Hay there

When Arthur Miller was invited to speak there, he asked what kind of sandwich it was. Hay-on-Wye is in fact one of the biggest literary festivals in the world, and is held every spring in a little market town on the Welsh border with England.
The town is called Hay and the river's named Wye. It sits at the edge of the Brecon Beacons National Park. Offa’s Dyke, the ditch that divides England from Wales, runs through the middle of it, so you’re never quite sure which country you’re in - but it likes to think of itself as Welsh and natives call it Y Gelli (pronounced eeGETHlee). And it’s one of the most beautiful spots in Britain.
They call it a market town, but its main market is second-hand books. Hay is one big bookshop, with books occupying any available space: the former castle; a cinema: a chapel; a Victorian military drill hall. Bookshelves line the main street, with honesty boxes labelled ‘Hard backs 50p’. You pay what you like for paperbacks.
Hay has a population of 1300 people and 39 bookshops - that's one shop for every 34 inhabitants. You’ll find bookshops that specialise in anything: books about bee-keeping, about British birds, about WWII medals. One shop sells only new books at £1. Marijana Dworski sells books in Polish.

If that looks familiar, it's part of a post I did last May, updated. Well, it's May again and we're off to Taffyland this morning clutching our 'must find' book lists, for our ninth trip to the Land of our Fathers. (DG was born there and so was my great-grandfather.) The photo's by Justin Williams, who has to be another Welshman.
'My books are the tendrils of my soul', wrote another Riviera writer, Robert W. Service. I'm not sure I know what a tendril is, and even less a soul - but I agree.

Desert Island Disc N0. 7 It’s May 24, my Dad’s birthday. He was my earliest musical influence, but I’ve no idea where his own preferences came from. Neither his class nor his education could have exposed him to much other than Victorian Music Hall (Burlesque): Florrie Forde, Harry Lauder, Sandy Powell etc., and he remained a Music Hall addict all his life, taking my mother and me to one or other of the many Liverpool (and later Blackpool) theatres at least once a week. That’s why I know all the words to songs like Any Old Iron, My Old Man, Oh Mr Porter and My Old Dutch. (I met the Sherman brothers once - the guys who wrote the music for Mary Poppins - who amazingly turned out to be English Music Hall fans. They were massively impressed with my repertoire if not my singing and asked me to write down the words, which finally found their way into an exhibit at EPCOT. Sure beat Supercallifragilistic.)
Dad also loved the musical comedies of his day: Rose Marie, Maid of the Mountains, Student Prince, White Horse Inn and such. But the surprise was that he also knew the works of people like Mendelsohn, Offenbach, and Herman Darewski. We didn’t have anything so sophisticated as an electrically-operated gramophone when I was a kid – in fact we didn’t have an electrical anything – but we would spend hours winding up the old machine and listening to Dad’s records. They would run more slowly as the spring wound down until finally Jeannette MacDonald would sound more like Ronald.
Later, my older brother would get into jazz and the records would be of Louis Armstong, Jelly-roll Morton and Billie Holday - but that’s another post.
One of Dad's and our favourites - we were a railway family and it began with ‘steam train’ effects - was Darewski playing Beyond the Blue Horizon. The train motif was taken up by the orchestra, building up speed and slowing at the end with a steam release like a sigh. Or was that the spring running out? I was later knocked out by the Artie Shaw arrangement, so that's the one I'm taking to the island, to remind me of old Walter tapping his fingers on the sewing machine and listening to his train sounds and the words: 'Beyond the blue horizon waits a wonderful day'.

Lemon envy

Karma citrus I noted a distinct lack of sympathy for our lemon plight last week, so thought a picture or two might be worth – and less boring than – a thousand words. One of these is next door's lemon tree, the other is ours. No prizes.





Phoney war There have been posts recently on the injustice of judging past events by today’s standards. Hilary Spurling calls it ‘cutting the past to fit contemporary orthodoxies’ - you know: Jefferson’s slaves, potato famines, lynch mobs and such. The recent death of Kurt Vonnegut has brought up Dresden again. He built a career on his night there, and I thought I might present another point of view.


I was sitting in the back of a small car with my brother – at the time, an adventure in itself for two Liverpool kids. The lady in the passenger seat said to the driver ‘It’s started then’, and he said quietly ‘Oh, has it?’ ‘Yes, 11 o’clock’, she said.

They were talking about the Second World War. It was September 3rd 1939, and we were evacuees, being sent away to avoid the bombs that everyone thought would soon start dropping on Liverpool.

But for almost a year there were no bombs – they called it the ‘Phoney War’ - and eventually the countryside began to pall. We city kids began to miss our cinemas, theatres and above all our football idols at Goodison Park and Anfield; and our parents began to tire of spending their weekends trekking off to visit their evacuee kids, often in two or more different locations. We began to drift back, and by the next September we were back at our old schools.

Then the Real War started. In the next two years, the Luftwaffe raided Liverpool more than 500 times, killing more than 3,000 people and destroying a quarter of a million homes. It culminated in May, 1941 in what came to be known as the ‘May Blitz’ when, for eight consecutive nights, from midnight to dawn, the city was pulverised by bombs and mines of every kind. Every night, as darkness fell, the streets were packed as people tried to get onto trams or hitch rides out of the city, and each morning they returned to see if their homes were still there. In Anfield cemetery on May 14, 67 years ago tomorrow, 1,000 unidentifiable bodies were buried in a mass grave

The house of my schoolmate across the street was hit, killing the whole family; our local station where my Dad worked, and the church where my parents were married, were flattened; Dad’s parents’ home was destroyed and they were found weeks later in separate hospitals 35 miles away and never saw each other alive again. After this Dad decided he had to get us out and applied for a transfer to a tranquil seaside resort 50 miles away. But by the time we moved, the raids had stopped.

Thus, although I was evacuated twice, I never missed a single Liverpool air-raid. But I don’t regret that. There was something unforgettable about that period of our lives - the fellowship, compassion and humour of the people of my natal city that made me proud to call myself a Scouse. Yes, Vonnegut was right: war is hell. But Britain didn’t start it, and there were many reasons - at the time - why not many tears were shed in Liverpool for Dresden.

Desert Island Disc N0. 6 It’s important, as a young parent, to believe that you are the sole influence on your children’s development, and that Darwin was nuts. I remember when, although a congenital jazz fan, I decided not to expose my kids to jazz lest they become similarly afflicted. When driving the car - the only place where very young kids are exposed to music since families clustered around the radio – I would give them only gentle classics: Ferde Grofe, Tchaikovsky – that sort of thing. And it worked – they loved the Grand Canyon Suite. ‘Put the donkey music on, Dad’, they would say cheerily on our way to church (I decided I ought to expose them to that, too – but it soon turned out that they only came for the Dunkin’ Doughnuts afterwards.) I started to picture my children as students, queueing up outside the Albert Hall to hear Mahler and Harrison Birtwhistle.

Then one day they caught me listening to Sonny Rollins playing St. Thomas and they never went back and I realised it’s all in the genes.

Then at some point you notice that the roles are reversed. Your son gets into the car outside school, and within one nanosecond his cassette (remember them?) is in the machine and you're listening to Huey Lewis. Then I was picking him up from school for his first gig - at Covent Garden. (No, not the Opera - he was playing alto in a bar down the street.) About the time he should have been joining the Boy Scouts he was introducing me to unpronounceable Bolivian folk singers, but then settled down to the likes of James Taylor whom I could at least understand.

One day he mentioned the Loose Tubes. The name implied tone-deaf adolescents with amps and acne, but then I saw them – at Ronnie Scotts – and my life changed. New (ie. non-jazz) instruments, new music, new arrangements. No one had told them that big bands had not been financially viable since Duke Ellington. (They probably knew but didn’t care.) The leader and main composer was a kid called Django Bates – obviously someone whose father had played Hot Club de France records in the car. They broke up after a year or so and most of them are now leading smaller, more economic groups of their own.
Amazon has only one Tubes record. They were meteoric: they didn’t burn for long, but what a light it was! That’s the choice for No. 6: The Loose Tubes and Delightful Precipice. (A synonym for a cliff?)

