Koestler

There are certain famous people I have taken a dislike to without knowing much about them. One is C.S.Lewis. I have not read a single work of his but know of him through others' mentioning of him and through references to him on radio and TV. It's quite ridiculous but I can't help it. Another is Arthur Koestler about whom a new biography has just been published. At least a review of this work gives me some justification in my dislike (if not actual hate) of the man. "Scammell's biography is a sympathetic one. But the Koestler he depicts is consistently repugnant - humourless, megalomaniac, violent."
Again, Christopher Caldwell writes in The New York Times review of Scammell's book: "In print as in life, he was driven by ego, not principle. His subject was himself."
And further: "Like many people concerned about 'humanity', he was contemptuous of actual humans."
I have a certain admiration for the man who wrote "Darkness at Noon" though I have never read it; it had the effect of helping to eliminate from Western sentimentality about Stalin and his totalitarian state the ideas that the place was utopian to some degree or, at least, promised utopian solutions. And there are his scientific works such as "The Sleepwalkers" parts of which I have read (being myself interested greatly in the 17th and 18th Century thinkers and scientists this work appeals to me more than most of what he wrote).
So this dislike I have of these people - I dislike if not hate Mel Gibson, I can't bear to hear him speak, believe it or not - is probably more to do with me than with them; something has triggered some kind of mental mechanism that has brought about a totally illogical and possibly meaningless emotional reaction.
And yet.... and yet.... I can't help thinking lof Michael Foot's wife, Jill Craigie, and her assertion after Koestler's death that he had raped her when she was a young woman. Scammell is not sufficiciently critical of these happenings says Caldwell and seems to think that, to put it briefly, times have changed.
Not good enough surely.
Can we excuse him for his apparently abhorrent behaviour because he was so great a man? Caldwell recognises the difficulty when he writes: "And yet, at a moment when the ghastliness of Soviet Communism was still invisible to a lot of thinking people, this apparently conscienceless man awakened the conscience of the West."

Promotion

I am reading an excellent novel by Robert Harris called "Imperium". It is about the great Roman orator and stateman named Cicero. This short passage, when Cicero decides to take on the powers that be and go for broke so to speak, took me back to my first teaching post: "Yesterday has taught me a lesson. Let us say I wait a year or two, hanging on Pompey's every word in the hope of favour, running errands for him. We have all seen men like that in the senate - growing older, waiting for half-promises to be fulfilled. They are hollowed out by it. And before they even know it, their moment has passed and they have nothing left with which to bargain."
Yes, it took me back to a meeting I had, in the corridor of the school I had been at for two years and which I pondered leaving, with the deputy head. He said: "In about 10 years time J.G., head of physics, will be retiring and you can slip into that post." I stood there and to anyone seeing me I probably gave the impression of someone actually considering the "offer"; but underneath that veneer of pleasant approbation of the idea was the real me thinking "d'you think I'm going to stay in this bloody hell hole for another ten bloody awful years and then find that someone else has been appointed instead of me?"
I left soon after and got a much better job, more pay too. A sort of promotion.
I have seen too many who, as Cicero explains, waited and waited hoping against hope that the next job they have been half-promised will give them the promotion they feel they deserve only to find their hopes dashed when they are told something like "Well, of course, I did my best for you but....."

Humbug

Is it my imagination or is it the case that this near-Christmas time newspapers and magazines are filled wih stuff about how to enjoy the festival more than ever before? There are "ways to enjoy Christmas", "drinks to buy", "the best food to eat" and, of course, "the ten things to make the festival a success".
Here are my ten thing to make Christmas bearable.
1. Get yourself invited to someone's home so that they do the cooking etc.
2. Buy loads of booze and hide the good stuff.
3. If you feel like going for a walk, perhaps suggested by a family member who is younger than you and wishes to "breathe the fresh air of Winter", sit down until the feeling goes away.
4. Don't buy presents because they cost too much and often are not wanted; buy vouchers so that they can buy what they want - if you have lots of money buy from Next and M&S and W.H.Smith; if not buy vouchers from What!
5. Don't kiss anyone - they may have swine flu. Don't even kiss your wife/girl friend/partner - they may have kissed someone with swine flu.
6. Do something you don't usually do, for fun, like have a bath.
7. If invited to a party you don't want to go to, tell them you have swine flu.
8. If you go to the pub for a pint, take enough money for the pint and no more: "Dammit, I've left my wallet at home."
9. Before turning in on Christmas night, say your prayers (as a back-up) and drink a bottle of your favourite wine - one of those you'd hidden away.
10. If you don't want to follow any of the above pieces of advice, book a holiday in some country that doesn't celebrate Christmas - like Pakistan or Iran.

Edward G. Robinson

His real name was Goldenberg and the G in his stage name was just a G - it stood for nothing, just filled a gap. Yet it became part of him: you could never call him anything else but Edward G. Robinson because Edward Robinson could be anybody, and he wasn't just anybody.
He could do pretty well everything from psychopathic villain ("Key Largo") to comic uncle ("A Hole in the Head"), from gun-carrying gangster ("Little Caesar") to tough-talking and inftelligent insurance inspector (Double Indemnity"), from cruel sea captain ("The Sea Wolf") to respectable professor ("The Woman in the Window").
I have just seen "The Woman in the Window" again; it's just as good as it was when I saw it many moons ago; then there was an announcement at the beginning of the film that asked members of the audience not to divulge the twist at the end of the film - naturally, people did and so, you'd have thought, have spoilt it for those who hadn't yet seen it. The odd thing is that it doesn't spoil it: I knew the twist ending when I saw it a few days ago and waited for it with glee - it works even when you know it because Robinson, or I should say Edward G. Robinson brings off the humour of the situation he finds himself suddenly in.
Fritz Lang directed this film together with another one similar film with Joan Bennett, "Scarlet Street", "in which he is a gentle bourgeois sucked into sordid murders" according to David Thomson. Thomson thought Lang brought the best out of Edward G. Robinson; he brought the best out of a lot of actors including Glenn Ford in "The Big Heat", Arthur Kennedy in "Rancho Notorious" and Peter Lorre in "M" (in German).

Child actors

The child film actor I recall best is Freddie Bartholomew chiefly because he could play English roles, usually toff English roles. Though when I was young I didn't like him at all, not in "David Copperfield" or in "Captains Courageous"; but when I got older and saw some of his films on TCM and other TV stations I have to admit I thought him rather good. Certainly, in "Captains Courageous", from the Kipling novel, he was superb; maybe he was playing himself or playing someone he had known - a toffy-nosed prig of a boy from an upper class family who bossed his servants and was simply a perfect prat (twerp, twit and maybe twat too). While it had an oscar-winning performance from Spencer Tracey as a yeeoldee Nowegianee sailor (oscar winning! it was one of the most ridioculous pieces of acting I've ever seen), Bartholomew was the brilliant: he showed how the character of the twit, prig, twerp (and maybe twat too) changed when being forced to suffer the perils of ocean life on a fishing boat; he turned into a decent, caring guy "with a heart".
Roddy McDowell I didn't like either. I am talking about his performance in "How Green was my Valley" in which he played the youngest son in a South Wales mining family. Again, on re-seeing it I think he's rather good: "hugely appealing" is how David Thomson, the American film critic, describes him in that film.
Sometime directors do strange things to get from a young actor a performance they wish to have. Carol Reed in "The Fallen Idol" told the young actor in that film stories that had no bearing on the plot he was involved in in the picture - stories that induced the emotional responses he required.
Vincent Minelli did a very cruel thing in making "Meet me in St Louis". Mark Steyn in his "Songbook" tells of speaking to Hugh Martin, one of the songwriters of the film; he remarked that the scene in which Margaret O'Brien smashes the snowmen to pieces "was an incredibly powerful scene". "It was child abuse," Martin replied. "Just before shooting that day Minelli told the girl that her dog had been run over. He hadn't. But Margaret O'Brien burst into tears and he just kept the cameras rolling."

Conrad

My father loved Joseph Conrad novels; I have always found them difficult. In my mind always is the idea that Conrad wasn't English but Polish, a Pole who had learned English, so I had the idea that here was a man who thought in Polish and translated it into English in his head before writing it down. Probably not true but this idea satisfied me that that was the reason I found him difficult - not my fault but his.
Then I read a short novel called, if I remember right, "Typhoon" and my feeling towards him changed: here was a great writer whose powers of description were matched and enhanced by great literary style.
Yet "Heart of Darkness" I still find difficult. The "framed narrative" makes it seem contrivedly difficult; Marlowe is not an easy character to like; Kurtz is too mythical a character to be believed when later he is met by Marlowe; a lot of the writing is so beautiful stylistically that I sometimes feel myself distracted from the story by my admiration of it.
I have just seen "Apocalypse Now", Francis Ford Coppolla's film which is, of course, a modernish version of "Heart of Darkness" and I feel impelled to re-read the novel. But I found the film too quite difficult to understand and, at times, to bear. It is very very slow; I felt that violent occurances were there sometimes to give the slow up-river journey some dramatic qualities; I thought the end quite unbelieveable and the philosophising of Kurtz a bit on the cracker-barrel side.
Yet it left me with an overall feeling of admiration, a feeling that there was in this film and the book more than met the eye; that there was in it a depth that I had not penetrated; and it makes me wish to discover some of the truths underlying this strange, fascinating work.
I shall re-read the book.

Coffee

"Big street chains such as Costa, Starbucks and Caffe Nero are doing well...." So wrote someone in The Times in an article about how coffee is becoming the British favourite drink - not tea any more. Well my experience of coffee at these and other cafes and restaurants is not good. The coffee at Costa might be good quality but THEY SERVE IT IN CARDBOARD CUPS. Now I don't know why cardboard cups or plastic tumblers make a difference to the taste of drinks but they do. To me anyway. If the 'elf 'n safety crew make pubs use plastic containers for drinking beer from, then I won't be visiting their premises. And wherever coffee is served in cardboard containers, you won't see me there either.
A friend of mine used to object to having his nightly large whisky served him a in half pint glass or a wine gklass. He wanted it served in a proper, stocky whisky glass, he said. The barman would shake his head in disbelief that the type of glass made any difference. It probably doesn't affect the taste - it shouldn't scientifically - but it affects.... I don't know what it affects but it's wrong, that's what it is - wrong!
Wine in a wine glass, not a half pint mug; whisky in a whisky glass not a wine glass or pint mug; brandy in a brandy glass not in any other kind; beer in a pint glass; sherry in a tall sherry glass. And coffee in a cup please. O yes, at Cafee Nero a few weeks ago I ordered a double espresso and had it served me in a large cup. Didn't complain. Never do. Just won't go there again.

