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.’ 

DEAD, VAST AND MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

One of my Christmas presents this year was Richard Burton’s diaries - a real doorstopper of a book.   Absolutely everything has been included regardless of how repetitive, banal, trivial or uninformative.  It is hard to write a diary whose greater part doesn’t suffer from these characteristics and Burton’s is no exception, but a decent editing job would have produced a book a third the size and much more informative. The editor (Chris Williams of Swansea University who have custody of Burton’s ‘papers’) has also included a mass of footnotes many of which serve little elucidatory purpose.  You might ask then why anyone should want to read it. 


The answer is because the diaries are like gold ore. Among the 'dead vast and middle of the night' entries are brilliant flashes, dramatic observations, fascinating accounts of people and places, illusions and self-deceptions, strengths and vulnerabilities, which make the writing as interesting as the acting.

I am a great fan of Burton and have often been entranced by that magic voice.  I can also remember standing on stage once in front of a 650 watt spotlight struggling to deliver a particular speech and turning to him in my head for help.  Quick as a flash I heard his voice telling me to concentrate on pronouncing each word; if I did this the line would follow, he said.  Whether it was my imagination or the great man taking pity on a fellow thesp what he suggested seemed to work and I drank his health in the bar afterwards.

Though why it is that we drink people’s health, I have no idea.  Booze did for Burton in the end just as it has done for so many of the great and good.  Still it is said that people who drink moderately live longer than those who don’t.  I used to wonder whether this really meant anything in that some of the most miserable people that I have met have been elective teetotallers.  And if one thing kills you faster than alcohol it is misery.  But however would we manage social occasions without it? 

Such as, for instance, Twelfth Night, a long forgotten part of the Winter Festivities calendar which I have been doing my bit all my life to resurrect.  Among our little theatre group here we have now a tradition of doing something on the evening of 5th or 6th January: the jury is still out on which is the correct date.  This year we read a play - Patrick Barlow’s 39 Steps adaptation, which is currently touring the country.  Fourteen people came in all, including a ventriloquist’s dummy called Sonny Goy, and a very good time was had by all.

In the invitation we stated that nibbles would be on offer but so many people brought food that we have been living on leftovers.  But why is it that everyone brings red wine to parties and then asks for white?  My stock of white wine is now seriously deleted but I have enough red wine to float a battleship.  I think I shall have to specify something about this on the invitations next year.

Actually this week I have been ill, sunk by the same virus that seems to be knocking on everyone’s door and I was driven to my bed.  I cannot remember the last time that this happened. My brain refused to function and all I wanted to do was sleep.  The business carried on however and we have had quite a few orders which I struggled to despatch in my dressing gown.  I am better now but a week has gone by with no work done on the Boraya project.  I have printed out the text and it is now a great thick mass of paper.  The next step is to read it. But I am finding this difficult.  Other people have writers’ block, I have readers’ block.  This doesn’t reflect on the text; the few pages I have read are not bad, though I say it myself.  It is hard, though, not to keep spotting the infelicities of a first draft and the bits that will require reworking and so only half my mind is focused on the reading and the other on something else.  Still, I expect I shall get there, if the business gives me half a chance.

Meanwhile I shall read Burton.  At one point in his diary he says ‘if only I didn’t have to work then I might write a book or something.’ Richard, I know the feeling well, though you could, you know, have just walked out on the picture studios, bought a little place in the south of France and set about a life of scribbling or perhaps teaching at Oxford.  But it is all too late. I wish though I had your capacity for speed reading - two or three books a day - and with the ability to retain what I’d read.  What a turbo-charged mind!