Ernest Naish was 88 when he gave up sheep farming. He could still travel between his three farms at Cwm Pennant, Trawsfynydd and Anglesey but he was too tired to work when he arrived.
When he joined the pre-war Navy he was a dagger man, the fast track naval elite. He dismissed it.
“My only distinction is I hold the naval record for going on courses. Ten years. Alas, the day I joined my first ship I went for my typhoid inoculation and was jabbed with a dirty needle. I became seriously ill.”
Ashore, he commanded a trials party which inspected submarines on maiden voyages. He was about to board one when he was taken ill again. The submarine was HMS Thetis which sank in the Irish Sea on its first trial.
“My successor is buried in Holyhead. A very painful thought that is with me all the time.”
Invalided out, Naish bought an Anglesey sheep farm and weaving mill, though he knew nothing about either trade. “I just asked my neighbour what to do next.” Good neighbours, obviously. He became an international authority on sheep, and when he found his property included a disused mill, he restored it and wove tweed of such beauty it was taken up by fashion houses in London and Paris. The war intervened. When he came back, the tweed market had been wiped out by an 80 per cent purchase tax.
Fortunately he found a part-time job to boost his farm income. He set up and ran the Ty Croes Guided Missiles Station at RAF Valley, commanding 15 jet fighters and a staff of a hundred. In his spare time.
He remembered it was great fun: “I would do the morning milking; then fly down to the Air Show at Farnborough, say. Then fly back in time for the evening milking.“
The Air Ministry asked him to go to Woomara in Australia to report on a new pilotless plane. He barely had time to buy his second farm from a small advert in the Guardian. ”Five hundred-acre farm on Cwm Pennant, with cottages and fine Victorian villa, built by wealthy father of quarry owner, £4,500.“
He only had time to look at it from the road. He bought it the same day.
The bard asks: “Oh Lord, why did you make Cwm Pennant so lovely and the life of a shepherd so short?” Naish made a liar out the bard but agreed with the sentiment: “I am part of this farm, just like the pigs and the sheep. This is the worst land in the Cwm, a foot of peat on rock. But it is a lovely place to live. It is a hard place to make a living but my heart is here. In forty years I have only spent four nights away. That is why I have a hobby that keeps me at home.”
The hobby was painting. He wouldn't sell his paintings or exhibit them either. He did once and regretted it ever after.
“My arm was twisted to take part in this touring exhibition sponsored by the Countryside Commission. I put four or five in. They were valued at £500 a piece and I thought, that’s fine, they are safe, no one will pay that. Blow me if I didn’t sell two. I made a resolution never to do a silly thing like that again. I am a non-profit-making water-colourist because, frankly, I don’t need the money. I paint purely for my own pleasure. I get an idea by walking round the farm and looking at things; then I come back and ruin a lot of old envelopes sketching on them. I cannot start painting until the picture is complete in my head. I start in one corner and work across the paper. I don’t know any of the rules. Never had a lesson. Don’t know why I paint and why I paint such big pictures. It is very exacting. It takes hours and hours. My eyes and my limbs are going so I can only manage twenty minutes at a time.“
There isn’t space to tell how he designed a water-driven Aga in which an electric heater was powered from a generator he built which was fed from his stream. Nor about the machine he designed and built which extracted heat from cold air. As he said, “Nothing really. Just reverse the principle of the fridge.”
Just an ordinary bloke............and I am the Queen of Roumania.
ON THE CULTIVATION OF WEEDS
I am not an obsessive gardener. When I lived at Tattenhall on the Welsh border I had to remonstrate with an enthusiastic neighbour whose flower seeds blew over the fence and choked my weeds. At a subsequent flat on the Rows in Watergate Street, Chester, the single window box was tended by a firm of jobbing gardeners which was also responsible for the hyacinth bowl. So there is no need to warn me that lawn mowing brings on heart attacks. More active gardeners may wish to know that it is the first cut of the season that is the unkindest cut of all and does the damage. Doctors call it lawnmower angina and I can take a hint. When my doctor said I was so far overweight the slightest exertion could kill me, I acted at once. I gave up exertion. It is the same with the first lawn mowing of the season. That is the one I gave up. In fact I gave it up right through to November. At our property on the Isle of Anglesey I was proud of my traditional Cottage Garden. You would love it. Right in the middle of my land I grew this traditional cottage; the rest was nature, red in tooth and claw. I am sure Conan Doyle had my bindweed in mind when he wrote “The Speckled Band". I wouldn't go out after dark in case it had me by the throat and dragged me off to its lair in the ivy which was gradually dismembering the garden wall. The dog wouldn't go near the place. One summer she was so covered in burrs she was four times propositioned by kerb-crawling hedgehogs. And the cat was mugged by a robin. I had convolvuli that could bring down a running rabbit in their own length and dandelions that were bred from real lions. When you pulled my nettles they pulled back. Soil? I had nettle-strengthened soil so vitamin choked you could plant a seedling in the garden and by the time you reached the back door it was six foot tall and waving at you. Tendrils from my peas plucked passing pigeons out of the sky. The real trouble with gardening is that whatever you grow you always have two hundred over. Especially lettuce. Breed like triffids and there is no sight in nature more terrifying than a lettuce gone to seed. Mind you, I love gardens. Other people's, where someone else does the weeding and you can stretch out on a lawn without that nagging worry that it is growing so fast you are levitating. If you don't rush in for the mower you are going to have an angry giant fee-fo-fumming at you. Also you don't have to buy packets of seed which cost you more than the Indians were paid for Long Island. Can you understand it? Every year you weed away annuals that have sown themselves. Every marigold has enough seeds on its stem for the deposit on a house. Yet when you buy a packet the only variety you get is King's Ransom - because that is what it cost. And now we have something else to worry about. Killer tomatoes from outer space. Did you read where American schoolchildren projected 12.5 million tomato seeds into space? After six years they came back and no sooner had they been planted in schools across America than NASA warned that their exposure to cosmic radiation meant they could be toxic. All part of an experiment, I read, to find the effect of space exposure on living tissue. Now we know. Lethal tomato butties. On top of which I do not understand why grown men want to float around on their backs doing unmentionable things into plastic bags just to get to the Moon. I would almost rather go to the Costa Brava.
BOOK REVIEW
When I was a reporter for a BBC Wales magazine programme, the star of the network was a merry imp of a man called Allan Barham. If there was a forest fire, Barham was in the middle of it, interviewing firemen. An angry crowd at a strike meeting? Look for him under the banner, fearlessly waving his microphone at the most militant striker.
I could forgive him being braver than I am. What I could never forgive was his dexterity with a tape recorder. He was to the BBC issue Uhers what Kennedy is to the violin and Blumenthal of the Fat Duck Hotel is to whisky-flavoured ice cream.
The worst part of being a radio reporter was editing the magnetic tapes on which programmes were recorded. It was a fiddly business, best carried out in a studio with all the editing equipment the BBC could muster. It involved cutting out superfluous words, inserting linking narrative and generally making a broadcastable item the precise length needed for the programme.
The BBC ran a course where trainees were taught how to cut the “ums” out of interviewees’ responses, Barham needed no training in cutting out a section of tape, spooling on and then putting it back in logical sequence. But he did it on his tape recorder in his car, with clothes pegs to hold the tapes he had cut until he needed them. He took the tape from the play back head, kept his eye on the exact spot and cut it with a razor blade.
Comparatively poorly paid, he was nevertheless the uber loyal servant who lived and breathed BBC Radio Wales. For 32 years he covered an area from Chester westwards to Holyhead, down to Aberystwyth, then east to the English border. With a heavy tape machine on his shoulder, he climbed mountains and burrowed underground over an area of many thousand square miles. He interviewed heroes and villains, adventurers and the barking mad. He seemed to know everyone in Wales.
His reward? When we got a new nationalist editor, he was, like me, made redundant, because he wasn’t Welsh enough. He wrote to the Controller of BBC Wales to ask if there were odd spots in any programmes he could fill. Five years later he is still waiting for a reply.
Amazingly, he doesn’t bear grudges.
He says: “A letter saying ‘Goodbye’ would be nice and a party would have been even better. So to all Heads of Departments I say this……….if you didn’t appreciate my thirty two years completely loyal and unbroken service, it’s a pity, and if you didn’t enjoy my career as much as I did, then never mind - I enjoyed it and that’s all that matters.”
The good news is that he has written those biting words in a book “Radio Reporter”, published by Toby Books (enquiries@tobybooks.co uk or www.tobybooks.co.uk) at £10.99, in which he has reprised the best of his stories. It is a nice fat book, an hilarious, tender account of sometimes highly improbable people doing strange and wonderful things. It should be required reading on all Media Studies courses and at everyone’s bedside. Especially those bedsides which are occupied by what passes for interviewers in today’s radio.
I was interviewed about my recent book for Radio Manchester. The only question I was asked was “Have you met any famous people?”
Pretty well all the famous people I have met have been boring in the extreme. Barham knew more than most how far from ordinary, ordinary people are.
end
Saturday, 18 October 2008
Thursday, 9 October 2008
One per cent is all it took.......................
For 99 per cent of the world’s history, I read, man did not exist. It is a tribute to his energy that he has only needed one per cent to ruin it.