Browning

My father was fond of Robert Browning's work. He had a soft leather bound book containing most of his works (which I have lost, damn it). He also had a copy of "The Yellow Book" and Browning's poem based on the case (mislaid those too when we moved house). I know little about that poem or the original book from which it came; but I do know that my father is the only person I have met who read them both.
There was a radio programme on 4 a couple of days ago about a favourite Browning poem of mine - no, the favourite - "My Last Duchess". And a very good programme it was. First the poem, or as they called it, the "dramatic monologue" was read superbly by Timothy West, then came some detective work, meeting various fans of the work, trying to find out who the characters in the poem were in real life (the narrator was none other than Lucretia Borgia's grandson), wondering if the poem's admirers thought him to be the central character of the work - one thought the lady in the portrait was.
The last time I heard the poem read on radio was some years back; it was read beautifully and dramatrically by Marius Goring.
In many ways it's a nasty poem: here is this Duke showing an emmisary (I take it) of someone whose daughter he wishes to marry, showing him a portrait of his former wife whom he had had killed. Rather unlikely I think. But while that may be a flaw in the story, the poem itself is scintillatingly dramatic and bristling with tension.
Browning (like Dickens) seemed attracted to murder, grotesque tragic happenings - even The Pied Piper, written for children, is quite a horrid tale. Having read the opening of a study of Browning some time ago I was drawn to a passage about how he read so much "lierature" about torture in his youth.
I read "My Last Duchess" many times before I discovered that it rhymed throughout; it reads like prose yet you can feel the rhythm beneath the prose; then when you realise it rhymes, it works new wonders on you.

Toffs

Why is that if I were to say "when I came down from Cardiff" somone might possibly ask "by bus or train?" but when someone says "when I came down from Oxford (or Cambridge)" people assume he meant the university? It's because, I suppose, that Oxford has a long history of being a university but Cardiff has a long history of being a docks.
I'm afraid that, though many people say the contrary, there is a class barrier in this country, we are not now all like each other with no working class, middle class and upper class but one large homogeneous lump of wriggling human beings..... etc etc.
A lot of mention of toffs is going on these days, especially by the Labour Party members who see an opportunity to make some headway politically by pointing to the front bench of the Shadow Cabinet and saying "Eton toffs, who'd want to vote for them? They don't know anything about what ORDINARY people want or feel."
While this smacks of bad manners at the very least there is some truth in it. And now that Zac Goldsmith has thrown his hat into the political arena, on the face of it, at least, there is more than a modicum of truth in it. For if the Tory Party decide to adopt him as a candidate in the next election they will lose more votes than if they asked the Speaker's wife to stand (or lie, which she seems to find more pleasure in) as a Tory. Zac Goldsmith is a posh toff. No he is a Green posh toff. He's a danger not just to the Tories but to politics itself. Why? Because he is smooth as you know what and as calculatingly devious as.... as his father was before him.
I see that Taki admires him tremendously. Game, set and match to Labour then.

Escargots

A long time ago I wrote a short story called "Escargots". It was about a retired Welsh miner hesitating to phone his daughter because the last time they met he had committed a faux pas for which he felt he would not yet, if ever, be forgiven. His daughter had married posh and she too was now posh. So when she and her husband took her father to a posh restaurant and ordered escargots he was sick - over the waiter. These are snails, he announced. I hate them, he said.
Since I was unable to sell the story I turned it into a short play and sold it to a company that was not well known and so it wasn't performed many times (though it was done by an Irish amateur company and they, in a competition in Dublin, won an award for acting (the waiter who cooks the snails) and for choice of play, which I was pleased with.
I have used the story at some writers' groups as an exercise in "turning a story into a play" and it always produces an eager reaction, not to do with the quality of the story so much as for the memories it brings to mind by the writers most of whom are middle-aged ior old. Without fail they always say that a similar thing has happened to them: their daughter went off to university and lost touch with them or their son brought some friends home and "I was treated like some kind of slave". It seems to bring out a feature of family life that has been unconciously buried in the pressures of everyday life.
I did this exercise at one of those writers' weekends which was attended by some well klnown writers and literary agents. One of the Pollinger agents insisted on coming to my talk and took a back seat. I read the story, then got some of them to act the play. I proceeded to say that in writing a short story you focussed usually on one person and looked at what goes on from his point of view; with a play there are more than one points of view. I then asked them to start a story from the point of view of one of the characters in the same story apart from the old man. After about 20 minutes I asked them to read out what they'd written. I tried to ignore Mr Pollinger waving his arms about in the back indicating his desire to read but eventually I couldn't ignore him any more and asked for his effort. He had written, a superbly dramatic and immensely amusing story.... wait for it.... from the point of view of the snail.

Saachi Art

There's a TV programme about Saatchi and his so-called art. There was a slim possibilty that I might, just might, have watched it; then I saw the name of one of the judges - Tracey Emin of Unmade Bed fame. A judge? Come off it Saatchi. But when you think about it, it's not all that surprising; after all Saatchi is an advertising specialist not an artist, nor a known critic of art, only a collector. And a collector is someone who collects. Sometimes, as with old books, they turn out to be valuable objects; often they are collected because someone who has no taste at all likes them - as with comics (some of which are now quite valuable I hear).
Saatchi is a fraud. Emin is a non-artist. As for "the shark" - as Robert What'shisname said of it "more praise to the angler, at least he caught the f****** thing" or words to that effect.
I think people are beginning to come round to thinking that a lot of modern art, modern music, modern poetry is really a load of junk. With art, a guy decides to present a made object to the gullible public and he proceeeds to argue about its artistic content - it's the argument that becomes the important feature not the work itself. Poetry is bogged down in free verse and non rhyming lines which often read like prose. Music.... I've done my best to try to listen to some modern music but have now given up altogether; I now feel like the critic who, at a concert where Schonberg was playing one of his 12 tone pieces, got to his feet and said "Stop, stop, that's enough, no more...." and left.
Charles Saatchi - isn't he married to that Lawson woman who is said to be sexy as she cooks (as sexy as a rice pudding in my opinion)? But her food looks good. Perhaps Saatchi should try presenting her dishes as works of art: they look better than The Unmade Bed. You can eat them too!

Leftovers

A food writer in Slatemagazine.com says the leftover turkey (after Thanksgiving) should not be turned into other meals like risottoed turkey scraps or tsunami fried fricasee; she believes that the only decent way to eat leftover turkey is in a sandwich, that turkey is a really inferior bird to the chicken and other more exotic wild birds. She's right. Turkey is popular in America because its a traditional food to eat at Thanksgiving parties; its not eaten because it's particularly liked but because it's... well, traditional: it brings America's short history into mind, how they got shot of us by emigrating to America from Britain; it's in memory of the Pilgrims who celebrated their first harvest of The Plymouth Colony in 1621. They don't eat it because they like it, they eat it because, like Everest, "it's there".
I don't like turkey either. It's too dry, not very tasty. You have to have stuff with it to make it interesting, often to make it palatable: cranberry sauce, stuffing, sausages..... Chicken is superior in taste and texture. The author of the article mentions capon as being better than both turkey and chicken. It's bigger, has the breast, nearly, of a turkey and tastes better. It's not a large chicken but a castrated cock. Nice to know!
Leftovers in general are more popular now probably because of the credit crunch; why waste all that food, sort of thing? What I do with leftovers is this: chicken pieces leftovers I put in a pan and pour over them a tin of curry and heat (Homepride is my favourite) or throw them in a wok and pour over them a jar of sweet and sour sauce (Uncle Benn's is good). Beef leftovers? Cottage pie - fry with onions, put in a dish, cover with mashed potatoes and stick in the oven. Lamb leftovers? Shepherd's pie - same as cottage pie only it's lamb not beef. Pork leftovers? Leave well alone. Duck leftovers? No such thing - there's so little breast, you eat it all in one go.
O yes, leftover potatoes: chop into small pieces, fry, beat an egg in a cup and pour over them. It's called.... all together now.... an ommelette.

Malta

"Britain has fewer road deaths by number of cars than any of the other 27 countries in the European Union, apart from Malta," according to Alexander Chancellor writing miserably about his fate at the hands of the fuzz when he was caught on a drink-driving charge. Never mind about the point he was going on to make, I was stalled from reading on a for a while at the name "Malta".
I was on holiday there some years ago and three things struck me: it seemed like a country that had at some time in the distant past been part of volcanic fallout - there wasn't a blade of grass to be seen anywhere, the ground was like shale, no fields, no bushes, can't remember if there were trees. Secondly, the place was full of crooks trying to sell you "time shares" - one young chap came up to me and asked me to dip my hand in his bag to see if I would be lucky; I did and he immediately told me with great delight that I had won a holdiay to the Caribbean. "Just pop in the house down there and...." "They'll try to sell me a time-share place" I put in. He shook his head and went on to explain something but I said, handing him back my Caribbean prize "Here, you have the holiday in the Caribbean." Thirdly, I remember the cars there. They all seemed fifties and sixties - if not earlier - British cars which were just about roadworthy. Everyone drove like maniacs but, as Chancellor says, there were few accidents. One of the reasons is, I believe, that there are no traffic signals; when they arrived at a cross roads they gave way to bigger vehicles. Simple way to clear up road casualties: no traffic signals.
O yes, there is another thing I remember about Malta, something that killed off what little socialistic principles I had retained from my youth, the state red wine. It's was about 50p per bottle and it was dreadful stuff. I thought "if the state can't do better than this then something's wrong with the state."

