FIFTY YEARS ON - SHOOTING AT BISLEY

Artists Rifles Clubhouse at Bisley

In his novel ‘Any Human Heart’  William Boyd has his his protagonist, Logan Mountstuart, reflect on playing golf and getting a hole in one.  One day Logan, a lifelong amateur golfer,  is on a course in Nigeria, playing just for fun with a work colleague when he wallops the ball hard on a par three hole and then watches as the ball runs unerringly into the hole.  As Logan acknowledges, his shot could not have been played better, even by the most accomplished golfer in the world and he concludes that in no other sport could a rank amateur perform, if only on a single occasion, as well as someone who was at the top of their game. Well, there is another sport and that sport is rifle shooting.

    Last Sunday I went to the National Shooting Ground at Bisley for a reunion of some of the members of my school’s old shooting team.  I hadn’t shot a rifle for more than 50 years and so the invitation to have lunch and then a shoot in the afternoon was too good to miss.  I had never been a great shot: I was always too erratic; good on my good days but indifferent at other times.  I had a good day one summer afternoon on Otmoor where I became the Under 16 Oxfordshire full-bore champion and I shot at Bisley for my school on several occasions, though to no great effect.  After school I gave the sport up and since then I haven’t shot a rifle in 50 years.

    So it was with trepidation that I approached the occasion.  First there was the nervousness, exactly like entering a new school, of finding Bisley and then the right clubhouse within the camp and then meeting new and strange faces, but I needn’t have worried.  Ducks to water, even.

     The lunch was at the aptly named Artists Rifles clubhouse - originally deriving from the Artists Rifles regiment which must have been great fun to be in, composed as it was of writers, poets and actors, composers, painters and musicians of every kind.   Yet they were a serious bunch and won 8 Victoria crosses in the First World War.  Noel Coward was a member of the regiment at one point.

    All the clubhouses at Bisley must have been built, I imagine, about 100 years ago and they are redolent of Edwardian England.  Indeed collectively they look like something you might find in India, perhaps, from the days of the Raj.  Inside the Artists Rifles Clubhouse the decoration was as eclectic as you might expect, full of regimental memorabilia and recruiting posters from the first world war.  The service and linen tablecloths also spoke of a bygone age. 

    Sixteen of us turned up and incredibly five of these were people I had shot with at school, so once we had recognised each other it was just like old times.  It is strange how people change.  Appearances change, though the eyes are a constant as are people’s mannerisms, their ways of smiling, moving, walking and their tone of voice.  What was also slightly comforting to me was that they were all deaf or, like me, heading in that direction: a consequence of the lack of hearing protection in our younger days and the regular blast of the .303 service rifle in your ear from a couple of feet away.  Nowadays hearing protection is mandatory: you can see why.

    So after a good lunch and a chance to catch-up, it was on to Bisley’s great Century Range - so called because there used to be 100 targets there.  Now there are 108, colour coded alternately red and yellow.  The assets are being sweated.

    Fifty years ago we used army service rifles - No 4’s from the second world war - and ammunition left over from that conflict.  I remember someone saying that there was enough .303 ammunition to last 50 years.  Well, the 50 years are up and today shooters use mainly modern  0.762 millimetre rounds;  it is more accurate they tell me.  The rifles have changed too.  Gone are the heavy service rifles; the shooting today is with modern target rifles which are lighter.  The targets have changed, too: they are smaller now to match the greater accuracy of the rifles.  Even the bull has been changed and is now divided into an inner and an outer bull - on the same principle as the A* at A Level.  The inner bull (called the ‘V’ bull) is now the equivalent of golf’s hole in one.

    Certain things, however, do not change and induce nostalgia.  The crack of the report that seems to carry its own momentary echo, the dull wetness of the grass of the firing point, the flags that indicate the wind strength and direction, for a bullet is carried by the wind like a bird and you have to allow for this.  Above all the faint scent of burnt cordite drifting in the air.

    Shooting at 500 yards and using a borrowed rifle too long for me in the stock I nevertheless shot a 27 (out of 35) including one of those ‘could not be bettered’ ‘V’ bulls:  a score which would have let down my shooting team in the old days but which nonetheless would not have been unknown.  Incredible, I thought.  50 years on and so little  changed.
   
   

AN APPEALING HOUSE

I am writing this in my favourite place: in bed. On Saturdays I can be quite self- indulgent. ‘I am allowed,’ as the children used to say defiantly when they were growing up.  I like working in bed, it has many advantages and when I turn my head from the laptop I can see out of the bedroom window across the intervening valley to the white gable of a tall house on which the sun is shining.  Behind the house are trees and behind the trees is a sky of grey-blue.  It isn’t far away, this house, we are not talking of a big valley.  The house is no more, I should think than 300 yards away, 400 yards at most and the curious thing is that, although I must have walked past this house many times, I could not go to it and point it out and say ‘This is the house I can see from my bedroom window.’  The ground rises and falls, there are trees that hide and reveal, everything looks so different close to. 
    Houses are funny things: they have personalities of their own.  Last night, walking around the village for exercise and meditation I passed a house called ‘Greenfield’ that cries out to me in sadness whenever I pass it.  And always my reaction is the same.  ‘If my fairy godmother touches me on the shoulder with her sparkly wand, I shall buy you and pour money into you to make you snug and watertight and warm with thick carpets, and John Lewis kitchens and at least two staircases and roaring fires of apple wood logs. Outside there would be soft lawns around the ash trees and where I would take afternoon tea and listen to the tinkling of the brook running close by.  It is that sort of house. An old house, a traditional house, a comforting house, a house that feels home.
    Refurbished the house would be worth a £1 million, maybe more.  As it is - I cannot remember it ever having been lived in for at least twenty years - it might probably be worth half that. I doubt that it’s habitable at present.  What I cannot understand is why it has been left for so long, accumulating dereliction.  Once some years ago an estate agent’s sign went up plastered with the word ‘SOLD.’     A couple of weeks later it was taken down and the dereliction continued.
    Yesterday as I walked past - for the house lies at the bottom of the bluff on which St Quentin’s Castle stands and the Castle, which may once have housed the deposed King Edward II for a night or two, is one of my favourite places to walk to - I again felt the house’s presence calling to me like a stray animal or an orphan child.  Not so much, please take me home - such sentiment would be difficult for something made of a thousand tons of stone - but rather please let me be your home and look after you and keep you warm in winter and cool in summer where you could write to the sound of the tinkling brook, sitting with your back against the trunk of one of the ash trees.  And again I responded, that should my fairy godmother reach out and touch me so that I have fortune galore, then, yes I shall buy you and live in you.
    At this point I was approaching ‘Greenfield’ from its back, down the hill.  I now turned the corner, my unspoken declaration ringing in my ears as it were and suddenly there, in the garden, was an enormous double sign advertising the presence of a construction company.  Well, well, well.  Perhaps refurbishment will start at last.  Maybe the house will become grand again and all I shall have to do is either to win the Lottery on a rollover week or maybe have ‘Boraya’ hit the all time best-seller lists and to be made into a film - a box office hit of whose proceeds I would be awarded five per cent. 
    Or, on a more modest scale, I wondered whether they might be going to turn the house into retirement flats.  I might then even be able afford to buy one and so could write in the house to the sound of the tinkling brook after all even without fairy godmother’s intervention for I shall be needing such a flat sooner or later. 
    But then I wondered: suppose they are just going to demolish the house and instead build three or four modern ‘executive homes,’ stamping on the old house’s mystery and charm and grinding it into the dusk like a cockroach?  Or even maybe remodel the house, destroying its old world charm with some ghastly modern carapace of glass and steel.  I shuddered at the thought.
    So maybe that was the house’s sudden call to me as I walked down the hill: it really was the cry of an orphan child shouting, ‘Save me from the architect and his wrecking ball.’ 

