For reasons best known to itself the army once thought I was officer material. That was despite the fact that I lost my first command, a party of twenty short-sighted soldiers I took to be be fitted with spectacles. They deserted to a man whilst my balance of my mind was disturbed.
Even more bizarre was the test of fitness to command they gave us. Can you believe: “Assemble a domestic light fitting!”
Perhaps that is one explanation for the existence of generals. Sir Richard Dannatt, the former boss of the army, told a R4 audience that we must choose the role we are going to play in the world and THEN choose the weapons we are going to use. “Anything else would be putting the cart before the horse.”
Watch where you are putting your cart, General. In the next war, start without me. If I am going to shoot anyone I like to know beforehand that I can afford to buy a gun.
A military friend reproaches me:
“What Dannatt is saying is that the government should decide in consultation with the military experts what role Britain is to play in the world and then equip the Armed Forces accordingly so they are not going into battle in the desert with equipment designed for the Cold War or into the jungle with desert kit etc., etc.”
Which is fine by me because the Balkanisation of Britain into New Ruritania means that two rapiers and a sling shot should see us through.
We were told this week that our hospitals can hardly cope with the casualties they are already nursing, let alone the wounded we are expecting in the putsch of the coming weeks in Afghanistan. The last time that happened was in the Crimea and it made a legend out of Florence Nightingale, undeservedly as it has turned out.
The tactics we are employing in this assault reverse the traditional view that surprise is the finest weapon in street fighting and in war. We have been warning the Taleban for weeks that we are on our way. Deliberately. It will mean more of our young men will die, the Ministry of Defence tells us with brazen effrontery. They will do so safe in the knowledge that, as a result, fewer Afghans will die. I thought he idea of warfare was to inflict casualties on the other side, not on ourselves.
The generals also believe the more mercenary Taleban will be encouraged by our warning of hell to come to take the thirty pieces of silver they are offered to lay down their arms. They believe we are fighting a Public School's Eleven. The thought that they might take their thirty pieces, spend them and then put their hands out for more does not occur. The other .piece of the equation is that Muslims don't mind dying. Dying, according to the Koran, is when life begins.
I have to say I see no reason to change my long held belief that anyone of higher rank than lance corporal is not to be trusted with anything, especially one's life.
ADDERATION
My old friend Allan Barham is a smile and a voice. Physically he is small but his voice would win Oscars, his smile light rooms and all the rest of him is talent. We worked in friendly competition on BBC Wales for more than thirty years and it was a competition in which I always came a convincing second. Apart from the fact that he could edit his tapes on a portable machine whilst sitting in his car, draping the cut tapes for reassembly over the steering wheel, when everyone else had to use a studio editing suite, his great gift was to find and interview a series of improbable eccentrics that defied belief.
I was glad I retired before he took up authorship. His first book was an account of life in a family hotel that made Fawlty Towers the new Ritz. His second “Radio Reporter” was an account of those interviews and in addition the finest instruction manual a trainee broadcaster could hope for.
It should have come as no surprise, therefore, to find he is a world expert on the adder. This week he brought out “The Adder Report”, a book which his publisher Toby Books rightly claims is “a bewitching brew, a steaming broth of legends and, yes, facts and fantasises that spill slithering from the cauldron and wriggle from the fearsome to the rib tickling funny..” For once a publisher undersells.
Professor David Bellamy, the TV man, points out in a foreword:
“The Adder Report is good news for snakes of all shapes and sizes. I hope many snake lovers will read this book and henceforth walk with care through our countryside fearful of the fact that they will harm the snakes...”
Oh I will, I will. In turn the book should carry a health warning: “Do Not Read in Bed”. I did and fell asleep whilst reading about a man who came eyeball to eyeball with an adder whilst crawling through a meadow. Nightmares I can handle. I was once married to one. NightSNAKES?
That was one night that sleep did not knit up the ravelled sleeve of care. I should think Barham is a stranger to sleep. On the evidence of the book, people write to him from all over he world and some pretty hair raising tales they have to tell. Quite why an adder should have two penises one cannot think. But he does.
There is no escaping them. Adders have been found in the Arctic Circle and at least one man successfully made a pet of one. He said it made a fine watch dog and every morning went for the postman. But as Spike Milligan observed, “There is nothing madder than a trod-on adder.”
My chum Colin Dunne writes;
The Washington Post has published the winning submissions to its yearly contest, in which readers are asked to supply alternate meanings for common words.
And the winners are:
1.Coffee, n. The person upon whom one coughs.
2. Flabbergasted, adj. Appalled by discovering how much weight one has gained.
3.Abdicate, v. To give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
4.Esplanade, v. To attempt an explanation while drunk.
5.Willy-nilly, adj. Impotent.
6.Negligent, adj. Absentmindedly answering the door when wearing only a nightgown.
7.Lymph, v. To walk with a lisp.
8. Gargoyle, n. Olive-flavored mouthwash.
9.Flatulence, n. Emergency vehicle that picks up someone who has been run over by a steamroller.
10.Balderdash, n. A rapidly receding hairline.
11.Testicle, n.. A humorous question on an exam.
12.Rectitude, n. The formal, dignified bearing adopted by proctologists.
13.Pokemon, n.. A Rastafarian proctologist.
14.Oyster, n. A person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddishisms.
15.Frisbeetarianism, n. The belief that, after death, the soul flies up onto the roof and gets stuck there.
16.Circumvent, n. An opening in the front of boxer shorts worn by Jewish men
Friday, 12 February 2010
Saturday, 6 February 2010
AUTOLYCUS THE THE CHEMIST AND THE TOWN THAT DROWNED THE VIRGIN MARY
Jim Bentley was the splitting image of the silent film comic Ben Turpin and he had the squeaky voice of an anguished squirrel. God made him in the image of a comedian but gave him a scholar's brain.
Almost single handed he cleared miles of industrial tramways, excavated pottery, preserved historic bricks, wrote poetry and made 400 paintings of life in his town. He paddled his canoe from Bala, where the Dee rises, to Chester where it empties into the sea. He cycled all over Britain and in Ireland saved a dying sheep by giving it the kiss of life.
He was a pharmacist in the Welsh border town of Buckley. The town was famous in medieval times for sentencing to death by drowning a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary which had fallen in a storm killing a passer-by. After a trial they threw it into the river Dee and it came ashore in Chester where it was thought to be a miraculous sign. It was erected on land which is still known as the Roodeye.
According to the News of the World, Buckley was also the European capital of incest. Had the entire population thronged the main street copulating merrily Bentley would not have noticed. His eyes were firmly fixed on the past. It was his spiritual home.
Through various accidents, Welsh towns like Caernarfon and Buckley have their own language. In Caernarfon, Welsh is sprinkled with words unknown elsewhere. They are cockney slang which the townsfolk picked up from the 19th century occupation by an English Militia at a time of industrial unrest.
Buckley mountain was a wild place in the 19th century. People came from Ireland, Staffordshire and Lancashire to work in its coal mines and potteries. They built shanty towns in clearances in Buckley Forest. The local language was Welsh but from the mixed population a new language evolved which was a conglomeration of Welsh and all the dialects. Bentley saved it from oblivion by writing reams of poetry in Bucklese.
He created his poems with the same intensity he applied to excavating tramways that had been used to transport pots, bricks, clay and coal to barges on the River Dee estuary. When he arrived in the town, the tramways had disappeared under tangled undergrowth, buried in ten feet of debris. Bentley dug out tons. As an archaeologist, he donated four lorry loads of artefacts he found to the museum service.
Thanks to him, Buckley became a place of pilgrimage for railway buffs. And to show them what it was like in its busy past, Bentley painted 50 illustrated boards.
A SOURCE, A SOURCE, MY KINGDOM FOR A SOURCE
The Head Ferret has been driving the family mad seeking the author of an aphorism “Live as though you were going to die tomorrow Study as though you are going to live for ever.”
It has a Johnsonian ring but Google attributes it to Gandhi. I cannot believe that silly poseur who caused so many deaths would have thought of anything so wise. Alas, none of my many books of quotations have supplied the answer.
As always, it has been fun searching. I have enjoyed paddling down many irrelevant tributaries. The urbane and defiantly upper class Geoffrey Madan's notebook is a dry Martini among anthologies. The flyleaf describes him as 'a connoisseur of the excellent, the original and the pungent in thought, word and deed.' He is also wildly funny in a Noel Coward kind of way:
“Our military advisers, if they had their way, would garrison the moon to protect us from Mars.” (Lord Salisbury)
“Americans go deeply into the surface of things.” (Henry Ward)
“I clearly very see a day when this vainglorious and immoral people (the French) will have to be put down.” (The Prince Consort)
“ A Moustache that looks as though it has been hammered through from the inside.” (When I read this I thought of our hapless Defence Secretary.)
It is almost certainly envy but I am not a fan of education. Educated people, I find, are frequently eager to reach out and grab the wrong end of the stick. Frank Muir was self educated but one of the best read men of his day. Among the many blessings he bequeathed us was a social history “The Frank Muir Book”, in which I was delighted to find another hero John Aubrey quoting Sir Henry Blount:
“He was much against sending young men to the universities...because they learnt there to be debaucht. And that the learning that they learned there they were to unlearne again, as a man that is buttoned or laced too hard must unbutton to be at his ease.”
It is fashionable to decry the blog as a nasty modern piece of navel gazing. It is nothing of the kind. It was invented in the 17the century by my favourite human being, Michel de Montaigne, who created the essay as a literary form.
We are old friends. We met when I was about twelve in Withington Public Library, where I came across a magical book by an American scholar Marvin Lowenthal. Its title “An Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne” seemed a contradiction in terms. How could it be auto? Lowenthal had written it and, anyway, Montaigne was the ultimate autobiographer. It was not a contradiction. Lowenthal explains: “I have long been tempted to give an account of his life...I realised it would be folly and impertinent to write the life of a man who had spent his genius writing it himself...I decided to invite him to collaborate with me.”
