1 London.

69. Dylan Thomas. Under Milk Wood (Radio play). Welsh village exposed for all to see. Sample lines: Polly Garter: “Only babies grow in our garden.” Butcher Bynon: “... running down the street with a finger – not his own – in his mouth.”

68. Stendahl. The Red and the Black. Julian Sorel, something of a weak-need rogue but you gotta love him.

67. Oliver Goldsmith. She Stoops to Conquer (Play). Eighteenth-century heroine pretends to be lower-class to snag hero. I heard it first on radio; still terrific.

66. Ernest Hemingway. A Moveable Feast. Atypically un-hairychested prose; young couple enjoy life in 1920s Paris. Claims to be memoir but style is novelistic.

65. Isaac Asimov. I, Robot. Imagination at full-stretch. Compiles Three Laws of Robotics and explores them in this and other lively novels.

64. Gustave Flaubert. Madame Bovary. French provincial doctor’s wife fights rural boredom by overdosing on infidelity. Boy, does she regret it! Now somewhat out of favour for its anti-feminism.  

63. James Thurber. My Life and Hard Times. The one where JT’s mother believes removing a light bulb causes electricity to leak away.

62. Thomas Mann. Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man. An exploration of immorality, but lighter in tone than, say, Joseph and his Brethren. Unfinished, not that you’d know.

61. Mark Twain. Critique on James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Defects. Uses simple arithmetic to destroy JFC for ever and a day.

60. Albert Camus. The Plague. A testament to human goodness.

59. Robert Burns. My Luve is Like a Red Red Rose (Poem). “An’ I will love you still, my dear/Til a’ the seas gang dry.” Now I can sing it too.

58. Phillip Roth. Goodbye Columbus. Relentlessly hilarious yet critical account of growing up in a Jewish family. Especially hard on Jewish mommas. Portnoy’s Complaint had yet to arrive.

57. Charles Dickens. Great Expectations. Take just one detail: had there ever been a fictional heroine anything like Estella up to then?

56. Anita Brookner. Hotel du Lac. The heart of a middle-aged single woman comforted only by lonely money.

55. Herman Melville. Moby Dick. Tough for many wouldbe well-reads. Because I gulped it down in a week I often feel unnatural among the intelligentsia. It’s about whales and whaling. The initial sentence is a wing-dinger, thereafter you have to concentrate.

54. Marcel Pagnol. Manon des Sources. Recipe: Take a handful of Provencal peasants and a shortage of water; mix well. Could break your heart.

53. G. B. Shaw. The Devil’s Disciple (Play/movie). Brits vs. Yanks in the War of Independence. As often with Shaw, the villain, General Burgoyne, gets the best lines. Not surprisingly he’s played by Laurence Olivier in the movie.

52. Eric Ambler. The Levanter. Much detail about a ceramics factory, yet it’s all germane to this polished thriller set in Syria.

51. Jane Austen. Persuasion. Family lacks money to maintain their life-style. Heroine, Ann Eliot, is 27 and thus – by our standards - only a few steps away from a care home. I like the realism.

50. Anthony Trollope. The Way We Live Now. AT wrote 47 novels. I read about thirty of them then gave up. This is by far the best. High finance and embezzlement.

49. Kurt Vonnegut. Slaughterhouse Five. Worm’s eye view of carpet bombing of Dresden.

48. Henry James. What Maisie Knew. Child’s view of adult behaviour. HJ’s masterpieces can be hard going (The style! The style!) but this is much shorter and goes down like slippery elm food. Didn’t know he had it in him.

47. Olivia Manning. The Balkan Trilogy. Recently married Brit couple, Guy and Harriet Pringle, escape the Nazis’ overflow of Europe by travelling south-east. Best thing: Guy’s dominance gradually wanes and it’s Harriet who shoulders the responsibilities.

46. Vladimir Nabokov. Lolita. Yes, I know. Pervy and all that. And yet this may be the wittiest novel ever written. Alas, uncomfortable for US citizens.

45. Anthony Burgess. The Malayan Trilogy. Three of his earliest, all of a piece, a great sense of place, even poignant. Later novels tended to be show-offs.

44. Walter Raleigh. I Wish I Loved the Human Race (Poem). It spits with weary disenchantment.

43. John Updike. The Poorhouse Fair. That someone so young (26 when he did so) could write so tellingly about being old!

42. Honoré de Balzac. Le Père Goriot. Father sacrifices himself, degrades himself, for the sake of his daughter. In Paris – where else?

41. Beatrix Potter. The Tale of Peter Rabbit. As parents, VR and I read/re-read aloud books to our babes-in-arms, force-feeding them words. We never tired of Peter “bursting his buttons”

40. Noel Coward. Present Laughter (Play). A very junior reporter, I first saw this done by amateurs. I was trying hard to be cynical but laughed my head off. Still do. It’s bomb-proof.

39. Joyce Carey (He’s a man, by the way.) The Horse’s Mouth. No one has written more persuasively about how it feels to slap paint on to canvas. Or about immediately-post-WW2 London.

