Intertalea:: Notes from the Other Side

THE BIG SOCIETY

2012-02-02T13:23:00.000-08:00

Her Majesty has stripped Fred Goodwin of his knightly title, so he is no longer Sir Fred, but just Fred. It's a pity Her Majesty's subjects can't strip him of his ill-gotten earnings since the bank he ran down (RBS) was baled out by British taxpayers at the expense, no doubt, of the vital services we are losing as part of the austerity measures. No chance of a refund though. We weren't compensated for the sale of public utilities under the last Tory Government, so compensation for the bungled antics of Fred and his banking band is as unlikely as re-nationalisation of the railways, the water, gas and electricity supplies, and the GPO, which a few of us traded for British Telecom shares, just as poor Siberians in the early nineties traded their shares in the state-owned oil companies that that were issued to them instead of pay.

But enough of that. I wanted to write about good people. Yesterday, I met up with two good people, Sue and Paul Farmer, who are trying to put some heart back into the dying community that is Redruth by offering a number of creative projects designed to offset the hopelessness and apathy that is facing the young people of the town. Redruth has been in decline since the tin-mining industry fell off, but the last few years have seen the commencement of its death throes. It costs 50p to park in Redruth for an hour but that is too much for locals on a tight welfare budget, who can catch a free bus to Tesco. If the falling price of tin took the heart out of the town, then Tesco gutted it and filleted it so that it increasingly resembles an eviscerated corpse. When I saw in the news last week that Tesco's profits are on the wane, I stood up and cheered. Shirley Cohen ), a major shareholder since her father started the supermarket chain, is finally getting some come-uppance. Why doesn't Her Majesty strip that woman of her Dame-ship? Who will be the next to be stripped of their ill-deserved title? I'd vote for (Lord) Julian Fellowes, but I doubt it will be him because he got the gong for reinforcing a status quo that was out of date in 1918.

Sue Farmer's blog

Redruth Community Radio

JUBILEE

2012-01-11T16:47:00.000-08:00

We are ten days into the new year, and plans for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee are already underway. News reports yesterday suggested that the pagentry and fuss would bring billions into the British economy from all the tourists who are sure to visit London this summer with its two-for-the-price of one attractions: Her Majesty and The 2012 Olympics. Now I have a great deal of time for The Queen. I think she is generally A Very Good Thing for this country, not just for her patronage of all kinds of good works, but because she shields us from the horror and embarrassment of a presidency (think Bush Junior, Berlusconi and his Bonga-Bonga, and others too unspeakable to mention). That said, I doubt very much that the hordes of Americans predicted to descend on Jubilant London in a few months time would want to exchange an elected head of state for a hereditary monarch, however good at her job Her Majesty has proved herself to be. It is delusional to think that the rest of the world (except for the Afghans maybe) is envious of our Monarch and our Royal Family. I fear that the billions of Jubilee pictures that are sure to be snapped by a tsunami of i-phones, and disseminated across the globe via Twitter and Facebook et al, may be as ephemeral as the House of Windsor when Her Majesty is no longer reigning over us.

In the meantime, Lord Julian Fellowes (Baron Claptrap) is spouting forth, as usual on all things great and small, latterly the Tories' plans to dumb-down the British Film Industry to make entertainment that 'people would want to see and which would make money', rather than the bleak, realist cinema turned out by directors like Ken Loach, who present a far more dystopian vision of this country than we like to project abroad, although one only has to watch the news to see the reality of life in the Fairest Isle in 2012. The ascent of Julian Fellowes means more films about the Royals and more daft dramas like 'Downton Abbey' the greatest piece of soma-inducing drivel to hit the small screen since Crossroads. I have a recurring memory of those sad people back in the '70s who tried to book rooms at the Cardboard Motel.

In spite of all that, I am jubilant so far this year because I have cast off the glass-half-empty syndrome and am looking forward to travelling abroad again with my beloved daughter.

LIFE UNDER THE TORIES

2011-05-19T08:03:00.000-07:00

I have just calculated that I will be £4,000 worse off next year owning to 'reduction in duties' at work and to the loss of Child Tax Credit and Child Benefit from 1 September. I have friends - GPs earning in excess of £100,000 per annum, who didn't even notice their Child Benefit payments. Yesterday, I was taking coffee in the morning room of a very grand house in Devon, where the host, a big society sort of guy (he has certainly paid his dues to charity) was talking of buying another grand piano for a knock down price of £16,000 - nearly three quarters of my gross annual income before the forthcoming reduction. He also needs another house in which to place the piano (he has two already) and the large collection of antiques that have outgrown his mansion. The rich really are different - at least the ones I know. Their world view is entirely alien to that of most ordinary Joes like me.

We have a Tory Government composed of very rich people with vast inherited wealth which keeps on growing, thanks to careful investments and tax allowances (creative accounting). They may be nice people, some of them at least, but they all share the old Tory insousiance of the very rich when it comes to making policies that will affect the rest of us. I have survived under the Tories before, so I know pretty well what is coming, and I think I still have the personal resources to prepare for and handle it; but what of those who don't? What about the chronically disabled, the under-educated, the elderly poor and those lone parents with children under 5, who can't work at all and for whom the loss of £4,000 a year cannot be made up elsewhere? I like the idea of an austerity period - it has a fine and noble ring to it that makes it sound as though it is good for the soul. But I haven't found any belt-tightening amongst my rich friends, which suggests to me that, though all austerity measures are equal, under this Tory-dominated Coalition, some are more equal than others.

NEWS BLACKOUT

2011-05-03T05:10:00.000-07:00

I won't be watching the news for the next few days. I am sickened by the sight of so many Americans congratulating themselves for killing Osama Bin Laden. Sure he brought death into the world through his messengers of hate, but the backlash against him from The White House resulted in the deaths of thousands more innocent civilians - old, sick, children, women - in Iraq and Afghanistan, London and Madrid. It is therefore more than a little unseemly to crow at his killing and I am ashamed of our British government for joining in. Wouldn't it be better to reflect on the state of the world now that Bin Laden has left it? Will his death lead to peace and co-operation between Islamo-terrorists and the West? Low probablility. A vacuum has been created, waiting for some less clapped-out a leader than the chronically ill and softly spoken Osama to fill. Will the threat of terror be any less? Not likely. The signs are that Britain and and the USA are still on high alert for more bloody reprisals from those who hate America and all it stands for. The sight of all that blood in Bin Laden's Pakistani hideaway should be a warning to us all.

The news studio is a crazy place to be, reflecting a crazy world back to its dazed and suffering inhabitants. The Royal Wedding on Friday brought an uplifting sort of message to the billions worldwide who tuned into it -even to closet republicans like me, who shed a few tears. The sight of two well-starred young people setting out together in a pageant of colour and music brought hope and joy, because it is love that unites the world, not vengeance, Doesn't that belong to God?

LORD JULIAN FELLOWES?

2010-11-22T05:47:00.000-08:00

I may have spelled his name wrong, but I caught a radio item stating that Julian Fellow(e)s, writer of pap film and TV drama scripts, had received a peerage. Michael Winner, one of the studio guests, was offended by getting 'only the second step down' - an OBE.

