STRUTTING AND FRETTING

This is going to be a blog about the trials and tribulations of the theatre in general and our little theatre in particular. I shan't be in the least offended if you turn away now, for I ask myself constantly, "why am I doing this?" - by which I don't mean writing a weekly blog, though I suppose the same question could be just as usefully put in relation to Corner-Cupboard as to the Market Theatre. 'Why, O why?'

When I am acting, forcing myself to learn the lines and then forcing myself again at the end of a hard and long day to remember them on stage while simultaneously trying to remember what the director wants me to do, I say to myself - 'acting is the hardest job in the world.'

My brain positively throbs with this imposed activity. If someone were to cut out a slice it would glow red and yellow with all the neurones firing off at the same time, as I struggle through those lines. My heart goes thump, thump, thump, like a rabbit startled at the approach of a farmer. I strut and fret (oh how Shakespeare put it well).

Of course it gets easier. At some point you know the lines and the movements and how to say what you have to do in a way that holds the audience's attention and doesn't send them to sleep. Or so you hope. It can even be enjoyable then as you slip comfortably into the skin of a villain, a monarch, a witty raconteur, a lover or whatever is called for.

But through those long weeks of rehearsal I feel like Winnie the Pooh who, if you remember, was dragged backwards down the stairs by one leg each morning and thereby hit his head on each successive step - thump, thump, thump. 'There must be a better way,' he said to himself 'if only the thumping would stop long enough for me to think of it.'

And of course there is. And it is to be a director. You miss out on the congratulations at the end of the show, on the adulation - no-one notices the director until you get to the Hall or Spielberg level - you can sink quietly into anonymity. But this is a small price to pay for power without responsibility. The director never has to face dying on stage.

Rather than strutting and fretting yourself you let others strut and fret while you sit in the stalls with your feet up, making occasional notes and encouraging noises. Easy and relaxing. That, anyway, is how it seems to the poor fretting actor.

I last directed a proper play about seven years ago. And just as you forget your lines after a performance so you forget just what a horror directing really is. It is like trying to organise a battle and finding half your troops have better things to do.

So you rush around in desperate Red Hen mode running yourself ragged to find people to cast and do all the other jobs - lights, sound, stage management, props, prompt, costumes, design, front of house, bar. There are tickets to sell and publicity to organise and the theatre to clean and theatre suppers to arrange and all this away and beyond the direction of the actors and the choreography of the play.

Of course lots of people are involved in a production but the director is very much in the position of Owain Glyndwr who boasts in one of the Henry IVths that he can summon spirits from the 'vasty' deep. 'Of course you can', says Hotspur - 'and so can any man - but when you call them do they come?'

And that is the problem - as a director you have all the levers of power in your hand but frequently the levers are not connected to anything. People are on holiday, or won't respond to emails, or can't be fitted on the stage, or things just collapse, or actors don't know their lines, or change their minds or simply give you nightmares.

Then there is the problem of ideas. When people have ideas they assume they are good ideas by virtue of the fact that they have had them at all. It is the supreme example of 'all my geese are swans.' But, quite apart from the fact that it is not ideas that are in short supply but people to do the routine and boring jobs, most ideas that people present you with are not very good. The ratio of good ideas to bad ideas is about 1 to 20 in my opinion. Nevertheless you have to allow people to have ideas.

I don't exclude myself from the above criticism. I have more bad ideas than anyone. But in most cases conventional and boring wisdom will get you further and faster than some clever 'idea.'

So I worry and fret late into the night, wondering whether we shall sell any tickets at all. We have sold six so far out of a possible 280. Whatever possessed me to want to direct again, I say to myself, and I long for the responsibility free domain of the actor. The wheel will turn full-circle again.

Ah well it was ever thus. If you have been, thanks for reading.