38. J. B. Priestley. Angel Pavement. Huge compendium novel (they-re out of fashion these days), interweaving a handful of characters locally based in pre-war London. Priestley’s from my home town, Bradford, and I used to think him uppity. Not here, though.

37. Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina. Proving that whatever Hollywood says gender incompatibility outweighs lerve and can prove fatal.

36. Hans Hellmut Kirst. Gunner Asch series. WW2 as seen by a low-ranking German infantryman who is more of a pain to Hitler than to the Allied forces. One of the war’s great survivors. Zestful and funny.

35. John Donne. To his Mistress Going to Bed (Poem). A perfect crutch for male adolescence. Sex without sentiment. What young man could not thrill to: “Licence my roving hands, and let them go”.

34. Malcom Bradbury. The History Man. Send-up of extreme left-wing lecturer in modern (ie, not Oxbridge) British university. Corruption from an unexpected  source. Unbelievable mental cruelty. One laughs uneasily.

33. Muriel Spark. The  Girls of Slender Means. Does more or less “what it says on the can” in sixties London. Beautifully selective English. Memorable line: “Fearful bad luck! Preggers! Wedding’s on Friday.”

32. John Osborne. Look Back in Anger (Play). Said to summarise the fifties – ie, “no causes worth dying for.” I preferred it for the language: Elderly woman referring to central character’s judgment on her: “He said I’d be a good blow-out for the worms.”

31. Ross Thomas. The Fourth Durango. But it could have been Chinaman’s Chance, Out on the Rim, Protocol for a Kidnapping, or a dozen others. Masterly thrillers, great dialogue, worldwide settings.

30. Joseph Heller. Catch 22. With every passing generation this novel helps re-establish the sheer madness of warfare. I saw it as a dark comedy; re-reading it revealed a far tougher – more intellectual – proposition than I remembered.

29. John le Carré. The Honourable Schoolboy. Possibly his longest novel; plenty of elbow-room for scuffling through the files where much of the drama is created.

28. Elmore Leonard. Cuba Libre. The US’s greatest dialoguist.  Turns his back on Detroit/Florida and opts for Cuba at outbreak of Spanish-American war. Smuggling horses, for goodness sake.

27. Salman Rushdie. Midnight’s Children. Published in 1981; said to exemplify magical realism, making it a difficult read. For my money a clear-sighted, well dramatised account of India’s partition and independence.

26. Robert B. Parker. The Judas Goat. Spenser, Boston private-eye, pursues a case in London. Terse, formulaic, somehow appealing. One of my guilty secrets.

25. Mary McCarthy. The Group. US best-seller for two years. Eight Vassar girls have sex in previously unheard-of detail. Moderately serious. Better than it sounds.

24. J. D. Salinger. Catcher in the Rye. It’s all been said.

23. Hilaire Belloc. Tarantella (Poem). Better known for its first line: “Do you remember an inn, Miranda?” leading to “And the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees.” Frisky, virtuosic rhyming from one who knows his trade.

22. Annie Proulx. The Shipping News. For me the hero is Newfoundland.

21. Barbara Trapido. Brother of the More Famous Jack. English family eccentricity in an assured debut novel that entertains you straight from the title.

20. Anthony Powell. A Dance to the Music of Time (12 volumes). Ambitiously claimed as British equivalent of Proust’s A la Recherche... but more like a plot outline. Skims over Oxbridge-educated elite during four or five decades. Best bits: three titles covering WW2. Stodgy style initially hard to digest. Included here because of the creation of Widmerpool –  a literary one off.

19. Penelope Lively (Actually a Dame). The Road to Lichfield. Booker Prize finalist. Heavily domesticated, non-working. middle-aged wife goes in for a spot of adultery. Opens up a new form of eroticism for me.

18. Antony Jay, Jonathan Lynn. Yes Minister (TV series). Uncomfortably true account of how UK is governed. Side-splittingly funny but should we now be laughing?

17. Elizabeth Jane Howard. The Cazalet Chronicles (Four volumes or, if you like, five). Best seller sequence. Home Counties, numerous, upper-middle-class family up to and including WW2. Characterisation is fine; much better are the details about leisure pursuits and ways of earning a living.

16. V. S. Naipaul. A House for Mr Biswas. I ignored this for ages. Shouldn’t have done. I’m ashamed.

15. Michel Butor. La Modification. Man leaves Paris, travels by train to Rome to his lover. Intends to say he has found a job in Rome, will leave his wife and family, will live with his lover. Gradually doubt, fear and cowardice intervene. All in the mind.

14. Romain Gary. Gros Calin. Man keeps python as pet in his Parisian apartment. Go on! Imagine! Bet what you come up with isn’t as funny as this book.

13. Paul Scott. The Raj Quartet. India during WW2. Uneasy co-existence for the Brits. Read all four in one burst and sweat along with a long list of characters.

12. Alan Bennett. The History Boys (Play). What constitutes a great teacher? Why might society find such a paragon unacceptable?

