Too witless to view

And so we say farewell to the Protestant Work Ethic. The last frontier has been breached and the generations of Methodists who are embalmed in my genes shrivel like vampires touched by the sun.

 

I have had a TV set erected in my bedroom.

 

Gone are the days I would not watch TV of any kind during daylight hours. Now I am the unwilling prey of those bumptious young men of little wit and absolutely no presence, those haughty beauties being clumsily and self-consciously coy, who are the presenters of morning programmes of alleged news.

 

At 3 am one morning I caught myself watching yet again ”Hill Street Blues”.and reflecting that Hell would be being trapped in a police car with one of those caring homespun policemen forever worrying about daddies who, quite understandably, don’t love them. There is worse. Not only do they repeat classic shows like “Minder” to the point where one begins to dislike them: the latest development is to remake old series with a different cast. Presumably they are blind to the fact that “Minder” owed much of its genius to the casting of Waterman and Cole.

 

In my early days as a freelance reporter I had many friends in the rainbow world of ducking and diving that exists on the edge of the dull world we all inhabit. So accurate was the portrayal of Terry and Arthur they could have slipped seamlessly into the rainbow.

In this age of mediocrity I should expect little else from almost everything I examine. It is not a political statement, merely an observation to say that we are badly governed. Manacled, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, in chains of unworkable legislation.

 

The brave new worlds of extra terrestrial TV are merely the homes of aged repeats and what little original TV we see is shamed by the quality of our past.

 

The banking industry has brought Western Civilisation to its knees because, frankly, it is not very good at banking and does not seem to grasp the first law. DO NOT LEND MONEY TO PEOPLE WHO CANNOT PAY YOU BACK. I notice that banks are reluctant to lend money to each other which suggests certain shortcomings. If a bank cannot borrow from a bank should we leave our money with it?

 

The second rule is not to get involved in things you don’t understand. When greedy bankers moved into property development and building societies, crocodile tears at bonus times were inevitable.

 

The third rule is to watch the overheads. A professional gambler of my acquaintance put it at its most succinct: “Exes ruin all games and do not place a bet before you have studied the form book.” Poor Lol, he could have saved Western Civilisation with those simple words.

 

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I ws going to spend my convalescence trying to find something worth reading in the newspapers. I fear I have failed. There were nuggets, of course, but what used to be a newspaper is now a forum on which a number of people of whom one has never heard  lecture on the government, the drama, literature, schools and any other subject that occurs to their ready pen.

 

So far as I can discover, few of them have any qualifications in the subjects they seek to dominate.

 

Radio, which I love above all things, is in a sad state. Would poor Carol Thatcher have been sacked for an innocent remark in the Green Room had she been anyone but the daughter of the Prime Minister the BBC hates above all?

 

I am frequently called a Teddy Bear and I fail to see why Golliwog should be thought to be a term of abuse since both refer to the cuddly toys we enjoyed in childhood when a Teddy and a Golly served me, an only one, as brothers.

 

What one should say about transport and education systems that collapse under the weight of a snowflake, I do not know. This news item from the Times did not help. It said that children who threw snowballs in public places were warned they could be arrested or fined for antisocial behaviour.

 

……………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

A distressed friend seeks my advice.

 

“Flown with wine and impertinence, I behaved very badly at a recent party.  How can I extricate myself and regain social goodwill?”

Lie, little friend.  Whatever you say, your hosts are not going to alter their opinion, because people try to think badly of each other if they possibly can.  Personally, I favour lies so totally improbable they might just be true.

I once behaved so badly at the 100th birthday party of a very aristocratic lady that my attempt to kiss a lady governor of the BBC went largely unremarked.  The next day I wrote to my host:

“I understand that a person posing as me attended your mother’s birthday party yesterday and behaved badly.

“It is not the first time this has happened and the police are on the look out for him. Unfortunately, the likeness between us is so exact I have myself been cautioned by them for behaviour of his.

“He is a cunning fellow and I still cannot think how he managed to sneak into my home and borrow my suit, returning it in the early hours in a disgusting condition.  But that will give you some idea what the police are up against.

“I will of course make good any damage done by him.”

Now that I am virtually bone dry, I can look back on these follies with indulgence, though I am still not to be entirely trusted with whisky-flavoured ice cream.  Of course, there is always that delicious moment when you fall off the wagon and then anything can happen.

The most embarrassing moment of all was not really my fault.  A delicious girl I met in Bad Hartsburg at the end of the war invited me to meet her father, a Junker Baron, warning me he hated the English.

 

She did not warn me that he hated Scots.  Otherwise I would not have dressed in full fig - kilt, white spats, belt, and hair sporran.