For all that time before his arrival, neither welcome nor opportune, the world had been a tropical paradise in which magnificent animals roamed freely without a single war. They ate each other, it is true. But only when they were hungry.
When it first swung out of the trees, man was timid. Well, it was the smallest and the least equipped to defend itself. Naturally it became another tasty morsel in a vast delicatessen. So its first priority was to duck and dive.
Like the other animals, it ranged the tropical earth looking for nuts and fruits and the occasional animal which was either smaller or less equipped to duck and dive. Then some fool invented territory and an even bigger fool invented religion to explain the natural phenomena which puzzled and frightened them. Warfare was an inevitable consequence. We became the only species on the planet which brought mass production to killing perfect strangers.
Since then the evolutionary escalator has been programmed ever downwards. We reached the basement in the 18th century, in what we had the nerve to call the Age of Enlightenment, which gave us among other horrors the Industrial Revolution.
True, we invented music and painting and told ourselves stories to pass the time. We learned how to create beautiful buildings and pleasing artefacts; but spent most of our time destroying them by ever more sophisticated methods. Science has discovered many wonders, most of which produce ever more efficient ways of destroying ourselves. Medicine has learned to keep us alive long after our sell-by dates; yet has not learned how to care humanely for the old. It has banished many of the diseases which were Nature’s way of maintaining a healthy balance.
It is one hell of a price to pay for daytime TV
*************************************************************
My chum Revel Barker, a former Mirror Group Managing Editor, shares my view on climate warming. He writes:
An Intuit Chief Aqqaluk Lynge is particularly worried about "an authoritative report by 250 scientists" that the climate in his region would change between 4C and 7C over the next 100 years - "which would be twice the global average."
Which is true, provided that the global average increase over the next 100 years is 2C to 3.5C.
On the other hand, Mr Lynge [; for all I know it might be Mr Aqqaluk] could listen to 250 different scientists who say the climate isn't noticeably changing at all, or 250 others who say that if there are any changes they will not be caused by mankind, or - far more comforting for him, presumably - the thousands of scientists who warned, authoritatively, in the 1970s that we would have another Ice Age by 2020.
As far as we can tell, the earth's temperature increased during the last 100 years by an average of slightly less than 0.7 of one degree centigrade. In other words, by an amount smaller than could be measured on most thermometers.
That was a century that saw the introduction and popularisation of the motor car, the aircraft, the jet engine, world-wide air travel, two highly mechanised world wars, the explosion of the atom bomb (and several test explosions of it), the bombing and deforestation of Viet Nam, space travel, and more coal dug and burnt, and more industry pumping out smoke, than ever before or since.
This century has cleaner air than ever before, and a slow-down on deforestation, but according to the warm-mongers things are gonna get worse, far worse.
If Inuits are taught Eskimo history, they will know that their country is colder today than it was just over 1,000 years ago when it was discovered by Erik the Red and his Viking chums.
They called the place
I have no idea what their impact might have been on the local environment, a bit of ploughing perhaps, the firing of wooden missiles into the air during hunting, but 500 years later came the "Little Ice Age", which made the place what it is today: covered in ice. The region's polar bears - presumably hitherto gathered in the frozen wastes around the north pole like May dancers in an English country village - must have thought that Christmas had come early. And then that it had come for good.
Wake up and smell the melting blubber, Aqqaluk. The climate changes. It always has. That's what it does.
What serious scientists have found is that the main land mass at the south pole (the Antarctic) is actually getting colder, while at the north pole the western Arctic is - yes - getting warmer, but the eastern Arctic is getting colder. Mother Nature (don't you find?) seems often to find a way of levelling things out, somehow.
In
When I asked whether there was, in fact, any actual evidence that the number of polar bears was decreasing, or that their continued existence was under any threat, the Greenpeace representative replied (and readers who are being scared out of their wits by the doomsayers might like to consider this): "Maybe not. We don't actually know. But the classification is a temporary measure, while we try to find out the facts."
Well, that's one way of approaching science - declare a situation as true and scary, and then set about checking it out.
The documentary "evidence" to support this claim appears to be one photograph of one polar bear on one tiny ice flow. Other pictures show wiser bears moving off small pieces of ice onto more solid ground. That, presumably, is how the species continues to survive.
The Greenpeace argument also claims to be supported by "NASA findings that the polar bear is at risk."
Exactly why NASA (that's the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - the people who send people to the moon, vehicles to Mars, and run the space shuttle) should be interested in polar bears is a different matter for concern, but Greenpeace says that it (NASA) had announced "measurements showing Arctic sea ice is hitting major lows... This is more bad news on the impacts of global warming effects and bad news for the polar bear."
Only the first of those two statements was actually from NASA. And where did the spacemen get their data about Arctic ice? Oh... From Greenpeace-US.
American travel agents who specialise in Arctic ventures are meanwhile advertising excursions on the basis that it is nowadays easier than ever to guarantee polar bear sightings - "possibly" (being no more scientific than that) because of an increased population.
So perhaps we should be more concerned about the finders, than about the findings.
Meanwhile, if the polar bears (presumably currently enjoying the most immense acreage ever known to their species) are worried about survival, they'll need to move around a bit, something that's not normally beyond the wit of even the dumbest animals. Similarly, if Inuits are worried about their property falling into the sea, they'll have to learn not to build so close to the edge.
If they can't survive a small temperature change, well, maybe they were not intended to survive at all. Or maybe they were intended and expected to shift camp, as Erik the Red did, when he fetched up in the place around 982... having fled
###
Thought for Today
From the splendidly named Sir Laming Worthington-Evans, secretary of state for war nearly a century ago: "If the Arab population realised that the peaceful control of Mesopotamia ultimately depends on our intention of bombing women and children, I'm very doubtful if we shall gain that acquiescence of the fathers and husbands of Mesopotamia to which the Secretary of State for the Colonies looks forward." He was referring to
Saturday, 4 October 2008
Blogger Me ?
Why does the Blog get such a bad press? It is a genre which goes back to the very beginnings of the essay as invented by Montaigne. He chose to write about the only subject of which he was the greatest expert, Himself. Which pretty well defines the Blog.
Writing one is a great source of pleasure. The first time in my life I have defied Dr Johnson who claimed that no-one but a blockhead writes, except for money. If you write for money you are limited by what your paymaster wants to read. I wrote a vituperative column on the death of Princess Di when a fever of hypocrisy gripped the world.
The page one splash of the National Enquirer online that morning was all about the secret love life of the randy Princess. By lunchtime it had changed to some slush about the Queen of Hearts and how she was mourned by the world.
The Editor of the Liverpool Daily Post refused to publish my observations.
I get great pleasure from reading the blogs of other people. I particularly enjoy the blog of an “old” chum, Daily Express reporter Mary Duffy(marydloughrea.blogspot.com.). I also enjoy Mary Beard; Revel Barker’s weekly trip into newspaper nostalgia (Gentleman Ranters); Cathy Buckle on the horrors of life in Zimbabwe; the intermittent despatches from a girl in Baghdad; Azelea, a delightful American girl whose Blog title is a quotation from Cicero “To Each His Own is Beautiful”. This week she is worried that she is going to die. I commend to her my good friend Geoff Mather’s Perspective Blog.
Mather, who has an exotic acquaintance we would all covet, was Features Editor of the Daily Express in the days when it was still a newspaper. He is both entertaining and erudite. A thoughtful Buddhist, he writes this week of the white light which we are supposed to see at the moment of death. It is a well known Buddhist concept and is the pure mind of Enlightenment. He also quotes the Tibetan Book of the Dead which says we have 49 days before we are reborn.
I received news this week which suggests, in Noel Coward’s words, that “Time’s winged chariot is beginning to goose me”. I have to say that 49 days isn’t very long for R and R before I have to go through the whole tiring business of another life. Possibly on the pavement of some crowded Indian city.
I have lived a life of vast entertainment, enjoyed some success and experienced moments of great happiness. I would not go quite so far as Gilbert Harding who confessed in a television interview that he would be glad when the future is over.
However, I am living in a world where I increasingly feel a stranger. This week on You Tube I watched great comics like Rob Wilton and mourned their surly successors whose idea of fun is to be rude about everyone upon whom they can lay their scrofulous tongues I also heard on You Tube an interview from Radio Birmingham so inept it made me ashamed of my once and only trade.
I have watched the laughter leave the face of once Merry England. Frankly, 49 days is not enough. Not perhaps oblivion but certainly a good lie in.
COOKERY CORNER
A traveller to strike envy into the heart of Marco Polo, the time approaches for the Head Ferret’s Great Expedition. In December she redistributes the nation’s wealth taking costly gifts round her family like some transvestite Magus. In her absence Plas Skidmore goes on a war footing. Plates, nil; spoons, one. Oxtails, two. Eaten from the pan. Despite Christmas, December is my favourite month, gastro-wise.
There was for a while, you may recall, a ban on oxtails but my tradition was not interrupted. Black market connections were established by my policeman father when he joined the wartime crime squad designed to eradicate it. Within weeks, our house was so full of groceries I thought I was the son of a uniformed grocer. Since then I have established my own naughty network and contraband tails continued to wag.
Should you be minded to try a carnivore’s Ambrosia, here is the definitive recipe for a ragout. Two oxtails are required. Remember second helpings.