Aided by scissors and paste, he arranged and edited Montaigne's entire output to make what is the most precious book I have read. He inspired me to look for the essays which Montaigne wrote in a tower in his house near Bordeaux. It was a revelation. One opens the book and he immediately leaps from the page and becomes corporeal. It is as though he is sitting in your lap, chatting amiably about everything under the sun. Over the years I have collected his essays, his complete works - published in one blessed Everyman Library volume - and a two-volume Cockerel Press translation by de Florio from which Shakespeare profited.
Three times economic shipwreck has forced me to sell my books and three times, though it wasn't on offer, my Lowenthal disappeared. It is not an easy book to replace. The last time it took two years of diligent searching before I found a copy in New York.
So it is a relief to find that Sarah Bakewell, though she does not mention it in her bibliography, has revived Lowenthal's idea with “How To Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts”. It is published by Chatto and Windus and I heartily commend it to anyone looking for a friend who is both wise and literally delightful.
BEWRE OF GREEKS BRINGING TRUTHS
My classicist brother-in-law Francis Lucas offered this comment on the Iraq War. Pity Blair didn't read it.
"Take time, then, over your decision, which is an important one. Do not allow considerations of other people's opinions and other people's complaints to involve you in difficulties which you will feel yourselves. Think, too, of the great part that is played by the unpredictable in war: think of it now, before you are actually committed to war. The longer a war lasts, the more things tend to depend on accidents. Neither you nor we can see into them; we have to abide their outcome in the dark. And when people are entering upon a war they do things the wrong way round. Action comes first, and it is only when they have already suffered that they begin to think."
Thucydides Book 1 ch 75
My old friend, the former Daily Mail columnist JOHN EDWARDS, now snow-bound in Pembroke, sent this:
SIGN IN A STORE WINDOW
'WE WOULD RATHER DO BUSINESS WITH 1000 AL QAEDA TERRORISTS THAN WITH ONE SINGLE BRITISH SOLDIER!'
This sign was prominently displayed in the window of a business in
Glamorgan, South Wales .
You are probably outraged at the thought of such an inflammatory statement. However, we are a society which holds Freedom of Speech as perhaps our greatest Liberty. After all, it is ONLY A SIGN, you may say. 'What kind of business would dare to post such a sign?'
Answer:
A FUNERAL PARLOUR.
Almost single handed he cleared miles of industrial tramways, excavated pottery, preserved historic bricks, wrote poetry and made 400 paintings of life in his town. He paddled his canoe from Bala, where the Dee rises, to Chester where it empties into the sea. He cycled all over Britain and in Ireland saved a dying sheep by giving it the kiss of life.
He was a pharmacist in the Welsh border town of Buckley. The town was famous in medieval times for sentencing to death by drowning a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary which had fallen in a storm killing a passer-by. After a trial they threw it into the river Dee and it came ashore in Chester where it was thought to be a miraculous sign. It was erected on land which is still known as the Roodeye.
According to the News of the World, Buckley was also the European capital of incest. Had the entire population thronged the main street copulating merrily Bentley would not have noticed. His eyes were firmly fixed on the past. It was his spiritual home.
Through various accidents, Welsh towns like Caernarfon and Buckley have their own language. In Caernarfon, Welsh is sprinkled with words unknown elsewhere. They are cockney slang which the townsfolk picked up from the 19th century occupation by an English Militia at a time of industrial unrest.
Buckley mountain was a wild place in the 19th century. People came from Ireland, Staffordshire and Lancashire to work in its coal mines and potteries. They built shanty towns in clearances in Buckley Forest. The local language was Welsh but from the mixed population a new language evolved which was a conglomeration of Welsh and all the dialects. Bentley saved it from oblivion by writing reams of poetry in Bucklese.
He created his poems with the same intensity he applied to excavating tramways that had been used to transport pots, bricks, clay and coal to barges on the River Dee estuary. When he arrived in the town, the tramways had disappeared under tangled undergrowth, buried in ten feet of debris. Bentley dug out tons. As an archaeologist, he donated four lorry loads of artefacts he found to the museum service.
Thanks to him, Buckley became a place of pilgrimage for railway buffs. And to show them what it was like in its busy past, Bentley painted 50 illustrated boards.
A SOURCE, A SOURCE, MY KINGDOM FOR A SOURCE
The Head Ferret has been driving the family mad seeking the author of an aphorism “Live as though you were going to die tomorrow Study as though you are going to live for ever.”
It has a Johnsonian ring but Google attributes it to Gandhi. I cannot believe that silly poseur who caused so many deaths would have thought of anything so wise. Alas, none of my many books of quotations have supplied the answer.
As always, it has been fun searching. I have enjoyed paddling down many irrelevant tributaries. The urbane and defiantly upper class Geoffrey Madan's notebook is a dry Martini among anthologies. The flyleaf describes him as 'a connoisseur of the excellent, the original and the pungent in thought, word and deed.' He is also wildly funny in a Noel Coward kind of way:
“Our military advisers, if they had their way, would garrison the moon to protect us from Mars.” (Lord Salisbury)
“Americans go deeply into the surface of things.” (Henry Ward)
“I clearly very see a day when this vainglorious and immoral people (the French) will have to be put down.” (The Prince Consort)
“ A Moustache that looks as though it has been hammered through from the inside.” (When I read this I thought of our hapless Defence Secretary.)
It is almost certainly envy but I am not a fan of education. Educated people, I find, are frequently eager to reach out and grab the wrong end of the stick. Frank Muir was self educated but one of the best read men of his day. Among the many blessings he bequeathed us was a social history “The Frank Muir Book”, in which I was delighted to find another hero John Aubrey quoting Sir Henry Blount:
“He was much against sending young men to the universities...because they learnt there to be debaucht. And that the learning that they learned there they were to unlearne again, as a man that is buttoned or laced too hard must unbutton to be at his ease.”
It is fashionable to decry the blog as a nasty modern piece of navel gazing. It is nothing of the kind. It was invented in the 17the century by my favourite human being, Michel de Montaigne, who created the essay as a literary form.
We are old friends. We met when I was about twelve in Withington Public Library, where I came across a magical book by an American scholar Marvin Lowenthal. Its title “An Autobiography of Michel de Montaigne” seemed a contradiction in terms. How could it be auto? Lowenthal had written it and, anyway, Montaigne was the ultimate autobiographer. It was not a contradiction. Lowenthal explains: “I have long been tempted to give an account of his life...I realised it would be folly and impertinent to write the life of a man who had spent his genius writing it himself...I decided to invite him to collaborate with me.”
Aided by scissors and paste, he arranged and edited Montaigne's entire output to make what is the most precious book I have read. He inspired me to look for the essays which Montaigne wrote in a tower in his house near Bordeaux. It was a revelation. One opens the book and he immediately leaps from the page and becomes corporeal. It is as though he is sitting in your lap, chatting amiably about everything under the sun. Over the years I have collected his essays, his complete works - published in one blessed Everyman Library volume - and a two-volume Cockerel Press translation by de Florio from which Shakespeare profited.
Three times economic shipwreck has forced me to sell my books and three times, though it wasn't on offer, my Lowenthal disappeared. It is not an easy book to replace. The last time it took two years of diligent searching before I found a copy in New York.
So it is a relief to find that Sarah Bakewell, though she does not mention it in her bibliography, has revived Lowenthal's idea with “How To Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts”. It is published by Chatto and Windus and I heartily commend it to anyone looking for a friend who is both wise and literally delightful.
BEWRE OF GREEKS BRINGING TRUTHS
My classicist brother-in-law Francis Lucas offered this comment on the Iraq War. Pity Blair didn't read it.
"Take time, then, over your decision, which is an important one. Do not allow considerations of other people's opinions and other people's complaints to involve you in difficulties which you will feel yourselves. Think, too, of the great part that is played by the unpredictable in war: think of it now, before you are actually committed to war. The longer a war lasts, the more things tend to depend on accidents. Neither you nor we can see into them; we have to abide their outcome in the dark. And when people are entering upon a war they do things the wrong way round. Action comes first, and it is only when they have already suffered that they begin to think."
Thucydides Book 1 ch 75
My old friend, the former Daily Mail columnist JOHN EDWARDS, now snow-bound in Pembroke, sent this:
SIGN IN A STORE WINDOW
'WE WOULD RATHER DO BUSINESS WITH 1000 AL QAEDA TERRORISTS THAN WITH ONE SINGLE BRITISH SOLDIER!'
This sign was prominently displayed in the window of a business in
Glamorgan, South Wales .
You are probably outraged at the thought of such an inflammatory statement. However, we are a society which holds Freedom of Speech as perhaps our greatest Liberty. After all, it is ONLY A SIGN, you may say. 'What kind of business would dare to post such a sign?'
Answer:
A FUNERAL PARLOUR.
Saturday, 30 January 2010
FOR BECCY WITH LOVE
She was 22 when I met her but she was “in shape no bigger than an agate-stone on the forefinger of an alderman.” If she had been able to straighten her pain-wracked body she would not have been a yard tall. She weighed 40 pounds - and she is the only giant I ever knew.
Her name was Rebecca Osborne. She suffered from a rare form of Werdnig Hoffmann syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes wasting of the muscles. She was almost totally paralysed, her head had to be balanced for her and she had to be turned every hour at night by her loving mother Jenny - angels ran in the family - or she would have choked to death.
She knew the value of life and treasured it. She persuaded her parents to join the Sealed Knot (her father loved dressing up) “so they won't be lonely after I die.”
She was one of the wisest people I have met, and amongst the most thoughtful..My wife wondered whether it mattered when she gave so much love that she could never marry or have children. You could ask her questions like that and get a thoughtful answer.
She said:”Celia, I cannot let it. I have friends, very special friends. Some people have no friends and there is more to life than sex. I have got three dogs and a cat. Who wants men when you can have a dog?”
She had been too ill to go to school. What little education she had as a child came from supply teachers who visited her home. One advised her to find something to pass the time. She was incensed. She told me: “I thought, is this it? Pass the time? Until what? Till I die? Is this all I am here for? It's so futile, So many people have no dream, no vision, nothing to work for. I don't envy others because I know where I am going and I am going to get there and that is enough for me.”
