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

.

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.

HIM OF PRAISE

When one catches the glint of a surgeon’s knife a role model comes in handy. I’m reminded of mine by a small wooden toy piper. It belonged to a dead Royal Marine called “Cockie” Warren. Or, to introduce him formally, Colonel Alan Ferguson Warren, CBE, DSC, a pre-war adjutant at the stone frigate at Chatham,Fleet Air Arm pilot with the China Sqdn and an enthusiatic pirate hunter, liaison officer with all the para-military underground forces in Malaya before the fall of Singapore, C.O of 42 Commando and a Deputy Adjutant General of the Royal Marines.

 

None of those offices were responsible for me refusing his invitation to call him Alan. To me – an officer hater from way back – he will always be The Colonel. And I count it the greatest honour of my life that I was with him when he died of the cancer he collected in a Jap POW camp. When he said he wished I had been with him in the camps I nearly fainted from pride.

 

The last time we met he was in agony in a hospital in Lymington and a few hours earlier he had tried to speak. I had to lean over him to hear what he was saying. It was: “Have you been offered something to drink?”

 

I met him when I was researching a book about the escape from Singapore after it fell to the Japanese of my oldest friend Lord Langford, another Colonel as it happens. The Colonel had given up his place in a dhow he had bought to escape across the Bay of Bengal to Langford, who was anxious to trace him and thank him. I brought them together and said I would be honoured to write a book about Warren. He said: “You will have to hurry up. I have come back to the UK to die. You have got a year.”

 

It was a fascinating book. Tiring of his job at Chatham, Warren, the first Royal Marine to pass from the Staff College, transferred to the Fleet Air Arm and spent the closing years of peace hunting pirates on HMS Hood with the China Squadron. When the war came, he was serving with Military Intelligence and volunteered to go into occupied France after Dunkirk to look for any stragglers. The submarine which was to take him off failed to appear so he stole a dinghy and rowed it back to England.

 

In Malaya he organised a bombing school, inserted parties, led by Spenser Chapman, behind the lines and then frequently visited them in his motor launch. Another legend, Angus Rose, who led a guerrilla band, said of him, ”He was incredibly ubiquitous, a master of time and space. He was fearless, but too intelligent to be foolhardy. In manner he was upright, downright and straightforward and in appearance he was hard, handsome and immaculate.”

 

Spenser Chapman, recalling a mission behind the enemy lines with Warren, said: “It was an ideal way of going to war, in a jeep piled high with tommy guns, plastic explosives, and I felt so like a crusader that when we passed a wayside Chinese temple I almost suggested we should have our tommy guns blessed.”

 

Warren took on mammoth tasks including organising the evacuation of Penang Island and the destruction of military stores in the face of the oncoming Japs. Earlier he had organised an escape route across Sumatra, along which thousands of troops fled when Singapore fell. The route went overland to Padang on the east coast and thence by sea either to Australia or Colombo.

 

When he arrived in Padang to make his own escape, he was shocked that no senior officer was prepared to stay to look after the troops, whose immoral behaviour towards the citizens of Sumatra was alienating the Dutch government. He gave up his place in the boat and issued an order that he would personally shoot any serviceman disobeying him.

 

When the Japanese came, although there was a price on his head, he officially surrendered the British army to them. In the three and a half years that followed, he commanded British slave camps on the Burma-Siam railway. Had the Kemptai discovered his identity he would have been shot. There had been a price on his head since the early days in Malaya.

 

An Australian surgeon Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, who became known as the Christ of the Burma Railway, wrote to me of Warren. He said: “His was a life of a man who at the crucial point turned his back on what he was supremely equipped to be, a highly successful soldier, and chose instead the gesture of compassion towards the wounded and battered debris in Sumatra.”

 

When the Colonel left the army he worked as an English teacher at Flint Hills, a private school in the United States. A pupil wrote this tribute:

 

“Colonel Warren’s leaving Flint Hills marks the end of an era. He is Flint Hills’ Mr Chips. With his grey hair carefully groomed, his white moustache well clipped, he is the epitome of the English military gentleman. …those students who have been fortunate enough to have him as a teacher know there will never be anyone who can take his place.”