These 'honours', doled out by the artistically conservative British Establishment, have long ceased to mean anything; still I wonder if Fellow(e)s's ennoblement is a worrying sign of the times. In the Philistine 1980s (which this present coalition seems to be rehabilitating) we had Jeffrey (later Lord) Archer peddling his appalling fiction, and now here's the Fellow(e)s fellow receiving Oscars and God knows what other plaudits for his snobbish and cliche-ridden writings. His Oscar for Gosford Park came from the American academy, of course, who seem eager to buy into 'historical' narratives about British toffs, although the US has more than its fair share of home-grown talented screenwriters to fall back on. It was Britain, however, who gave peerages to Archer and Fellow(e), and that has no excuse. Also aired with the radio programme was some military top brass rant about the excellent Jimmy McGovern's new TV series, The Accused. Tonight's episode apparently concerns an army corporal accused of bullying young soldiers, something which the general felt would cause offence to the relatives of those serving in Afghanistan, already worried by media hysteria over pictures of wounded soldiers and funerary scenes at Wooton Bassett. Military jingoism and misplaced sentiment are perhaps predictable consequences of these hard times, but, as with the Falklands furore, the wicked witch is kept at bay by the myth of our boys' offering themselves as a sacrifice to a notion called Hearts and Minds, never mind the collateral damage. These are not wars like the Second World War, where the issues were clear, and the enemy still clearer, and the draft of young men to kill other young men a necessary evil. Leaving all that aside, the general missed the simple point that Jimmy McGovern is a serious and gifted TV dramatist working in a contemporary-realist genre in which bullying in the army seems to me to be an entirely suitable theme.

Fellow(e)s's well-thumbed subject is the good old escapist mystery of social class, dressed up in the (often inaccurate) historical flummery of The Good Old Days. Even his 'contemporary' novel, Snobs, is a pointless, inconsequential narrative of social climbers and flunkeys toadying around the titled folk in the big house. Are we meant to look to these people for some sort of moral and social model? Know your place, and stay in it. Is that a way for a little country to get ahead in a globalised world order?

After Downton Abbey, watchable only because of the sterling attempts of the cast to inject some life into a silly story with a banal script, we will no doubt be treated to another fairytale, the wedding of royal William and Kate, presented as a tonic for the masses in troubled times but intercut with historical footage from that other fairtytale wedding of recession-hit 1981 which unfortunately failed to stick to the story. Now that was drama with an original twist.

AFTER THE FLOOD...

2010-11-22T04:55:00.000-08:00

A concerned comment to this blog about the floods in Cornwall last week alerted me to the fact that I haven't posted anything since March this year. Where did the spring go and the summer, and the autumn which is nearly over? I swept away the last leaves this morning, getting cat shit on my clogs for all my pains, but now I have permission from the owner (Pussy Woman) to throw water over the offending fluffy ginger creature after it terrorised a heron in my garden back in July. In fact (a fact which I owned up to her), I have been throwing water and other missiles at her revolting pet since she moved it in a couple of years ago, but I have only got as far as scaring it out of the garden by my mere presence; the fouling and the wildlife mauling just goes on and on. I know that life is far too short to care about a cat, but in this neighbourhood it feels as though the utterly pointless animals have inherited the earth. I wouldn't want to eat any planted vegetable from a cat-infested garden or allotment, organic or not. Some creatures, including humans, are quite demonic, and if you're not careful, the whole of existence can be reduced to a a constant battle against the fiends.

But last week, before the floods, I was sitting in The Blue Bar at Porthtowan drinking well-kept Guinness and looking at the all-powerful ocean that washes sins away. I go to Porthtowan to remind myself why I live in Cornwall, and it always works. All my ghosts are on that beach: my gentle black labrador bitch, long dead, and the spirit of my daughter's childhood that haunts the sea caves where we used leave pebbles and shells for the mermaids on the tide. In summer, we'd go down to the shore with a breakfast sandwich and a flask of tea and wait for the sun to warm the sands - a cat-free zone.

SUPPORT FOR HAITI IN READ AN E-BOOK WEEK

2010-03-07T04:29:00.000-08:00

Pay what you like (or nothing at all) for twenty-five selected BeWrite Books ebooks in all formats during Read an Ebook Week from March 7-13. All income will go to the Red Cross effort in Haiti. Simply visit the BeWrite Books Smashwords.com page and scroll down through the catalogue: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/bewrite

ST PIRAN'S DAY (5 March) AND MICHAEL FOOT

2010-03-06T06:51:00.000-08:00

I found out yesterday that St Piran was the patron saint of tin miners. I knew he was patron saint of Cornwall because his flag (a monochrome version of the Swiss flag, though rectangular, not square) flies everywhere these days. It felt like the first day of spring because the sun was shining and there were schoolgirls dancing in the streets of Truro behind a band of accordions, bhodrans and the odd piece of brass. The Cornish politicos were there, dressed in black overcoats and selling co-ordinating flags for a pound a time. It wasn't a large procession, and I don't think they sold many flags, though the police had stopped the traffic to encourage shoppers to stop. The whole thing was a metaphor for hope over experience, a bit like the CND Marches and rallies of the Old Left that I watched on TV in the 'Seventies.

Michael Foot, long time CND marcher and Leftist, died yesterday, aged ninety years. There is not one single politician living today in this country who has a smidgen of Foot's integrity, sincerity, and belief in a fairer world based on social(ist) principles, with the exception of Tony Benn, who has now retired from Parliament and, like Foot, is fading into late old age. Foot wore his donkey jacket to Remembrance Sunday parade when he was Leader of the Opposition and was, apparently, complemented on it by the queen or by her mother while the press had a feeding frenzy at his 'lack of respect' and sartorial savoir faire. In the dawning age of media politicians, Foot, like Gordon Brown, was a disaster for his Party, once he became leader, but only because people had stopped listening to what he said. The tragedy for us all now is that there is no one left to say it for him.

Stanley's Final Ashes Tour

2010-02-21T04:25:00.000-08:00

Stanley (see previous post) is celebrating his death with a final progress round the world's test cricket grounds. Henceforth, some far flung corner of those foreign fields will be forever Stanley...

The full story is at

http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1192405_cricket_fan_stanleys_final_ashes_tour

God Bless Him.

BAD BOOKS

2010-01-08T06:36:00.000-08:00

Listening to yet another anodyne serial on Radio 4, I started thinking about the worst books I have ever read. This is tough to do because I rarely finish a book I don't engage with, apart from the required academic reading (could come up with quite a few there), or out of some horrible or prurient fascination with the subject (Miss Whiplash's 'autobiography' comes to mind). But suddenly, it came to me. The worst book I have ever read was Jeffrey Archer's 'First Among Equals'.

I found it amongst the board games in the day room of the neurology ward, where I spent a good six weeks last summer. A torn paperback edition, it was the only book there; maybe someone had hidden it there, in shame. Anyway, we were right in the middle of the MP expenses scandal and, bearing in mind Lord Archer's past convictions for shady dealings, I thought his book might shed some light on the workings of the House of Commons, particularly since one enthusiastic critique trumpeted it as the most important political novel of the century. It opened with a series of potted characterisations of the four main players. Two thirds through the book itself, I was still having to turn back to these character profiles to work out who was who and doing what to whom. In other words, all of the usual, even painstaking means of building characters through narrative and dialogue, were subject to gaps and omissions. The prose was dire; short declarative sentences, unrelieved by the slightest reflection, like some processing plant. The plot revolved around which of the four 'new' MPs would become Prime Minister. I didn't stick around long enough to find out, the library trolley having ridden to my rescue with a copy of Michael Palin's excellent 'Hemingway's Chair'; but I suspect it wasn't any of them. It must have been the wild card (Margaret Thatcher character). Now there's a twist in the tale.

More recent nominations, which I haven't actually read, might be:

Wayne Rooney's (auto)biography

Anything by Jordan (Katie Price).

STANLEY

2009-12-31T03:30:00.000-08:00

2009 was in most ways a very bad year for me. Apart from a nine-month struggle with my health, a message came, just before Christmas, from a friend in Australia:

"...I'm afraid to have to pass on the sad news that Stan passed away last Thursday night. After spending about 6 months in Tobago he was in New Zealand for the Tests against Pakistan. Staying at one of his favourite places in Wellington he had a suspected heart-attack during the night and died in his bed. I'm sure that this would have been one of his preferred ways of leaving us. I just can't imagine Stanley having a long illness, being in a home etc so this would have suited him just fine I'm sure. The day before he was still jogging the streets on Wellington and I've no doubt he was pounding the dance floors that evening too..."