Back to the Sun

So you think it’s an easy life? Arriving back, it takes us a whole ten minutes to get acclimatised: enter, open shutters, put table, chairs and parasol on balcony, unpack, wire up laptop, take bottle from ’fridge, grab binoculars, sit on terrace and study the boats. It’s sunny now but it has been very wet here and the lemon trees are grateful: being in pots they’re very dependent on kind persons giving them a drink. (Like their owners.) Not sure how this works but they’re currently carrying the puny remnants of last year’s miserable crop, plus lots of blossom promising a good harvest this winter. Frustrating thing is that whichever window we look out of – left, right or in front – are huge lemon trees, groaning with crops that will never get harvested, but are tantalisingly just out of reach. So we have to buy lemons at the shop. I thought I’d tell you all this ‘cause I’d hate you to get the impression that it’s all cakes and ale around here.
And that’s not all: I’ve managed to forget the USB device that controls the wireless mouse and keyboard, so have to use the fiddly laptop I/O facilities. Yes, I know I can pop down to the shop and buy another keyboard – but it will be a French AZERTY keyboard, with three functions to every key and all the keys the wrong place. So there’s my excuse for a brief blog and low productivity.

Ségo and Sarko There’s only one topic of conversation here. Everyone asks ‘Who do you think will win?’ It’s the Deuxième Tour of the présidentielle today – the Second Round of the Presidential Election - with the socialist Ségolène Royal (Ségo - see post Nov 17) in a run-off against Nicolas Sarkozy (Sarko) the conservative – and favourite. Actually they’re both ‘neos’ now because this is the round in which they try to grab the votes that were wasted in the first round in this eccentric electoral system. So Ségo set out to get Bayrou’s (centre-left) voters and Sarko went after Le Pen’s (almost as far right as an American Democrat) voters. So in the past week the whole thing has moved right and it’s all anti-immigration, anti-Europe and anti-union; and the Messiah is – and this’ll kill ya – Margaret Thatcher!
Not a word is being said about what will happen to the incumbent, Chirac. Will he lose his Presidential immunity and be indicted for the alleged skull-duggery when he was Mayor of Paris? No one‘s talking, but I think he’s made a deal somewhere.

Canary Island Discs No. 5 I’m heading west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike on my way home from work. I’m slightly earlier than usual because it’s the day of the Katherine D. Markley school concert. KDM was similar to most American elementary schools – the kids learned about Davy Crockett, Paul Revere and all fifty state birds. But there was one big difference: Mr Miller. Mr Miller was an enthusiast - he taught music and led the school orchestra and the school military and dance bands, and as his name might imply, he was a Glenn Miller fan.
Unlike my kids, my own musical ineptitude was that of a tone-deaf mule. I preferred drums because the harmonics were unchallenging, you could make sticks out of meat skewers and drum on Mum’s sewing machine. (Never got along with the cymbals though.) I got the level of coaching that I deserved, and could only ever play one tune: Over the Rainbow - probably the result of a long-forgotten passion for Judy Garland or because I loved that octave leap at the beginning.
On this occasion Mr M announced that my daughter, who played in the orchestra, would be playing a flute solo as a surprise for her Dad. It was a surprise all right. I still have that huge disc the size of a flying saucer on which my daughter plays Over the Rainbow, but, this being a digital world, it’s unlikely that a desert island will have a diamond stylus. So for my Canary Island Disc No 5 I’ll have to settle for Judy’s version.
To recap:
Disc 1. Amhrán na bhFiann, the Irish national anthem, (to remind me of my mother, whose birthday is today).
Disc 2. Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring.
Disc 3. Zoltán Kodály’s Háry János Suite.
Disc 4 Michel Petrucciani, Caravan.
Disc 5 Judy Garland, Over the Rainbow

This keyboard’s driving me mad – that’s all folks. Except to say, for those who care, that unless they are beaten by Chelsea by more than 10 goals next week, that EVERTON are in the UEFA Cup. Watching the level of French opposition tonight - Marseille - they should do well.

Everything is beautiful

Wiltshire is in bloom after the warmest April on record – that’s in 350 years – and our neighbour’s lambs are now with their siblings, gambolling joyfully as only a species with its own exclusive verb can.
There’s also a new colour taking over the countryside around here: the hills are awash with the colour of traffic wardens’ jackets.
It’s brassica napus or, for Archers listeners, rape-seed oil, and it’s the in colour this year. Apparently the oil is not only the most poly-unsaturated, but it’s also the most economical source of bio-diesel fuel, so it looks as if it’s here to stay. Pity it doesn’t come in a more attractive colour.

No way, Jose I mentioned last week Jose Morinho's outburst about how Man U are always being awarded penalties while Chelsea never get one. It was obviously one of those claims that could easily be proved or disproved, but I was too lazy to check it.
Now Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times has taken the trouble. (Well, he gets paid.) The highest number of penalties awarded this season went to, not Man U, but Arsenal (8), then Everton (7), then a 6 and a couple of 5s, and only then Man U (4), followed by Chelsea (3). Sorry, Jose – you doth protest too much.
As for Everton, things are not looking so good. Two weeks ago they looked a certainty for a UEFA Cup place, but they lost to lowly Watford. Then on Saturday, despite having led Manchester United by 2-0 with half an hour to go, they managed to present them with four free goals. (Far be it from me to suggest a conspiracy, but I understand that a clause in Rooney’s transfer contract said that Everton would be due a large sum of money if Man U won the Premiership – and one of Man U’s goals was an own goal scored by a former Man U player whose brother still plays for them, and another was scored by - Rooney.)
So now Everton lie only sixth, with Chelsea to play – away. Since Chelsea now can’t win the Premiership, I’m hoping that they’ll do the decent thing and lie down.

A writer in the Financial Times last week - can’t remember who or the precise wording - said that bloggers were mostly IT contractors with bad personal hygiene and no friends; who are endowed with boundless communications capability but a profound lack of anything interesting to say. I object: I’m not an IT contractor and don’t have boundless communications capability – but hey, three out of five ain’t bad.

What's a talent like yours doing in a dive like this?

At last, someone has said it in public. Jose Morinho, Chelsea Manager, interviewed on Saturday, said his team would not catch Manchester United under ‘the new rules of football’. When asked what were the new rules, he said, ‘it is not possible to get a penalty against Manchester United’.
Yes, we’ve heard Morinho’s outbursts before, but this time he’s right – though I might qualify it with ‘especially on home ground’. It’s also tempting to add, ‘and furthermore, no one is allowed to tackle Christiano Ronaldo, because when Ronaldo dives he always wins a free kick’. (Cue wink at team-mates saying ‘See - it works every time’.)
But then Jose blew it: he said, ‘and it is not possible for Chelsea to get a penalty.

Virginia Woolf said it – not about football but about life – that if you personalise your argument you weaken it. Once Morinho introduced his personal paranoias, a perfectly valid case, about gutless refereeing, was lost. I'm not saying refs are dishonest - yet. It must be hard to be independent when you've been pre-conditioned by a knight and are being advised by 70,000 Cyclopean Mancunians.
That woman who stopped T. Blair in his tracks to complain about NHS waiting times while he was happily glad-handing his sycophants, ruined everything when she brought in her family’s problem. Blair pounced on the get-out-of-jail card: ‘I’ll get someone to look into your case’. Problem solved – for her - but the NHS waiting times remain. Thousands of doctors are emigrating because they can’t find jobs, but it takes four months to see a cardiologist.
On August 12, 2006 I was referred for some tests. I got there in October but the machine was broken, then missed my appointment in December (my fault). ‘No problem’, they said when I rang to apologise, ‘we’ve sent details to your GP’.
The GP says he’s not able to interpret them, and writes (yes, ‘writes’) to a different cardio, at a different hospital, requesting an appointment. And yesterday, April 23, was the big day – St. George’s day, when the cardio-vascular dragon was to be slain! Result: the ticker’s in great shape - but if the symptoms return you can always get another appointment.
There I go, doing what Virginia says I shouldn’t. But it’s hard not to.

No I don't want to know about Santa Claus: Since I did my rapturous post on spring and lambs, Bridget has burst the bubble. I thought that Spring burst out all over like they say in Oklahoma! (or was it Carousel?), chased off old man Winter, opened up the daffodils and told the little lambies it was warm enough to join the world. Now the lambs are getting bigger and boldly going several feet from the food source.
Bridget is a farmer’s wife, and she has been correcting my ovine dreams. Even lambing, it seems, is technologically-induced. The farmer withholds contraceptive treatment from individual flocks so that all the Mums in that field will conceive at the same time, thus making more effective use of labour and transport.
Another romantic illusion shattered.