GLOVES

Gloves from the National Trust

I heard a knock on the door and saw outside a dirty yellow van.  Its driver was ringing the bell.  He asked whether I was who he thought I was.  I nodded.  ‘I thought it better to ask beforehand,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to have to carry it all the way back.’
    You might think we live some distance from the road but it’s only a few yards.  True we live on a hill and the slope is therefore moderately steep, something that always used to annoy my Mother-in-law.  ‘I don’t understand why they built a nice house like yours and then had to go and put a hill in front of it,’ she used to say.  I think she saw the hill, on which half the town is built, as just a bit of landscaping.
    In Britain we aren’t very inventive when it comes to hills.  In the Cantal, in France, where there are even more hills than in Wales, they tuck their houses into the hillsides so that if you approach from one side you go into the ground floor and if you come from the other you arrive on the floor above. 
    Enough of a diversion:  satisfied he had found the right address the driver hurried back to his van emerging a minute or two later with a very large box.  I told him to bring it into the house and scrawled something on his electronic box of tricks.  He hurried off and left me in possession of a Sovereign petrol lawnmower, bought as a bargain in Homebase’s late season sale for less than £100.
    Actually it’s the theatre’s mower but as I tend the thespian grass I keep it here.  The old mower could no doubt be repaired.  It’s only about five years old and has worked excellently until now.  But the last time I used it it ran slower and slower until it stopped.  There may be a fuel blockage: it’s the sort of thing that a repairer could no doubt sort out quickly.  If we had a repairer of course: the last one closed when the garden centre made way for Waitrose two years ago.  The old mower also needed a few other things including a new blade and a new handle for the starting cord.  All of which made specialist repair uneconomic.
    So the old mower has to go the way of all flesh, which makes me feel a planet wrecker and part of our irresponsible throw-away society.  We ought to repair machines and clothes but it is cheaper now - and far less time consuming - to buy new.  The mower is in my car and I shall trundle it to execution at the tip after I have written this.
    The metaphor is apt for I have just completed Mikhail Sholokhov’s ‘And Quiet Flows the Don,’ - the classic novel from a Nobel prize winner about the Cossacks before, during and after the First World War.  When it starts the story is reminiscent of Hardy, with wonderful descriptions of life and love out on the steppe.   But everything, including the writing, gets bleaker and more tragic with the outbreak of war and the infection of the Russian revolution and the outbreak of Civil War.  It ends compellingly with a mass execution of Red Guards by the Whites made even more emotional by the fact that these were men who had fought alongside each other against Germany and had lived in the same villages on the Don.  I am still trying to get the scene out of my head.  Sholokhov was applauded for ‘socialist realism,’ but he just reminds me what life in Syria must be like at the moment.
    After that I needed something to cheer me up.   So I wasn’t best pleased to receive a brown  envelope (you’d think technology might have given us a different colour by now) from our friends at the Inland Revenue, asking me why I thought I should be exempt from paying National Insurance Contributions.   They pointed out that though I might have been just a few months short of my 67th birthday when I filled in the form I was still (by a few weeks) 64 at the start of the financial year and therefore I would owe them a significant lump sum, interest and perhaps even a penalty as well.  Oh dear! Another example of the Hostile Forces of the Universe.
    I did have some good news though.  My first earnings from self-publishing have begun and amount to all of £2.91.  I celebrated with a pint of beer costing £3.15 on the grounds that there may be more next month.  As someone said ‘it’s a start’ and it means the sheet is no longer entirely blank.  And this week I finished the text of the second book - comprising my Neolithic research - which I have hurried to complete before my talk in Cambridge next month.   Some time ago I promised myself that I would update my computer as soon as I earned some money from one of my books. That hurdle has now been surmounted by the slimmest of margins, but I think I shall have to wait to see whether the Inland Revenue’s depredations leave any money in the coffers.  Maybe I should have bought shares in Royal Mail after all.
    But to conclude where we came in, as it were, I have just received another delivery, this time from the National Trust.  I have been using their gardening gloves for some time now - not for gardening, but for everything else.  They offer white (not an especially good colour for gardening) cotton-lined hide gloves for only £10.  I have already bought two pairs from them and now I have bought another two and will keep one for best.  They are only available in large but the size fits me well enough and I don’t have big hands. I can recommend them as a bargain.  The winter is set to be a cold one and if ever you need to direct traffic they will prove just the job.

CLIMBING FRAME

Elder Daughter in Front of the Battered Climbing Frame

Rather than install a new kitchen at vast expense we have determined on a tarting up the existing one with new lighting, tiling and worktops.  Ken, the builder, is a little dubious. ‘It’s only a couple of week’s until the Howden’s sale,’ he opined plaintively the other day.   He said the same thing a year ago.  I think he’s on commission and I know he would like me to have a new Howden’s kitchen with fancy cupboards and lighting and oak worktops. 
      A charming young man even came out armed with a catalogue, refused a cup of tea, and carefully measured up.  Later Ken brought us computer images of how our kitchen would look.  It was showroom plus.  The epitome of good taste. How could anyone not fall in love with that? 
     The cost though was prohibitive.  ‘Well you did choose the most expensive options,’ said Ken.  ‘That’s because there were no prices in the catalogue,’ I replied.
     Alas the fancy images were given short shrift and the project postponed for a year and so we have gone instead for a facelift using beech worktops and new lighting from IKEA and some fancy tiling.  It will see us out anyway.  I sense our years in this house are limited.  In three or four we shall have downsized to some shoe box somewhere, stripped of a lifetime’s accumulated possessions.  We shall have to leave our kitchen behind. Ah well!
      Ken has disappeared again now in the way that builders do, though I have to say he did put in a prompt appearance to fix a leaking cistern and to carry out some major surgery on a hedge. This gives me time to learn something about tiling and worktops.  But for the moment I need to turn my attention building a climbing frame.  I was so appalled at the prices charged for climbing frames when the children were small that I designed and built one myself.  It was the shape of a truncated pyramid with a base 2 metres square and it had bars on the side for clambering up.  The children loved it - it became a house, a ship, a car, somewhere to hang wet washing.  It even became an umpire’s chair when we used to play soft tennis on the lawn.  Later its use evolved into somewhere to keep livestock: wrapped in wire netting it became a temporary pen for geese and chickens.  Finally it rotted and went the way of all flesh.  So now I am commanded by Younger Daughter to build another for Theo and Bean, a rectangular one this time, to fit the confines of her small Cardiff garden.  What are Sunday’s for?
    As it happens last Sunday I was travelling back from Le Havre, not somewhere you would wish to go unless you were going somewhere else, if you see what I mean, for it was bombed to bits in the war.  Three thousand French civilians died in the Le Havre bombing, so my friend who lives there tells me, and the then German commander actually pleaded to be allowed to evacuate the town.  It made no difference.   Anyway it was rebuilt in a concrete Stalinist style and won some UNESCO award, though I am not sure for what. In fact, like Slough,  another bombing might be doing it a service.
     John lives in a village outside the town and used to teach English there.  We were at university together in the 1960’s - those halcyon days when the authorities actually paid you for the privilege of giving up your valuable time to be educated. Not that either of us has done a very great deal since, come to that.  Still, there is time yet I tell myself. 
       I have been asked to return next month to Cambridge to give a talk on the amateur research I have been doing for the last thirty years on Neolithic sites in the Vale of Glamorgan and I am hurrying to prepare a booklet summarising this work and to have it printed before then.  I conclude that the Neolithic people must have been able to write and that they measured the circumference of the earth, which is something rather easier to do than you might imagine. You can even do it yourself if you are a good judge of distance, have excellent eyesight and some knowledge of Pythagorean geometry.  Of course you probably won’t be very accurate but that doesn’t matter: it is the principle that counts.  
     What the learned souls - students mostly - who will listen to me will make of this I tremble to think.  I cannot talk from a script - even notes distract me.   The only way I can address an audience and hope to hold their attention is simply to talk and hope I don’t dry up.  Nevertheless, I am scared. I see in my mind’s eye only a field of cold, hard, sceptical academic stares which any amount of smiling and amusing anecdote may fail to melt.  And to talk on buoyantly for fifty minutes when the audience is as receptive as a brick wall is hard, even when you know the material well.  I know,  I have often done it and in the theatre it is far easier to act when you have the audience on your side.
     Ken the builder is sympathetic and I sense knows the feeling.  I want him to repair the soffits and fascias at the top of the house where rot and jackdaws have made a hole.  ‘Are you OK with heights?’ I ask solicitously.  ‘Oh, I’m not worried by heights,’ says Ken.  ‘I don’t have a fear of falling.’ 
    ‘That’s all right then,’ I say.
    ‘No,’ says Ken. ‘It’s just the fear of hitting the ground that terrifies me.’
       

