If you can't carve it, it's not Sunday dinner. I say
this with all the gloomy force of a man who last week
sat down to a Sunday dinner of Shepherd's Pie.

Chief among the pleasures modest affluence brings is Sunday dinner,
in which the starring role is taken by a comestible which is
at ease in the presence of Yorkshire pudding, onion - or apple - sauce.
Nothing that can't be carved is at ease in that company.
Needn't be grand, mark you. Shoulder of lamb, nice
piece of belly pork, poultry or brisket. I ask no more of
life. And Sunday dinner, whenever you eat it. Sunday lunch
was always cold in gentleman's houses so that the servants
could go to church. We have it in the evening and call it
supper. A consequence of marrying above myself.
To a lady whose devotion to Shepherd's Pie is a sign of that deprived background common
to the upper middle classes.
Also bread-and-butter pudding. Of which I prefer not to think. I'm convinced that it was
the enervating effect on the ruling classes of generations of bread-and-butter pudding consumption which led us into the grave error of giving up the Empire.

I'm not by any means an insular eater, you understand.
I can eat Coq au Vin till it's Coq au Vanquished. And I
wish I had a pfennig for every apfel I have struddelled.
My teeth have travelled the world. But never on
Sundays. Sunday is silent and shady. Made for snoozing and long
safaris through the Sunday papers. For martyred dog walking
and home in time to lead the singing in Hymns of Praise on the tele.
It is not the time for Shepherd's Pie.


Tuesday is irrevocably linked to Sunday. In well regulated
working class homes it was always rissoles on Tuesday, made
from the left overs of the joint, memorable chiefly as the
consort of the mushy pea. What Romeo was to Juliet, Eloise to
Abelard, port to stilton, egg to bacon the rissole is to the
mushy pea.
A culinary consort.
In fairness nothing exceeds the mushy pea in affability. A deux or in a menage a trois with fish and chips it is the ultimate gastronomic gladhander.A Tuesday
treat even on days when the joint had all been eaten by
visiting uncles.
How wise are the Maoris who say " Eat Up Guests May Arrive."
On such Tuesdays we had a sheet of bacon ribs, sinews stiffened by mushy peas and just a hint of brussel sprout.
Apart from champagne and brown bread,only the mushy pea was
completely at home with the kipper., another Tuesday favourite.

I am never entirely sure why Wednesday should be the best
day for eating Chinese food.
But it is.
I suspect, because there is nothing quite so celebratory as Chinese
food. It is the only cuisine at which wine is not missed and thus a consolation to teetotallers. To those unhappy few, it is not the wine cup that cheers, but the chopstick.
Only the chip butty shares Chinese gastronomic principles.
Soft bread,cold butter,crisp chip batter and the melting
inner heat of the potato, chime precisely with the principles
of hot and cold, hard and soft at which the classic Chinese
chefs aimed.

It may be all in a name,of course.
Bubble and Squeak and Toad in the Hole may be delicious;
but they lose something in the telling against
Lucky Smiling Ball,batter baked to produce a wide smile
and Autumn Mooncake, which is an oriental Scotch egg

God's Little Acre

Climate warning that our lovely planet is about to become a long beach and a deep sea.? Shouldn’t take Him long to sort that out. It only took Him a month to make a wilderness of a garden I once had in Wales
When I lived there, we worked the garden together and in those days it burgeoned with beans, peas proliferated, onions peeped anxiously out of the soil in case there were pigeons about and nascent apples promised a succulent autumn.
Now He has got it on His own and, no disrespect but what a mess.
Bindweed and nettles, docks and dandelions. Long grappling bramble hands pluck at your coat sleeves and valerian leers from every crevice. It is a jungle where cats get mugged by robins
That's the trouble with God. Too softhearted. He can never refuse a bed to a weed and He is a stranger to Weedol.
In a way I am glad. It augurs well for the future of the planet. If God, a good friend but a lousy gardener, can do that to a garden in Wales; removing all trace of the Industrial Revolution is going to be child's play for Him.
A hundred years to Him is no more than a lazy afternoon, an eye blink in the life of a planet. So where I can see how environmentalists have got as much right as I have to make a few bob, I don't think they need worry us all that much.
When we finally blow ourselves up over the next week or so, I expect He will just heave a Heavenly Sigh, scatter a few pocketfuls of seed and wait to see what comes up.
My own journey through time has reached that stage where you start getting your bags together because you sense it is nearly your stop, so I do realise I can be accused of waving cheerfully through the back window of a departing charabanc.
But I think we can all take heart from the fact the salmon is back in the Thames and you cannot see my beetroot in Wales for chickweed.
You have to give God His due.He is a grafter.
Look how he covered the Sumerian, the Greek and the Roman civilisations with sand and wild thyme; World War Two had scarcely ended before he was scattering purple loose strife all over the bomb sites.
About that time I discovered the books of a lady naturalist called Frances Pitt and as a result I decided I wanted to spend the whole of my life in the countryside.
One story she told I remember still. There was a plague of voles in Essex and they were eating everything in sight. No one could think of any way to catch them when suddenly a flock of owls appeared from nowhere.
A Flock.
When did you last see a flock of owls? But they arrived and ate all the voles.
Do you know I derive more comfort from that than I do from the whole of Hymns Ancient and Modern.