What’s it all about? Alfie. Alfred Edwards started a football club in Italy in 1899 and, like a true Englishman, called it, not Milano, but Milan, and the name has stuck. So tonight’s Champions League semi-final is Manchester United v. A.C. Milan. I’m told I protest too much about refereeing so won’t – except to award the Irony of the Week prize to the Gum-chewing Knight, Sir Alex ("Mind-games") Ferguson. He has had the gall to appeal publicly to referees to ‘protect’ his diving diva from over-enthusiastic defenders who might be tempted to try to get the ball off him. I don't know whom to support - patriotism is struggling with fairplay - but you never know: against Milan, Christiano might find himself in a diving Olympics.

Smile on the face of the Eiger

You know you’re getting old when you find yourself admiring actors who turn out to be the offspring of actors you admired: Vanessa Redgrave, whose father’s Macbeth was my first theatre experience; Zoë Wanamaker, daughter of the incredible Sam; Jamie Lee Curtis – you get the point; Colin Hanks, Bart Simpson – er - George Bush?
I found a new one the other day - Rachel Stirling. Apparently she’s to be the new Bond girl, in the footsteps of her delectable mum, Diana Rigg, (whose Mother Courage out-Brechted them all) and whom I fancied. She smiled at me once, but I don't suppose she remembers.
I was skiing at Kleine Scheidegg, at the foot of the North Face and was making my timid way down when this vision in a beige cat-suit passed by - and smiled at me.
It must have been a practice run - they were shooting On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – but she wasn’t skiing. She was kneeling on a chair that was on skis. In front of her, a cameraman skied backwards, his skis on back to front – don’t ask how he got his boots on – while, behind, another skier held the end of a rope tied to the chair, presumably in case it got out of control. In the middle of this convoy knelt Diana, swaying from side to side in a way that no one ever would on a straight schuss, and waving her ski poles like Toscanini – but andante, because they would speed up the shot later. When she got to the bottom of the slope there was a helicopter waiting to take her up to the top again. I went and queued for the cable car.
It only ever happened to me once – but then, to a lot of people it never happened at all.

Out, Out, brief handle I’m having a spring sale in which everything is free. It’s a title sale. No, not real estate – it’s when you think of a title, but (as A A Gill says in his book with the borrowed title Previous Convictions) you can't be bothered to write a book for its plinth. There’s one about talent-bereft singers on The X Factor that I was going to call ‘New Faeces of 2007’, but I hereby relinquish all rights.
There are lots more that I’ll never use. About bitchy female columnists called Ladies Who Lynch; or the views of referees on tennis brats: The Umpire Strikes Back. They’re anyone’s.
But I’m keeping The Last Mango in Paris and A Fridge Too Far – cookery and dieting pieces will always sell.

Found in Translation Among the literary treasures left here by our trusting landlady is The Odes of Horace, printed in 1889. Quintus Horatius Flaccus was, (it says here), born in 65BC, the son of a slave, and died in the sixth year BC. It’s always hard to know with translations, whether they’re better or worse than the originals – who knows if:
Awake! for morning in the bowl of night
Has cast the stone that puts the stars to flight
- were the words of Omar Khayyam or Fitzgerald?
And who cares, I guess. Not being able to read Farsi or Latin we’ll never know, so why not just enjoy it? This is a bit of Horace’s Ode to [his boyfriend] Mǽcenas. There are a many translations of it, but this one (Dryden’s) is my favourite – and it should be well out of copyright by now:

Happy the man, and happy he alone
He who can call today his own
He who, secure within, can say
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today

Happy Easter!

It’s spring. Two days ago, not a lamb in sight. Today , dead on time, (Good Friday), looking out of the Wiltshire window, there’s hardly a sheep in sight who is not accompanied by brand new twin sprogs with nothing on their minds but food – something with which the lumbering, dag-encrusted mums are evidently well endowed. (Don’t anyone mention mint sauce.) But where are the proud dads - resting?
Happy Easter everyone!

It must have been a slow news day. I guess the media were all waiting for President After-dinner Jazz to squeeze the last drop of PR from his magnanimous gesture. (As also did our own media - at the expense of the four soldiers killed in Iraq on the same day.)
The BBC News carried an item about Britain that our local TV station in Nice had run more than three weeks ago. It’s a piece about the ubiquitous CCTV cameras that not only spy on and film us, (Britain is the most CCTV-watched country in the world), but that can now shout at us: like ‘No skateboarding’ or ‘Pick up that cigarette packet you just dropped’. Ayatollah Blair likes control: ID cards (a case of locking the chicken-shed door now the fox is inside.); DNA, eyeball and fingerprint data bases. Even Uncle Sam has a picture of my eyeballs.

Funny thing about control - while trying not to attach the word ‘freakery’. People who try to control other people – whether with tears, withdrawal of emotional or physical needs, spying, nagging, blackmail or threat of violence - usually begin with insecurity or fear. Fear of exposure; of loss of financial security; of loneliness – fear of partner, of children or relative leaving them. It’s a kind of disease, and if neglected can become at best a habit, at worst an obsession, with the original fear forgotten (A dominatrice I know controls - adult - family board games to make sure the same person doesn’t win twice!).

As fiction it can be fun: anything from dramatic (Pinter) to hilarious (Steptoe). Controller/controllee relationships need not be male/female. They can be female/male (African Queen), male/male (Maugham’s The Servant – screenplay, interestingly, by Pinter), female/female (The Killing of Sister George), parent/child (Mommie Dearest), or child/parent (King Lear). But in real life it is tragic.

The irony of control is that it never works. On the contrary, it usually ends up causing exactly the eventuality that was most feared. At first the controllee doesn’t even know. It creeps up on him (it’s not necessarily a ‘him’ of course but you have to say) imperceptibly, with decisions like whether they wallpaper or paint. He may prefer paint, but partner spends more time with wall than he does. What kind of car? He might feel a little more strongly about that one, but what the hell - he’s in love.

It may even be well-intended – controllee thinks he’s keeping partner happy and partner is saving him the bother of dealing with trivia. And so it goes until the decisions get weightier – and controllee realises with a shock that it’s a long time since he initiated or participated in a domestic decision.

Eric Berne, in Games People Play, talks of ‘an ongoing series of complementary ulterior transactions progressing towards a [...] predictable outcome’. In advanced stages, there’s no room for compromise: Contollees can give up careers, ostracize lifelong friends and even relatives, until there’s only one way out. ‘Out’ can mean booze, different partner or just ‘out’

We can’t always fight it – we know we probably will end up with Heathrow Terminal 5; street lighting that blocks out the stars; Gordon Brown as Prime Minister, carrying ID cards or living in a house we don’t like. (But it's not all bleak: Blair will eventually leave and take up his directorships in British Airways, BAe and the rest.) But at times we might have avoided some of them if we had spoken up earlier.


Not enough control I bought three things on Monday: a new TV set, a DVD player and a flat screen for the computer. None of them were usable. The TV (Curry’s) came without a cable to connect to my antenna, the DVD (Amazon) came without a SCART cable, and the screen (also Curry’s) came without a VGA cable to connect to the PC. Don’t say I should have spoken up earlier – I did. Curry’s said they were in the box.


Too much control I know I go on a bit about referees, but last night’s UEFA cup game between Sevilla and Tottenham could have been a great one – two good teams who play fast, flowing football. OK, a bit of police brutality – when else do they get a chance legally to crack a few English heads? – and some spectacular diving by the Spaniards: what else is new? But the score was made farcical by the stupidity of the referee, who had blown his whistle before the ‘fouled’ player hit the ground, and was standing over the penalty spot a second later. It was obvious that Robinson had got both hands to the ball, and that the player with the ball at his feet would trip over him – even if he had not intended to. Robinson got a yellow card for letting it be seen that he was not in full agreement with the ref. The other 20 million were not charged. That ref. has a promising future.