Should you be wondering the play is 'Temporary Shelter,' an intelligent and imaginative comedy by the novelist Rose Tremain. Originally written as a radio play (in which format it won the Giles Cooper prize for best radio play of 1984) We have adapted it for the stage and shall be presenting it between 13 and 16 July at the Market Theatre, Cowbridge. Tickets £6. Come if you can - an evening of sparkling comedy awaits you.

IS IT VERVEINE OR CHAMPAGNE?

Verveine! Or, as it's sometimes called here, Verbena, is a most unprepossesing little weed which I first met on a 'herbal walk' conducted by that eminent herbalist, Zoe Hawes. It was growing in a sandy car park, I remember, and had little purpley-pink flowers.

Now I can't live without it, for made into a tisane - a type of herbal tea - and drunk at bedtime it ensures that even insomniacs like me will have a good night's rest. There are two problems, however: first it tastes like cat's pee and secondly you can't easily buy it inexpensively in Britain.

As to the first, well it is amazing what you learn to put up with for a good night's sleep but an admixture of orange or peppermint improves the draught. And as to the second, the answer is just to buy the stuff in France where the supermarket shelves bulge with rack after rack of tisanes of every description, including half a dozen different preparations of Verveine. The cost is minimal - about €1.30 for 25 sachets.

Knowing my weaknesses, my neighbour, Annie, who is French, came back from a trip home this week not only with several boxes of Verveine tisane but a winebox as well. I suggested that an aperitif was due over an above a monetary settlement. She agreed but insisted we came to her.

There's an upside to that, for Annie always serves champagne and not only any champagne but a champagne - Denis Salomon Brut Reserve - that is not sold in shops but which she acquires mysteriously by the cellarfull. It has a wonderfully, dry biscuity taste that is so much friendlier than many similar concoctions. Anyway, in no time at all we had managed to put away two bottles and reeled home to supper full of that especial bonhomie which only champagne can bring on.

The following day we were on Theo duty - looking after our grandson of two and a quarter whose diversion of the moment is painting rather than champagne. We covered the kitchen floor with blank paper, mixed a pot of blue paint, put a brush in his hand and in no time had some thoughtful abstracts, vortexes of blue against the swirling white for which a gallery might have proposed the name 'Parental Anguish.'

We tried some hand painting, and then some foot painting; bold prints tracked across the paper.

"Why, Theo," I asked, "don't you try painting a head?" I was wondering whether he might attempt John the Baptist or whether that might be a step too far.

He contemplated the problem, stroking his cheek with the business end of the paintbrush. Then his face half-blue, he lay down on the paper and pressed cheek to canvas. A broad blue spludge resulted. Well, I had suggested head painting.

On Thursday we flipped the phone through to the mobile and headed up in the late afternoon for our first visit to the Hay Festival where Russell, an old friend and colleague and now a Professor in Cardiff, was delivering the Richard Livsey Memorial Lecture.

As it happened our host - who was also introducing the talk - had been delayed and so we were sitting there in the tent, a small but select gathering, wondering what to do. For a moment I thought that I might have to make the introduction, which indeed I was to learn later I was well placed to do. But then our host arrived, the introduction was made, and we heard a most interesting exposition on the History of the Welsh Liberal Party.

But it made me wonder whether I should perhaps be writing some of this history; certainly of the anecdotes and stories of the local and national figures that I had worked with during the eighties and nineties. I mentioned this to Russell in the sponsors' tent afterwards as we sipped an obligatory glass of Cava. "But it's all in my book," he said. "We did a two hour interview, you gave me a great deal of material. Do you not remember?"

That must have been three or four years ago, but all memory of it is wiped! Gone! Now that he had reminded me I recalled a dim trace that he was preparing something or other. So now I have to wait until September when the book comes out to see what is and what isn't in print already.

Oh dear, I am getting old. Or maybe a side effect of drinking Verveine is memory loss. One never knows quite what these innocuous herbs do - and it must be doing something to send me to sleep as it does. Then again it could be the champagne!