Stanley was 72, or maybe slightly older. At least, I remember sending greetings for his seventieth birthday a couple of years ago. We never met in the flesh, having being 'introduced' over the internet by the same friend who sent the sad news; but Stan did ask me to meet him several times, when he was in Europe: to show me round his London Club (The Oxford and Cambridge, I think) and once to share a pizza at the budget hotel in the south of France where he was spending the summer. He had no base or family left in England. We had a daily correspondence going at one time. Stan spoke seven languages, once for each day of the week. I had run out by Wednesday or Thursday but kept it up heroically for a while, trying to call his bluff. He wrote poetry, as well as various articles on cricket, and emerged (in my reading) as something of a Romantic, in a buccaneering, Byronic, experience-chasing way, which the lines about him from my friend would seem to bear out. I never experienced Stanley doing his thing on the global Test cricket circuit, which was maybe a good thing since I think I would have liked that side of him less. Meeting him, I suppose, would have meant one of two things: disappointment or consolidation - but of what, though: a correspondence conducted in the ether where words have a different significance perhaps from those that come out of the mouth? The air is full of sound waves, radio waves, unseen impulses. The Stan I knew is still among them.

I NEVER GOT WHERE I AM TODAY BY WEARING UNDERPANTS WITH BEETHOVEN ON THEM....

2009-04-26T20:22:00.000-07:00

That's a quote spotted in this month's Saga magazine to promote the remakes of the Reggie Perrin series. As though Martin Clunes (Patron Saint of Middle England) could ever replace the immortal Leonard Rossiter, who caught the role to a tee in all its poignant, existential - funny - essence. LR was a performance ARTIST!

Before I blog off Intertalea for a while, I want to send a message to Middle England...I signed ofF sick from my cancer blog (www.topicofcancer.blogspot.com) yesterday with a piece about my grandma Edith. Now the only 'crime' of Grandma E, an eccentric and sometimes 'difficult' woman (she certainly stood out....) was to be full of potential and taste and talent. And the Hocus-Pocus of the See of Eeee and the Village Hall doesn't like that at all.

This is such a banal evil, this demon of Middle England: the irritating spirit of mediocrity (and how!) and limitation that senses its own shortcomings ((well perhaps it senses because it ain't great at insight:" I never think about myself....I am always running after other people...." being a common cry) and projects them onto other, finer spirits whom it seeks to crush. I am absolutely serious about this. This is why so many shy, retiring, hesitant souls get labelled 'schizophrenic' or difficult Within the Family, or need their bums smacking or taking down a peg or two by Hocus Pocus of the Harvest Supper. Or by Hocus Pocus at the Doctor's Surgery (blank stare - if you're lucky; click; 'take a seat please in the smelly shit-filled downstairs waiting room...').

Had she lived under the Nazis, I am convinced that my mother (a Parish Assistant at the Chester See of Eeee Diocese) would have been one of the low-grade administrators who kept the sinister regime in motion - not in a spectacular way; it doesn't have to be spectacular; it just has to go on functioning. My mother - in her supreme authority - removed a bottle of whiskey and a fruit cake from the grave next to my late father's because it was 'against the rules' to leave things like that littering what is actually a revolting blasted heath of a cemetary. No celebration of life there in any way whatsoever. I asked what she'd done with the cake and the bottle i.e. given them to the Homeless (although not many of them hanging around in rural, rich Vale Royal); but she said she had thrown them in the bin. As she put the late Deborah Hutton's cancer help book (the one I asked her to get when I was diagnosed four years ago)) straight up on the shelf - unopened. And my own first novel - in the same place ('When I saw what it was about, I couldn't read it' , she said....), until I retrieved the copy at Christmas and gave it to a very dear friend - who did want to read it, but didn't even know I had bloody well written a novel at all, let alone two more since! That's what happens when you spend your time with Hocus Pocus, locked up in a drawer, condemned (well not quite...) to a sugary diet of cakes and biscuits (terrific bakers, these parish assistants, it has to be said) and - worse - a soul feed of tacky 'women's' novels about poor Victorian virgins who don't quite get into THAT sort of trouble, but sail pretty close to the wind. They're not even as good as Barbara Cartland books- because at least the Pink Dame's stories are full of tight-breeched Bucks, who let the virgins know what they are after in no uncertain terms. At least some RUTTING spirit there...

I think about the Parish Assistant wielding the Chalice up at the altar this last Christmas in her ridiculous red wool, special Christmas cape. The Christmas Day service at that Cheshire church had every trapping of a family holiday - about 50 people there (the visiting relllies boosting the usual number of four-five old regulars); there was even a sprinkling of snow. My daughter refused point blank to go up to the rail; but I went up ('Horrible for Joan if she doesn't...' muttered a person unknown to me - an old lag, from the pew behind...). But I am not in communion with the See of Eeeee anymore; so I did not take the Sacraments. The Vicar put his hand on my head - which was nice, and I avoided the parish assistant's eye. God, she was hanging on to that Chalice for dear life, apportioning out the fair share.

But what was in it, I wonder? I always thought it was an Article of Faith (cultural practice) in the See of Eeeee to say the Creed before Communion (my poor, seeking father and his Articles .....). But all we'd done was sing some peculiar song (well, Cara wouldn't sing it..), the Vicar making us repeat one verse three times (in a teribly shambolic and embarrassed way), though the signifance eluded me then, and I certainly can't remember it now. The other embarrassing moment at such services is the exchange of the Sign of Peace, where total strangers (British strangers - Gawd!) are meant to turn to one another and shake each others' hands. Imagine it - and here, for a wonderful book about British Behaviour, I highly recommend Kate Fox's 'Watching the English'; or any Popular Anthropology by Kate Fox. You would have to Google her... She's highly entertaining - but her research is bona fide. Meticulous.

The couple in front were game though, the woman swaying and holding up her hands; so there must have been some significance, somewhere. 'Let's get out of here,' Cara said; but, of course, we could not. That would not have been polite, and certainly not the right form on Christmas Day in rural Cheshire. I can't stand to see bad manners developing in my girl (local Ed Authority that offers no sort of moral leadership in its overtested over statisticised schools managed by people with MBAs take note) - so she sat on and stuck it out. The Vicar did preach, opening by asking the assembled who had opened their Christmas presents yet, and who was waiting till later. We were waiting (very good of Cara, I thnk, though in my case, I didn't want any bloody Christmas presents: I was feeling ill and dizzy and dreading the anticipation of having to lug a whole load of unwanted gifts back down to Cornwall on the blasted CrossCountry Train that doesn't have adequate luggage space - putting it mildly. I went into a reverie, planning where around my mother's spacious house I would jettison the loot - not difficult to do amongst her doll and teddy collections; she has well over a hundred dolls, sitting about the place with sinister little glass eyes and china cheeks; and about the same number of teddies, some dressed like Mrs Tiggywinkle or Hunca Munca. You get the picture. Beatrice Potterland - Big Time. Must be worth a few quid though. She was always promising them to my daugher. Oh no......No. No.

Anyway, after the present speech (about half had opened; half not), I can't remember what the Vicar went on to say. He was entertaining though; and I liked him - of course - because he came from Liverpool. (Beloved City where I went to the truly excellent and pioneering Belvedere School.) The last Vicar there to cover those 3 village churches though, was involved in some sort of scandal for giving let us say inappropriate comfort to a number of widows. (My poor father - he'd liked that vicar, too - talk about 'Jamaica Inn' - the ravenous Vicar of Altarnun, a real wolf in sheep's clothing, that one, and one of Daphne DuMaurier's very best creations. She sure spotted a Universal type there.