Enid Blyton

I have only ever read one story by Enid Blyton; it was mercifully short and pretty awful. But the woman fascinated me then probably because I was looking for financial success in writing (never achieved) and wondered how it was that she was so prodigiously successful; maybe I could learn the trick from her. I learnt nothing from her from that one story of course, so I decided to read her biography - or was it her autobiography? Whatever - it was, I think I can truthfully say, the most boring book I have ever read (though Agatha Christie's autobiography runs it a good second).
Now that I have seen the BBC play about her life I can understand why it was so boring: it contained none of the dirt. This dramatisation was a real hatchet job on her; it was hard to imagine how it was possible to live with her, yet she had two husbands who, for a time, were fond of her - myself, I think I'd have left at the earliest opportunity before I found myself with m,y hands round her neck crying "will you just stop talking for a minute or two...."
The play gradually transformed her from being an irritation, like a rash that gradually gets worse and worse, into a monster.
Of course she was determinedly ambitious to such an extent that she practically abandoned her two daughters to the care of a maid. And her ambition was such that she achieved immense success. I read once that her sales were almost as great as The Bible which took top place in the best-seller list. Apparently she still sells 8 million books per year though she died some time ago.
She was never popular with libraries and schools whose personnel looked down their noses at the stuff she turned out. But there! they turned down their noses at Roald Dahl too.
It's always the case that when someone is very successful there's a desire by the elite writers or artists or sculptures or whatever to try to demean them for their lack of literary style or some such thing. In a book about literature for children I once looked at, there was no mention of either Enid Blyton or Roald Dahl; both seemingly were despised by that elite group of children's writers whom few children actually read.

Bristol Old Vic

Just come back from seeing a wonderful production of Chekov's "Uncle Vanya" at The Bristol Old Vic. There has been a lot of controversy over the past few years about this old and famous theatre resulting in its closure for a year or so, but things have now been resolved and plays are being produced once again. The theatre has been refurbished - well yes it has in a way: the foyer and bars have been improved but the inside seems to me to have remained the same as it was when I went there about 20 years ago.
Now there is I suppose a good deal of nostalgia about this ancient theatre; I have the feeling that because of memories of great theatre there in the past they didn't dare modernise the interior. The fact is that it is one of the most uncomfortable places I have been for some time (excluding the upper circle of Cardiff's New Theatre). The seat I had was small and there was little leg room; the seat itself was not horizontal but sloped forward; every time I tried to sit properly the seat squeeked. Another thing about the row I sat it - the front row of the upper circle: it's dangerous - the balcony is too low and I could imagine someone (me that is) toppling over onto the seats in the stalls.
So here I was trying to get comfy while watching one of the finest productions of Chekov I have seen. This "Uncle Vanya" was as good as, if not betteer, than one I saw years ago with Olivier, as the doctor, and Redgrave as Vanya.

Writing and cutting

Last week I started to read Tom Wolfe's second novel, "A Man in Full", but I didn't continue. It's a great lump of a book, about five inches wide.... In short (no pun intended) it's too long. He puts every detail he can into his descriptions so that you wonder "has he done this so that he cannot be accused of doing too little research?" for he must have done a tremendous amount of research since it is a book about big business and banks and money dealings and collapse and I'm pretty sure he didn't know much about this when he set out. Something came to mind about Raymond Carver, the short story writer, who when asked how he produced a short story said he'd write it then he'd cut it and cut it and cut it. If only Tom Wolfe had followed this precept then I might have read further because, I have to say, it was quite an interesting novel. I did finish and enjoy "Bonfire of the Vanities", his first novel, and was looking forward to enjoying this one but.... no, I could not spend weeks reading the rest of it (I'm a slow reader).
I once had a story of mine accepted by the BBC on condition that I would cut it from about 3400 words to the Morning Story section of 2400 words. So I set about cutting it; I didn't enjoy this but if that's what the producer wanted then that's what I'd give him. It was accepted as the new 2400 worder. And I have to say it was much improved.
This same story I gave to a class of evening writers I used to teach and asked them to cut it from 3400 to 2400 words approximately, as I had already done. I was surprised and pleased that they all made practically the same cuts I had made.
I'll wait for the film of "A Man in Full" to come out with the hope that it is rather better than the film of "Bonfire of the Vanities".

Norway

In a letter in The Daily Telegraph yesterday someone was writing from Norway about being nostalgic about church bells; he had been living in Norway for many years and, apart from the lack of church bells ringing, he seemed to love the country. Well I was nostalgic for Britain after only a week or so in Norway.
For one thing I could not find a pub there; and the only place I could buy a bottle of wine there was a sort of supermarket where wine was sold from behind bars - the prison kind! One had to point to a picture of the wine one wanted and the server (behind the bars) would fetch it and pass it to you through a slot.
It seemed to me that you weren't encouraged to drink there; on the contrary, drinking was something that was frowned on - so the cost of a pint was extremely high.
I saw a stand with bottles of red wine on it one day when I went to down to dinner; they were about £20 each. I asked how much the house wine was and was told "that is the house wine".
But it wasn't just the cost of booze that made me averse to Norway's attractions. There was the fact that the weather was so dreadful all the time we were there. In Bergen one day we had sun, rain, snow, sleet, a high wind, and hailstones all in a few hours.
The fiords I expected to see blue (like on the telly) were grey. The waterfalls I expected to see like Niagara were small, like you see in North Wales (they're better in North Wales).
In a large hotel we stayed at, the evening entertainment was the hotel's regular dining room pianist dressed up as Greig playing - Greig!
I was glad to get home, away from the greyness and the lack of cheap drink and the beetroot (cooked with practically every meal as a vegetable). Back to the church bells.

Man of the West

I recall reading somewhere a long time ago that the avante garde "new wave" French critics were very fond of American gangster films and that a much favoured western they liked was Anthony Mann's "Man of the West". I have just watched the first half of the film tonight and will watch the second half in a few minutes. I don't often agree with the French critics but in this case I do. I think it's a superb Western, though not a traditional kind, no chases, not much riding and there's no real hero; rather, there's a flawed hero, a man who's changed but who knows he was once capable of brutal violence.
To play a part like this requires someone of powerful cinematic presence; a certain kind of star is required. Possibly James Stewart, one of Anthony Mann's favourites ("The Man from Laramie"; "Winchester 73" etc.), might have filled the roll satisfactorilly enough but the choice of Gary Cooper is surely the best there could be. Here he is getting on in age, he moves not too athletically, but he is there, that presence which fills you with the feeling that whatever happens to other less courageous characters, he'll be there to comfort and protect them - if he can.
He is the gentleman among some of the darkest criminals I can think of on the screen with Lee J. Cobb the vilest of them.
While I am fond of Anthony Mann's earlier westerns with James Stewart, I like this one more.
How two critics can differ so profoundly in their judgements is illustrated by David Thomson's take on this film: "Mann's final masterpiece...." and Leslie Halliwell's: "Talkative, set-bound, cliche-ridden star western with minor compensations".

Tenessee Williams

I've just, this afternoon, seen Theatre Clwyd's production of Tenessee Williams's play "The Glass Menagerie"; quite a good production done in a style which, I read, is very like the style in which it was originally performed.
There is one unsettling thing, to me, about the central character, Amelia, the mother of Tom and Laura, both no longer in their teens (though their mother treats them as if they still are) and that is that she is such a bore. Bores are difficult enough to portray in novels (I think immediately of the one in "Emma" which almost wrecked the book for me) but should prove almost impossible to present in plays. This one is so grindingly borish that I wondered if the part had ever been successfully played. Well it seems that it has - many times! Must be me then. Though I insist that this middle-aged woman from the deep south of America is a person whom, if you met her in real life, you'd flee from as fast as you would from someone with swine flu. She is obsessed. She is full of romantic yearning for the life that once was when she was young and had "gentlemen callers" by the dozen mooning over her. She is tactless. She is ruthless, unsympathetic, manipulating and deceitful. She is, in short, a monster. Yet great actresses have played her and succeeded in making her palatable. More than that - they've made her acceptable as a human being..... but surely not loveable!
The play itself is a bit of a mess with its "voice over" of the son telling us what's coming next (really, though, what has been) and the opening act's relentless battles between mother and son, with the same things being said over and over.
But the second act lifts the play into a world of manners and decency that gives the play a rich centre that is near to being moving.
I was surprised to see that Gertrude Lawrence played the mother in an early film and that Kirk Douglas played the gentleman caller (though I think he must have done this rather well - just up his street).

Maths

There was a quite famous mathematician at Cardiff University in my day; can't remember his name but he was one of those guys who could do fantastically difficult numerical problems in his head as if he didn't have to think of them at all; he just spoke the answer straight out just after the question had been asked. Yet as regards the teaching of Maths there I am told there were many complaints: a group of students went to see him about the quality of the teaching in his department; he said, of course, that he would do something about and, of course, he never did. After he retired a rather brillant woman took over (Rosa Morris was it?); she had, it was rumoured, done some brilliant work on some aspect of flight during WW2. She was a rather grim person whom, you felt, you would never dare attempt to approach and while the teaching in her department was pretty awful no one was ever brave enough to approach her about it.
There were some lecturers in that department who were so dreadful that it was a wonder that they were employable at all. One youngish man (one of those blokes who you wondered if he'd ever know what it was to be young) used to start with chalk on the left hand side of the board in big letters and symbols and end up on the other side in letters and symbols so small you couldn't see them.
Another had a tiny book from which he read to us in a high-pitched voice, so high you had to be a dog to be able to hear it properly. Another, when asked a question, went off on a different track from that which he was on and lost everyone in the course of it.
I was told that he, when he later became professor of the department, took a phone call from a colleague after the xcolleague had been on holiday for about eight weeks and the conversation went somethig like this:
Colleague: Hello Professor, how are you?
Professor: Hah, it's you.... the answer is dee y, dee x squared plus 2 dee y dee x...... etc etc.
I wonder if the best mathematicians make the best teachers. In my experience they made the worst.

