DIPLOMACY

I am running short of verveine tea again.  It is my usual bed-time tisane and without it I wake up shortly after falling asleep and toss and turn.  I’ve been taking it now for many years; the problem is that you can’t buy it in Britain.  Although here the supermarket shelves stock an ever expanding range of herbal teas, verveine in its various forms (verveine and peppermint, verveine and orange) is not among them.  Verveine by itself tastes like cat’s pee.

    So I buy it in France whenever I go over there, but I haven’t been since last August and that is why I am running low.  My neighbour sometimes brings some back for me. I received an email message from her last week containing a number of interesting recycling ideas such as using old boots for plant containers and making chandeliers out of old wine bottles.  It was written in French which made me think possibly she was at her French home in Tharon rather than fifty yards away on the other side of the road.  So I replied hopefully in French, but she said she was in fact over the road and wouldn’t be crossing the Channel again until Easter.

     I looked on the internet and tried our local health store. ‘You asked about this before,’ said the woman who runs it, looking at me suspiciously. ‘It’s impossible to get hold of.’  And so it is.  Nasty Continental habit. Obviously!

    The trouble is I need the stuff more than ever just at the moment what with the hoo-ha in the Ukraine and the outbreak of the First World War being rehearsed nightly on the television in the shape of that excellent drama 37 Days that traces the diplomatic missteps that blundered the Continent to catastrophe.  Even today it seems all rather worrying.  Of course everything has settled down, but only after two world wars and it is quite possible to argue that Russia’s actions today in the Crimea have their roots in the various German invasions.   Queen Victoria should have taken better care of her grandchildren.

    There once existed a game called ‘Diplomacy.’ (It may exist still for all I know).  The players each represented a major European country in about 1900. Turkey was given honorary status in this respect, though not Ukraine.   You were allocate armies and fleets which you could move around the board attacking other countries and defending your own. You could also form alliances, temporary or permanent.

    I once played this game on a Saturday in the Occupational Psychology Department of Birkbeck College, London where I happened to be studying. Each team representing a country had its own room complete with telephone, which meant that you could set up alliances in secret from the other players.  My team was playing France and I proposed the immediate strategy of a permanent alliance with Great Britain. Imagine, I said what Pitt and Napoleon might have achieved had they worked in alliance!  With France’s armies and Britain’s fleets they could have ruled the world.  The world might have been all pink (or at least pink and blue) instead of only half of it.  (Quite why British rule should have been represented by pink is a question that has never been satisfactorily explained). 

    Anyway this strategy worked brilliantly and during the course of the day we successively wiped the Italians, the Turks, the Germans and the Russians from the map.  Then in the last move of the game, in a stroke of perfidy that I am still smarting from, Britain attacked France, thereby demoting her from joint winner to second.  I never played the game again.

    Now the West and Russia play Diplomacy with Ukraine. There will be a solution however uncomfortable it may be to one or other party, but I suppose we shall have to pass through a lot of unnecessary pain to get to it.  So it is no wonder I need my verveine and peppermint tisane to help me sleep.  Of course other people would prefer something stronger.  A glass of malt whisky has long been recommended for insomniacs. But my stomach rebels and its rumblings would outdo Vesuvius.  While this is much to my chagrin, it is to the distinct benefit of my pocket.  For the price of a glass of malt I can buy a whole month’s supply of tea.

    Still all is not lost for I wrote for help to my friend John who lives near Le Havre and received an immediate reply.  Touched by my plight he went immediately to the French supermarket and purchased fifty sachets. This he put in an envelope which will be winging its way here shortly.  That is if the customs don’t intercept it on the grounds that I am importing an illegal botanical specimen.  You never know. 

WHY AM I CALLED PERIWINKLE?