LAST WRITE OF THE PROMS

Of course I blame Nigel Kennedy.

We’d been invited to a friend’s house for supper and a joint watching of the Last Night of the Proms which, apart from the wonderful Joyce DiDonato and Marin Alsop, also starred Nigel Kennedy.  At least he is British, the other two being and sounding - as Simon Schama was to observe - impeccably American.  Pomp and Circumstance internationalised at last.  But I miss the sea shanties.  Perhaps they couldn't be internationalised.

Still, Nigel Kennedy made me think of three very pretty female violinists who play ‘Kalinka’ on YouTube.  Well I guess they play it in lots of other surroundings as well but I always used to listen to them when I was writing my novel  ‘Boraya’ to put me in a suitably Russian mood and when I got home after the Proms I played the video again.

Suddenly I was transported back to Borayaland - to the Casa Malinka dacha:  an eerie feeling - half way between a dream and a memory.  I wandered through the rooms of the dacha, sensing the atmosphere as though in an empty house, being reminded of the events and the people and the conversations that I had placed there.   I had written these but now I felt that I had merely been a fly on the wall and that the events I had imagined had really taken place and I had seen them.  Strange and bewildering this confusion of memory and imagination.

Casa Malinka wasn’t based on any house I had ever seen being a Catalan house on the Gulf of Finland, with an onion dome on the roof; large windows, big heavy doors and a long garden, falling gently away from the house.  It was as though I had lived there once - which I suppose for the nine months I that was writing the novel - I had been.

'Boraya'  still has no takers, however.  The manuscript - or should that now be ‘e-script?’ - lies on a London agent’s slush pile awaiting the end of the month when the sands of hope will run out.  It is looking as though I shall have to publish it myself.  We’ll see.  It was a learning experience, though still a good read and a page turner.  Maybe a little unsubtle, but little in Russian life is subtle.  Some people have read it avidly, others it seems to have left cold.  I suppose as my first (possibly my only, who knows?) novel it has a special place in my heart.

All of which makes me yearn to get on with writing my second one - 'Henric's Mill' - which will be set in France and which spans the life of a refugee from the 1920’s Russian Civil war who escapes from Russia with his sister’s papers - something that leads to all sorts of complications.  The story set first in Paris and then in the Cantal runs through the Second World War and up to the present (more or less) when Felix, the protagonist and now in his late eighties becomes a refugee from French Justice and escapes back to Russia.  Felix's character is slowly forming in my head and beginning to tell me the hoops through which he wants me to jump.

But instead of being able to get on with composing such entertaining nonsense I am hard at work trying to publish all the Neolithic research I have done over the years in order at least to  have a proof copy of a small book when I have to give a talk to a student archeology society in November.  The text is more or less written but it is taking ages to transform it into the typeset and illustrated pdf file required by the publishers.  In this case it is the pictures rather than the characters that seem to have minds of their own.

Yet I did do something this week for the first time (or at least the first time that I can remember, which isn't the same thing) and that was to pick up my neighbour’s six year old from school.  The neighbour had had to go to London and my task was to take her daughter home and give her to the babysitter who would be arriving - or so I was told.

I stood in the rain with huddled groups of other parents awaiting the magic hour at which the school portals would open and the children emerge.  Except they didn’t.  They come out one at a time and these days each has to ‘spot’ a parent or parent substitute before being released.  Luckily Rose knows me quite well, but she was one of the last to come out and the rain was heavy.  I wondered if I had come to the right door.  But eventually there she was and so we were able to run home while she told me a long and involved story she had written that day about a white rabbit called Milly who had a brother and a sister (also white rabbits) and a Mother rabbit, called Lily (or maybe Lilly), who was Ginger.  I didn’t catch half of it and all the rabbits ended up in a tree at one point from which they descended by simply leaping to the ground.

I protested.  "Rabbits don't climb trees," I said unhelpfully.

“That’s the thing about stories,” said Rose a little crossly.  I can make my characters do absolutely anything I want.

Bright confident morning! Clearly the rabbits haven't started yet to argue with their author. 

GOING BLACKBERRYING

It was decided, it being a sunny afternoon, that I would take my little grandson blackberrying.  He even turned off, by himself, the television where the umpteenth episode of Shaun the Sheep that he had watched so far that day had been playing  a moment before.  He loves his Shaun the Sheep does our little Theo.
    Tupperware bowls in hand - a small one for him, a larger one for me - we set out hand in hand towards the lane where the blackberries grow, with Theo pausing here and there to pick some shrivelled offering growing by the roadside and putting it in his mouth. I explained about petrol fumes but I don’t think he was bothered.
    Eventually we came to where the fruit grew more plentifully.  I had taken the precaution of bringing with me some secateurs the better to approach some of the wilder hedges and started to snip, clearing a way for Theo. This was a mistake.  Here was a far better pastime than blackberrying. He demanded the secateurs and began to snip. I had lost one blackberry picker and in return - I turned round to watch his progress - I had gained a snipper of leaves, a little pile of which lay on the ground.  He was not one wit interested in cutting out the bramble shoots that had grown so vigorously across the path.  He just wanted to cut a happy little nest of leaves.  Luckily at that point I found a lovely little crop of fruit at the right height for him to pick. I relieved him of the secateurs and gave him back his bowl.
    But then came a howl - a howl of fright more than anything. I thought he’d found a dead body,  a half-eaten rabbit perhaps, he came rushing back to me gasping for breath.  He struggled to get the words out - “there, there!” he panted, pointing.
    “Where, what?”  I started to go over to where he was pointing.
    “No!” he shrieked.
    “There’s nothing here.”  And there wasn’t.  Not anyway anything that I could see.
    “Spider’s web!” he intoned in terms of dread.
    Now that I looked more closely I could see if I bent down to his height that the sunlight caught a corner of a cobweb.  Theo has a relaxed relationship with arachnids, but for some reason their webs terrify him beyond all reason.
    “It’s nothing,” I said, and avoiding the web as best I could, picked the blackberries.  Theo watched in anxiety as if expecting me at any moment to be turned into a pillar of salt. 
    I went further into the lane hoping that there might be fewer autumnal spiders’ webs but Theo was loathe to follow. I think he thought the vegetation which towered around us might suddenly come alive and imprison us.  Both literally and metaphorically another blackberrying avenue became closed off.
    Reluctantly I retraced my steps, but then found a bush which I could guarantee free both of overhanging vegetation and spiders’ webs.  At last Theo might add to the three meagre specimens in the bottom of his Tupperware.
    He began reaching hesitantly for the fruit, but then dropped the bowl and clasped his hands over his ears.  He came running back to me.
    “Bees, bees!” he shouted and he did a little jig on the spot still with his hands over his ears as though convinced that if you couldn’t actually hear a bee then it wouldn’t sting you.  The poor lad has never been bitten by a bee though  in recent weeks  he has unfortunately been stung by a wasp. Naturally, when I looked I failed to see any bees. 
    Another wail - this time Theo had been stung by a nettle.
    At this rate we were not likely to return home with much of a harvest. So then I hit on a plan.  Theo could give me his bowl and stay six feet away from the brambles and the nettles but from where he could still see to point out the blackberries to me, especially the low lying ones which he could see from his height and I couldn’t see from mine.  This plan worked most excellently.
    “There!” he would say, “there, underneath.  Look!”
    We had the bowls filled in no time and then we went home and baked a crumble with Theo mixing together the flour and the sugar and the butter, picking the mixture up and letting it slip through his fingers.  He even cleaned up the mess on the table afterwards.

MY OLD OFFICE

Blood clinic this afternoon so walked down to the Leisure Centre at half past three. Vast hall and only six beds in operation; didn't appear especially busy. But the greeter on the door consulted a chart liberally marked up with highlighter and said she couldn't fit me in until half past five. 'You see I've sent a lot of people away and told them to come back now.' I walked away and sat in the physic garden for half an hour reading. 