11. Len Deighton. Trio of Bernard Samson trilogies (Hook, Line, Sinker, etc). Inter alia, a spy-story writer whose compact, seemingly emotionless, tense yet witty style of writing has got better and better over the decades. A joy to read for his plots, his characterisation and his technique.

10. Colm Toibin. The Master. One of two novels (the other’s by David Lodge) centering on real-life Henry James’s humiliation when writing for the stage. Unexpected from Toibin, proof of his width

TOP TEN

9. Ford Madox Ford. Parade’s End tetralogy. Anthony Burgess rated FMF as the greatest British novelist of the twentieth century, so who am I dispute this judgment? These four novels centering on WW1 are about honour, obligation and “being a gentleman” in the old-fashioned sense of the word. I’d like to think that they provide a reference point for present-day Tories but that idea has been betrayed endlessly in the last four or five years.

8. Graham Greene. Our Man in Havana. How can a novel be simultaneously funny and dead serious? How can a Chief of Police in an authoritarian state be morally pure, or sort of? GG shows how.

7. Anne Tyler. The Accidental Tourist. But they’re all good. A simple recipe: take the common folk of Baltimore and their quotidian concerns, mix them up, out comes platinum. I’d like to be able to write like AT, better still, imagine like her.

6. Scott Fitzgerald. Great Gatsby. A short novel, so here’s a short verdict: blissfully elliptical.

5. Patrick O’Brian. The Aubrey/Maturin series (20 titles). Historical novels are written now about then (ie, the past). I’m not normally a fan but I’ve read this series at least three times. The language is then, the social mores are then, the politics is then, the two central characters are precisely of their time. There’s fun, stirring adventure, affection, tragedy, contemporary science.

4. Michael Frayn. Copenhagen (play). Two scientists, German, Danish, familiar with the uncertainty principle, talk glancingly about progress in atomic physics in 1941. It would bore the pants off you, wouldn’t it? Yeah. It ran for over 300 performances in London, same on Broadway.

3. Colette. Le Blé en Herbe. The most delicious male adolescent’s daydream ever written.

2. Evelyn Waugh. The Sword of Honour trilogy. Waugh on war. So he wasn’t just limited to the Catholic church and Britain’s toffs. Irony that could break your legs.

1. William Wordsworth. Composed upon Westminster Bridge (Poem.). A sonnet, of course, the only real poetry for me. A title that’s hardly a title. But the way it starts: “Earth has not anything to show more fair”. Ah! In other hands it would be either fustian or boiler-plate. For decades I ignored poetry until these fourteen lines spoke out to me: “Stop being a twerp.”

Unnumbered. James Joyce. Ulysses. Some twenty percent I don’t understand and probably never will. I can live with that. Two widely differing men inhabit the parts of Dublin they’re familiar with. Finally they meet. A woman who is both fiercely individual and yet all women reflects on her life. Of course it isn’t that simple. But it’s vivid and human, it shows what can be done with language, and the reference to The Odyssey is far from coincidental. Having read it more than once I’m both humbled and pumped up with pride. The story lingers in my mind, never far away. I took a photo of the Martello Tower (yes, that one), not something I usually bother about. I dare say I’ll look at it again some day. But it’s the words that reach out:

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”

Notes on prodigality

Asked in a dream to react journalistically to The Prodigal Son, I awoke reluctantly. Refreshed by sleep I really fancied the job, so here we are. I didn't re-read the parable, I worked from memories dating back to primary school when the war was still on. For simplicity’s sake I call the sons Remain and Brexit.

For Brexit to leave with cash in his pocket the family estate would have had to be liquidated. A nightmare these days since the house would need to be sold. Did Palestinians then own their houses? Dunno. I'm more inclined to think it involved disposing of a flock of sheep and goats.

The division was into halves not thirds which was lousy for the father. In effect, the proposal involved bringing the future back into the present; in the future the father would be dead.

It is either said outright or implied that Brexit "wasted his substance in riotous living". I see wine (and shudder at its probable taste) and I see a red-light district (encore shudder). Would they be enough to ruin him? Ah yes, there's gambling, that would do it.

When Brexit returns, all tuckered out (Did disease play a part?), Remain quite justifiably complains. Dad talks about a son that was once dead and is now alive. Parental forgiveness outweighs legal fiddle-faddle. But did it work out? My worry is that Remain might not even trust his father again, let alone his ne'er-do-well brother.

The lessons are obvious. But here's another. A sub-text suggests Brexit was bored with his agrarian life amd set out to debauch himself. He achieved that but I doubt it was much fun. Debauchery is only enjoyable when it's incidental. And now a never-ending life of toil stretches beyond the horizon.

Choices, choices

The Guardian doesn't permit casual use of "schizophrenia" when it simply means facing two choices. It's thought unsympathetic towards those with mental illnesses. Nevertheless...

Since an early age I've needed to arrange words in sequences that might make sense. Letters, lists, arguments, stories, articles, novels, verse - but, most important, shuffling the elements, creating something out of nothing.

