REVOLVING HEELS

I discovered the other day that the man who began the company that became Norwich Union Insurance - and later Aviva - developed an idea for shoes with revolving heels.

Or maybe they were boots with revolving heels. I’m not sure. Anyway I gather the idea didn’t catch on, though I am not sure why. Heels are always the most vulnerable part of the shoe and if the heel could rotate, well it might wear down evenly across its surface, though eventually, presumably, leaving a protruding pin in the middle of the heel which might do serious damage to a polished floor.

Since those very early days I’m not sure that any more work has been done on heels though a cobbler could perhaps rapidly put me right on that. Whether work has or hasn’t been done, heels still seem to wear down apace and that is without any serious walking.

And when I think of serious walking I think not of people in boots with trousers tucked into their socks, striding upwards over the Brecon Beacons, but of William Gladstone who thought nothing of a twelve mile hike from Chester to Hawarden carrying a suitcase or more probably one of those large bags that bear his name. His shoes must have worn out quickly and I suppose the cobbling trade in those parts must have been profitable.

Three or four times a week I trudge up the local hill above the town here in pursuit of exercise and it is on such treks that my brain, let off its humdrum leash, begins to rehearse such thoughts. Are they valuable? I don’t know. They seem to be the counterpoint to the ‘useless’ knowledge that schools used to try to drum into the heads of sixth formers whose minds were otherwise engaged with ‘A’ levels and university entrance papers. The phrase ‘Useless Knowledge’ (or something very similar) figures prominently in Alan Bennett’s play ‘The History Boys.’

Is 'Useless Knowledge' - useful? After all, it seems to be a question that many people in and out of education have spent a long time worrying about. The fact that you can’t define useless or useful seems no hindrance to the debate. Nor in fact does the fact that the useful versus useless dimension is but one aspect of the question. I’d prefer to pose the question: is useless knowledge fun? Does it contribute to human happiness? That seems a more relevant line to debate.

Had I been a cobbler I could perhaps have written a technical blog about mending heels, which I doubt would have interested anyone outside the cobbling fraternity; and I would look silly learning about such technical aspects and trying to regurgitate them if I weren’t a cobbler. But anyone can write about revolving heels and can imagine the eccentricities of direction they might imply. That seems infinitely more fun and in these days of economic drift - someone suggested we might be in this mess for the next twenty years - fun is perhaps all we have left.

THEATRE THOUGHTS

Some of you may know that I adapted (with her very kind permission) one of Rose Tremain’s award winning radio plays recently and we put Temporary Shelter on the stage here at our little theatre in July.

I am pleased to say that it was a success. We had full or almost full houses and the feedback was excellent. For that credit must go to the original author who created a great show. Nevertheless, the amount of work that went into the adaptation was considerable, writing and re-writing lines and juggling their positions (is it better if he says this before she says that?) Moreover, moving from a radio to a stage show involved creating a whole complex choreography.

Even after the play had been performed I knew I would have to do another re-write: certain things work in performance and other bits don’t. When you hear lines spoken and actions acted, you look at what you’ve written anew. So you polish and improve - or anyway try to. At least I do

The Drama Committee have now asked if I would do another Rose Tremain adaptation next summer and I have been giving some thought to this. All depends on finding something suitable and.......she giving her permission.

The work that kept bouncing before my eyes was ‘Restoration’ perhaps her best known novel which won a variety of prizes when it first appeared in 1989 and was short-listed for the Booker prize. Restoration is a wonderfully creative and inventive novel - a theatrical creation if ever there was one. I knew it had been made into a film....but a play?

All the same as I turned it over in my mind, wondering how I might put this scene on the stage, or that; mulling over what characters I would need, how the action might divide into acts....and so on. I realised it would be difficult with our small and ageing group of actors and the limited resources of our stage and theatre. (The novel embraces a mental institution and the Great Fire of London - but, what ho! - playwrights like a challenge!). I had inner doubts (was I being wise even to think about it?) but, floating in my brain, remained a burning desire to try.

Part of the reason, I knew, was my feeling for (and indeed identification with) Merivel, the seventeenth century physician and fop, who is the main protagonist of the novel. For in many incidental details - to do with our mothers, our education, our early professional lives, the parallels between this literary creation and myself, despite three intervening centuries, seem uncanny.

I won’t go into all that here now but let me give you another, which I have only just realised. The surname I use as a nom de plume is Somerville - you will see that word has Merivel embedded in it, and practically in plain, too; while my email address - fensomerville (@hotmail etc) - is an anagram of ‘Lens of Merivel.’ (The Fens also happen to be where Merivel is exiled). Is this serendipity or what?

Of course, all this means nothing at all. It is pure coincidence and would not lead me to write a better or a worse play. All the same it is interesting don’t you think? Besides I know I am not in any way really the same character as Merivel. I cannot, for instance, as he can, fart at will. Not that I have seriously ever wanted to, you understand.