He was waiting for me in the entrance hall of his apartment, seated at a table on which was a decanter of colourless fluid and two glasses.

He poured drinks, barked “Prosit” and downed his in one.  I swear it was rocket fuel. Mine would not go past my epiglottis.  The next one lay on top of it and the merciless third, on which he insisted with mounting malevolence, stirred the others into action.

I rushed to the bathroom.  No time to reach the lavatory.  My pink tribute flowed into the bath.  Reaching for the tap to ease its passage down the drain, I mistakenly turned on the shower and was drenched.

At the frosty dinner which followed no one mentioned my soaking condition, though steam rose from me in billowing clouds, rivers of white Blanco ran down my kilt and small pools of water from the sporran that looked like a drowned  badger formed at my feet.

But you could see the Baron felt some consolation for losing the war.

 

 

SIC TRANSIT JESSE MATTHEWS……………………….

 

A reader, Sarah Thomas, writes:

 

I don't know much about Jesse Matthews. Googled to deal with my ignorance and am not any the wiser: I got, along with much else, a reference to the national Scrabble championship, a notice of appeal, dated 2008, by someone in the state of Tennessee who has been convicted of assault and battery, and a poster dating from 1936 which must be the relevant Jesse but it didn't enlighten me.

 

Sarah: - Miss Matthews was a Soubrette, star of pre-war theatre and films who lived on to become Mrs Dale in that famous Diary on the Home Service, now known as Radio 4.

On becoming A semi colon

...........which fully expected to become a full stop

Wearing a stoma bag, I find, is like having a ferret in your trousers. A very talkative ferret which mutters to itself in a cross sort of way, although I am told it will settle in due time into gloomy silence.

 In view of what he has done for me, I would not wish to seem critical of God as Designer but I have to say that the artificial arrangement with the gubbins on the outside, rather like the Pompidou building in Paris, has many advantages over the original model. So much so that in the considerable literature devoted to colon surgery there is an article on Stoma Envy among wives who are no stranger to hurried exits to the bathroom.

I was a bit worried the surgeon might miss the target organ when he mistook my wife for my daughter, not the first person to do so, I regret to say. In the event, he proved a triumph, although he admitted that I had been hard work. It took him six and a half hours hard digging, which was complicated when I had chronic kidney failure. I doubt he did much digging in the garden last weekend. It turned out he was TA and had been MO to the Black Watch (RHR) in Iraq.

I was only in hospital a week, though I cannot think why I was in a rush to come home. I was treated like Haroun el Raschid, with pretty ladies by the score tending to my every need.

 And what fascinating studies they were. One, a Filipino, when I asked if all her country folk were small, put her hand to her head and said “four foot”. Then she put her hand to her waist and extended it outward saying “eleven foot”.

 She said she got angry when people criticised the NHS service. “In my country we do not have it,” she told me. “Few of us can afford doctors so we have to rely on homeopathic cures.”

 “What? For cancer ? What happens?”

“We die,“ she said.

 One of my doctors, an ex Australian SAS man, admitted to me that when he thought of the NHS he found it difficult not to cry, so noble were its aims.

 Many of the nurses have three jobs and run homes as well. We had such a pair last weekend who overheard my wife calling me “Whisker”, her rather embarrassing pet name for me. They used it loudly at every opportunity. So in revenge I called them Burke and Hare.

 Their excitement at the wonders of medicine was a delight to behold. Even simple operations sent them into transports of joy.

 “Look at that dressing.” they would say. “I have never seen anything like that.”

 I said, “You don’t fill me with confidence.” But they were too excited to hear.

I was pinioned by more catheters than St Sebastian had arrows. Taking one out the size of a Prussian bayonet, “Burke” shrieked with joy. “I have never seen one that long,” she said. “Neither have I,“ said “Hare, “Leave it in for a minute while I go and get Susan. She would love to see it.”

 By the time they took the catheter out I was rather miffed not to get a  round of applause.

 In many ways cancer was a doddle. Breaking out of the hospital was another matter. I had permission from the Escape Committee (doctor, surgeon, and bagpuss-fitter - who only agreed after I demonstrated before her and two rather startled medical students that I could fit a stoma bag unaided.

 I pointed out that I had written 26 books, night news edited three national newspapers, was a fellow of the Royal Cambrian Academy, a Member of the Welsh Academy and an award-winning broadcaster so I might just manage to stick a bag on my belly. But they had obviously set their little hearts on a cabaret so I put the bag on like fishnet tights in a strip club, singing "Stoma Weather" the while.)

 The Staff Nurse still wouldn't let me out until the prescription department had issued me with my tablets. I pointed out, with some heat, that the only tablets I had to take out were the ones I had brought in with me. Still had to wait three hours.