Her father Brian made her a study to her own design in an upstairs room of their home in Port Dinorwic, near Bangor, North Wales. He put in a long window so she could look out at the prize-winning garden her mother created for her. He said: “We have tried to give her a stable home life and keep her occupied but her brain is always ahead of us. She has never allowed her body to rule her life but her ideas always outstrip her physical abilities.”
Her mother said: “She is a marvellous person. So kind and thoughtful. It is a tragedy she is as she is. She would be a high flier.”
Would be? Like the lark she perpetually ascended.
She enrolled for' A' level English tuition at Bangor Technical College. She couldn't go to the college so the college and five students came to her. She began to write, including a short story about a holiday romance, and before long a publisher agreed to publish it in a collection. She made jewellery and greeting cards; she did intricate lace making;sewed miniature tapestries on tiny canvases and tended a miniature garden in a wheelbarrow. It contained rare alpines and miniature specimens of jasmine,clematis, bamboo and oxalis. She kept a large proprietorial cat who lived on her wheelchair while her three dogs, a long haired chihuahua, a white papillon and a Pomeranian, rode on the step.
She was chiefly occupied making exquisite miniature rooms in boxes. She got the idea after seeing one in a catalogue. Her boxes contain farmhouse kitchens, bedrooms, sitting rooms. I have one before my as I write. It is the kitchen of my home on Anglesey. It reflects my interests. There are books and miniature newspapers, a tape recorder, a fishing rod and riding boots, a dog, and a bottle and glass. Knowing my views on Christmas, she put in a Christmas tree as a sly joke.
She did Trollope's Barchester books for 'A' level and made a miniature of Warden Mr Harding's study. On the top of the tiny wardrobe is a cleric's round hat.
She made all the furniture for her rooms but never included people. Yet you could always sense the sort of person who would use them. She held frequent exhibitions. Her first won the North Wales Arts Association artist's development award.
Anthony Andrews gave her 'Aloysius', the teddy bear he carried on Brideshead Revisited, and she had the world's largest collection of hearts, given to her by everyone she ever met. She said she kept ours on her mantelpiece. It made us very proud.
She was the only sufferer from the disease who lived beyond childhood. She told me:“I am slightly beyond my sell by date but for me I am not disabled in any way. I am not disabled for my work or for my writing.”
Death caught up with her too soon. She gave him a run for his money but I for one will never forgive him. I think of her as the slave girl, of whom Martial wrote: “Lie lightly on her turf and dew, She put so little weight on you.”
Dean Swift was much concerned about death in his elegaic poem “The Time Is Come”. I prefer his more acerbic attitude in his verses “ On the Death of Dean Swift” and a poem which is less well known.
Well from commerce and the weary world retired,
Unmoved by fame, nor by ambition fired,
Calmly I wait the call of Charon's boat,
Still drinking like a fish,
Still f,,,,,g like a goat.
His advice to old men is not without merit
Not to keep young Company unless they really desire it.
Not to be peevish or morose, or suspicious.
Not to scorn present Ways, or Wits, or Fashions, or Men, or War, &c.
Not to be fond of Children, or let them come near me hardly.
Not to tell the same story over and over to the same People.
Not to be covetous.
Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.
Not to be over severe with young People, but give Allowances for their youthfull follyes and weaknesses.
Not to be influenced by, or give ear to knavish tatling servants, or others.
Not to be too free of advise, nor trouble any but those that desire it.
To desire some good Friends to inform me wch of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, and wherein; and reform accordingly.
Not to talk much, nor of my self.
Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favor with Ladyes, &c.
Not to hearken to Flatteryes, nor conceive I can be beloved by a young woman,
Not to marry a young Woman
Not to be positive or opiniative.
Not to sett up for observing all these Rules; for fear I should observe none.
Her name was Rebecca Osborne. She suffered from a rare form of Werdnig Hoffmann syndrome, a genetic disorder that causes wasting of the muscles. She was almost totally paralysed, her head had to be balanced for her and she had to be turned every hour at night by her loving mother Jenny - angels ran in the family - or she would have choked to death.
She knew the value of life and treasured it. She persuaded her parents to join the Sealed Knot (her father loved dressing up) “so they won't be lonely after I die.”
She was one of the wisest people I have met, and amongst the most thoughtful..My wife wondered whether it mattered when she gave so much love that she could never marry or have children. You could ask her questions like that and get a thoughtful answer.
She said:”Celia, I cannot let it. I have friends, very special friends. Some people have no friends and there is more to life than sex. I have got three dogs and a cat. Who wants men when you can have a dog?”
She had been too ill to go to school. What little education she had as a child came from supply teachers who visited her home. One advised her to find something to pass the time. She was incensed. She told me: “I thought, is this it? Pass the time? Until what? Till I die? Is this all I am here for? It's so futile, So many people have no dream, no vision, nothing to work for. I don't envy others because I know where I am going and I am going to get there and that is enough for me.”
Her father Brian made her a study to her own design in an upstairs room of their home in Port Dinorwic, near Bangor, North Wales. He put in a long window so she could look out at the prize-winning garden her mother created for her. He said: “We have tried to give her a stable home life and keep her occupied but her brain is always ahead of us. She has never allowed her body to rule her life but her ideas always outstrip her physical abilities.”
Her mother said: “She is a marvellous person. So kind and thoughtful. It is a tragedy she is as she is. She would be a high flier.”
Would be? Like the lark she perpetually ascended.
She enrolled for' A' level English tuition at Bangor Technical College. She couldn't go to the college so the college and five students came to her. She began to write, including a short story about a holiday romance, and before long a publisher agreed to publish it in a collection. She made jewellery and greeting cards; she did intricate lace making;sewed miniature tapestries on tiny canvases and tended a miniature garden in a wheelbarrow. It contained rare alpines and miniature specimens of jasmine,clematis, bamboo and oxalis. She kept a large proprietorial cat who lived on her wheelchair while her three dogs, a long haired chihuahua, a white papillon and a Pomeranian, rode on the step.
She was chiefly occupied making exquisite miniature rooms in boxes. She got the idea after seeing one in a catalogue. Her boxes contain farmhouse kitchens, bedrooms, sitting rooms. I have one before my as I write. It is the kitchen of my home on Anglesey. It reflects my interests. There are books and miniature newspapers, a tape recorder, a fishing rod and riding boots, a dog, and a bottle and glass. Knowing my views on Christmas, she put in a Christmas tree as a sly joke.
She did Trollope's Barchester books for 'A' level and made a miniature of Warden Mr Harding's study. On the top of the tiny wardrobe is a cleric's round hat.
She made all the furniture for her rooms but never included people. Yet you could always sense the sort of person who would use them. She held frequent exhibitions. Her first won the North Wales Arts Association artist's development award.
Anthony Andrews gave her 'Aloysius', the teddy bear he carried on Brideshead Revisited, and she had the world's largest collection of hearts, given to her by everyone she ever met. She said she kept ours on her mantelpiece. It made us very proud.
She was the only sufferer from the disease who lived beyond childhood. She told me:“I am slightly beyond my sell by date but for me I am not disabled in any way. I am not disabled for my work or for my writing.”
Death caught up with her too soon. She gave him a run for his money but I for one will never forgive him. I think of her as the slave girl, of whom Martial wrote: “Lie lightly on her turf and dew, She put so little weight on you.”
Dean Swift was much concerned about death in his elegaic poem “The Time Is Come”. I prefer his more acerbic attitude in his verses “ On the Death of Dean Swift” and a poem which is less well known.
Well from commerce and the weary world retired,
Unmoved by fame, nor by ambition fired,
Calmly I wait the call of Charon's boat,
Still drinking like a fish,
Still f,,,,,g like a goat.
His advice to old men is not without merit
Not to keep young Company unless they really desire it.
Not to be peevish or morose, or suspicious.
Not to scorn present Ways, or Wits, or Fashions, or Men, or War, &c.
Not to be fond of Children, or let them come near me hardly.
Not to tell the same story over and over to the same People.
Not to be covetous.
Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.
Not to be over severe with young People, but give Allowances for their youthfull follyes and weaknesses.
Not to be influenced by, or give ear to knavish tatling servants, or others.
Not to be too free of advise, nor trouble any but those that desire it.
To desire some good Friends to inform me wch of these Resolutions I break, or neglect, and wherein; and reform accordingly.
Not to talk much, nor of my self.
Not to boast of my former beauty, or strength, or favor with Ladyes, &c.
Not to hearken to Flatteryes, nor conceive I can be beloved by a young woman,
Not to marry a young Woman
Not to be positive or opiniative.
Not to sett up for observing all these Rules; for fear I should observe none.
Saturday, 23 January 2010
FRIENDS AND LABOURS
The people I miss most from my time in Wales are the scholars. Not the academics who ring fenced the culture with an artificial Welsh language, incomprehensible to the average Welshman, which served to protect their jobs from non-Welsh competition.
My scholars were were the auto-didacts obsessed with a theory, usually bizarre, on which they spent their lives. A singularly unpleasant Welsh peer of my acquaintance amassed considerable evidence to prove he was the rightful king of France. An accountant friend Kathryn Pritchard Gibson bought Pen y Bryn, a chicken farm in Gwynedd. She became convinced it had been a royal palace. Experts scoffed at her years of research but she was proved right. Her turreted manor house was built from the ruins of the lost palace of Llywellyn the Great. Another chum, a quarryman's son, the Rev Aelwyn Roberts, vicar of Llandegai, exorcist to the bishop of Bangor, was the author of a best selling book on ghosts, founder of a publishing firm and a world authority on the Ty Bach (Welsh for outside privy). He wrote two books tracing that noble edifice back to the chamber pot of the Emperor Diocletian.