First make five gallons of cider. True, a litre is sufficient for the ragout but, in matters of drink, the wise err on the safe side.
My ancestor Viscount Scudamore brought the first red streak apple to Herefordshire from his Paris Embassy, prompting the poetic tribute in Evelyn’s Pomona: “Of no regard till Skydmore’s courtly hand, taught it its savage nature to subdue.” I use cider in his honour. He also bred the first Hereford cattle; designed by heaven to provide tails that swish with a cry of joy as they leap into the frying pan.
Water can be used; but never by me, except for pre-cooking, soaking and boiling. If water IS used, adding two tablespoonfuls of red wine is essential.
After boiling and draining, put oxtail pieces into a large paper bag with seasoned flour. Shake and transfer to bacon-scattered pan for flash frying in butter. Remove. Replace with onion stuck with cloves, bouquet garni, carrots, seasoning. Flash fry. Mix tomato juice, beef stock, plump garlic and cider with meat and veg. Casserole gently for four hours. Cool. Skim fat.
Add carrots, turnips, leeks, potatoes and - a personal preference - haricot beans. Cook for three quarters of an hour.
Now comes the magic bit. Thirty minutes before serving, add a tablespoon of raisins which have been swollen and two dessert spoons of pine kernels. Just before serving, correct seasoning and sprinkle with bitter chocolate. Attack with spoon. Trust me. It gets better every day.
No Comment!
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. "—Thomas Jefferson, 1802
Writing one is a great source of pleasure. The first time in my life I have defied Dr Johnson who claimed that no-one but a blockhead writes, except for money. If you write for money you are limited by what your paymaster wants to read. I wrote a vituperative column on the death of Princess Di when a fever of hypocrisy gripped the world.
The page one splash of the National Enquirer online that morning was all about the secret love life of the randy Princess. By lunchtime it had changed to some slush about the Queen of Hearts and how she was mourned by the world.
The Editor of the Liverpool Daily Post refused to publish my observations.
I get great pleasure from reading the blogs of other people. I particularly enjoy the blog of an “old” chum, Daily Express reporter Mary Duffy(marydloughrea.blogspot.com.). I also enjoy Mary Beard; Revel Barker’s weekly trip into newspaper nostalgia (Gentleman Ranters); Cathy Buckle on the horrors of life in Zimbabwe; the intermittent despatches from a girl in Baghdad; Azelea, a delightful American girl whose Blog title is a quotation from Cicero “To Each His Own is Beautiful”. This week she is worried that she is going to die. I commend to her my good friend Geoff Mather’s Perspective Blog.
Mather, who has an exotic acquaintance we would all covet, was Features Editor of the Daily Express in the days when it was still a newspaper. He is both entertaining and erudite. A thoughtful Buddhist, he writes this week of the white light which we are supposed to see at the moment of death. It is a well known Buddhist concept and is the pure mind of Enlightenment. He also quotes the Tibetan Book of the Dead which says we have 49 days before we are reborn.
I received news this week which suggests, in Noel Coward’s words, that “Time’s winged chariot is beginning to goose me”. I have to say that 49 days isn’t very long for R and R before I have to go through the whole tiring business of another life. Possibly on the pavement of some crowded Indian city.
I have lived a life of vast entertainment, enjoyed some success and experienced moments of great happiness. I would not go quite so far as Gilbert Harding who confessed in a television interview that he would be glad when the future is over.
However, I am living in a world where I increasingly feel a stranger. This week on You Tube I watched great comics like Rob Wilton and mourned their surly successors whose idea of fun is to be rude about everyone upon whom they can lay their scrofulous tongues I also heard on You Tube an interview from Radio Birmingham so inept it made me ashamed of my once and only trade.
I have watched the laughter leave the face of once Merry England. Frankly, 49 days is not enough. Not perhaps oblivion but certainly a good lie in.
COOKERY CORNER
A traveller to strike envy into the heart of Marco Polo, the time approaches for the Head Ferret’s Great Expedition. In December she redistributes the nation’s wealth taking costly gifts round her family like some transvestite Magus. In her absence Plas Skidmore goes on a war footing. Plates, nil; spoons, one. Oxtails, two. Eaten from the pan. Despite Christmas, December is my favourite month, gastro-wise.
There was for a while, you may recall, a ban on oxtails but my tradition was not interrupted. Black market connections were established by my policeman father when he joined the wartime crime squad designed to eradicate it. Within weeks, our house was so full of groceries I thought I was the son of a uniformed grocer. Since then I have established my own naughty network and contraband tails continued to wag.
Should you be minded to try a carnivore’s Ambrosia, here is the definitive recipe for a ragout. Two oxtails are required. Remember second helpings.
First make five gallons of cider. True, a litre is sufficient for the ragout but, in matters of drink, the wise err on the safe side.
My ancestor Viscount Scudamore brought the first red streak apple to Herefordshire from his Paris Embassy, prompting the poetic tribute in Evelyn’s Pomona: “Of no regard till Skydmore’s courtly hand, taught it its savage nature to subdue.” I use cider in his honour. He also bred the first Hereford cattle; designed by heaven to provide tails that swish with a cry of joy as they leap into the frying pan.
Water can be used; but never by me, except for pre-cooking, soaking and boiling. If water IS used, adding two tablespoonfuls of red wine is essential.
After boiling and draining, put oxtail pieces into a large paper bag with seasoned flour. Shake and transfer to bacon-scattered pan for flash frying in butter. Remove. Replace with onion stuck with cloves, bouquet garni, carrots, seasoning. Flash fry. Mix tomato juice, beef stock, plump garlic and cider with meat and veg. Casserole gently for four hours. Cool. Skim fat.
Add carrots, turnips, leeks, potatoes and - a personal preference - haricot beans. Cook for three quarters of an hour.
Now comes the magic bit. Thirty minutes before serving, add a tablespoon of raisins which have been swollen and two dessert spoons of pine kernels. Just before serving, correct seasoning and sprinkle with bitter chocolate. Attack with spoon. Trust me. It gets better every day.
No Comment!
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. "—Thomas Jefferson, 1802
Saturday, 27 September 2008
Seeing is Never Believing
.:
" I imagine the earth when I am no more:Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights."
Czeslaw Milosz (He lived in Warsaw during the German occupation, writing for Polish underground publications and translating T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land.")
If you reach eighty and still think anything in this life is important then you haven’t been paying attention. Set aside that everyone on the planet will be dead in a hundred years, the fact remains that the Horsemen will continue to trample us under their horses’ Apocalyptic hooves. There will always be wars and there will always be famines because they are the most efficient forms of birth control. There will always be dramatic life- ending changes of climate because that is the nature of climate. At best we can only tinker with the engine, like clumsy mechanics.
WE are toy makers. We can divert ourselves with art, delude ourselves with politics, make our stay comfortable with invention and manufacture, prolong it with medicine. The engine will run its pre determined course.
The American Indian says that life is a circle; Marcus Aurelius that it is a river and the only reality is that part of the river which lies at our feet. The river that has still to flow and the river that has flowed past do not exist. The same principle is central to Zen, to Buddhism. You can hear it in Chinese poetry of the classical age. It is implicit in the hedonism of “drink, for tomorrow we die“.
Yet we are what we have been and we carry the seeds of what we will become. How many centuries of musicians lived in Mozart? Why does each of us have skills that seem to come naturally?
The Buddhist denies death. Other religions have invented paradise. I prefer The Way
With great age comes the revelation that Government is like horse riding. You are assumed to be in charge so long as the horse behaves but if it bolts you have no other course than to hang on grimly, pretending the horse is under control. Governments need wars. Not only do they cull the surplus males who might be disruptive. Wars bring prosperity and jobs for all.
The realisation dawns that banks are not good with money. From the South Sea Bubble onwards, every century has its money crisis, which commonsense would have avoided. We are witnessing the collapse of banks who have been constantly lecturing us about prudence and punishing us, illegally, if we misbehave. Yet they have lost billions loaning money to banks they knew were investing in lenders demonstrably unable to repay.
I have a chum who is Lloyd George’s grandson. As a child he met all the world leaders and was surprised how ordinary they were. They pose as supermen and we believe this despite the evidence.
Bad decisions by so-called statesmen at Versailles have managed in less than a century to make enemies of the Muslim world, which once looked up to us as men of honour. Over the same period we have witnessed the end of Merry England and its replacement by a grey and unpleasant land.
We have a drunken evening during a visit to Paris by Mrs Thatcher to thank for the Channel Tunnel, which was closed and blazing brightly as I mulled over this rant. A major factor in the binge drinking which defaces our society is the smoking ban. It was based on faulty research but has driven thousands out of the pubs into the supermarkets and the cheaper booze. Its only achievement has been to kill the English Pub, for centuries the heart of our communities.
Privatising our public utilities has seen them disappear into foreign hands. Now our nuclear industry is owned by the French Government. Privatising hospital cleaning resulted in lower standards of cleanliness and near epidemics.
We look to those most puissant Princes, William and Harry, to restore the monarchy. Yet I remember meeting Prince Charles when he was their age and being so impressed with him I almost wrote to the Queen to congratulate her, on the grounds that all mothers like to hear well of their sons.