 None of the foregoing should be taken as criticism of the NHS. I think Aneurin Bevan is a candidate for sainthood. The country may be broke but there is still one priceless jewel in our kitty.

 I, for one, am very grateful.

A

On Becoming a Semi Colon

..........which fully expected to become a full stop

Wearing a stoma bag, I find, is like having a ferret in your trousers. A very talkative ferret which mutters to itself in a cross sort of way, although I am told it will settle in due time into gloomy silence.

 In view of what he has done for me, I would not wish to seem critical of God as Designer but I have to say that the artificial arrangement with the gubbins on the outside, rather like the Pompidou building in Paris, has many advantages over the original model. So much so that in the considerable literature devoted to colon surgery there is an article on Stoma Envy among wives who are no stranger to hurried exits to the bathroom.

I was a bit worried the surgeon might miss the target organ when he mistook my wife for my daughter, not the first person to do so, I regret to say. In the event, he proved a triumph, although he admitted that I had been hard work. It took him six and a half hours hard digging, which was complicated when I had chronic kidney failure. I doubt he did much digging in the garden last weekend. It turned out he was TA and had been MO to the Black Watch (RHR) inIraq.

I was only in hospital a week, though I cannot think why I was in a rush to come home. I was treated like Haroun el Raschid, with pretty ladies by the score tending to my every need.

 And what fascinating studies they were. One, a Filipino, when I asked if all her country folk were small, put her hand to her head and said “four foot”. Then she put her hand to her waist and extended it outward saying “eleven foot”.

 She said she got angry when people criticised the NHS service. “In my country we do not have it,” she told me. “Few of us can afford doctors so we have to rely on homeopathic cures.”

 “What? For cancer ? What happens?”

“We die,“ she said.

 One of my doctors, an ex Australian SAS man, admitted to me that when he thought of the NHS he found it difficult not to cry, so noble were its aims.

 Many of the nurses have three jobs and run homes as well. We had such a pair last weekend who overheard my wife calling me “Whisker”, her rather embarrassing pet name for me. They used it loudly at every opportunity. So in revenge I called them Burke and Hare.

 Their excitement at the wonders of medicine was a delight to behold. Even simple operations sent them into transports of joy.

 “Look at that dressing.” they would say. “I have never seen anything like that.”

 I said, “You don’t fill me with confidence.” But they were too excited to hear.

I was pinioned by more catheters than St Sebastian had arrows. Taking one out the size of a Prussian bayonet, “Burke” shrieked with joy. “I have never seen one that long,” she said. “Neither have I,“ said “Hare, “Leave it in for a minute while I go and get Susan. She would love to see it.”

 By the time they took the catheter out I was rather miffed not to get a  round of applause.

 In many ways cancer was a doddle. Breaking out of the hospital was another matter. I had permission from the Escape Committee (doctor, surgeon, and bagpuss-fitter - who only agreed after I demonstrated before her and two rather startled medical students that I could fit a stoma bag unaided.

 I pointed out that I had written 26 books, night news edited three national newspapers, was a fellow of the Royal Cambrian Academy, a Member of the Welsh Academy and an award-winning broadcaster so I might just manage to stick a bag on my belly. But they had obviously set their little hearts on a cabaret so I put the bag on like fishnet tights in a strip club, singing "Stoma Weather" the while.)

 The Staff Nurse still wouldn't let me out until the prescription department had issued me with my tablets. I pointed out, with some heat, that the only tablets I had to take out were the ones I had brought in with me. Still had to wait three hours.

 None of the foregoing should be taken as criticism of the NHS. I think Aneurin Bevan is a candidate for sainthood. The country may be broke but there is still one priceless jewel in our kitty.

 I, for one, am very grateful.

A

I intend to spend the next fortnight of convalescence trying to find something of interest in newspapers.  And almost certainly failing.  I may be jaundiced but they seem only to be interested in elections and erections, neither of which is of more than passing interest to me.  I wonder, too, about the talent which is able to fill the supplements and so called magazines with so many items which are of no interest to anyone over the age of ten.What happened to news?  There was a time when it was more important than one’s life’s blood.

 Older readers may remember an author called Derek Humphreys and how he made wife euthanasia profitable by writing a book about his own efforts in that direction. 

 He did a trial run on me.

In 1965 we were sent by our newspapers to the opening of the electricity grid on Anglesey.  A girl called Veronica offered to drive us to the Mermaid Inn in Brynsiencyn and, since she was very pretty, I broke my rule never to be driven by anyone who had been drinking with me.  Unwise, since she unaccountably drove through the closed iron gates of the Indefatigable Sea School.