He also catalogued its etymology. To the Saxons it was the Gongfermor (gong, a privy; fermor, to cleanse). To the Welsh it is a Ty Bach (little house); Ty Cefyn (back quarters – of a house); Ty Cyffredin (House of Commons) and, most puzzling of all, Y Lle Chwech (The Sixpenny Place). He did solve the problem of the house with two outside privies at Chapel House in Amlwch. One was roomy and very posh, the other utilitarian. The posh one was for the exclusive use of visiting ministers, the plainer one for the tenants.
As yet no one has substantiated his greatest obsession. Aelwyn believed Shakespeare was the pen name of a committee headed by a Welshman, John Williams. A 17th century archbishop of York, Williams was buried in Llandegai church. The theory started with an itinerant tax collector called George Winchcombe, who, with his brother Bernard, published a bizarre book “Shakespeare's Ghost Writers” in the 1960s. Aelwyn believed the theory was corroborated by an inscription in Latin on Williams's tomb which acknowledges “his outstanding eminence in the world of letters for which he was showered with honours by two kings.”
As Aelwyn pointed out, the Archbishop's only published work was a tract on the Communion Table.
But he certainly had the intellectual capacity to write the plays. He spoke nine languages, was a brilliant scholar, well versed in law, theology and the classics. He spent most of his life in Court and was a privy councillor, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and Lord Chancellor. When he was bishop of Lincoln, he was fined and his chaplain put in the stocks for producing “A Midsummer Night's Dream” in his palace. He was a friend of Squire John Salisbury of Denbigh, to whom Shakespeare dedicated a poem. Tom Roberts, an antiquarian bookseller of that town, discovered an unknown poem of Shakespeare's, together with evidence that the Bard spent the plague years as a guest of Sir John.
In the matter of obsessions, an old sea captain I knew, Richard Turner, was the king. His great love was a nun called Gwenllian who had been safely dead for 700 years. She was the daughter of Llywellyn, the last Prince of Wales, who was 'defeated' by the English – or, as another friend of mine assured me, assassinated by the Welsh. Gwenllian was kidnapped and sent to a nunnery at Sempringham Priory.
When, in his late sixties, Captain Turner heard that the bishop of Peterborough was to dedicate a plaque to St Gilbert, the Priory's founder, he knew exactly what was due. Watched in astonishment by several dozen dignitaries, he staggered up the Priory path carrying a heavy tombstone in Gwenllian's memory. He had it made by a Caernarfon blacksmith with the inscription “Died at Sempringham, 7.6.1337, having been held a prisoner for 54 years”. He put it in the boot of his car and drove nearly 300 miles to deliver it. He had not sought permission from the Crown, who owned the land, or the Diocese who owned the Priory. Bishop Bill Ind was in a quandary. But he was an amiable man. He couldn't put the stone in the ruin but he gave permission for it be erected in the grounds.
When I went to interview him, Captain Turner was in the middle of an even more ambitious plot. He had read that a fragment of the True Cross, which had been part of Llywellyn's regalia, had been cemented in the roof of the new St George's Chapel in Windsor. The Captain wanted to borrow a ladder and steal it back. Alas, he knew no one in Caernarfon who had a hundred foot ladder.
I knew a house builder, Emrys Jones, who built 60 of the 120 houses in his village Llanrhaedr, Denbighshire, a restaurant, a garage and a village museum which he stocked and curated. In his spare time he painted the most exquisite miniatures. Lacking anywhere to show them, he decided to build an art gallery. Alas, he got carried away and, by the time he had finished, the gallery was so big the miniatures would have been lost in it. When I last met him he was searching desperately for an artist to take it off his hands.
Another builder pal of mine, Clement Beretta, built his wife a house and painted murals on every available surface. She moved in but Beretta had run out of walls. So he built her another house next door. In all she moved sixteen times. She refused to move to the seventeenth: Beretta planned to build it underground..
The murals are great selling points. In his youth, Beretta had been introduced to the painter Rex Whistler, who had been commissioned by the 6th Marquess of Anglesey to paint murals in his dining room. When Whistler saw Beretta's work, he recruited him to paint the trompe l'oeil coffered Italian ceilings and a series of fluted pilasters. It took him six months and so far no one has been able to tell where Beretta's work ends and Whistler's begins.
The 7th Marquess was my landlord and is a great friend. He is not an auto-didact but is very scathing about his school, Eton. “Outdoor earth closets and no fires before 4.30 in the afternoon.” He was learning the cello but his housemaster said he must give it up because he was so bad at maths. “Now,” he told me ruefully, “I cannot play the cello and I am no good at maths.”
He is too modest. William Mathias, the composer, said he could earn his living as a professional musician; our neighbour Sir Kyffin Williams, the painter, insisted he could paint to a professional standard. He has also been awarded the Berkeley Gold Medal for his multi volume History of the Cavalry. He served in the Royal Horse Guards, which his ancestor, Wellington's Cavalry Commander at Waterloo, commanded. But he hates horses.
In 1940, when he was 16, he got a job in the drawing office at a Vickers Armstrong aircraft factory near Chester. He said: “We worked 17 or 18 hours a day with every third Sunday off and there wasn't a moment that wasn't absolutely wonderful, exciting, thrilling, getting on with it. Nothing mattered at all except to thrash Hitler. It was fun because there were all sorts of things that needed new drawings and I can claim that two or three improvements in Wellington bombers were due to me. I was also asked to build a ramp up to the canteen that is there to this day.”
I ONLY ASKED.........................................
Reading a history of Haiti in the terrible days of Papa Doc makes one wonder even more why the U.S. was so keen to topple Saddam Hussein but allowed the more evil Papa Doc to flourish in Haiti, which, as they have demonstrated this week, they can invade with ease. They even helped his equally evil son escape into exile with the Haitian treasury.
My scholars were were the auto-didacts obsessed with a theory, usually bizarre, on which they spent their lives. A singularly unpleasant Welsh peer of my acquaintance amassed considerable evidence to prove he was the rightful king of France. An accountant friend Kathryn Pritchard Gibson bought Pen y Bryn, a chicken farm in Gwynedd. She became convinced it had been a royal palace. Experts scoffed at her years of research but she was proved right. Her turreted manor house was built from the ruins of the lost palace of Llywellyn the Great. Another chum, a quarryman's son, the Rev Aelwyn Roberts, vicar of Llandegai, exorcist to the bishop of Bangor, was the author of a best selling book on ghosts, founder of a publishing firm and a world authority on the Ty Bach (Welsh for outside privy). He wrote two books tracing that noble edifice back to the chamber pot of the Emperor Diocletian.
He also catalogued its etymology. To the Saxons it was the Gongfermor (gong, a privy; fermor, to cleanse). To the Welsh it is a Ty Bach (little house); Ty Cefyn (back quarters – of a house); Ty Cyffredin (House of Commons) and, most puzzling of all, Y Lle Chwech (The Sixpenny Place). He did solve the problem of the house with two outside privies at Chapel House in Amlwch. One was roomy and very posh, the other utilitarian. The posh one was for the exclusive use of visiting ministers, the plainer one for the tenants.
As yet no one has substantiated his greatest obsession. Aelwyn believed Shakespeare was the pen name of a committee headed by a Welshman, John Williams. A 17th century archbishop of York, Williams was buried in Llandegai church. The theory started with an itinerant tax collector called George Winchcombe, who, with his brother Bernard, published a bizarre book “Shakespeare's Ghost Writers” in the 1960s. Aelwyn believed the theory was corroborated by an inscription in Latin on Williams's tomb which acknowledges “his outstanding eminence in the world of letters for which he was showered with honours by two kings.”
As Aelwyn pointed out, the Archbishop's only published work was a tract on the Communion Table.
But he certainly had the intellectual capacity to write the plays. He spoke nine languages, was a brilliant scholar, well versed in law, theology and the classics. He spent most of his life in Court and was a privy councillor, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal and Lord Chancellor. When he was bishop of Lincoln, he was fined and his chaplain put in the stocks for producing “A Midsummer Night's Dream” in his palace. He was a friend of Squire John Salisbury of Denbigh, to whom Shakespeare dedicated a poem. Tom Roberts, an antiquarian bookseller of that town, discovered an unknown poem of Shakespeare's, together with evidence that the Bard spent the plague years as a guest of Sir John.
In the matter of obsessions, an old sea captain I knew, Richard Turner, was the king. His great love was a nun called Gwenllian who had been safely dead for 700 years. She was the daughter of Llywellyn, the last Prince of Wales, who was 'defeated' by the English – or, as another friend of mine assured me, assassinated by the Welsh. Gwenllian was kidnapped and sent to a nunnery at Sempringham Priory.
When, in his late sixties, Captain Turner heard that the bishop of Peterborough was to dedicate a plaque to St Gilbert, the Priory's founder, he knew exactly what was due. Watched in astonishment by several dozen dignitaries, he staggered up the Priory path carrying a heavy tombstone in Gwenllian's memory. He had it made by a Caernarfon blacksmith with the inscription “Died at Sempringham, 7.6.1337, having been held a prisoner for 54 years”. He put it in the boot of his car and drove nearly 300 miles to deliver it. He had not sought permission from the Crown, who owned the land, or the Diocese who owned the Priory. Bishop Bill Ind was in a quandary. But he was an amiable man. He couldn't put the stone in the ruin but he gave permission for it be erected in the grounds.
When I went to interview him, Captain Turner was in the middle of an even more ambitious plot. He had read that a fragment of the True Cross, which had been part of Llywellyn's regalia, had been cemented in the roof of the new St George's Chapel in Windsor. The Captain wanted to borrow a ladder and steal it back. Alas, he knew no one in Caernarfon who had a hundred foot ladder.
I knew a house builder, Emrys Jones, who built 60 of the 120 houses in his village Llanrhaedr, Denbighshire, a restaurant, a garage and a village museum which he stocked and curated. In his spare time he painted the most exquisite miniatures. Lacking anywhere to show them, he decided to build an art gallery. Alas, he got carried away and, by the time he had finished, the gallery was so big the miniatures would have been lost in it. When I last met him he was searching desperately for an artist to take it off his hands.