Our intelligent and kindly bookseller - 'Ross at the Bookshop' is how he invariably announces himself when he telephones - agreed the other day that he would take some copies of my book 'The Ill-Fated Battalion' to complement his displays of other books on the First World War.   I took them down to him earlier in the week.
      The Ill-Fated Battalion deals with the twin tragedies of the 1,000 men and boys of the 7th Battalion, The Royal Scots, in the summer of 1915 first at Quintinshill near Gretna, where the train in which they were travelling ran into another train standing on the same line, and then at Gallipoli where they became cannon, or rather machine gun, fodder, displaying all the while great bravery and spirit.  I began to write this story in 1983 on an old manual typewriter but concluded, by the time I had got to the end, that it was horribly overwritten and therefore turgid despite the fascinating story, culled mainly from contemporary newspapers retrieved from the bowels of the British Museum Newspaper Library at Colindale.  So I put the book away and put the effort down to experience.
     But with the anniversary of the First World War - and indeed the anniversary of the 1915 railway accident itself - looming, I thought I should take another look at the material and rewrite the book on a computer which is what I did.  I published it myself last year through Completely Novel.
      People who have read it have been kind enough to say that they like it, except for one individual who gave it a very dusty review on Amazon on the sole grounds as far as I could make out that I had omitted reference to some equally compelling Gallipoli bravery by another regiment involved in the same operation.  Still, there's no pleasing some folk as we all know.  We'll see how Ross makes out selling it to his patrons.
     It is hard, though, to drift into Ross' shop without coming away with a purchase and a displayed paperback caught my eye.  The book's author was Eric 'Winkle' Brown and it was his account of his life as a test and experimental pilot during the war years and afterwards.  He is credited by the Guinness Book of Records with having flown more types of aeroplanes than anyone else, ever:  four hundred and eighty seven types in all, including many German, Italian and Japanese planes captured at the end of the Second World War.  Many of these I had never heard of.
    But it was the nickname 'Winkle' that intrigued me - for my own father who had also been in the Royal Air Force during the war used to call me by the same name: 'Winkle' or 'Wingle'  (the two sound very similar); and sometimes 'Wingle Wangle,' and sometimes again 'Periwinkle.'
     I don't think I ever asked him whence the name came; I just accepted it.   I had thought - because he liked to read Edward Lear's poems to me - that it came from 'The Quangle Wangle's Hat' which goes.....

On the top of the Crumpetty Tree

The Quangle Wangle sat,

But his face you could not see,

On account of his Beaver Hat.

For his hat was a hundred and two feet wide,

With ribbons and bibbons on every side

And bells and buttons and loops and lace,

So that nobody ever could see his face

Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

This gets us to 'Wangle' but from 'Quangle' to 'Wingle' is rather a jump so I wondered if my father might have picked up this nickname for me from Eric Brown, the author of this book whose purchase I was now contemplating.  

     What made this seem more possible was that I could read from the blurb that Eric Brown was only six months older than my father.  More than this they both were attending schools in Edinburgh at the same time, he the Academy and Eric Brown the Royal High School. Maybe they had met in Edinburgh, or maybe they had met sometime during the war or afterwards.  Or maybe, of course, not.

       I have since learned that Eric Brown's nickname was short for 'Periwinkle' and Wikipedia suggests he was thus dubbed by his service colleagues on account of his small stature. (Among other things a periwinkle is a small marine snail). This seems improbable to me. Periwinkle is a feminine name; moreover why call anyone after a snail? No, I feel sure there must be some common connection - a character in a film perhaps.  Or it might be an Edinburgh appellation or something to do with aeroplanes or indeed both. 

     I suppose it is possible that he had to be 'winkled' out of his cockpit on a couple of occasions when the aircraft he was flying crash-landed and so got the name that way with the idea that of pulling a short body out of a carapace of cockpit.  Maybe several airmen were so dubbed. Maybe the usage was common.  Maybe I had to be 'winkled' out of the cosiness of my mother's womb.  She always said giving birth to my head was not the problem but my shoulders got stuck.   I was born in Edinburgh and lived there long enough to have acquired this nickname if the nickname were local.   

     The matter is intriguing me now, so I would welcome any ideas anyone may have.

