Saturday, 13 October 2007
Saturday, 6 October 2007
Death, whatever happened to thy sting?
Since so many of the population watch the X Factor, it is probably not good news but the fact remains we are conquering Death.
Whatever else war was, it was an absurd waste of the flower of manhood and a greater condemnation of our collective intelligence even than watching the X Factor.
It is inconceivable that in the 21st century we are still resolving arguments, and stealing each others’ tribal lands and riches, by sending our young men to kill perfect strangers with whom they have more in common than in dispute. We should have got over that when we left the cave and abandoned the club. It defies common sense. If a farmer knew a field was full of poisonous weeds, he would be unlikely to test it by sending in his finest herd of young pedigree cattle.
Curiously, Russia, which has spent most of its existence either killing itself by the million or other people it has never met, takes the lead in showing us that killing people is unnecessary. All you have to do is switch off the light, as this week it threatens to do with Georgia. At a stroke, the country is helpless.
Another country which is demonstrating that it is quite unnecessary to go to all the trouble and expense of killing people is China. In fairness, this is a country which has so many people of its own to kill by the million that it has no need to look for fights with its neighbours as a means of population control. It now shows how absurdly easy it is to defeat an opponent by hacking into the IT systems by which we are governed - and we pass quietly into governance by Chinese restaurants, which I have been convinced for years ,judging by the number of waiters they employ have been outposts of the Chinese SAS. Though recalling the excellence of service and the delicious quality of the food in the ones I use, a Chinese take over might be the logical extension of a take away and not entirely a bad thing. We may not understand what our new rulers are talking about - but what else is new?
It is a sobering thought that in any contest between Western civilisation and a computer nerd, Western civilisation would be about ten to one against. Not only is warfare on its last legs: no sooner does nature invent a new disease to get rid of the human race which is wrecking its planet than our scientists invent a cure. Thus we are able to sink deeper in the primeval mud of old age, our minds blanked by Alzheimer’s disease, our bodies wracked with Parkinson’s or eaten by cancers.
Keep fit, keep well, the Government advises us, so you can spend long years sitting in rows in Non Care Homes, wetting yourselves and watching the X Factor.
I have never kept fit, nor consciously tried to be well. When a doctor warned me I was so fat that movement was a risk, I reduced movement to a minimum and survived. I even failed the entrance exam for a Slimmers’ Clinic.
Some years ago, an Anglesey doctor admitted, as he wrote approvingly “growing old disgracefully” on my medical records: “If we kept dogs alive in the state we do people, we would be summonsed by the RSPCA.”
I am like that character of Somerset Maugham’s in “The Razor’s Edge” who admitted he would not complain if he died tomorrow. I have seen the finest pictures in the world, listened to its greatest music, read its books, seen its plays. I have known in the biblical sense some beautiful women. I have enjoyed happiness in marriage, bred good children, been a professional success, eaten in the finest restaurants in Europe. I write this with my dog at my feet, surrounded by my books.
As an aspirant Buddhist, I do not believe in death, anyway. I am one with Dylan Thomas who prophesied “Death Shall Have No Dominion”. John Donne put it even more strongly “ And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.”
Though, mind you, for many years he kept his coffin by his desk. A great man for the each way bet was Dr Donne. And I am quite ready for my next body, too. Not for Enlightenment.
Enlightenment sounds too much like Alzheimer’s with attitude, celebrated in a Celestial Care Home.
I wouldn’t mind coming back as a grape.
THE STORY THAT TELLS A PICTURE
Readers may have been puzzled at the press cutting for my BBC Wales programme, “Radio Brynsiencyn”, which appeared by some quirk of word processery unknown to me on this page some weeks ago. This is its story
The best editor I had in my years of Taff-railing for BBC Wales was called Bob Atkins. He was an Englishman too, so he was scuppered from the first day on the job.
He called me to Cardiff and said he enjoyed a programme I was doing at the time.
It was called Skidmore’s Island, and how it worked was that a producer called Jack King knocked at my door with his tape recorder playing and for the next half hour I talked: about books and about neighbours. If anyone knocked at the door, I interviewed them and I played music on my radiogram. No scripts; no conception of what was going to happen.
Unfortunately, Bob, who liked a drink, took me to the BBC Club in Cardiff and as he carried me out and poured me into a taxi he said, ‘I won’t ask you to explain how the programme works now…’ (Which was just as well; it took me ten minutes to tell the driver where I wanted to go). ‘…Do me a memo.’
I didn’t remember that until I was back home in Brynsiencyn, on Anglesey, when still, in Milton’s words, flown with wine and impertinence, I typed out the following:
‘Radio Brynsiencyn: - This is your smallest outpost. In the customary fashion of BBC bosses, I have slept with the entire staff. But since we have been married for ten years it may not count. Our Uher tape recorder is so old it has a pebble glass window and a thatched lid. Our music department is a wind-up gramophone and our record collection includes Teddy Bears’ Picnic and In A Monastery Garden. In fact that is the extent of our collection.’
Then I sealed and posted it and it wasn’t until I sobered up that I realised I had probably dashed the prospect of a glittering career with an audience of sheep and men who wore clothes that looked as though they had been made from the covers of old prayer books.
What happened was that I got a letter from Bob: ‘Forget Skidmore’s Island. I want a series of twenty Radio Brynsiencyn.’
The trouble was I had forgotten by this time what I had put in the letter.
But… I had a title for my programme, twenty slots at peak listening time, and a Uher tape recorder I bought for sixteen quid on the same stall at Llangefni market where I had found the wind-up gramophone that was my music department. I had an outside broadcast unit in the shape of a sit-up-and-beg bike with an errand boy’s basket on the handlebars and a wife with a posh voice. And not an idea of what to do with any of them.
It struck me that was par for the course in my ‘parent’ BBC so I decided to do what they did in similar circumstances: surround myself with a staff.
Anglesey being an island, I needed a Foreign Editor to handle matters in the dark lands on the other bank of the Menai Strait. Fortunately, a chap I had first known on a Bangor weekly paper had just retired. His name was Angus McDairmid and he had some experience of the role. After brilliant coverage of the wrecking of a sailing ship in the Menai Strait, he was poached by the BBC and went on to become a distinguished foreign correspondent, covering Washington at the time of Watergate and various wars for the Corporation.
Eminently suitable to look after Bangor.
Angus had interviewed world leaders but he remained obsessed with his home town, where he was still ‘Gus’ McDermott (his name before being swamped by the Celtic Renaissance of the Sixties). He used the job to indulge a secret vice. Wherever he had been in the world, however great the crisis, he always found time to visit any town called Bangor. Every week on Radio Brynsiencyn, until his sad death, he told an eager world about them.
Then there was the matter of a Cleaning Staff, vital because broadcasters are a messy lot. Fortunately, one was at hand: the love of my life, Rose Roberts, who already cleaned for us and ruled us with a rod of iron. I christened her Attila the Hoover and I was only partly joking. Dirt was terrified of her and dust disappeared at her touch.
Rose had a voice with the carrying power of a giant crane. She had appeared in the programme for only a few weeks when she took a day trip to London. She was queuing for the Palladium and passing pleasantries with her companions that could have been heard in Newcastle upon Tyne. ‘Blimey,’ came a voice from far down the queue, ‘it’s Attila the Hoover!’
No Welsh broadcasting station is complete without a choir. At a lifeboat charity evening I heard a quartet called the Oscars, and immediately recruited them. A pal of mine, Derek Jones, was a bit worried about his teenage son whose singing voice had just broken. He was keen on broadcasting so Derek asked if we would teach him the art of interviewing. I was a bit reluctant. Whenever I heard the lad sing, the hair on the back of the head lifted and I had a sense that he had been touched by God. His name was Aled Jones. Done quite well since, but at that time his preoccupation was a sandwich toaster he had bought with his first earnings and he was forever thrusting toasted sandwiches at you.
But I thought, ‘Give the lad a chance’, and employed him at a fiver a week. Aled did nothing by halves. He played tennis to county standard; a fine footballer, he was offered trials with professionals; and he was so keen to get his GCSEs that in the interval of a concert before most of America in the Hollywood Bowl, he sat in his dressing room, swotting. Aled went out with my wife on a couple of interviews and picked the art up so quickly he was soon doing them on his own. His dad told me he nearly drove his parents mad practising interviewing on them.
A remarkable boy. Never a trace of nerves. Singing for the Royal Family, he forgot the lyric and made up one as he sang along. He went to record Memories for Andrew Lloyd Webber. ‘Like to do a run-through?’ said Lloyd Webber. ‘Can we go for a take?’ asked Aled.
They did, and the first take was all that was needed. ‘Good God,’ said Lloyd Webber, ‘it took Barbra Streisand a week to do that.’
His Dad told me later: ‘I didn’t like to explain he was in a hurry to watch Match of the Day.’
Aled was blessed with three gifts: the voice of an angel and his parents, Derek and Nest, who kept his feet firmly nailed to the ground.
When he was awarded his first Gold Disc, the BBC planned a huge reception in Cardiff for the award ceremony. ‘Out of the question,’ said Derek, ‘he would have to miss school.’ The BBC had to hire a helicopter to get him to the ceremony; it landed on the playing field of his school in Menai Bridge.
The programme was beginning to take shape: a ‘pirate’ radio station that parodied the commercial radio of the day. We had a signature tune; a group of producers and broadcasters sang the jingles to announce the items; Celia (Celia Lucas, ex Daily Mail, Mrs Skidmore) did interviews and I headed the whole thing with a rant.
Wearing a dinner jacket, of course.
The BBC printed T shirts, ties and mugs with the station logo which started to appear in the oddest places all over the world. We had the highest listening figures on BBC Wales; a ‘club’ of listeners was formed in Boston in the USA and the daughter of a friend started a Radio Bryn fan club at Oxford University.
Islands can be dull places in winter. Anxious to get away, a neighbour toured the Loire. By the river one day, he switched on his radio as he unwrapped a picnic… and heard the signature tune of Radio Bryn doing an outside broadcast – outside his house.
Celia recorded the programme in our kitchen, rough cut it and sent it to Dewi Smith, head of light entertainment in Wales, for final polishing and transmission.
Then a funny thing happened.
Everyone was convinced it was a real station and I started to get applications for jobs. W.I.s, youth clubs and at least one school asked if they could tour the studios. Then BBC Controller Ulster heard it while driving across Anglesey and rang my editor to ask, ‘Do you have a studio in the cottage or does it come to you via landline?’ We were even a page lead in the Daily Mail.
The series ended seventeen years ago. It is still talked about in Wales. Everything in what I laughingly call my career was an accident. This was the happiest of them all.
I won a Golden Microphone after thirty years as a ‘celebrity’ presenter on Radio Wales and a fortnight later they dropped me because I was English. I took the BBC to a Race Relations Tribunal and there was quite a lot of fuss about it.