 

The Colonel bought the little wooden piper in New York and gave it to me shortly before he died. I can still see him crossing the car park to the cancer clinic. He marched as though military bands were playing in his head.

That is why the little piper always marches at my side.

Picked Up by a Penguin

Thanks to the war and my own disinclination I attended school for no more than five years out of a possible fifteen.

I did not miss school. I had discovered the world of books. I devoured, especially, the wonderful early Penguins. And I never missed a day at the public library. The discovery that there was a building in the village filled with books which grown ups were desperate to lend you was the defining moment in my life.

One discovery I made was that there was no need to leave your home in order to travel. Over the centuries, this strange breed The Author was eager to do your travelling for you. You could sit back in your armchair and enjoy the best bits whilst The Author got bitten by mosquitoes.

Apparently this odd breed of human being had existed for centuries. Unhappily, with no one to guide me, my reading followed no pattern. I took Herodotus home because I thought he was in some way connected with the Daily Herald and I had ambitions to get a job there. I could not have chosen a better guide to travelling in ancient Greece and Egypt. He wrote in vivid language and - in my translation by de Selincourt anyway - used the sort of short words which we used in every day conversation. He was a great traveller but, like most reporters, no one believed what he said. He described how the pyramids were built after interviewing Egyptian priests on the subject. For centuries scholars insisted his explanation was rubbish. Some years ago I interviewed the keeper of Egyptian antiquities at the British Museum. He told me that scholars were coming round to believing that Herodotus was telling the truth.

Never mind every dog has its day. In today's tabloids every day has its dog story. So with Herodotus. He knew his readers liked stories about lovable animals. So he told the story of a breed of sheep which was prized for its fat tails. Tails which were so fat and so heavy that the shepherd made little carts that the sheep dragged carrying their tails behind them.

Herodotus knew that a tabloid story must have sex, crime, royalty or scandal. In the story of building of the treasury for Pharaoh Ramphsinitus’s vast fortune, he managed to combine all four. Herodotus tells how the tradesman who built the treasury contrived a secret way in, which, on his death bed, he told his sons so that they could steal the Pharaoh's Hoard . He wrote:

“They came by night to the palace, found the stone in the treasury wall and took it out. The king on his next visit to the treasury was surprised to see that some of the vessels in which his treasure was stored were no longer full though the seals were not broken. He ordered traps to be set near the money jars. The next time the thieves came one of them made his way to the treasure chamber; but as soon as he approached the money jar he was after, the trap got him.

“Realising his plight, he at once called to his brother and begged him to come as quickly as he could and cut off his head. Less the recognition of his dead body should involve both of them in ruin.

The brother, seeing the sense of this request, acted upon it without delay. Then, having fitted the stone back into place, went home taking the severed head with him. Next morning the king visited the treasury, and what was his astonishment when he saw in the trap the headless body of the thief.

Much perplexed, he decided to have the thief’s body hung up outside the walls and a guard set with orders to arrest anybody they might see thereabouts in tears or showing signs of mourning.

“The thieves' mother was much distressed by this treatment of her dead son’s body and begged her other son to do all he could to think of some way of getting it back. At last he thought of a way out of the difficulty. He filled some skins with wine and loaded them on donkeys; which he drove past the guard. Arriving there, he undid the fastenings of three of the skins. The wine poured out and he roared and banged his fist. The soldiers, seeing the wine flow down the road. seized their pots and ran to catch it.

“Such a quantity of wine was too much for the guards. Very drunk and drowsy, they stretched themselves out at full length and fell asleep at the spot. It was now well after dark and the thief took down his brother’s body. Then he put the body on the donkey and returned home.

“The king was very angry when he learned the thief’s body had been stolen. And determined at any cost to catch the man who had been clever enough to bring off such a coup.