Fly Away, Peter.....

My much loved vicar is being buried to-day on Anglesey
Peter Gledhill.
He was a lovely man, son of a judge; a former colonial administrator he took Holy Orders after his mother died. It had been his ambition for some years, but he didn't want to upset her because she was an atheist. Once told me he rather looked down on his sister because she hadn't been to public school. He was at Rugby with my wife Celia's cousin who said Peter had been so bright at school he had drained the masters of all their knowledge by the time he was sixteen. Went on to become a formidable classicist. Died on the lavatory last week, and as he went I am sure he recalled with satisfaction that so did the Emperor Augustus. And for that matter Catherine the Great.
If he sounds formidable, he wasn't. Completely lovable. Became in his old age fervently Welsh. The trouble was he spoke Welsh with a pronounced public school accent and none of his parishioners understood a word he said. We went on a Mothers Union outing with him. Whenever he made an announcement Celia had to translate his Welsh into the Welsh the mothers spoke. We were privileged to see on that occasion a little behavioural lapse which made him famous.
In the middle of his sermon a thought obviously struck him which required his attention. He suddenly went silent whilst he pursued it and the congregation who knew him, waited placidly for his return. He often did that, they told us with quiet pride.
At our convivial dinner parties another friend the painter Sir Kyffin Williams and me would deliberately say outrageous things to provoke a response. The first to do so, won.
Peter would look at us with surprise, close his eyes and as often as not pat this head, which resembled one of those statues on Easter Island. After an interval he would open his eyes and say with considerable gravity “ I cannot quite agree with that”
Peter played the triangle in the Menai Bridge Silver Band with an absorption which was palpable. It was agony to watch him, so fierce was his concentration as he awaited his moment to "ping"
Like me he was an unwilling exile from Anglesey. He had come back from his new home in Southampton for a holiday on the island when he died.
When she rang to tell us about it his wife Bridget said " I think he did it on purpose."
The silver band will be in attendance to-day; the funeral director was a member of the Welsh poetry group to which Peter belonged. So he will be amongst friends.
I always thought it was typical of him that his daughter Ruth should combine the jobs on The Times of Religious and Ballroom dancing correspondent.
We were very close friends and in all the time I knew him he never once mentioned religion.

Asleep in the orchestra stalls

The ever open purse of the National Lottery gapes at the prospect of men and women in short trousers running round and round. Celebrating in a faux Olympic Games, the coming together of a world that is a bomb blast away from World War Three., A celebration of unity and the brotherhood of man when a major item on the price list is a defence against international terrorists.

The rot set in with opera houses.,. Fifty million for Covent Garden, as much
again for the biggest greenhouse in the world in Cardiff.
Wasted on me. For years Opera acted on me like musical mogadon. I have
slept in most of the great opera houses in Europe.
Paris, Vienna,London.........
In Rome,during the overture, which is still a course and distance record. Italians surrounding us were aghast.
"Don't worry," said my wife bitterly, "he will waken the moment the bar opens. He has never missed an interval."
Sadly, since she dashed the glass all but permanently from my lips, I have found it almost impossible to get to sleep in the theatre. I even stay awake in Ibsen, though not, Thank God, in Becket.
My first experience of opera was a Carl Rosa fifties' production of Aida. A story of war,you may recall between Egypt and Ethiopia and the only occasion in military history when the Egyptian army won a battle.

