Old Father Thames

Taking the plunge My wife and I have separated. The logic behind the annual return to UK in early July is that in July and August, England’s weather is at its (unreliable) best. Bah humbug - last month was the wettest June on record, and since in one day - yesterday, July 20 - we had more than twice the average monthly precipitation, July looks like doing the same. So we are separated - by water. I came to Wiltshire earlier this week to do some work, the plan being for the DG to join me on Friday. I even prepared my speciality, a Chicken Cacciatore (it is also the only thing I can cook) and put a bottle of something fizzy in the fridge. But she is still in Windsor because the Thames Valley is awash. If she doesn’t arrive soon I too will be awash – with Chicken Cacciatore and fizzy.
Taking another plunge A strange epidemic is affecting the nation, the most worrying aspect of which is that it seems to afflict only women, with teenagers and the post-menopausal being especially susceptible.
It is called ME - mammaritis exhibitus. Its early symptom is an uncontrollable desire to expose portions of the mammary glands formerly concealed. The phenomenon was first observed in Roman times, when St. Agatha was reputed to have displayed her attributes on a silver platter. It was last prevalent in this country following the Napoleonic wars, but was completely eradicated during the Victorian era. Psychologists cleave to the view that the disease is delusional, since those with the least desirable appendages seem to be the most eager to flaunt them.
So far our new Home Secretary holds the booby prize: when making her inaugural appearance in the House of Commons as a Cabinet Minister, she decided to make a clean breast of the matter - which is more than her predecessor ever did.
It is feared that the disease has already infected the USA: Victoria Beckham, arriving in LA, stressed two points: that her appearance owed much to sartorial engineering, and that WYS was definitely not WYG. But whether or not the disease could flourish on the beaches of Florida is contentious: a scan of American women has revealed a divided front on the matter.

Riviera Writer's cramp Watching the shots in London last night of people who’ve been queuing three days for the privilege of buying the latest – I don’t believe it’s the last – Harry Potter book, I had to smile ruefully . The ‘rue’ is because I’ve finally got a date for my paperback. You’ll be excited to learn that it’s due out on September 26. Applause! To date, Harry Potter has sold 325 million copies. It’s an indication of my publisher’s confidence that they are printing 2,000. If you intend to queue don't bother with the umbrella - it won't take that long.
As a special treat for faithful readers and those too poor - or chintzy - to pay £11.99 ($24), I’m going to drop in brief excerpts from the book from time to time. Here’s a bit on D. H. Lawrence:

Vence is a small cathedral town - that is, a town with a small cathedral. Its eleventh-century church is among the smallest in France. The old town is a vaguely concentric maze of narrow streets protected on one side by monumental gates and on the other by medieval ramparts. Elegant, urn-shaped fountains play in sheltered squares, of which one served as the Romans' forum, and another housed the town guillotine in Revolutionary times. The beauty of the old town is now the traveller's reward for having negotiated the suppuration of hotels and ugly apartment blocks that surround it.
Vence stands almost a thousand feet up in the hills, about ten miles inland: two features that, in January 1930, caused the English novelist and travel and short-story writer David Herbert (D.H.) Lawrence to move there. In coastal Bandol, he had been examined by Dr Moreland, an English chest specialist on holiday in the area, who had told him that he should move to a higher altitude, away from the coast.
Lawrence finally, and belatedly, accepted Dr Morland's diagnosis: that he had had tuberculosis for many years. As Katherine Mansfield had done 13 years earlier, he left coastal Bandol for the last time.
He had hoped that his ranch in Taos, New Mexico, might better meet the doctor's requirements, but, apart from his visa problems, the doctor was sure that Lawrence was in no condition for such a long journey.
So he moved into what he called 'a sort of sanatorium' in Vence. When he got there he weighed just six stone - 84 pounds - and was close to death. The building had formerly been the home of a local astronomer, and both its name, Ad Astra (To the Stars), and its location - just across the road from the cemetery - now took on a grisly significance. Lawrence’s wife Frieda checked into the nearby Hôtel Nouvel.
It was not really a sanatorium. As Lawrence wrote on a postcard to Aldoux Huxley's wife Maria, it was just 'an hotel where a nurse takes your temperature and two doctors look after you once a week'. H.G. Wells, who was living near Grasse at the time, came to see him there, as did the Aga Khan. On 27 February, 1930, after only two weeks, he wrote to the Huxleys again; this time with a P.S. 'This place no good.'
The next day Frieda took him away from the home to a villa she had rented: the Villa Rochermond (later the Villa Aurelia) near the great 2,400-foot cylindrical rock of St. Jeannet.
Optimistically, she took a six- month lease starting on 1 March, and moved her bed into his room because he wanted to be able to see her. He was writing a book review when the Huxleys arrived, and he grasped Maria Huxley's hands and said, 'Maria, don't let me die.'
At 9 pm the next day, a doctor came from the 'sanatorium' and gave Lawrence morphine for his pain. He said, 'I am better now', and fell asleep. He died at 10.15 pm.
Lawrence was buried beside a south-facing wall in the Vence cemetery. In addition to Frieda and Barby, her daughter by her previous marriage, the small group of mourners included the Huxleys and their friend Robert Nichols, and English poet living in Villefranche.
At the time, no one thought that, exactly five years later, another small group would gather in carré 7 of Vence cemetery to witness Lawrence's exhumation.
In the time between burial and disinterment, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, on their way home from a holiday in Italy, had made a side trip to Vence to visit the grave - and, it being 1933, had found him in. In the meantime, the grief-stricken Frieda had been comforted by a number of lovers, at least two of whom had shared her with Lawrence while he was still alive.
One was John Middleton Murry, with whom she had had a passionate affair immediately following the death of his wife Katherine Mansfield in 1923. By the time Lawrence died, Murry had acquired another consumptive wife, whom he left with their children in his haste to fulfil his urgent mission to Vence to fill the void left by Lawrence's death.
It is uncertain who comforted whom: Frieda at 50 was still alluring enough for him to write later, 'You don't know what you did for me in Vence … you recreated me.'
The next to console her was Angelo Ravagli, the Fascist Italian army officer who had served as her occasional extra-curricular lover during her marriage, and was the reason for her late arrival at Port Cros some years earlier. By 1935, he and Frieda had moved to Taos. He had built a small mausoleum chapel there - a friend called it a 'station toilet' - in Lawrence's memory, and had been charged with exhuming Lawrence's remains in Vence and shipping them to Taos to complete the shrine.
Deterred by French bureaucracy from exporting a long-dead body, Ravagli had the remains burned and urned in preparation for their 5,000-mile journey. At the docks in New York, the ashes suffered - just as the living Lawrence had done - immigration difficulties, but they were finally accepted as unlikely to have subversive intent or communist sympathies, and were permitted to board the train to New Mexico.
The anarchic Lawrence would probably have enjoyed the rest of the story, as researched by his biographer Brenda Maddox. Distracted by the enthusiasm of Frieda's welcome, Ravagli left the urn and its incinerated contents on the train, after which their fate becomes confused. Either Ravagli went back to the railway station and collected them, or he was unable to find them at the station and bought another urn, which he filled with similar substance.
The disposal of the ashes has raised even more conspiracy theories. Some, including Maria Huxley, believe that the anti-Ravagli school suspected that he had built the Lawrence mausoleum in Taos with a view to charging admission to tourists, and they planned to thwart him by stealing the ashes and casting them to the desert winds. Frieda, hearing of this plan, tipped them into the mixer that was making the concrete altar stone for the chapel.
Twenty years later, a drunken Ravagli revealed that, immediately after the cremation of Lawrence's body in 1935, afraid of hassles with the French authorities over the export of the remains, he had tipped the original ashes out in Vence and replaced them with cindered wood.
Although this contradicted his earlier, already conflicting, statements, it seems to leave only three possible fates for the true ashes: they are either somewhere in Vence, or in a block of concrete in Taos, or in a left luggage office somewhere in New Mexico. And the one true tomb of David Herbert Lawrence is the one in Carré 7 in Vence cemetery, over which a plaque reads, 'David Herbert Lawrence reposed here from March 1930 to March 1935'.
Murry (without mentioning his relationship to Frieda) swore on oath that he had seen a will in which Lawrence bequeathed all his rights in his works to her, and none to his family, (which included a destitute sister) and Frieda and Angelo lived on in New Mexico, getting ever richer on Lawrence’s royalties. They married there in 1950, his Italian wife having given her consent for them to marry.
It was convenient that Italian law had not recognized Angelo's American divorce and marriage, because after Frieda died in New Mexico, Ravagli's wife was able to accept him back as her legal husband without further ceremony.
©2007