Sentence with more 'thises' than Richard II Hope you've been watching this: This is This this week - not better than usual, just a bit different. There's still time to catch it. Looks like a great idea, eg. for dilettante bloggers who don't want the commitment of a full-time blog. Apply here.

West with the Wagons

Guess I must have boasted about the Riviera weather and am being punished. Last Sunday we lunched on the beach at Cannes and had to cover up lest we fried. Yesterday there were large hailstones on the balcony and our front door blew open during the night and filled the place with leaves. Today we lunch indoors.

A couple of weeks ago we went west - almost what the French call Le Far Ouest - Wiltshire. We were looking for somewhere remote in the hope that it might prove a perfect writing retreat. It is: it’s so bloody perfect that the DG also fell in love with it – so much so that I’ll now have to find another place to write in. Or I can stay home: it'll be quiet there if everyone's in Wiltshire. I’ll tell you how wild this place is: it’s in an English village without a pub. It has a ‘phone box – a lovely old-fashioned red one – but it doesn’t work and there’s no mobile reception. People get lost trying to find you – well, the ones you want to see do. Like the BT man bringing broadband: in order to make a call to find out what had happened to him when he was six hours late, the DG had to drive four miles. And there's no gas - that's proper gas, not gasoline - which there's none of either. But boy does it have stars!
The other day, having armed ourselves with an Ordinance Survey map and a compass, we went for a walk. There’s a ridge about five miles away that’s marked intriguingly on the OS map ‘Danger Area’, which we assumed must mean there’s a steep escarpment on the other side, so we went up there – and came across a tall flagpole flying a faded red flag. Thinking it might carry some political message, we concealed our Daily Telegraph and went closer. The sign read ‘Do not pass this point when the red flag is flying. Do not touch any object as it may explode’.
We had chanced upon an army bombing range. It seems that 250 square miles (38,000 hectares) of Wiltshire, or one ninth of its area, is owned by the Ministry of Defence Estates Department, and that a third of that is used for live firing. As we stood there, a line of army trucks come over the horizon one by one - thought they might get in a circle. The good news is that there’s good mobile reception up there, which is a comfort if you're about to become a practice target for full metal jackets.
At least it explains all those moon-crater-like foxholes that we thought were king-size rabbit warrens; and that frequent crunchy noise that sounds as if some farmer is scaring off rooks with a trench mortar. And why the rents are low.

Canary Island Discs No. 4 This one’s by a French jazz musician called Michel Petrucciani. He died in New York in 1999, aged only 36 – not of an overdose but from a chest infection - before he'd had time to enjoy the fame he deserved. I did a post on him in 2005, a little of which is repeated here – hope that’s not a breach of copyright.
He was about a metre tall, and his normal-sized wife used to carry him onstage like a baby and place him carefully on the stool, whence he could reach the pedals only because they were built up with wooden blocks, and he reached the high and low notes by rolling his body along the stool, sometimes clinging to the woodwork for the long arpeggios. He had forearms like a bricklayer, but a touch like a butterfly: if you ever heard his version of Ellington's 'Caravan', you'd have wished that the Duke could have heard it. He seldom played anything the same way twice, but he would usually open with a quiet Bach-ish fugue, which he would gradually build upon – layering notes on notes and chords on top of chords until he reached a crescendo, before returning, in a very French, Debussy-like way, to a gentle six-note coda. Come to think of it, he barely plays the melody of ‘Caravan - but it's always there in your head.
Perhaps it was because of his stature that he did not get the recognition he deserved until late in his short life. Perhaps, like Charlie Parker, his frantic work rate was in expectation of an early death. I saw him play on the diving platform of an Olympic swimming pool high in the Alpes Maritimes above Grasse, (don’t ask me how they got the Steinway up there); at the Nice Jazz Festival; in a smoky Paris jazz club called Le Petit Journal; and, solo, in a packed Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.
He opened his gigs with his own composition: Looking Up. He is looking up in all his photographs; he looked up, physically, at the world, and metaphorically, despite his debilitating handicap, at life. When my (then) early teen-age son and I once met him at the Nice Jazz festival, son asked him for his autograph. And what an autograph it is! Instead of the usual celebrity squiggle, it is a brilliant caricature of the little giant himself, cherub-faced, looking up, and one word: 'Peace'. Disc No. 4: Michel Petrucciani and Duke Ellington’s Caravan.

The best-planned lays of mice and men...

...gang aft a-gley’, as Burns wished he had said. Now this is not going to be another anti-Scottish diatribe. As you know, I am not prone to racial prejudice of any kind, particularly against Scots. After all, my nominee for sanctification on the next vacancy will be Glaswegian Saint, David Moyes, for the last five years Manager of the Everton Football Club, who rescued them from the brink of disaster to which their previous manager had brought them. (Come to think of it, he too was a Scot, but it did him no harm – he’s now Manager of the Scottish national team.)
It was while listening to one of the BBC’s best news presenters, James Naughtie, (a Scot), interviewing our Secretary of State for Defence, Des Browne (a Scot) about his hope that the House of Commons (whose Speaker is a Scot) hasten progress on updating our Trident missiles so that we can kill more people quicker so the incoming Prime Minister (Yes, you guessed) can deny all responsibility – that I realised why I worry about the Great Scottish Takeover.
It’s not because, although they pay the same taxes as the English; elderly Scots get free personal care, while ours don’t; or because Scottish students get free tuition, while ours don’t; or because they get better drugs and health care than we do; or even that they obtain 20% more per person from the State budget. Not at all – good luck to them if they can get away with it. To be fair, they do have colder winters and higher coronary death rates, and they have to eat haggis and deep-fried Mars bars and watch Scottish football.
No, my objection is that the Royal Mint has decided that the £20 note will no longer bear the profile of our beloved Elgar, composer of Stance and Circumpomp and our unofficial national anthem, Land of Hope and Crosby, and whose very name is an anagram of 'regal'.

Elgar is out: in future, the Bank of ENGLAND’s most popular banknote will feature – back-to-back with the Queen - a Scottish bean counter called Adam Smith.

Ethnic cleansing comes to football Isn’t it odd that, having got three English teams into the last eight in the Champions League, they managed to avoid playing each other in the Quarter Finals, thus setting up the possibility of an all-English final in Athens? But then, is there such a thing as an ‘English’ club any more, when, of our top three clubs, one is Russian-owned, and the other two are owned by Americans?
It’s the same with the players: When Arsenal played Philips Eindhoven in the Champions League last week, there was only one Dutchman in the Dutch team – and even he didn’t last the distance. And there were no Englishmen in the English team. You realise what this means: it means that when the Scottish revolution takes place, there'll be no Englishmen here for them to take over. The best-laid plans will have ganged a-gley.

Canary Island Discs No. 3 When I was a kid, our parents took us to Blackpool every September to see the Illuminations - Dad worked for the railway company so got cheap tickets. One of my favourite light-and-sound shows was the one at South Shore baths to a looped tape of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody. Maybe that’s when I started to like Hungarian music.
Years later, I went to a concert given by the New Zealand National Orchestra in Wellington, and they played Kodaly’s Háry János Suite. It was a revelation - they played it again as an encore, and then had to play it again because people wouldn’t let them stop. When I went to the record shop next day, they had sold out.
Fast forward another twenty years and I’m in a restaurant in Vienna the name of which I forget, and a small group of white-haired musicians are playing Hungarian gypsy music. Hearing the unusual sound of the cimbalom, which is featured on the Háry János, I asked them if they did it. It was like asking Benny Carter if he did Body and Soul.
I went back there a number of times – they also served good food - and as I arrived they would strike it up. So Disc No. 3 – for Blackpool when it was a fun place, Wellington, Vienna and the cimbalom, it’s Zoltán Kodály’s Háry János Suite.