I look at him now, wrecked by a lifetime of cosseting, and am reminded of the golden youth of Henry VIII and of many another Royal Head swollen by a glass hat.
A TRIBUTE
I was delighted to see that a bronze statue of my old friend, the lifeboat coxswain Dick Evans who won two lifeboat VCs, now stands on the cliffs at Moelfre, on Anglesey, looking out triumphantly at the sea which tried so hard to take his life.
I wish Wales was as generous to its literary giants. Some weeks ago I wrote of Howard Spring, her greatest novelist. Now I turn to Gwyn Thomas.
Gwyn Thomas was not just a novelist. He was a talker. The Master of the Moving Mouth. He raised talking to an art form. The novels he published were, in reality, a series of brilliant conversations he put into the mouths of his fictional characters.
I treasure my recordings of every broadcast Thomas made. I regret I met him only once. At the International Eisteddfod at Llangollen I was confronted by this face like a gnarled fist, glowering under the worst trilby hat ever made. Yet, compared to the sports jacket it surmounted, the hat was a sartorial triumph. The jacket was to clothing what computer instructions are to the English language. It looked as though it had been knitted from a Welsh Assembly Mission Statement.
Midway between trilby and jacket, there was a muscular mouth, which, at the moment of introduction, was manoeuvring like a wrestler for the best of three falls out of a cigarette.
It seemed the cigarette was winning. It leapt nimbly from side to side of the mouth, until the lips did one of those scissor grips so beloved of that great wrestler of my youth, ‘Angel Face’ Joe Batten, and the cigarette slapped its submission.
Triumphant, Gwyn Thomas dimped the defeated cancer stick and began to talk.
I know about talkers. I have listened to Dylan Thomas spouting like a grubby whale in the bar of the King’s Head and Eight Bells in Chelsea. I have heard Nye Bevan and Lady Violet Bonham Carter woo, in their different ways, an audience of miners. I have been enchanted by Wynford Vaughan Thomas. As a child I was steeped in the wit of Oscar Wilde. I have earned my living for half a century in a trade that used to produce talkers with the tongues of blasphemous angels.
Gwyn Thomas was the best. I have never met a man who used words so readily, so cosily, so wittily, so profoundly. Somewhere in heaven, please God, there is a deeply-cushioned rustic bench, with a tray for drinks, where Alcibiades is ignoring Socrates, Boswell shushing Dr Johnson, Haroun el Rashid giving Scheherazade the elbow. They all want to listen to Gwyn Thomas.
Earthbound, we have one consolation. We have his works, which are valuable beyond price. Not just his novels. Novelists are two a penny. Gwyn’s Gift is rarer. You can hear him in every word he writes.
TAIL WAG
Hospital car parking is free in Wales so a friend was puzzled at the Maelor Hospital in Wrexham when he was asked by a car park attendant to take a ticket from a machine and post it on his windscreen.
He said " I thought parking was free"
"It is," he was told. " But you still have to show a ticket"
" I imagine the earth when I am no more:Nothing happens, no loss, it’s still a strange pageant,Women’s dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights."
Czeslaw Milosz (He lived in Warsaw during the German occupation, writing for Polish underground publications and translating T. S. Eliot's "Waste Land.")
If you reach eighty and still think anything in this life is important then you haven’t been paying attention. Set aside that everyone on the planet will be dead in a hundred years, the fact remains that the Horsemen will continue to trample us under their horses’ Apocalyptic hooves. There will always be wars and there will always be famines because they are the most efficient forms of birth control. There will always be dramatic life- ending changes of climate because that is the nature of climate. At best we can only tinker with the engine, like clumsy mechanics.
WE are toy makers. We can divert ourselves with art, delude ourselves with politics, make our stay comfortable with invention and manufacture, prolong it with medicine. The engine will run its pre determined course.
The American Indian says that life is a circle; Marcus Aurelius that it is a river and the only reality is that part of the river which lies at our feet. The river that has still to flow and the river that has flowed past do not exist. The same principle is central to Zen, to Buddhism. You can hear it in Chinese poetry of the classical age. It is implicit in the hedonism of “drink, for tomorrow we die“.
Yet we are what we have been and we carry the seeds of what we will become. How many centuries of musicians lived in Mozart? Why does each of us have skills that seem to come naturally?
The Buddhist denies death. Other religions have invented paradise. I prefer The Way
With great age comes the revelation that Government is like horse riding. You are assumed to be in charge so long as the horse behaves but if it bolts you have no other course than to hang on grimly, pretending the horse is under control. Governments need wars. Not only do they cull the surplus males who might be disruptive. Wars bring prosperity and jobs for all.
The realisation dawns that banks are not good with money. From the South Sea Bubble onwards, every century has its money crisis, which commonsense would have avoided. We are witnessing the collapse of banks who have been constantly lecturing us about prudence and punishing us, illegally, if we misbehave. Yet they have lost billions loaning money to banks they knew were investing in lenders demonstrably unable to repay.
I have a chum who is Lloyd George’s grandson. As a child he met all the world leaders and was surprised how ordinary they were. They pose as supermen and we believe this despite the evidence.
Bad decisions by so-called statesmen at Versailles have managed in less than a century to make enemies of the Muslim world, which once looked up to us as men of honour. Over the same period we have witnessed the end of Merry England and its replacement by a grey and unpleasant land.
We have a drunken evening during a visit to Paris by Mrs Thatcher to thank for the Channel Tunnel, which was closed and blazing brightly as I mulled over this rant. A major factor in the binge drinking which defaces our society is the smoking ban. It was based on faulty research but has driven thousands out of the pubs into the supermarkets and the cheaper booze. Its only achievement has been to kill the English Pub, for centuries the heart of our communities.
Privatising our public utilities has seen them disappear into foreign hands. Now our nuclear industry is owned by the French Government. Privatising hospital cleaning resulted in lower standards of cleanliness and near epidemics.
We look to those most puissant Princes, William and Harry, to restore the monarchy. Yet I remember meeting Prince Charles when he was their age and being so impressed with him I almost wrote to the Queen to congratulate her, on the grounds that all mothers like to hear well of their sons.
I look at him now, wrecked by a lifetime of cosseting, and am reminded of the golden youth of Henry VIII and of many another Royal Head swollen by a glass hat.
A TRIBUTE
I was delighted to see that a bronze statue of my old friend, the lifeboat coxswain Dick Evans who won two lifeboat VCs, now stands on the cliffs at Moelfre, on Anglesey, looking out triumphantly at the sea which tried so hard to take his life.
I wish Wales was as generous to its literary giants. Some weeks ago I wrote of Howard Spring, her greatest novelist. Now I turn to Gwyn Thomas.
Gwyn Thomas was not just a novelist. He was a talker. The Master of the Moving Mouth. He raised talking to an art form. The novels he published were, in reality, a series of brilliant conversations he put into the mouths of his fictional characters.
I treasure my recordings of every broadcast Thomas made. I regret I met him only once. At the International Eisteddfod at Llangollen I was confronted by this face like a gnarled fist, glowering under the worst trilby hat ever made. Yet, compared to the sports jacket it surmounted, the hat was a sartorial triumph. The jacket was to clothing what computer instructions are to the English language. It looked as though it had been knitted from a Welsh Assembly Mission Statement.
Midway between trilby and jacket, there was a muscular mouth, which, at the moment of introduction, was manoeuvring like a wrestler for the best of three falls out of a cigarette.
It seemed the cigarette was winning. It leapt nimbly from side to side of the mouth, until the lips did one of those scissor grips so beloved of that great wrestler of my youth, ‘Angel Face’ Joe Batten, and the cigarette slapped its submission.
Triumphant, Gwyn Thomas dimped the defeated cancer stick and began to talk.
I know about talkers. I have listened to Dylan Thomas spouting like a grubby whale in the bar of the King’s Head and Eight Bells in Chelsea. I have heard Nye Bevan and Lady Violet Bonham Carter woo, in their different ways, an audience of miners. I have been enchanted by Wynford Vaughan Thomas. As a child I was steeped in the wit of Oscar Wilde. I have earned my living for half a century in a trade that used to produce talkers with the tongues of blasphemous angels.
Gwyn Thomas was the best. I have never met a man who used words so readily, so cosily, so wittily, so profoundly. Somewhere in heaven, please God, there is a deeply-cushioned rustic bench, with a tray for drinks, where Alcibiades is ignoring Socrates, Boswell shushing Dr Johnson, Haroun el Rashid giving Scheherazade the elbow. They all want to listen to Gwyn Thomas.
Earthbound, we have one consolation. We have his works, which are valuable beyond price. Not just his novels. Novelists are two a penny. Gwyn’s Gift is rarer. You can hear him in every word he writes.
TAIL WAG
Hospital car parking is free in Wales so a friend was puzzled at the Maelor Hospital in Wrexham when he was asked by a car park attendant to take a ticket from a machine and post it on his windscreen.
He said " I thought parking was free"
"It is," he was told. " But you still have to show a ticket"
Saturday, 20 September 2008
If yer knows of a better 'Ole
Evelyn Waugh founded Friends of the Neutron Bomb when he heard it wiped out people but left buildings and their contents standing. On balance, he thought that a very good thing.