Hake

When I was a kid we ate hake regularly. Not cod very much and whiting even less - hake was the dish. Hake is now so expensive that cod is the usually bought fish; sometimes haddock, rarely whiting. Why was it that we, my family, could afford hake and dismiss cod etc as an inferior fish. A friend of mine of my generation told me that in his household hake was usually eaten and that cod was bought "for the cat".
In Ashton's fish market stall in Cardiff, cutlets of hake are for sale at about £12 per lb while cod is much cheaper. I watched a woman buy a few cutlets of hake one day and pay about £15. Now, go along the counter a little and there you will find whole young hake selling for about £2.40 per lb. This is what I buy. Of course, when the head and tail is cut off the weight is less than that when the fish was weighed and priced, but it's still cheap.
I've often wondered why some people who like hake but can't afford the cutlets won't try this young hake in preference to the bigger, wider cutlets of hake; I can only guess that either they don't wish to buy fish with the head on with its eyes staring up at them solemnly, condemningly because of their lack of compassion .... or something, or, more likely, because they don't want the bother of cleaning them. Well, I have met people who don't like whole fish - or for that matter whole anything: chicken, duck etc - because somehow they feel they are going to eat a once living creature and they don't want to be reminded of that. But I feel drawn to the second reason: they don't wish to clean the whole fish. Well, actually, and this they might not know, the fishmonger does it all for you - free of charge. Great: you go home with two fillets of delicious hake for the cost of a cutlet of coley.
The hake we had today was so delicious I recalled the old days when we ate fried hake regularly and, if not gave the cod to the cat, would have liked to.
My method of cooking hake: powder it with flour, place it, skin side down in a non-stick frying pan on a low heat for five minutes, turn it and give the other side five minutes; pop it in a warm oven while I make chips. Salt and vinegar. Angel's food!

Baking Potatoes

There was an article in Times 2 yesterday about methods of baking potatoes; it was written on Bonfire Night when, of course, there'd be fires available for baking purposes. The writer suggested that a large potatoe be wrapped in foil and placed at the hottest, most firey part and left there for about half an hour.
When I was a kid we were always making fires in a lane near our house and often baked potatoes in them. We didn't wrap them in foil (I doubt if it had been invented then) but put them directly into the red-hot part of the fire and waited until they cooked. We didn't wait half an hour - our potatoes were small ones - but about a quarter of an hour; then we'd remove them with a stick and, when they able to be touched, we'd remove the hot, charcoal-burnt skin with light fingers, for fear of being burnt, and eat the potatoes. My recollection of them is that they were delicious. No salt, just the hot, crumbly potatoe.
Now, when I bake a potatoe, I choose a large one, prick it with a fork all over and place it in a hot 200 degree oven for about an hour. When it's done I cut it through the middle, drop a lump of butter in the groove together with some grated cheese. Open a tin of beans in tomatoe sauce to go with it and eat. Delicious.
But maybe not so delicious as those eaten round the camp fire many years ago.

Roald Dahl

Toby Young, in his regular column in The Spectator, last week wrote about how he was looking forward to seeing the new film "Fantastic Mr Fox" because the story "is a favourite in our household mainly because it is so gloriously 'off message'..... Instead of the usual homilies about inclusion and tolerance (in other children's books), it is a celebration of criminality". He was greatly disappointed because Wes Anderson, who directed and helped write the script, had "shoehorned" a politically correct message into the story. There's no political correctness in Roald Dahl stories.
About 20 or so years ago I picked up a book in the library: modern children's literature. I had not heard of most of the writers and didn't know anyone who had. I looked for Roald Dahl, he being one of the most popular of children's writers at the time.... he wasn't mentioned. Pretty obviously he wasn't considered good enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with this elite bunch.
There was a time when Enid Blyton was one of the most popular of children's writers; I doubt very much if she would have secured a place in a not so modern version of such a book. She had the reputation of not being wanted on the shelves by librarians. They'll stick yards of Mills and Boon there but not Enid Blyton (incidentally, I heard a librarian say to an audience once that they bought Mills and Boon books "by the yard").
But while Enid Blyton is (still) popular with kids she is simply unreadable by adults surely whereas Beatrix Potter can be enjoyed when you've matured into a bitter old bugger who can't stand kids.
Roald Dahl though is a writer of quite great stature: his short stories are wonderful - I particularly like "The Man from the South".
"There are some national treasures that simply shouldn't be entrusted to the Americans and the author os 'Fantastic Mr Fox' is one of them". So says Toby Young and I think I agree with him.

Cooks

They call themselves cooks? I am referring to the candidates aiming to own a restaurant in the new BBC show with Raymond Blanc. At one stage of the competition Blanc's sidekick, a woman who is herself a restaunteur, said to Blanc: "I wouldn't allow any one of those people into my kitchens." She was talking about three couples who were each attempting to cook one course of a three-course meal, a course that "should reflect their style". I too wouldn't allow any of them near my kitchen for the simple reason that they seemed to me to be a positive danger to health.
One couple, a woman and her daughter, were trying to prepare a dessert that consisted of a few bits and pieces and some coconut juice and grated coconut. Hence what was required was, of course, a coconut. But how does one slice open a coconut? With a carving knife of course. The mother pressed the point of the knife against the coconut's armadillo-like shell and proceeded to hammer the handle with a rolling pin. To my amazement she actually succeeded in making a hole in the shell but the daughter had to run for a bowl to catch the juice before they lost it all on the floor. Next came the opening of a tin of something or other.... A tin? Cooking from basic fo0odstuff? Might as well open a tin of Sainsbury's peaches and pour some cream over them. Anyway, they now had the problem of opening the tin. And once more they attempted this task with the aid of 'our trusty blade' - the kitchen knife. The daughter pressed the point of the long knife against the top of the tin and, as with the coconut before this, proceeded to bash the handle with the trusty old rolling pin - while - get this - holding the knife vertical with her hand firmly gripping the blade. Blanc showed them that there does exist such a thing as a tin opener.
As they'd say in The Daily Mail about MP's fiddling: "You can't make it up."
Needless to say Raymond Blanc sent them packing before the end of the programme.
What I simply cannot understand is (a) how that useless pair ever got to be candidates (b) how any of the couples qualified for the programme since none of them I would trust to cook a sausage and (c) what are the other 100 000 people like who applied to get on this show and failed?

Shane

I have just finished reading "Shane". The main character is not much like the film's version of him played by Alan Ladd; he is tall and dark and mean whereas Ladd is short and blonde and pleasant. Both versions of the story are fine: the novel is short, the film is long and more fully develops some of the people in the book who are just mentioned by name, barely described. Wilson, the gunfighter brought in by Fletcher to stir things up, speaks much more in the book than he does in the film (played by Jack Palance who, with only about ten lines to speak, won an oscar). The boy, Bob, is not so prominent as in the film and the closeness of Shane to the boy is not so strong, not so sentimental, though at the end when Shane leaves it's still very moving. There's a sort of epilogue in the book which, you feel after seeing the film, should not be required but surprisingly it works well, it explains a lot about the family and where they go from here and how the love they all felt for the mysterious stranger will be felt for ever.
Elisha Cook Junior is a great presence in the film (in the book he is a bigger man, a tougher guy) as he was in all the films he appeared in: he was stupendous in "The Killing" and great in "The Big Sleep". Any part he was given, never of course star roles, he invested with a quality that was his own, often nervous, sometimes mean, needy, pathetic.... What an actor!

Longines

I own a Longines watch. It's lying in a drawer, not working, with no hands. It was there when we had a burglary and it's still there. Beside it were a couple of digital watches worth hardly anything; they're what the burglar took. He must have looked at the Longines, saw it was not working and had no hands and left it; the gold in it is worth more than the bits and pieces, such as white, gym socks, a pullover that he did take (though he also took a video machine and an expensive diamond ring which, a policeman who called said he probably would have sold to a second hand shop for a few quid).
I was told when I had the watch cleaned a long time ago that Longines were worth quite a lot but not working they were worth only the gold in them. I don't know what to do with this watch: to get it repaired at the Longines distributors would have cost me about £300 and that was about 15 years ago. Is it worth it? From the nostalgic point of view, that it was my father's before me, it would I suppose be worth it but it's a lot of money to be nostalgic about.
I wonder what a new Longines is worth these days. I was on a plane a long time ago sitting next to a man who said "Is that a Longines you have there?" I said yes. He seemed impressed. He told me he dealt in watches and that my Longines was worth about £600. Now? I showed it to an auctioneer who looked at it and said "worthless".
So there it lies with no strap and no hands and the inside is broken. I am told that gold is selling for high prices these days..... No, think I'll keep it a while, might win Ernie or Lotto.... Apart from nostalgia there's a sort of glamour about it: mentioned, I recall, in a Raymond Chandler novel - rich guy, probably a crook, dressed elegantly and "on his wrist was a Longines".

Rabbits

A famous chef named Mossiman was on TV for a few minutes today to talk about a meal his father used to make on Sundays, and to demonstrate, as he talked, how to prepare and cook it (it was a short "fill-in" sort of programme so the ingredients weren't specified but you could see them). Looked a nice dish. A long time ago I'd have enjoyed it. But not now. I have not eaten rabbit for many years. When I was child my mother often cooked rabbit; it was a popular, cheap meal - chicken then was something of a Sunday treat, much dearer than rabbit. Then two things happened at about the same time. One day my uncle, home from the forces, walked into the dining room, sniffed the air and said: "Rabbit! I just cannot stand the smell of rabbit." Suddenly I was aware of the smell.... of course I had always been aware of it, but I had never thought of it as it being a horrible one. His remark did it for me, finished me with rabbit.
I might have ignored what he said and gone on eating it - I might have - but for the fact that myxomatosis was infecting rabbits all over the country just after he had apocalyptically made his announcement and, of course, no one would now eat wild rabbit for fear of catching it.
So rabbits went off my menu for good. I noticed it was back on the menus of some restaurants some years ago and this is a little surprising to me because about twenty years ago we had pet rabbits in the back garden until suddenly they died. From myxamotosis.