I've started so I'll finish

I’ve never told anyone this before, but this is the new, glasnostic, publish-and-be-damned me. To set the scene – though there’s probably more scene than story - I was in a jazz club that I used to frequent in Paris. It was underneath a bar called ‘Montana’ in a street off the boulevard St. Germain. I had invited a colleague who I knew was a jazz freak, and he had asked if he could bring his thirteen-year-old daughter because she was taking piano lessons and he wanted to try to interest her in jazz. The club’s regular pianist was a great guy called René Urtreger and he was playing some Thelonius Monk. René once toured Europe with Miles. (That’s not relevant to the scene-setting, but some might find it interesting.)
Anyway, Daniel goes up to the bar to order some drinks, leaving me alone with his charming daughter. Now, my conversational capacity with young teenage English girls is limited: with French teenagers it’s virtually non-existent. So I ask her if she’s enjoying the Monk and she says she is. I’m about to start on the weather forecast when René starts to play a piece I know and love, and I say, partly for her education, partly showing off, ‘Ah! Blue Monk’. And she says, quietly, ‘I think it’s Crepuscule with Nellie.
Imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury being told by one of his flock, ‘Excuse me Arch, but I think you’ll find it’s twelve apostles, not ten’. What do you say when corrected in your specialist subject, to which you’ve dedicated a lifetime – and a heap of money - by a French female adolescent?
You say ‘But of course’, of course.

It’s happening! The paperback is happening – or at least it looks like it’s about to happen. Those good folks at Amazon are announcing the forthcoming release of Riviera Writers Two – which is the same as Riviera Writers One but with a new cover, a ludicrously reduced price and my name at the top instead of squeezed in as an afterthought at the bottom.
After all, no one could doubt the integrity and efficiency of the great Amazon Brain Forest – why, aren’t these the same people who send you sticker books with the stickers already stuck in, and tell you they don’t have a particular DVD - then, when you’ve been out and bought it in a shop, (remember them: S-H-O-P-S?), send it to you and charge your card?
Anyway, this is the NEW cover.I don’t know where you stand on the commercial exploitation of bloggery but I’m also going to try to put it on my profile if I can handle the html bit. How about that? – WORD didn’t put a wavy red line under ‘html’...

Canary Island Discs 2 It was the autumn of 1960 and I was living in Sydney. I didn’t know anyone and was much more shy than I am now. So life was what the French call Metro, boulot, dodo – commute, work, sleep. I was alone from 5pm one day until 9am the next, and - with the exception of playing football for Greenwich on Saturday afternoons – all weekend. The friendly glad-handing Aussie in the tourism commercials is an extinct species in Sydney.
I noticed in the Morning Herald an ad about a concert by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. It sounded interesting at first – I’d heard of them, and, having spent the previous three years in a small town in New Zealand’s South Island in which the National Orchestra performed one gig a year, felt I should take advantage of the opportunity. The only problem was that there was some guest conductor I’d never heard of, and he was conducting a programme of his own works. Not very promising, I thought - but better than going home to my bedsit in Manly, where my landlady laid out the breakfast trays the previous evening, so that by morning your breakfast was covered in ants. (I used to squash them in a ring around the side of my plate as a gesture of disapproval, but then she asked me if I had a problem about ants in my food, because they were quite harmless. She came from Papua, New Guinea and apparently thought that ants added a healthy shot of protein to the morning Wheaties.)
So I went to the concert – and still haven’t recovered. The name of the composer/conductor was Aaron Copland and the piece of music that changed my life was Appalachian Spring. It says so much to me: America, spring, wide open spaces and starry skies that you rarely see in crowded, light-polluted Europe. Although I owned it as a 33rpm and then as a CD. it’s one of those works - like the 1812 Overture - that should be he listened to live, and preferably in the open air. I watch out for it every year when the summer Proms programme comes out, but it’s never there. But I can tell you, Plumley, Lawley or whichever adverb runs it now, that if Appalachian Spring is not on my island, I’m not staying for the next eight records. I‘ll do a Steve McQueen and jump aboard the next passing inner tube.

Canary Island Discs: Record No. 1

When we were on our desert island last month, internet-rationed, bereft of Sunday Times and Sky Sports and with the radio only in Spanish and German, I pined for Radio Four: John Humphrys and the Today programme were never so sorely missed. (He has been on the show twenty years last month. Congratulations, John.)
But it wasn’t just Humphrys – I yearned for them all: Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue; Just a Minute – even The Archers, which is about as bad as it can get you.
Songs of Praise apart, Desert Island Discs is the longest-running show on radio. I used to listen to it when Roy Plumley’s plummy voice used to say – over Eric Coates’s Sleepy Lagoon - ‘Each week we ask our guest to tell us which ten records they would like to have with them if they were marooned on a desert island with only a gramophone and an inexhaustible supply of needles’.
Finding myself similarly marooned - and without a single needle - I started to think which ten records I would choose. It’s not as easy as it sounds: you have to balance the relative importance of, say, taste, nostalgia, image and repeatability. (Chancellor of the Exchequer Ken Clarke chose all jazz, and some rock singer chose ten records of himself.) But in the end, nostalgia usually wins, which I guess puts family top of the list

My numero uno? (I'm getting ready for Liverpool v. Barca tonight.) I have to confess I’ve never owned the disc in question, or even consciously sought to hear it, but the Irish national anthem always sends me on a furtive tissue-quest. My mother was Scouse-Irish, and on occasional Sunday nights our little house would rock to the Gaelic music on Radio Eireann, to which my mother, aunts and assorted expatriate Micks would dance, or sometimes sing along to Paddy McGinty’s Goat or Rafferty’s Motor Car. We kids were usually in bed at the time, and heard, rather than saw, the ceilidh, but my mental image of the scene - somewhere between Riverdance and Gaelic football - may not be far wrong. The signal for the end of the evening was the midnight time signal followed by what I used to think was a jolly nice quickstep, but is known nowadays as Amhrán na bhFiann, the Irish (Republican) national anthem.

So it means a number of things to me: childhood, home, parents, brothers, summer holidays in Drogheda or Cork and ‘Oh-oh – we're going to be thrashed at Rugby again’.

To travel hopefully…

February 18 Now I don’t mind business travellers in general: only the ones who talk loudly about it on public transport so we’ll all know how important they are – like ‘Well I’ll try but I can’t imagine we’ll get Frankfurt to accept that’, or ‘Sorry, can’t make it – I’m in Madrid until Wednesday and Prague the rest of the week’.
Why all this business travel? Whatever happened to video-conferencing? It was going to cut corporate travel costs, reduce executive stress and carbon dioxide emission. So why do business people travel so much?
Because they like to. There are a number of reasons: it’s a tax-free perk and an ego-massage – not to mention those lovely Frequent Flyer miles, gold cards, executive lounges and free upgrades.
There’s nothing nearly so impressive about, ‘Can’t make it – got a video-conference on Tuesday’.
And besides, what would all those Conference Centres do? (Even Maspalomas, where no one makes anything, ships anything or digs anything out of the ground, has one.) Or the ‘Conferences’ departments of the big corporations? What would all those high-flying academics do? (What self-respecting medical academe hasn’t played every golf course in Florida, Oahu or the Algarve, courtesy of a drugs or cosmetics giant?) How would they be able to say ’74.8% of doctors recommend…’?
No, the only thing we can do if we want to save the video-conferencing industry – and incidentally the planet - is either to develop a video-conferencing system that will guarantee a 5 handicap - or do what the Swedes did and tax people on travel perks.
But they won’t – not while Tony likes his Antillean jaunts and not while John (“Why-didn’t-Clapton-shoot-the-Deputy?") Prescott likes to go to Texas and dress up like a Yorkshire dude.
No, business travel is here to stay: I know - I did it for years. But then my journeys were important.

February 21 There’s a pub in the Maspalomas shopping centre that, before it becomes a tinitus-inducing disco at around eleven, is a jock’s paradise, with five TVs on the wall, each tuned to a different Champions’ League match. Surrounded by large Dutchmen, we watched PSV-Arsenal - with peripheral glances at Lille-Man U next door. Great game (ours) clean – only one yellow card - fast – thought it was on fast-forward in the first half – and noisy – cheers going up from different parts of the room at different times. Tonight will be even noisier: Liverpool-Barcelona - it's the only time I can support the Reds in public.

Notices in Maspalomas camp: Schwimmen Sie nicht nach dem Essen, oder wenn Sie Alkohol getrunken haben. Pity - I used to like the swimming.

Now is the Winter...