Anyway widow-chasing Vicar's wife - a very drab-looking, crushed sort of jam-making woman, had a sideline flogging Tupperware (TM) around the village while the Parson (interesting etymology: it comes from the Person of the parish - i.e. the Man in Charge....the Man the great revisionist John Wesley wanted to kick off his smug little perch....) called on his flock. I was up there once - when Cara was small, we only ever visited two or three times - I think you'll get why. Cara was about 3, and needed to eat around six; but Parson Widow- Chaser just sat there, my parents fetching him tea, waiting for his wife to return with her Tupperware (TM) money. In the end, I got up and said I was going to to need to fix some food for Cara; at which point he took the hint. My parents didn't like it though. The parish assistant was mortified. And boy, did I get it from my father!

But there is light at the end of this sad litte tunnel, for Parish Assistants end up in an old folks' home, out of sight and out of mind. (Well, certainly out of mine!) Parish Assistants end up in 'Shady Pines'. Remember that marvellous, Golden Girls series (US ) in which the feisty Dorothy, a Jewish (or is she Italian?) Matriarch from NYC, under seige in her autumn years from her doddery Ma, threatens the old bag every time she slips up with the immortal admonishment: 'Shady Pines, Ma! SHADY PINES.!.'

Anne Morgellyn 27.4.09

ST GEORGE'S DAY

2009-04-23T13:11:00.000-07:00

FOLLOW THE LINK BELOW TO ST GEORGE - just might help straighten out who he is, if not quite why we do or don't celebrate his Day in England now....For those who don't know, George is our Patron Saint, like the Irish have Patrick (we've all heard of HIS DAY, sure, with the Guinness chasers 3 for 2 in pubs in Taunton when I was there on 17 March this year (sneaking an early Pizza Express at 5pm, before the streets got too slicked up with vomit....), and 'the English' peasantry running around in daft green wigs and leprechaun hats.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George

England. Ah England. My Lionheart. We no longer deserve a saint like George, though he'd do well to come and give us a bloody big kick up our mealy-mouthed, resentful, whingeing little pants (Arthur Smith of "The One Show " (BBC 1 today) - embarrassed about being English and wittering on in that ASININE postmoderist/mockney-accented way about multiculturalism (as though that precludes the celebration of a national day), please take note.

We deserve an Adrian Childs Day, or a Martin Sodding Clunes Day. God, George, how the mighty have fallen. No more heroes anymore...

I was at the Crown Court in Truro yesterday, swearing an oath with a receptionist woman (not even a paralegal), who looked as though she'd just got up to to dig the garden (old pants, unspeakable shapeless jumper, and frizzy hair. What does it cost to put on a skirt and blouse (and a smile) and say, good morning?

POD OF DOLPHINS....

2009-04-21T04:34:00.000-07:00

BBC report a sighting of dolphins in the Carrick Roads area.

When I hear things like this, I am reminded exactly why I made the decision to move to Conrwall. That is, Cornwall itself. The land. Or, in this case, the sea. My name - in Cornish - yeah, see, I do know some Cornish (unlike the numpties on the Piazza in Truro the other week, who told the roving reporter that they were LOCALS - but when asked to come out with a greeting in Kernwek, couldn't even muster an 'ello, my ansome...'). Anyway, my name....My name, mor ((sea) gellyn (holly).

And when I hear that the dolphins are coming back, the low numpty culture that, sadly, blights the people of this place through its pathetic attempts to administer any kind of social benefit, be it in local state education, city planning, or plain simple everday common courtesies between human beings, can do no evil.

Glorious morning at Malpas yesterday, with the tide in and the sun gleaming on the river....

from (and by) John Scattergood

2009-03-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

Weather prognosticating groundhog Punxsutawney Phil makes his annual prediction on Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney Pennsylvania | Photo - Yahoo! News UK

2009-02-02T15:39:00.001-08:00

Weather prognosticating groundhog Punxsutawney Phil makes his annual prediction on Gobbler's Knob in Punxsutawney Pennsylvania | Photo - Yahoo! News UK

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/22/20090202/img/pod-weather-prognosticating-31a4c5e56899.html
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Two Terries

2009-02-02T15:05:00.001-08:00

I know two Terries in Truro: He-Terry (Terry) and She-Terry (Terri). Tonight, I came back to a gentle admonishment from He-Terry (who kindly follows my blogs) that I should make these posts more positive. He is quite right, of course. I have no right to be so grumpy and crone-like, even if I have nearly attained the age of The Crone - a female archetype which, so my Falmouth friend, John tells me, gives permission to let oneself go and go on at all and sundry as a sort of warm-up to full-tilt Old Git-dom. In mitigation for these bursts of Crone-like crabbiness, I offer a quote from the preamble to my daughter's quarter-term report, which states: 'The early part of the Lent term can be characterised by cold weather and a certain feeling of post Christmas deflation.' Quite.

She-Terry, meanwhile, decided to bring me a pasty for my supper in case I had nothing in after my tough journey through post Christmas snow, which hasn't so much deflated the UK today as brought it to a state of near prostration. The pasty was cold, but it warmed the cockles of my heart no less for that. And I escaped the worst of the weather. And my daughter is safe, and the hamster is still alive, at the ripe old age (for a hamster) of two years two months. And, as the train came through Lostwithiel, I saw one solitary golden daffodil cheering up the punters from a station planter. Yes, indeed: I should - and I do - count my blessings.

2009-02-02T15:03:00.000-08:00

2009-01-27T07:55:00.000-08:00

BURNS NIGHT

2009-01-25T10:10:00.000-08:00

25 January is the traditional date to commemorate Scottish poet, Robbie Burns(a poet I have always struggled to understand, even when 'translated' into English; because Scotland, I'm afraid to say, is not a place that holds many happy memories for me...).

BUT....

The BBC have roped in no less a personage than HRH The Prince of Wales to read a couple of Burns's poems online. Here's a sample:

'My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here,
My heart's in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer;
Chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands, wherever I go.'

Doesn't this ring a bit false? Doesn't it, doesn't it...? For starters, Charles Windsor (or Charles Mountbatten (corruption of the German 'Battenburg' -Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) isn't even Scottish! His grandma, the late 'Queen Mum' was a Scot of sorts, though seems to have spent most of her life in England, supping G and Ts with English Upper Class society. But he is a crypto German with a bit of Danish mixed in...I can understand why his heart's in the Highlands, though - like many of his poor benighted subjects right now, I guess: any dreamland will do to escape the Recession. But I always thought that the great Robbie -(Rabbie?) B himself was a lowlander. Did he not come from Dumfrieshire???

There's nothing new under the sun. We're still 'led' by in this country (or expected to defer to) whimsical fools caught up their own entrails of nostalgia. ('My heart's in the Highlands' indeed - well, f... off there, Sir, give up your Succession, and start paying a few more taxes...!). And the BBC, playing true to its toadying form, commissions a non-Scot Royal to lead the honours...Where's the logic in that? What a load of old Cobblers, as HRH the Duke of Edinburgh (Charles' German-Danish dad) might say...Plus ca change...

PRINCE ALBERT (OUCH!)