For two years I've been trying to write my fifth novel, Rictangular Lenses, one-third complete. Lately in dribbles of one sentence at a time. Three days ago a bright vista opened up: a long scene in skeleton form which I knew I would enjoy writing. This, yesterday morning:

The holding company, Heung Fung Private Ltd, was based in Singapore, and was represented by three businessmen of Chinese origin. All wore carefully tailored suits in pale grey, somehow achieving far greater formality than the dark blue their western equivalents would have favoured. They approached in a triangular phalanx, one to the fore, the others two steps behind on either side. A hand extended.

With the next two thousand words clear in my mind.

Yesterday, too, a late birthday present: the 56-page score for Schubert's cycle, Die schöne Müllerin, 19 songs most of which I know fairly well, but only by ear.

I break off  from Rictangular to savour the printed notes of Song 8, Morgengruss. Sing along quietly for ten bars, then back to the keyboard and the novel. Then back to Song 3...

It's driving me mad but the two impulses are equally strong. What’s more, I’ve broken off to write this post. Remember the fable about the dog with a bone, seeing its own reflection in the stream, losing the bone? Yeah, but that story’s already written

So, how was your month?

An unpleasant general election campaign is ending and conflicting events have flitted by.

Young innocents were slaughtered in Manchester, adult innocents (most, it seems, from foreign parts) were slaughtered near London Bridge.

In a tiny speck of national unimportance, V and I sing, full volume, Mozart's duet about the rightness of men and women getting together. V, exhilarated, to be married next month, applauds my progress and delights in lending her voice to the duet. I present her with champagne and, for a moment, we try not to dwell on Manchester kids also entranced by music.

The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Express and other newspapers combine to vilify Jeremy Corbyn. Yet he, one of life's natural protestors, comes over as more human on telly than Theresa May. The Guardian christens TM The MayBot for her mechanical, repetitive and hopelessly abstract responses to questions.

The Hay Festival, a celebration of cultural unity - from Jane Austen to the marvels of human microbiology - arrives and departs. An Italian professor at Oxford University (Oh, hateful, hateful Brexit) discourses wittily on the ways we must react to an IT-dominated world.

Donald Trump quotes the London mayor (a Muslim) out of context and sneers at him. A presidential spokesman suggests DT's tweets could well be ignored.

Our grandson, Ian, arrives early for Hay and prepares casseroles, etc, in advance for ourselves and our guests. An aid to VR whose shingles has now endured almost a year.

Sydney Nolan, Australia’s greatest painter, lived nearby during his final years and a new gallery of his work has opened. We visit. Observe vigorous yet profound paintings, each an unmistakable expression of his quirky personality.

We eat asparagus and refuse to be seduced by promising Labour figures in the opinion polls.

More offshore notes

As to the European Union  (see News From An Offshore Island) I regard  "In" as the least worst option. But forget political, statesmanlike and commercial arguments; let's go sentimental.

A holiday is not a holiday unless I go "foreign". When we stay overnight at UK locations these aren't holidays: we go to London to see opera or visit the National Theatre, or Welsh fastnesses to celebrate a birthday. Real holidays lasting a week or a fortnight require a touch of the exotic.

"Exotic" starts with a foreign country's visual impact, typically its architecture. This doesn't mean cathedrals, they’re too rare; I'm talking day-to-day buildings.

It was a lousy grey day when we drove into Germany in late December for the Cologne Christmas market. We were on a motorway not a winding country road and passing by what Brits call industrial estates. Nothing quaint, nothing artistic, but already Germany's foreignness was beckoning, and I was reponding. German offices and factories (see first pic) are simply different: clean-looking, nearly always severely rectilinear, often in unexpected colours (black, for instance), tidily arranged car-parks. This won’t set your pulse pulsing because you're hoping for rolling hills and generous oaks; but I'm contrary, out for confirmation I'm in LvB country.

Then there are the poster hoardings. Horrible, you say. A blot on the landscape. Me, I'm eating up the posters. Language you see, and the thrill of being able to translate what's displayed.

We enter residential suburbs and now we know for sure we're not in Brit-land. Those steeply angled roofs, the plethora of windows, the use of tiles.

Even if the UK votes "Out" I can still visit Germany but it won't be the same. I'll be merely a non-European in transit. Nothing more than a tourist. No inside track.

Sand-strewn salons, cool and deep

Hair (especially women's hair) fascinates me:

Clare  - Gorgon Times
 ... a transformation that Clare had covertly inspected many times during the past few days. Multicoloured highlights, running from root to tip, varying subtly from light brown to dark gold, like trapped sedimentary layers in an exposed cliff. A sauce where cream and chili oil had been added and gently stirred, just once. Colours that simulated movement.

Jana - Out Of Arizona
Her ash blonde urchin cut was still wet as she combed it into two arcs bracketing the sides of her face. With the fingers of her left hand as a scissor-like guide she edged round the extremities with real scissors, removing a precise 17 mm. Heat from the hair dryer caused the edges to curl inwards.