How Green was my Valley

I saw this film many, many years ago and thought it junk. It was, I thought, rather offensive to Welsh people like myself in that it depicted us as rather quaint, a bit foolish at times, foreign. When I saw it again many years later I liked it a lot. It had those magnificent scenes, characteristic of John Ford's Westerns: scenes that spread the action out of doors, scenes of great drama in court rooms - here in the chapel, scenes of brawls (mostly drunken) - here in the school yard. Then the scenes of the devastation down the mine when there is an explosion and the boy, Huw, goes down with the preacher, Mr Richards, to rescue Huw's father with, outside, the crowd of womenfolk and children waiting in anguish for their loved ones. "Kameradshaft" is supposed to be the greatest mining disaster film but its political message is too strong and contrived for me, and, cinematically, Ford's work is simply better.
This time I found it terribly sentimental in places and I found it difficult to place it in South Wales - not least, probably, because Ford had used a predominatly Irish cast (though most did their best to imitate Welsh accents); but it is a great film in that it's a film on a big scale with a big story and its full of life; it has the energy and drive of great stories which take in all aspects of humanity from the story of Huw's sister's love for the new preacher who cannot commit himself to the horridly real expulsion of a young woman from the chapel by the deacons for giving birth to an illegitimate child; from the birth of union activity to the emigration of two sons to America and other places looking for work.
I regard it as one of John Ford's "Irish Films" in that it wallows in sentiment that is a bit fake. When he was once asked about his films he replied "I just make Westerns". But like all expatriots (or those who like to think they are similar since they have family roots elsewhere) he saw Ireland through rose-tinted glasses: unreal, much loved but a sentimental love. His Westerns he saw them without the clutter of fanciful baggage.
There are some fine performances in the film: I think it is one of Walter Pigeon's finest performances and as for Donald Crisp, who won an oscar for it, one of his best and,surely, his funniest.

Love songs

I thought I had cracked it: why was Wagner's Leibestod from "Tristan and Isolde" on a higher plane than Puccini's "One Fine Day" from "Madam Butterfly"? Well, let's go one step further down the love song path, down to pop music and to Jennifer Rush singing "The Power of Love". Here we have lust posing as love: " 'Cos I'm your lady and you are my man, whenever you reach for me I'll do all that I can...." A bit on the lusty side I would have thought. Up to Puccini and here we have a woman singing about the return of her lover and husband (except that he isn't - well she thinks he is but he doesn't.... never mind); she doesn't sing of "bodies" in contact as Rush does but of lover's kisses and yearning for his return etc. But there is a good deal of sentimentality here, not just in the words but in the music too, underlining the passion. So now we reach the highest point of passionate human love with Isolde's aria in "Tristan and Isolde" - the wonderful Leibestod, surely an expression not so much of animal passion but of a higher form of spiritual love.....
Not from the accounts of how it was received when it was first performed. From a critic in 1965: "Not to mince words, it is the glorification of sensuous pleasure.... an act of indecency." Later from another critic: "the worship of animal passion"...." the passion is unholy in itself and its representation is impure." And from Clara Schumann no less: "the most repugnant thing I have ever seen or heard in my life."
So there you have it: here's me thinking that Wagner was presenting human passion as a spiritual passion and really he was down there with Jennifer Rush and Madam Butterfly. My mistake was thinking that Wagner's music conveyed something of a grander passion - I was seduced by the music - and this probably was as a result of my not understanding the German language.

Albert Dekker

Off to Torquay last weekend (one of those deals for a three night stay which is "an offer you can't refuse") but wondering how to spend the time there; plenty of entertainment in the hotel itself but not really to my liking - second rate performers doing all the old favourite songs and comedians.... I won't go on..... So, I booked to see an amateur production of "All my Sons" by Arthur Millar. This was put on by Torquay's "Toad Theatre Co." and a wonderful company it is.
The acting was superb and the play was a near masterpiece (flawed I felt by Millar's tendecy to preach and to generalise - but it was an early play). What I found particularly admirable was the set: it often is one of the failings of amateur productions that the set design and construction is less than adequate; this was excellent.
The play deals with an aircraft manufacturer who has supplied faulty parts of engines thus indirectly causing the deaths of 21 pilots and the repercussions of his crime. I had seen the play before, I remembered, not as a play but as a film. With Albert Dekker. Think I can find any reference to the film? The only film I can track down is one which had Edward G, Robinsion and Burt Lancaster in it. It is definitely not the film I saw but one which I would like to see (I am a member of lovefilm.com but they don't have it).
Albert Dekker made some good films in the fifties but not many are now remembered. The two most memorable are "The Killers" and "Dr Cyclops". In "The Killers" he played the ruthless leader of a crooked gang; he set out to find the guy who had deceived him over a woman and a haul of money. Great film. From a Hemingway short story, the first twenty minutes of the film transpose the story almost word for word to the film - after that it's flashbacks.
It was remade with Albert Dekker's role taken by Ronald Reagan, his last film before he decided to solve the world's problems!

Robert Wise

Robert Wise's output was so varying in content and style that he is not easy to categorise: he made critically acclaimed films like "The Set Up", horror films in his early years and, of course the immensely popular "The Sound of Music". David Thomson, the American critic, is not a fan: "he wandered easily into mediocrity or worse...." "he brought to the screen the appalling but grotesqely successful 'The Sound of Music' ". I get the feeling that as a young director of horror films like "The Curse of the Cat People" he showed great promise which, later, was dissipated in a materialistic union with Hollywood values.
Robert Wise returned to his horror genre later when he directed an immensely scary film called "The Haunting". Whenever I walk under trees in the wind, as I did today, that first scene of "The Haunting" comes to mind as the heroine, maybe a bit deranged, walks towards the house that is the scene of the haunting. Makes me shiver now. I don't think I can watch the film again. When it's put on now, on TCM or Film 4, it's always late at night; you can't watch that and hope for a good night's sleep.
The remake, I am told, is poor in comparision.
The "appalling" "The Sound of Music" ran in Cardiff for ages and I avoided seeing it then (I have since seen it on TV) not wishing to drown in syrupy sentimentality. There was a woman who attended every performance of the film, afternoon and evening. Eventually the manager of the cinema decided to let her in for nothing (maybe with the idea that if the sound track broke down she'd be able to supply the vocals to the "miming" on the screen!).
I don't suppose he was one of the great directors but it seems to me he was an artisan who did his best to make what he was given to direct entertaining.
But surely, if you want to talk of"classic Horrors", "The Haunting" is up there with the scariest of them.

WNO

The Welsh National Opera's production of Alban Berg's opera "Wozzeck" was stupendous. Though the opera is, as Geoff Brown in The Times put it, "still a prickly customer after 84 years", the performance was excellent in every respect: the singing, the design, the production by Richard Jones, everything.
For me the feature that makes me not go completely overboard is the music itself: Alban Berg was a student of Schonberg's and it shows. The twelve tone scale stuff is, to my ears, still difficult to enjoy and though Berg's music seems to be a mixture of 12 tone with more tonal music, it still jars.
However, it was an enjoyable experience since it is a dramatic opera with elements that are pathetic, horrifying, tragic and at times quite scary and the acting of the principals was superb.
Quite frankly I never thought the WNO capable of such wonderful work. I have been disappointed in the past by many operas they have staged - "Salome" recently was a big disappointment, and "Hansel and Gretel" though musically thrilling was, I thought, rather dull in performance and design - I had formed the opinion that everything they did was rather second rate. This performance of "Wozzeck" dispelled all such thoughts. Now they can stand tall with the best in the country, if not the world.
Next year Wagner. Something to be looked forward to now.

H.G.Wells

There was a story of H.G.Wells's that I read many years ago which I recall enjoying tremendously; the trouble was I couldn't remember the title so was unable, until yesterday, to find it in the collected stories. Now at last I have found it and read it again and it's still superb. All I did was put up on Google "H.G.Wells - short stories" and up came a list of his stories and, by clicking on a title, I was able to read the whole story. The wonders of modern science! The wonders of the internet!
The story is called "Mr Brisher's Treasure". It tells - or rather Brisher himself tells - how he was engaged to a young woman whose father did not like or approve of him..... But read it for yourself. Wonderful story, very amusing, superb ironic end.
I recall Malcolm Muggeridge saying that he did not like Wells. I wondered at the time if it had to do with Wells the man or his works. Probably both. Muggeridge could take against a lot of other writers: Zola he hated, Chandler he made fun of. Yet he seemed a decent type. When he interviewed Brendan Behan on television he was the soul of tact and decency. There he was, unruffled by Behan's drunken behaviour, insisting on asking him questions about his art while Behan did his best to answer him but struggled against the booziness of his brain. Afterwards I recall Behan referring to Muggeridge as "the only English gentleman I have ever met".
I do wish I knew why Muggeridge did not like Wells: did it have something to do with Wels's aetheism? Or his style of writing? Or his womanising? What I wonder? He never gave a reason to my knowledge.
I have not read many of Wells's novels but his short stories I think are marvellous.

Wozzeck

Off on Sunday afternoon to see Alban Berg's opera "Wozzeck" by The Welsh National Opera Company. What am I going to make of it? Will it be too avante garde for me? To refer to something as avante garde is I suppose to refer to art that is ahead of its time now. Now, not back then in the 1920's when Berg wrote the opera. Yet his music, together with that of Schoenberg and Webern, is still difficult, is still unassimilated into the musical nerves of your average modern music lover. There are people who like this twelve tone scale music but they, I guess, are few and far between. Just as modern poetry is enjoyed by an ever diminishing group of people - mainly other poets - it seems to be that music by these three German composers is written to be heard by an elite, and that elite are other composers who work in the same genre. So the ordinary music lover like me, trying as best he can to enter this seemingly sealed world, finds it difficult to get to grips with it. It's rather like, I think, trying to engage in Calculus without the basic knowledge of mathematics to help: like trying to read a foreign language without a dictionary to hand.
One thing struck me about the story of Wozzeck: none of the characters are what you would expect to find in romantic opera. While the subject is tragic the plot does not follow the course of most tragedies where the central character is a man of high regard brought down by flaws in his character or illness or social conditions. It is not a Don Carlos or a Madame Butterfly or a Boheme; it's more in line with the drama of German Expressionism. The central character is someone who is low to start with; he can't get much lower except by doing something horrid.
In The Spectator last week Lloyd Evans, the theatre critic, wrote complimentarilly of Horvath's play from the 20's or 30's, "Judgement Day", but he said: "I admired it a lot. I just didn't like it much. Simple reason. The characters are all ghastly people". I have the feeling that that's how I will respond to Alban Berg's "Wozzeck".
We shall see.