The Captain Headmaster, who had been photographed by TV with the Duke of Edinburgh, had invited friends round to watch the film.  Our car brought down the power line just as he was switching on the set which exploded in his hand.

I passed through the windscreen, slid off the bonnet and landed in a bloodstained bundle.  Humphreys climbed out of the wreckage and, stepping over me, said to Veronica, "I am going to the phone."

When he returned, she asked, "Will the ambulance be long?"

He said, "I wasn't ringing an ambulance.  I was putting my story over."

 I had to stagger to the nearest house to phone over my account of the opening.  The copytaker said he couldn't hear me.  The reason was the phone kept filling with blood, which I emptied on the carpet and passed out.

It took my newspaper two days to find me in the hospital to which I had been rushed.  I had several stitches in my nose which were not expertly done.  When my own GP asked in disbelief “Who did that?” I told him it was an Indian surgeon.  “With a bow and arrow?” he asked.

Probably enough to get him struck off in our enlightened times.  Doesn't surprise me, though, that Humphreys became a world authority on wife disposal.

 

 

Many thanks for all the cards and good wishes kindly sent. . I was especially grateful to get this poem from an old friend Brian Hitchen, a former editor of the Sunday Express when it was the world’s greatest Sunday newspaper.  Patriot and a reporter’s reporter.

Goodbye to my England, so long my old friend,

Your days are numbered, being brought to an end.
To be Scottish, Irish or Welsh, that's fine,
But don't say you're English, that's way out of line.

The French and the Germans may call themselves such,
So may Norwegians, the Swedes and the Dutch.
You can say you are Russian or maybe a Dane
But don't say you're English ever again.

At Broadcasting House the word is taboo;
In Brussels it's scrapped, in Parliament too.
Even schools are affected, staff do as they're told,
They must not teach children about England of old.

Writers like Shakespeare, Milton and Shaw,
The pupils don't learn about them anymore.
How about Agincourt, Hastings, Arnhem or Mons
When England lost hosts of her very brave sons?

We are not Europeans, how can we be?
Europe is miles away over the sea.
We're the English from England, let's all be proud,
Stand up and be counted - Shout it out loud!

Let's tell our Government and Brussels too,
We're proud of our heritage and the Red, White and Blue.
Fly the flag of Saint George or the Union Jack,
Let the world know - WE WANT OUR ENGLAND BACK

 

     No wonder the Queen gave Hitchen a CBE

IT ADDS UP TO SOMETHING PRETTY SCANDALOUS

5865858575 is a telling sequence of numbers in my DNA.  It does not on the face of it throb with emotion.  Yet it is Abelard and Heloise, Romeo and Juliet - name any of the great stories of star crossed lovers.

 

Those numbers speak of guilty passion, secret fumbling, lies.  They are the telltale numbers that differ from the rest of my family in a line that stretches back 15,000 years to a small colony of tribesmen in the Pyrenees.  It includes a cousin of Elizabeth I, a duchess of Norfolk whose husband had never had a wash: she went mad on the church steps at her wedding.  The line includes Sir John Skidmore, Spenser’s parfait gentil knight Sir Amoret.  Not so parfait as it turns out.  In real life whenever he left their home he chained his wife to a wall.

 

The DNA numbers 5865858575 don’t sound much fun.  Yet they are a confession of adultery.  Somewhere along the line in the 19^th century one of my female ancestors had it away with a man not her husband.  It is there in black and white.  Published in all its shame by the Genealogical Institute, acting the role of a sort of statistical Sam Spade, as played by Humphrey Bogart.

 

Was it 586 whose roguish smile attracted a neighbour?  Or her neighbour 585 whose naughtn in ess behind the lace curtains blotted my copybook?  Or was it the exotic sounding 857 who lured the young stags of Staffordshire - and is 5 the result?

 

Our indefatigable family historian Linda Moffat has narrowed the culprits down to two generations. Though my record in my second marriage is unblemished, there was a time…and a little bit of me thinks it’s slightly unfair on the poor woman.  All that subterfuge, the meticulous lipstick removal, the lies and the evasions.  All in vain.  Two hundred years later you get found out.

 

I do know about the goings on of one distant ancestress Lady Frances Scudamore, a great heiress with estates in Herefordshire, Monmouthshire etc.  Even for the Duke of Beaufort she was a good catch. However, when he tried to divorce her on the grounds of her adultery with Lord Talbot, she enmeshed him in the most sensational trial of the century.  When a court upheld her claim that the Duke was impotent, he agreed to copulate behind a screen until the climax when he would knock on the screen and a distinguished panel of doctors and diarists, including Horace Walpole, would watch him ejaculate.