By the fifties Carl Rosa was in decline. More your Carl Sinka. The Egyptian army in the production was down to platoon strength; the tomb in which hero and heroine are immured collapsed under the weight of a soprano. The company's scenery made the cardboard walls of the much lamented Prisoner of Cell Block 'H', granite-like in comparison.
In the Flying Dutchman the eponymous tenor was instantly grounded when the flies fell on him. So pinched were the productions that in La Boheme it was the audience's imagination and not Mimi's tiny hand that was frozen.

It is not that I haven’t tried. And to some measure, which I ascribe entirely to forced near tee-totalism I have succeeded. In Birmingham I saw my third production of "Aida" - the second in Bielefeld was memorable mostly for a tomb the size, and indeed the thickness, of a golf umbrella.
This third production was in the Sports Arena, which holds fourteen thousand people and is about the size of of a small village.
Massive cast, including an army, which had it been available to the Egyptians in the Six Day War would have got them a result, and a River Nile in which I swear I saw trout.
I was converted.
I do not claim I will ever become as attached to opera as my late Uncle Tommy, a road digger in Edinburgh who discovered grand opera late in life when my father played him a recording of Bjorling singing "None Shall Sleep", at which he could give Pavarotti three blacks.
Uncle Tommy blew his life savings, amassed over the previous week because he was sadly improvident, on a radiogram and all the arias he could cram into a carrier bag.
I still don't see opera needs ever larger home for its productions. But then in my Carl Rosa days productions were built to fit theatres: now it is the other way round.

ends

Join me in Headlong Hall

My favourite place in the world is the inside of my own head and the older I get the more time I spend there. It is, above all, the one place in the world where you cannot be got at; the ultimate freedom. The room in which you have chosen all the furniture, the pictures and the books. Shut your eyes, kick off your body’s boots and you can go wherever you like, do whatever -literally - you have a mind to do.
There is even a little workshop at the back where you can rebuild conversations, including the things you would have said, if only you had thought about it at the time.

I had a friend, Kenny the Creature who abandoned his surname as unnecessary baggage and who came to the Isle of Angelsey every year in his horse drawn caravan. He used to insist it wasn’t his home but just his shelter. He told me once that his home was in his head and the idea so chimed with my own thoughts that I appropriated it.

Of course you have to spend a great deal of your time keeping it tidy, throwing out all those useless sideboards of bulky information, the dusty filing cabinets of facts we acquire and keep in the belief that one day they will prove useful. They never do.

It helps if, like me, you have not had a formal education. I am blissfully ignorant of the whereabouts of India, but since I have never had occasion to look for it I cannot see that it matters.

Anything that has a place in my head I have fuddled out for myself, in second-hand bookshops mostly and just window gazing my way round Europe. As I say,I was educated by paper-back book. I am a sort of M.A. (Penguin)

There are leather bound volumes there too, albums of memories I have not looked at for years. But I keep nothing that is not either useful or pleasureable.The mind is the perfect librarian. Ask it for anything and you have barely settled at your reading desk before it has blown the dust off a memory and set it before you, open at just the page you need.

I have won Grand Nationals up there behind the eyebrows, fought tribesmen, ridden with the Wild Bunch, served with the cavalry and rescued distressed damsels by the bushel

I have a collection of novel plots that would stock a library. Every painting I have ever loved; every piece of sculpture I have ever owned or touched in wonder has its place in the gallery under my thatch. My ears, my nose and my eyes are indefatigable collectors. Forever on the look-out for the music, the scents and the objects of art they think I will enjoy.

I can flood my space with Beethoven’s Ninth or turn down the lamps to listen to the best of jazz played just for me by Miles Davis, Count Basey or Duke Ellington, those matchless aristocrats. I can instantly command the scents of gardens after spring rain; the taste of asparagus. The soft reassurance of burgundy, the crisp joy of Anjou. Mine is the most extensive cellar with cases of the ‘24 and ‘45 ports I tasted in youth.
I can make myself instantly thirsty and quench my thirst with the Draught Bass the brewery used to make before the market men took over.

I can talk to who I please, raise the dead if I wish. My friend, Tom Firbank is still alive there and Ken Williams and Alexander Cordell. My bloodhounds Amy and Minnie Kip my lurcher. Jorrocks my bulldog and the collie Mitzi who was my surrogate sister in childhood are comfortably kenneled there.