I had been rewarded with many by-lines on the Daily Mirror over the years: now I was the subject of a front page lead. The Head of BBC Wales told the paper I was a Victor Meldrew figure and the editor said I was too old. He didn’t say the same about Jimmy Young, Humphrey Lyttelton or Alastair Cooke, to name but a few. So perhaps the ruling just covred the foot soldiers. But the BBC gave me a few grand to keep quiet, and I did. Within a month, both the Head and the Editor had been sacked.
But as I sit by my pond, keeping herons off my koi, I do ponder a bit. My Manchester accent has softened on account of marrying above myself and marinating the throat muscles in the benevolent sweat of the juniper. But I hope and pray I have not lost it.
At the time I had 26 million listeners worldwide to my rants. Plainly my bosses at BBC Wales were not among them. Or they might have noticed that I seldom said Yachi da (I didn’t even know how to spell it).
Whatever else war was, it was an absurd waste of the flower of manhood and a greater condemnation of our collective intelligence even than watching the X Factor.
It is inconceivable that in the 21st century we are still resolving arguments, and stealing each others’ tribal lands and riches, by sending our young men to kill perfect strangers with whom they have more in common than in dispute. We should have got over that when we left the cave and abandoned the club. It defies common sense. If a farmer knew a field was full of poisonous weeds, he would be unlikely to test it by sending in his finest herd of young pedigree cattle.
Curiously, Russia, which has spent most of its existence either killing itself by the million or other people it has never met, takes the lead in showing us that killing people is unnecessary. All you have to do is switch off the light, as this week it threatens to do with Georgia. At a stroke, the country is helpless.
Another country which is demonstrating that it is quite unnecessary to go to all the trouble and expense of killing people is China. In fairness, this is a country which has so many people of its own to kill by the million that it has no need to look for fights with its neighbours as a means of population control. It now shows how absurdly easy it is to defeat an opponent by hacking into the IT systems by which we are governed - and we pass quietly into governance by Chinese restaurants, which I have been convinced for years ,judging by the number of waiters they employ have been outposts of the Chinese SAS. Though recalling the excellence of service and the delicious quality of the food in the ones I use, a Chinese take over might be the logical extension of a take away and not entirely a bad thing. We may not understand what our new rulers are talking about - but what else is new?
It is a sobering thought that in any contest between Western civilisation and a computer nerd, Western civilisation would be about ten to one against. Not only is warfare on its last legs: no sooner does nature invent a new disease to get rid of the human race which is wrecking its planet than our scientists invent a cure. Thus we are able to sink deeper in the primeval mud of old age, our minds blanked by Alzheimer’s disease, our bodies wracked with Parkinson’s or eaten by cancers.
Keep fit, keep well, the Government advises us, so you can spend long years sitting in rows in Non Care Homes, wetting yourselves and watching the X Factor.
I have never kept fit, nor consciously tried to be well. When a doctor warned me I was so fat that movement was a risk, I reduced movement to a minimum and survived. I even failed the entrance exam for a Slimmers’ Clinic.
Some years ago, an Anglesey doctor admitted, as he wrote approvingly “growing old disgracefully” on my medical records: “If we kept dogs alive in the state we do people, we would be summonsed by the RSPCA.”
I am like that character of Somerset Maugham’s in “The Razor’s Edge” who admitted he would not complain if he died tomorrow. I have seen the finest pictures in the world, listened to its greatest music, read its books, seen its plays. I have known in the biblical sense some beautiful women. I have enjoyed happiness in marriage, bred good children, been a professional success, eaten in the finest restaurants in Europe. I write this with my dog at my feet, surrounded by my books.
As an aspirant Buddhist, I do not believe in death, anyway. I am one with Dylan Thomas who prophesied “Death Shall Have No Dominion”. John Donne put it even more strongly “ And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.”
Though, mind you, for many years he kept his coffin by his desk. A great man for the each way bet was Dr Donne. And I am quite ready for my next body, too. Not for Enlightenment.
Enlightenment sounds too much like Alzheimer’s with attitude, celebrated in a Celestial Care Home.
I wouldn’t mind coming back as a grape.
THE STORY THAT TELLS A PICTURE
Readers may have been puzzled at the press cutting for my BBC Wales programme, “Radio Brynsiencyn”, which appeared by some quirk of word processery unknown to me on this page some weeks ago. This is its story
The best editor I had in my years of Taff-railing for BBC Wales was called Bob Atkins. He was an Englishman too, so he was scuppered from the first day on the job.
He called me to Cardiff and said he enjoyed a programme I was doing at the time.
It was called Skidmore’s Island, and how it worked was that a producer called Jack King knocked at my door with his tape recorder playing and for the next half hour I talked: about books and about neighbours. If anyone knocked at the door, I interviewed them and I played music on my radiogram. No scripts; no conception of what was going to happen.
Unfortunately, Bob, who liked a drink, took me to the BBC Club in Cardiff and as he carried me out and poured me into a taxi he said, ‘I won’t ask you to explain how the programme works now…’ (Which was just as well; it took me ten minutes to tell the driver where I wanted to go). ‘…Do me a memo.’
I didn’t remember that until I was back home in Brynsiencyn, on Anglesey, when still, in Milton’s words, flown with wine and impertinence, I typed out the following:
‘Radio Brynsiencyn: - This is your smallest outpost. In the customary fashion of BBC bosses, I have slept with the entire staff. But since we have been married for ten years it may not count. Our Uher tape recorder is so old it has a pebble glass window and a thatched lid. Our music department is a wind-up gramophone and our record collection includes Teddy Bears’ Picnic and In A Monastery Garden. In fact that is the extent of our collection.’
Then I sealed and posted it and it wasn’t until I sobered up that I realised I had probably dashed the prospect of a glittering career with an audience of sheep and men who wore clothes that looked as though they had been made from the covers of old prayer books.
What happened was that I got a letter from Bob: ‘Forget Skidmore’s Island. I want a series of twenty Radio Brynsiencyn.’
The trouble was I had forgotten by this time what I had put in the letter.
But… I had a title for my programme, twenty slots at peak listening time, and a Uher tape recorder I bought for sixteen quid on the same stall at Llangefni market where I had found the wind-up gramophone that was my music department. I had an outside broadcast unit in the shape of a sit-up-and-beg bike with an errand boy’s basket on the handlebars and a wife with a posh voice. And not an idea of what to do with any of them.
It struck me that was par for the course in my ‘parent’ BBC so I decided to do what they did in similar circumstances: surround myself with a staff.
Anglesey being an island, I needed a Foreign Editor to handle matters in the dark lands on the other bank of the Menai Strait. Fortunately, a chap I had first known on a Bangor weekly paper had just retired. His name was Angus McDairmid and he had some experience of the role. After brilliant coverage of the wrecking of a sailing ship in the Menai Strait, he was poached by the BBC and went on to become a distinguished foreign correspondent, covering Washington at the time of Watergate and various wars for the Corporation.
Eminently suitable to look after Bangor.
Angus had interviewed world leaders but he remained obsessed with his home town, where he was still ‘Gus’ McDermott (his name before being swamped by the Celtic Renaissance of the Sixties). He used the job to indulge a secret vice. Wherever he had been in the world, however great the crisis, he always found time to visit any town called Bangor. Every week on Radio Brynsiencyn, until his sad death, he told an eager world about them.
Then there was the matter of a Cleaning Staff, vital because broadcasters are a messy lot. Fortunately, one was at hand: the love of my life, Rose Roberts, who already cleaned for us and ruled us with a rod of iron. I christened her Attila the Hoover and I was only partly joking. Dirt was terrified of her and dust disappeared at her touch.
Rose had a voice with the carrying power of a giant crane. She had appeared in the programme for only a few weeks when she took a day trip to London. She was queuing for the Palladium and passing pleasantries with her companions that could have been heard in Newcastle upon Tyne. ‘Blimey,’ came a voice from far down the queue, ‘it’s Attila the Hoover!’
No Welsh broadcasting station is complete without a choir. At a lifeboat charity evening I heard a quartet called the Oscars, and immediately recruited them. A pal of mine, Derek Jones, was a bit worried about his teenage son whose singing voice had just broken. He was keen on broadcasting so Derek asked if we would teach him the art of interviewing. I was a bit reluctant. Whenever I heard the lad sing, the hair on the back of the head lifted and I had a sense that he had been touched by God. His name was Aled Jones. Done quite well since, but at that time his preoccupation was a sandwich toaster he had bought with his first earnings and he was forever thrusting toasted sandwiches at you.
But I thought, ‘Give the lad a chance’, and employed him at a fiver a week. Aled did nothing by halves. He played tennis to county standard; a fine footballer, he was offered trials with professionals; and he was so keen to get his GCSEs that in the interval of a concert before most of America in the Hollywood Bowl, he sat in his dressing room, swotting. Aled went out with my wife on a couple of interviews and picked the art up so quickly he was soon doing them on his own. His dad told me he nearly drove his parents mad practising interviewing on them.
A remarkable boy. Never a trace of nerves. Singing for the Royal Family, he forgot the lyric and made up one as he sang along. He went to record Memories for Andrew Lloyd Webber. ‘Like to do a run-through?’ said Lloyd Webber. ‘Can we go for a take?’ asked Aled.
They did, and the first take was all that was needed. ‘Good God,’ said Lloyd Webber, ‘it took Barbra Streisand a week to do that.’
His Dad told me later: ‘I didn’t like to explain he was in a hurry to watch Match of the Day.’
Aled was blessed with three gifts: the voice of an angel and his parents, Derek and Nest, who kept his feet firmly nailed to the ground.
When he was awarded his first Gold Disc, the BBC planned a huge reception in Cardiff for the award ceremony. ‘Out of the question,’ said Derek, ‘he would have to miss school.’ The BBC had to hire a helicopter to get him to the ceremony; it landed on the playing field of his school in Menai Bridge.
The programme was beginning to take shape: a ‘pirate’ radio station that parodied the commercial radio of the day. We had a signature tune; a group of producers and broadcasters sang the jingles to announce the items; Celia (Celia Lucas, ex Daily Mail, Mrs Skidmore) did interviews and I headed the whole thing with a rant.
Wearing a dinner jacket, of course.
The BBC printed T shirts, ties and mugs with the station logo which started to appear in the oddest places all over the world. We had the highest listening figures on BBC Wales; a ‘club’ of listeners was formed in Boston in the USA and the daughter of a friend started a Radio Bryn fan club at Oxford University.
Islands can be dull places in winter. Anxious to get away, a neighbour toured the Loire. By the river one day, he switched on his radio as he unwrapped a picnic… and heard the signature tune of Radio Bryn doing an outside broadcast – outside his house.
Celia recorded the programme in our kitchen, rough cut it and sent it to Dewi Smith, head of light entertainment in Wales, for final polishing and transmission.
Then a funny thing happened.
Everyone was convinced it was a real station and I started to get applications for jobs. W.I.s, youth clubs and at least one school asked if they could tour the studios. Then BBC Controller Ulster heard it while driving across Anglesey and rang my editor to ask, ‘Do you have a studio in the cottage or does it come to you via landline?’ We were even a page lead in the Daily Mail.