He would have shared my disappointment when the Hadron Collider in the Cern experiment did not, as promised by some, send our planet scuttling down a Black Hole like some White Rabbit in our increasingly Alice in Wonderland times. It would have been ironic if Switzerland, which has assiduously kept out of European wars in order to collect money from both sides, had provided the force that ended it all.
Instead, in Stephen Hawkins’ memorable phrase, the Big Smash was like two mosquitoes colliding.
My understanding of scientific matters is, to say the least, patchy but I thought that the experiment was meant to replicate the Big Bang that created the World.
In which case, how do we know it didn’t?
How do we know that at this moment a parallel world isn’t forming and its inhabitants beginning the long and weary journey to being US?
I hope they do not send out a team of market researchers. I imagine them with Bristol boards and pencils distributed among their eight arms stopping a passer-by and asking him what he is about.
He might be going to one of the few pubs still open after the Government’s draconian smoking ban.
He will explain he is going to a pub
“???????”
“A pub. A building with a wooden divider,” the passer-by will explain. “I stand on one side and a man stands on the other side selling me drink.”
“???????”
“A drink is a liquid. I have to be careful not to drink too much of it because it will make me sick and cause me to do silly things before falling over.”
“You are being punished??????????????????????????”
“No, no. No. It’s a pleasure and it costs me a lot of money.”
“?????????????????????????????”
“Money. Every day I spend eight hours locked in a building staring at a machine and at the end of the week I am given money.”
“??????????????????????????????Which you give to a man who gives you in return a substance which makes you sick and causes you to do silly things until you fall over………………………Is there a Black Hole we can go to, do you know?”
The other day four of the newspapers I read online carried pictures of Victoria Beckham's new hair-do. The Daily Mirror devoted its entire front page - and three more inside - to the "shock pixie cut" and declared that this was "literally the biggest thing to happen to hair since the Moss Fringe of '07". A smaller story disclosed that doctors and most secondary school teachers will no longer be recruited from outside the EU. But there will be exceptions for sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand - and ballet dancers.
Black Hole, here I come*****************************************************
******************* +++++++++++++++ ***********************
For my money there is nothing more frightening at the front door than a builder going, “FFFFFFFFFF”. I am sure you recognise the sound. It is the noise a workman makes when he comes into your house for the first time and sees any bit of work at all that has already been done by another workman. “FFFFFFFFFFFF,” they go. “Who put that in for you? Must have been drunk. That cross-piece there. See. Pulling on the contra-levels of the stays.”
“Could you take it down then?” you ask. And have you noticed how they always repeat what you say. Scornfully.
“Take it down? Take it down? No need. Come down of its own accord before the year’s out.”
I have a friend who is a master plumber. And if there was an Eisteddfod competition for the solo “FFFFFFFF” he’d walk it. Not only does he have a “FFFFFFFF” that is the envy of the Federation of Master Plumbers; he can do it backwards. Straight up. Backwards. I’ve heard him.
“FFFFFFFFFF,” I’ve heard him say, time and again. “I don’t like the look of that universal joint.”
He is a man who only has to be confronted with a universal joint to become instantly racked with doubt.
“Can it be put right?” the more foolhardy would ask.
“FFFFFFFFFF. Put right? You’re joking. You’d have to rebuild the bathroom.”
And, do you know, in forty years of admiring friendship I have never once seen his lips change their conformation.
It’s not only plumbers. Motor mechanics, joiners, plasterers and bricklayers, they all do it. “FFFFFFFFF”. I don’t know why. But “FFFFFFFFFF” they go. And a century of Trades Union solidarity bites the dust. Nothing kindred about trades today. There are those workmen who would rather pour scorn than tea.
He would have shared my disappointment when the Hadron Collider in the Cern experiment did not, as promised by some, send our planet scuttling down a Black Hole like some White Rabbit in our increasingly Alice in Wonderland times. It would have been ironic if Switzerland, which has assiduously kept out of European wars in order to collect money from both sides, had provided the force that ended it all.
Instead, in Stephen Hawkins’ memorable phrase, the Big Smash was like two mosquitoes colliding.
My understanding of scientific matters is, to say the least, patchy but I thought that the experiment was meant to replicate the Big Bang that created the World.
In which case, how do we know it didn’t?
How do we know that at this moment a parallel world isn’t forming and its inhabitants beginning the long and weary journey to being US?
I hope they do not send out a team of market researchers. I imagine them with Bristol boards and pencils distributed among their eight arms stopping a passer-by and asking him what he is about.
He might be going to one of the few pubs still open after the Government’s draconian smoking ban.
He will explain he is going to a pub
“???????”
“A pub. A building with a wooden divider,” the passer-by will explain. “I stand on one side and a man stands on the other side selling me drink.”
“???????”
“A drink is a liquid. I have to be careful not to drink too much of it because it will make me sick and cause me to do silly things before falling over.”
“You are being punished??????????????????????????”
“No, no. No. It’s a pleasure and it costs me a lot of money.”
“?????????????????????????????”
“Money. Every day I spend eight hours locked in a building staring at a machine and at the end of the week I am given money.”
“??????????????????????????????Which you give to a man who gives you in return a substance which makes you sick and causes you to do silly things until you fall over………………………Is there a Black Hole we can go to, do you know?”
The other day four of the newspapers I read online carried pictures of Victoria Beckham's new hair-do. The Daily Mirror devoted its entire front page - and three more inside - to the "shock pixie cut" and declared that this was "literally the biggest thing to happen to hair since the Moss Fringe of '07". A smaller story disclosed that doctors and most secondary school teachers will no longer be recruited from outside the EU. But there will be exceptions for sheep shearers from Australia and New Zealand - and ballet dancers.
Black Hole, here I come*****************************************************
******************* +++++++++++++++ ***********************
For my money there is nothing more frightening at the front door than a builder going, “FFFFFFFFFF”. I am sure you recognise the sound. It is the noise a workman makes when he comes into your house for the first time and sees any bit of work at all that has already been done by another workman. “FFFFFFFFFFFF,” they go. “Who put that in for you? Must have been drunk. That cross-piece there. See. Pulling on the contra-levels of the stays.”
“Could you take it down then?” you ask. And have you noticed how they always repeat what you say. Scornfully.
“Take it down? Take it down? No need. Come down of its own accord before the year’s out.”
I have a friend who is a master plumber. And if there was an Eisteddfod competition for the solo “FFFFFFFF” he’d walk it. Not only does he have a “FFFFFFFF” that is the envy of the Federation of Master Plumbers; he can do it backwards. Straight up. Backwards. I’ve heard him.
“FFFFFFFFFF,” I’ve heard him say, time and again. “I don’t like the look of that universal joint.”
He is a man who only has to be confronted with a universal joint to become instantly racked with doubt.
“Can it be put right?” the more foolhardy would ask.
“FFFFFFFFFF. Put right? You’re joking. You’d have to rebuild the bathroom.”
And, do you know, in forty years of admiring friendship I have never once seen his lips change their conformation.
It’s not only plumbers. Motor mechanics, joiners, plasterers and bricklayers, they all do it. “FFFFFFFFF”. I don’t know why. But “FFFFFFFFFF” they go. And a century of Trades Union solidarity bites the dust. Nothing kindred about trades today. There are those workmen who would rather pour scorn than tea.
Saturday, 13 September 2008
A SPRING TOO FAR BEHIND?
For some time now I have been the victim of a particularly vicious TAFFIA dirty tricks campaign.
I will not go into details. I believe with Marcus Aurelius that to mourn a disaster is to repeat it. I am, however, incandescent, and very voluble, when I consider how the Welsh Establishment has treated Welsh geniuses like Ivor Novello, Howard Spring and Gwyn Thomas whilst lauding indifferent talents, it often seems, solely because their owners speak Welsh.
There was a time when the best way into Welsh broadcasting was through the back door of the Manse. The results were usually abysmal. One, producing an arts show which included interviews with myself and Gwen, the widow of the poet Vernon Watkins, insisted we had a rehearsal. Gwen pointed out we were both reasonably intelligent and well able to handle interviews off the cuff.
“Ah,” said this son of the Manse, “if the interviewers don’t know in advance what you are going to say, they have to listen to your answers.”
Until the sixties Howard Spring was Britain’s best selling author. He wrote 14 novels, three plays, three children’s books, a volume of literary criticism and three autobiographical memoirs. His novels, which were read the world over, were made into films and television series. His books were used to teach English in Japanese schools. When Churchill met Roosevelt to sign the Atlantic Charter, Spring, who was then working for the Manchester Guardian, was one of only two journalists (the other was H.V. Morton) who were chosen to accompany him on the battleship Prince of Wales.
He was admired by such diverse men as Arnold Bennett, A. E. Russell, Einstein, Kipling and Beaverbrook. Most of his novels are well written, run-of-the-mill family sagas. Two, “Shabby Tiger” and “Rachel Rosing”, were as good as any published at that time.
With “Fame is the Spur” he reached another dimension. I have read countless novels but never a better than “Fame”. In it he is Dickens without the caricatures and the dreadful heroines; Tolstoy without the interminable Masonics; Hardy without the gloom. And the only time Thackeray came near him was in “Vanity Fair”. Like Trollope, he shows the good in the worst and the flaws in the good.
He was incapable of creating a character without falling in love with it, warts and all. His gift was to engage readers with the characters he created. You feel his creations have lives before the book is opened and they go on living after it is closed.