“I find it hard to believe, says Herodotus, the priests’ account of the means he employed but here it is:

“He sent his own daughter to a brothel with instructions to admit all comers. And to compel each applicant to tell her what the cleverest and wickedest thing was they had done; and if anyone told the story of the corpse she was to get hold of him, scream for the guards and not allow him to escape until they arrived.

“The girl obeyed her father’s orders and the thief, when he came to know what she was doing, could not resist the temptation to go one better than the king in ingenuity. He cut the hand and arm of the body of a man who had just died; and putting them under his cloak, went to visit the king’s daughter. When she asked him the question she had asked all others, he replied the wickedest deed he had done was to cut off his brother’s head when he was caught in a trap in the king’s treasury; and the cleverest was to make the guards drunk so that he could steal away his brother’s body.

The girl immediately clutched at him. But under cover of darkness the thief pushed towards her the hand of the corpse, which she seized and held tight in the belief it was his own. Then leaving it in her grasp, he made his escape through the door.......”

A very sporting Pharaoh as it turned out. He was so impressed he offered the thief not only a pardon, but the hand of his daughter.......I only hope it was HER hand.

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"The Christmas Tree" by a much

neglected poet  C. Day Lewis

Put out the lights now

Look at the tree, the rough tree dazzled

In Oriole plumes of flame.

Tinselled with twinkling frost fire,tasselled

With stars and moons - the same

That yesterday hid in the spinney and had no fame

Till we put out the lights now

Hard are the nights now

The fields of moonrise turn to agate,

Shadows are cold as jet

In dyke and farrow, in copse and faggot

The frosts tooth is set;

And stars are the sparks whirled out by the north wind's

fret

On the flinty nights now.

So feast your eyes now

On mimic star and moon-cold bauble

Worlds may wither unseen

But the Christmas tree is a tree of fable

A phoenix in evergreen.

And the world cannot change or chill what the mysteries

mean

To your hearts and eyes now

The vision dies now

Candle by candle the tree that embraced it

Returns to its own kind

To be earthed again and weather as best it

May the frost and the wind.

Children it too had its hour - you will not mind

If it lives or dies now.

When the Sunday Times columnist Godfrey Smith asked his readers for their favourite poems and prose about Christmas, that poem came high on the list.

NATIVITIES WITH A CONTEMPORARY TWIST (Daily Telegraph)

Getting Ready for Christmas, by Meg Harper

Aimed at Key Stage 2 children (seven- to 11-year-olds), this Nativity looks at the different characters' reactions to Mary's pregnancy. Promising "cross-curricular activities" the script allows children to explore the themes further in personal, social and health education, ensuring the play has some classroom relevance.

Topsy Turvy Christmas, by Lucy Moore

Another one for Key Stage 2 children, this introduces pupils to truanting and blue-sky thinking. Two angels are skiving off choir practice to watch television. Seeing events unfold on TV, the angels at first view God's plans for the birth of his child as crazy, until they realise that the first Christmas is, like, "so upside down it's the right way up!" Among the humour are songs in the style of rock'n'roll, rap and even calypso.

Jesus's Christmas Party, by Nicholas Allan

This Nativity, for any children from three up, takes on the tale of the innkeeper, who loves nothing more than a good 40 winks, but suffers a night of interruptions and lost sleep. He gets increasingly irate, but melts at the sight of the little baby. A musical version, by Roger Parsley, is available.

The Stars Come Out for Christmas, by Andrew Oxspring

This play is held in the style of a Hollywood – "Tinseltown" – awards ceremony, recognising the services of those who've made an "outstanding contribution" to Christmas. Nominees include Santa, Christmas cards and Christmas dinner. But who's the biggest star of them all? Why, Beth of course: the Star of Bethlehem.

AND TO TOP IT ALL MY BROTHER IN LAW WHO MAKES MUCH OF XMAS WAS UNABLE TO FIND ANY WRAPPING PAPER THAT DIDN'T CARRY THE INSCRIPTON “WINTER WISHES”.

         

                         

SHOO TREE WHILST I AM STILL SOLVENT

I can never set a foot on the calendular escalator that leads to Christmas without remembering my friend Curly Beard and the free Xmas tree.