The series ended seventeen years ago. It is still talked about in Wales. Everything in what I laughingly call my career was an accident. This was the happiest of them all.
I won a Golden Microphone after thirty years as a ‘celebrity’ presenter on Radio Wales and a fortnight later they dropped me because I was English. I took the BBC to a Race Relations Tribunal and there was quite a lot of fuss about it.
I had been rewarded with many by-lines on the Daily Mirror over the years: now I was the subject of a front page lead. The Head of BBC Wales told the paper I was a Victor Meldrew figure and the editor said I was too old. He didn’t say the same about Jimmy Young, Humphrey Lyttelton or Alastair Cooke, to name but a few. So perhaps the ruling just covred the foot soldiers. But the BBC gave me a few grand to keep quiet, and I did. Within a month, both the Head and the Editor had been sacked.
But as I sit by my pond, keeping herons off my koi, I do ponder a bit. My Manchester accent has softened on account of marrying above myself and marinating the throat muscles in the benevolent sweat of the juniper. But I hope and pray I have not lost it.
At the time I had 26 million listeners worldwide to my rants. Plainly my bosses at BBC Wales were not among them. Or they might have noticed that I seldom said Yachi da (I didn’t even know how to spell it).
Sunday, 30 September 2007
Goody Two Brains
The interesting thing is that we have got two brains. There is the nice, civilised brain in the neat bed sitting-room behind the eyes. Then there is the other brain, the animal brain left over from our tree-swinging days: Cro Magnon. A survival, like our coccyx, which is all we have left of our tails.
If you want to meet prehistoric man, the brontosaurus basher, the chest thumper with the dinosaur dangling from his belt, just go straight up the spine, turn left at the ears and you cannot miss him in his dark little nest.
The moment I read about him, I recognised him at once. He is the one who has been getting me in trouble all these years. I am a stout, elderly gentleman of quiet pursuits and academic leanings. That is the influence of Better Behaved Brain. Nice little property he has up there in the head. “First Floor Front” the address runs “Forehead, Upper Nose on the Brow, ME.”
You will get him there most times, enjoying ‘Country Life’ like as not and listening to music. He does all my thinking and worrying for me and as a tenant is very desirable. He is not a scrap of trouble. About once a year he will come out, give me a nudge and say, “About time we were writing a book, isn’t it?” I say nervously, “It won’t hurt, will it?” “Of course not,” he reassures me, and off we go arm in arm to the word processor.
Never a cross word but we are often puzzled. Sometimes Better Behaved Brain and I have dozed off during our evening gin and wakened to find the glass empty and the bottle all but dry. Then we notice the sherry has gone too and the wine we were going to have with dinner. Some nights we have even had our suspicions about the washing up liquid. Now we know it is Animal Brain. The moment our eyes closed there he was swinging down the spine looking for trouble; emptying every bottle in sight and playing havoc with my good name.
It is all clear now but I used to wonder why people who invited me to their dinner parties were always a touch frosty when we met the next day. It was the old story. You get invited twice. Once to apologise.
It got so bad, that after the 100th birthday party of his mother, I had to write as follows to my host Lord Langford:
“.........It has come to my attention that your mother’s party was disrupted by a person posing as me. Sadly this is not the first time this has happened. I can only assume that some impudent fellow lies in wait for the post and steals my invitation..........”
Fortunately my old friend, the Ninth Baron, has a sense of humour and I was forgiven. Now I realise that no blame should have attached in the first place. It wasn’t me who goosed his cousin, a Governor of the BBC and the one who taught Mrs Thatcher to be a lady, emptied three decanters, sang the ‘Gallant Forty Twa’ and marched up and down The Boudoir playing imaginary bagpipes. It was Animal Brain. He had locked the forehead so that Better Behaved Brain and I couldn’t get out, and taken over the piloting of the body.
It was he who started arguments in pubs, sent rude letters to editors and producers. He is the racehorse urger. It was his nose that twitched with desire all those years ago. He who, when I won a pig in an army raffle, insisted on riding back to the camp where I was Provost Sergeant on the Orderly Corporal’s motor bike, with the pig on the pillion. I will bet it was Animal Brain who was forever pushing me off bar stools.
With Better Behaved Brain you know where you are. Stuff some chocolate caramels into his dressing gown pocket, poke up the sitting room fire and give him a Ngaio Marsh to read and you can leave him for hours. He likes a glass of wine, of course, and I keep a small cellar of choice wine just for him.
Animal brain is jealous. Not only is he programmed to self destruct; he wants to take Better Behaved Brain with him. As you know, our Better Behaved Brains have a quadrillion of cells. That is a million with nine noughts.
The trouble is every time you have a hangover you wipe out a million. Even worse, the ones that go first are the cells of memory, with the result that thanks to Animal Brain I am heavily overdrawn at the memory bank. I think I am down to five.
Animal brain can remember nothing and is wholly uneducated. When I was working, producers of television and radio programmes used to ring me up from time to time, saying, “We are looking for someone who can take a fresh look at……” whatever the subject was of the programme they planned.
Animal Brain always got to the phone first and he knew that what they were really saying was that the search was on for some incompetent who knew absolutely nothing about a subject. You were the only representative of the species who knew nothing about, say, sport, or farming, or, come to that, pretty well anything. Indeed Animal Brain has cornered the market in abysmal ignorance. It knows less about more subjects than any other brain operating in the secondary jungle of the media.
For a decade I made weekly appearances on a popular news quiz on BBC Radio Wales chaired by a man who knew everything, Vincent Kane. In ten years I doubt if I won more than a dozen times. Indeed I won so rarely that when I did Animal Brain demanded a recount.
The interesting fact is that although Animal Brain was asked to appear every week, my fellow contestants, politicians, business tycoons and academics who had developed their Better Behaved Brain and evicted AB’s Dark Shadow, only appeared once a month.
IT IS ONLY COMMA SENSE
As I admit in my profile, I am stranger to punctuation. Readers of these essays may therefore wonder that the punctuation is immaculate. That is because I always marry above myself. My posh wife has ‘A’ levels in every conceivable subject and an Oxford degree and she very kindly looks over everything I write.
My friend Ken Ashton knows my attitude to punctuation, which incidentally was shared with Wordsworth. In his book on the Lakeland Poets, Thomas de Quincey tells how Wordsworth sent him to London to correct the proofs of a pamphlet because Wordsworth had little sympathy with punctuation.
Ashton has been kind enough to draw my attention to a friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley who lacked the comfort of a learned wife. He complained that whenever he began to write, he never could arrange his ideas in grammatical order. Which occasion suggested the idea of the following lines to the poet:
Here I sit with my paper, my pen and my ink,
First of this thing, and that thing, and t'other thing think;
Then my thoughts come so pell-mell all into my mind,
That the sense or the subject I never can find:
This word is wrong placed, — no regard to the sense,
The present and future, instead of past tense,
Then my grammar I want; O dear! what a bore,
I think I shall never attempt to write more,
With patience I then my thoughts must arraign,
Have them all in due order like mutes in a train,
Like them too must wait in due patience and thought,
Or else my fine works will all come to nought.
My wit too's so copious, it flows like a river,
But disperses its waters on black and white never;
Like smoke it appears independent and free,
But ah luckless smoke! it all passes like thee —
Then at length all my patience entirely lost,
My paper and pens in the fire are tossed;
But come, try again — you must never despair,
Our Murray's or Entick's are not all so rare,
Implore their assistance — they'll come to your aid,
Perform all your business without being paid,
They'll tell you the present tense, future and past,
Which should come first, and which should come last,
This Murray will do — then to Entick repair,
To find out the meaning of any word rare.
This they friendly will tell, and ne'er make you blush,
With a jeering look, taunt, or an O fie! tush!
Then straight all your thoughts in black and white put,
Not minding the if's the be's, and the but,
Then read it all over, see how it will run,
How answers the wit, the retort, and the pun,
Your writings may then with old Socrates vie,
May on the same shelf with Demosthenes lie,
May as Junius be sharp, or as Plato be sage,
The pattern or satire to all of the age;
But stop — a mad author I mean not to turn,
Nor with thirst of applause does my heated brain burn,
Sufficient that sense, wit, and grammar combined,
My letters may make some slight food for the mind;
That my thoughts to my friends I may freely impart,
In all the warm language that flows from the heart,
Hark! futurity calls! it loudly complains,
It bids me step forward and just hold the reins,
My excuse shall be humble, and faithful, and true,
Such as I fear can be made but by few —
Of writers this age has abundance and plenty,
Three score and a thousand, two millions and twenty,
Three score of them wits who all sharply vie,
To try what odd creature they best can belie,
A thousand are prudes who for Charity write,
And fill up their sheets with spleen, envy, and spite[,]
One million are bards, who to Heaven aspire,
And stuff their works full of bombast, rant, and fire,
T'other million are wags who in Grubstreet attend,
And just like a cobbler the old writings mend,
The twenty are those who for pulpits indite,
And pore over sermons all Saturday night.
And now my good friends — who come after I mean,
As I ne'er wore a cassock, or dined with a dean,
Or like cobblers at mending I never did try,
Nor with poets in lyrics attempted to vie;
As for prudes these good souls I both hate and detest,
So here I believe the matter must rest. —
I've heard your complaint — my answer I've made,
And since to your calls all the tribute I've paid,
Adieu my good friend; pray never despair,
But grammar and sense and everything dare,
Attempt but to write dashing, easy, and free,
Then take out your grammar and pay him your fee,
Be not a coward, shrink not to a tense,
But read it all over and make it out sense.
What a tiresome girl! — pray soon make an end,
Else my limited patience you'll quickly expend.
Well adieu, I no longer your patience will try —
So swift to the post now the letter shall fly.
YET ANOTHER GOODBYE
Jim Lovelock, my good friend and one of the oldest, died this week at his home in Spain. Death must have had quite a struggle because Jim was the stuff that old boots are made from.
Editor of a weekly newspaper in his early twenties, he was crippled with polio as a child, but nevertheless became a mountaineer, a pot-holer and a member of the expedition which climbed Nuptse, Everest’s younger sister. Working for the Daily Mail, he once climbed the south face of the building and climbed through the window into the editor’s office.
He was also my boss for a day and a half when he was proprietor of Stockport News Service.
Jim was a remarkable man who collected oddities. The rest of the staff of Stockport News Service was an odd little chap called Mickey. We had to find him to be introduced, and that was never easy. A year after his arrival, no one knew Mickey’s surname and I don’t think anyone ever found out where he lived.
He was invariably respectful and called Jimmy “Master”. He had a single purpose in life: to discover how millionaires made their first thousand pounds. Their memoirs, said Mickey who had read them all, always included the phrase, “with my first thousand pounds I bought…….” but never explained where the thousand pounds had come from.