Sue us, Canal

For anyone still not bored into indifference by the subject, we have – if not exactly won the Great Canal War – won the latest battle. In my hysterical call (34cents a minute) to the laughingly-named ‘Help’ line, I at last heard them say ‘go to your Canal dealer and have them replace your decoder’. Not having a Canal dealer in our town meant a bus ride to Nice and an argument with a dealer who insisted there was nothing wrong with the decoder. I would have to buy a new TV because, he said ‘the solder in one of the connections must have come loose’. ‘Solder’? (I should add that our TV, if not exactly plasma technology, is only about four years old – so definitely post-Flintstones.) So I took it to another dealer, jolly-good-old-British-owned Darty - failing to mention my experience with the first dealer. Darty, without even testing it, gave me a new decoder.
I fit it with trembling fingers, fearful lest dealer #1 be right and the box be broke. And – joy unconfined! – we get the rest of the Wimbledon Finals in peace and can watch Swiss, French, Spanish, Serbians and Americans battling for the British title when the last Brit candidate went out in round two. And the tennis was great - not just the power game now, but power plus guile.

Garbage wars In the current controversy about whether councils should collect rubbish weekly or fortnightly, it’s worth mentioning that in Villefranche they take it away every night. Our garbage gatherers in Wiltshire, the Kennett Council, are much more sniffy. They collect fortnightly, and although they supply ‘recycle bins’, they will not accept cardboard, plastic bottles or anything with plastic attached, ie. most packaging. The bin men sort out the garbage at your doorstep and leave behind what they don’t want – which you then have to take to the council tip five miles away. As you can imagine, all these enforced tip trips cause increased use of petrol, greater CO2 production, and considerable traffic congestion – especially at weekends – so much so that they have to employ extra staff, not to mention a traffic controller. But they still boast a 50% recycle rate.

Minuty on the Bounty One of the great things about shopping in France is the food shops. OK, there are supermarkets like anywhere else, where you buy your toothpaste, beer and washing-up liquid, but the little food shops that specialise in different food and wines – that we in UK banished long ago – still seem to thrive there, as do the street markets, boulangières, fromagiers etc. On the other hand, we in the UK do have greater choice in wine: in the supermarket, in addition to the usual French, Italian, Spanish, etc., there’ll be departments for most wine-producing countries – Oz, Enzed, South Africa, California, Argentina and so on. But in France and Italy, under the heading ‘Foreign’, you won’t find much more than Ernest and Julio Gallo and Rioja. The wines of Provence are still the best-kept secret: Bandol might be getting a little over-exposed and over-priced, but our favourites are still good value - like Château Roquefeuille (only available in restaurants) and Château Minuty. As this is an anagram of ‘mutiny’ I can't supress a mental image of Charles Laughton wiping his lips – the original cinematographic ‘wipe’ – and saying ‘Minuty’s an ugly word, Mr Christian’.

Absinthe makes the heart go Before we leave, a last 45-minuty drive to San Remo in Italy for a seafood lunch and a farewell shop to top up on the Parmigiano, Olio Extra Virgine (truly Italian oil, not Algerian), pasta, shirts and booze. For this, the last stop is at the supermarket in Latte, a mile before the border, where Jack Daniel’s is 34 Euros (£22) for a 1½ litres and the Amarone de Valpolicellas and Barolos are less than 20 (£14). Most of the cars in the car park have French number plates: come to load up with (French) Pastis.
Then back to Windsor to watch the rain fall and wonder when the grass will be dry enough to mow. Oh yes, and we missed garbage day – guess we’ll have to take it home with us… That'll raise a few eyebrows in Security.
Talking about security, I just found out what's been happening to my lemons:
I'd know that arm anywhere.