Plum

I don't get it, I just don't get it: this adulation from well known people, some of them well known writers (like Evelyn Waugh no less), for P.G.Wodehouse. I have never been able to read more than a few pages of any of his books; I don't find the main characters very interesting, rather tiresome I think are Jeeves and Wooster, and the subsidiary characters are , well, "characters", cardboard cut-outs of English upper class toffs.
Rupert Christianson, writing in The Telegraph about a year ago about Alan Bennett's play "The History Boys" (by the way, am I the only person in the world who thought it pedestrain?) mentioned certain artists he did not much like: Wodehouse was amoung them; John Gielgud another; and Bruckner. I was glad to see Woodhouse there but not too pleased to see Gielgud by his side, so to speak. As for Bruckner, well he's an acquired taste - one I have not quite acquired yet but, like the parson's egg, I feel he's good in parts.
Yet, though I can't read P.G.Woodhouse (whom his admirers call "Plum" for some reason I don't know and really don't wish to know), I still like to hear about him: the way he lived, his success at writing lyrics for musicals, his so-called collaboration with the Germans in WW2 and so on; and I have to say that I have enjoyed the radio plays that were done a couple of years ago, don't know why but they made me smile.
I know only one of his songs, the one from "Showboat": "Along Came Bill". I read somewhere that he had written it originally for another of Jerome Kern's shows but Kern hadn't used it; now when he decided to use it, Oscar Hammerstein who was writing the book and lyrics for "Showboat" objected to its inclusion.
Well I'm glad Kern won the argument because it's a marvellous song. Actually, though, it is, as Hammerstein probably saw, it is completely out of place there.

Recipes

I am often amazed to see recipes that are recommended by well known chefs for the ordinary bloke, like me, to try are almost impossible to follow. There was a recipe for "real" curry which had about fifty items on it most of which I do not have on the shelf; I know someone who tried to do it and failed - she ended up serving her guests with a well known bottle version straight from Sainsbury's shelves.
Then there are recipes that look complicated but, when you take the trivial items away from them, are really quite simple. By "the trivial items" I mean a bit of this and a bit of that - leaves mostly chopped for artistic effect. One this week in a colour mag by a "famous chef" boiled down to (if I may) grilled steak with trimmings i.e. trivial items.
I was surprised on reading one of Keith Floyd's menus for roast lamb that it had garlic in it and rosemary. Who wants garlic with roast lamb for God's sake? And surely mint sauce is better than rosemary. And why cook it in red wine?
It seems to me that a lot of the stuff that is added these days are so powerful that they often suppress the real taste of the main constituent. Floyd covered his bream with white wine sauce! Isn't the fish good enough on its own?
I liked a fishmonger on Nigel Whatshisname's show who held up a mackeral and said how beautiful it was and all you needed to do to it was fry it or grill it and eat it as it was, no trimmings, with a hunk of bread.
Today I had a roast lamb with mint sauce (from the garden - the bottle stuff is not good), boiled potatoes, carrots, parsnips and French beans, followed by a plain rice pudding (not from a tin). All helped down with a few glasses of red wine. Angel's food.

Chairs

P. J. O'Rourke was looking at a folding chair and he read a tag on it which said: "do not attempt to lift the front end of the chair while sitting down on it". He thought that this spelled out what was wrong with America but I won't go into that because (a) I didn't really follow it and (b) I know what's wrong with America already and it's not what O'Rourke thinks. I'm more interested in Chairs. Folding chairs can be a menace; I once as a child caught a finger in one that collapsed under me and I can feel the pain now. Maybe they're safer now than then but I am not one to test that out - I never now sit in deck-chairs.
The topic of chairs came up today when my wife and I were dining in a very good restaurant in Cardiff called "The Brasserie". She remarked on how comfortable the chairs were: soft, seemed to fit cosily into the curves of your back, upright so that you could get close to the table and so on. How many times have I suffered with restaurant chairs, with hard seats and knobbly backs with bits sticking into my spine. Chapter Arts Centre is a case in point of a chairs perhaps satisfying an artistic idea of what a seat should be to look at while being almost impossibnle to sit on.
The test of a chair is how it feels when you sit on it not how it looks. Van Goch's yellow chair looks good I suppose but it also looks most uncomforetable.

Groups

One of my favourite films is "Shane" which I saw, again, a few weeks ago. I knew there was a novel from which the film had been made so I ordered it through Amazon and am now reading it. I have just read the part where Shane and Starrett get to work on a large stump of a tree. In the film it takes minutes but, with cuts and characteristic George Stevens's slow fade cuts, the impression is that it takes hours; in the book it takes about six pages. Both forms are well done, showing how the two unlike men, one a gunfighter (or former one), the other a rough-hewn farmer, sort of bond.
This bonding of people in groups was discussed in an article in The Times recently: someone has produced a theory that when people get together they usually have the same interests but that these interests, by virtue of the bonding, become more striking; if they are political interests they become more intense and sometimes fanatical. The two men in "Shane" have a common purpose and by doing it together they become over-earnest, dedicated to the task, almost fanatical. They are not going to let that stump of a tree beat them. They are not going to get the team of horses out to help them. They are going to do it together even if it kills them.
I had an experience a long time ago of this group mania. I was taking part in a student protest march against something - can't think what. Someone said "look at that sign over there in that garden - let's get it down." And, for some inconceiveable reason, the urge to do just that swept over our group of about six young men and we went over there, pushed and shoved it (as if it was a tree stump?), wrestled with it until it came out of the ground and then we joyfully threw it down. We returned to the march feeling we had achieved something.
We hadn't, of course, acheived anything; we had destroyed something. I don't know what was written on the sign - probably "house for sale" or something. I probably didn't even know at the time. It didn't matter. What mattered was that someone had set in motion an atavistic urge to become a pack who acted as one because.... I suppose because the group wanted it done.
"Me Lud, it wasn't me, it was the group."
Turn to "A Tale of Two Cities" by Dickens to learn more about crowd behaviour, or to Zola's "Germinal".
Looking back it seems so crazy, but at the time it seemed to be the obvious thing to do: pull that sign up and dash it to the ground.

George Sanders

I always liked George Sanders even when he was in quite poor films; you couldn't help being struck by and admiring in a funny sort of way that plummy English accent, those rolling tones perfect for Wildean disdain (as in "The Picture of Dorian Gray"). He seemed to have made a living out of practising a soft kind of disdain that only in films in which he played a villain became vile.
I remember him in films like "Samson and Delila", "The Moon and Sixpence" and other poor stuff and, more pleasantly, in "All about Eve" and "This Land is Mine". Of course his early work as The Saint and thereafter The Falcon (played later by his elder brother, Tom Conway) was amusing, light entertainment and his late work was pretty disastrous. Then there were in-between films like "Rebecca", where he played someone he could do so well - the cad - and, also for Hitchcock, "Foreign Correspondent".
Of course his finest role was in "All about Eve" for which he won an oscar, deservedly so. A little known film which starred Charles Laughton had Sanders playing a man who collaborates with the Nazis and here I thought he was superb.
Maybe the best directors got the best out of him: Joseph Mankiewicz in "All about Eve"; Jean Renoir in "This Land is Mine" and Robert Rossellini in "Viaggio in Italia" (not seen by me) about which David Thomson has written "Rossellini boldly cut through irritability to the shy observer of life who hid behind Sanders's barbs."
Thomson again: "The movie business feels so flat nowadays without figures like George Sanders."

Bells

The bells in Ipswitch church have at last, after a quarter of a century, been repaired and are now ringing again. I wonder if the people living close to the church are as happy as those who helped repair and intsall the enormous bells; because they can be rather monotonous to hear. Wouldn't it be better if they played tunes as they do on the continent?
I think it was Dorothy L. Sayers who remarked that on the continent the church bells play tunes while in this country they play mathematical permutations.
I am not personally in favour of these loud sounds relayed across the land from such places as churches; maybe it reminds me of that hooter that used to, well, hoot from the local coal mine when I was a kid; it hooted loud and clear across the valleys every morning at about four o'clock to inform the miners that it was time they got out of bed and into their working clothes. What an intrusion in the lives of people? If they tried something like that these days there'd probably be a strike.
I think in some town in the north of England where there are great numbers of Muslims, it was mooted that a sort of hooter be used to call people to prayer. Thankfully it has not been installed. Yet!

Honesty

J.C.Grayling, the philosopher who attempts to make philosophy easy to undersatnd and to relate it to everyday ideas, writing to day in The Times wonders if we should dismiss dishonesty because "it can be virtuous". There are times when you need to be dishonest, he says. For example: "is it dishonest to tell someone that she looks nice in the hideous outfit she is wearing to save her feelings and your own embarrassment?" He says that kindness sometimes justifiably triumphs over truth.
I recall studying (if that's not too strong a word for it) an essay given us in school; it was by Hilaire Belloc and was in the form of a letter written by somone who intended to tell a friend the whole truth and nothing but the truth. I thought it quite amusing at the time. Of course the whole letter was a long insult. But I asked the teacher why the writer had written "Dear" whoever and ended with "Sincerely". Can't remember what she said but probably defended it on the grounds that these were commonly used methods of address rather than meaningful words.
The film "Liar Liar" with Jim Carrey is a similar kind of affair where he has to (for some reason I can't recall) always tell anyone he meets the truth. For Jim Carrey it was rather a good film I thought - I'm not a fan.
Grayling says unless we are on the whole truthful and honest in our dealings with other people, in business for example, then nothing will function in a practically good way. Which made me think of the man who repaired my roof last week. There was a small hole which he made larger. This was so that I couldn't say to him when he mentioned the fee "O, I'll find someone else". Then he said the fee and I had to agree because there was now a large hole in the roof and if he'd left the rain would have come pouring in.
In short, he could have told me pretty well any figure as a fee and I'd have had to pay it - or get wet. Or have the tiles blown off in a high wind, as he explained - "be an £1800 job then".
So there's business dealings and there's roofer's dealings. Cost me £280 by the way.