THREE SISTERS

Each year without fail for the last sixty-five years I’ve had a birthday in this month. It always turns up, as regularly as clockwork at the time the chestnuts come into full flower. I used to think that my parents had been very clever to arrange for me to be born on the most beautiful day of the year, but the reality turned out to be somewhat different: my conception was an unintended, but not wholly unwelcome product, of the 1945 Japanese surrender. My father and mother were so impressed by the achievements of General MacArthur that they got quite carried away.

I suppose I (and later my sister) were some kind of peace treaty in their more domestic hostilities. If we were, then peace didn't last very long and both went their separate ways taking one of us each along with the furniture and the curtains and each spawned new families along the way. The families became estranged, by design rather than accident.

Once sixty-five was a fine old age a time of white hair, a lined face, a permanent stoop and nodding off in the afternoons. Today sixty-five is merely a beginning - or so I try to tell myself. What has gone before - a lifetime’s exhilarations and futilities - is just the gestation for a period of maturity and flowering, of threads being drawn together, of putting one’s duck’s in a line.

Birthdays are a particularly good place to start this renewal process. So I thought it might be a good idea this time to introduce some of my sisters to some other of my sisters who had never had the privilege of meeting before. My full sister had never met any of my half sisters (of whom I have five), nor had they met my half brother either for that matter, or his family.

As we were staying with Rosie and Jim down at their son’s Mill in the southern Auvergne, I suggested that I might hold a little party and ask the various sisters - or at least the two half-sisters who live in South-West France and the full sister who lives in Suffolk, to come. They most kindly agreed; the invitations were sent and the sisters who had never met arrived in due course.

They brought with them roast duck breasts and a magnum of champagne to show us how they live in Gascony while Rosie baked an intriguing cake most improbably out of courgettes and cocoa that made a satisfying accompaniment to the champagne. More: it played Happy Birthday, courtesy of some clever Asiatic piece of miniaturisation.

Incidentally, it was the first time I had ever to pour champagne from a Magnum bottle and by jingo you need strong wrists to control it for the bottle is heavy and you have no idea how far the liquid will gush. I spilt more than I had intended. (For a Jeroboam or Methuselah I suspect you would need some species of harness).

Several kind souls, including the former mayor, joined us from the village and also brought gifts - his speciality being a home-made concoction of raw alcohol laced with fruit flavouring. Never have I tasted anything as strong. Still if ever we should run out of petrol....

More practically, his wife brought a wonderful ‘fouace.’ This is an auvergnat bread cake shaped like a giant doughnut and exceptionally tasty. The following morning (see picture at the head of this post) we climbed up to the village for coffee and cake in the sunshine on the terrace of Dennis and Caro’s beautifully converted barn from where you can see for miles and where the rays of the midsummer sunset pass through the a special window cut into the bedrooms.

But back to the sisters: I don’t know quite what I was expecting. I suppose I had some romantic vision of sisterly love. Great embraces accompanied by oceans of tears of the sort you might find written into one of the more dreadful soap operas. But of course it wasn’t like that at all. They were strangers and strangers in mature middle age do not fall upon one another’s necks. Instead they made polite conversation about the price of ducks and enquired of each other whether one had come far.

Well at least they didn’t fight. And they did eventually did show a modicum of interest in each other and the sixteen children they share between them. If the temperature is not yet warm, at least the ice has been broken, the ducks on the same pond if not yet in line. You never know they may even meet again sometime. And we did have a splendid party. I wonder what my old father - our old father - would have made of it?

Here they are falling upon each other with excitement: from left to right: Vicky (full-sister), Sarah and Alyson (half-sisters).

FAX AND WUNDERFAX

I have always been fascinated by fax machines. Too much watching Startrek, I suppose, where people go in one end and come out the other. I remember a splendid cartoon once showing someone in court with the judge looking grim and asking the prisoner at the bar whether he had anything to say before he passed sentence, whereupon the prisoner breathes into his wristwatch "Beam me up, Scottie. I'm in the s***t down here."