Francine - Second Hand
As they put on their blues Chinelo (Nigerian trainee surgeon) said, “I envy you your hair. I’ve read about the comparison - corn-silk - but never seen it. I love the way it floats and flops blondishly. Your cap contains it like a mesh bag. No cap on earth holds in this wiry hedge of mine."

Judith - Blest Redeemer
Her hair dropped down beyond her shoulder blades and would demand half an hour’s combing, coiling and pinning before she was satisfied... Shorter hair would have been less trouble but would have betrayed her mother’s (whisper): “Long hair isn’t always in fashion, but many people like it.” ...The essence of long hair, (Judith) told herself, was length. And if long hair was admired, longer hair might be admired more.

 

Presently I’m experimenting. The shampooing phase (rare) opening up the sagacious, the Byronic, the mentally disturbed, the self-aggrandising, the Cairn terrier, the anchorite and the cliché physicist phases. Why be stuck as just an old man?

 

 

Two separate score cards

It's been a hard two years for our daughter, Occasional Speeder.
But which is 47-year-old OS, which her 24-year-old daughter, Bella?

My personal ratings for Borderlines Film Festival, just finished.

FIVE STARS
Winter Sleep (Turkey). Masterfully deconstructed ego in wild Anatolia
Birdman (USA) Frenzy behind scenes on Broadway. Ambitious, witty
Ida (Poland). Jewish nun explores her Holocaust history. Austere, eloquent.
Phoenix (Germany). Established actress/director partnership; concentration-camp survivor competes with pre-war self.

FOUR STARS
Wild Tales (Argentina). Dark vengeance played out in six hilarious mini-films.
Mr Turner (UK). Three-dimensional, vivid later-years biog of Britain’s greatest painter.
Still Life (UK). Bureaucracy saves souls in SE London. Touching but very English.

THREE STARS
La Maison de la Radio (France). Day in life of French radio channel
Whiplash (USA). Frankenstein gets to teach jazz drumming. Often a bit too OTT.
Foxcatcher (USA), Wealthy madman manipulates wrestling world. True but unreal.
Cycling with Molière (France). Actors become their parts in classic play, Le Misanthrope.
Lourdes (France). Is it or isn’t it a medical miracle?  Fascinating authentic background.
Black Coal, Thin Ice (China). Cops and murderers in hideously ugly but persuasive modern China
Effie Gray (UK). Why art-critic John Ruskin preferred writing.
Inherent Vice (USA). Early druggy/PI Pynchon novel becomes astonishingly coherent movie. Funny.

TWO STARS
Amour Fou (Austria/Germany). Could Jane Austen accommodate a suicide pact? Perhaps not.
The Duke of Burgundy (UK). Excessive lesbian sado-humiliation among lepidopterists. But beautiful.
A Most Wanted Man (UK/USA). Disappointingly flat end to  Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s career in treacherous spy fest.
Before I Go to Sleep (UK). Promising start explores amnesia; distintegrates into blood-boltered whodunnit.

ONE STAR
Enemy (Canada). Much praised, characterless alter-ego tale. Good camera.
Boyhood (USA). Texan rite of passage: sentimental, setbacks mysteriously overcome.
The Clouds of Cils Maria (France/Switzerland). Out-of-control, shapeless, inferior version of Hollywood classic, All About Eve.
Ex Machina (USA). Inarticulate nerd tests robots for signs of AI. The irony is unacknowledged.

Got it? Flaunt it!

Luxury is several things:

● Ease/comfort based on habitual or liberal use of expensive items without regard to cost.

●  Something desirable but costly or difficult to obtain.

●  Something relatively expensive adding to pleasure or comfort but not indispensable.

Do I do luxury? Ignoring wine as too complex, the answer must be no. I once bought a Savile Row suit but only to dazzle potential US employers at job interviews. Several shirts were excessive but were needed for special events - notably weddings.

My Longines wristwatch cost lots but was a gift. Dictionaries? - they're big but I flatter myself I need big. Dover sole costs much more then cod but it's better; in any case it's a rarish treat.

Only my shaving bowl refills are luxurious. A tenner, they cost three times more than the competition and come from Geo F. Trumper in swanky Curzon Street, London, who once cut James Bond's hair. When they lasted a year they were almost a bargain. Now only six months.

Trumper is "for the discerning" and issues instructions: "Only shave after a bath or shower; prepare the skin with Trumper’s skin food.”

Why Trumper? To keep tabs on the enemy.

PROUSTIAN TITBIT
I would sleep wrapped up, as it were, in a great cloak of snug and savoury air, shot with the glow of logs which would break out again in flame in a sort of alcove without walls, a cave of warmth dug out of the heart of the room itself, a zone of heat whose boundaries were constantly shifting and altering in temperature as gusts of air ran across  them to strike freshly upon my face…

Embarrassment - a second try

My late mate Joe (née Plutarch) handled social embarrassment better than I did and yesterday's post, A Little Tit-For-Tat, tried to explore this. It failed and I deleted it. This should be an improvement.