What to do?  Wait and go back, or go home?  Once giving blood seemed to be easy and fun: the staff were helpful, there was almost a party atmosphere in the sesssions in the old Town Hall.  You met your friends.  Now in the vast hall of the Leisure Centre with six beds pressed against one wall and what seemed like an army of staff checking and re-checking lest someone who whose mother had Creuzfeld Jacob’s disease and who had sex (with or without a condom) somewhere in Africa that wasn’t Egypt might be trying to slip through the net.  There's a mighty dead hand over everything.  I suspect it has something to do with the re-organisation of the Health Service but in an attempt to cut cost and do things better they are killing the golden egg laying goose. In this curmudgeonly mood I turned away and went to have a small beer in Aboreal on the way home.  

Aboreal, which is a pleasant cross between an restaurant and a bar is a lovely place, full of distressed and limed woodwork.  There are street tables (the whole front can be opened up on sunny days so there isn’t really an inside and an outside) but also comfortable sofas.  Dining tables also.  It is a place to sit and read or to meet your friends.  The staff are friendly and efficent and whenever I have eaten there it has been a happy experience. It was also once my office.  I had a square little box which I rented which now lies in the middle of Arboreal.  One corner has been cut off to provide access and one wall is now the rear bar, but I can still say, ‘this is where I had my desk’ and ‘here I kept my filing cabinet.’

After supper I wandered out just as the sun was setting to check the greengages on the tree. They are just turning and one or two are already ripe and beset by insects who mine deep cavities in the yellow flesh. Not such a good crop as last year - the spring was cold and wet and the wildlife that might have fertilised the blossom stayed firmly indoors. So I suppose I should be grateful for what fruit there is. Nothing quite beats the taste of a ripe greengage fresh off the tree, the soft feel of the fruit taken either by fingers or tongue is sensual and luxuriant. And next to the tree is a hibiscus whose flowers lend a touch of the exotic with their oriental shade of purple. It goes with the green fruit. Wimbledon colours!

Strange to think that these same sensations, the fruit, the light, the flowers would have been available (more or less) to my neolithic people who might have stood 6,000 years ago on this very spot, pausing perhaps from surveying operations.  Earlier I had begun the job of condensing all my neolithic research into a little self-published book to take with me when I have to give a talk to a university student archeology club in Cambridge in November and I want to have something to take with me.  It is a task that I have long put off and I was glad to have started it.

We tend to think of the Stone Age as above all else uncivilised and primitive. But they are only 240 generations away from us. They were also clever and - so I argue - could write and do mathematics. They measured the earth accurately and based units of linear and area measurement upon the result. We have them still today. The cricket pitch at one chain or four poles is exactly one two millionth of the earth's circumference.  Busy with their monumental stones and demonstrating their mathematics these people unfortunately overlooked the science of metal working and so were wiped out by more aggressive folk in the iron and bronze ages. 

PLAY AND PROJECTS

Reading Oscar Wilde's 'An Ideal Husband'

10 August
Summer party this afternoon and our staged reading (under my faltering direction) of 'An Ideal Husband.' The weather looks as though it will be kind - a blessing (as Poirot might put it) 'most considerable,' though interestingly the Welsh weather forecast illustrated the afternoon with an ominous patch of blue over the Vale of Glamorgan, while the UK forecast foretold a sunny afternoon everywhere. As the Welsh forecasters work from the same data - indeed the same maps - I wonder how such differences (which occur frequently) happen. Anyway 'Ideal Husband' by Oscar Wilde is our entertainment for this afternoon.

Later
Afternoon passed off very well, considering. All the actors played their socks off and the weather was kind, the garden lovely and the music transporting. (As the piano was placed between beds of lavender, Bach wafted towards us in the interval on the calming scent).

We even had a pigeon come to visit - not, a dove of which I am particularly fond, though it did have a large white flash on its neck and therefore may have some dove blood from way back.  It rather crashed landed in the ash tree that hangs over the river not twenty feet from where we were playing and it may have been shot for I heard distant popping, as though the farmers were busy with their guns, and the bird’s feathers looked ruffled.  But it didn't appear seriously hurt, more exhausted than frightened.  Anyway it climbed higher in the tree and from its position in the gods sat watching the third act of the play.  The thought occurred that the bird might have been old Oscar himself, reincarnated and come to watch how his play looked one hundred and twenty years on. Do the dead take on the forms of living creatures?  Many people seem to think so.

15 August
Each year there comes a day when the weather says 'summer is over; autumn has arrived.' The seasons change in a day. One moment you are out in the garden until nine o'clock, basking in bare sleeves and the next you are thinking about lighting the fire, looking for dry logs and it is dark at seven. The wind gets up and the rain is no longer summer rain but autumnal, borne in on an Atlantic wind that makes the trees toss angrily and which finds from somewhere you hadn't noticed little piles of dried leaves to blow around. The air smells different: an autumnal fruity smell; an odour of finality. That's it, it seems to say: growth over, the year over, downhill all the way now. Of course, young September will rebel and October may bring fresh crisp frosts and magnificent colours to the foliage; fruit may be abundant and be not yet ready for picking, but there comes a day when you know that that is it for another year and that day was today - 15 August - early,  so perhaps we are in for a hard and unrelenting winter. At least in these Bardic parts of the kingdom.  Stock up little birds, fatten yourselves up at my bird table, nibble away you rodents that scurry in the nightime - for it is a long time until next May and there will be hungry months ahead.

This morning however it is brighter and sunnier - but in an autumnal sense now. I am still worried by the lack of insects and the absence of House Martins in the sky. Last night when I walked to the castle for a bit of exercise as I often do, the bats were out in force, searching perhaps for a hatch of something or other.  Having just written that I notice a fly and a bee basking in the sunshine on the wall outside my office window. The bee seems to be trying a handstand, which on a vertical wall is rather difficult.  Anyway he has now given up and flown away. The starlings that used to be so numerous and which used to nest under my eaves are also now completely absent.

16 August
If I walk for thirty five minutes along the disused railway line - full of rabbits now - and with cows and sheep grazing among the hawthorn and ash on every side and then if I turn off and walk up through an elderly wood lit by dappled sunlight on the leafy branches and so up the hill I eventually turn the corner and there is a thatched pub that serves draught Bass.  And that's where I have just been to sit in the autumnal sunshine and sip a pint of the best beer to have been brewed since 1777 or whenever it was that Bass was first brewed - before the French and American revolutions certainly - and ponder on my various literary projects.

I am experimenting at the moment with self-publishing a book I have long had on the stocks - a bit of first world war history - grim for a day such as today, or any day really.  It was begun in 1983 and it has been sitting on my conscience since.  Then in November I have to give a talk in Cambridge about my researches into Neolithic measurement: I have been asked by an undergraduate archaeology society, so I think it’s time to assemble all the papers and website data I have accrued in the last twenty or thirty years and make them into another book, which I could hand round and even autograph.   The material is all written: I’d just have to edit it and prepare a continuous text.  After that there’s ‘Boraya’ - my great (at least in words) Russian novel which at the moment sits in London on an agent’s slush pile.  If there’s no interest come November then I’ll publish that myself, too.

Now I must prepare some supper: avocado, lettuce, tomato, feta, smoked salmon, perhaps with a glass of white wine if I feel extravagant. Afterwards we shall have the remains of some pastries, which a kind neighbour bought over this morning, and contemplate tomorrow. The sky is blue and, wonder of wonders, there is even a House Martin in the sky. It must have put in a fleeting appearance just for me.  Or maybe it’s the spirit of some dead ancestor just checking up.

A VISIT TO LONDON

The Cherry Orchard

 Last weekend we went to London to stay with our friends who live in Dulwich - a part of London quite impossible to reach without enjoying long spells trapped in the purgatory of the South Circular Road.  In the  habit of these things the road is neither really south, nor circular nor even a road, being bits and pieces of roads tacked together on that familiar British pattern of ‘make-do and mend.’  Apart from the M25, I asked, when was the last time that a major road was built in London? The 1950’s I should imagine.  Boris, get weaving.