Oh well, yes, fax machines. But why stop at mere text is what I have always wondered. Will one day we be able to fax more than just text? I'm thinking specifically of food - or at least a Caesar Salad and croutons. You have a machine, plugged into a telephone line and linked up to a few simple containers of veggie protein, flavouring, starch, and so on - and then you would take a recipe and the machine would whirr and grind and synthesise for you an atomically perfect Caesar Salad - or Boeuf Bourginon if you'd dialled the wrong number.

You might ask why the machine could not simply concoct the Caesar Salad from resources in its own memory bank in the manner of a most marvellous coffee machine I worked with once in Spain which, when you gave it a peseta or two, ground and churned and hissed and produced a perfect cup of freshly ground coffee from starting ingredients of whole coffee beans and water?

Well, the telephone would be necessary so that the machine could check the atomic balance of its ingredients against some sort of master template - which might of course be your Mum. So you would phone up and say, 'Mum - how do I make Yorkshire Pudding?"

And Mum would say, "Put the Wunderfax on dear," and she would then scan one of her Yorkshire Puddings and send it down the phone line and in a few moments the machine in your kitchen would ping and you would open the door and there would be your beef and potato accompaniment and your husband would beam and say, "Those Yorkshires are every bit as good as your Mum's."

The invention would add to marital harmony and join the dishwasher and vacuum cleaner in the annals of domestic essentials.

So why have I put a bottle of whisky at the top of this post? Well there's a back story, which briefly is that running low on my favourite cold cure I went into our local store looking for Highland Park, my favourite malt, only to find that with the budget and VAT rise, prices had almost doubled overnight.

The price of malt whisky, incidentally, seems to fluctuate wildly for no reason at all. The bottle that is £33 today, sells for £19 tomorrow. I do not understand why. Nothing else does this. Nothing I like anyway.

Which brings me at last to the point. You see driven by these cost pressures I eschewed my normal 12 year old malt in favour of a souped-up ('with peaty, smokey malts,' the label said) version of 'Famous Grouse', called 'Black Grouse,' which was half the price.

Unfortunately, it was only half as good, at least to my taste. If you had blended raw spirit with battery acid and left it next to a bonfire you might get an idea of the taste. No doubt the makers have tried very hard but as they suggest drinking it with oranges and Coca-cola, it suggests that the flavour on its own may need disguising.

Now, when you make whisky you distill malt and then you stuff the brew away in barrels and leave it a long time to absorb the flavour and the colour of the wooden barrel. To make a good whisky you need to wait 12 years and a really good whisky, 20.

But why? When we are all constantly beseeched to improve our efficiency this must be the most inefficient industrial process going. Twelve years? It isn't even as if they move the stuff about, stir it, heat it up, mix it with platinum catalysts. No, they leave it in a warehouse.

Well, brother-in-law is an inventor and he has a theory that you can age any wine - or presumably whisky - by zapping it in a microwave oven. One zap per year. If you want to age it by twenty years you give it twenty zaps. I did try this with the Black Grouse and to be fair it did take the edge of the rawness. But you have to be careful that you don't end up with a hot drink instead of a cold one.

Surely in this modern age we could analyse what goes into a good whisky? What are those complex flavour and aromas but chemicals? So much of this, and so much of that. Couldn't we just mix the stuff?

Instead of waiting 12 years you could buy bottles of spirit distilled yesterday and then dial up on your Wunderfax - the same machine that made your Mum's Yorkshires - with a few extra ingredient compartments. There would be little sliders perhaps like those on fancy hi-fi sets - more smoke, less peat, more strawberry, less haddock, more colour, fruitier, richer - and there you would be.

Think of the savings! Think of all that whisky stored for 12 years that would no longer be needed. Think of the sherry casks and all those oak and hickory trees that would now no longer need to be cut down.