Forty-plus years ago I attended an odd press conference. Joe, sponsored by a forklift company, had written a booklet about forklifts and was conducting the launch. Since Joe was my editor boss I was merely a passive spectator. Another journalist asked the obvious question touching on Joe's impartiality as author. I winced sympathetically and was relieved when Joe responded well.

Thirty years later, as an editor myself, I spoke at a press conference to launch my magazine's logistics exhibition. In the audience were journalists from magazines competing with mine. The issue was: did industry need this new exhibition? I'd prepared myself  and came out on top.

Both occasions had the potential for a special type of embarrassment. I suspect Joe avoided his problem as I avoided mine: through preparation.

But Joe could also avoid wider embarrassment, typically when approached by a street loonie. He embraced the event. Asking questions he defused the awkwardness. Whereas I tended to walk away furtively. Real mates usually have skills one lacks; this was one of Joe's.

FRENCH BIGGIE As hinted I've started re-reading A La Recherche... It fits me like an old shoe. Recommending Proust is far too dangerous but how about an extract now and then?

… awake again for short snatches only, just long enough to hear the regular creaking of the wainscot, or to open my eyes to settle the shifting kaleidoscope of the darkness, to savour, in an instantaneous flash of perception, the sleep which lay heavy upon the furniture, the room, the whole surroundings of which I formed an insignificant part…

Re-introducing Blessed Jane

Recently I’ve been off Jane Austen. Not her fault. She simply became inescapable on telly which is how most newer fans identify her. Far too many versions of P&P although the P&P sequel, Death Comes To Pemberley, was a moderately entertaining TV Christmas special.

An interactive Austen session at Hay put me back on track and I'm presently re-reading Mansfield Park. For those who only know P&P, MP will come as quite a shock; for one thing the heroines are polar opposites. Feistily forward Elizabeth Bennett has little in common with MP's timid, self-effacing Fannie Price.

Only a year separates the novels yet MP includes much more real-time narrative. Given a good idea (the multi-motivated visit to Sotherton, the unsanctioned amateur dramatics) Jane lets the dialogue - and the action - run, page after page. Thus there's less need for those visible contrivances whereby A is transported to B, or C "accidentally" meets D.

And then there's Mrs Norris, a Gorgon who is almost too realistic. Am I glad I was born into the twentieth century!

JOE'S NUDGE
No more shilly-shallying with dubious doggerel. For me this is good:

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages.

Now over these small hills they have built the concrete
That trails black wire;
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude, giant girls that have no secret

Reasons why. I love the compression and the palindromic echo of the first two lines. The choice of “turned on” in line four. The simile in line eight and the way “secret” is picked up again and somehow reversed. OK, it’s just descriptive, there’s no philosophy. But that’ll do, Pig.

Stephen Spender

'Tis the genes, of course

It was inevitable I would be at loggerheads with my father - a deeply opinionated, mainly insensitive oenophile with Tory leanings. And that when I reached 78, the age he died, that cameo would equally describe me once "Tory" was replaced by "Leftie".

But what about books? My father's enthusiasms were dry-fly fishing for brown trout and beagling (chasing after hare with dogs). His early reading reflected these matters:  Surtees' Jorrocks Jaunts and Jollities, Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Cobbett's Rural Rides (but with the reformist themes ignored). Later his tastes widened but by then I had lost interest.

When he became ill he was reduced to asking me to lend him books. I had to think hard choosing titles. He didn't care for Michael Frayn who wrote the play Copenhagen (about quantum mechanics) and the novel, Spies, but I had more successes than failures. In fact he never returned Mark Twain's Roughing It.

The high-spot was his joy at Nabokov's comic novel Pnin. He read aloud the key sentence in the first chapter: "He is on the wrong train." and I realised we had more in common than I thought. A rapprochement ensued.

JOE'S NUDGE
Something more difficult:

It is time that I wrote my will;
I choose upstanding men
That climb the streams until
The fountain leap, and at dawn
Drop their cast at the side
Of dripping stone;...

Reasons why. You must stop here, so I must too. The language is simple even if the aim - establishing the poet's preference for "pure" instincts - is metaphorical. The will grabs your lapels, the poetry (“climb the streams”, “the fountain leap”) says you are in intelligent hands. You are inclined to read on.

Yeats. (I swear I had no idea.)

Full stop. Capital letter

There are certain, rare moments in life when what went before stops dead. When what follows is quite different. Marriage is one obvious junction and ours occurred in 1960. This was Wednesday, December 28 1965. I suspected life would change but it’s taken forty-nine years to say just how much.

In the New York Port Authority building (above) a barber, shaving me with a cut-throat razor, noticed a neck rash and suggested a massage. The rash was not unexpected. More than a day before, wearing a three-piece suit. I had travelled by train from Bradford to Glasgow. A bus had transported me to Prestwick airport on the western Clyde. A propellor plane took eleven hours to fly to Iceland, and seventeen hours to Kennedy. I wore the suit to avoid carrying it, I sweated, a rash formed.