He thought they had nicked it; but, scorning that as being too easy, he tried dealing. He only really mastered the art of acquiring: disposal escaped him. To Jimmy’s puzzled chagrin, he used the Agency’s office as his warehouse. There were racks of clothes of improbable sizes; a job lot of stringless violins, picked up for a song, inevitably tuneless; twenty gross of heavily tinselled cards wishing “A Happy Xmas for 1948” which he bought in 1951; and other less saleable items. You could never find a pen there, or even a typewriter; but anyone in need of a stringless violin was easily accommodated.
Next he tried gambling, a curious reversal. This time, disposing was child’s play: acquiring, he never quite mastered.
He had one suit he wore to the office, except on the days when he wore a mackintosh in the hope that “Master” would not notice he was wearing only a shirt, tie and underpants beneath, having pawned the suit. The gartered socks were a give-away.
By the time I arrived, Jimmy had taken to paying him by the day. The second day there I got an out of town job; I was, after all, the only member of staff who could be relied on to turn up in a suit. Wilmslow Magistrates Court, which in those days could be reached from Stockport by train, was hardly outer space but Mickey anxiously took me for a couple of pints to stiffen the sinews. One pint led to another and by the time I got on the train I was exhausted, fell into a deep sleep and woke up in Crewe. I had seen enough Hollywood newspaper films to know what to do. I rang Stockport on a transfer charge call and asked Jimmy to wire me my fare back to Stockport.
I was touched that he went further: he drove all the way to Crewe to collect me. I see now that the reason was that it gave him a greater opportunity for an in-depth character assessment, but at the time I thought it a charming gesture.
We were nearing Stockport when he ended his assessment. “Skiddy,” he said, “we have two alternatives. Either I employ you or we stay friends.” Again I was very touched; it was my friendship he valued.
He generously paid me for a day and a half, but despite the joint urgings of Mickey and myself, refused to add the one and a half hours’ holiday money to which we felt I was entitled. After nearly sixty years the debt remains unpaid, though I have over the years mentioned it many times, even sent bills to his retirement home in Spain. He always copped me a deaf ‘un.
In the fullness of time he came to work for me, doing shifts when I ran the night desk on the Sunday Pictorial. I tried to have my holiday money docked from his shift money, but the linage department was obdurate. No amende honorable, not even when he made a fortune doing night shifts for six nationals, on one occasion sleeping in his car outside the vicarage in Cheshire in case his prey, the naughty Vicar of Woodford, sneaked back from his love-nest in the South of France
In fairness, he did bring me a Kukri back from Nepal when he climbed Nuptse and I treasure it to this day.
I was especially touched because he would have had every right to be cross. George Harrap, the picture editor, and I had sent him a telegram as soon as the news broke of his successful attempt. “Is there froth on the top?” it read, rather cleverly, we thought.
We didn’t know that it would take the Sherpa who delivered it three days to climb the mountain.
Mickey? No idea. The last time we met we were having lunch with Lord (Tony) Moynihan when his wife’s breast fell out and somehow, in the excitement of that, I never got round to finding out whether Mickey made his first thousand, but I was pleased to see he was not wearing his Mac.
But I will be waiting for the publication of Jimmy’s will………………
If you want to meet prehistoric man, the brontosaurus basher, the chest thumper with the dinosaur dangling from his belt, just go straight up the spine, turn left at the ears and you cannot miss him in his dark little nest.
The moment I read about him, I recognised him at once. He is the one who has been getting me in trouble all these years. I am a stout, elderly gentleman of quiet pursuits and academic leanings. That is the influence of Better Behaved Brain. Nice little property he has up there in the head. “First Floor Front” the address runs “Forehead, Upper Nose on the Brow, ME.”
You will get him there most times, enjoying ‘Country Life’ like as not and listening to music. He does all my thinking and worrying for me and as a tenant is very desirable. He is not a scrap of trouble. About once a year he will come out, give me a nudge and say, “About time we were writing a book, isn’t it?” I say nervously, “It won’t hurt, will it?” “Of course not,” he reassures me, and off we go arm in arm to the word processor.
Never a cross word but we are often puzzled. Sometimes Better Behaved Brain and I have dozed off during our evening gin and wakened to find the glass empty and the bottle all but dry. Then we notice the sherry has gone too and the wine we were going to have with dinner. Some nights we have even had our suspicions about the washing up liquid. Now we know it is Animal Brain. The moment our eyes closed there he was swinging down the spine looking for trouble; emptying every bottle in sight and playing havoc with my good name.
It is all clear now but I used to wonder why people who invited me to their dinner parties were always a touch frosty when we met the next day. It was the old story. You get invited twice. Once to apologise.
It got so bad, that after the 100th birthday party of his mother, I had to write as follows to my host Lord Langford:
“.........It has come to my attention that your mother’s party was disrupted by a person posing as me. Sadly this is not the first time this has happened. I can only assume that some impudent fellow lies in wait for the post and steals my invitation..........”
Fortunately my old friend, the Ninth Baron, has a sense of humour and I was forgiven. Now I realise that no blame should have attached in the first place. It wasn’t me who goosed his cousin, a Governor of the BBC and the one who taught Mrs Thatcher to be a lady, emptied three decanters, sang the ‘Gallant Forty Twa’ and marched up and down The Boudoir playing imaginary bagpipes. It was Animal Brain. He had locked the forehead so that Better Behaved Brain and I couldn’t get out, and taken over the piloting of the body.
It was he who started arguments in pubs, sent rude letters to editors and producers. He is the racehorse urger. It was his nose that twitched with desire all those years ago. He who, when I won a pig in an army raffle, insisted on riding back to the camp where I was Provost Sergeant on the Orderly Corporal’s motor bike, with the pig on the pillion. I will bet it was Animal Brain who was forever pushing me off bar stools.
With Better Behaved Brain you know where you are. Stuff some chocolate caramels into his dressing gown pocket, poke up the sitting room fire and give him a Ngaio Marsh to read and you can leave him for hours. He likes a glass of wine, of course, and I keep a small cellar of choice wine just for him.
Animal brain is jealous. Not only is he programmed to self destruct; he wants to take Better Behaved Brain with him. As you know, our Better Behaved Brains have a quadrillion of cells. That is a million with nine noughts.
The trouble is every time you have a hangover you wipe out a million. Even worse, the ones that go first are the cells of memory, with the result that thanks to Animal Brain I am heavily overdrawn at the memory bank. I think I am down to five.
Animal brain can remember nothing and is wholly uneducated. When I was working, producers of television and radio programmes used to ring me up from time to time, saying, “We are looking for someone who can take a fresh look at……” whatever the subject was of the programme they planned.
Animal Brain always got to the phone first and he knew that what they were really saying was that the search was on for some incompetent who knew absolutely nothing about a subject. You were the only representative of the species who knew nothing about, say, sport, or farming, or, come to that, pretty well anything. Indeed Animal Brain has cornered the market in abysmal ignorance. It knows less about more subjects than any other brain operating in the secondary jungle of the media.
For a decade I made weekly appearances on a popular news quiz on BBC Radio Wales chaired by a man who knew everything, Vincent Kane. In ten years I doubt if I won more than a dozen times. Indeed I won so rarely that when I did Animal Brain demanded a recount.
The interesting fact is that although Animal Brain was asked to appear every week, my fellow contestants, politicians, business tycoons and academics who had developed their Better Behaved Brain and evicted AB’s Dark Shadow, only appeared once a month.
IT IS ONLY COMMA SENSE
As I admit in my profile, I am stranger to punctuation. Readers of these essays may therefore wonder that the punctuation is immaculate. That is because I always marry above myself. My posh wife has ‘A’ levels in every conceivable subject and an Oxford degree and she very kindly looks over everything I write.
My friend Ken Ashton knows my attitude to punctuation, which incidentally was shared with Wordsworth. In his book on the Lakeland Poets, Thomas de Quincey tells how Wordsworth sent him to London to correct the proofs of a pamphlet because Wordsworth had little sympathy with punctuation.
Ashton has been kind enough to draw my attention to a friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley who lacked the comfort of a learned wife. He complained that whenever he began to write, he never could arrange his ideas in grammatical order. Which occasion suggested the idea of the following lines to the poet:
Here I sit with my paper, my pen and my ink,
First of this thing, and that thing, and t'other thing think;
Then my thoughts come so pell-mell all into my mind,
That the sense or the subject I never can find:
This word is wrong placed, — no regard to the sense,
The present and future, instead of past tense,
Then my grammar I want; O dear! what a bore,
I think I shall never attempt to write more,
With patience I then my thoughts must arraign,
Have them all in due order like mutes in a train,
Like them too must wait in due patience and thought,
Or else my fine works will all come to nought.
My wit too's so copious, it flows like a river,
But disperses its waters on black and white never;
Like smoke it appears independent and free,
But ah luckless smoke! it all passes like thee —
Then at length all my patience entirely lost,
My paper and pens in the fire are tossed;
But come, try again — you must never despair,
Our Murray's or Entick's are not all so rare,
Implore their assistance — they'll come to your aid,
Perform all your business without being paid,
They'll tell you the present tense, future and past,
Which should come first, and which should come last,
This Murray will do — then to Entick repair,
To find out the meaning of any word rare.
This they friendly will tell, and ne'er make you blush,
With a jeering look, taunt, or an O fie! tush!
Then straight all your thoughts in black and white put,
Not minding the if's the be's, and the but,
Then read it all over, see how it will run,
How answers the wit, the retort, and the pun,
Your writings may then with old Socrates vie,
May on the same shelf with Demosthenes lie,
May as Junius be sharp, or as Plato be sage,
The pattern or satire to all of the age;
But stop — a mad author I mean not to turn,
Nor with thirst of applause does my heated brain burn,
Sufficient that sense, wit, and grammar combined,
My letters may make some slight food for the mind;
That my thoughts to my friends I may freely impart,
In all the warm language that flows from the heart,
Hark! futurity calls! it loudly complains,
It bids me step forward and just hold the reins,
My excuse shall be humble, and faithful, and true,
Such as I fear can be made but by few —
Of writers this age has abundance and plenty,
Three score and a thousand, two millions and twenty,
Three score of them wits who all sharply vie,
To try what odd creature they best can belie,
A thousand are prudes who for Charity write,
And fill up their sheets with spleen, envy, and spite[,]
One million are bards, who to Heaven aspire,
And stuff their works full of bombast, rant, and fire,
T'other million are wags who in Grubstreet attend,
And just like a cobbler the old writings mend,
The twenty are those who for pulpits indite,
And pore over sermons all Saturday night.
And now my good friends — who come after I mean,
As I ne'er wore a cassock, or dined with a dean,
Or like cobblers at mending I never did try,
Nor with poets in lyrics attempted to vie;
As for prudes these good souls I both hate and detest,
So here I believe the matter must rest. —
I've heard your complaint — my answer I've made,
And since to your calls all the tribute I've paid,
Adieu my good friend; pray never despair,
But grammar and sense and everything dare,
Attempt but to write dashing, easy, and free,
Then take out your grammar and pay him your fee,
Be not a coward, shrink not to a tense,
But read it all over and make it out sense.