 

 

IN CASE OF NEED

My favourite quotation, which I had printed on the matchboxes given to guests at my wedding. is from Goethe: " The wedding march always reminds me of soldiers going into battle."

As a fully paid-up chauvanist pig, I was delighted to find this couplet from the Chinese 6th century classic, The Book of Songs: "My lord is all aglow. In his left hand he holds the reed pipe; with his right he summons me to make free with him. Oh, the joy."

That, I think, sets the right tone.  But to balance I suppose I must include Germaine Greer at her most lyrical: "If women are to effect a singular amelioration of their condition it seems obvious they must not marry."

A Kafka like note.  And talking of that merry man, he wrote to the fiancee he twice jilted: "My health is only just good enough for me; it is not good enough for marriage, let alone fatherhood."

I much prefer the robust advice of William Cobbett: "Never mind the pieces of needlework, the tambourining, the maps of the world made with her needle.  Get to see her at work on a mutton chop, or a bit of bread and cheese; and if she deal quickly with these you have a pretty good security for that activity, that stirring industry without which a wife is a burden instead of being a help."

 

It’s easy, really.

 

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

 

The ninth century Tao scholar Huang Po wrote:

 

All the Buddhas and all sentient beings are nothing but the One Mind, besides which nothing exists……………………………….

 

………………………………..If an ordinary man, when he is about to die, could see the five elements of consciousness as void, the four physical elements as not constituting an I, the real Mind as formless and neither coming nor going, his nature as something neither commencing at his birth nor perishing at his death, but as a whole and motionless in its very depths, his Mind and environmental objects as one – If he could really accomplish this he would receive Enlightenment in a flash.

 

 

JUST A THOUGHT

The eulogies of John Mortimer – and I am prejudiced because he told my producer that my interview with him was the best he had ever done- were well deserved.  Rumpole is a comic figure to stand besides anything of Dickens.

But it is worth remembering that it was Mortimer’s eloquence in defence of pornography that made Russell Brand possible and Jonathan Ross inevitable.

In fact he did almost as much harm to our quality of life as that liberating home secretary Roy Jenkins.

DIARY REVISED

In my Christmas stocking one year there was a copy of Dr Sam Johnson's Journal of a holiday he spent in North Wales in 1774; and an electronic organiser, a press button diary.

Difficult to imagine any more eloquent symbols of dramatic change.

To use the electronic diary - so far as I can understand the instructions - I have to limit entries to sixteen characters; generous for the cast of a play; less than adequate to tell the story of a day in the life of........

True, in the history of diary writing there have been some notable one-liners.

In 1725 a country doctor called Claver Morris wrote: "Busied in mulling red wine and the funeral of my dear wife.”

The antiquarian Elias Ashmole in 1681: “I took early in the morning a good dose of elixir and hung three spiders round my neck and they drove my ague away. Deo gratias.”

Gratias, indeed. And to the novelist Arnold Bennet for this: London. Palace Theatre. Pavlova dancing the dying swan. A feather falls from her costume. Two silent Englishmen. One says, ‘Moulting’. That is all they say.”

Dr Johnson had no such limitations, either of space or vocabulary. How pleasant it must have been for him to sit before a roaring fire on a day such as this and turn to this entry: “We would have staid in Conway if we could have found entertainment, for we were afraid of passing Penmaenmawr mountain, over which lay on our way to Bangor, but by bright day....."

Happily the party found that a new way had been made. Johnson recalled it: "A wall secures the precipice, which is deep and dreadful. The wall is here and there broken by mischievous wantonness. The side of the mountain seems to have a surface of loose stones, which every accident may crumble   Our thoughts of danger now being past the rest of our journey was very pleasant.”

More than my electronic diary could memorise.

There was a rime when I filled in the Cash Summary conscientiously every year until I discovered, as I do every year, that the cost of living was making further living financially non-viable.

My favourite diaries are those written by the gentle Francis Kilvert, who was curate of Clyro, a still peaceful hamlet across the river from Hay-on-Wye. One entry read as follows: "Miss Child told me of the adventures of the wood owl, Ruth, which she took home from here last year. She and her sister, stranded in London at night, went to the London Bridge Hotel with little money and no luggage except for the owl in a basket. The owl hooted all night in spite of their putting it up the chimney, before the looking glass and under the bedclothes. AND in a circle of lighted candles which they hoped it would mistake for the sun. The owl went on hooting, upset the basket, got out and flew round the room. The chambermaid, almost frightened to death, dared not come inside the room. Miss Child asked the waiter to get some mice for Ruth, but none could be got."

My friend John Julius Norwich frequently includes strange diary entries in his commonplace selection book "A Christmas Cracker" which he sends to his legion of friends every year.