In my pocket was a bus-ticket to Pittsburgh. The carrier was Continental Trailways not, as I had romantically hoped, Greyhound. Romance, curiosity, daring and a year's hard work had brought me to this point. I was about to start a six-year stay in the USA by my own choice.

Six years in a foreign country. Forget the common language, the USA is far more "foreign" than say France and Germany where I had lived for short periods. Its foreignness shaped my life.

When I returned I saw Britain differently. More international, less comfortable. Less charitable, better informed. Secular. More cramped. I was more communal and (inexplicably) more confident. Less prone to cliché. Better informed about industry. I supported US world views until leftwing friends (rare in Pennsylvania) compensated.

There's more but the romantic 1965 innocent with the sore neck had gone for good. A carpet rolled up. But how many other carpets since? We’ll see.

His tail's like that too

Years ago Tone Deaf, then Works Well, did the knife and then the spoon. Time now for the very symbolic fork.

It has, for instance, been a source of dissension between the Rs. In logistical terms the fork is inferior to the spoon. Used poshly (ie, upside down) the fork holds less tucker (ie, Oz for food; probably outmoded by now) and what it does hold is less secure. It is not the tool of choice for a hungry man since not everything is spearable.

In my youth and middle age I was always hungry and saw no reason why I had to eat, say, scrambled egg with a fork. VR disagreed and I gave in. Casseroles were another area of dispute.

The fork is, of course, associated with the Devil. I'm using an initial capital letter but will take advice on this from devout Christians.

The fork (used with the knife) divides transatlantic table habits. Or did, things may have changed. To a Brit it was all strangely unsettling. All that sawing with no eating, the food getting cold. Then the switchover - like getting off a horse and mounting a child's tricycle. By then my plate would be half-cleared. I never dared raise this point, I suspected it was written into the Constitution.

But Brits aren’t really more efficient. We deliberately insist on balancing food on the fork’s under edge, whence it falls off. Especially peas. Americans often point out this anomaly, unaware of their own practises.

Secretly, when no one's watching, I invert my fork and push with the knife. Lowering my head betimes.

A warning to untravelled Americans: forks are big etiquette in the UK.

No one I know uses a spoon to eat fish.

Liszt or layshaft?

My recent short story is about music: “your favourite subject”, says Beth. But is that true?

Walking hard to pick up The Guardian I ponder gearboxes. Devices installed between a car’s engine and the driven wheels. Devices which help overcome certain shortcomings in the engine, making it more efficient and more economical. I envisage a cutaway drawing of a gearbox and reflect on its beauty.

Music has beauty. Give or take an opinion or two that’s all it’s got. It was composed with beauty in mind. No gearbox was ever designed to be beautiful. If it turned out so – and it takes a certain kind of mind to detect this – then that’s incidental. Gearboxes are designed to perform a task, to do work. Work isn’t beautiful.

Work is beautiful. Or can be. Watch an amateur saw wood; the blade flutters, the sequence is irregular, chances are the sawer is not positioned correctly. Watch a carpenter and it’s a pleasure. Pleasure is one of beauty’s byproducts.

A gearbox does what’s needed by offering differing gear-trains. Something similar occurs on a pedal bike but restrictions (weight, cost) prevent the most elegant solution. The bike’s “gearbox” is spread out; the car’s is compact, saving weight and space, increasing durability, demanding and getting ingenuity.

Compactness is arrived at via simplicity. Gearbox internals (smaller pic) are often pretty to look at; imagining them operating in concert – not easy, I grant you – conjures up two ideas: beauty of purpose, beauty of achievement. Our old standby form follows function.

I respond to this. Useless to compare a gearbox with a string quartet. Best to have both. But which influences me the more? Damnit, I can’t say. No favourites then.

Waiting in Waitrose

At 9.30 am today the check-out queues at Waitrose, Abergavenny, were twenty trolleys long but staff were offering free choice from boxes of Quality Street. Tried, but failed, to imagine this happening at Tesco.

Our queue extended down the detergent aisle so impulse buys seemed unlikely. But no, the woman ahead suddenly picked two fluffy duster refills. Encouraged, VR had time for a little mental arithmetic; taken to the third decimal place Essential Waitrose Laundry Liquid Sachets were a good buy.

Me? I was enjoying an impromptu Welsh lesson from the bilingual aisle posters: Toilet tissues (Papur toiled), Magazines (Cylch gronau), Home storage (Storio yn y cartref).

Ahead a smartly dressed woman gutted her copy of The Daily Mail, absorbed the quick crossword, did the Sudoku at similar speed, and was now tackling another teaser. She showed me: Pitcherwits - images converted into words. Since I intended to mention her here I asked if she was an Abergavenny resident. “Born in the Cotswolds, brought up in Hereford, living out in rural Wales. Put me down as a local.” Our queue fed two check-outs and I pointed out she would be taking the one on the left. “Which will be against your political inclinations,” I teased. “Indeed,” she replied. VR nudged me; in supermarket queues politics is off the menu.