What a tiresome girl! — pray soon make an end,
Else my limited patience you'll quickly expend.
Well adieu, I no longer your patience will try —
So swift to the post now the letter shall fly.
YET ANOTHER GOODBYE
Jim Lovelock, my good friend and one of the oldest, died this week at his home in Spain. Death must have had quite a struggle because Jim was the stuff that old boots are made from.
Editor of a weekly newspaper in his early twenties, he was crippled with polio as a child, but nevertheless became a mountaineer, a pot-holer and a member of the expedition which climbed Nuptse, Everest’s younger sister. Working for the Daily Mail, he once climbed the south face of the building and climbed through the window into the editor’s office.
He was also my boss for a day and a half when he was proprietor of Stockport News Service.
Jim was a remarkable man who collected oddities. The rest of the staff of Stockport News Service was an odd little chap called Mickey. We had to find him to be introduced, and that was never easy. A year after his arrival, no one knew Mickey’s surname and I don’t think anyone ever found out where he lived.
He was invariably respectful and called Jimmy “Master”. He had a single purpose in life: to discover how millionaires made their first thousand pounds. Their memoirs, said Mickey who had read them all, always included the phrase, “with my first thousand pounds I bought…….” but never explained where the thousand pounds had come from.
He thought they had nicked it; but, scorning that as being too easy, he tried dealing. He only really mastered the art of acquiring: disposal escaped him. To Jimmy’s puzzled chagrin, he used the Agency’s office as his warehouse. There were racks of clothes of improbable sizes; a job lot of stringless violins, picked up for a song, inevitably tuneless; twenty gross of heavily tinselled cards wishing “A Happy Xmas for 1948” which he bought in 1951; and other less saleable items. You could never find a pen there, or even a typewriter; but anyone in need of a stringless violin was easily accommodated.
Next he tried gambling, a curious reversal. This time, disposing was child’s play: acquiring, he never quite mastered.
He had one suit he wore to the office, except on the days when he wore a mackintosh in the hope that “Master” would not notice he was wearing only a shirt, tie and underpants beneath, having pawned the suit. The gartered socks were a give-away.
By the time I arrived, Jimmy had taken to paying him by the day. The second day there I got an out of town job; I was, after all, the only member of staff who could be relied on to turn up in a suit. Wilmslow Magistrates Court, which in those days could be reached from Stockport by train, was hardly outer space but Mickey anxiously took me for a couple of pints to stiffen the sinews. One pint led to another and by the time I got on the train I was exhausted, fell into a deep sleep and woke up in Crewe. I had seen enough Hollywood newspaper films to know what to do. I rang Stockport on a transfer charge call and asked Jimmy to wire me my fare back to Stockport.
I was touched that he went further: he drove all the way to Crewe to collect me. I see now that the reason was that it gave him a greater opportunity for an in-depth character assessment, but at the time I thought it a charming gesture.
We were nearing Stockport when he ended his assessment. “Skiddy,” he said, “we have two alternatives. Either I employ you or we stay friends.” Again I was very touched; it was my friendship he valued.
He generously paid me for a day and a half, but despite the joint urgings of Mickey and myself, refused to add the one and a half hours’ holiday money to which we felt I was entitled. After nearly sixty years the debt remains unpaid, though I have over the years mentioned it many times, even sent bills to his retirement home in Spain. He always copped me a deaf ‘un.
In the fullness of time he came to work for me, doing shifts when I ran the night desk on the Sunday Pictorial. I tried to have my holiday money docked from his shift money, but the linage department was obdurate. No amende honorable, not even when he made a fortune doing night shifts for six nationals, on one occasion sleeping in his car outside the vicarage in Cheshire in case his prey, the naughty Vicar of Woodford, sneaked back from his love-nest in the South of France
In fairness, he did bring me a Kukri back from Nepal when he climbed Nuptse and I treasure it to this day.
I was especially touched because he would have had every right to be cross. George Harrap, the picture editor, and I had sent him a telegram as soon as the news broke of his successful attempt. “Is there froth on the top?” it read, rather cleverly, we thought.
We didn’t know that it would take the Sherpa who delivered it three days to climb the mountain.
Mickey? No idea. The last time we met we were having lunch with Lord (Tony) Moynihan when his wife’s breast fell out and somehow, in the excitement of that, I never got round to finding out whether Mickey made his first thousand, but I was pleased to see he was not wearing his Mac.
But I will be waiting for the publication of Jimmy’s will………………
Saturday, 22 September 2007
SWALLOWING THE TABLOID
In the 1880s two young American salesmen-cum-pharmacists, Silas Mainville Burroughs and Henry Wellcome, invented the ‘tabloid’. It was not originally a cut-down newspaper but a form of compressed pill — the name was an elision of ‘tablet’ and ‘alkaloid’ — which they imported to Britain. Helped by its sales, their company Burroughs Wellcome achieved huge success: insulin was another of their inventions; while Henry Wellcome created the first proper medical bags, giving them to Stanley for his trips to Africa and Scott for his walk to the Pole.
Tabloid writing is designed to be an easy pill to swallow.
At its best, it is concise and composed of non-obscene short words. A story is never longer than two folios. It is always black and white. Colourful writing is for journalists.
Is there a difference? There is, and it was best expressed in an old Hollywood film: a journalist is a guy who bums drinks off reporters.
Content in a tabloid is important. There are certain essential ingredients. A very good tabloid reporter called Frank Howitt, whose son Peter is doing quite well on TV, once wrote the ultimate tabloid headline: “Glamorous dog-owning granny elopes with Vicar.”
Animals are important. The Daily Mail sacked a reporter for not including the death of a rabbit among the thirty people killed in an air crash.
I overheard the best lesson in tabloid writing in the fifties in the Mirror office, which I had just joined with another Kemsley reporter called Arthur. Brooks. Arthur was clothed in the invincible Armour of Vanity. I once heard him tell another reporter: “You supply the facts and I will do the word artistry.”
He invariably, and oddly, greeted you by rubbing his extended hands along the wings of his highly polished hair, straightening an already rigid tie, and saying “No danger” out of the corner of his mouth.
Bizarre greetings proliferated. A reporter called Rosenfeld always began a conversation with a request to borrow your comb and tuppence to ring a friend. He was cured by another very good tabloid reporter called Terry Stringer who pressed a silver coin in his palm and said, “Here’s sixpence. Phone them all.”
On the occasion of the lesson of which I speak, Arthur had handed in his account of a murder which contained sufficient words to be published in paperback. He was called up by the news editor who always resented people bringing him stories and so interrupting his study of the Sporting Life.
“Arthur,” he asked, “are you familiar with the Bible?”
“No danger,” said Arthur with a sideways sweep of the glittering hair.
“Then you will have noticed,” said the news editor, “that the story of the Creation is told in four or perhaps five paragraphs?”
When Arthur nodded, his hair caught the light and flashed like sunlight caught in a mirror.
“Then why does it take you five folios to tell the story of a tatty murder in Liverpool?”
Damon Runyon and Ernest Hemingway between them changed for ever the language of journalism when they fathered tabloid reporting.
Runyon was the Media Studies degree of an earlier generation. Few of us have resisted the temptation to plunge in at the deep end of the present tense; several have made a living from it.
When the critic Cyril Connolly praised Hemingway for killing the Mandarin style of writing he was referring to literature, but it also applied to Hemingway the Foreign Correspondent.
“By Line”, a collection of his early journalism, shows the emergence of the style which was to make him the finest short story writer of the twentieth century. The tragedy of Ernest Hemingway was not that he shot himself, but that he got his timing wrong. Had he shot himself in 1953 when he won the Nobel Prize for literature with “The Old Man and the Sea” his place in the World of Literature would have been assured. As it was, he lived to become a comic self parody in a cruel farce. As Freud points out, all novelists are fantasists with an end product. Alas, not all fantasists are novelists, which may explain why so many men one meets claim to have been in the SAS. To accommodate them all the regiment would have to be the size of the Salvation Army.
If Runyon did not invent the style he certainly brought it centre stage. His stories of life on Broadway and the Great White Way, both of which terms he invented, are classics. Sadly he did not use it in his newspaper reports, which are sadly overwritten.
.
Those who condemn my inky trade are perhaps unaware that it stands on the shoulders of giants. Dr Sam Johnson and Charles Dickens, Addison and Steele were practitioners. My present vehicle, the blog, was the child of a sixteenth century, retired diplomat Michel de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay. He explained that he wanted to devote his life to writing on the subject of which he was the greatest expert - himself.
.
…THE LAW IS A ASS, SAID THE BEADLE……
WE “celebrate” the 60th anniversary of the bloodiest act of criminal ineptitude in the History of Empire, the Partition of India. It was the work of three lawyers, Ghandi, Jinnah and Nehru, assisted by a fourth who, without any knowledge of the country, decided the line of Partition in a month and then fled the country in fear of what would happen to him if he stayed. A senior civil servant minuted his Department Head: “I sometimes think,” he wrote, “that the worst disservice we have done to India is to take their best sons and turn them into lawyers.”
As, with the inevitability of Greek Tragedy, the ordeal of the McCann family reaches its denouement, it is perhaps timely to inquire why they should have been faced with hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal costs in their efforts to clear their name.
I wonder with Omar Khayam what they buy,these lawyers, which is half so precious as the stuff they sell
VINCE MULCHRONE AND THE FONEY FLOOK
Newspapermen don’t come much better than Vincent Mulchrone, a friend since weekly paper days. The last time we met before his too early death, I had been hired by the Brewers’ Society to argue the case for Sunday Opening of pubs in Wales. A cause close to my heart.
The most graphic way to illustrate the anomalies, it seemed to me, was to hire a coach and get my friend Robin Wills, the manager of the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester, to make a massive, extravagant picnic, because Robin did extravagance better than anyone I knew, as befitted a tobacco company heir
I would invite Fleet Street’s finest to join me in a tour of the Welsh border, visiting pubs. Pubs where you could get a drink in the snug, but not the lounge, the bar but not the dining room, and in once case where the boundary between England and Wales ran through the centre of the pub, on the left hand side of the bar but not the right.
Mulchrone was first on my list.
Late in the afternoon we left the main party and settled down to have a comfortable drink in the Crown in Denbigh, which had never closed in living memory. It was there that Vince told me the story of the time he hired a man to wear a Flook suit at a seaside promotion by the Daily Mail.
Flook was a very popular furry bear, star of the paper’s cartoons page. Vince said he found a reluctant candidate at the town’s labour exchange.
“A fiver,” Vince wheedled, “just for a morning’s walk on the sands.”
“Deck-chairs?” the man asked suspiciously. “I couldn’t give out deck-chairs. It’s me back and I can’t stand heat.”
“It’s not the bloody Sahara,” Vince said, “and we’ll throw in a water bottle. All you’ve got to do is be nice to a few kids.”