Sunblog

Heathrow bristled with cops, the departures lane was blocked by a Police 4x4 and the Fast Bag Drop was a misnomer, but we were delayed mainly because our plane was – as our captain put it – ‘broke’, and they had to ‘go and find another’. How do you find a B737? How do you lose one? – (To lose one 737, Mr Worthing, is a tragedy…) This put us late enough to have a prandial drink and observe the changing faces of BA flight attendants. Smile as you board – glued-on; smile as they serve first drink – always just as you’re finishing your meal - cursory; smile if you dare order a second – snooty (DG was so intimidated that she said ‘We’re sharing it’); smile when they’re selling the (so-called) duty-frees - expansive; and ‘thank-yous’ as you leave - glued-back-on.
But it’s nice to be back in the sun after the wettest June since Noah docked. Or it was until a person very dear to me who shall be nameless so no one gets hurt especially me is complaining about the heat and can’t wait for the cool 19º promised for tonight.
They’ve done a naff but cute thing in Villefranche: in the more picturesque spots, they’ve put up paintings of it by local artists. This is the Place de la Fontaine.


Canal Minus Watching the news on TV is like still being at home: it’s all about England. The 104th Tour de France bike race starts tomorrow in London for the first time, and, what with our new prime minister, the weather, the floods, the terrorists, Alan Johnson’s release and a wet Wimbledon, (now that France has 12 men in the top 100 they’ve started showing Wimbledon. Britain got one man past the first round), French Schadenfreude is rampant. But don’t get me started on French TV. (Warning: the rest of this paragraph is so boring it could damage your health.) The only remotely watchable channel, unless you like quizzes and 1960s reruns, is an encrypted one called Canal Plus, for which you pay 30 Euros (£20) a month - but for six weeks it has remained stubbornly crypté. You ring the techies (45 cents a minute – average wait time 12 minutes), and Presto! It works - for an hour. Next night you have to ring again. I wrote cancelling the contract last month, and guess what? It started working! They wrote apologising and offered me a new contract at 22 Euros (£14) a month. Foolishly, I accepted, and promised the DG she’d have Wimbledon in French. You can guess the rest: it’s crapté again. Last night’s call was 17 minutes – can’t wait for tonight’s. Remember the name – Canal + or Canal Plus.
But it’s nice to be RW again after a frenetic few weeks, to have your meals outside, exhume the tube of sunblock that’s long past its squeeze-by date, and go for a walk without an umbrella.

Brown sauce Say what you like about Brown – please – but you’ve got to agree he’s lucky. In his first week as PM he saved Scotland from terrorism, freed Alan Johnston and stopped dropping his jaw between sentences. No wonder his ratings are soaring.

Carbon dating Went to a sensational party before we left. It was an eightieth birthday party. But no Zimmer-shuffle this: the music was blue-grass and the dancing square. The hostess is one of our group of travelling companions who’ve been visiting European cities together for eleven years, (this year we’re off to Naples). Two days after we get home from Naples, the said octogenarian is off up the Amazon – by canoe I wouldn’t wonder. (More later on this wonderful group of Nomads whose collective age looks like a telephone number.) Happy birthday Maggie!

Writers' block

An item on this morning’s news said that the creative industries – arts, showbiz etc. - make a bigger contribution to the UK economy than the financial ones. I fear this will only perpetuate the myth that writers are rolling in it. A survey by the ALCS of 25,000 authors found that their average salary was 30% lower than the national average wage. Take your Dan Browns out of the mix and it’s a sorry scene.
A publisher I met at Hay told me that even if an author sells out a complete print run of 2000 hardbacks and 5,000 paperbacks he is unlikely to cover his advance. I’m not half-way towards mine yet – which means I worked three years at less than a pound a day. So you have to wonder who gets it - do publishers put their kids through college and pay off their mortgage on a quid a day? Fortunately, as the DG never fails to remind me, we don’t do it for the money.