And if your father in law was in some far off land enjoying a most excellent aperitif, he could dribble a little of it over his mobile phone and it would pass down the telephone line and into your kitchen Wunderfax and out would come the same thing, same flavours, colours and all.

Of course, you'd be stuck in a power-cut.

POINT OF DEPARTURE

You know what they say - don't shoot the pianist he's only doing his best.  Mind you I don't know who 'they' are in this case.  Anyone know from where the saying comes?  Or so I have just enquired of the Purple Coo website - of which I am a longstanding member. The site has just been rebuilt and in another place causing much ruffling of feathers in the dovecote. I guess we’re getting old and change is too difficult.

My own life I keep feeling is in a rut. There’s this horrid feeling that comes sweeping over me and tells me that there is an inescapable sameness about day to day events and that I ought to sell up and head off into the setting sun on a camel - or take the Queen’s shilling, or become a foreign correspondent or whatever the modern day equivalent is for someone of my advanced age. Maybe it is to join MSF as a volunteer, or some other benevolent organisation, and be shot at for your pains.

I did try to join VSO once - when I had fallen on hard times and I thought they might welcome a pair of hands while I gathered my wits about me, but they didn’t and wouldn’t let me. Bah! Ah well, it was before the Big Society.

Still running off to sea or whatever would I tell myself be grossly irresponsible seeing as one has responsibilities in the here and now, friends, and particularly relations, who would be not one wit pleased by some poetic abandonment. Besides, I have to say I would miss them dearly as I am fortunate to enjoy tolerably good relations with my relations, if you see what I mean and I would be bereft were I not to see my little grandson who is coming to lunch tomorrow with his parents in tow. Which means I shall have to scrub the kitchen floor ready for him to deposit and smear a new quantity of comestibles over both it and the kitchen furniture.

Babies and toddlers should really be fed on dried food until the age of ten.

Well, where were we? I am afraid this may turn out to be a somewhat meandering post. So let us return to the pianist issue with which I began this ramble. Last evening I put on the radio and heard, quite by chance Beethoven's 4th piano concerto. On Classic FM. I love that piece and can recommend a listen to anyone fancying a quiet fifty minutes, curled up on the sofa with some light and not too distracting reading matter. It was the first piano concerto (and maybe even the last) to open with the piano itself. A soft chord. Beethoven played it first time round, apparently.

I think it is safe to say that he didn’t play it on a Yamaha either, which has always made me wonder why you don't you ever see a Bosendorfer motorcycle? Or a Norton organ, I suppose? I mean it is hard to think of two machines with such different purposes as a piano (or an organ) and a motorcycle with a particularly plangent and revolting whine. You don’t think they make them in the same place, do you? I suppose both machines have to be tuned. But not, I guess by the same people.

I'm going to a film preview tonight. A French film. The story of (I've forgotten - it's about some woman writer who lived 100 years ago).  All top hats and petticoats.  But somehow Egypt comes into it too for the blurb describes it as Indiana Jones meets Amélie.  The fearless writer doing the equivalent of volunteering for MSF in 1911. A year incidentally when very little happened. Or so says James Cameron - the famous foreign correspondent responsible for preaching the then heretical doctrine that the people who lived in Vietnam at the time it was being bombed to pieces were actually human beings and cared just as deeply about their nearest and dearest as the rest of us. James Cameron was born in 1911, or so he tells us in his autobiography, and grew up in France.

One day he had rather a shock when his school teacher in a fit of heightened emotion removed his own arm and waved it above his head. It was a false arm, of course; the previous one having had an argument with an explosive projectile around 1916, but the young James Cameron hadn’t realised this. It rather put him off wars and fighting for life.

Anyway, his biography, which came out around 1967, is a very good read. It is called Point of Departure and was once available in Penguin. Not one letter of this beautifully crafted book is out of date though for all I know they all may be out of print. He was a pianist and most definitely not one to be shot at. Though of course he was. Literally and metaphorically, too.