2009-01-15T14:33:00.000-08:00

Extraordinary search (research, in fact) for Prince Albert, Consort of Queen Victoria, threw up 2 links - before the one to the Prince himself - to 'Prince Albert (PA)' which turns out to be a 'popular' type of penis piercing. Clicking on the Wikipedia link - quite by accident, I promise, because I made this search in all innocence (I could have been a child researching a history project, for God's sake!) produced some horribly graphic pictures, showing where the ring was to be positioned in both circumcised and fully capped male members. Have we gone completely mad? Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, for all his probable faults (especially as a parent to his eldest son) deserves far better than a third place listing on Google below some sick popular fetish. When I wrote PINCUSHION, the third in a series of psychological chillers (available in BeWrite Books via Amazon et al), I wanted to question the stupid fashion for body piercing, rationalised, very solemnly, for me by a bestudded and pierced anthropologist with whom I taught 'contextual/cultural' studies some years ago at a second-rate art school recently turned into a 'university college'. (This same college, in Cornwall, was funding the final year of her PhD research into fetish clubs in London, and even paid, through the same round of research funding, for the massive tattoo she had done on her sternum; in fact, she took immense gratification from flashing her cleavage at the Principal, remarking that 'he'd paid for it...) I knew, from her research (and photos from The Torture Garden) that genital piercing was quite a fad (so much for originality and personal autonomy..); but calling these penis rings after 'Prince Albert' is new to me - and quite beyond the pale.

Cripes!

Meanwhile, rockets fall on Gaza, children are murdered by their parents, and 500 plus jobs per day, it seems, are being axed in Britain's economic downturn.

We don't live in a perfect world, I know, but these 'Prince Alberts' make no sense at all, and the fact that they are 'mainstream', it seems, evidenced by top billing on Google, only makes fools of us all.

MAKE DO AND MEND

2009-01-14T06:51:00.000-08:00

Watched a 'Style' programme on BBC4, covering the fashions and habits of wartime Britain. Clothes were, necessarily, less ornate, but elegant, nonetheless, and certainly smarter than they are now in our infantile age of tracksuits and trainers. Food was scarcer and frugally used, but healthier and more democratic since even the 'best' restaurants were obliged to offer meals at a government-fixed price, equating the cost of a meal at The Ritz, for instance, with one at a Greasy Spoon in the old East End. There was a sense of danger, the Blitz making every hour an uncertain proposition. So people made an effort to look their best and get on with it. Ostentation and excess were out. You had to make do and mend.

I still have many of my grandma's things from the 1940s, including photo-magazines dramatically capturing The Blitz, and a whole trunk full of clothes patterns. (Such was grandma's skill at making do, I even have a few of her old wartime Clothing Coupons.) When I downsized here from her old house to my tiny one, my biggest regret was leaving her old treadle-operated Singer sewing machine, although I still wear the magnificent sheepskin coat she made on it (after the War) and one or two other pieces untroubled by the moth. Grandma always looked stylish, although her 'look' was probably fixed in the 1930s (and I still have her Twenties silk wedding gown and tennis dresses). She carried on making do and mending long after the War was over, guided by the less-is-more principle and the kind of 'investment' dressing that valued quality above all else. Her clothes were always made of the finest wool or silk or cotton, with the exception of her nylon stockings (after rationing had stopped, of course).

On Monday, on a two-hour break between trains in Reading, I wandered aimlessly around the Sales; but, in spite of the 70 percent reductions (which mean little, really, since most of these things were over-priced in the first place), I saw little of enduring value and certainly nothing to tempt me to do my patriotic bit and spend (how absurd that diktat is!). It was the same in Truro yesterday, which is now making me wonder why I am bothering to 'save myself' for London when I go up again next week. There are more interesting things to be had in many of the charity shops, my current favourite being The Salvation Army one off Regent St, W1. It seems as though we have become so used to an excess of disposable tat (a throwaway consumer society, sacrificing to to the gods of shopping every Sunday), we just can't cope when 'deprived' of unlimited opportunities to spend. God help this country if we were under fire like the people of Gaza. It has now become politically unwise for a Labour Goverment to start issuing austerity measures (though the Tories had no choice during the War), so instead, we get the likes of Peter Mandelson promising to shore up businesses (what businesses., I wonder - not bloody INDUSTRIES, I bet) with taxpayers' money 'to get the economy going'. I object to this. Sure, the Thatcher government did nothing to help the miners and everything to help Britain run down into the stupid, financial services-led economy that has got us into this current mess; but non-intervention can, sometimes, make people more resourceful - happier, even, in their own resourcefulness. As someone living on a fixed income, and recently a semi-invalid, I hated the excess of recent years. I longed for a time of more frugality, reflection, quality, genuine creativity, rather than the celebrity flim-flam kind (a la Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand - you know what I mean). Maybe the hour is coming. So let's make do and mend..

STAYCATIONING

2009-01-13T15:07:00.001-08:00

It seems that The Collins English Dictionary people have been having a huge lot of fun with new entries for the coming year, examples of which are:

1. Staycation: a holiday at home (or at least not one taken abroad);
2. Recessionista: someone who can't afford a holiday at home OR abroad;
3. Manscaping: grooming a man's body hair (the mind boggles...);
4. Bad-bank: i.e. Northern Rock or other state-supported financial institution (all Icelandic banks perhaps);
5. Credit-crunch: No explanation needed;
6. Brickor mortis: the product of items 4 and 5; and
7. Downturn: we should all know that by now.

Most sobering of all perhaps are:

8. Antisocial networking: posting a negative message about someone on Facebook et al; and
9. Defriending.

I had to defriend someone recently. A woman who I went to school with (in the last century, of course), who I can't really remember as ever being a close friend of mine but who suddenly got in touch with me about ten years ago to announce that she was going to visit me in Cornwall with her new (much younger) husband and baby son. They arrived about 3 hours late with her remarking sniffily: 'Oh, it's small and noisy here, isn't it?'. After listless conversation and the dried up lunch I offered, we all went out into the garden where they proceded to take snaps of each other, but none of me (the long-lost 'friend') or my very photogenic daughter. Nevertheless, the Christmas cards kept coming after this dismal reunion, every year, without remission, and latterly including those dreadful, smug bulletins about what the three of them had been doing. It was like being assaulted by unwanted information; and, as with any unwanted information I might tune into quite involuntarily on the radio or TV (or web), I decided it was time to turn it off, especially since my own, weakly expressed exchange of information (I actually apologised for not sending them a Christmas card this year) met with a pompous and outrageously patronising rebuff about someone as obviously poor as me letting myself into a load of trouble for sending my talented daughter to a top independent school (the point about her scholarship had obviously not been well made), not to mention considering a boarding education for her - particularly insensitive this, since I would never have considered it at all had I not been a lone parent with cancer. Then I got a load of patronising but clearly unsympathetic comments about my cancer treatment. So I defriended. 'Thank you for getting in touch at Christmas, I wrote, 'but I haven't seen you for many years and I think it's fair to say that, at nearly fifty, we have both moved on.' There was a reply, but, true to my defriending principles, I declined to read it. The D word in Collins thus rang a bell with me yesterday, but not a pleasant one. Not a D major!

The prospect of staycationing at home here in Cornwall doesn't fill me with the joys of spring either. But spring is coming, and I think I might manage a short staycation in south east England, looking for a medium to long term move when the curse of the bad banks has been lifted and brickor mortis relieved.

WISE WORDS

2009-01-06T11:25:00.001-08:00

These words of wisdom were sent to me today by my friend, Rosie Howes:

"The Budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled and assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest [we] become bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance'

Cicero, 55 BC"

QED. So is there really nothing new under the sun?

CELEBRATING HITLER

2009-01-03T12:43:00.000-08:00

Seems that Liverpool's successor as Euro City of Culture is not some Baltic town, as I had thought (where did that come from??) but the Austrian city of Linz, so beloved of Adolf Hitler (known in my family as Asshole Shitler) that he planned to build a 5-star luxury ADOLF HITLER HOTEL in the place and plant statuary representing German 'heroes' (some contradiction in terms there, what?) along the city's 'Niebelungen Bridge'. Far from distancing themselves from this dubious (to put it politely) legacy, the good burghers of Linz (too many old Nazis and their descendants on these teutonic Councils, I fear ) are refusing to 'sweep Adolf Hitler (Shitler) under the carpet', but are determined to celebrate his association with their city with a series of reference points along the so-called culture tour.