The man’s eyes blazed with panic. “It’s not Father Christmas, is it? I couldn’t do Father Christmas; not again. I ‘ad to do it three years ago. Horrible it was. I give out the wrong parcels and a little girl hit me wiv a bleeding train.”
“It’s mid-summer,” Vince told him, “you don’t have Father Christmas in summer.”
“They had me in September that year,” the man countered. “I wouldn’t have to give anything out, would I?”
“Lollipops. In a tray,” Vince told him quickly. “Round your neck. When you’ve given the last one out you’ve finished.”
“They wouldn’t have to sit on my knees, would they? I couldn’t have kids sitting on my knee. They all have wet drawers, you know. It’s the excitement.”
But he was weakening. “How many lollipops?”
“Fifty.”
He made up his mind. “OK!” he said. “But not a word to this lot. I don’t want to lose me amchoor status.” “And no sitting on bleeding knees,” he warned. “I ain’t ‘aving a conviction for that. Definite.”
“Flook has no knees.”
When they got to the Entertainments Shed on the prom and saw the Flook outfit, the little man changed his mind. “I’m not getting into that bleedin’ thing,” he said. “It’s horrible.”
He agreed when Vince doubled the fee but not even the lure of a third fiver, which Vince had to give him to put on the plastic head, would induce him to remove his cap.
The incessant electronic barking of Flook obviously unnerved him, Vince told me. With a sudden, desperate jerk, the little man tore himself away from the grips of a Circulation man and, banging and dipping his plastic head, shot through the hut door and out into the Great World.
Colliding almost at once with a group of holiday-makers, he tumbled and rolled down the promenade steps to the beach where the weight of his head sent his feet shooting into the air. In a moment he was up and running, little gauntleted hands waving wildly as he struggled to unfasten the head. Zigzagging across the beach, terrifying holiday-makers.
“Look at him!” A Circulation man fumed, “he’s ruining the whole bloody thing leaping about like that. He should be walking slowly, chatting up the children.”
From that day many readers of the Daily Mail were able to get instant obedience from their young by threatening them that Flook was coming. He emptied that beach faster than rain, or even a deck chair attendant. At first the children had been delighted. You could hear a concerted shout of ‘OOOOOH’ all over the front as a horde of children threw away the spades with which they had been burying their fathers and made for Flook. No doubt it was the lollipops that attracted them, for the trail of red toffee which charted his progress down the beach soon became a line of struggling, laughing children. But the mood changed dramatically when, brought to bay at last, the little man turned on his pursuers and started throwing lollipops at their heads.
“It’s all wrong,’ said the man from the Circulation Department pettishly, “there should only be one lollipop to each child. That little girl has been hit twice.”
Vince said he admired the man’s aim: he could not see and was directed solely by sound. Under the circumstances Vince thought he put up a creditable performance. Even when the last lollipop was discharged the man in the Flook suit fought on, hurling pebbles and even rocks of a respectable size. When he finally put the children to flight and sent parents scuttling for the protection of the promenade wall, the little man stood for a moment whimpering, a lonely figure on a deserted beach.
He threw himself down on the sand, kicking at the air as he struggled to pull off his head which by now was dented badly. Finally, he scrambled to his feet, skidding in the wet sand at the sea’s edge. Soon he was paddling, if you could so describe his nervous leaps and surges, as the water washed first round his ankles, then his knees, his little furry thighs and finally his middle as he floated further out to sea.
The Circulation man must have had a sticky few moments on the phone calling out a lifeboat to a man in a bearskin. When he came back he wore the air of a man who has known suffering. “They wanted to know, if they tow it in, do they get salvage money?’ he said.
End
Tabloid writing is designed to be an easy pill to swallow.
At its best, it is concise and composed of non-obscene short words. A story is never longer than two folios. It is always black and white. Colourful writing is for journalists.
Is there a difference? There is, and it was best expressed in an old Hollywood film: a journalist is a guy who bums drinks off reporters.
Content in a tabloid is important. There are certain essential ingredients. A very good tabloid reporter called Frank Howitt, whose son Peter is doing quite well on TV, once wrote the ultimate tabloid headline: “Glamorous dog-owning granny elopes with Vicar.”
Animals are important. The Daily Mail sacked a reporter for not including the death of a rabbit among the thirty people killed in an air crash.
I overheard the best lesson in tabloid writing in the fifties in the Mirror office, which I had just joined with another Kemsley reporter called Arthur. Brooks. Arthur was clothed in the invincible Armour of Vanity. I once heard him tell another reporter: “You supply the facts and I will do the word artistry.”
He invariably, and oddly, greeted you by rubbing his extended hands along the wings of his highly polished hair, straightening an already rigid tie, and saying “No danger” out of the corner of his mouth.
Bizarre greetings proliferated. A reporter called Rosenfeld always began a conversation with a request to borrow your comb and tuppence to ring a friend. He was cured by another very good tabloid reporter called Terry Stringer who pressed a silver coin in his palm and said, “Here’s sixpence. Phone them all.”
On the occasion of the lesson of which I speak, Arthur had handed in his account of a murder which contained sufficient words to be published in paperback. He was called up by the news editor who always resented people bringing him stories and so interrupting his study of the Sporting Life.
“Arthur,” he asked, “are you familiar with the Bible?”
“No danger,” said Arthur with a sideways sweep of the glittering hair.
“Then you will have noticed,” said the news editor, “that the story of the Creation is told in four or perhaps five paragraphs?”
When Arthur nodded, his hair caught the light and flashed like sunlight caught in a mirror.
“Then why does it take you five folios to tell the story of a tatty murder in Liverpool?”
Damon Runyon and Ernest Hemingway between them changed for ever the language of journalism when they fathered tabloid reporting.
Runyon was the Media Studies degree of an earlier generation. Few of us have resisted the temptation to plunge in at the deep end of the present tense; several have made a living from it.
When the critic Cyril Connolly praised Hemingway for killing the Mandarin style of writing he was referring to literature, but it also applied to Hemingway the Foreign Correspondent.
“By Line”, a collection of his early journalism, shows the emergence of the style which was to make him the finest short story writer of the twentieth century. The tragedy of Ernest Hemingway was not that he shot himself, but that he got his timing wrong. Had he shot himself in 1953 when he won the Nobel Prize for literature with “The Old Man and the Sea” his place in the World of Literature would have been assured. As it was, he lived to become a comic self parody in a cruel farce. As Freud points out, all novelists are fantasists with an end product. Alas, not all fantasists are novelists, which may explain why so many men one meets claim to have been in the SAS. To accommodate them all the regiment would have to be the size of the Salvation Army.
If Runyon did not invent the style he certainly brought it centre stage. His stories of life on Broadway and the Great White Way, both of which terms he invented, are classics. Sadly he did not use it in his newspaper reports, which are sadly overwritten.
.
Those who condemn my inky trade are perhaps unaware that it stands on the shoulders of giants. Dr Sam Johnson and Charles Dickens, Addison and Steele were practitioners. My present vehicle, the blog, was the child of a sixteenth century, retired diplomat Michel de Montaigne, the inventor of the essay. He explained that he wanted to devote his life to writing on the subject of which he was the greatest expert - himself.
.
…THE LAW IS A ASS, SAID THE BEADLE……
WE “celebrate” the 60th anniversary of the bloodiest act of criminal ineptitude in the History of Empire, the Partition of India. It was the work of three lawyers, Ghandi, Jinnah and Nehru, assisted by a fourth who, without any knowledge of the country, decided the line of Partition in a month and then fled the country in fear of what would happen to him if he stayed. A senior civil servant minuted his Department Head: “I sometimes think,” he wrote, “that the worst disservice we have done to India is to take their best sons and turn them into lawyers.”
As, with the inevitability of Greek Tragedy, the ordeal of the McCann family reaches its denouement, it is perhaps timely to inquire why they should have been faced with hundreds of thousands of pounds in legal costs in their efforts to clear their name.
I wonder with Omar Khayam what they buy,these lawyers, which is half so precious as the stuff they sell
VINCE MULCHRONE AND THE FONEY FLOOK
Newspapermen don’t come much better than Vincent Mulchrone, a friend since weekly paper days. The last time we met before his too early death, I had been hired by the Brewers’ Society to argue the case for Sunday Opening of pubs in Wales. A cause close to my heart.
The most graphic way to illustrate the anomalies, it seemed to me, was to hire a coach and get my friend Robin Wills, the manager of the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester, to make a massive, extravagant picnic, because Robin did extravagance better than anyone I knew, as befitted a tobacco company heir
I would invite Fleet Street’s finest to join me in a tour of the Welsh border, visiting pubs. Pubs where you could get a drink in the snug, but not the lounge, the bar but not the dining room, and in once case where the boundary between England and Wales ran through the centre of the pub, on the left hand side of the bar but not the right.
Mulchrone was first on my list.
Late in the afternoon we left the main party and settled down to have a comfortable drink in the Crown in Denbigh, which had never closed in living memory. It was there that Vince told me the story of the time he hired a man to wear a Flook suit at a seaside promotion by the Daily Mail.
Flook was a very popular furry bear, star of the paper’s cartoons page. Vince said he found a reluctant candidate at the town’s labour exchange.
“A fiver,” Vince wheedled, “just for a morning’s walk on the sands.”
“Deck-chairs?” the man asked suspiciously. “I couldn’t give out deck-chairs. It’s me back and I can’t stand heat.”
“It’s not the bloody Sahara,” Vince said, “and we’ll throw in a water bottle. All you’ve got to do is be nice to a few kids.”
The man’s eyes blazed with panic. “It’s not Father Christmas, is it? I couldn’t do Father Christmas; not again. I ‘ad to do it three years ago. Horrible it was. I give out the wrong parcels and a little girl hit me wiv a bleeding train.”
“It’s mid-summer,” Vince told him, “you don’t have Father Christmas in summer.”
“They had me in September that year,” the man countered. “I wouldn’t have to give anything out, would I?”
“Lollipops. In a tray,” Vince told him quickly. “Round your neck. When you’ve given the last one out you’ve finished.”
“They wouldn’t have to sit on my knees, would they? I couldn’t have kids sitting on my knee. They all have wet drawers, you know. It’s the excitement.”
But he was weakening. “How many lollipops?”
“Fifty.”
He made up his mind. “OK!” he said. “But not a word to this lot. I don’t want to lose me amchoor status.” “And no sitting on bleeding knees,” he warned. “I ain’t ‘aving a conviction for that. Definite.”
“Flook has no knees.”
When they got to the Entertainments Shed on the prom and saw the Flook outfit, the little man changed his mind. “I’m not getting into that bleedin’ thing,” he said. “It’s horrible.”
He agreed when Vince doubled the fee but not even the lure of a third fiver, which Vince had to give him to put on the plastic head, would induce him to remove his cap.
The incessant electronic barking of Flook obviously unnerved him, Vince told me. With a sudden, desperate jerk, the little man tore himself away from the grips of a Circulation man and, banging and dipping his plastic head, shot through the hut door and out into the Great World.