Somerset Maugham

A new book about the life of Somerset Maugham has been written by Selina Hastings and a very good book it appears to be having read a few reviews. One passage appealed to me because it showed a rather nice side to Maugham, something I have not been particularly aware of before now. The reviewer writes: "Rejected by the actress Sue Jones, he met Syrie Wellcome who ensnared him by falling pregnant... Syrie threatened to reveal the names of his male lovers if he did not marry her, just as 14 years later she would threaten to reveal them if he did not divorce her. 'By doing the right thing,' said Maugham, 'I brought happiness neither to her nor to myself'."
How is he rated now? I would say that as a playwright he is not rated highly yet he is a damn good one; even now after the period pieces have lost their relevance they work as dramas very effectively. As a novelist he is probably not read much - I found his first novel "Liza of Lambeth" pretty well unreadable, though I liked his "The Painted Veil". He will probably be remembered most as a short story writer, often as good as Maupassant or Chekov. Yet there is that feeling in me that there is something curmugeonly about his attitude to people; there is often an ironic twist in the tail that seems to say: "You may think you are living in a world where morals matter but let me tell you, they don't." It's an attitude more in keeping with the equally curmugeonly Evelyn Waugh than with Chekov, a wholly kindlier soul.
His novels never made good films but his short stories did. There were three films that each had three or four of his stories in them and they were not only critically successful but popular too. I once met a young American who said they were highly rated in the USA and that their filmmakers had tried to emulate them but had failed.
In those films he always introduced the stories himself. What a strange face he had with that downturned mouth and that wrinkled face. A bit like W.H.Auden's face of which Stravinsky is supposed to have said to a friend "One day I would like use a flat iron on his face to see what he really looks like."

Cary Grant

Whenever I catch the beginning of "North by Northwest" on TV (and it's often on these days) I cannot turn it off for at least 20 minutes; it is one of the best openings to a film I've ever seen. Cary Grant at his smoothest and handsomest (though really he was rather old for the part - older in fact than the woman who played his mother) involved in a spy plot that enabled him to show the two sides of the character he always was in films: sophisticated and suspicious at one and the same time. His verbal sparring with James Mason, in his sophisticated and deeply-ingrained-nastiness role, is wonderful to behold, choreographed brilliantly by Hitchcock. Then his drunk scene. Playing drunk can often be embarrassing to watch rather than funny; Grant makes it hilarious. And soon after, the scene in the UN building when a man is killed and Grant, catching him as he falls, removes the knife from the man's back and stands there, to be photographed, knife in hand over the dead body. Here he does a marvellous about turn: at first he is showing the crowd that it had nothing to do with him; then, realising he must appear to be the killer, sees that the only way he won't be arrested is to pretend he is the killer and to threaten everyone around him with the knife. It's a brilliant piece of thoughful acting that I wonder if anyone else could have achieved. Certainly not James Mason however masterful an actor he was. James Stewart maybe? Robert Mitchum maybe not.
David Thomson writes: "As well as being a leading box office draw..... he was the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema."
Agreed.

Chekhov revisited

Alan Davies, stand-up comedian and actor, tells in The Times today how great an influence Chekhov was on him when he was studying to be an actor. He draws particular attention to the opening of "The Seagull": "I've always loved the play's opening where Medvedenko, the smitten but hapless teacher, asks the world-weary Masha why she always wears black. 'I'm in mourning for my life,' she replies. That tickled me the first time I read it and seems as good a test for an appreciation of Chekhov as any."
I agree with that but then he then goes into a rather heavy-handed description of why the line is so funny; I don't think that's needed - you either get it or you don't.
Chekhov doesn't go for the big laugh; you tend to chuckle at his lines and at the characters who say them. The characters are not comical but perfectly serious. The humour is there because they are so sad and do not understand how out of date they are: society is changing but they aren't changing with it. Another playwright would hate these people but Chekhov is too humane for that: he loves them but at the same time wishes they would prepare themselves for the new life that's ahead. The ageing actress in "The Seagull" says at one point when her son (?) is about to stage a modern-type avante garde play "I don't care what they do as long as they leave me out of it" which, I think, is as funny - and as tragic - as Masha's "in mourning for her life". But you either get it or you don't.

Eli Jenkins

First, thanks Gloria for your excellent comments on "Night of the Hunter" and the useful info you've given. I didn't know Agee wrote "The African Queen".

I was sitting in the Eli Jenkins pub, in Cardiff Bay, this morning with my wife who asked "who was Eli Jenkins?" I said the only Eli Jenkins I know of is a character in "Under Milk Wood", the Reverend Eli Jenkins who stands on the threshold of his home and prays:

Every morning when I wake,
Dear Lord, a little prayer I make,
O please do keep Thy lovely eye
On all poor creatures born to die.....

I always felt that Dylan Thomas was being rather cynical here in his depiction of this good hearted vicar, feeling that the hymn/prayer is a spoof of what a simple soul might say. The ironic thing about it is that it is probably the most liked and certainly most popular part of the play - put "Eli Jenkins' prayer" on Google and you get numerous choirs singing it, also Bryn Terfel is there somewhere doing his version.
In the Eli Jenkins pub (excellent beer by the way, and good, cheap, British style food in an old-fashioned style pub) I noticed a game machine which had Trivial Pursuit as one of the games. This surprised me because I thought the makers had withdrawn these machines because certain people had learned how to win. But maybe now the winnings are not big. I say this because about ten years ago I overheard a conversation in a sports centre where two young men were telling another how they travelled the country playing these machines and making a living that way.
Didn't dine in the Eli Jenkins since we had vouchers "2 for the Price of 1" in Strada, nearby. Excellent food and a very nice table red wine.

Film Noir

There are a series of programmes and films showing this weekend on BBC 4. I'm looking forward to seeing tonight's films, especially "Farewell My Lovely" which I saw many years ago. When it came out everybody was surprised that Dick Powell, song and dance man before that, was chosen to play Philip Marlowe - too soft, not tall enough, not a bruiser etc. He was astonishingly good. Maybe Bogart was the best of the Philip Marlowe's (though he was hardly big enough) but Dick Powell came a good second, in front of Robert Mitchum, Robert Montgomery and others.
They are also showing a documentary on Film Noir which is described in a part of The Times today as: "Dark city streets. Treacherous femme fatales. Fatally flawed heroes adrift in a cruelly amoral universe. Such are the essential ingredients of Film Noir."
They mention more modern versions of the genre: "L.A. Confidential"; "Chinatown"; "The Last Seduction"; "Basic Instinct". But they don't mention my favourite: "Red Rock West" with Nicholas Cage and that master of the art of "stealing a scene", Dennis Hopper. Also with J.T.Walsh, always good (alas, with us no more).
A friend of mine, Roger Ormorod, a writer of detective fiction who had 40 or so novels published which featured a male detective, Richard Patton, decided he would like to try his hand with a new novel featuring a female detective. This proved quite successful for a few books. The female detective's name? Phillipa Marlowe.

Critics

Who needs critics? Word of mouth works better. And I speak as a one-time critic who went to about three plays per week. I had the idea that I was doing something important, letting the general public know what was good in the theatre and what was bad. I'm not at all sure that many people read me, and those who did, I imagine, didn't take much notice of what I wrote. Though someone did say to me once "I'm glad you gave that show a bashing because I too thought it bad". She was looking for confirmation of her view of it from someone she believed would have the qualifications to make a sound judgement.
Qualifications? I didn't have any. When I enquired about doing some reviewing for a certain newspaper, the features editor who had read my letter saying that I had done some work for a local magazine and that I had written a couple of plays (unproduced), said "you seem to have the right qualifications" and tried me out.
I think I was pretty honest in my reviews. Too honest possibly since I got banned from one theatre in South Wales for being too critical (and probably too humorously cynical).
You can't trust critics to tell you which plays to go and see - especially with prices as they are, through the roof - because their views vary so much from paper to paper, mag to mag. Can you believe Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph when he says of "Faust": "though this often works as decadent spectacle, it seems a shabby way to treat one of the great masterpieces of world drama", and when Benedict Nightingale of The Times says of the same play: "(they) may be sacrificing narrative clarity for spectacle but O boy, what spectacle!"?
Nightingale gave the show 5 stars, Spencer gave it 2 stars.
Probably I'd lean towards Spencer since I once reviewed a play by Turgenev that Nightingale had given a tremendous boost to, yet I found it dull, poorly acted and tedious.
No, critics won't help you decide which play to see, all they can do is write a report of it from their point of view, which may be interesting or may be garbage.

Burma

Vera Lynn is apparently making a comeback at 92, not singing this time but giving talks about her life's experiences; and she's packing 'em in. She was interviewed on the TV today and when asked what was her most memorable experience when she was a singer during the second world war, she said "being in Burma, singing to the troops there; it was," she said, "the forgotten war and she felt the troups there needed support."
She was right: it was forgotten and a horrible war. My only knowledge of it was seeing the Laurence Olivier narrated documentary about WW2. But I do have a closer link to it in that my uncle Mick was there. He never talked about it much but I know he was there throughout the campaign. I don't know what rank he had or what he actually did in the forces and I can't now find that out since he died last year in Australia at the age of about 92 - the same age as Vera Lynn is now.
After the war he went to Yorkshire where he worked on a farm. I have the feeling that for some reason he had to move from there fairly quickly (something to do with a lady I believe - and maybe a shotgun too).
I used to go cycling with him when he was on leave after the war, pre-Yorkshire; we used to ride to a cousin's farm in Llandenny, near Raglan, when my relatives gave us marvellous food to eat: I recall having wood pigeon on one occasion - delicious, though you had to watch you didn't swallow the lead shot that had killed the birds.
Mick eventually emigrated to Australia where he became a sort of cowboy for a few years. He got married there (might have been married once or twice before) and settled there until his death last year.
He was great fun to be with. The ghastly Burma campaign had not appeared to affect him emotionally or mentally or psychologically..... but, you never know - might have made him that restless spirit who found it difficuklt to form long-term relationships.... But I'm guessing.
We spoke on the phone about four years ago and I remember him saying, about the Iraq war that we shouldn't try to change the way other countries do things by force. I said yes to that though, actually, at that time, I supported the war. Not so sure that I should have and have grave doubts about Afganistan now.