OK, so Linz is one place I won't be visiting, ever. I have already cancelled my trip to Vienna in March, and feel quite glad about that now, whereas before I was wavering.

Adolf Hitler and Culture. It beggars belief. Can't the Austrians find someone else - surely - to celebrate? Mozart (done him to death, I guess), Schubert, even Johann Strauss..(but he was Jewish, I think - hmmmmmmmmm).

NEW BEGINNINGS

2009-01-01T07:50:00.000-08:00

2008 ended for me where it began, in the metaphorically and meteologically cool city of Liverpool, which has just handed over to some uncool place in the Baltic states (I think) as European City of Culture. After a miserable Christmas, which saw me in a very dark place indeed, post 'flu and a dose of the family break-ups which always come back to haunt me at the end of the old year, Liverpool has raised my spirits. It was my salvation long ago, when I was at school there and discovered such treasures as The Walker Art Gallery, The Playhouse, and The Neptune Theatre. Not to mention, of course, the irrepressible heart of the people. All the cliches about the place are true - Scallies and all, but it remains a cool cool place, up there with the coolest places on earth.

Apart from that, the so-called festive season consisted largely, as far as I could see, of dodging viruses (no easy feat on stuffy UK trains) and the feeding-frenzy that is the Yuletide shopping fest. It's not really festive at all any more, because there is so much of it. Christmas may be there, ostensibly, to celebrate the birth of the divine Infant, Jesus Christ, but in the second Millenium it's become well and truly infantilised. It used to be the case that only (lucky) children received a large number of Christmas presents; but now everyone is expected to 'buy' for the slightest adult acquaintance, and not just tokens of appreciation and regard, but sackfuls of unwanted tat. I read somewhere that eBay saw a surge on Boxing Day in sales of unwanted Christmas presents. Something like a billion pounds worth of tat. (Credit crunch - wot credit crunch?!) It's probably fair to say that Christians, whose feast this is, buy less than anyone else, because it's only practising Christians who see Dec 25th as something more than a day of gross self-indulgence - not that there aren't plenty of self-indulgent Christians, too, I am sure. Because the New Year has come, with its universal message of hope and renewal that everyone can understand and believe in, I feel able to crawl out from under my stone to say these Scrooge-like, curmudgeonly things. But I can't be the only one who feels like this about Tinsel-Tide.

Animals set store by winter and hibernate. Come autumn, we humans too used to garner and gather in, but now we expect to have an abundant harvest, all the time, 365 shopping days of the year. So while I feel deeply for those who are losing their jobs in retail following the demise of giant chains like Woolworth, MFI, et al, I won't be venturing out to the sales to spend money I can't afford. This is not, in any case, the way to shore up a failing economy; but perhaps the old way of simple economy is. It's salutary to have to save for treats, instead of indulging the infantile drive to have it all on demand. It's creative to scour one's cupboards to cobble up frugal but nutritious meals, instead of spending a fortune on packaged 'cuisine' at Marks and Spencer's food-porn theatre. (OK, home made pea soup might not be as sexy as some M and S pudding oozing chocolate and cream, but it is better for body and soul.) It is character-building to learn to live within one's means. At least, I hope it is - it's been a long time since I had to to do it. But I have done it in the past, when some weeks, in Maggie Thatcher's '80s hell, I had only about a fiver to live on (and sometimes had to borrow that fiver from my neighbour). We are still one of the world's richest economies. Most of us have food to eat, water to drink, and a bed to sleep in. Most of us, note - but by no means all. And it is the by-no-means-all that should be exercising us, not the closing of another tacky furniture store or the failure to get the banks to credit us with some tacky package holiday or planet-polluting car. We may not have the sense to know it, but we have it pretty good.

LIVERPOOL LINKS

2008-11-18T12:09:00.001-08:00

Click on the link below to link to a rich variety of free e-cards from Liverpool City Museums. I sent myself the one of lego characters jumping on Tracy Emin's bed as a taster. Who said the Turner Prize couldn't be fun?

http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/postcards/displaycard.aspx?card=5nxStr9181707182308255188&coll=13

REDRUTH REDUX

2008-11-14T13:24:00.000-08:00

Whenever I get blase (snooty even) about Cornwall and the Cornish, a short sweet visit to dear Redruth puts me straight again. I know that Redruth was chosen as the place to try out curfews on under sixteens (presumably because a significant number of under-sixteens in the town were being a bloody nuisance all over the place). I know the town is in terminal decline and has been so throughout the boom-years of the last decade (now, of course, we are all in terminal decline). But for all of that, for all its faults, it's a friendly, honest, direct kind of place, with hearts of gold. A poor-looking woman in Jim's Cash and Carry pitying those 'up-country' who are worse off than she, or about to be in the coming recession. ( 'About to lose their homes and all.') Kind, unfailingly patient ticket clerk (or should that now be Customer Service Rep?) at the railway station, determined to get me the best price deals on tickets to London, Newton Abbott, Crewe - to the moon, maybe, if I'd asked her. The best fish and chips ANYWHERE at Morrish's (better, even, than in the North - yes, BETTER!). The carpark that is more than 100% cheaper per hour than in upmarket Truro (which might as well be the moon as far as Redruth is concerned). The charity shops turning over some very good, pure wool coats for under a fiver.

I think it's because I feel close to my father there. He went to school in Redruth, when it still had a grammar school whose headmaster felt it his God-given duty to plead with parents to keep their boys out of the mines by letting them stay into the Sixth Form, after which 'there were many scholarships available to bright boys to study at the University' (my father got one to Imperial College, London). In those days, after the War, the town was probably far less grim than it is now, because it would still, then, have been a town with hope. The tin mines were open still, after all. There was still a kind of (if limited) future in farming and fishing.

And there were no signs in Cornish anywhere (I have that on my father's authority - although, since he's been dead these last ten years, he can't corroborate it). They didn't need signs in Cornish, no more, really, than they do now. Redruth people have that air of always knowing who they are - and were.

REVISITING BRIDESHEAD

2008-11-07T09:20:00.000-08:00

Large amounts of my time out this week have been spent watching 'Brideshead Revisited' through the ITV website, courtesy of the Silverlight software downloaded onto the Macbook by my daughter during her half term holiday. What a joy to escape from the tedious reality TV and so-called 'edgy' (as in the unoriginal and puerile Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross variety) shows of the mainstream present into a golden age of past glories. 'Drowing in honey', as Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons) puts it in episode 2.

When I first watched Brideshead on TV, it was during its first airing in 1981, when I was myself an undergraduate in London, though with plenty of friends (and consequent week ends) up amongst the dreaming spires of Oxford and the slightly more puritanical cloisters of Cambridge (always the more radical of the two). That fey, floppy hair and languid manner of the 'boys' irritated me then, and still does now, although I now see the series (and indeed the novel) less as a nostalgia trip about toffs than as an excellent narrative study about the disintegration of a character-type and his place in a changing world, represented by Sebastian Flyte, a deserving BAFTA-winning role for Anthony Andrews. (What has he done since? Has he ended up like Flyte through playing Flyte?). Brideshead, though slightly fading round the edges, is a sumptuous production, redolent of Eighties excess, although, curiously, it was almost stymied by the strikes of 1979, which interfered with its shooting. There are, of course, too many undeserving 'haves' in it, and too many hapless, forleock-tugging 'have-nots'; but to get fixated on a Marxist-socialist reading of the drama is to miss the point - not to mention the fun. Anyway, at my age (middle age...), I'd far rather watch old re-runs of intelligent dramas like this - even less intelligent, but hardly less entertaining ones, such as Upstairs Downstairs (which makes the class divide into family viewing) than the disjointed programmes we get today in which narrative continuity seems a forgotten art.