February 11 Two days before we left for Maspalomas, our central heating boiler packed up. The day we left, it snowed in England. When we got there it was 24º. For once we got it right – then why do I feel guilty – rats leaving sinking ship and all that? Plus I had not met my Feb 7 deadline – hope my editor doesn’t read this.
It’s at the southern tip of Gran Canaria, one of the group of islands off the west coast of Africa where northern Europeans go in winter to defrost – at the risk of being called a wimp I have to admit that even the Riviera doesn’t quite do it in midwinter
The last time I was here my kids were younger than my grandkids are now – it was more than 30 years ago. And how it has changed! It was just a place name that looked like a failed anagram of the capital, Las Palmas, and some sand dunes – they shot bits of Lawrence of Arabia here. Now you can hardly find the dunes.
It’s a man-made international vacation centre – a sort of Disney-less Florida, with the same green, planet-draining golf courses and the same Hispanic natives. Which means everything looks new; but nicely new: it's tastefully developed – even the big hotels are hidden behind vast gardens of bougainvillia and hibiscus. The whole place looks pristine and the only workers to be seen apart from domestics are men in white overalls with white-spotted faces, carrying buckets of paint
We got here just in time to watch Spain beat the NEW England team. Well no, only the coach was new – the players were the same eerie-dreary mustn’t lose automatons as before. When you see how hard they play when they play club football, you have to assume that the new coach is no better motivator than the old one.
It’s a truly multicultural place – the area we live in is called Campo Internacional. You can distinguish people’s nationality from their feeding times: FWVSCs (families with very small children) and Americans dine at around 5.30, followed by Dutch and Germans. Brits and French tend to turn up around eight, then when everyone has left and the restaurants are so deserted you think they're on the verge of closing, the Spanish start to arrive: waiters cheer up and enjoy animated banter about the relatIve merits of Real Madrid and Barca.
All in all, a very nice place, and it will do nicely until the worst of the winter’s past. Other assets – not much to do and no internet access: ie. very conducive to work. And as for the deadline – what’s Spanish for mañana?
But it's a great comfort, as we sit here surrounded by electric heaters waiting for the boiler men to arrive, to know that it's now 28 degrees in Maspalomas.

Sign language You see some odd signs in Maspalomas, but this one is about the oddest. Even in Spanish it doesn’t seem to make sense – although it must. But in German it does – it's that Kamelstation. Thus I think it must
mean ‘Access only to the camels’ place.’

Carbon Dating We were walking along the promenade the other night. It was a warm evening of the kind we sometimes see in UK in mid-August, and there was a gentle sea breeze. As we rounded a bend, there was a fountain – well, not so much a fountain as a mini-Niagara without the men in yellow coats telling you obvious things like ‘do not walk too near the falls’. Anyway, whether it was the surprise of seeing and hearing all that water cascading over pink rocks, or the balmy evening or the wine I don’t know, but we were both moved just enough to exchange a spontaneous - but perfunctory and discreet - kiss. And my immediate thought was of a recent post in which a dear fellow-blogger – who I’m sure would never entertain the slightest age-ist thought - complained about not liking to see old people snog. Now I’d say I’m not a fan of public snoggery by anyone, and can never understand how it is that the escalators on London Underground – especially the Bakerloo Line - tend to make people feel romantic.
But next morning, when we spoke to our neighbour, he asked us if we’d enjoyed our meal the previous evening, so we asked if they’d seen us. ‘Yes,’ they said, ‘by the fountain’.
Should we apologise?

Canary Row

(This being a Canary Island, it´s probably my once in a lifetime opportunity to use this title, so I hope Steinbeck doesn´t mind).

This is an interim post to explain my absence from the blog waves and, it´s hoped, sustain RW-hungry readers until we can get internet access. As you may have heard, contact with the world is limited here: ships take a week to reach England, and although there are ring-necked doves (with the most boring mating call known to ornithology - how they expect to tempt a female from spinsterhood I don´t know. Still, it must work or there wouldn´t be so many of the ring-necked buggers) there are no homing pigeons. But then, since this would be their home, they would not want to take messages to the mainland anyway.

No, the only net access within 40 miles is Stalag 17 up the road, where one is limited to 15 minutes at a time - of which the first 4 are taken up loading the blog and the remaining 11( at my typing speed) in entering the title. I cheat - the DG is typing this. There is no Wifi and the Obergruppenfuhrer does not permit pre-recorded text: uploading pictures is similarly verboten, and when your 15 minutes is up, everything is erased.

No more excuses - clearly the system is designed to discourage blogging and e-mailing - which for a vacation island is probably right. So apologies to both e-mailers and bloggers for this hiatus - I only hope the wait will turn out to have been worth it for you.

Do-roo-do-dooh Mrs Robinson

When the eldest son of King George III was the Prince of Wales (later George IV), he was a bit of a lad. He used to install his mistresses in locations convenient to Windsor Castle, just as Charles II did with Nell Gwynne in the 17th century and, more recently, the future Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson.
One of the Prince’s dalliances was called Mary Robinson, a poet and actress most famous for playing Perdita in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale. He saw the play when he was 17, fell in love with her, rechristened her Perdita and gave her a residence in Old Windsor (the older part of the town, where the Romans built the original Windsor Castle because it was a day’s march from London but which, since it was made of wood, has not survived). He asked her to become his mistress and it was agreed she would do so for £7,000, payable when he was 21, but by then he had tired of her and he never paid up. Not to be outdone, Mary got George III – in exchange for the Prince’s letters to her - to pay half of it and give her a pension, and she spent the rest of her life as a writer in Old Windsor. I’ve been looking for Mary for years because she’s a character in the book I’m researching - and this week I found her right here, in Old Windsor Parish Church:

Fizzy O’Therapy Made two careless mistakes with the wine order. First, I bought a case of ‘mixed Loire whites’. My daughter once nearly married a Tourain and he introduced me to Loire wines so I thought it would be good. But I broke my own rule: never buy 'mixed cases'. Mixed cases are how they get rid of rubbish they can’t sell by the case. It may be a crap bottle, you say of the first, but never mind - it’s only one bottle, and it’s open now, so…
But when the next one you open is also vino crappo you realise you've been conned.
The other mistake was not to read the catalogue properly. We like a cool Pino Grigio after a hard day’s retirement. But it was frizzante. I wondered what on earth I’d bought when I saw all those bubbles, but it's great. Good mistake.

Rough Justice I got my wife back after 3½ weeks of dispensing justice, so, as the British judicial system prevented us from escaping the worst of the winter, we decided to defrost in the Canary Islands. THEN… (disaster chord, followed by solo violin):
As David Letterman would say - what ten things would you least want to happen when you’re on a deadline and 1500 words short and two days from going away and have not yet made any preparations? And it’s the coldest day of the year? And - oh yes, it’s Sunday morning? OK – just one then? You’re right – the thing you’d least want would be for the central heating to pack up.
Well it did. After spending most of the morning in the Yellow Pages talking to answering machines, we finally got hold of Jonathan. He sounded more sleepy than enthusiastic: ‘Yawn. It’ll cost you double time’
‘ That’s OK.’
Jonathan arrives and says – ‘Of course I’m not really a repairer, I’m an installer’. Funny he didn’t mention that earlier (he’s listed under ‘Gas Engineers’.)
‘Can you fix this?’
‘The gas valve has gone.’
‘Can you fix it?’
‘I don’t carry spares’
‘Can you fix it?’ ‘
‘No, but I can install a new-technology energy-saving boiler for you.’
‘When?’
‘Couldn’t say. I’m busy until the week after next.’
‘Thanks Jonathan. By that time we’ll be on a sub-tropical island. We’ll call you. How much did you say?’
‘You'll have to add VAT to that.’

I can’t type any more – my fingers have gone numb.
Can't even stay up to watch the 5-hour car commercial interspersed with the odd few seconds of men in tights and body armour playing American football - also known as the Superbowl. The Bears will win anyway.
Gotta go - as Captain Oates said, 'I may be some time'. Do-roo-do-dooh

Sunday Blogger

When an admirer asked Philip Larkin if he would dedicate one of his books to her, he agreed, but said she would have to wait a long time, because he was only a Sunday writer. That’s what I am these days. Except that I suspect he only said that to convince the Hull City Library that he didn’t write poetry on payroll time. I never write in payroll time, but not because I'm writing immortal poetry: it's because no one pays me. Weekly blogging is not nearly as satisfying as the inspirational spur-of-the-moment kind: by the time Sunday comes around you’ve forgotten most of what pleased or angered you during the week – in fact you’ve almost forgotten how to blog. The solution, as every writer knows, is to carry a notebook and pen at all times – but my most brilliant thoughts come in the shower and the notes get soggy and unreadable.