Another builder pal of mine, Clement Beretta, built his wife a house and painted murals on every available surface. She moved in but Beretta had run out of walls. So he built her another house next door. In all she moved sixteen times. She refused to move to the seventeenth: Beretta planned to build it underground..
The murals are great selling points. In his youth, Beretta had been introduced to the painter Rex Whistler, who had been commissioned by the 6th Marquess of Anglesey to paint murals in his dining room. When Whistler saw Beretta's work, he recruited him to paint the trompe l'oeil coffered Italian ceilings and a series of fluted pilasters. It took him six months and so far no one has been able to tell where Beretta's work ends and Whistler's begins.
The 7th Marquess was my landlord and is a great friend. He is not an auto-didact but is very scathing about his school, Eton. “Outdoor earth closets and no fires before 4.30 in the afternoon.” He was learning the cello but his housemaster said he must give it up because he was so bad at maths. “Now,” he told me ruefully, “I cannot play the cello and I am no good at maths.”
He is too modest. William Mathias, the composer, said he could earn his living as a professional musician; our neighbour Sir Kyffin Williams, the painter, insisted he could paint to a professional standard. He has also been awarded the Berkeley Gold Medal for his multi volume History of the Cavalry. He served in the Royal Horse Guards, which his ancestor, Wellington's Cavalry Commander at Waterloo, commanded. But he hates horses.
In 1940, when he was 16, he got a job in the drawing office at a Vickers Armstrong aircraft factory near Chester. He said: “We worked 17 or 18 hours a day with every third Sunday off and there wasn't a moment that wasn't absolutely wonderful, exciting, thrilling, getting on with it. Nothing mattered at all except to thrash Hitler. It was fun because there were all sorts of things that needed new drawings and I can claim that two or three improvements in Wellington bombers were due to me. I was also asked to build a ramp up to the canteen that is there to this day.”
I ONLY ASKED.........................................
Reading a history of Haiti in the terrible days of Papa Doc makes one wonder even more why the U.S. was so keen to topple Saddam Hussein but allowed the more evil Papa Doc to flourish in Haiti, which, as they have demonstrated this week, they can invade with ease. They even helped his equally evil son escape into exile with the Haitian treasury.
Saturday, 16 January 2010
ARMCHERISHED
We met across a crowded room at a jolly lunch party given by neighbours. For the Armchair and I it was love at first sight.
It was the size of Surrey and welcomed me with open arms of such substance that, had they circled Constantinople, they would have protected that city from sacking by unsavoury Crusaders in the pay of the Venetian Empire. It was stuffed with the feathers of a thousand good tempered geese and I sank into its embrace like a lost soul come home to a safe haven.
We were so obviously meant for each other that Jeannie and Philip, my generous hosts, brought it over on Twelfth Night, the old Christmas Day in the Julian calendar, and gave me the finest gift in the history of that noble day.
We celebrated The Arrival with a magical dinner of pheasant, stuffed with apple, black pudding, breadcrumbs, thyme, parsley and brandy. Alas, a temptress lay in wait. A genuine Martini glass with the narrow stem of a Gibson Girl and an Ella Fitzgerald lip that was wide and welcoming. We found it in a curious Factory Shop where we always find something to buy but never the item we were looking for.
I had been searching for just such a glass since another friend, Brian Hitchen, passed on to me the recipe for a Mafia Martini, which, when he worked in New York, he had acquired from a great friend who was a Mafia Capo di Capo.
Alas, the Martini proved such excellent company that I had several, fell asleep in the armchair and had to have the pheasant again the next day to discover what it tasted like.
I am now besotted with the armchair and bought it, as a welcome home present, a loose cover so costly it is almost certainly cloth of gold.
Being stationary suits me. When we lived in Wales, I needed Quells to cross the Menai Bridge. Yet the voice travelled far and wide. Until I retired, I broadcast a weekly letter from Anglesey for the World Service, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Forces Broadcasting Service. Mine was a household voice in Hobart, a cult in Calcutta, very big in Belize and in Orange, New South Wales, they talked of little else.
The voice was a world traveller but the rest of me stayed at home and did a weekly radio interview “Skidmore's Armchair” and a programme based on our street called “Radio Brynsiencyn”, which involved the minimum of moving about.
Lethargy was brought to my christening by an insistent fairy and another brought the love of the world of books. 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.
There was no need to leave your home in order to travel. Over the centuries this strange breed, The Author, has been 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.
With no one to guide me, my reading followed no pattern. I took Herodotus home because I thought it 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 translation by de Selincourt - used the sort of short words which we used in everyday conversation. He was a great traveller but, as with most reporters, no one believed what he said. He described how the pyramids were built after interviewing Egyptian priests. For centuries scholars insisted his explanation was rubbish. Years later on “Skidmore's Armchair” 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 the building of the treasury to house 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.
It was the size of Surrey and welcomed me with open arms of such substance that, had they circled Constantinople, they would have protected that city from sacking by unsavoury Crusaders in the pay of the Venetian Empire. It was stuffed with the feathers of a thousand good tempered geese and I sank into its embrace like a lost soul come home to a safe haven.
We were so obviously meant for each other that Jeannie and Philip, my generous hosts, brought it over on Twelfth Night, the old Christmas Day in the Julian calendar, and gave me the finest gift in the history of that noble day.
We celebrated The Arrival with a magical dinner of pheasant, stuffed with apple, black pudding, breadcrumbs, thyme, parsley and brandy. Alas, a temptress lay in wait. A genuine Martini glass with the narrow stem of a Gibson Girl and an Ella Fitzgerald lip that was wide and welcoming. We found it in a curious Factory Shop where we always find something to buy but never the item we were looking for.
I had been searching for just such a glass since another friend, Brian Hitchen, passed on to me the recipe for a Mafia Martini, which, when he worked in New York, he had acquired from a great friend who was a Mafia Capo di Capo.
Alas, the Martini proved such excellent company that I had several, fell asleep in the armchair and had to have the pheasant again the next day to discover what it tasted like.
I am now besotted with the armchair and bought it, as a welcome home present, a loose cover so costly it is almost certainly cloth of gold.
Being stationary suits me. When we lived in Wales, I needed Quells to cross the Menai Bridge. Yet the voice travelled far and wide. Until I retired, I broadcast a weekly letter from Anglesey for the World Service, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Forces Broadcasting Service. Mine was a household voice in Hobart, a cult in Calcutta, very big in Belize and in Orange, New South Wales, they talked of little else.
The voice was a world traveller but the rest of me stayed at home and did a weekly radio interview “Skidmore's Armchair” and a programme based on our street called “Radio Brynsiencyn”, which involved the minimum of moving about.
Lethargy was brought to my christening by an insistent fairy and another brought the love of the world of books. 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.
There was no need to leave your home in order to travel. Over the centuries this strange breed, The Author, has been 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.
With no one to guide me, my reading followed no pattern. I took Herodotus home because I thought it 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 translation by de Selincourt - used the sort of short words which we used in everyday conversation. He was a great traveller but, as with most reporters, no one believed what he said. He described how the pyramids were built after interviewing Egyptian priests. For centuries scholars insisted his explanation was rubbish. Years later on “Skidmore's Armchair” 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 the building of the treasury to house 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.
Friday, 8 January 2010
SO FAR NO FATHER
Looking back over a lifetime which has sparkled with unlikely friendships, the most gleeful was the one my wife and I enjoyed with two other writers, a retired judge called Ronnie Knox Mawer and his wife June, the most talented broadcaster I have ever met who in retirement turned out best sellers with provoking ease.
The apogee of Ronnie's career - and the subject of his hilarious books - was his appointment as Chief Justice of the South Seas in a bizarre career as a Colonial Judge in the days of Empire. He had been many things. An author, broadcaster, lorry-driving soldier, barrister, circuit judge and stipendiary magistrate. In retirement he toured the grand hotels scrounging unguents and blankets for the needy who crowded the St Vincent de Paul Society hostel near Victoria. He explained he was the Archbishop of Westminster's Arthur Daley.
Ronnie's guardian angel was an impish creature constantly devising comic situations which Ronnie relished. Going to war must have been light relief. Sent up a windmill in Holland to watch for V2s, he slipped gently out of his unit’s collective memory. So completely they forgot to tell him when the war ended and he was only recalled when his name was missed on the demobilisation list.
His time as a colonial judge in the South Seas ought to have been the subject of an Ealing Comedy. Ronnie, who would have had to put on weight to be spectral, spent his 35th birthday in full judicial robes partnering a 20-stone King of the Savage Islands in a dance of welcome. On circuit, his judge’s lodgings were a tree house which he shared with a colony of flying foxes. His predecessor had made history by adjourning a murder trial when the defendant's family ate the jury.
Back in this country and appointed a London stipendiary magistrate, his spectral appearance caused chaos in his court at Bow Street when a cleaner mistook him for the Ghost of the Clerkenwell strangler.
Back home he wore two overcoats. Not so much for warmth as to become visible to the naked eye.
Ronnie was 26 when he first put on the black cap and sentenced a man to death. He subsequently handed down more death sentences than most people have had last breakfasts.
The Knox Mawers spent their winters in a smart flat in Park Lane, Mayfair, and the summer in a row of cottages they had converted at the end of a vertiginous lane in the Eliseg Crags above Llangollen. The last time we dined together we had been bidden to celebrate the massacre of a colony of wasps who had turned a corner of his garden into Helmand Province.
I am standing over the nest with the insecticide and my friend is saying to the wasps within, “Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say.....”
I was puzzled to know why I had been lured seventy miles by the prospect of a hearty dinner to kill wasps. Then I recall my friend has a fine legal sense of precedent and my family has had a long connection with executioners. A gentle man, inevitably he went to grant the wasps a pardon, abandoning that section of his garden.
His father was a well known Wrexham chemist. A terrifying tyrant, he ruled his family in a gaunt, Victorian villa from which evacuees fled. In his book ”Are You Coming or Going?”, Ronnie turned him into a clown. As a precaution against gas attacks in 1939 Ronnie and his three sisters were all ordered to wear their masks wherever possible. Father set an example by wearing not only his gas mask to prune his cherished damson tree: he also wore a black steel helmet captured by an uncle from the Austrian army in 1914.