    But I shouldn’t commence one of these increasingly rare blogs with a rant when I spent a good part of the weekend surrounded by great beauty. I ate breakfast in a cherry orchard. No, really, I did, in the heart of Surbiton and only a stone’s throw from the River Thames.  Admittedly all the cherry trees had been felled and the land used to build the Surbiton equivalent of dachas - just as Chekhov predicted in his play - except that is for a single ancient specimen that was still producing knicker pink blossoms with Japanese extravagance left in the middle of our friends' garden where we admired it from the comfy furnished warmth of a conservatory while eating a type of meal known only to Londoners (they say London is a foreign country) which started with almond croissants, fresh rhubarb and yoghurt and progressed via black pudding, baked tomatoes, fried egg and sausages made from wild boar to ordinary butter croissants and jam.  And all this while contemplating the cherry blossom like Madame Ranevskaya herself.  Sublime would not be an excessive adjective with which to describe this gastronomic experience.
    But I mustn’t confuse you or you’ll be thinking that Surbiton is in Dulwich.  It isn’t.  We came home via Surbiton which lies on the river Thames to the South West of London, whereas Dulwich lies in the South or South East.  From Dulwich we went to Greenwich, which is on the river, and which claims to lie at the centre of the earth and has the Meridian line to prove it. (In passing you might think that Boris might have named a Tube line ‘Meridian,’ especially if one ran out to Greenwich, but I understand from my friend Angus who joined us on the Greenwich trip and whom I have known since University days, that the reason there are no tubes in South London is because the ground is sand, whereas north of the river it is clay. When you tunnel into sand it collapses, apparently, thus foiling your idea of a tube train.  So that is why the overground railway predominates south of the river but makes up for the land stolen for the tracks by providing a rich harvest of railway arches underneath which a good part of the commerce of London started, apparently).

Greenwich Park and the Maritime Museum. Canary Wharf Beyond

    Where were we? Greenwich.  Yes.  Home of Elizabeth, the unlikely heroine of Boraya, my Russian novel which just yesterday I finished or at least have done with for the time being.  One of the last things I altered was to put Elizabeth in the Trafalgar pub when she returns on a visit to Greenwich, where she used to live before she became sucked into her Russian maelstrom.  She had a flat somewhere near the park and the station, but she also visited the pub and last weekend I did the same and drank beer watching the river in full flood lapping at the pub windows.  It almost felt dangerous. We could almost have been in St Petersburg.

The River Lapping at the Gates

    Greenwich is just so beautiful that one wonders why the world ever again should need architects.  Sir Christopher Wren and Indigo Jones (and perhaps we could throw in John Nash and Capability Brown) have done all the work needed; they have produced the designs and the proportions and the perspectives.  Now our computers could just produce endless variations of their work. Modern buildings it seems are just shallow impersonations of architecture and ugly to boot.  The Shard, which towers above you when you stand on London Bridge station, may be profitable and clever but it is uncivilised and soulless. Give me Greenwich and St Pauls any day.

The Shard

  So we walked past the Observatory on the hill and eschewed the chance to stand on the Meridian line and headed for the Maritime Museum, to view our glorious ocean going heritage. Nelson is there of course, or rather parts of him, to wit his frock coat, which looks made for a twelve year old boy brought up on a poor diet.  How the musketeer in Redoubtable ever managed to hit such a small target is quite amazing. It can’t have been an aimed shot - just a lucky, or if you were Nelson, unlucky, chance. 

Queen Anne's House

    Still there was no getting away from Nelson, even in the Queen Anne House, built ingeniously for the wife of James I (or VI) by Inigo Jones over a species of the Old Kent Road.  It’s a lovely white box of a house that contrives to look both plain and beautiful, and a home, too.   Tardis like, it is bigger inside than out but sadly has been stripped of its furniture and now houses all the Maritime Museum’s pictures including the stonking great canvas - the size of Victory’s mainsail I shouldn’t wonder - that is Turner’s depiction of the battle of Trafalgar.  It is so large that Turner must have bought his paint by the gallon and I remember it with awe.

JMW Turner: The Battle of Tralgar

    All rather surreal, but then just in case visitors got carried away,  the students from nearby Greenwich University decided to stage a production of Shakespeare’s ‘The Winter’s Tale.’  We kept running into the cast as we wandered about looking at the pictures.  I asked one of them who was holding a bloody rag where the bear was and she told me that it was in my imagination.  I offered to play the bear, but as we were then half way through the play she thought my performance might be a trifle under rehearsed. It wouldn’t have mattered; the performance was anyway quite inaudible given the vast echoing chambers of the unfurnished Queen Anne’s house while the audience’s attention kept being diverted by the superb proportions of Mr Jones’ halls and galleries and the geometric patterns of his marble floors.  ‘Bear with me,’ I said  and turned regretfully away.

The Cutty Sark Tea Clipper

    Finally we looked at the Cutty Sark, magnificent against a grey sky.  But why, I asked, did people ever bother to race the tea home from China?  Surely it would have been cheaper to build a bigger, uglier ship that might have taken a fortnight longer to make the voyage but would have delivered the tea more cheaply?  No sooner had I asked the question than I knew that I was speaking with the spirit of the Shard, and not with the civilising souls of Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones.  

Pictures are mine apart from those of Turner, of The Shard, and of the Cherry Blossom which are courtesy of Wikipedia.

BORAYA

On their blog  The Lazuli Portals,  Joanna and Ron are soliciting responses to a questionnaire about writing works in progress.  I had fun in filling this in (I am a glutton for questionnaires) and so thought you might like to see the responses.  Thank you Joanna and Ron. 

What is the working title of your book or project?

Boraya

Where did the idea come from for the book or project?
 
I was once at a New Year Party and met a Russian who, at 9 o’clock, said he was going to bed as it was midnight in Russia.  The whole novel grew from that premise.

What genre does it fall under, if any?

This is hard.  I hope, above all, people will find it a good story.  I weave together three broad genres: romance; thriller and historical - at the same time the book isn’t an historical romantic thriller.

If applicable, who would you choose to play your characters in a movie?
 
There are 23 characters, who would require casting if ever the book became a film plus various historical characters.   I have been wrestling with who might play the younger characters but no-one quite seems suitable.  I’d have Dame Judi Dench, though, playing Ludmila, the matriarch, and, were he up to it, Peter O’Toole, playing the elderly Loic, the nearly eighty year old gardener cum groom at the Casa Malinka dacha.    But I’d also need a younger 1940’s version of Peter and perhaps someone to play Loic's father.  

There are two horses as well: Borodino and Tantsovshitsa.
 
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your manuscript or project?
 
In Russia love, war and chocolate inspire ordinary people to do most extraordinary things.

Will your book or story be self-published or represented by an agency?
 
Have to see first whether anyone wants to take it up.

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?
 
I began in August and was finished by mid December - so four and a half months.  It’s about 120,000 words.  I'm on the final edit at the moment.

What other book or stories would you compare this story to within the genre?
 
I can’t think of an easy comparison.  I have definitely been influenced by Rose Tremain and William Boyd.

Who or what inspired you to write this book or story?
 
I met Rose Tremain at the Hay Literary Festival some years ago.  I didn’t know who she was.  She didn’t know who I was.  Rashly, she told me to write.   Boraya, I suppose, is the result.

What else about the book or story might pique the reader’s interest?
 
Well, there’s some good sex in it! And a lot of snow!  I’d like to think there’s a fair amount of human interest, too, given that it’s a book about four principal characters: one Scots, two Russian and one French, compelled by love, war and chocolate (Boraya is the name of a chocolate company in St Petersburg whose uneasy privatisation forms the backbone of the novel) to do extraordinary things.  It’s a story of people a long way out of their comfort zone and also a city moving between grandeur, terrible affliction during the wartime siege, and rebirth.