Colliding almost at once with a group of holiday-makers, he tumbled and rolled down the promenade steps to the beach where the weight of his head sent his feet shooting into the air. In a moment he was up and running, little gauntleted hands waving wildly as he struggled to unfasten the head. Zigzagging across the beach, terrifying holiday-makers.
“Look at him!” A Circulation man fumed, “he’s ruining the whole bloody thing leaping about like that. He should be walking slowly, chatting up the children.”
From that day many readers of the Daily Mail were able to get instant obedience from their young by threatening them that Flook was coming. He emptied that beach faster than rain, or even a deck chair attendant. At first the children had been delighted. You could hear a concerted shout of ‘OOOOOH’ all over the front as a horde of children threw away the spades with which they had been burying their fathers and made for Flook. No doubt it was the lollipops that attracted them, for the trail of red toffee which charted his progress down the beach soon became a line of struggling, laughing children. But the mood changed dramatically when, brought to bay at last, the little man turned on his pursuers and started throwing lollipops at their heads.
“It’s all wrong,’ said the man from the Circulation Department pettishly, “there should only be one lollipop to each child. That little girl has been hit twice.”
Vince said he admired the man’s aim: he could not see and was directed solely by sound. Under the circumstances Vince thought he put up a creditable performance. Even when the last lollipop was discharged the man in the Flook suit fought on, hurling pebbles and even rocks of a respectable size. When he finally put the children to flight and sent parents scuttling for the protection of the promenade wall, the little man stood for a moment whimpering, a lonely figure on a deserted beach.
He threw himself down on the sand, kicking at the air as he struggled to pull off his head which by now was dented badly. Finally, he scrambled to his feet, skidding in the wet sand at the sea’s edge. Soon he was paddling, if you could so describe his nervous leaps and surges, as the water washed first round his ankles, then his knees, his little furry thighs and finally his middle as he floated further out to sea.
The Circulation man must have had a sticky few moments on the phone calling out a lifeboat to a man in a bearskin. When he came back he wore the air of a man who has known suffering. “They wanted to know, if they tow it in, do they get salvage money?’ he said.
End
Saturday, 15 September 2007
.
Having your portrait painted is being interviewed in Technicolor. So when the Beaumaris, Anglesey, artist Ishbel McWhirter sought to paint mine, I hovered between being flattered and being frightened. I had spent a lifetime constructing a caricature behind which to hide. Bit late now to break cover.
Nothing, however, succeeds like flattery. So I went to her superb glass-walled studio overlooking the Menai Straits at Glyn Garth. In less time than it took to tell my life story she painted not one, but four, two of which I bought. Not out of conceit but because the portraits were such perceptive interviews I did not want them falling into the hands of strangers. Like the African tribesmen who will not be photographed because they fear the camera will capture their soul.
The first surprise was how quickly McWhirter works. At the end of the two-hour sitting I was already there, trapped on the canvas, spinnaker belly and all. She was attracted to me, she said, because of the flowing silk handkerchief I wear in my top pocket. Not the noble brow, the classic profile. Clearly the lady has much to learn about flattery though nothing about painting.
She was taught by the best. She was the favourite pupil of the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka, a founder of the Expressionist movement and in post-war Europe a name as revered as Picasso and Matisse. Kokoschka's talent as a portrait painter was frightening. In his day he was said to have manipulated a psychological tin opener to prize out the recesses of the soul.
So well did he teach McWhirter that after his death in 1980 she was the only one of his pupils to be invited to exhibit in a retrospective of his work at the archive museum at his birthplace Pöchlarn, outside Vienna.
But I paint in the background too early. The outline first. McWhirter was born in Prestatyn in 1927 and Kokoschka was the second genius she met. Her first was the pioneering educationalist A.S. Neill who founded the controversial Summerhill School where she was educated. He thought so highly of her he used the portrait she painted of him as the cover for his autobiography.
I think of myself as one of God’s more obvious jokes, a sort of walking Baboushka doll, with a face not so much lived in as trampled upon by time and deep self indulgence. The only time I have ever been complimented on my figure was by a lady in our Welsh village, Brynsiencyn. “Never mind Mr Skidmore,” she consoled me one day, “you are very thin, from the back.”
Perhaps that is why I have fourteen caricatures and two pot statuettes of myself. The pencil and the potter’s wheel plainly find me irresistible.
XMAS MALE SACKED
In 1950 Roly Watkins, the news editor of the Daily Mirror and a close friend, described me as unemployable. I have fulfilled that early promise by having been sacked from trade magazines, news agencies, weekly and evening newspapers, provincial and national dailies, a rival blog, TV and the BBC.
Will it never end? At 78 I have been sacked yet again. This time by my doctor from his “Fitness for the Future” Clinic. Well, not so much sacked. I failed the entrance examination on grounds of lack of motivation. When he put my name down I wrote to him to say I would be very glad when the future is over and what I was looking for was parole not an extension to my life sentence.
The first time I was out of work it was Christmas time. I met Bob Ashton, then doing the gossip diary for the Manchester Evening News. He said, "Do not suppose you will be having much of a Christmas?"
I said, "If I wanted a mince pie I would have to buy it on H.P. We will be out on Xmas Day because it is warmer out than it is in the house and I have promised the kids we will go to Curry’s to watch the Queen's Speech through the window. Then we are going to a park to mug robins for their breadcrumbs."
"Not having a bird on The Day then?"
"Not unless I can grab one of the robins as we steal their breadcrumbs."
He said, "Why don't you nip down to the poultry market at Shudehill just before it closes on Xmas Eve? They practically give birds away.
"Then," he said, "come to the Press Party at the Continental Cinema on Market Street. I will wait for you in the foyer and smuggle you in.”
So I did.
I picked up a chicken with my last half crown and went to the party, where I set up a record for drinking free scotch and eating vol-au-vents unbroken for many years.
Then this guest said, "Let's play rugby."
Another guest said, "We haven't got a ball."
A third guest said, "Yes, we have," and grabbed the parcel of chicken from where it had been roosting under my arm. Everyone but me applauded the skill with which the next guest, a rather showy chap, executed a back pass with my parcel between his legs.
I was less pleased than anyone when the next guest followed through with a drop kick.
It was powerful, I will say that.
It sent the parcel soaring across the foyer, out into Market Street, over the heads of the passers-by, to drop, perfectly positioned, under the tyre of a passing bus.
They were all very apologetic. The manager of the cinema particularly. He said he hoped the parcel hadn't contained anything important. I said, no, it was just a chicken I got for tea on Boxing Night.
For the rest of the party I was a bit thoughtful, though I did manage to clock up a further freeloader's record of eight scotch and a round dozen vol-au-vents.
At the death, the manager came up and gave me a parcel. "I hope you will accept this replacement with our apologies," he said.
It was a twelve pound turkey.
Which would have been nice... but we didn't have an oven at the time, just a gas grill. So we had to cook it a leg at a time.
End
Sunday, 9 September 2007
DEATH WHERE IS THY SING
As an aspiring Buddhist I live in the world of Perpetual Present. There is no death in my world, so the news of Pavarotti’s demise has not saddened me. Indeed, thanks to technology, immortality is available at the turn of a switch. Whilst his body lay in state in Modena Cathedral I was able to watch, and more importantly hear, his 1993 concert in Central Park, New York, on my TV set. Not that the watching was unimportant. I was able to see on his face the enjoyment he was getting from the act of singing and the tears of joy running down the face of a woman in the audience, briefly immortalised by the camera.
The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius described life as a river, the past flowing away and unclaimable, the future yet to come. Only the river at your feet is real.
Not any more.
In truth, there is in this wonder full (literally) world, six realities: the record, video, DVD and cassette cabinets, the library and the photo album. Memory is drawn up in ranks, awaiting the order to parade.
There is a dark side to this glittering, golden coinage. In earlier times the Sin Eater, though a pariah, was one of the most important people in the parish. It was his job to eat bread from the bare chests of corpses because in doing so he took on the sins of the dearly departed.
Nowadays we have the media. No longer pariahs, but frequently ennobled.
Reporting the death of Pavarotti the Daily Mail described him thus:
“..six feet tall, weighing 25 stone, by nature a clown, a sadist, venal, petulant, often a pain in the backside to fellow performers.”
Though some are slim, the same words could be usefully employed to describe every proprietor and most editors I have worked for over the past sixty years.
The Mail quoted Pavarotti as saying: “I do not sing for love, I sing for lira.”
This was manifestly untrue of the Central Park concert and many other performances by that gifted voice. But again I cannot think of a fellow practitioner of this inky trade who does not endorse Dr Johnson’s view that no one but a blockhead writes except for money. I believe the Editor of the Mail is paid a million pounds a year.
The same is true of sexual congress. High talent in art, commerce and politics is very often accompanied by a high sex drive. It was said of Julius Caesar that he was every woman’s husband and every man’s wife; Napoleon all but conquered the world but is remembered by “Not tonight, Josephine”; American presidents impregnated their slaves but created a country which was, until recently, the envy of the world; Clinton did more good than either Bush;as did Kennedy. But one is remembred for a casual act of oral sex and Kennedy for saying, “I will do for sex what Eisenhower did for golf”; Gladstone pursued prostitutes. According to his son Randolph, Winston Churchill, who was involved in a homosexual scandal whilst a young cavalryman, from which he was extricated by his wondrous mother (who herself, according to George Moore, had 200 publicly acknowledged lovers), slept with Ivor Novello in Leeds Castle and described the experience as “musical”.
Lloyd George won World War One and was the founder of the welfare state but is better known for sexual athleticism.
Not by my granny, I hasten to add. That famous “Welshman” was born round the corner from our house in Moss Side in Manchester. I passed it every day as a small child accompanying my granny to the shops to change her wireless accumulator. As we approached it, she bade me remove my cap in respect. “That is the man who gave me my old age pension,” she explained.
Ernest Hemingway, of all unlikely people, put it best in a letter to Robert Cantwell in 1950. He wrote: “Please do not repeat, do not put anything about how many times I have been shot at. I asked both Cape and Scribners not to use any publicity about my military service and it is distasteful to me to mention it and destroys any pride I have in it. I want to run as a writer, not as a man who had been to the wars, nor a bar room fighter, nor a shooter; nor a horse-player, nor a drinker. I would like to be a straight writer and be judged as such…
“What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little out house surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog, Black Dog?
“The question is can you write?”
Or sing, or paint, or write music, or decorate a room, plumb a house, mend a TV?
I have been touched by greatness. I was in the audience at the Llangollen Music Festival which acclaimed the choir from Modena. It was the first experience of international public acclaim for a schoolboy called Luciano Pavarotti and it decided him to become a professional singer.
I was Moura Lympany's house guest at her festival in Rasiguere in the South of France, Victoria los Angeles ws a great chum, after I interviewed her at the Beaumaris Festival on the Isle of Anglesey.
I employed Aled Jones as a junior reporter and felt my hair stand on end whenever he sang.