Curly was a former champion show jumper for whom I used to ride work in the days when I could be carried by a single horse.  He spent much of his retirement drinking in the Sportsman, up on the Welsh border at Tattenhall.

I was in the bar there one day with Curly and my old man.

I said: "I will have to go after this. Going to buy a Christmas tree from the Delamere forest."

Curly said: "You don't have to buy one.  I'll get you one free.  But we will have to wait until dark."

So I said: "What will you have while we are waiting?"

Curly said he would have a large gin and my old man said, while I was ordering, would I call him up a large scotch?  By the time I had added mine, the free Christmas tree had cost me £4 (it was a long time ago).  By the time it was dark it had cost me another ten quid and we were in no state to go digging up Christmas trees.

We arranged to meet at opening time the next day.  We were just going to have one and then collect a free tree from a friend of Curly's.  We would have done, too, if the Wynnstay Hounds hadn't been meeting at the Cock at Barton.

In those days hunt followers of standing - or in our case barely standing - shared the stirrup cup, a potent mixture of port and brandy which reconciled people to falling off horses.  It tasted so good we stayed on after the hounds had moved off. Let's be honest, we were still on it, at my considerable expense, when the huntsman blew kennels somewhere over by Overton.

We kept meeting like that for about a week and I had lost count of how much the free tree had cost me in drinks.  But it was well over fifty quid, 70s’ prices.

To be fair, though, the next night we borrowed the landlord's spade and went off to dig up the tree.  I do not know how we managed to break the spade, which I later replaced at the cost of £11.50.

I know how I broke the tree.  I remember falling on it.  And even if I hadn't remembered, my wife of the time kept reminding me of it for years.

If you can avoid the Christmas disasters, have a very merry time.  Do not forget the wise words of The Tao by Lao Tsu:

 

“The wise therefore rule by emptying hearts and stuffing bellies, by wakening ambitions and strengthening bones.  If men lack knowledge and desire, then clever people will not try to interfere.  If nothing is done, then all will be well.”

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Opening presents is the only part of Christmas that is as good as it was when you were a child.  But it is seldom that a Christmas gift changes one’s whole life.

 My chums Dr Philip and Patricia Brown (nee O’Callaghan and a formidable Express reporter) have given me such a gift.  I feel like Moliere’s Misanthrope who discovered to his delight that he had been talking prose all his life.

 

Would you believe, I am an epistemologist and always have been?

 The book in which I made this discovery is “The History of Britain Revealed” by M. J .Harper.  The discovery is Applied Epistemology, which posits, briefly, that everybody gets everything wrong.  That the cherished national myths of the Island of Britain are just that; that most of the entries in the Oxford English Dictionary are wrong; British place name history is misconceived; Latin is not what it seems; the Anglo-Saxons played no major part in our history or language; and Middle English is a wholly imaginary language created by academics.  Oh, and the epic “Beowulf” is a medieval forgery.

 I cannot remember a book I read with more pleasure and little whoops of agreement…………………………………..

The quieter the Christmas, the better I like it.  No one better expressed the warm companionship I feel at times like these than Victoria Sackville West:

 

         “Sometimes when night has thickened on the woods

          And we in the house's square security

          Read, speak a little, read again,

          Read life at second-hand, speak of small things

          Being content and withdrawn for a little hour

          From the dangers and fears that are either wholly absent

           Or wholly invading - sometimes a shot rings out.

         Sudden and sharp.  Complete, it has no sequel.

 .         No sequel for us, only the sudden crack

           Breaking a silence, followed by a silence.

           Too slight a thing for comment, slight and unusual.

           A shot in the dark, fired by a hand unseen

           At a life unknown, finding or missing the target.

           Bringing death? bringing hurt? teaching perhaps escape?

           Escape from a present threat, a threat recurrent,

           Or ending once and for all?  But we read on.

           Since the shot was not at our hearts, since the mark was not 

            Your heart or mine, not this time, companion.”