Still I learned yesterday that Restoration has in fact already been adapted for the stage, and professionally too - so probably a lot better than I would ever be able to do it. So that avenue is closed. At first this disappointed me - but then I knew I was relieved. A great burden of making elegant bricks without much in the way of straw had been taken from my shoulders. Thank you Francis Matthews and the Salisbury Playhouse

Old Merivel, however, refuses to go away. He is sitting in the back of my mind having sneaky ideas. Farting, too, probably.

Picture shows the Chapel at Peterhouse, Cambridge, a building familiar both to Merivel and Me

THE HOUSE WHERE THEY PROMOTED DISQUE BLEU

The imagination plays tricks, does it not? There is more going on inside the brain than is dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio! Even inside a tired old box of grey matter like mine.

My sister has been married forty-years and her children had kindly organised a surprise party for her to take place in what is now the family home of her eldest daughter. We were invited too and last week we stayed chez our eldest daughter in Frome en route across England to the fastness of East Anglia. Sleeping on the sofa bed I dreamed a dream of being taken in a bouncy small bronze-coloured car to see the place 'where they promoted Disque Bleu' - that being a brand of French cigarette common about forty years ago. Why I was being taken there I was not told: dreams don't always provide much by way of explanation.

So there I was sitting on the leather back seat of this car while in front rode a man and a woman with thick black hair. We drove down an avenue lined with plane trees, the sun shining and hot, the road dusty and eventually we came past a tall red brick house at the end of a row. It looked like the house of some mid-nineteenth century industrialist, imposing but in a rather grim sort of a way, with a great bay window and next to it a forbidding black front door towering above broad stone steps.

Although mainly built of brick, and therefore red, the architect had specified stone facings and mullions for the windows. At some point it had also been divided into two - 'the place where they promoted Disque Bleu' being thus semi-detached. Only one half of the house thus boasted a confectionery of advertising slogans, none, this being the modern age, had anything to do with tobacco.

Le voilà shouted my companions as we sped past looking now for somewhere to park; but I knew as soon as I had seen the house that I had been there long before. I had visited this very house. I could describe to you what lay beyond those stone steps and forbidding front door; what you could see inside that bay window.

I knew that the interior, as that of so many French houses of the period, would be dark and gloomy and smelling of that mixture of garlic, coffee and black tobacco so typical of France. Inside the room with the bay window, a large enough ‘salle de jour’ incidentally, was, and perhaps would still be, a café-style bar taking up much of the space. Someone had tried to reproduce a café in this front room.

When I had been there before I’d taken a beer and sat down on one of the nondescript chairs at a small table and lit a cigarette: Disque Bleu in all probability for it had been at the time that everyone smoked. I remember no other visitors, the bar had been empty except for the gruff man with an apron who had poured me my beer and who appeared to be ‘le patron.’

I had been there some minutes when from somewhere in the interior arrived a sharp-suited fellow with a little attaché case. He too had been smoking and he talked fast and quickly to the ‘patron,’ occasionally looking round and lowering his voice as though he were discussing business of a kind that visitors shouldn’t hear. He drank pastis, I seem to remember, and wore a Trilby, and looked like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Jean-Louis Tritignant.

Someone even then had told me then that this was the house from which the entire marketing operation for the cigarette company was run - it seemed unlikely, but looking round the walls I could see faded photographs and certificates that looked, I supposed like those you might expect to find in some under used board room, faded photographs and the odd curling and yellowed certificate. Perhaps I had arrived in the town and someone had said I could buy a drink there and I suppose I had gone in the hope, if not the expectation, of some largesse of cigarettes. But none was to be forthcoming. I left and forgot the episode. Maybe I had been about eighteen or twenty at the time.

But now the memory came back with a start as the driver found a parking slot and skidded the car deftly into it. I got out. The man and woman talked animatedly, but not to me, but I followed them back down the hot and empty road with the light dust blowing on the wind. Looking up, I saw a paper sign high on a gable end, black and white. It read LOT . I wondered if that was where we were. But the letters might simply have been the first three or the last three letters of a longer word. I didn't know and it didn't seem to matter.

And I was never to learn either. For at that point I woke up.

Now I was back in England and time had rolled forward to the present. We were off to my niece's house in Suffolk which had once belonged to my brother-in-law's parents. I had, it is true, once been there briefly during the time it had been left unoccupied and semi-derelict, its steps and terraces overgrown with weeds, its timbers ravaged by rot; That had been perhaps about twenty years before. I had forgotten completely what it looked like other than we approached it via an avenue of trees. Still this is an imposing house. Built around 1850 - the same age as my French house - and it is built of red brick. Moreover the mullions around the windows are stone and there are steps up to the door.

But if my conscious brain had forgotten this house, my unconscious brain clearly hadn't. Indeed, it had remembered it on cue and bolted it into my dream. I was even being driven, too, for younger daughter, who has dark brown hair, was driving. It is all uncanny and spooky. But who was the fellow in the Trilby that looked like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Jean-Louis Tritignant? And where is the woman with the thick black hair?