Our queueing lasted an hour. I’m sure it would have seemed longer in Tesco.

WIP Second Hand (52,006 words)
As she stood up Florence reached towards the hi-fi. Francine started to protest but Florence waved a finger. “Poulenc’s Concert Champetre – an acquired taste. We don’t want to be feeding the baby with gin.”

“But let’s have something else. Something vague, indistinct, uncertain.”

Florence opened the cupboard which held her CDs. “I don’t go in for music that’s uncertain…”

Silly season in the Marches

HURRAY FOR HFD Professional Bleeder and partner, Peter, are staying. They live in Luton and cannot agree with a local judgment that nearby Harpenden is "the most beautiful village in England". For one thing it's more of a townlet, for another a main road runs through it. I suggest that Eardisland, 20 miles outside Hereford, might be a stronger contender. We drive there, PB takes pix with her camera and we all come away smugly satisfied that Harpenden hasn't a hope.
Sir Hugh's advice is worth the effort.

BELATED DISCOVERY Peter is a great Kindle user. Can walk to work reading, without tripping over kerbstones or being squashed flat by a white van. I say I wished older Kindles offered page numbers rather than percentages especially with long books. He says there is a way - hold down Menu and the page number plus the total number of pages appears. But no doubt you all knew this.

BROTHERHOOD? I leave the cathedral close and enter Church Street, a narrow atmospheric ginnel left over from Old Hereford. A lad sits with a begging tray, reading a thick old hardback, his finger moving painfully along the line. He's still there when I return and I drop a pound coin in his tray. I hate doing this because I always need change but occasionally there are larger obligations.

WIP Second Hand (30,134 words)
(Lorne said) "Perhaps you’d be better off working in customer services... More interesting than till-work... How do you feel?”

(Francine said) "Sounds like an intellectual step up...  What’s this about training?”

“Knowing where we keep gherkins. Explaining why and what World Foods are. Working the Lottery machine. Arguing the toss about out-of-date vouchers. Handling returns. Knowing kids’ ages when they order cigarettes. Fun stuff.”

Waiting or anticipating?

The most useful feature of an electric toothbrush is the two-minute timer, a nagging device to ensure we meet our dental norms.

Switching to electricity we quickly learn we lack dental conscientiousness. Our unpowered scrubbings didn't last anything like two minutes. I raised this when I discovered VR sang a hymn in her head that she said lasted the requisite period. A very long hymn I averred, as did others.

Can you estimate the passage of time? Because I own a Longines with a beautiful face (a gift from VR), I love looking at it. What time is it now? I ask myself. Often, if time has passed subconsciously, I am surprisingly accurate. But time's passage is elastic. In a doctor's waiting room a mason chips it out in stone. Two hours of The Killing, the Danish TV thriller series, gobbled up the quarter-hours uncaringly.

Looking over my life I note periods of expanded and compressed time. RAF time was all longueurs while the greedy periods between VR emerging off-duty from Charing Cross Hospital at 9.30 pm and her taking the tube home to Finchley Road flashed by.

"Time like an ever rolling stream" says the hymn. But it could be in flood or maybe there's a drought.

WIP Quote from my current novel, Hand Signals. The first para

"WORK at the hospital started at seven-thirty. Francine Embery rose early but not earlier than her mother. As Francine opened the bedroom door the smell of toast rose up the staircase. On the landing, on top of the laundry basket, lay a folded pile of smalls she'd worn over the weekend. Abstracted from her bedroom and hand laundered while she slept. Fran sighed."

Survival of the inexplicable

Evolution can inform things as well as organisms. Usefully too. It spotlights anomalies where an item has ceased - for unknown reasons - to develop and has entered an evolutionary cul de sac.

The worst car I ever owned was an Austin Cambridge - by far. As I struggled with ownership I might, if I'd been better educated, have comforted myself with the thought that better cars lay ahead. With the Cambridge there was even more retrospective comfort in that better companies lay ahead and the manufacturer, BMC, then BL, then who knows, was to wither deservedly. A case of evolution acting as it should.

But I cannot say the same about the deck-chair. I neither know nor care when this cynical exercise in bad ergonomics (the science of man's relationship with his immediate environment) was devised, only that it too should have withered. It is difficult to get into and out of, induces agony just behind the knees, and can guillotine the finger-tips of the wary. Yet still it persists. You may say it has a certain gaiety. I would say... no, I won't say it.

Tin-opener technology has a come a long way. Tone Deaf and, before that, Works Well, have celebrated this progress. But a deficient design is still available, notably in French street markets. It is fabricated from pressed mild steel, suggesting it may have appeared soon after WW2 when cheapness and shortage of materials were dominant. The handle is painful to hold, the cutter tears at the tin resulting in flesh-menacing jaggery, and the fold-away cork-screw is based on a helix that is so narrow it often pulls straight out of the cork. Who favours this thing? Those who must have a tin-opener like grannie's? Nostalgia like that can be bad for you.