All the world sees of me is a belly like a spinnaker, the whiskers and a nose quietly erupting like a volcano with nostrils. Up there behind the forehead, a different creature stalks. Considerably taller and much thinner. He never spills soup on his ties. A fearless horseman always up with hounds, hands of steel and a remarkable seat. Walks like a cat and pierces with a glance. Wears - the ultimate bliss - a curly rimmed brown bowler of a stamp and style that have long been banished from the streets outside. Never seen without his monocle and gold topped malacca cane.
Now there is a chap. Made his bones with the Mafia; got Sam Spade out of many a hole and fought at the side of Glyndwr. Hotspur, the bravest soldier in history is a boon companion. Hell of a gardener between wars; his roses are the wonder of the western world. No-one leans over HIS wall to tell him they have bigger onions in their garden and has he tried mixing sugar with the water he gives them.

Quite commodious too is Headhigh Hall, with two windows in the main reception area. Rather special windows I can swivel in any direction. I can choose what I look at so the prospect always pleases. Landscape, mountainscape or seascape
I have merely to register the thought and the whole edifice turns in the direction I wish.

But the nicest thing about such a home is that there is no waiting list for a tenancy. Everyone in the world has their own key. Just climb the neck and there you are.

End

Writing a book is easy

Broadly speaking, writing a book is easy. Once you have the first sentence you only have to think of six thousand more and the thing is accomplished.
Don’t have to be short. Proust opened his Cities of the Plain with one that used up 958 words. They should grip the attention. Like the opening of George Orwell’s 1984… “It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
The first sentence is the tricky one but it can be managed by a nine year old. That was the age of Daisy Ashford, the J.M. Barrie protégée, when she began her best seller The Young Visitors. - “Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42.”
Doesn’t have to be clever. Virgil rested content after he began his Aeneid – “Arms and the man I sing”.
You can steal of course. Snoopy of Peanuts stole his introduction, “It was a dark and stormy night,” from Bulwer Lytton, the Victorian author whose introductions were windy too:
It was a dark and stormy night, the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals when it was checked by a violent gust of wind (for it is in London that our scene lies) rattling along the housetops and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness…
I’ll bet Mrs Lytton had to have a reading of that the second it dripped from the quill.
The easiest of all is to write a book of other people’s introductions. Such as the one I found recently which promised much.
Forget “Last night I dreamed I was back in Manderley.”
An American academic, Professor Scott Rice, holds a competition every year for the worst introduction his students can conceive. The published collection is awe inspiring.
I liked best the 1983 winner: The camel died suddenly on the third day, and Helen fretted sulkily and buffing her already impeccable nails - not for the first time since the holiday began - pondered snidely if this would dissolve into a vignette of minor inconvenience like all the other holidays with Basil.
In 1984… The lovely woman child Kaa was mercilessly chained to the cruel post of the warrior chief Beast, with his barbarous tribe now stacking wood at her nubile feet, when the strong clear voice of the poetic and heroic Handsome roared, ‘Flick your bic. Crisp that chick and you will feel my steel through your last meal.’
I feel there lurks the next Arnold Schwarzenegger epic.
But my own favourite appeared in the historical romance section: As she fell face down in the black muck of the mud wrestling pit, her sweaty, three hundred pound opponent muttering curses in Latin, Sister Marie thought, ‘There is no doubt about it. The Pope has betrayed us.’
Contemporary romance: During an exuberant rainfall a languid bottle of salad dressing sat passively on a Formica counter top as her lips crushed satisfactorily against the velour upper railing of his moustache.
Even steamier… As she writhed and moaned ‘No,no,no’ he was writhing too and moaning ‘Yeth, yeth, yeth.’
Even steamier than that: Casting an eye over his shoulder he threw her bodily on the bed, ripping her clothes off with one hand, fumbling with the other at his jammed zip, their panting breaths coming as one impassioned sibilance; their ardour dampened only by her spiked heel puncturing the water bed and their bodies cascading round the room immersed in 200 gallons of water.
Biography: Let me tell you how luck, hard work and the love of a good woman brought Roc Sledge from obscurity to the job of chief salesperson in Peoria’s third largest shoe store.
Detective novel: There are things a good detective can feel in his bones and Dillon Shane knew that Josephine Kimberley Collingworth did not drown in her sleep on New Years Eve.
Drama: Heatheton stood menacingly at the very edge of the dark rampart, his formidable apelike figure starkly outlined against the nasty void by a sudden crack of lightning and amid the horrid din of growing thunder and precipitous downpour, shouted up at Emily who hung limply in the belfry, her head almost severed by the hangman’s noose: ‘I say woman, does this mean supper will be late again?’
So that is how it is done. Any questions? No? Well off you go...
Only six thousand more, and riches await.