Ronnie wrote:“Father looked startlingly like the scientist in the horror movie ‘The Fly'........
.......our neighbour Mrs Hurford Jenkins was peacefully weeding her bed of African marigolds. Her shriek of terror rang down the entire road as she was helped into the house. Inevitably her husband hurried round to complain. ‘Are you trying to win your own war of Nerves, Knox Mawer?’ he demanded. Since father’s voice was muffled behind his mask, the major received no satisfactory reply............”
My father was the official driver to Albert Pierrepoint, the most famous public hangman. He did not mind his macabre role. It was a rest from his other job in the wartime police which was running a black market cartel. Though he did find it a touch strange the way Albert, who had a fine baritone voice, liked to lead a singsong in pubs on the way home from work.
Albert had a pub himself near Blackpool called “Help the Poor Struggler”, which even my old man thought was not in the best of taste. Though the coachloads of trippers who called there every day thought it a great joke and all wanted their photographs taken standing under the sign with Albert.
Another hangman I knew called Wade had a cafe in Yorkshire called “Rest Weary Pilgrim” so maybe a macabre sense of humour went with the job. Though a third chum, hangman Harry Allen, kept a pub called The Junction so it wasn't universal.
In the days of which I speak even bars on the road to Blackpool not run by hangmen did a roaring trade .Gin and orange was the staple drink and stood ready poured in rows on the bar top waiting for a charabanc to arrive. Unscrupulous landlords filled the glasses with orange juice and wiped a gin stained finger round the rim. No one ever noticed. Another scam after a punter had drunk three genuine gin and tonics was to serve him plain tonic for subsequent orders. The punter would still taste gin. It works. Try it.
My father was a wit, a bon viveur, the jovial heart of every merry company. A street fighter, a womaniser. And from the age of eleven I hated him. I had plenty of reason. He beat my grannie, my mother and he beat me.
When I was younger we were inseparable. When he wasn't drinking he would spend hours teaching me to draw or reading me Westerns or adventure stories about an improbable man called McClusky. He also read Dickens and Thorne Smith, a now forgotten humorous writer. He risked lung cancer to get a collection of English classic novels by smoking enough Kensitas Black Cat cigarettes to qualify for the gift.
My father was a thwarted student. At 15 he was fighting in the front line in World War One with the 1st Royal Scots. His war medals chronicled his dizzy climb to lance corporal and rapid return to private soldier. He claimed to be one of the last men to be given Field Punishment Number One, which was being lashed to the wheel of a field gun and birched. It was the only part of his service he talked about. War stories were verboten. Too painful to be recalled. Gassed and given up for dead, he recovered working on a fruit farm and became fit enough to join the police force in Manchester where he was shot in the head by the IRA, although he claimed the shot was fired by his inspector who disliked him.
Long after they were both dead, I realised that, unintentionally I was the cause of their misery. I learned my mother had declined conjugal relations since 1928 when I was conceived. She became pregnant before they were married. He had done what used to be called “the honourable thing” but they lived the rest of their lives in a bitterly unhappy marriage. Under the circumstances, his adulteries and his furies were surely understandable.
What I have since come to realise was that, had we not been father and son, we would have got on like a house on fire. He was born for trouble. On his first night as a policeman, a dentist had asked him, if he came across a stray cat, to put it in the dentist's cellar to clear an infestation of mice. Unfortunately, my father told the other policemen what he had done. All but one of them put a cat in the cellar. It was the one who put the dog in that got my father on a disciplinary charge.
His weakness was his willingness to accept gratuities. You could have given my father leprosy as long as it was free. In the early thirties there was an outbreak of psittacosis, a deadly disease transmitted by parrots. As a result, parrots were given away on every street corner. My father was the only person I heard of who accepted one. He was on duty at the time, but he brought the parrot home, then went back on his beat. Within minutes, the parrot had been killed by the cat.
We were living with my granny at the time, a lady who could have given Machiavelli three blacks and beaten him. When my father came home and demanded to know what had happened to his parrot, she told him it had just dropped dead. “Good God,” he said,”psittacosis!”
Before he could be stopped, he piled all our furniture into a heap in the backyard and burned it.
According to my mother, I had watched the incident intently. I did not speak until the fire burned down, when I said, “Naughty pussy ate the parrot”. It began a lifelong enmity between my father and his mother-in-law.
If the Bible has got it right,which I doubt, I should be meeting him soon. I hope so. As I say, I will be glad of the chance to apologise.
THE WORLD SPINS ROUND AND ROUND...........................
John Major and Lady Williams are two politicians of principle I have always found it possible to admire. On Radio this week they agreed that the worst thing that had entered politics in their lifetime was Spin and that the surest way to regain public respect for parliament was to sack all the spin doctors.
I am surprised they thought it a recent phenomenon. Spin is as old as humanity. It was evident in the cave paintings of animals and hunters which persuaded our ancestors that by making them they would achieve success in the field.
When I was a reporter so many people told me things about themselves I would have hesitated to tell my best friend that I decided the driving force of our sorry species was a desire to escape from anonymity. It isn't. What drives us is spin.
One of the great speeches in the Classical world was Pericles's funeral oration to the Athenians. Ostensibly, it celebrated the glorious dead in the first Peloponesian War. In fact it was an eulogy of the way of life to which he aspired for the Athenians. An appeal, like the later speeches of Churchill, another fine war leader and a master of spin, to sentimental patriotism. Cicero swayed the Senate with his oratory to achieve his ends.
I have only made two minor discoveries about Shakespeare. The first was that his play “The Tempest” contains echoes of most of the plays which preceded it, reminding those playgoers who saw it of the smash hits he had written in the past. The other is that the great battle speeches were not entirely the products of his soaring imagination. A source book he used was “Halle's Chronicles” which can now be read free on Gutenberg and Google. In them you will read the speeches of Henry V before Shrewsbury and Agincourt, which were the skeletons on which Shakespeare put flesh and were designed to put heart into the worn out soaking soldiers .
Today the ultimate spin is Warmgate.The principal spinners and doom sayers are the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, now derided, and the Met Office who cannot even get the weather right for the weekend but nevertheless presume to give forecasts for the next century. You remember Mr Fish's Tornado blip and the barbecue summer? In September they forecast that this was going to be the warmest winter for years. I read that in fact it has never been as cold for a quarter of a century. Now they excuse themselves by saying that climate (which affects global warming) is different from weather which doesn't. So we are committed to 6,000 wind farms in the sea round our septic isle.
Poor President Obama is a highly intelligent lawyer, clearly a man of principle untainted by the corrupt backcloth which has overshadowed his office for so many years. He wants to bring peace; he tried to provide every American with health care. Taken all in all, he was a man. But he has been spinned as a godlike figure who would solve all mankind's problems. He hasn't, and is being pillories because he has feet of flesh and blood.
The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect home owners from foreclosure was hailed as a Good Thing. A year later it has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.. The program has lowered mortgage payments on a trial basis for hundreds of thousands of people but has largely failed to provide permanent relief. Critics increasingly argue that the program, Making Homes Affordable, has raised false hopes among people who simply cannot afford their homes.
The apogee of Ronnie's career - and the subject of his hilarious books - was his appointment as Chief Justice of the South Seas in a bizarre career as a Colonial Judge in the days of Empire. He had been many things. An author, broadcaster, lorry-driving soldier, barrister, circuit judge and stipendiary magistrate. In retirement he toured the grand hotels scrounging unguents and blankets for the needy who crowded the St Vincent de Paul Society hostel near Victoria. He explained he was the Archbishop of Westminster's Arthur Daley.
Ronnie's guardian angel was an impish creature constantly devising comic situations which Ronnie relished. Going to war must have been light relief. Sent up a windmill in Holland to watch for V2s, he slipped gently out of his unit’s collective memory. So completely they forgot to tell him when the war ended and he was only recalled when his name was missed on the demobilisation list.
His time as a colonial judge in the South Seas ought to have been the subject of an Ealing Comedy. Ronnie, who would have had to put on weight to be spectral, spent his 35th birthday in full judicial robes partnering a 20-stone King of the Savage Islands in a dance of welcome. On circuit, his judge’s lodgings were a tree house which he shared with a colony of flying foxes. His predecessor had made history by adjourning a murder trial when the defendant's family ate the jury.
Back in this country and appointed a London stipendiary magistrate, his spectral appearance caused chaos in his court at Bow Street when a cleaner mistook him for the Ghost of the Clerkenwell strangler.
Back home he wore two overcoats. Not so much for warmth as to become visible to the naked eye.
Ronnie was 26 when he first put on the black cap and sentenced a man to death. He subsequently handed down more death sentences than most people have had last breakfasts.
The Knox Mawers spent their winters in a smart flat in Park Lane, Mayfair, and the summer in a row of cottages they had converted at the end of a vertiginous lane in the Eliseg Crags above Llangollen. The last time we dined together we had been bidden to celebrate the massacre of a colony of wasps who had turned a corner of his garden into Helmand Province.
I am standing over the nest with the insecticide and my friend is saying to the wasps within, “Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say.....”
I was puzzled to know why I had been lured seventy miles by the prospect of a hearty dinner to kill wasps. Then I recall my friend has a fine legal sense of precedent and my family has had a long connection with executioners. A gentle man, inevitably he went to grant the wasps a pardon, abandoning that section of his garden.
His father was a well known Wrexham chemist. A terrifying tyrant, he ruled his family in a gaunt, Victorian villa from which evacuees fled. In his book ”Are You Coming or Going?”, Ronnie turned him into a clown. As a precaution against gas attacks in 1939 Ronnie and his three sisters were all ordered to wear their masks wherever possible. Father set an example by wearing not only his gas mask to prune his cherished damson tree: he also wore a black steel helmet captured by an uncle from the Austrian army in 1914.
Ronnie wrote:“Father looked startlingly like the scientist in the horror movie ‘The Fly'........