Into each reign some life must fall. It’s the interregnum: the Gordon and Tony show. Tony, who, having taken the nation into two wars, committed it, on his last day in office, to serve the Euro-bureaucrats in Brussels – presumably with the intention of becoming one of them - and then went off to see the pope, seeking either absolution or sainthood. He should be in The Hague explaining himself to the International Criminal Court: 'well... y'know... I mean...' And, fresh from charm school, Gordon - our incoming PM, who, having devolved even more powers to Scotland, now wants to colonise England.

A market update item from Travelwriter Marketletter: 'Success magazine has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization'.
You just can't depend on anything any more.

Take the A train

The mantelpiece won’t look the same this Christmas. The only head of state with whom I exchanged cards died last week. You remember the Waldheims – he was Sec-Gen of the UN, then president of Austria. Like Richard Nixon, he absentmindedly lost a piece of his life, but whereas Trickie Dickie lost only 18 minutes, Kurt lost 18 months. When his memoirs claimed that he was in Vienna studying for his law doctorate, he was in Croatia helping the Fascists to line them all up. He wasn’t tried for war crimes, but then the prosecuting authority was the UN. No wonder he wasn’t there to meet us in Vienna.


For a train freak, it’s the ultimate self-indulgence – or the penultimate if you dream of taking the Trans-Siberian Express. As Noel, our dinner companion, said, it’s something you have to do once in your life. Not wanting to leave it too late - and fast approaching the age when More Than, my travel insurance company, will drop me for a younger model after happily accepting my premium for 50 years, we decided that this was that moment. Our flimsy justification was that it was both our wedding anniversary and our joint birthday gift to each other (I actually owed her two).
Instead of the two-hour trip out, the ride home took 28 – lunch in Austria, dinner in Germany, breakfast in France and brunch in England. The train is a French-polisher’s nightmare, its vintage coaches dripping with royal blue and brass. Liveried flunkies in light blue and gold anticipate your every wish, for – as the receptionist at the Vienna Hauptbahnhof put it - ‘From here on we do not schlep’.
It’s priced accordingly: when I selected the cheapest item on the wine list – a Sancerre at £44 – the Maitre d’ suggested ‘a much superior wine that is only slightly more expensive’ – at £79. The Sancerre was delicious.
The train itself is gobsmacking. Our coach was built in 1922: on the corridor walls are polished brass light fittings – to hold the gas lamps – and beside the beds are brass hooks so that the gentlemen can hang their fob watch and chain within easy reach (a little fur-lined pad below it prevents scratching of the woodwork). The Orient Express can take you almost anywhere in Europe - Vienna, Milan, Rome, Bucharest, Venice – and never stops anywhere for more than a couple of hours, so the crew don’t get home much during its travel season. Steve, our steward, lives in the Dolomites and is a ski instructor during the winter.
The train doesn’t go to London. At Folkstone a Dixieland band plays you aboard the Pullman for the last lap, a lap of luxury. Our coach, says the plaque, is used regularly by the Queen and was a favourite of the previous one. General de Gaulle left no comment.
Suddenly it’s all over. It’s raining as we schlep our luggage out of Victoria station, pondering the thought of take-away Chinese for the next month.

It’s good having visitors – instead of chasing around to new places, you get to see your own country. It’s like never seeing French people up the Eiffel Tower. Our guest from New York this week wanted to see Stonehenge. (Des. Res., Grade I listed, construct. approx. 4,000BC, full air cond. lintels needing attention.) Missed the solstice by a couple of days, but it’s easier to see when it’s less crowded. She also introduced us to Windsor Castle. Next time she comes she’s going to show us London.