Although the story is set mainly in the late 1990’s there are excursions into the 1940’s and although it is set mainly in and around St Petersburg, we drift to London, Edinburgh, Helsinki, Zurich, Brittany even.  On the way we meet various historical figures, including  Elizabeth the Great, the illegitimate, cross-dressing, washerwoman’s daughter who becomes Empress of Russia, (who proves yet again that fact is always stranger than fiction);  Rodolphe Lindt, who accidentally revolutionised chocolate making in the nineteenth century, and Flora MacDonald, whose eventful life on two continents is reflected in that of her descendant - the Elizabeth MacDonald of Boraya - whose unknown Russian leaves her at nine o’clock on New Year’s Eve. 

Oh, there’s a ruined wooden church in it as well.

DOG DAYS

Life this Easter is disrupted: we are dog-sitting Elder Daughter’s Labradoodle puppy and the experience has served to remind me why I decided not to have another dog when Samson, the second of our two Newfies, died fourteen years ago.

    She’s not a puppy puppy this Daisy, more an obstreperous teenager, foisted on unsuspecting grandparents.  Her weapon of choice is the bark and her preferred game is ‘can’t catch me.’  She also refuses to mount the stairs.  Now I know plenty of people who would think this an excellent quality in a dog if it stopped them parading through the bedrooms and bathrooms and so it would be in Daisy, but the trouble is she doesn’t like being left and so when you go upstairs she stands at the foot of the staircase and barks until you come down again.  As a result I am writing this on the kitchen table where Daisy can keep an eye on me rather than in my study upstairs. Peace is anyway reigning, but I suspect she will come and nuzzle me soon enough demanding a game of chase in the garden where she has found that I don’t like her chewing the young Medlar tree; she knows this will make me chase her away, which is why she does it. No doubt she will grow up into something sage and docile as most teenagers do, but such maturity cannot come soon enough.  At half-past six on a cold morning with an icy wind lifting the corners of your dressing gown, the dog undoubtedly gets rather more pleasure from the game than you do.

Apart from the dog Easter otherwise threatens to be peaceful, and as a bonus the sun is shining. That means I shall give the grass both here and at the theatre its first cut of the year.  I went yesterday to buy petrol which cost me almost £6.  I reflected that when I learned to drive petrol in France was 7/6 a gallon - 37.5p in new money - and that that had seemed outrageous.  In Britain the cost was still only five shillings a gallon (25p) and everyone then thought that prohibitive.  I can’t remember the price of oil but it would be served by a garageman from a little pump into a sort of jug labelled 'Castrol' and then he would pour a pint or a quart of it into the engine - an elaborate business now lost in the mists of time.


Yesterday I went to two parties: a children’s Easter Egg hunt in a neighbour's garden took place in the afternoon.  Usually when my kind neighbour puts on a children’s event I am accompanied by Theo, my grandson, who is four, but while Elder Daughter is living the high life in Amsterdam this Easter (and we are living the low life with the dog) Younger Daughter has whisked the grandchildren off to West Wales.  Most inconsiderate!  It feels quite odd to be attending a children’s party sans child, though there are always plenty of adults and suitably adult refreshments to while away the afternoon.  With a glass of cold Cava I heard an explanation - something else from the mists of time - of why Easter should be populated by Rabbits and Eggs, rabbits not laying eggs ,obviously.  My fellow guest said that the origin lay in the hares that disputed their territories by boxing around Easter time.  These territories tended to be fields in which plovers had laid their eggs.  By some process of zoological metamorphosis the hares became rabbits and the plovers’ eggs, the exorbitantly priced chocolate confections we know so well.  

The second party was a friend's 70th and was a most jolly affair marred only by our wondering continually in what state our home might be after two or three hours of depredation by the dog.  This didn't prevent us meeting some old and some new friends and from eating what must be the best birthday cake I have ever tasted.  It was a fruit cake, rich and moist and baked to perfection, wonderfully marzipanned - which triggered an incidental conversation with an Indian doctor about almond trees in central India - and with a plaster-perfect thick layer of white icing.  For adornment the cake boasted not candles but a marzipan blackboard on which had been written e = mc2, along with a figure wearing long shorts (Ilian had been a physics teacher, in Bermuda).

Sadly there has been no word from Ken whose rest I shall have to disturb again after the break.  We shall shortly be having an Estonian visitor who is coming to improve her English.  The idea is that in return for such instruction and her board, lodging and modest entertainment she will help us paint the house.  I do feel that to keep our end up with the Estonians we shall need a bath with working taps.  It isn't just something to keep the coal in.

TAPS AND SERVICE

I rang Ken our builder on his mobile.  It rang and rang and eventually the answerphone kicked in.
I should have insisted that he fixed the taps in the bathroom when he was here last autumn but he was anxious to move on to another job and by mutual consent we agreed the bathroom taps could wait.  But now the taps can wait no longer:  they have expired.  You turn the handle but water flows there none, if you see what I mean. The plastic widget that holds the metal splines of the tap has worn smooth rendering the tap useless.  The only thing we can be thankful for is that the tap expired in the off position rather than the on.

Now I don't know whether you've ever had anything to do with taps, but they are a conspiracy on humankind.  Not only do the manufacturers contrive continually to change their designs, thus making it quite impossible to replace like with like, but they are hideously expensive to buy.  Nor is that all, for you cannot buy the little plastic widget, worth about 3p without buying a whole new tap.  I don't call it a conspiracy for nothing.

 There are goods that you buy - mobile phones for instance - which make you wonder how anything so complex can be made so cheaply.  With taps it is the reverse.  We have had taps since Roman times and though they are simple devices involving no complicated technology they still lag behind in the value for money stakes by a mile.  Which might be understandable if taps were rare, but most people have at the very least half a dozen in their houses and some many more.  Why then are taps so expensive?  It's a question to put to the government; it might take their minds off the deficit. Think of all the taps there must be in government offices!

Anyway, there we are, or rather there Ken isn't, so I set off down to the Post Office through the rain and sleet to post a parcel consoling myself that I would pop into Waitrose afterwards for a free regular cappuccino to which my little green loyalty card entitles me daily.  Though I have my laptop with me I find - or in this case fail to find - my reading glasses.  Luckily I can go over the road to our newly refurbished and ultra-efficient local library and pick up a most excellent pair of reading glasses, gold rimmed, half moon, in a cigar type metal holder for only £4.99, which seems to me to be another piece of incredible value, besides which the purveyors of taps should bow their heads in shame. 

So there I am sitting in Waitrose, with my coffee and new reading glasses, and tapping away at the front end of Boraya - which, in case you were wondering, isn't a car but a novel with an overly long introduction from which I have to remove at least 10,000 words of carefully crafted and much sweated over prose.  This makes me weep almost as much as the taps.  Still it has to be done, but it makes me worried and anxious.

Now Waitrose staff (or Partners as they prefer to be called) are programmed to respond to worried and anxious looking customers and so, before long, Julia makes her smiling appearance beside me.  I reassure her that my troubled brow has nothing to do with my inability to choose the right brand of olive oil or a possible absence from the store of Duchy Originals, and that on the contrary I am exceeding content with everything apart from the problem of the front end of my book.  Not to waste a conversation with a customer Julia then produces a card and invites me to email a cordial sentence to Waitrose encapsulating my experience in the store that day, for which, she implies, there is a prize of £500. 

Now £500 for one sentence isn't bad going.  It's about £20 a word. Exeter Writers are running a short story competition with a £500 prize, but for that you have to write 3,000 words, or thereabouts,  a mere 20p a word.  I intend to enter it.  I have a story written.  But £500 for one sentence beats this hollow and so when I got home I thought I would compose a particularly soupy paeon of praise to Waitrose customer service in general, and Julia in particular, and I duly ventured into the website to post it.  I may have had to wade through a number of survey questions about my grocery shopping, but hopefully my telling observations about customers and staff being one happy partnership have been properly recorded.

In the middle of this I see the answerphone blinking.  It is Ken, asking me to ring him back.  I do and we make contact. 'I'm in Cornwall,' he says.  'On holiday.  I'll ring you next week.'  If he's in Cornwall, I think, it will be a bit of a busman's holiday for him what with landslips and houses collapsing.  I hope he has taken his tools with him.  So, our taps will have to wait.   The grandchildren who look forward to splashing in the bath will be seriously put out and we ourselves will have to make do with showers.  Meanwhile I live in hope that Ken's bill for installing new taps in the bathroom will be matched by a timely voucher from Waitrose or a cheque from Exeter, but I am not holding my breath.