“Fame is the Spur” is about a small boy born in the slums who rises to lead a great political party. Clearly he had Ramsay MacDonald in mind when he created his central character. It is a triumph of the writer’s art: a man capable of greatness but with terrible flaws.
It is also the story of the infant Labour party, started by working class people out of a desire to give a voice to the poor.
Some years ago I interviewed Tom Ellis, a Labour MP who defected to the Social Democrats. I asked him why. “Because Labour has met all the targets it set itself” he said.
We live in a Golden Age which was largely the creation of a Labour party of working class men and women, of which Spring wrote so perceptively.
He knew whereof he wrote.
He was born in unimaginable poverty in two rooms in a slum in Chapel Court off Cathedral Road, Cardiff. One of nine children, his father was a jobbing gardener, an irascible, taciturn man who was surrounded by mystery. He never earned more than a pound a week yet professors from the University of Wales came to the house for long conversations. He loved literature and read the classic books he bought for a few pennies by their only light, a tin lamp with no shade and a reflector of polished tin. He made his children read them aloud and punished any flaws in pronunciation.
They had no cooker. To roast a joint Mrs Spring tied it to one end of a length of string and fastened the other end to a nail hammered into a wooden mantelpiece. The children took turns to twirl the string. The family had one bed on which they all slept head to toe with legs folded.
A.L Rowse said of them: “The family had an absolute passion for knowledge.”
Spring wrote movingly of his elder brother whose thirst for knowledge was so great. “Though of wretched physical condition, he drove at learning with a sustained frenzy. I came home at night to find him asleep at a table with a pile of books and a penny bottle of ink upset at his hand. It killed him in a few years.”
Spring’s father died when he was ten and the boy earned money by chopping and selling firewood, and selling rhubarb he picked in a market garden. Every Saturday he worked as an errand boy. His wages were a dinner, a shilling and a couple of herring. He lost the job when he took time off to sit for a scholarship.
He only had one holiday. He and his elder brother decided to go to Bideford. They saved the twelve shillings and sixpence for their digs and a few shillings for expenses. Spring was working as a messenger boy on a Cardiff newspaper. They used the newspaper’s free pass for the ferry from Cardiff to Ilfracombe and set out to walk the 20 miles to Bideford carrying the heavy portmanteau of books without which they never moved. After ten miles, virtually collapsing in the summer heat, they had to use part of the few shillings they had saved for treats on train fares for the rest of the journey.
Whilst he was working as a messenger boy, Spring bombarded the Western Mail with stories and theatre reviews until they gave him a job as a reporter. From Cardiff he moved to Yorkshire, where he worked for three years on the Yorkshire Observer before joining the Manchester Guardian.
He published first a children’s book and then “Shabby Tiger”. One of the characters Rachel Rosing so fascinated him he made her the heroine of his next book. His third book “My Son, My Son” (first published as “Absalom,Absalom”) was a world-wide best seller.
The inspiration came to him on a train journey. At one station his train took on water from a giant trough. He thought: what a place for a murderer to hide in. On a slip of paper he wrote a brief synopsis in the five minutes the train was halted. That night he began writing the book. It took him fourteen months to complete
In Wales this incomparable writer is forgotten and unsung. Over the years I have tried to persuade every “major” Welsh publisher to reprint his works or commission a biography. I have failed.
I met him once. We had a mutual friend, a Guardian reporter called Edgar Ridley who introduced us in a Manchester chop house and told him I wanted to be a writer.
When I asked for his advice he said buy a notebook. When you come across a word you do not understand, find out about it and write it down. In that way, he said, you will never forget it.
First editions of Fleming, Tolkien or Rowling will cost thousands. I have just bought a first edition of “Fame is the Spur”, one of the few great novels of the twentieth century, for £2.50.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The most important thing about tradition and ceremonial is its inherent absurdity. If the Ancient Order of Druids parading in Wales round the twelve stones at the Gorsedd of Bards is absurd; if it is risible that the whole pageantry of the Eisteddfod was devised and first presented in London and that the Gorsedd stones represent the twelve tribes of Israel, then what of the Trooping of the Colour, the military form of “Come Dancing”? Or the procession of the Garter Knights at Windsor Castle? A queue of old men with tea cosies on their heads and their supporters’ club badges stitched on their dressing gown pockets. Let he who is without risibility cast the first hoarse laugh.
I’d hate visitors to Wales to go away thinking that it is a dull place, peopled by small, dark men wearing suits made from the covers of old prayer books. Far from it. Wales may be the only country in Europe not to have invented an alcoholic drink, but, as that great life enhancer Rene Cutforth observed: “The Welsh are Mediterraneans in the rain.”
The army is, of course, the guardian of tradition. I was part of a host of national servicemen called back to the colours for an ‘Extras’ fortnight’s training. Our Commanding Officer called a battalion parade to try to instil in us a sense of our regimental tradition. He told us how our fortnight would be an opportunity to meet again men we had fought with across Europe. This puzzled us because, to a man, we had been at school for most of the war. But the colonel was riding a stallion called rhetoric and nothing could check him. Marching across the square to the front rank, he paused dramatically before a minute Glaswegian cut-throat. “For instance,” he said, “I seem to recognise your face.” And the small, bitter Glaswegian looked up at him and said, “I’ve niver seen ye in ma bliddy life, Jock.”
Reading the Greek Anthology I came across this, written probably 3,000 years ago.
Epitaph for a Dog
Stranger, commemorated here
‘Tis but a dog you see.
And yet I beg you do not sneer
My master wept for me.
Wept as the dusty earth
He pressed above my lifeless head,
And wrote where now I lie at rest
The words that you have read.
From the Daily Mail
Sugar gliders - a species of possum native to New Guinea and Australia - are becoming popular as domestic pets.
"With soft brown eyes, fluffy fur and their amusing acrobatics, they are seen as ideal pets."
Perhaps. But for £150 you are lumbered with a creature that needs to be let out at night to glide around (up to 200ft), craves attention (and is prone to depression should they not receive it) and makes a noise "similar to an electric blender".
I will not go into details. I believe with Marcus Aurelius that to mourn a disaster is to repeat it. I am, however, incandescent, and very voluble, when I consider how the Welsh Establishment has treated Welsh geniuses like Ivor Novello, Howard Spring and Gwyn Thomas whilst lauding indifferent talents, it often seems, solely because their owners speak Welsh.
There was a time when the best way into Welsh broadcasting was through the back door of the Manse. The results were usually abysmal. One, producing an arts show which included interviews with myself and Gwen, the widow of the poet Vernon Watkins, insisted we had a rehearsal. Gwen pointed out we were both reasonably intelligent and well able to handle interviews off the cuff.
“Ah,” said this son of the Manse, “if the interviewers don’t know in advance what you are going to say, they have to listen to your answers.”
Until the sixties Howard Spring was Britain’s best selling author. He wrote 14 novels, three plays, three children’s books, a volume of literary criticism and three autobiographical memoirs. His novels, which were read the world over, were made into films and television series. His books were used to teach English in Japanese schools. When Churchill met Roosevelt to sign the Atlantic Charter, Spring, who was then working for the Manchester Guardian, was one of only two journalists (the other was H.V. Morton) who were chosen to accompany him on the battleship Prince of Wales.
He was admired by such diverse men as Arnold Bennett, A. E. Russell, Einstein, Kipling and Beaverbrook. Most of his novels are well written, run-of-the-mill family sagas. Two, “Shabby Tiger” and “Rachel Rosing”, were as good as any published at that time.
With “Fame is the Spur” he reached another dimension. I have read countless novels but never a better than “Fame”. In it he is Dickens without the caricatures and the dreadful heroines; Tolstoy without the interminable Masonics; Hardy without the gloom. And the only time Thackeray came near him was in “Vanity Fair”. Like Trollope, he shows the good in the worst and the flaws in the good.
He was incapable of creating a character without falling in love with it, warts and all. His gift was to engage readers with the characters he created. You feel his creations have lives before the book is opened and they go on living after it is closed.
“Fame is the Spur” is about a small boy born in the slums who rises to lead a great political party. Clearly he had Ramsay MacDonald in mind when he created his central character. It is a triumph of the writer’s art: a man capable of greatness but with terrible flaws.
It is also the story of the infant Labour party, started by working class people out of a desire to give a voice to the poor.
Some years ago I interviewed Tom Ellis, a Labour MP who defected to the Social Democrats. I asked him why. “Because Labour has met all the targets it set itself” he said.
We live in a Golden Age which was largely the creation of a Labour party of working class men and women, of which Spring wrote so perceptively.
He knew whereof he wrote.
He was born in unimaginable poverty in two rooms in a slum in Chapel Court off Cathedral Road, Cardiff. One of nine children, his father was a jobbing gardener, an irascible, taciturn man who was surrounded by mystery. He never earned more than a pound a week yet professors from the University of Wales came to the house for long conversations. He loved literature and read the classic books he bought for a few pennies by their only light, a tin lamp with no shade and a reflector of polished tin. He made his children read them aloud and punished any flaws in pronunciation.
They had no cooker. To roast a joint Mrs Spring tied it to one end of a length of string and fastened the other end to a nail hammered into a wooden mantelpiece. The children took turns to twirl the string. The family had one bed on which they all slept head to toe with legs folded.