.......our neighbour Mrs Hurford Jenkins was peacefully weeding her bed of African marigolds. Her shriek of terror rang down the entire road as she was helped into the house. Inevitably her husband hurried round to complain. ‘Are you trying to win your own war of Nerves, Knox Mawer?’ he demanded. Since father’s voice was muffled behind his mask, the major received no satisfactory reply............”
My father was the official driver to Albert Pierrepoint, the most famous public hangman. He did not mind his macabre role. It was a rest from his other job in the wartime police which was running a black market cartel. Though he did find it a touch strange the way Albert, who had a fine baritone voice, liked to lead a singsong in pubs on the way home from work.
Albert had a pub himself near Blackpool called “Help the Poor Struggler”, which even my old man thought was not in the best of taste. Though the coachloads of trippers who called there every day thought it a great joke and all wanted their photographs taken standing under the sign with Albert.
Another hangman I knew called Wade had a cafe in Yorkshire called “Rest Weary Pilgrim” so maybe a macabre sense of humour went with the job. Though a third chum, hangman Harry Allen, kept a pub called The Junction so it wasn't universal.
In the days of which I speak even bars on the road to Blackpool not run by hangmen did a roaring trade .Gin and orange was the staple drink and stood ready poured in rows on the bar top waiting for a charabanc to arrive. Unscrupulous landlords filled the glasses with orange juice and wiped a gin stained finger round the rim. No one ever noticed. Another scam after a punter had drunk three genuine gin and tonics was to serve him plain tonic for subsequent orders. The punter would still taste gin. It works. Try it.
My father was a wit, a bon viveur, the jovial heart of every merry company. A street fighter, a womaniser. And from the age of eleven I hated him. I had plenty of reason. He beat my grannie, my mother and he beat me.
When I was younger we were inseparable. When he wasn't drinking he would spend hours teaching me to draw or reading me Westerns or adventure stories about an improbable man called McClusky. He also read Dickens and Thorne Smith, a now forgotten humorous writer. He risked lung cancer to get a collection of English classic novels by smoking enough Kensitas Black Cat cigarettes to qualify for the gift.
My father was a thwarted student. At 15 he was fighting in the front line in World War One with the 1st Royal Scots. His war medals chronicled his dizzy climb to lance corporal and rapid return to private soldier. He claimed to be one of the last men to be given Field Punishment Number One, which was being lashed to the wheel of a field gun and birched. It was the only part of his service he talked about. War stories were verboten. Too painful to be recalled. Gassed and given up for dead, he recovered working on a fruit farm and became fit enough to join the police force in Manchester where he was shot in the head by the IRA, although he claimed the shot was fired by his inspector who disliked him.
Long after they were both dead, I realised that, unintentionally I was the cause of their misery. I learned my mother had declined conjugal relations since 1928 when I was conceived. She became pregnant before they were married. He had done what used to be called “the honourable thing” but they lived the rest of their lives in a bitterly unhappy marriage. Under the circumstances, his adulteries and his furies were surely understandable.
What I have since come to realise was that, had we not been father and son, we would have got on like a house on fire. He was born for trouble. On his first night as a policeman, a dentist had asked him, if he came across a stray cat, to put it in the dentist's cellar to clear an infestation of mice. Unfortunately, my father told the other policemen what he had done. All but one of them put a cat in the cellar. It was the one who put the dog in that got my father on a disciplinary charge.
His weakness was his willingness to accept gratuities. You could have given my father leprosy as long as it was free. In the early thirties there was an outbreak of psittacosis, a deadly disease transmitted by parrots. As a result, parrots were given away on every street corner. My father was the only person I heard of who accepted one. He was on duty at the time, but he brought the parrot home, then went back on his beat. Within minutes, the parrot had been killed by the cat.
We were living with my granny at the time, a lady who could have given Machiavelli three blacks and beaten him. When my father came home and demanded to know what had happened to his parrot, she told him it had just dropped dead. “Good God,” he said,”psittacosis!”
Before he could be stopped, he piled all our furniture into a heap in the backyard and burned it.
According to my mother, I had watched the incident intently. I did not speak until the fire burned down, when I said, “Naughty pussy ate the parrot”. It began a lifelong enmity between my father and his mother-in-law.
If the Bible has got it right,which I doubt, I should be meeting him soon. I hope so. As I say, I will be glad of the chance to apologise.
THE WORLD SPINS ROUND AND ROUND...........................
John Major and Lady Williams are two politicians of principle I have always found it possible to admire. On Radio this week they agreed that the worst thing that had entered politics in their lifetime was Spin and that the surest way to regain public respect for parliament was to sack all the spin doctors.
I am surprised they thought it a recent phenomenon. Spin is as old as humanity. It was evident in the cave paintings of animals and hunters which persuaded our ancestors that by making them they would achieve success in the field.
When I was a reporter so many people told me things about themselves I would have hesitated to tell my best friend that I decided the driving force of our sorry species was a desire to escape from anonymity. It isn't. What drives us is spin.
One of the great speeches in the Classical world was Pericles's funeral oration to the Athenians. Ostensibly, it celebrated the glorious dead in the first Peloponesian War. In fact it was an eulogy of the way of life to which he aspired for the Athenians. An appeal, like the later speeches of Churchill, another fine war leader and a master of spin, to sentimental patriotism. Cicero swayed the Senate with his oratory to achieve his ends.
I have only made two minor discoveries about Shakespeare. The first was that his play “The Tempest” contains echoes of most of the plays which preceded it, reminding those playgoers who saw it of the smash hits he had written in the past. The other is that the great battle speeches were not entirely the products of his soaring imagination. A source book he used was “Halle's Chronicles” which can now be read free on Gutenberg and Google. In them you will read the speeches of Henry V before Shrewsbury and Agincourt, which were the skeletons on which Shakespeare put flesh and were designed to put heart into the worn out soaking soldiers .
Today the ultimate spin is Warmgate.The principal spinners and doom sayers are the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, now derided, and the Met Office who cannot even get the weather right for the weekend but nevertheless presume to give forecasts for the next century. You remember Mr Fish's Tornado blip and the barbecue summer? In September they forecast that this was going to be the warmest winter for years. I read that in fact it has never been as cold for a quarter of a century. Now they excuse themselves by saying that climate (which affects global warming) is different from weather which doesn't. So we are committed to 6,000 wind farms in the sea round our septic isle.
Poor President Obama is a highly intelligent lawyer, clearly a man of principle untainted by the corrupt backcloth which has overshadowed his office for so many years. He wants to bring peace; he tried to provide every American with health care. Taken all in all, he was a man. But he has been spinned as a godlike figure who would solve all mankind's problems. He hasn't, and is being pillories because he has feet of flesh and blood.
The Obama administration’s $75 billion program to protect home owners from foreclosure was hailed as a Good Thing. A year later it has been widely pronounced a disappointment, and some economists and real estate experts now contend it has done more harm than good.. The program has lowered mortgage payments on a trial basis for hundreds of thousands of people but has largely failed to provide permanent relief. Critics increasingly argue that the program, Making Homes Affordable, has raised false hopes among people who simply cannot afford their homes.
Thursday, 31 December 2009
OUT, OUT, BRIEF CELEBRITY
Brian May is a pop star, a member of Queen and an astro-physicist of international repute. On radio the other day he admitted he did not approve of celebrity. Billy Bragg is a highly intelligent pop star and thinker. He admitted on radio that he too reckoned nothing to celebrity.
I only suffered a brief moment of celebrity when I appeared on TV but I know exactly why they are concerned. On radio I broadcast every week to about 26 million listeners worldwide and no one had a clue who I was. Just a disembodied voice that was remembered only by the most eagle-eared.
When the first two programmes of a TV series “Home Brew”, which I co-presented with a folk singer called Frank Hennessey, went out, I became a marked man. The first intimation of fame is that one thinks one's flies are undone. This is because wherever you go people give you a double take. The second glance is because the first one leaves them with a niggling feeling they have seen the glancee somewhere before. It always produced in me a hasty examination of my flies.
Even worse is the bolder spirit who is not going to let you get away with eluding his memory. He stops you in mid-tread and says, “I know that face. Don't tell me...” You have no intention of telling him, even if you knew what he didn't want to know.
“I'll have you a minute,” said this one guy in Cardiff. “On the tip of my tongue. Never forget a face.” A pause before illumination dawned. “Got you,” he said. “You are the Town Crier of Llandrindod Wells.”
I thought I ought to have some visual clue that would fix me in the minds of such people. So when I was invited to present the Welsh Sheepdog Championships I wore a different coloured waistcoat
for each programme. Worked like a charm. Fellow stopped me in Llandudno.
“Saw you on TV last night. Fantastic!” “Oh, you like sheepdogs then?” “Cannot stand them, yapping b.....s.” “It's not the sheep, surely?” “Course it's not.” “ Oh, so you liked me? Thank.........”
“You? You were crap. You gabbled.” “So what was so marvellous?” “The waistcoats. Bloody fantastic, man.”
I spent the rest of that brief career in the limelight convinced I could have sent the waistcoats on jobs whilst remaining comfortably at home.
Sometimes the voice is memorable.
I had a comedy programme called “Radio Brynsiencyn”. There was no budget so I had to use the people round me as characters. The singer Aled Jones's dad asked me to teach the boy soprano interviewing. Didn't charge me when I made him my junior reporter.
One of the most important women in my life was called Rose Roberts. She came to us as a cleaner but soon took complete charge of us, the animals and the house. She had a voice that would strip paint. I recruited her as the station cleaner and called her Attila the Hoover. She had a camp friend with a lovely Welsh accent. I re-created him as Goronwy Generator, who pedalled the bike that powered the generator that beamed the programmes. The entire Welsh nation is formed of actors. They read the scripts I wrote for them like real pros. Aled, who takes work more seriously than anyone I have ever met - he did his school homework in the dressing room of the Hollywood Bowl whilst waiting to stun a capacity audience - was soon a very professional interviewer. He was a quick learner.