Meanwhile I can vouch for Eric 'Winkle' Brown's book which is most exciting if you like aeroplanes as I once did and it has rekindled a lost period in my life when I learned to fly (one of my few claims to fame is that I learned to fly a plane before learning to drive a car and all courtesy of the Air Ministry as I think the Ministry of Defence then wasn't).  

     But here's a funny thing:  I used to suffer from terrible and embarrassing air sickness, until I was actually flying the plane myself.  Then I could throw it about the sky without feeling the least queasiness.  Now why should that be?

THE STATUS OF THE BULGARIAN LEEK

Last week I went to London to see an old friend who has been giving me help with my novel Boraya.  She is Russian and now that the novel is written I have asked her to pick over any bits that don’t seem wholly authentic. I expect there are many. She is very kind. We met at the Maritime Museum in Greenwich and toured the Turner exhibition there before having a mid-afternoon meal in the Trafalgar pub just along the river.  The exhibition was fine up to a point, the point being that not all the pictures were by Turner for reasons not easy to ascertain - you’d have thought the Trade Descriptions people might have had something to say about it - and many of Turner’s best loved maritime paintings weren’t there either.  Still the well-known and staggeringly beautiful ‘Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight’ had been brought across the ocean from the USA and its presence made up for a lot.  How much more you see in a painting than in a print.

Greenwich features in Boraya: it is where Elizabeth is living when the story opens and I’d wanted to go to the Trafalgar pub because it too gets a mention.  I did go there once before writing it into the novel but now that the book is written going into the pub seems like some literary quest.  Something written about in a book of fiction becomes legendary in the sense that it acquires an existence beyond the ordinary.  The characters become ghosts, if you follow me.  This isn’t just ‘the Trafalgar pub,’ but the pub where Elizabeth and Ginnie have a rather strained meeting.  You wonder where they sat and what they ate or drank and who else might have been there at the time.  Given place, fiction easily morphs into fact.  And for the first time I wondered what other fictional characters might be hovering in the ether watching us while we ate our lunch?

As it happens at that time in the afternoon - too late for the lunch-time crowd and too early for those looking into the pub on their way home - the pub was almost empty apart from Maria behind the bar who hailed, breezily and bouncily from Bulgaria.  We began a conversation about leeks.

Once upon a time - not so very long ago - all those providing service to the public in London were born within the sound of Bow Bells - or near enough.  Now they hail from every country on earth, their English clothed in a panoply of accents. This is charming: a way of instantly engaging them in conversation. 

That was how I began to talk to Maria about leeks a conversation that seemed to carry over from the first Bulgarian that I ever met who happened to be the Chargé d’Affaires at the time Bulgaria joined the European Union.  A man built in the Brezhnev mould, mountainous and taciturn who I met at one of those celebratory receptions.  Trying to make small talk I rehearsed with the poor man Wales’ attachment to the leek as a national emblem, but he was at a loss: he appeared to have no idea what a leek was.  I drew a little picture but he continued in a state of bafflement.  Maybe he had only even eaten them in soup.

So, relieved at having met another Bulgarian at last I reverted immediately to the question of leeks and Maria at once reassured me that leeks were a culinary staple of the Bulgarians and that the second Bulgarian empire which dominated most of the Balkans, Greece and quite a bit of Russia in the thirteenth century, would never have grown as it did without the sustaining properties of these vegetables in the soup.  Or at least she might have done, had her concentration not turned at that point to pouring beer and seeing to the lunch: sausages for me, fish for my Russian friend.  The status of the Bulgarian leek was settled.

The light faded and the pub began to fill.  We drank our beer and talked of many things. Across the river Canary Wharf twinkled into a concrete Christmas tree and the roof of the Dome, exploded in a crown of floodlighting.  The blue sky, freckled with clouds, darkened to a robust indigo over the black water.  How much of this would the pregnant Elizabeth have seen, I wondered, that April day in the spring of 1997?   How much had the pub itself seen? The body of Nelson would have been brought along this very same river in 1805 and the pub looked as though it was old enough to have witnessed the event.

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.’