A.L Rowse said of them: “The family had an absolute passion for knowledge.”
Spring wrote movingly of his elder brother whose thirst for knowledge was so great. “Though of wretched physical condition, he drove at learning with a sustained frenzy. I came home at night to find him asleep at a table with a pile of books and a penny bottle of ink upset at his hand. It killed him in a few years.”
Spring’s father died when he was ten and the boy earned money by chopping and selling firewood, and selling rhubarb he picked in a market garden. Every Saturday he worked as an errand boy. His wages were a dinner, a shilling and a couple of herring. He lost the job when he took time off to sit for a scholarship.
He only had one holiday. He and his elder brother decided to go to Bideford. They saved the twelve shillings and sixpence for their digs and a few shillings for expenses. Spring was working as a messenger boy on a Cardiff newspaper. They used the newspaper’s free pass for the ferry from Cardiff to Ilfracombe and set out to walk the 20 miles to Bideford carrying the heavy portmanteau of books without which they never moved. After ten miles, virtually collapsing in the summer heat, they had to use part of the few shillings they had saved for treats on train fares for the rest of the journey.
Whilst he was working as a messenger boy, Spring bombarded the Western Mail with stories and theatre reviews until they gave him a job as a reporter. From Cardiff he moved to Yorkshire, where he worked for three years on the Yorkshire Observer before joining the Manchester Guardian.
He published first a children’s book and then “Shabby Tiger”. One of the characters Rachel Rosing so fascinated him he made her the heroine of his next book. His third book “My Son, My Son” (first published as “Absalom,Absalom”) was a world-wide best seller.
The inspiration came to him on a train journey. At one station his train took on water from a giant trough. He thought: what a place for a murderer to hide in. On a slip of paper he wrote a brief synopsis in the five minutes the train was halted. That night he began writing the book. It took him fourteen months to complete
In Wales this incomparable writer is forgotten and unsung. Over the years I have tried to persuade every “major” Welsh publisher to reprint his works or commission a biography. I have failed.
I met him once. We had a mutual friend, a Guardian reporter called Edgar Ridley who introduced us in a Manchester chop house and told him I wanted to be a writer.
When I asked for his advice he said buy a notebook. When you come across a word you do not understand, find out about it and write it down. In that way, he said, you will never forget it.
First editions of Fleming, Tolkien or Rowling will cost thousands. I have just bought a first edition of “Fame is the Spur”, one of the few great novels of the twentieth century, for £2.50.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The most important thing about tradition and ceremonial is its inherent absurdity. If the Ancient Order of Druids parading in Wales round the twelve stones at the Gorsedd of Bards is absurd; if it is risible that the whole pageantry of the Eisteddfod was devised and first presented in London and that the Gorsedd stones represent the twelve tribes of Israel, then what of the Trooping of the Colour, the military form of “Come Dancing”? Or the procession of the Garter Knights at Windsor Castle? A queue of old men with tea cosies on their heads and their supporters’ club badges stitched on their dressing gown pockets. Let he who is without risibility cast the first hoarse laugh.
I’d hate visitors to Wales to go away thinking that it is a dull place, peopled by small, dark men wearing suits made from the covers of old prayer books. Far from it. Wales may be the only country in Europe not to have invented an alcoholic drink, but, as that great life enhancer Rene Cutforth observed: “The Welsh are Mediterraneans in the rain.”
The army is, of course, the guardian of tradition. I was part of a host of national servicemen called back to the colours for an ‘Extras’ fortnight’s training. Our Commanding Officer called a battalion parade to try to instil in us a sense of our regimental tradition. He told us how our fortnight would be an opportunity to meet again men we had fought with across Europe. This puzzled us because, to a man, we had been at school for most of the war. But the colonel was riding a stallion called rhetoric and nothing could check him. Marching across the square to the front rank, he paused dramatically before a minute Glaswegian cut-throat. “For instance,” he said, “I seem to recognise your face.” And the small, bitter Glaswegian looked up at him and said, “I’ve niver seen ye in ma bliddy life, Jock.”
Reading the Greek Anthology I came across this, written probably 3,000 years ago.
Epitaph for a Dog
Stranger, commemorated here
‘Tis but a dog you see.
And yet I beg you do not sneer
My master wept for me.
Wept as the dusty earth
He pressed above my lifeless head,
And wrote where now I lie at rest
The words that you have read.
From the Daily Mail
Sugar gliders - a species of possum native to New Guinea and Australia - are becoming popular as domestic pets.
"With soft brown eyes, fluffy fur and their amusing acrobatics, they are seen as ideal pets."
Perhaps. But for £150 you are lumbered with a creature that needs to be let out at night to glide around (up to 200ft), craves attention (and is prone to depression should they not receive it) and makes a noise "similar to an electric blender".
Saturday, 6 September 2008
The Sound of One Foot Tapping
Life dances to hidden music and I have only rarely caught the sound. The first time was when a very senior officer in the Courts Service explained how the Establishment had massaged the murder statistics in order to justify abandoning the death penalty.
The second time was more pleasant. My eldest daughter took me to a promenade performance of Shakespeare’s “farewell” play The Tempest in the breathtaking Memorial Park in Lancaster. Set on a hill, it is really a series of parks and each scene of the play was performed in a different area of its 50 acres.
As I watched, entranced, on a lovely summer evening, it became clear in this separation of scenes that buried in The Tempest are echoes of the Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and so many other of his masterpieces.
It became clear that Shakespeare was saying goodbye to his audience with a series of “trailers”, reminders of earlier successes. Shakespeare, the professional writer, recycling his material. If possible, it made me love him even more.
Now I hear the music again. This time it is hard and atonal. It is the sound of a society being driven into obedience.
Councils are seeking volunteers to pry on their neighbours, clerks are being given powers of arrest. It is the overture of the Stasi state in Britain.
At the Buxton Festival some years ago I interviewed one of Mrs Thatcher’s inner cabinet of advisers. Talking of “Yes Minister”, the satirical TV look at Westminster, he admitted that it came very close to the truth about the governance of Britain.
The founder of Welsh Nationalism Gwynfor Evans told me he did not care if a Plaid Cymru MP was never elected so long as he had a cadre of nationalist civil servants.
The rot began, in my view, during the war when the bureaucrats were allowed to bring in all manner of petty legislation whilst their "masters", the MPs, slept. The first post-war Labour government - the only one that thought of the electorate as human beings for whom it had a duty of care - sought control with draconian planning regulations.
Proliferation as policy is the driving force of the bureaucrat. It lives through endless cloning and it has been quick to take advantage of the laziness of our MPs who no longer scrutinise the legislation proposed by Civil Servants.
Another weapon is the manufacture of false fear. Dangerous Dogs legislation has done little or nothing to reduce attack. The Dunblane gun panic succeeded only in closing gun clubs where weapons were handled with respect. A man who altered replica guns to facilitate eight murders will do a year in prison for every life he stole. If I carry a penknife, or sgian dhub in Highland Dress, I risk imprisonment. Our young are slaughtered by the day.
The smoking regulations were supported by spurious research. The World Health Organisation tried for six years to prove there was such a thing as passive smoking but had to admit failure.
We were told there was evidence to prove that more than four units of alcohol were harmful. It later emerged the figure had been plucked from the air.
TWO centres for the European Parliament in Strasbourg and Brussels? Why?
The European parliament exists to control; and its legislation is often harmful. It decrees that each member country must produce a given rate of fuel economy. The foreign owned utilities are offered huge sums to establish wind turbines and farmers paid excessive rents to house them, although it is accepted the entire output of wind farms is less than that of one power station.
We are persuaded there is a vast terrorist army waging war against us. In fact we are suffering from understandable resentments which date from the Crusades. The terrorists are separate entities, like the Afghans who have been fighting us for centuries, the Saudis whose Wahabi beliefs are the product of the self interest of Ibn Saud. Pakistan, that nest of trouble, is an artificial construct that came into being because Ghandi, Nehru and the rest of that self serving crew got tired of fighting for control of a united India. The partition boundaries were decided by a lawyer who did not know the sub-continent and never left his bungalow.
As if being bombed is not bad enough, we are told that our profligate ways are changing the world's climate. Rubbish. Life on the planet has only been possible for 25,000 years, separated by massive natural climate change.
How far are we from emulating the law recently imposed in Japan that requires all adult citizens to have their waists measured? If they repeatedly exceed the allowable limit – 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women – they are subjected to "health re-education" and their employers become liable to financial penalties.
Obesity is still almost a crime in our society. But it is also a commercial opportunity. Oxo are large scale manufacturers of slimming aids. When I puzzlingly slimmed on radio, I discovered the firm financed magazines, slimming clubs, even appetite-diminishing toffees.
In The Independent, Dominic Lawson disclosed that an anti-obesity report from Dr Foster Research was funded by Roche, the pharmaceutical company which developed the anti-obesity drug Xenical.
A year ago, Dr Foster issued a report which complained that "around 3 per cent of Primary Care Organizations do not fund the use of drug therapy for obesity, despite the recommendations of organizations such as the National Institute for Clinical Excellence."
The most blatant twisting of the truth has been in the climate that produced the Drink and Drive legislation.