I am glad Pavarotti enjoyed sex. Most of us do. I once asked a chum of mine, the baritone Sir Geraint Evans, how it was always the tenors who got the girl.
“Not when I am in the cast, they don’t,” he told me.
Ends
A FRIGHTENING FRIEND CAN STRIKE YOU DUMB
When my friend Andre Auckland was married in Maidstone the speeches from the bride’s side were gloomy in the extreme. The most optimistic began: “I suppose they might be happy…”
At length a small man of military appearance stood up and said, “I have known Andre for five years and have always found him friendly, co-operative and a social asset.”
His defender proved to be the Governor of Maidstone Prison and Andre’s host for half a decade.
Like many of the legends that hung from Andre’s ample belt, this may be apocryphal. Though why anybody made up stories about this benevolent Belgian is beyond me. The reality was terrifying enough.
Andre was my minder on the Sunday Mirror and without him at my side I would have got into far less trouble than I did. How he got to Eccles,Lancs, where he ran, amongst other more nefarious things, a taxi service, he never disclosed. But he did reminisce about his days in a unit of the Belgian Resistance in Brussels, which met regularly in the café which was the local of the Gestapo. As he explained: “It was the last place they would have looked for us.”
He was introduced to the Sunday Mirror by the news editor Harry Ashbrook at whose side corkscrews miraculously appeared rapier straight. Andre was ecumenical in friendship: confidence tricksters like Ashbrook, who sold Jack Stoneley, one of his reporters, a car without wheels; out and out gangsters, prominent businessmen and two hangmen, were all members of Andre’s fan club.
I met one of them, Harry Allen, the deputy hangman, who said, when he learned I lived in Chester: “Let’s see… that’s Shrewsbury nick. Don’t get much work down there. But the very next time I’ll break the journey at Chester and we’ll make a night of it.”
If you were a friend of Andre’s………..
We were doing a job in Leeds when I foolishly remarked that it was Race Week in Doncaster where I used to work on the Evening News. Indeed the St Leger was being run that weekend.
“We’ll go,” said Andre, and instructed me what to tell the desk and to be sure they wired £50 to Doncaster post office. There was never any doubt who was in charge when I worked with Andre.
We had a great time in Doncaster. We lost most of the fifty on the course, but all my friends loved him. One of them, a very attractive lady, vigorously in the back of his car. It was midnight on the first night before I had the chance to point out to him that we had nowhere to sleep and that every hotel bed in Doncaster was booked weeks before the Leger.
Nothing to a man who was almost certainly on the Gestapo darts team in that pub in Brussels. He hammered on the door of the Wellington in the Market Square. When the landlord opened it, he explained in broken English that we were from “Paris Match” and had been diverted at the last minute from Morocco to cover the St Leger. We had not slept for two nights and were exhausted.
The landlord was very sympathetic. He said he didn’t do B & B but he did have a single bed in a spare room that one of us could have and the other could sleep on the settle in the snug. You will not be surprised to learn who got the settle, but when the landlord asked me, “Are you sure you will be comfortable?” Andre broke in to explain, “Alas, my friend does not speak English.”
Alas, his friend did not speak French either, apart from four remembered words “Sur Le Pont d’Avignon” which do not go very far in conversations in a Yorkshire pub, even when orchestrated with what I hoped were Gallic shrugs and a vocabulary of grunts.
So for two days I could not say a word, which for a gabby guy like me is not easy. I only remember fragments of the last night but the next morning is etched on my soul. My stomach seethed, my mouth was as rough as a tram driver’s glove, my left lobe was not speaking to my right lobe and my eyes felt like hot raspberry jam.
An aged crone was polishing glasses behind the bar.
“Pour us a white label Worthington, love,” I gasped.
“By ‘eck,”she said, “not taken you long to pick up the language.”
Ends
The Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius described life as a river, the past flowing away and unclaimable, the future yet to come. Only the river at your feet is real.
Not any more.
In truth, there is in this wonder full (literally) world, six realities: the record, video, DVD and cassette cabinets, the library and the photo album. Memory is drawn up in ranks, awaiting the order to parade.
There is a dark side to this glittering, golden coinage. In earlier times the Sin Eater, though a pariah, was one of the most important people in the parish. It was his job to eat bread from the bare chests of corpses because in doing so he took on the sins of the dearly departed.
Nowadays we have the media. No longer pariahs, but frequently ennobled.
Reporting the death of Pavarotti the Daily Mail described him thus:
“..six feet tall, weighing 25 stone, by nature a clown, a sadist, venal, petulant, often a pain in the backside to fellow performers.”
Though some are slim, the same words could be usefully employed to describe every proprietor and most editors I have worked for over the past sixty years.
The Mail quoted Pavarotti as saying: “I do not sing for love, I sing for lira.”
This was manifestly untrue of the Central Park concert and many other performances by that gifted voice. But again I cannot think of a fellow practitioner of this inky trade who does not endorse Dr Johnson’s view that no one but a blockhead writes except for money. I believe the Editor of the Mail is paid a million pounds a year.
The same is true of sexual congress. High talent in art, commerce and politics is very often accompanied by a high sex drive. It was said of Julius Caesar that he was every woman’s husband and every man’s wife; Napoleon all but conquered the world but is remembered by “Not tonight, Josephine”; American presidents impregnated their slaves but created a country which was, until recently, the envy of the world; Clinton did more good than either Bush;as did Kennedy. But one is remembred for a casual act of oral sex and Kennedy for saying, “I will do for sex what Eisenhower did for golf”; Gladstone pursued prostitutes. According to his son Randolph, Winston Churchill, who was involved in a homosexual scandal whilst a young cavalryman, from which he was extricated by his wondrous mother (who herself, according to George Moore, had 200 publicly acknowledged lovers), slept with Ivor Novello in Leeds Castle and described the experience as “musical”.
Lloyd George won World War One and was the founder of the welfare state but is better known for sexual athleticism.
Not by my granny, I hasten to add. That famous “Welshman” was born round the corner from our house in Moss Side in Manchester. I passed it every day as a small child accompanying my granny to the shops to change her wireless accumulator. As we approached it, she bade me remove my cap in respect. “That is the man who gave me my old age pension,” she explained.
Ernest Hemingway, of all unlikely people, put it best in a letter to Robert Cantwell in 1950. He wrote: “Please do not repeat, do not put anything about how many times I have been shot at. I asked both Cape and Scribners not to use any publicity about my military service and it is distasteful to me to mention it and destroys any pride I have in it. I want to run as a writer, not as a man who had been to the wars, nor a bar room fighter, nor a shooter; nor a horse-player, nor a drinker. I would like to be a straight writer and be judged as such…
“What difference does it make if you live in a picturesque little out house surrounded by 300 feeble minded goats and your faithful dog, Black Dog?
“The question is can you write?”
Or sing, or paint, or write music, or decorate a room, plumb a house, mend a TV?
I have been touched by greatness. I was in the audience at the Llangollen Music Festival which acclaimed the choir from Modena. It was the first experience of international public acclaim for a schoolboy called Luciano Pavarotti and it decided him to become a professional singer.
I was Moura Lympany's house guest at her festival in Rasiguere in the South of France, Victoria los Angeles ws a great chum, after I interviewed her at the Beaumaris Festival on the Isle of Anglesey.
I employed Aled Jones as a junior reporter and felt my hair stand on end whenever he sang.
I am glad Pavarotti enjoyed sex. Most of us do. I once asked a chum of mine, the baritone Sir Geraint Evans, how it was always the tenors who got the girl.
“Not when I am in the cast, they don’t,” he told me.
Ends
A FRIGHTENING FRIEND CAN STRIKE YOU DUMB
When my friend Andre Auckland was married in Maidstone the speeches from the bride’s side were gloomy in the extreme. The most optimistic began: “I suppose they might be happy…”
At length a small man of military appearance stood up and said, “I have known Andre for five years and have always found him friendly, co-operative and a social asset.”
His defender proved to be the Governor of Maidstone Prison and Andre’s host for half a decade.
Like many of the legends that hung from Andre’s ample belt, this may be apocryphal. Though why anybody made up stories about this benevolent Belgian is beyond me. The reality was terrifying enough.
Andre was my minder on the Sunday Mirror and without him at my side I would have got into far less trouble than I did. How he got to Eccles,Lancs, where he ran, amongst other more nefarious things, a taxi service, he never disclosed. But he did reminisce about his days in a unit of the Belgian Resistance in Brussels, which met regularly in the café which was the local of the Gestapo. As he explained: “It was the last place they would have looked for us.”
He was introduced to the Sunday Mirror by the news editor Harry Ashbrook at whose side corkscrews miraculously appeared rapier straight. Andre was ecumenical in friendship: confidence tricksters like Ashbrook, who sold Jack Stoneley, one of his reporters, a car without wheels; out and out gangsters, prominent businessmen and two hangmen, were all members of Andre’s fan club.
I met one of them, Harry Allen, the deputy hangman, who said, when he learned I lived in Chester: “Let’s see… that’s Shrewsbury nick. Don’t get much work down there. But the very next time I’ll break the journey at Chester and we’ll make a night of it.”
If you were a friend of Andre’s………..
We were doing a job in Leeds when I foolishly remarked that it was Race Week in Doncaster where I used to work on the Evening News. Indeed the St Leger was being run that weekend.
“We’ll go,” said Andre, and instructed me what to tell the desk and to be sure they wired £50 to Doncaster post office. There was never any doubt who was in charge when I worked with Andre.
We had a great time in Doncaster. We lost most of the fifty on the course, but all my friends loved him. One of them, a very attractive lady, vigorously in the back of his car. It was midnight on the first night before I had the chance to point out to him that we had nowhere to sleep and that every hotel bed in Doncaster was booked weeks before the Leger.
Nothing to a man who was almost certainly on the Gestapo darts team in that pub in Brussels. He hammered on the door of the Wellington in the Market Square. When the landlord opened it, he explained in broken English that we were from “Paris Match” and had been diverted at the last minute from Morocco to cover the St Leger. We had not slept for two nights and were exhausted.
The landlord was very sympathetic. He said he didn’t do B & B but he did have a single bed in a spare room that one of us could have and the other could sleep on the settle in the snug. You will not be surprised to learn who got the settle, but when the landlord asked me, “Are you sure you will be comfortable?” Andre broke in to explain, “Alas, my friend does not speak English.”
Alas, his friend did not speak French either, apart from four remembered words “Sur Le Pont d’Avignon” which do not go very far in conversations in a Yorkshire pub, even when orchestrated with what I hoped were Gallic shrugs and a vocabulary of grunts.
So for two days I could not say a word, which for a gabby guy like me is not easy. I only remember fragments of the last night but the next morning is etched on my soul. My stomach seethed, my mouth was as rough as a tram driver’s glove, my left lobe was not speaking to my right lobe and my eyes felt like hot raspberry jam.
An aged crone was polishing glasses behind the bar.
“Pour us a white label Worthington, love,” I gasped.
“By ‘eck,”she said, “not taken you long to pick up the language.”
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