A WALL OF 'POST-IT'S

    Following my last post here I can say that the Mill is now sold, which is a relief to its owner but sad for us.  So I won’t write any more about the Mill although no doubt bits and pieces from our many visits there will find their way into stories I may write in the future.
    Surprisingly, perhaps, now that I think of it, there’s nothing about the Mill in Boraya - or at least nothing that I can remember.  The second draft of Boraya is coming on apace.  I’m averaging about 4,000 words a day of editing - which is really rather more than plain editing:  there’s an awful lot of verbal garbage to be removed, but also new material to be inserted.  I read an article a couple of months ago about the hundreds of rotting wooden churches in Russia, many built in the eighteenth century and now in an advanced stage of collapse.  The pictures of these churches looked so romantic and beautiful with their spires and their onion domes and their bell towers leaning at odd angles, that I had to put a fictional one into Boraya.
    My fictional church, built in 1745, remains standing despite wind, rain and heavy snow.  It is dedicated it to Saint Demetrius, a Greek saint from Thessalonica, and it stands in a clearing where the ground rises a little near the village of Kokkoila whence on November 8 (the Saint’s anniversary according to the Orthodox calendar) some of the older villagers bring icons and try to enter the building despite the chained and padlocked doors and the signs that indicate mortal peril from falling timbers: a very practical case of ‘abandon hope all ye who enter here.’
    The temperature is minus twelve on the night that Elizabeth and Vladimir visit the church of Saint Demetrius.  They are on horseback and the ground is covered in snow; a full moon is shining, silhouetting the church black against the sky and the horses have to plough through drifts of white, sparkling powder. 
     But characters are a bit like young children: you can only control them so far.  I had intended that Elizabeth and Vladimir should just ride to this church, but Elizabeth, of course, has to dismount and then find a fragment of rotted wood from the church to put in her pocket.   She wants, she decides (nothing to with me, guv!) to have something to drop into the coffin of the gardener at Casa Malinka, who used to visit this church long ago, for it was his death that was largely responsible for bringing the couple together.   So now I have to extend the funeral scene too.  And so it goes on, words are trimmed out and bits of story put back in.
     We were invited out to dinner by some actor friends the other evening and they showed me a book in which various well-known writers had been asked to submit a picture of their working spaces and to describe how they wrote.  One photograph stood out: it was of Will Self’s study which showed an entire wall covered with ‘post-it’ notes, each with a jotting about the piece he was working on.
     I was intrigued. What a wonderful idea! Because I find one problem with writing a novel  (Boraya is the first I have attempted) is that you can only see a small part of it at any one time.  An artist who paints a picture can see the whole work at once; so can a sculptor or your average poet. But a novelist can only see about a page at a time.  Not enough.  By putting ‘post-it’s’ on a wall you can get some reminder of what is happening.
      I will try that when I finished this second draft. There is some re-shuffling to do, particularly at the beginning.  And then I will read the whole thing out loud.  After that it should be finished: I hope in about six months.
    Still not a lot will happen today: the grandchildren are here, Theo and Isla.  I have already pushed Isla (10 months) twice around the block in her pushchair with the object of getting her to fall asleep. We are going out now to ‘Bijou’ - a play centre with a tall tower full of ropes and nets and slides where 4 year old Theo likes to romp while I drink a coffee and remember what it was like to be four years old.  I can remember it in fact very well.  It seemed like yesterday.   But how would you feel if you were suddenly four years old again and without memories and experience?  Almost naked, I would think, and certainly scared. Who am I? Who are you?  Who are all those people?

The picture by the way is courtesy of Google Images. I trust no one will mind my using it. If anyone does then I apologise.  If you go to this website http://www.richarddavies.co.uk/woodenchurches/ you will find plenty more and if this helps to promote action to save some of these wonderful structures, then it will all have been worthwhile.

A LAST LOOK AT THE MILL

It is quite amazing, isn’t it, how many conditions you can believe yourself to be suffering from if once you start clicking on those myriad websites that deal with health.  In fact someone might well organise a hypochondriacs’ conference at which there could be a competition to do just that.  Prizes could be awarded both for the severity and the rarity of the condition at the root of your malady.  Anything would do from an allergy to a rare insect bite through to some less romantic condition, gallstones, say, or alcoholism.  I could imagine a quiz: hypochondriacs versus the doctors and we could all place bets on the outcome.
   
Recently I have become convinced in this way that I suffer from ADHD - that is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder - and, for good measure, Hypothyroidism.  I suspect I actually suffer from neither of these as you can’t be hyperactive with an underactive thyroid, can you? Though in the small print they do say that even if you are not hyperactive you may still have an attention deficit and that is, I fear the case with me.  My attention wanders all too easily. After about ten years I become bored and need to move on to something else.

    I am now totally bored by politics, for instance, despite in my heyday having been a Parliamentary Candidate and having written umpteen policy papers, the contents of at least some of which my fellow politicians have inflicted on us, though naturally enough without acknowledgement.  Well, there are many others in the same game; one can’t be proprietorial.  But the business of politics, though clearly as important as ever, seems now to me to have become ever more shabby and worthless.  We know only too clearly what the outcome will be of their efforts to improve our lives, which is that the mess will get worse and we shall be left to clear it up ourselves with less money than we had before they started. Look at the latest scandals; indeed, at the latest legislation on gay marriage which, while I have nothing against it, does make me think that the Government, like Nero is fiddling mightily while Rome burns.  I rather identify with the sign that allegedly greets you at the Canadian Border: ‘We don’t care who you marry so long as you both watch hockey.’

    But we shall muddle through, I suppose, until one day the system collapses. My grandchildren I fear will have a harder life than mine has been. I still get emails from my former political friends, flattering me and soliciting money and help, but the spirit is no longer willing and neither is the flesh. My attention deficit disorder has moved me on and my hypothyroidism means I can’t be bothered anyway.  Though maybe of course I’m not suffering from these at all but something else that I haven’t discovered as yet.  It’s the one good thing about being a hypochondriac: you can always find something else that is wrong with you.

    If I appear in a sombre mood it is because the Mill down in the Auvergne belonging to Rosie and Jim’s son, where we have passed so many happy days in recent years, is sold.  They are down there even at this moment collecting up bits and pieces ready for the new owner to move in.   I doubt I shall see it again, which is really most sad for, with the sun shining, it presented with its trees and meadows and river and hills, the most perfect combination of atmosphere and environment that a human could wish for.  On sunny days busy insects buzzed endlessly and you could almost hear the wildflowers growing, and the apples, peaches and walnuts swelling further with each shower of rain.  The river and millrace chuckled endlessly, the swish and clatter of water, while deep in the woods the wild boar rooted, the deer skipped and martens went about their deadly hunt. Nearer the house, the great walnut trees provided shade under which flourished a whole encyclopaedia of minor wildlife.  And beyond the boundaries, in all the many villages round about, flourished the most beautiful stone architecture in the whole of France.

    On my last day there last summer I took a deckchair and a book and some chilled white wine and sat at the bottom of the lawn under the walnut trees where the forested hillside begins its steep climb to the village, looking back at the house and imagining that I was Logan Mountstuart, the protagonist of William Boyd’s great book ‘Any Human Heart.’  Logan does something very similar in a not very distant though fictional part of France at the age of 85 and unfortunately suffers a heart attack while leaving his book to investigate a bunch of thistles.  I didn’t have any thistles to investigate at the Mill, nor am I 85; maybe that is why I am still here, but next time I am on a health website I shall read up about heart attacks. You never know.  

JE NE SAIS QUOI

La Brasserie du Nord and Chicken and Chips

My great Indian doctor friend, Behjat, sadly no longer with us, was a man of great compassion and understanding and he used to make the best gin and tonics in the world. He used the same four ingredients that everybody uses - gin, tonic, lemon and ice - but his gins and tonic were incomparably better than those of anyone else and certainly were better than mine, even when I adopted his method of mixing, which was to add the lemon juice to the gin before you added the tonic. I think this was because he also added a secret fifth ingredient and that was ‘je ne sais quoi.’