In 1985 I wrote a column warning that Orwell’s 1984 had been ominously prescient.
The Central Statistical Office’s “Social Trends Survey” disclosed that year that, despite a vast increase in breath tests from 97,000 in 1971 to 245,000 in 1983, the rate of positive tests had fallen steadily from 58 per cent twelve years earlier to33 per cent in 1983. The overall figures for death and serious injury on the roads had been dropping since 1971.
Prompted by this, I discovered that the statistics for drunken driving included all road deaths in which drink was a factor. Including those of drunken pedestrians who walked into the path of traffic and accidents in which drunken drivers were involved, though not responsible.
More and more laws until at last you have a totally obedient population and it is welcome 1984!
**********************************************
Never mind 1984. Remember 1986 when there was this passion for getting machines to talk? Cars, rubbish bins, bus stops. There were even talking sewing machines.
I believe that machines, like small boys, should be seen and not heard. Or, if heard, should provide an agreeable hum from the kitchen as a background to the rustle of the evening paper and the light, rhythmic snore of the head of the house. Carefully employed by the malevolently-minded, the foot pedal of such a machine could be brought into sharp contact with the lino and, if the timing was right, jolt the head of the house out of the deepest slumber, mewing with fright.
On some sewing machines it was even possible to so operate them that the needle in its downward progress and the rhythmic hum of the motive wheel provided a backing group to that haunting lyric which I am convinced all wives learn as little girls at their mother’s knee. You know the one. It goes something like this: “You use this house like a hotel. You only come in to change your socks.” Or “My mother said to me, I’d rather be carrying you through that front door, feet first, than see you marry that man.”
I just hope that they haven’t been teaching sewing machines to make remarks like that. It will be the end of civilised marriage as we know it.
Then there was the talking bus stop. Funny to think that it’s not all that long ago when a person found listening to a bus stop ran a very real risk of being arrested as drunk and disorderly and being returned home some time later and several shillings the lighter.
But we lived in an age of technical miracles. When you could go to ten phone boxes on the trot and couldn’t get a peep out of any of them. But the bus stops talked your head off.
Have you ever wondered why there are so few odes to objects? It is common enough to laud abstract ideas but objects get pretty short shrift. Keats penned a stave or two to his Greek vase and Rupert Brooke did rather go on about cups and saucers, wet roofs and bread crusts.
The reason more people don’t, in my view, is that at this very moment the damned things are probably writing them themselves. The sewing machine in question, by the way, was Japanese and was called “Brother”, an Orwellian coincidence that has not gone unnoticed in this house.
The second time was more pleasant. My eldest daughter took me to a promenade performance of Shakespeare’s “farewell” play The Tempest in the breathtaking Memorial Park in Lancaster. Set on a hill, it is really a series of parks and each scene of the play was performed in a different area of its 50 acres.
As I watched, entranced, on a lovely summer evening, it became clear in this separation of scenes that buried in The Tempest are echoes of the Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and so many other of his masterpieces.
It became clear that Shakespeare was saying goodbye to his audience with a series of “trailers”, reminders of earlier successes. Shakespeare, the professional writer, recycling his material. If possible, it made me love him even more.
Now I hear the music again. This time it is hard and atonal. It is the sound of a society being driven into obedience.
Councils are seeking volunteers to pry on their neighbours, clerks are being given powers of arrest. It is the overture of the Stasi state in Britain.
At the Buxton Festival some years ago I interviewed one of Mrs Thatcher’s inner cabinet of advisers. Talking of “Yes Minister”, the satirical TV look at Westminster, he admitted that it came very close to the truth about the governance of Britain.
The founder of Welsh Nationalism Gwynfor Evans told me he did not care if a Plaid Cymru MP was never elected so long as he had a cadre of nationalist civil servants.
The rot began, in my view, during the war when the bureaucrats were allowed to bring in all manner of petty legislation whilst their "masters", the MPs, slept. The first post-war Labour government - the only one that thought of the electorate as human beings for whom it had a duty of care - sought control with draconian planning regulations.
Proliferation as policy is the driving force of the bureaucrat. It lives through endless cloning and it has been quick to take advantage of the laziness of our MPs who no longer scrutinise the legislation proposed by Civil Servants.
Another weapon is the manufacture of false fear. Dangerous Dogs legislation has done little or nothing to reduce attack. The Dunblane gun panic succeeded only in closing gun clubs where weapons were handled with respect. A man who altered replica guns to facilitate eight murders will do a year in prison for every life he stole. If I carry a penknife, or sgian dhub in Highland Dress, I risk imprisonment. Our young are slaughtered by the day.
The smoking regulations were supported by spurious research. The World Health Organisation tried for six years to prove there was such a thing as passive smoking but had to admit failure.
We were told there was evidence to prove that more than four units of alcohol were harmful. It later emerged the figure had been plucked from the air.
TWO centres for the European Parliament in Strasbourg and Brussels? Why?
The European parliament exists to control; and its legislation is often harmful. It decrees that each member country must produce a given rate of fuel economy. The foreign owned utilities are offered huge sums to establish wind turbines and farmers paid excessive rents to house them, although it is accepted the entire output of wind farms is less than that of one power station.
We are persuaded there is a vast terrorist army waging war against us. In fact we are suffering from understandable resentments which date from the Crusades. The terrorists are separate entities, like the Afghans who have been fighting us for centuries, the Saudis whose Wahabi beliefs are the product of the self interest of Ibn Saud. Pakistan, that nest of trouble, is an artificial construct that came into being because Ghandi, Nehru and the rest of that self serving crew got tired of fighting for control of a united India. The partition boundaries were decided by a lawyer who did not know the sub-continent and never left his bungalow.
As if being bombed is not bad enough, we are told that our profligate ways are changing the world's climate. Rubbish. Life on the planet has only been possible for 25,000 years, separated by massive natural climate change.
How far are we from emulating the law recently imposed in Japan that requires all adult citizens to have their waists measured? If they repeatedly exceed the allowable limit – 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women – they are subjected to "health re-education" and their employers become liable to financial penalties.
Obesity is still almost a crime in our society. But it is also a commercial opportunity. Oxo are large scale manufacturers of slimming aids. When I puzzlingly slimmed on radio, I discovered the firm financed magazines, slimming clubs, even appetite-diminishing toffees.
In The Independent, Dominic Lawson disclosed that an anti-obesity report from Dr Foster Research was funded by Roche, the pharmaceutical company which developed the anti-obesity drug Xenical.
A year ago, Dr Foster issued a report which complained that "around 3 per cent of Primary Care Organizations do not fund the use of drug therapy for obesity, despite the recommendations of organizations such as the National Institute for Clinical Excellence."
The most blatant twisting of the truth has been in the climate that produced the Drink and Drive legislation.
In 1985 I wrote a column warning that Orwell’s 1984 had been ominously prescient.
The Central Statistical Office’s “Social Trends Survey” disclosed that year that, despite a vast increase in breath tests from 97,000 in 1971 to 245,000 in 1983, the rate of positive tests had fallen steadily from 58 per cent twelve years earlier to33 per cent in 1983. The overall figures for death and serious injury on the roads had been dropping since 1971.
Prompted by this, I discovered that the statistics for drunken driving included all road deaths in which drink was a factor. Including those of drunken pedestrians who walked into the path of traffic and accidents in which drunken drivers were involved, though not responsible.
More and more laws until at last you have a totally obedient population and it is welcome 1984!
**********************************************
Never mind 1984. Remember 1986 when there was this passion for getting machines to talk? Cars, rubbish bins, bus stops. There were even talking sewing machines.
I believe that machines, like small boys, should be seen and not heard. Or, if heard, should provide an agreeable hum from the kitchen as a background to the rustle of the evening paper and the light, rhythmic snore of the head of the house. Carefully employed by the malevolently-minded, the foot pedal of such a machine could be brought into sharp contact with the lino and, if the timing was right, jolt the head of the house out of the deepest slumber, mewing with fright.
On some sewing machines it was even possible to so operate them that the needle in its downward progress and the rhythmic hum of the motive wheel provided a backing group to that haunting lyric which I am convinced all wives learn as little girls at their mother’s knee. You know the one. It goes something like this: “You use this house like a hotel. You only come in to change your socks.” Or “My mother said to me, I’d rather be carrying you through that front door, feet first, than see you marry that man.”
I just hope that they haven’t been teaching sewing machines to make remarks like that. It will be the end of civilised marriage as we know it.
Then there was the talking bus stop. Funny to think that it’s not all that long ago when a person found listening to a bus stop ran a very real risk of being arrested as drunk and disorderly and being returned home some time later and several shillings the lighter.
But we lived in an age of technical miracles. When you could go to ten phone boxes on the trot and couldn’t get a peep out of any of them. But the bus stops talked your head off.
Have you ever wondered why there are so few odes to objects? It is common enough to laud abstract ideas but objects get pretty short shrift. Keats penned a stave or two to his Greek vase and Rupert Brooke did rather go on about cups and saucers, wet roofs and bread crusts.
The reason more people don’t, in my view, is that at this very moment the damned things are probably writing them themselves. The sewing machine in question, by the way, was Japanese and was called “Brother”, an Orwellian coincidence that has not gone unnoticed in this house.
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