The picture shows a most respectable looking James Cameron in India and comes via the BBC and the Guardian, whose assistance is acknowledged with thanks.

WE WILL ROCK YOU

When I mentioned to a good friend that I was intending to see the ‘Queen’ musical ‘We Will Rock You,’ he told me that I never ceased to amaze him. I don’t know why. Though he and his wife have a more conventional taste in concerts - Mozart, perhaps, or a spot of Bruckner, there’s no reason why one shouldn’t be able to enjoy both pop and classics. I feel sure that Mozart, for instance, would have revelled in Queen’s fantastic creations and wanted to join in. What Bruckner’s attitude would have been I’m not so sure.

Anyway, whatever, we booked for the Wales Millennium Centre and we went despite the show having been panned by the critics for the past ten years. Had dear Freddie Mercury been buried rather than cremated the gyrations of his corpse in the grave might have rendered the search for further sources of renewable energy quite unnecessary. As long as people like me went along to see 'We Will Rock You,' that is.

We went. A big treat. A looked-forward-to occasion at the end of a big week. And I can’t begin to describe how ghastly it was. Well, I suppose I can begin for I have already begun and the proof of the pudding should be in the eating rather than the cliché. But it really was awful.

To anyone tempted by the hype I say spend the ticket money on a bottle of good wine. Buy yourself some Green and Black’s maximum strength organic chocolate and play all your Queen CD’s several times letting your imagination run wild and the tears of joy roll down your cheeks. And donate the surplus you will have saved from the tickets to AIDS research or some other socially useful charity.

So what is wrong with the show? In a word everything that you can possibly think of: the music was wrong, the volume was wrong, the set designs were wrong, the whole approach to the audience was wrong, the story was worse than wrong, the actors were wrong.

But then when you’ve stopped tearing your hair out and thinking that yes, even I, given a freehand, Queen’s music and the back of a fag-packet, could have created a better show than that, comes the awful thought, the perilous, tragic, worrisome thought that maybe, just possibly, it is I (and the critics) that are wrong - or, even worse, just old. And square and the sort of people who shouldn’t be allowed access to Queen’s music at all because it might excite them too much before their bedtime cocoa.

But banish this dreadful thought. No! No, young people! And no, Ben Elton, and the stagers of last night’s performance who I won’t embarrass by naming: no, no, no! How can you possibly so traduce the fine art of putting on a show? How can the world of popular musical theatre have possibly descended (despite its already long decline) from the wit and elegance and cadences and extravagance and charm and acting and sheer vocal skill to this: sheer brute force and cacophony and a story line that would disgrace the Beano, with absolutely no relation to the music whatsoever.

Cacophony - brute noise and ignorance - that is what it was. Never have I been so deafened. Six bars into the opening number and I was tearing the corner off an envelope to put into my mouth and chew to a maché with which to make a species of ear-plug. My other ear I plugged with my finger, taking it out when people appeared to be talking. Even with these barriers the sound was deafening. It echoed out in physical waves way beyond those levels which, in a factory, would have the Health and Safety inspectors reaching for their prosecution pads.

When the posters said ‘We Will Rock You,’ we didn’t think they meant it literally. The heavy bass grabbed the theatre and worried it like dog with a rag doll. The place will collapse if they run many more shows like that. The Cardiff earthquake of 1990 shook us less.

Apart from posing a serious long term risk to one’s hearing ability, sound at that level isn’t true. You can’t hear music at that super-volume however sophisticated the amplification. The brain shuts down. All you can hear is super-noise, with the singers screeching distorted against it.

If we ask ourselves why Queen were so great, why Freddie Mercury was such a great artist and why their live performances were so loved - the answer would surely have been because they reached out, they touched, they involved the audience, they drew you in. Last night we might have been watching a film. Protected by this wall of sound the cast stamped and shouted and screeched their way through their lines, all subtlety gone, all humour gone, all wit gone and the only possible scintilla of substance remaining, some fair to middling dancing.