'Je ne sais quoi' is French for ‘I don’t know what’ and it is the phrase best used to describe what turns the ordinary into the extraordinary.  It is applicable to anything that is made through the agency of human hand or human brain. By turns ‘je ne sais quoi’ may comprise love, imagination, flair, enthusiasm, art - or any such adjective.  'Je ne sais quoi' is particularly applicable in the kitchen.  A meal cooked with ‘je ne sais quoi’ is magical; a meal cooked without it may look identical, but will taste flat.

I was thinking of this yesterday coming back from a family party.  We had gathered in a large pub and restaurant near Bath to celebrate three noteworthy events: my elder daughter’s 40th birthday, the engagement of her sister-in-law,  and her father-in-law’s 80th birthday,  all of which occasions took place in sufficient proximity to one another to induce us to push the boat out. We were fourteen altogether, ranging in age from eight months to nine hundred and sixty months, (work it out!) and a very happy party was had by one and all.

Such parties bind the nation together.  It is difficult to imagine anyone in that group being thrown out or disowned by the other members.  In fact rather the reverse for I suggested that if we all sold our respective houses - we had six between us - we could afford to buy something so large that we would never ever get on each other’s nerves.  We would meet perhaps once a month like ships passing in the night in great corridors and by pooling our resources we might be able to employ people to do the ironing.

I have always fancied living in such a house though no-one else unfortunately shares my enthusiasm.  I think you could call it 'je ne sais quoi' applied to living.  It is, after all, what the musicians do in ‘Quartet’ that marvellous directorial debut film by Dustin Hoffman that I saw earlier in the week and which is worth a couple of hours of anyone’s time. It is not only Mr Hoffman's acting that boasts 'je ne sais quoi,' which, now that I come to think of it seems applicable to acting and theatre at least as much as it does to cooking. 

The only slightly disappointing thing about our day out was the food for which we paid an average British price of around £25 a head for something that sadly lacked this 'je ne sais quoi.'  (In France we should have paid a great deal less, despite their VAT and high social charges and the food might well - though not alas certainly - have been better.)  Still, it isn’t easy to say what this food actually lacked. It would have passed any culinary inspection but you had the feeling that the chef wouldn’t really have chosen to eat it himself. It looked pretty, but was devoid of sparkle, the ordinary rather than extraordinary.  The 'je ne sais quoi' wasn't there.

Note, this doesn’t mean exotic. A piece of dry toast can taste extraordinary, so can simple mashed potato and so can chicken and chips, which is what I chose for my main course on the grounds that I ought to be on fairly safe ground.  But chicken and chips is a dish that cries out for 'je ne sais quoi.'  I can remember from thirty-five years ago a chicken and chips in the basket served in the bar of the old Hand Hotel in Llangollen (Wales) and another chicken and chips eaten in ‘La Brasserie du Nord’ in Paris twenty years ago.  In this large busy restaurant they must have been serving one hundred portions of chicken an hour and yet the birds were succulent and truly magical.  More recently, down at the Mill, I can remember sitting on the sunny terrace of a little restaurant in Conques eating chicken and chips, so beautiful cooked and tasty and so carefully presented, that washed down with a splendid bottle of Gaillac rosé I thought that maybe I had already died and gone to Paradise.

My expectations were excessively raised perhaps by such memories.   The appearance of yesterday's chicken couldn’t be faulted; neither could the taste in any absolute sense it was just that somehow a vital ingredient was missing: the ingredient of 'je ne sais quoi.'

I flip through the paper at breakfast this morning. A headline says ‘Eight Easy Dishes. Restaurant Food at Home,’   but nowhere in the notes and instructions does the article mention ‘je ne sais quoi.’
In fact now that I come to think about it this ingredient is missing from a very great part of British life.  This wasn't always the case, but today we seem to have lost the ability to inject a little magic into what we do, preferring to settle for the ordinary, the conventional, the simply dull.  On this depressing thought I had better end.  Still the sun is shining, the cold weather has departed and spring will be here in a month or two.

USHANKA

My ushanka, ordered hurriedly from Amazon when the snow threatened, came this morning.  Arriving early,  the stalwart postman braving the ice had the kindness to hide the parcel in a green garden refuse bag under the table at the side of the house and scrawl a note to that effect on an envelope pushed through the door.  How thoughtful!  Our postmen and women struggling through all manner of weather burdened down by pound upon pound of junk mail, are really quite noble.  Postal spam is a wicked burden on them and us and I'm sure if the Government promised to abolish it it could count on at least five thousand extra votes in every constituency.

So there I have it and you can see it above.  The ushanka - a cold weather hat like a tea cosy with flaps that let down to cover the ears if required -  is a fetching shade of grey, and supposedly the authentic Soviet army model.  It is gunmetal grey and made, I think, from felt with a cotton lining. The outside isn't fur but has a thick carpet-like pile. Anyhow I can vouch for its warmth.  The ushanka even came complete with a  fetching detachable Soviet cap badge in gold and red, the hammer and sickle emblem surrounded by gilded leaves and securely attached by means of two long brass pins.  I have to say that I think it looks very pretty.

I was even in two minds about leaving it on but then I thought it would be asking just too much from my friends and neighbours who must think me eccentric enough as it is. So reluctantly the cap badge has gone; though it can no doubt be easily re-instated if ever there is a need.  Inside on the lining of the ushanka is printed a cartoon of a rabbit and some words in Cyrillic script and the figures 89 - which may well refer to the year of Soviet era manufacture. My ushanka may therefore be already 24 years old, though if so it has been stored well against the day when I might need it.

Also printed is the size, ‘60,’ which refers to the circumference of the head.  I find this slightly too large: the ushanka keeps falling forward, slowly tilting forward over my eyes, but a little padding will remedy that easily.  By my calculation someone whose head is 60 centimetres in circumference has a brain 10 per cent larger than someone whose head is only 58 centimetres in circumference and yet heads apparently range from 54 to 65 centimetres without noticeable effect on the intelligence.  In any case if your brain is too big you become, I understand, an idiot, which perhaps explains why cows and elephants are not the Einstein’s of the animal kingdom. They have large brains but don’t do much with them, except for never forgetting an injury.  Crows, on the other hand, could probably pass the eleven plus, and they have to make do with something the size of a large pea.

I wish my ushanka had arrived yesterday which was Day One of the Great Whiteout.  In fact we only had about three or four inches of snow but it is quite remarkable what changes even a little snowfall like that can bring. On the roads, even with the much reduced traffic, the pristine whiteness soon turns to slush - a grey, gunmetal at first and then for some reason it turns to a warm brown.  I have never understood why.  But out in the countryside the snow remains deep and crisp and even.  And pure white of course.  Yesterday I went for a walk in the gathering gloom of the afternoon and marvelled at the transformation: tranquillity and calm  everywhere descended.  There was a wind blowing and it had again started to snow;  moreover, the snow was lying as the thermometer had again fallen below zero.  Sliding occasionally on the ice, with the snow in my face, battling up the hill,  I felt like Scott on his way to the South Pole, but it was an exhilarating and elemental feeling and when I returned home tired and exhausted I drank a vodka to warm me up.

Vodka? Ushankas? I feel Boraya is turning me into a species of Russian. Perhaps because I have returned to the novel after a deliberate step back and layoff over Christmas and New Year.  First, reading the book, then reworking in my mind all its little connections and consequences and now, at last, putting fingers to keyboard. The country dacha in which Elizabeth and Vladimir begin their romance now has a name - the Casa Malinka - and a provenance in the shape of a Calalan architect.     Its ‘distinctive characteristic, the one that remains forever in your mind, is the external decoration.  It is painted extravagantly in broad vertical curving bands, alternately pink and blue,  and those swirls of colour even in winter bring the warm sunshine of Barcelona to the Gulf of Finland.’  

I have these swirls of colour in my mind - can’t get them out of my mind - have I seen them somewhere?  A photograph, perhaps? Or have I imagined them?  Anyway, unless or until she repaints,  (which she won't do while I am writing the novel) Elizabeth is stuck with them.  ‘Poka.’