I treasure an entry from the diaries of the great naturalist Gilbert White of Selbourne. Also about Owls.

"…most owls seem to hoot exactly in B Flat, according to several pitch-pipes used in tuning harpsichords, and as strictly at concert pitch."

We recipients of the Christmas Cracker spend our year looking out eagerly for items in our reading which we send off to John Julius in the hope they will be included in his collection. Twice I was fortunate enough to be one of the chosen. Difficult to explain the pride with which I say that.

The entry about owls brought this observation from Professor Howard Evans of Fort Collins, Colorado: "Even the simple wing sounds of midges and mosquitoes play a role in bringing the sexes together. In this case it is the female who attracts the male by the hum of her wings; a fact quickly appreciated by singers who hit a G in the vicinity of a swarm and end up with a mouthful of male mosquitoes."

Inevitably the Christmas Crackers contain occasional entries from Kilvert, including this one from the 10th February 1873: "My mother says that at Dursley in Gloucestershire when ladies and gentlemen used to go out to dinner together on dark nights, the gentlemen pulled out the tails of their shirts and walked before the ladies to show the way and light the ladies. These were called Durlsey Lanterns."

That entry is important not only for its charm but because it contains, I believe, one of the secrets of Kilvert. As we read it we can see those Dursley roads, unlit, unused and so dark the night is almost palpable.

"Mrs Nott told me that Louie of the Cloggi was staying in Presteigne with her aunt Miss Sylvester, the woman frog. This extraordinary being is partly a woman and partly a frog. Her head and face, her eyes and mouth are those of a frog,   and she has a frog’s legs and feet. She cannot walk but she hops. She wears very long dresses to cover and conceal her feet   which   are shod with something like a cow's hoof. She never goes out except to the Primitive Methodist Chapel…

“Mrs Nott said she has seen this person's frog feet and had seen her in Presteigne hopping to and from chapel exactly like a frog. The story about this unfortunate woman is as follows. Shortly before she was born a woman came begging to her mother's door with two or three little children. Her mother was angry and ordered the woman away with her children saying ‘Get away with your young frogs.’ The child she was expecting was born partly in the form of a frog as a punishment and a curse upon her..."

Curate Kilvert was, naturally, a prey to ghosts.

"When I went to bed last night I fancied that something ran in at my bedroom door after me from the gallery. It seemed to be a skeleton. It ran with a dancing step and I thought it aimed a blow at me from behind. This was shortly before midnight."

A ghost almost as strange as that most famous phantom of all; the one that materialised on the road in the 17th century before a friend of John Evelyn.

"When it was asked, ‘are you a good spirit or a bad spirit?" it disappeared with a most melodious twang."

Evelyn was a minor official of the Restoration but his diary has made him into a major historical figure. It was discovered by accident 200 years after his death in an old clothes basket at his home.

Kilvert had great gifts as a writer. His account of how he fell in love with Daisy Thomas, a girl above him in rank and wealth, when he had only a sovereign in his pocket; and the kindly way in which her father let him know he was not a suitable match always moves me. It is one of the great love stories.

The actress Mrs Sarah Siddons was a great beauty and the toast of fashionable Georgian Society. In 1802 she toured North Wales. Her companion Patty Wilkinson kept a diary. In it she wrote:

“We left Conwy next morning and e’re long crossed Penman Maur where, like other travellers, we alighted from our carriages to look from a bridge that commands the fullest view of the sublime landscape with all its rocks and water. A lady within hearing of us was in such ecstasies that she exclaimed, ‘This awful scenery makes me feel as if I were only a worm, or a grain of dust, on the face of the earth.’ Mrs Siddons turned round and said, "I feel very differently’."

Diary addicts, if they are not careful, overdose on Pepys. I find him an unattractive man, which I suppose is a sort of heresy. I feel his honesty is the unconscious honesty of the totally insensitive. But I always chuckle over this entry for December 5 1660:

“And so home and find all well. Only, myself somewhat vexed at my wife's 

neglect in leaving of her scarfe, waistcoat and night dressings in the coach today that brought us from Westminster. Though I confess she did give them to me to look after - yet it was her fault not to see that I did take them out of the coach."

I was delighted to find that I am not alone in my distaste for Pepys. The diplomat Harold Nicholson wrote: "To my mind Pepys is a mean little man. Salacious in a grubby way; even in his peculations there is no magnificence...It is some relief to reflect that to be a good diarist one must have a little, snouty sneaky mind.”

I am not sure that is true. But what I do find comforting about diaries is the evidence which abounds in them that social evils change only in name. The Lager Lout had his counterpart nearly two hundred years ago.