Da Vinci Code

Dan Brown's at it again: another book that will have to do with religion and mysteries surrounding it, problems to be solved and, of course, in writing the book, a heap of money to be made.
Best of luck to him I say.
Many others seem to resent his success pointing to his dreadful style. Not literature, old boy.
John Humphreys of Radio 4's Today fame had a go at him: "the literary equivalent of painting by numbers by an artist who can't even stay within the lines." And, naturally, Salmon Rushdie has put his two well shod boots in: "a novel so bad that it gives bad novels a bad name."
I liked "The Da Vinci" code. But there, I'm someone who finds it difficult to get through two or three pages of any Ian Macewan novel.
What the novel has got, if it is without literary distinction or even merit at all, is speed; it's a real page-turner. And with page-turners you don't, in a sense, actually read them - you speed read them. You're not interested in and certainly not aware of any literary content - only the speed of the action is what you're after.
Probably the trouble with it getting such a bad press is that it is pretentious, or seems so: maybe Dan Brown wants to be taken seriously as a novelist and so the story is over complex, with people trying to solve problems which, because of their nature (religious stuff), have the veneer of something to be taken seriously.
I enjoyed the film too (except for the part with Ian Macellan in).
So here's looking forward to the new novel and, later no doubt, the 700 million dollar grossing film. With Tom Hanks.

War

Andrew Roberts has written a history of the second world war and from the reviews it's getting it looks like it's a good read. It doesn't break new ground - so many books about WW2 have been written that it must be difficult for a historian to find something new to say; but Roberts writes so well that whatever he sets his sights on becomes an exciting read. Not only that but he writes from a certain perspective which I think is "from the right" so that he is not only thorough but positive in his judgements; you may not agree with some of them but you can't help but take notice of them and admire the way he presents them.
Paul Johnson wrote a review of this book, "The Storm of War: a New History of The Second World War", and praised it highly. But at the end of the review he wrote: "Roberts's book is a powerful, well-documented sermon on these inhumanities. Engrossing to read. But will it do any good?"
I don't believe it will. I am not thinking of what Henry Ford said of history - "history is bunk" -I'm thinking that so much has already been written about war in general, so many plays and films and novels have been written about war, especially WW2, and many of them positively against it, yet nothing much has happened to cause people to take heed before embarking on yet another war. Alastair Cook, I recall, in his Letters from America, some time back said something to the effect that after WW2 the United Nations was set up with its purpose to prevent other wars occurring, but he went on to say that (then, 10 or 20 years ago) there had been over 200 conflicts in the world since then, some minor conflicts but most full-scale wars.
I recall a war play on TV some years back being discussed by a panel of critics on radio, and I remember one of the panel saying "they keep writing these plays damning war but no one seems to take any notice of them, they carry on fighting."
Will it do any good? I'm afraid not. But don't ask me what will.

Music Critics

One of the best music critics was Neville Cardus (who also wrote well about cricket). I am reading a book called "Conversations with Cardus", a fascinating read in which he covers his own work with The Manchester Guardian (as it then was) and The Sunday Times and other newspapers and journals, as well as mention other music critics of whom he was fond or whom he admired: Shaw, Ernest Newman, Beerbohm and particularly Samuel Langford (of whom I had never heard). What struck me most about these music critics (and others I have read) is that they all seem to have aversions, "blind spots", over one or a few composers. Ernest Newman for example did not much like Mozart; Cardus is quite amazed at Newman's tendency to boost the reputations of quite ordinary composers - Bantock for example. Newman once wrote that Bantock's "Omar Khayyam" could be "mentioned in the same breath as the B Minor Mass of Bach". Cardus just couldn't believe that his usually discerning friend could be so blinkered.
Cardus himself hated "progressive" music. He thought it an artistic reflection of a materialistic society. "Some aspects of this 'progress' are destructive to the human spirit and many avante garde composers are expressing these aspects in their music..... within 50 years there will be a series of reactions against the more ridiculous concepts of life today."
Bernard Shaw disliked Brahms, certainly despising his first symphony and saying about a mass he wrote that there are certain experiences in life one does not want to repeat and that applies to listening again to Brahms's mass - or words to that effect.
I can't get close to liking Mahler. I admire him but I can't enjoy him. He doesn't seem to have any of the joy of..... wait fior it..... Mozart.
I don't know how Ernest Newman felt about Mahler but he was very enthusiastic about "the greatest English songwriter" Frederick Nichols.
Who's he for heaven's sake? Not even Cardus had heard of him.

Love stories

When I was tutoring a class of creative writers I met two very old ladies who each told me a love story that, they said, was true. I had no reason to disbelieve them for they were delightful, honest human beings one of whom was from Ireland, the other was local Welsh.
The Irish woman told me a story that had the famous writer Frank O'Conner as the main character. He fell in love with a married woman whose husband was a military officer. She left her husband to go and live with O'Conner. They lived together for some time until Frank O'Conner died. Soon after, the woman's husband asked her to come back to him. She did and they continued living together as man and wife.
The other lady had been a nanny to a rich family in South Wales. One of the daughters of the family fell in love with one of the "cow men" (she used this expression if memory serves me right). The family instantly dismissed him and he went to work elsewhere. They forbad her to have anything more to do with him but she followed him, married him and they lived happily together. Of course, the family would have nothing to do with her after that. But the woman who told me the story said that she often visited them at their small holding. She told me they were very happily married with a few children.

Odds On

William Rees-Mogg writing in The Times recently tipped Lord Mandelson to be the next leader of the Labour party with, at his heels, Harriet Harmon making good running. Give me a break please Rees-Mogg - Mandelson leader with Harmon his deputy, or vice versa?..... the mind boggles.
I would like to know what the odds are on these two in the betting market. Now that Rees-Mogg has tipped them then maybe the odds will suddenly have risen; but as the time draws nearer when decisions have to be made by the National Executive or whoever, my bet is that they won't, either of them, be in the running.
Remember some time back when Margaret Thatcher was PM and people were speculating on a change up top? Who then was odds-on favourite? No, you can't remember because he has pretty well disappeared without trace; so I shall tell you: Kenneth Baker. Remember him?
He was tipped for the top but somehow I knew that he didn't have a snowballs. He was too decent, too nice, too much the intellectual. So he went - to the Lords.
But I must say that Kenneth Baker was responsible for introducing a bill that had the most far reaching effects on social life: the Dog Act. Now many people said it wouldn't work; others said it was a disgrace, an assault on the right of dogs to do whatever dogs do - like bite and shit and bark and kill little babies. I thought, and still think, that it was one of the best acts passed through parliament that have taken place in the past 50 or so years.
So, cheers to Kenneth Baker for that and though he is virtually forgotten he will always be remembered by me as a man who did the right thing - though it wasn't the most popular thing and maybe that's what eventually wrecked his ambition. If he really had any.
Mandelson, leader of the Labour Party? Don't make me laugh. Why not Elton John?

Bats

In the article on Low Life in The Spectator this week Jeremy Clarke describes how a friend of his, villains on his tail bent of breaking his legs for grassing on them, says he's having to sleep with a bat in his room, which Clarke interprets as a living creature but which is in fact a baseball bat, for protection.
Bats can fly into rooms as I once found at a weekend course of writers when a lady returned to her room for the night to find a bat there. She screamed and people rushed to see what was going on. One brave gentleman somehow got it out the window but not before a rather strange lady on the course (we had a lot of those by the way) said "I must see it. A bat! How lovely!" She was too late and, of course, she was very disappointed.
She was the one who said that a friend of mine had "no aura". I never knew what she meant but, looking at him, I had an inkling: a sort of dry look about him.
I was once in a hut full of young men, mainly students, in France; we were all working there for the summer, not paid much, but we had keep - which is when I learned to drink a lot of red wine and smoke Gauloise cigarettes. It was one of those hair-brained schemes governments developed after the war to "get the nations together" or some such thing. Well, every night someone would, due to the heat, open doors at both ends of the hut and then we'd watch the bats, heaps of them, coming like racing cars through the building, brilliantly avoiding the vertical posts that held the roof up. Quite a sight. No one was afraid. No one had a beehive haircut for the bats to get tangled in (old wives tale). You went to sleep and didn't worry that your blood would be sucked in the night - like the young man in.... what was it?.... "Coral Island?".

Walford Davies

I typed Walford Davies into "youtube" to find that there are on the first page only two versions of his most famous work, "Solemn Melody". They always played it at the remembrance service but the trouble was that when you turned on the TV to watch, Richard Dimbleby would speak over it in his solemn tones. The full army band playing it is wonderful, gives it the depth of feeling it needs for the occasion; the two versions on "youtube" are not so good: the first is fine though - Julian Lloyd Webber with the orchestra of St Martins in the Field, very moving and "English" - and the second is good in its way - an organ version, loud and lacking in feeling. Give me the brass band version every time.
When my father was a young man in the 1920's he was a member of the Workers Education Association (WEA) in Blackwood; they used to have guest speakers at some meetings and one of these, he told me, was Walford Davies. Probably he was then a professor of music at Aberystwyth University. He used to get to Blackwood by train from Newport. When he got to the meeting he would speak first of the beauty of the Welsh valley he had just travelled up and of how he could understand how music was so important to Welsh people and how well they performed it in the light of the beauty of their landscape. (Not like Sir Thomas Beecham who, later, after WW2, said that "there is no music in Wales" which caused a bit of a furore in the press).
Another speaker at the WEA meetings was the poet Walter de la Mere. My father spoke proudly of how he had shaken his hand.
Who reads him now?

THE MOTH.
"Isled in the midnight air,
Musked with the dark's faint bloom,
Out into glooming and secret haunts
The flame cries, "Come!"