A GHOST OF XMAS PAST

 

 

This is the time of the year for telling old stories by the fireside. This is my favourite………….

 

I keep going back in my mind to the Christmas when I was out of work and this pal of mine said: "Don’t suppose you’ll be having much of a Christmas?"

 

I said: "If I wanted a mince pie I would have to buy it on H.P.  We’ll be out on Xmas Day because it is warmer out than in the house.  I have promised the kids we’ll watch the Queen's Speech through the window of a TV shop.  Then we’re going to a park to mug robins for their breadcrumbs."

 

"Not having a bird on The Day then?"

 

"Not unless I can grab one of the robins as we steal its breadcrumbs."

 

He said: "Why don't you nip down to the market just before it closes on Xmas Eve?  They practically give birds away.  Then," he added, "come to the Press Party at the Continental Cinema."

 

So I did.  I picked up a chicken with my last fifty pence and went to the party.  Where I set up a record for drinking free scotch and eating vol-au-vent which was unbroken for many years.

 

Then this guest said: "Let's play rugby."  

 

Another guest said: "We haven't got a ball."

 

A third guest said: "Yes, we have," and grabbed the parcel of chicken from where it had been roosting under my arm.

 

Everyone but me applauded the skill with which the next guest, a rather showy chap, executed a back pass with my parcel between his legs.

 

I was less pleased than anyone when another guest followed through with a drop kick.  It was powerful, I will say that.  It sent the parcel soaring across the foyer, out into the street, over the heads of the passers-by, to drop, perfectly positioned, under the tyres of a passing bus.

 

They were all very apologetic.  The manager of the cinema particularly.  He said he hoped the parcel hadn't contained anything important.  I said, no, it was just a chicken I got for tea on Boxing Night.

 

For the rest of the party I was a bit thoughtful, though I did manage to clock up a further freeloader's record of 18 scotch and a round dozen vol-au-vents.

 

At the death the manager came up and gave me a parcel.  "I hope you will accept this replacement with our apologies," he said.

 

It was a twelve pound turkey.  Which would have been nice... but we didn't have an oven at the time, just a gas grill.  So we had to cook it a leg at a time.

 

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Here's a funny thing.  We went by coach to Rochester for the Dickens’ Festival.  It is great fun.  There is a procession, led by a pipe band, of townspeople dressed as Dickens’ characters, special services in the Cathedral which was the setting for Edwin Drood, a carol concert in the grounds of the magical Norman castle and later a second procession by candle light lanterns of Dickens’ characters.  There was a Christmas market, mulled wine stalls in the streets and a fun fair.

 

I spent the journey reading some memoirs of the Restoration poet Lord Rochester written by his contemporaries and I came across this explanation of the Hobbesian influences which shaped his thought.

In the "The Leviathan” Hobbes wrote:

"The present only has a being in nature; things past have a being in memory only, but things to come have no being at all."

Rochester; wrote:

"All my past life is mine no more;

"The Flying Hours are Gone
"Like transitory dreams given o'er
"Whose images are kept in store
"By memory alone.
"Whatever is to come is not,
“How can it then be mine?"

 

Marcus Aurelius wrote of life being like a river.  The past has flowed by irretrievably; the future has yet to reach us; it is only the river at our feet which exists.  The Eternal Present is a Buddhist concept.

So that’s the Lord Buddha, Marcus Aurelius, Hobbes and Rochester agreeing we should live in the Present - which makes it pretty well unanimous.  I must say, it is a concept that has given me much content.

 

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A MERRX XMAS STORY FROM THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

 

Pantomime horses are a much-loved staple of the genre.  But the star of a new production of the classic fairytale has been denied her horse-drawn carriage because council officials say the use of Shetland ponies breaches rules on health and safety and animal welfare.

The stars of a new production of Cinderella which opened at the Nottingham Theatre Royal on Friday night had hoped to be joined on stage by their regular team of ponies.  But officials in Nottingham have banned the use of live animals in premises they control and so Cinderella's coach had to be brought on stage by two male members of the cast wearing horses' heads.