His dad told me about the time he went to Lloyd Webber's flat to record “Memories”. Lloyd Webber asked him if he would like to do a run through. Aled said he would rather go straight ahead with the recording. The first tape was perfect. A stunned Lloyd Webber said: “It took Barbra Streisand a week to do that.”
Aled's dad told me: “I didn't like to tell him the lad was anxious not to miss Match of the Day.”
.
Rose and Goronwy were avid theatregoers and never missed a West End opening. They were in the queue at the London Palladium when Rose gave voice, briefly. It was enough.
“Blimey,” said a man in the queue, “it's Attila the Hoover!”
Now that IS celebrity.
BLOW.BLOW THOU GLOBAL WARMING
It hardly ever snows heavily in the Fens. This week we have had blizzards. As I contemplated the snowy wastes from my window I remembered 1974 when Global Cooling was all the rage. A high-priority government report warned of climate change that would lead to floods and starvation.
It further stated that ‘leading climatologists’ speak of a ‘detrimental global climatic change’, threatening ‘the stability of most nations’.
The report was called ‘A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems’, written by the CIA for ‘internal planning purposes’ in August 1974.
Many of the terms bandied about 35 years ago are still being employed by today’s fear-mongers - about the very opposite phenomenon.
The usual disasters were projected: the ‘new climatic era’ was said to be bringing famine, starvation, refugee crises, floods, droughts, crop and monsoon failures, and all sorts of extreme weather phenomena. The Sahara would expand. World grain reserves, already at less than a month’s supply, would be depleted. A list of past civilisations brought down by ‘major and minor’ cooling episodes was given, which included the Indus, Hittite, Mycenaean, and the Mali empire of Africa. Any possible benefits to climate change were barely mentioned.
More parallels can be drawn. According to the CIA report, in 1974 climate science was developing ‘a successful climatic prediction model’, as indeed it still is. Government intervention had brought together eminent scientists who had previously been at odds with each other, then had established a ‘scientific consensus’ on ‘global climate change’.
The scientists claimed this pattern of cooling would cause ‘major economic problems around the world’. Dealing with this would, of course, require the creation of several new government agencies. The media at the time seized on all of this, just as it is doing now. Newsweek and the New York Times described the global cooling threat.
How is it that the parallels between that 1970s panic and today’s have been so little remarked upon? There have even been recent attempts to label the ‘global cooling consensus’ a ‘myth’, most notably in a well-publicised article by Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck, published by the American Meteorological Society in September 2008.
Predictably, the CIA recommended massive funding of the new field of research, climatology.
Thirty years later they once again join forces to warn us of the dangers of global warming. The world is about to end because of global warming. Temperatures are soaring, ice is melting, glaciers are retreating, seas are rising. The Royal Society says there’s no longer any room for scientific doubt about it. Britain’s Chief Scientist says it’s a bigger threat than global terrorism. Every schoolchild is now drilled to believe that man-made global warming is a Fact . Yet in February, The Telegraph reported that, although during January Europe, northern Asia and most of Australia experienced above average temperatures, large parts of the globe had their coldest winter for decades. According to the Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, the earth's warmest period was during the Holocene epoch. This period is dated from about 5,000to 3,000 BC. During this time average global temperatures were 1 to 2°celsius warmer than they are today. We survived.
All we can be sure of is that the climate is changing and something must be done. My modest proposal for saving the world is that we nationalise Skidmore's Island. Instead of fighting climate change we adapt to it. Let us redesign the United Kingdom. The first ten miles of the coastal area will be designated as a nature reserve and no building of any kind permitted on it. The next island band will be high carbon producing factories, office buildings etc. Within that will be a band of hospitals, old people's colonies and leisure centres. Residential accommodation will be limited to the high ground in the centre of the island, far away from the dangers of flooding .
AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YIN AND A
I only suffered a brief moment of celebrity when I appeared on TV but I know exactly why they are concerned. On radio I broadcast every week to about 26 million listeners worldwide and no one had a clue who I was. Just a disembodied voice that was remembered only by the most eagle-eared.
When the first two programmes of a TV series “Home Brew”, which I co-presented with a folk singer called Frank Hennessey, went out, I became a marked man. The first intimation of fame is that one thinks one's flies are undone. This is because wherever you go people give you a double take. The second glance is because the first one leaves them with a niggling feeling they have seen the glancee somewhere before. It always produced in me a hasty examination of my flies.
Even worse is the bolder spirit who is not going to let you get away with eluding his memory. He stops you in mid-tread and says, “I know that face. Don't tell me...” You have no intention of telling him, even if you knew what he didn't want to know.
“I'll have you a minute,” said this one guy in Cardiff. “On the tip of my tongue. Never forget a face.” A pause before illumination dawned. “Got you,” he said. “You are the Town Crier of Llandrindod Wells.”
I thought I ought to have some visual clue that would fix me in the minds of such people. So when I was invited to present the Welsh Sheepdog Championships I wore a different coloured waistcoat
for each programme. Worked like a charm. Fellow stopped me in Llandudno.
“Saw you on TV last night. Fantastic!” “Oh, you like sheepdogs then?” “Cannot stand them, yapping b.....s.” “It's not the sheep, surely?” “Course it's not.” “ Oh, so you liked me? Thank.........”
“You? You were crap. You gabbled.” “So what was so marvellous?” “The waistcoats. Bloody fantastic, man.”
I spent the rest of that brief career in the limelight convinced I could have sent the waistcoats on jobs whilst remaining comfortably at home.
Sometimes the voice is memorable.
I had a comedy programme called “Radio Brynsiencyn”. There was no budget so I had to use the people round me as characters. The singer Aled Jones's dad asked me to teach the boy soprano interviewing. Didn't charge me when I made him my junior reporter.
One of the most important women in my life was called Rose Roberts. She came to us as a cleaner but soon took complete charge of us, the animals and the house. She had a voice that would strip paint. I recruited her as the station cleaner and called her Attila the Hoover. She had a camp friend with a lovely Welsh accent. I re-created him as Goronwy Generator, who pedalled the bike that powered the generator that beamed the programmes. The entire Welsh nation is formed of actors. They read the scripts I wrote for them like real pros. Aled, who takes work more seriously than anyone I have ever met - he did his school homework in the dressing room of the Hollywood Bowl whilst waiting to stun a capacity audience - was soon a very professional interviewer. He was a quick learner.
His dad told me about the time he went to Lloyd Webber's flat to record “Memories”. Lloyd Webber asked him if he would like to do a run through. Aled said he would rather go straight ahead with the recording. The first tape was perfect. A stunned Lloyd Webber said: “It took Barbra Streisand a week to do that.”
Aled's dad told me: “I didn't like to tell him the lad was anxious not to miss Match of the Day.”
.
Rose and Goronwy were avid theatregoers and never missed a West End opening. They were in the queue at the London Palladium when Rose gave voice, briefly. It was enough.
“Blimey,” said a man in the queue, “it's Attila the Hoover!”
Now that IS celebrity.
BLOW.BLOW THOU GLOBAL WARMING
It hardly ever snows heavily in the Fens. This week we have had blizzards. As I contemplated the snowy wastes from my window I remembered 1974 when Global Cooling was all the rage. A high-priority government report warned of climate change that would lead to floods and starvation.
It further stated that ‘leading climatologists’ speak of a ‘detrimental global climatic change’, threatening ‘the stability of most nations’.
The report was called ‘A Study of Climatological Research as it Pertains to Intelligence Problems’, written by the CIA for ‘internal planning purposes’ in August 1974.
Many of the terms bandied about 35 years ago are still being employed by today’s fear-mongers - about the very opposite phenomenon.
The usual disasters were projected: the ‘new climatic era’ was said to be bringing famine, starvation, refugee crises, floods, droughts, crop and monsoon failures, and all sorts of extreme weather phenomena. The Sahara would expand. World grain reserves, already at less than a month’s supply, would be depleted. A list of past civilisations brought down by ‘major and minor’ cooling episodes was given, which included the Indus, Hittite, Mycenaean, and the Mali empire of Africa. Any possible benefits to climate change were barely mentioned.
More parallels can be drawn. According to the CIA report, in 1974 climate science was developing ‘a successful climatic prediction model’, as indeed it still is. Government intervention had brought together eminent scientists who had previously been at odds with each other, then had established a ‘scientific consensus’ on ‘global climate change’.
The scientists claimed this pattern of cooling would cause ‘major economic problems around the world’. Dealing with this would, of course, require the creation of several new government agencies. The media at the time seized on all of this, just as it is doing now. Newsweek and the New York Times described the global cooling threat.
How is it that the parallels between that 1970s panic and today’s have been so little remarked upon? There have even been recent attempts to label the ‘global cooling consensus’ a ‘myth’, most notably in a well-publicised article by Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley, and John Fleck, published by the American Meteorological Society in September 2008.
Predictably, the CIA recommended massive funding of the new field of research, climatology.
Thirty years later they once again join forces to warn us of the dangers of global warming. The world is about to end because of global warming. Temperatures are soaring, ice is melting, glaciers are retreating, seas are rising. The Royal Society says there’s no longer any room for scientific doubt about it. Britain’s Chief Scientist says it’s a bigger threat than global terrorism. Every schoolchild is now drilled to believe that man-made global warming is a Fact . Yet in February, The Telegraph reported that, although during January Europe, northern Asia and most of Australia experienced above average temperatures, large parts of the globe had their coldest winter for decades. According to the Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, the earth's warmest period was during the Holocene epoch. This period is dated from about 5,000to 3,000 BC. During this time average global temperatures were 1 to 2°celsius warmer than they are today. We survived.
All we can be sure of is that the climate is changing and something must be done. My modest proposal for saving the world is that we nationalise Skidmore's Island. Instead of fighting climate change we adapt to it. Let us redesign the United Kingdom. The first ten miles of the coastal area will be designated as a nature reserve and no building of any kind permitted on it. The next island band will be high carbon producing factories, office buildings etc. Within that will be a band of hospitals, old people's colonies and leisure centres. Residential accommodation will be limited to the high ground in the centre of the island, far away from the dangers of flooding .
AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR TO YIN AND A
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