Thomas Hearne was an indefatigable diarist. His ran to 147 volumes. In 1712 he wrote:

“A certain barbarous sect of people arose lately in London who distinguish themselves by the name of Mohocks. There are great numbers of them and their custom is to make themselves drunk and in the nighttime to go about the streets in great droves and to abuse after a most inhumane manner all persons they meet by beating down their noses, pricking the fleshy part of their bodies with their swords, not sparing even women whom they usually set upon their heads and commit such indecencies towards them as are not to be mentioned.”

Life hardly seems worth worrying about. From Lord Byron's journal, this famous entry: "When one subtracts from life infancy (which is vegetation), sleep, eating and swilling, buttoning and unbuttoning, how much remains of downright existence? The summer of a dormouse."

And in the end what does it all matter?

When, in his own golden phrase, time was beginning to goose Noel Coward, he made a last entry in his diary. It was this:

"With my usual watchful eye on posterity, I can only suggest to any wretched future biographer that he gets my engagement book and from that fills in anything he can find and good luck to him. Personally I have neither the will nor the strength to attempt the task.”

FINGS ARE NEVER WHAT THEY USED TO BE

 

Shakespeare was quite wrong. When that I was and a little tiny boy the rain it did NOT raineth every day. The world was bathed in perpetual sunshine, summer lasted from Easter Egg Time to Christmas Eve and more often than not I was Errol Flynn. With my blue mac, top buttoning fastened round my neck, the garment became either a Bengal Lancer’s pelisse, a cavalier’s cloak or Geronimo’s blanket. In early manhood I was flattered to be likened to Hemingway by Coronation St actorJohnny Briggs but later became  an amalgam of Falstaff and Pickwick.

Enjoyable though these flights  were,  I always knew there was a real world hovering menacingly in the suburb of my fantasies.

 

Nowadays fantasy is king. We live vicariously in Coronation Street, Albert Square or some unlikely village in Emmerdale. When newspapers write of actors who appear in soaps they use their characters’ names to identify them.

 

Like some latter day Alice we step through our computer screens into virtual worlds where we can inhabit the bodies of anyone we please. Recently two virtual characters sued in life for divorce

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We fight to the death in the person of a doppelganger, play golf, box, fish, climb mountains, even build entire civilisations through electronic games. We amass huge debts by living beyond our means and then are reassured by the Government that we can expunge them by creating more debt. No one says from whence the money we borrow will come.

 

Real money has vanished. In its place we have pieces of paper which we are told is money. This mock money we can use to buy shares which increase or diminish because the gamblers to whom we entrust our false money circulate rumours or fall into blind panic.

 

They lend supposed money to people who they k now cannot pay it back and then sell the bad debts to other gamblers who insist they have value.

 

We fight over the boundaries of “our” country. You cannot see the difference between “our” country and the country “owned” by strangers. Frontiers are abstractions yet we guard them with our real lives. Perhaps even more dangerous, we create fantasy countries. At Versailles, so rightly characterised as the peace that passeth all understanding, we created Iraq out of three tribes, the Sunni, the Shiites and the Kurds, who have been enemies since Mohammed’s day, and sewed the seeds for the disaster which is Israel. As America, Australia and New Zealand showed, the only way you can make a success of a takeover is to slaughter the native population.

 

Alas, that only works when the natives are limited to throwing spears and bows and arrows. In these days of equal weaponry, the only result is mutual destruction.

 

Our spiritual lives are governed by myths. Safe in the assurance that an immaculate conception brings, we laugh at the notion that people once believed gods were born from the foreheads of other gods. We demonstrate our difference by conforming.

 

Predictably the politicians are looking for a way to harness the fantasy principle.

 

A rock-star reception was accorded to Malcolm Gladwell on his arrival in London at the end of November. Gladwell, the best-selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, filled a West End theatre with eager fans when he turned up to talk about his latest book, “Outliers”, which promised to deflate the idea of individual genius and “tell the story of success”.

Remarkable the haste with which such books are snapped up by politicians in search of inspiration. Before “Outliers”, “Nudge” by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler, explains how, with a little discreet encouragement, human behaviour can be ushered in the right direction. When word got out that David Cameron had read it, sales soared.

Historians are the ultimate weavers of fancy. Gwyn Alf Williams, the Welsh Marxist historian, asked pertinently “When was Wales?” and averred that no reputable historian would endorse pre-Tudor histories of his country. The centre piece of Welsh cultural history, the “Ancient” Gorsedd of Bards, is little more than two hundred years old. It was invented by a drug crazed forger and first celebrated on Primrose Hill in London. The bardic stone represents the twelve lost tribes of Israel. My ancestor Owain Glyndwr was a psychopathic, English-educated aristo who murdered countless Welshmen. The 15,000-strong army with which Edward I invaded Wales included 11,000 Welshmen.