Among the plethora of important anniversaries last week: Dixie Dean, Saint Sebastian, etc – one slipped by unnoticed except, understandably, by me. On January 15, 2006, I started this blog.
At dinner the other evening a friend wanted to know why we blog. A number of people have asked me that, but if I told you that this questioner is a writer whose opinion I respect, you would find it – as I did – surprising. It’s tempting to give the short answer, like Louis Armstrong’s to the person who asked him to explain jazz - ‘If you have to ask, you ain’t ever gonna know’. But the real answer is much longer.
Friend said it was self-indulgent. He’s dead right: of course it is - but then so are eating, drinking a crisp white Burgundy and lots of other things, yet no one asks us why we do it. I don't understand why people play golf, grow orchids, watch Big Brother, support Manchester United, sail and so on – but chacun á son indulgence.
Although RivieraWriter may now be a mere shadow of its former self (which some would say was already pretty shadowy), I have to say, 167 posts, 3,854 hits, 6,221 page views and 71, 361 words later, that I look back on my twelve months of blogging as - for me at least – a very enjoyable and satisfying experience. I’ve improved my typing rate if not its accuracy; had a lot of fun and met some wonderful and amazing people. Try it Mike, what have you got to lose?

Sky Television commentator on Arsenal game this week: ‘Arsène Wenger is not generally known as a man who lets his feelings show, but tonight he has run the whole gambit’.

Less is more. I was putting it out the rubbish last week when the postman handed me the mail. After one glance, it went straight into ‘Rrecycled Paper’. It must be frustrating to be a postie, delivering mail that no one wants.
There’s a great magazine called The Week It has no political leaning – it just selects the best writing from every paper and magazine in the world and I wouldn’t be without it. But last week it came with EIGHT pieces of junk mail - the junk weighed almost as much as the magazine.
One of the worst culprits seems to be Dell. Mr Dell, if you’re reading this, I don’t care how good your computers may be, I’ll never buy one because of what you’re doing to the planet.
Less is more in the junk mail business. It’s obvious to us, so why can’t the PR agencies see it? The answer is they can, but they have clients who want splash, and it’s their money. How can I get word to these people that every red envelope; every IMPORTANT MESSAGE!!!; every ‘free gift!’ of a 29p biro; every ’Chance to win a luxury holiday in Paris!’; and every 24-point exclamation mark; goes unopened into the recycling. If you want my attention, send something that looks like a letter and is addressed to me and I'll read it - especially if it has a postage stamp on it.

Happy Hundredth Dixie!

I would have had to do this one even if I had not been given an official blog pass for weekends.

Everton are celebrating Dixie Dean Day this weekend. William Ralph Dean – universally known as Dixie - was the star of the Everton team during its glory years: the late 1920s and early 1930s, when over a five-year period they won the second division championship, two first division championships and the FA Cup.If he were alive he would be 100 years old on Monday.

My Dad (who would be 120) was an Everton fan. Our house was a museum of Everton iconography: ties, scarves, tea cosies and hot water bottle covers, all knitted by Mum in royal blue and white. My eldest brother went to the school next door to the ground, and my brothers and I, when we couldn’t afford the seven old pence it cost to get in, would stand outside the ground to listen for the roar that meant that we had scored – and at three-quarters time, when the gates would be opened for early leavers, we would rush in to see the end of the game.

Dad’s greatest moment was his trip to Wembley in 1933 with his brother - my Uncle Bert - to see Everton win the FA cup. Both were passionate Blues. What else could they be - the 1901 census shows their address as “Newsboys’ Home, Everton Road, Everton Valley, Everton”? (Media was obviously in the DNA.)

If Everton was our faith, Dixie was our high priest. I was brought up on the legend of Dixie: the goal-scoring genius who could shoot with either foot, head like a trench mortar – half of his goals were from headers – and turn water into wine. My earliest literature was yellowing clips from the Liverpool Echo recording Dixie’s greatest performance, when at the age of 21 he scored more League goals in a season than anyone else, before or since.

With three matches of that season still to go, few thought that Dixie could get the 9 goals he needed to beat the record of 59 goals in a season. But he hit six goals in the next two games – helping Everton win the First Division Championship in the process - and people started to hope. But he needed three goals in the last game - and it was against Arsenal, the cash-rich ‘Chelsea of the 1920s', who had already beaten us twice that season.

On May 5, 1928, despite the fact that the Championship was already in the bag, Goodison Park was packed with the Faithful, come to see if Dixie could do it. He scored in the first five minutes, then, mid-way through the first half, he cracked in a penalty – equalling the record. But with eight minutes to go, the score at 2-all, and 60,000 people looking anxiously at the clock, it began to look as though he wouldn’t make it. Then Alec Troup sent in a corner kick. I have a grainy picture of Dixie soaring above the Arsenal defence. When he came down, football history had been made.

Dad used to get out old newspaper photographs showing an open-topped bus besieged by ecstatic fans, and point himself out in the sea of faces. Pity he never met his grandson or great-grandson, Evertonians both.

Dixie’s record of 60 goals in 39 matches has stood for 80 years, and is unlikely ever to be beaten. He scored almost 500 goals in his career, including 37 hat tricks, before retiring to run a pub in Chester. The pub, the “Dublin Packet”, became a Mecca for former fans: my Uncle Bert was one of the many who made the pilgrimage from Liverpool. I made my own many years later, but by then Dixie was long gone.

His death was so appropriate it might have been cued by Max Clifford: suddenly, at age 73, at Goodison Park, watching the Blues play the Reds - our historic rivals. The only flaw was that Liverpool won 2-1. At the funeral, huge crowds lined the streets of Liverpool in silent tribute.

One of the series of postage stamps commemorating the 2000 European Cup featured a typical Dean header, and is captioned “Football Legend: Dixie Dean, 1907-1980” – long-overdue recognition of the football legend who transferred to Everton from Tranmere Rovers for £3,000, and at the peak of his career earned £8 a week.

Little-known fact: Dixie played baseball for Liverpool Caledonians. In the year before Dixie scored his 60th, Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs - and came to watch Dixie play against Spurs at White Hart Lane. The two legends met - but The Babe's record only lasted 34 years.

Happy Centennial, Dixie.

In a Private Member's Bill before Parliament today an MP is trying to give local people more say over local planning. One of its aims is to stop High Street globalisation – Windsor’s, for example, used to have two fishmongers, a shop catering exclusively for left-handed people, a saddler's, plus independent bakers, bookshops etc. Now I don’t think there’s anything that isn’t a chain store. There even used to be a real coffee blender's that you could smell the length of the street: Starbucks plan to open a thousand new shops in UK this year.

OK., so we vote with our feet - people must like them or they wouldn’t be there, etc. But France and Italy have chain stores and supermarkets – yet they still have independent shops and street markets.

Talking about France, some once-secret papers from the National Archive have just been released under the 50-year rule, and it seems that in 1956 the French Prime Minister Guy Mollet came to London to discuss the possibility of a merger between France, who were having a tough time economically, and Britain.

(The media are leaving no cliché unexploited, outdoing each other in inane conjecture: if it had gone through, would we all be eating frogs’ legs and snails by now – and they fish and chips? - and so on. The Mirror cartoon: kid says, 'Daddy, can I have a pony?' Father: 'You've already eaten'.)

We turned Mollet down, so he came back with another proposal: that France be allowed to join the British Commonwealth. He even said they would accept the Queen as Mrs Big. Quote: "there need be no difficulty over France accepting the headship of Her Majesty".

Which was probably where he blew his case . It's that word 'headship' - we know what the French do to Kings and Queens.

Sylvester Stallone was at Goodison Park last Sunday – and not only wore an Everton scarf but was still wearing it when he got to the opening of Rocky 11 or 12 in Paris. I wonder if he got to chat with Tim Howard, our American goalie. Americans tend to make good goalies – there are several in English clubs – because they can catch. (All except Tim, who has some difficulty with that aspect of his game.)