Trapp shooting

This is Salzburg – the original Salt Lake City – and the hills are alive with the Sound of Mozart. If it isn't Mozart it's Julie Andrews.
As we’re walking (yes, walking) by the Fuschlsee, (no, that’s as in ‘foosh’), a bus passes bearing, in two-storey-high letters, the words ‘The Sound of Music Tour’. We are in deepest SoM country.
To promote this piece of naffdom, the Tourist Board produce a brochure which includes a factual history of the von Trapp family, the words of all those unforgettable SoM songs (including such gems as ‘Me, a name I call myself’, ‘La, a note to follow So’, and ‘Edelweiss, Edelweiss, you look happy to meet me’), and contains pictures of the garden gates of some of the actual castles seen in the movie. But apparently the climax of the tour - the pièce de resistance - is when, at the end of the tour, every passenger receives, completely free, a packet of Edelweiss seeds.

We stay at Hof – resisting the temptation to precede it with another monosyllable – in the Salzkammergut mountains. We take the cable car up the Zwölfterhorn, where the air is as intoxicating as the beer and there’s an amazing 360-degree view of mountains and lakes: Fuschlsee, Wolfgangsee and at least three other -sees.
Austrians look and sound German, but they’re smiley and friendly - everyone talks to you. And funny: when I ring for an early call the man says they have a special offer: if you request a call before 5am, they’ll give you another at 5.30 for free. Everyone says Grüss Gott, unless you say it first, then they say Guten Tag, unless you say that first, in which case they say Grüss Gott.
I’m afraid there’ll probably be lots more Austria later, but I have to go now. Got to plant my Edelweiss seeds.

Hay again

Hay was, as usual, mind-blowing, although at one point we did have a fleeting disloyal thought: is it getting too big? The festival used to be held in the village school but it outgrew the school some years ago and is now held in a tented encampment - that gets bigger every year - in a field on the edge of the village. (Which is fine until Hay puts on one of its spring monsoons as it did this week, and you spend your time ankle-deep in red Welsh mud, and the churned-up car parks resemble the Somme. That we stayed with it either says something about the Power of Literature or a fear of getting stuck trying to leave.)
The slightly suburban location means the audience is captive – especially when wet - and they can thus charge twice as much for food and drink as they cost in down-village Hay. But it’s worth it all if only for the company of fellow book-worms: snippets of conversation in queues – like the boy (passing a line of people clutching books, waiting to have them signed by their favourite writers), saying ‘But Daddy, what's it a Festival of?’
Standing at the bar in the Swan, I heard a voice I recognized. Standing next to me, in snow-white Afro and beard, looking like an octogenarian Jimi Hendrix, was Wole Soyinka, whom I had just seen talking about The Power of Literature. There aren’t many Welsh mountain villages in which can you share a pub counter with a Nobel Prize winner.
Another difficulty is in choosing what to see out of 416 events: we’re getting pretty good at it and this year had only one dud. Crime writer Ruth Rendell made it clear with her monosyllabic answers that she hated the whole thing and was only there because it was in her contract.
But, Rendell apart, it was canvas-to-canvas joy – so good that it’s difficult to identify highlights. Was it Simon Schama doing his impersonation of Simon Schama doing The Power of Art? Or A. C. Grayling on The Form of Things? Or Brenda Maddox on Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones; John Julius Norwich on Mediterranean History; Colin Hubron on the Silk Route; Roy Hattersley on Shakespeare; Terry Eagleton on The Meaning of Life; or my favourite biographer, Hermione Lee, on Edith Wharton (who once lived with Henry James in the house right opposite ours and whose parents are reputed to be The Joneses that people tried to keep up with? All, ALL, gob-smacking. Yes, I know they’re only 60-minute distillations of lifetimes of erudition, but what a waste it would be if they went unheard!
Oh yes, and an Aussie stand-up called Sarah Kendall, discussing linguistic problems between our two countries. (What we call 'flip-flops', Aussies call 'thongs' - so when she gets foot problems she tells the chiropodist it's probably from wearing thongs...)
We return heavy-laden with books – him 19, her 18 – and yes, we’ll be back next year, for the tenth time
So now I’m donning lederhosen and the DG her Julie Andrews habit and we’re off to the Austrian Tyrol to get our minds unblown. It has to be easier than Welsh.

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?