Trevor Roper, who authenticated the forged Adolf Hitler diaries, posthumously published a debunking of Scottish history “The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History”.

Scots chroniclers, he says, simply filled in the gaps with heroic inventions of their own, tracing royal Scots lineage back to a Greek prince, who married Scota, the daughter of an Egyptian Pharaoh.

Ossian, the Gaelic bard whose verses were “discovered” in the 18th century, was hailed as “the Celtic Homer”. Finally the work was exposed as an elaborate hoax.

The kilt was invented by a Lancashire industrialist for his Scots employees; while the system of tartan patterns was published in the invented Vestiarium Scoticum by the Sobieski Stuart brothers, born John and Charles Allen in Egham, Surrey.

No Englishman who has worked in either Wales or Scotland would accept the myth of a United Kingdom.

In France they cling to Charlemagne and the legends of the Revolution. Marie Antoinette did not say. “Let them eat cake”. Estonians exalt the myth of Kalevipoeg the Giant, while Albanians recall the 15th-century warrior Skanderbeg, leaping from mountain to mountain on his charger, slaying Ottomans. William Tell, the 14th-century Swiss hero, shot an apple off his son's head, killed his Austrian oppressor and sparked the rebellion that led to the Swiss Confederation. He probably never existed, although 60 per cent of Swiss believe that he did.

In America they have Pocahontas, a president who could not tell a lie and a Wild West image of true grit which is false.

We have Alfred and his cakes, Arthur and his knights, St George (who, if he existed, was probably born in Cappadocia, now part of Turkey). Robin Hood is a hardy English myth, but he may actually be Rabbie Hood, a Scot, his story adapted from that of William Wallace, or possibly Robin MacGilchrist, one of Wallace's chief lieutenants. If tartan was the invention of two likely Surrey lads, Lincoln Green might just owe its origins to an Argyllshire aristocrat.

Everyone in England knows that if ravens quit the Tower of London, the monarchy will crumble: fewer know that the ravens' wings are clipped.

It is human nature to believe what we fervently hope might be true.

“How Stories Live or Die in Viral Culture” is a book by Bill Wasik, who invented the “flash mob” when he used e-mail and text to invite 200 young New Yorkers to converge on a store in the city. His book is the latest search for the holy grail of the net - why certain things propagate themselves and are passed around like a virus to be seen by audiences of millions.

The search for what geeks are calling the “internet meme” (after Richard Dawkins' neologism for a cultural idea that is transmitted like a gene), or how hype whizzes from peer to peer around the decentralised net, is of huge interest to everyone from artists to advertisers.

The BBC has created its own fantasy to justify its expansion beyond the limits which were set for it. The Corporation was financed to provide a public service but uses the greater part of its revenue in pursuit of the fantasy that it must compete with the commercial networks. The funding it gets does not depend on the size of the audience.

 

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I have often thought that Sir John Mandeville could have walked onto a job on the Sun. He pinched most of his stories from other reporters and when he couldn’t steal them he made them up.

But he only stole the best.

He wrote a travel book in 1322 which was still a bestseller three hundred years later. About the author we know little. He claimed to have been an English knight but that is unlikely. It seems he stole names as well as stories. Sir John Mandeville was probably the pen name of a French assassin called Bearded John..

He was very big on dragons.

“And some men say that in the Isle of Lango is yet the daughter of Hippocras in form and likeness of a great dragon. ......she was thus changed by a goddess yclept Diana. And men say she will stay in that form unto the time a knight come that is so hardy that dare kiss her upon the mouth....

“A knight of Rhodes that was hardy and doughty in arms said he would kiss her....

“He went in her cave where she lifted up her head against him. And when the knight saw her he fled away and the dragon bare the knight upon a rock, maugre his head.....

“Also a young man who wist not of the dragon came into the cave and found a chamber. There he saw a damosel that combed her head and looked into a mirror; and she had much treasure about her. She turned her head and asked him what he would?

“He said he would be her paramour.

“She told him to come on the morrow and kiss her on the mouth. And have no dread for I will do thee no harm, albeit thou see me in the likeness of a dragon. This is an enchantment. If thou kiss me thou shalt have all this treasure and be my lord.

“And the man came on the morrow to kiss this damsel. And when he saw her come out of the cave in the shape of a dragon, so hideous and so horrible, he had so great dread that he fled. She followed him. And when she saw that he turned not again, she began to cry, as a thing that had much sorrow.

“And anon the knight died. And sithen hitherward might no knight see her, but that he died anon”

 

I was always finding girl friends like that.