We left at the interval.

The picture at the top courtesy of Wikipedia is of Queen performing on stage in 1984.

WELSH MADNESS AND BABY BOOMING

I am besieged by official letters telling me to ‘ACT NOW!” Usually in capitals to increase the urgency and sometimes in very large envelopes - I suppose to make them seem more important. One weighed so much that I fear the spine of poor Annie, our ever cheerful post-lady, will be lop-sided ever after. Despite this she still smiled as she handed over my census form.

Incidentally, have you noticed how the majority of postmen (both male and female) are happy? Considering their lot - out in all weathers, carrying heavy loads, working to deadlines, awful management, poor pay - you’d think they'd be all as miserable as sin and only stay in the job a couple of weeks before exclaiming ‘blow this for a game of soldiers.’ But no, they go on and on. Smiling like the sun, even in the rain, and always ready to offer up those little courtesies that make life bearable.

Of course they complain - but they do so happily. Very few are sour and po-faced. So what is it about the postman’s lot? They are all very fit and I suppose that helps and seeing the rest of the world at seven o’clock in the morning must give you a comforting feeling of moral superiority.

But back to ‘ACT NOW.’ The heavyweight census form came in separate booklets in English and Welsh. Now I have nothing against the Welsh language. I even spent two years learning some of it at evening classes and I once played the Wicked Witch of the West in a performance of Snow White in some learners’ pantomime. I can still sing ‘Hi Ho, it’s off to work we go’ in Welsh (Hi Ho, Hi He, I ffordd y’r gwaith a’r ni). I have given a Welsh culture class at a school in Norway and had the students performing in Welsh and acting out a version of that great rugby song, ‘Sospan Fach.’ (Which means - and not everyone even in Wales knows this - ‘Small Saucepan’)

So I am not, you see, anti-Welsh. I have done my bit for the language. But I am certainly not up to completing my census in Welsh. Or any other form for that matter.

I shudder to think what it costs to send a Welsh Language census form to the ninety per cent of the population (and probably more) who will choose to respond in English. For many Welsh speakers will still choose to use the English version. More than two and a half million twenty-page booklets will go straight in the bin. All in the name of political correctness. The cost of translation into Welsh is appreciable and the cost of printing in Welsh is also elevated because most printers do not speak the language. But this is what the Welsh Language Act decrees.

It is madness. Why can we not opt how we wish to receive our government communications? When I go to a cashpoint the machine asks me, thoughtfully, in which language it should address me. Besides English and Welsh it offers other choices: French for instance, or German. So why not the government?

It would be a simple matter to register a preference. It could be done at the same time as the electoral register update? “Do you wish us to communicate with your household in: English only, Welsh only, or English and Welsh?” And we could tick the appropriate box. If there was doubt then the default position would be English and Welsh.

Still, now that I come to think of it, we might then demand another choice entirely. We might demand a form in English, properly thought through, and not in some form of hurry-up officialese.

For instance, seeing the words ‘ACT NOW’ you could be excused for filling in the form then and there and posting it off. Instead the small print says to complete the form on 28th March. But even acting on 28th March is wrong because the forms asks for details of people staying overnight on 28th March. Which means (because you never know who might turn up on your doorstep at two minutes to midnight, do you?) that it is impossible to complete the form accurately until 29th March.

Sometimes I’m glad I’m a baby-boomer and therefore on my way out. Responding to other requests to ‘ACT NOW,’ I claimed two pensions this week, one from the government (another binned booklet in Welsh) and one from a provider of ‘financial services.’ Or in my case disservices. Had I only listened to my inner self and put the money under my mattress I’m sure I couldn’t have done worse. Still I have ordered a small annuity and had it indexed. If now I can only manage to live until I'm 120 I feel sure I can extract my revenge.