In The Telegraph last Saturday, Charles Moore challenged the BBC's latest mess-up (the Brand-Ross-Sachs-Sachs's granddaughter affair) by refusing to pay his TV licence until Jonathan Ross is sacked, rather than simply penalised to the tune of a million quidsworth of licence-payers' money during his period of suspension. I don't know if I'd go that far, but I am seriously thinking of not renewing my TV set when the switch to digital goes through in Cornwall next year. Why pay to watch broadcasts of crap-TV (I put it in lumpen and vulgar terms because it IS lumpen and vulgar..) when quality 'old' TV is freely available via the internet? Looking forward now to a week end of Jewel in the Crown, Cracker, Auf Wiedersehen Pet, to name but a few, not to mention the eight episodes or so of Brideshead still to go. Just the thing on a November evening with nothing much going on outside here either!

A FRESH ASPECT

2008-11-01T15:11:00.000-07:00

Great to see a new website for tree-lovers:

www.fresh-aspect.com

In a world of greedy hedge-funders, French revisionists, and crazy Cornish nationalists, not to mention the revolting capers of over the hill presenters like Jonathan Ross and unspeakable Russell Brand (words fail me on that one), it's marvellous to see the trees again, instead of all this pesky dead wood.

ST CRISPIN'S DAY

2008-10-25T16:50:00.000-07:00

October 25th is the feast of St Crispin and the anniversary of the great Battle of Agincourt at which Henry V's English longbowmen routed the French, against very unfavourable odds.

But the French didn't like it, and so today, on this anniversary, a number of (not very rigorous) French academics are holding a revisionist seminar somewhere across the Channel in an attempt to demonstrate that the English didn't win the battle fair and square but cheated somehow by having a larger army than was believed up till now and by resorting not just to dirty tricks but to actual war crimes - against the French losers.

Bad losers, the French. I remember some debate several years ago when they objected to Waterloo Station as an insult to French people arriving off the boat train (no such trouble with the new Eurostar terminal at neutral St Pancras - so that one was sorted). And I remember my friend's French husband berating me at his home in the Marne (so much for Gallic hospitality) with a tale about Winston Churchill - in person, so it looked like from the rant, scuttling the French fleet in World War II. The fact that this was to prevent the Nazis getting hold of extra warships after walking, virtually unresisted, into France in 1940, seems to have been the sort of minor 'detail' that French fascist of our times, Jean-Marie Le Pen (another bad loser and revisionist) calls the Holocaust. I can't understand these hordes of (non French-speaking) English people moving to France, as though to some Gallic Arcadia. The great de Gaulle, remember, didn't want the British in the Common Market, a particularly petulant gesture of ingratitude after we housed him in London throughout the war and gave credence to his empty title as leader of the 'Free French', though he was as happy to get into bed with the Germans in the 1960s as the Vichy collaborators were in the 1940s (just read Irene Nemirovsky's 'Suite Francaise' on the antics of the French during the war, and you'll get what I mean). I've lived in France twice, one time in Brittany, which is a sort of French Cornwall, and once in Paris. There won't be a third time. As The Sun once put it, in the red-top's inimitable style: HOP OFF YOU FROGS!

I shared Laurence Olivier's (as Henry V) patriotic sentiments about England, driving up to Sussex and back last week in the autumn sunshine through villages that were probably around at the time of Agincourt and which may even have recruited archers for the battle. Ours is a lovely, gentle country and needs make no meek and mild apology to the French, much less kow-tow to them in the name of some fondly imagined 'superiority' of culture, lifestyle, language, and cuisine. The French only need to maintain this superior supposition because they are losers. And bad losers at that. Enough said.

CAN YOU SPEAK KERNEWEK?

2008-10-14T13:04:00.000-07:00

The local BBC news channel today reported a story (see link below) about Year 3 children in Cornwall being given a book of stories in the Cornish language, the idea being to keep the language alive in the minds of the young.

The problem is, the Cornish language died out nearly three hundred years ago. What's left of it today is a sort of resurrection - I say sort of because for a thing to be resurrected it has to be made to live again, in the same guise and in the same context as it lived before, which isn't the case with Cornish. It's become a linguistic experiment, like that other great white hope of internationalist linguistics, Esperanto; and Cornish too is embroiled in 'nationalist' politics. But what it isn't, and can't ever be again, is a living language, widely and fluently spoken in a natural and unaffected fashion down the generations, without a three hundred year 'break'; and it seems to me to be a stupid and rather irresponsible waste of the local education and literature budgets (and a waste of trees) to publish and dole out storybooks in Cornish to children here, some of whom may have difficulty enough with reading and expressing themselves in English! English, on the other hand, is very much a living language, and we should all celebrate it (including the Cornish, who are English really) for its marvellous richness and diversity. That said, I have nothing at all against storybooks in Welsh or Irish or Breton or Hungarian or any other living 'minority' language that has proved its credentials over the years and more than holds its own. Nor have I anything against long dead 'spoken' languages like Latin and Classical Greek, because they have an immensely rich literature which has been the bedrock of civilizing thought and soundly deserved their place in the school curriculum - although nobody, except scholars labelled 'elitist', complains about their being kicked off it. Not so, sadly, with Cornish, which is probably why it died out in the first place: because nobody wrote anything of note in it, and the only people who spoke it quickly learned that it was more effective to use English for any kind of advancement in the world. This, rightly or wrongly, is still the case today.

But somebody here is evidently making something out of the venture - even if it is only something close to the hearts of certain types of Cornishmen: a golden sop (or should that be a golden pasty) to nationalist (and dreadfully insular) pride, to be paraded about with the Cornish tartan at the annual Bard-fest known as the Gorseth, another falsely resurrected 'tradition' at which slightly crazed people in Druidic robes congratulate each other on their ability to make speeches in Kernewek for all of half an hour. I think most Year 3 children here would easily dispense with them, and with their funny language.

It almost - almost - makes Gunter Von Hagens's dismal ventures look as though they have some point to them. (See previous post VON HAGENS AT THE 02 CENTRE) And they're dead too!

2008-10-14T13:03:00.001-07:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/1/hi/england/cornwall/7670093.stm

GUNTER VON HAGENS AT THE O2 CENTRE

2008-10-14T10:46:00.000-07:00

Gunter von Hagens is again exhibiting his grotesque 'plasticinations' of human body parts in time for Halloween. The nerdy (his own description) son of an SS cook (that's Hitler's SS, not our dear Social Services), Von Hagens was deported from an East German political prison on the grounds that he was mad. Ever since, he's been making a slow killing from body parts, some sourced, it is said, from political prisons elsewhere (notoriously China and Russia). His exhibitions are the human equivalent of Damien Hearst's pickled cow series which, as everyone knows, are now worth millions. Only a decadent (dying) culture obsessed with 'material' (the goods), in all its forms, could value a human skull encrusted with diamonds as a piece of high 'art'. Von Hagens's work is as soullness and dull as Hearst's, and as degrading to the human spirit as that other fast-growing mass-media genre, pornography, in which bodies are over exposed to the point of ---well, what is the point exactly? Saturation point was reached a long time ago. As The Telegraph writer puts it:

'While Von Hagens has democratised death, he's also done something rather more daunting to it. As you look at his exhibits, it's not only the soluble fats that have been removed. He's also sucked all the emotional resonance out of them. Far from seeming poignant, or even human, these people just look like animatronic models from a bad sci-fi movie, with wisps of flesh adhering to them like bits of old biltong.'