Sly was a goalie once – remember Escape to Victory? A film about a bunch of prisoners of war that included, incredibly, Pele, Bobby Moore, Pusckas, and, even more incredibly, a paunchy Michael Caine. It gets even less credible: they form a team that beats the cream of the Wehrmacht at the Parc des Princes in Paris in a ‘friendly’ match and escape under the Germans’ noses while the crowd sing the Marseillaise. I saw it on an Air France flight from JFK to Paris and there wasn’t a dry eye on the flight.

Sly stayed just long enough to see Andy Johnson’s equalizer and left. If he’d stayed longer we might have won. If Dixie had been playing we would have won.

New kid on the blog?

No! Hey, it’s me! You remember me - Everton, Villefranche and all that?
How quickly people forget. I can’t tell you how much I’m missing blogging – blogless, I’ve felt at times that I don’t exist any more. I blog not, therefore I am not, as a drunken Descartes might have said - and although I still read my favourite bloggers and check out my hit rates (falling), it’s not the same. Oh - and I’ve rediscovered that writing is lonely.
But I’ve won a remission for good conduct and am permitted a brief weekly blogfix provided 3000 productive words have been written – so long as I don’t exceed 500 words.
The great British novel is taking shape, but it’s having a rough passage. Fiction’s hard after years of plagiarising – I mean researching - so I’ve devised a fiendishly cunning plan to acclimatise myself. I take a chapter of an earlier work that started out as a biography and fictionalise it into a complete short story. I’ve done that now – for better or for worse – and am almost ready to expose it to the ruthless but fair critics at my writers' group.
But the truth is, I never left you. The urge never went away, and I still find myself saying ‘that would make a neat blog’ – then forgetting what 'that' was.
You can’t plan a blog - blogging’s a sport, and has a similar affinity to jazz as sport. DG says that when we met she was surprised to find that I was a football fan. There she was – she says – thinking she'd found a bit of an intellectual, and he was a closet footy freak, and worse: a jazz fan! What a phoney – intellectuals don’t go for that stuff.
But there’s no difference between blogging and watching the teams run out at Goodison Park to the tune of Z-cars - the old Liverpool-based cops-and-robbers programme – or the moment Sonny Rollins ambles on stage, alone, tenor in hand. For the next 90 minutes you don’t know what’s going to happen - and neither does anyone else, even those most involved. The anticipation is the same. (Though you have to be prepared for it not working for you every time - just like blogs.)

Catching up on admin – even paid my tax 18 days early. There’s a questionnaire about on-line filing. Question 6: ‘Did you use the ‘Help’ button? Yes □ No □? I tick ‘No’. Q.7: ‘If you did, was it helpful?’ Yes □ No □? As there’s no ‘N/A’ box, I don’t tick anything`. You can guess the rest – they won’t accept it – ‘You have not answered Q.7!' Hope they’re not as pedantic when checking my return.

David who? David Beckham is heading for California on a 50-million-pounds – that’s pounds, not dollars - salary. Pity, I always wanted to watch him in Adidas whites at the Bernabeu and now I never will. He says he hopes to raise the profile of soccer in the US. I’d love to see it happen: there should be team sports for guys who are neither 20 stone (280lbs), nor giraffe-men.
When, in the 1951, the USA knocked England out of the World Cup, it was a national disgrace here, but no one in the USA even noticed. Some 20-odd years later, when I used to coach kids’ teams in Paoli, PA, things hadn’t changed much: the trainees were either immigrants’ children, like mine, or rejects from gridiron. Dads seldom came to watch, and, if they did, pretended they were walking the dog, even if they had to borrow a dog. The supporters freezing on the touchline were Moms. (Not quite as bad as New Zealand, where failure to make the grade in Rugby is grounds for disinheritance.)
Now I’m a bit of a fan of Becks: he can’t do many things on a football field, but what he does – pass, cross an early ball and take bendy free kicks – he does supremely well. But David, if the likes of Pele, Beckenbauer, di Stefano, George Best and many others couldn’t do it, I don’t think you’ve got a chance. Demi-god you might be in England or Japan, but US sport has its own. Good luck all the same.

Farewell to Blogs - or is it au revoir?

I’d like to say ‘Happy New Year’, but I fear that if this post is anything like as depressing to read as it is to write, you really ought to look away now – I’d hate to spoil your year. All this is because, as a prelim to writing this New Year’s resolutions, I thought I’d look at how I performed against last year’s, and I have to tell you that performance has been pretty abysmal. Some results were not bad: ‘to take more notice of the DG when it comes to personal relationships’ was even a qualified success, as was ‘drink better wine but less of it’. Even the one about the waistline - if it hasn't reduced much, it is not significantly increased either.
But the bad news, as the TV weather forecasters say - the deplorable news - was the one about writing the great British novel. Plan for 2006: to average 350 printable words per day. Actual: zilcho. In fact, it’s worse than zilch: since I’ve lost the thread of much that was already written in 2005, ‘net words completed’ is a reasonable figure - but a negative one. OK, family circumstances may have made a partial contribution, but in spite of this, over the same period I’ve blogged over 68,000 words: well on the way to a novel. The solution is obvious: less blogging, more fiction.
The problem is I love blogging – it’s cosy and friendly, while novel-writing is cold and lonely. And writing the book is only the beginning – you have to market it, get if published, proof-read etc. Blogging, to a writer, must be what, to an actor, is the difference between working on stage and in films – the reaction is immediate. Or, for a musician, the Nice Jazz Festival versus the recording studio. It must be the reason why Armstrong, Basie and Hampton did one-nighters all around the world until well into their 70s or 80s: instant response.
But what people will remember is the book on the shelf – or the CD or DVD - not the blog or the live performance. When I and my contemporaries are long gone, who will there be to remember Stan Kenton’s Accrington concert? Or The Duke at the Royal Albert Hall? Or Michel Petrucciani at the Festival Hall?
So it’s a temporary (I hope) goodbye to blogging – until either there’s some progress on the book, or I abandon the whole project. And goodbye to you long-suffering readers; I’ll miss your comments – posted, verbal and e-mailed. If anything exciting happens (like Everton getting into the Champions League) you'll hear it here first or on my website.

Take this tip from me

Where do you stand on tipping? I go through this confidence crisis whenever I go from the States, where it’s completely out of hand, to France, where I think it’s fairly orderly and sensible (except I hate paying to use public loos.) The UK is somewhere between the two, so you never know where you are. I think a tip is for a service above the normal call of duty and not for someone doing the job he’s paid for. Why should I pay the wages of restaurant staff, hotel flunkies, taxi-door openers and room cleaners? It seems demeaning for both tipper and tippee - no one ever gave me a tip.
I muse on this after a dinner in a pub in Newbury. Tipping-wise, pub eating presents special problems because they’re not restaurants and they’re not MacDonald’s. You do go up to the bar, you order and pay for your food, you collect your drinks and you take them to the table that you have selected. The only element of ‘service’ is when some youngster on the statutory minimum wage comes out and says, ‘Lamb chops?’ You say ‘Here’, and he or she plonks them down in front of you. It’s nice and casual, and infinitely better than some poncey restaurant. But tipworthy? In my book, only if he or she takes your wet coat and hangs it up, or finds you some freshly-made Sauce Bearnaise or puts your grandchild in a high chair.
But to Newbury: we called into a pub called The Swan on our way home from Tesco’s (that’s a possessive – short for Tesco’s supermarket). The manager, an Aussie, is clearly trying to ponce it up into a ‘restaurant’ – but it’s a pub. Usual procedure: belly up to bar, order and pay for wine and food, carry wine, glasses, condiments, napkins and cutlery to table, wait for food. And wait. Eventually girl delivers a plate of food and we eat. The food is quite good.
As we’re walking to the car, I realise I didn’t leave anything for the ‘waitress’. I ask spouse if she left anything. She says not. I was hesitating, wondering if I should go back and leave some token payment, when the pub door opens, a distinctly Aussie voice shouts – no, screams – ‘Fucking freaks!’, and the door slams shut.
Thus not only did this plonker ensure that we would never go near his pub again, but he prevented his girl from getting a tip – and he got himself blogged. Not bad for two words.

We had the last lunch of the year at Le Carpaccio on Villefranche port, sun glinting off the water - loup grillée fresh from the Med, service unfussy but impeccable – and included. How could you not leave a tip?

Happy old year folks and thanks for reading - and good blogging in 2007.