Quite.

Apparently, there are people queuing up to have the soluble fat sucked out of them (dead or alive). Plasticination is just liposuction by another name that doesn't, presumably, smell quite as sweet. I can see no earthly use in it - except perhaps one: could plasticination be the right solution for Gary Glitter?

COBBLERS AND CLAMPETTS

2008-10-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

Cobblers, it seems, are doing well out of the current credit crunch. This is no bad thing, I think, it being no bad thing generally to exercise a little thrift and learn to live with what you have, inspired by the grace and wisdom (as Aeschylus wrote) to live by what you need.

But it may be bad news, weather-wise, if you are thinking, as I am now, and with increasing urgency, of moving away from the Celtic fringe. I'm a city girl, really. Liverpool spawned me and London formed me. I saw my grandma die in Cornwall, and my good, if batty, neighbour, who was only 63 when she kissed off, to be found, a day later, by me and another neighbour. I don't want to die here, like Rosemary, or like my grandma (who would have been 103 on 5 October), old and alone, after a lifetime's travelling. 'I don't regret a thing, dear,' grandma would say. 'I've been in every capital in Europe.' What a stoic she was. How I admired her. But she wasn't loved, I think. She was admired, yes, but not loved. Maybe she was too formidable a woman to be truly loved. She was what you'd call a doughty dame.

Anyway, this morning, as I set off for Truro, which is a lovely, lovely city, and I love it to bits, I ran the gauntlet of that antithesis of doughty dames: those fishwife-Clampetts (Baby and Ma) on the other side of my Japanese cedar. Baby was standing by the open 'conservatory' doors, blowing fag smoke outside. She wore a shocking pink towelling bathrobe, Ma squatting inside in a complementary beige number. Both muttered something at me, possibly because I looked so shocked. It is breast-cancer awareness month, I know, but I doubt that Baby Clampett's deshabille showed any awareness whatsoever. (Terminal slatternliess is what that showed - and they had the cheek to call me 'a dirty woman' (you!)). That's one niggling-nagging problem with this place. It's not the place: it's never ever been the place (I love the place). It is a certain mentality, common, perhaps to many rural/insular communities. Insular. Inward-looking, mistrustful of outsiders. And mean-minded - so mean-minded - to the core. When I lived in London, the only violence I ever saw, in many years, was a 'domestic' argument on a Tube platform one night (at Charing Cross, I think). No one intervened, of course, the convention in the Underground being strictly no eye contact, ever. But then, shortly after landing in St Ives (as many incomers to Cornwall do - even one like me with a grandma in Truro still living at the time), I witnessed horrific, visceral, mean-minded violence, the whole town turning on on one another as soon as the summer visitors ('emmets') went home and the autumn set in. Why? Were they bored like the Clampetts, terminally dull and shifty? Those days, I was ashamed to be an 'emmet' and flourished my Cornish credentials (thin and only on my late father's side anyway) as often as I could. But not any more. I'm an emmet and proud of it. I'd rather be a sodding emmet than a Cornish Clampett. I'd rather say I was quarter Welsh (which I am) and quarter Yorkshire. Anyday.

GARY GLITTER-SPOTTING

2008-09-29T08:42:00.000-07:00

Heard a rumour today that Gary Glitter is planning a move to Cornwall, to Falmouth, in fact: Budock Terrace. What a truly ghastly admission to have to make in your sellers' pack for prospective buyers. (Problem neighbours? - Well, just one, a third-rate ex pop star with convictions for child abuse and rape in Britain and Vietnam...)

Gary Glitter, Gary Glitter. Oh man, it takes me back to a time when I was allowed to stay up and watch Top of the Pops, and even in those days, even when I was eight or nine, I still thought he was crap. 'D'you wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang...' (Stomp. Cue wide, beseeching eyes, like some sick Pied Piper.) I wish to God he'd fallen off those platform boots and broken his neck, or poisoned himself by inhaling too much hairspray; but the sun, alas, shines on good and evil alike. Glitter made record sales out of the pocket money of kids like me. And went on to even worse exploitation, the very worst of all abuse: abuse and rape of children.

Some say (he himself would say it for certain) he has done his time. But he did his time before, and time in prison taught him nothing. Secure in his royalty payments, he hot-tailed it to Vietnam to exploit and abuse more children there. And now, perhaps, he is fetching up in Falmouth (as he will have to fetch up somewhere), to live around the corner from a primary school and art school, Falmouth being very nuch (and unusually for Cornwall these days) a town of the young.

Segue to previous post: yes, indeed, friends, I may be better off in Mayfair!

2008-09-25T08:44:00.001-07:00

Here's the link to the Murder by 4 competition (25 for 25)

http://murderby4.blogspot.com/2008/09/25-for-25-free-pre-release-download-of.html

TURN AGAIN, WHITTINGTON

2008-09-24T14:29:00.001-07:00

In London all last week, securing a base while my daughter is at school in Sussex. It was worth the turning, and I realise now how much I have missed the city during my self-imposed exile on the Celtic fringe, what an insufferably precious poet here calls 'a near-island on the edge of England...where the wild landscape and the rich culture combine to create a uniquely inspiring environment. ' Maybe so for her (gush, gush) but it was edgy London, not the edge of England, that gave me the energy to write. It's an energy I can't cope with now for longer than a week at a time; and, fifteen years ago, it nearly burned me up; but it is an energy I need, like the odd sugar rush, or the high dose steroids that kept me buzzing all night during my chemotherapy.

Nevertheless, some aspects of London - or, rather, what the City (with a Capitalist C) stands for, are still all too alive and waiting to send me scuttling back to the fringe in a fluster of moral unease. The greed of the City still stands proud amongst the beautiful buildings (like the glorious Gherkin) that have sprung up in the decade since I left. And what the City stands for - boom and bust, sky-high profit and crushing losses, was highlighted last week with the Lehman Brothers demise sending shockwaves through the heart of London markets, emptying the champagne bars as the pubs of Fleet Street were emptied twenty years ago with the death of the old print unions and the bloodletting that went therewith. But some still saw a curious profit to be made from the Lehman crash. At Canary Wharf, the morning after, like pickpockets on the aftermath of some great battle, representatives from the Teacher Training Agency set out their stalls in a bid to lure the fired bankers with the promise of a rewarding new career in education. Is education thus devalued then - a last chance saloon for chancers in striped suits who can never see their way again to making a million in bonuses? Oh doh re mi...

At least the arts are still alive and kicking up in London. Saw a fantastic lunchtime concert at The Wigmore Hall. Jim Molyneux, BBC Young Musician of the Year, hitting the drums and playing some beautiful, haunting pieces on the maremba, an instrument that I have never heard in the flesh before, and what a captivating instrument it is. Rejuvenated by this experience, and by the ever-enthralling Wallace Collection close by, I am now looking forward to lunchtime concerts to come, and to walking those Soho streets again, mostly purged now of sleaze and sex (except for Rupert Street) but chock-full of characters and plots. I know my limits though: unlike Dick Whittington, I will never make Lord Mayor (has there ever been a Lady Mayor of London?); and I could never write a poem about the place as cheesy as Wordsworth's 'On Westminster Bridge'. Dr Johnson had it exactly, and succinctly, right about London when he said that he who tires of the city tires of life. And I'm not tired yet.

So am I now a resident of Cornwall with a base in Mayfair, or a resident of Mayfair with a home in Cornwall? Chicken or egg?

BOOK RELEASE

2008-09-04T13:40:00.001-07:00

COMING SOON....

6th September – PINCUSHION by Anne Morgellyn.

The latest in a series of psychological thrillers that chart the adventures of Louise Moon and her precarious love affair with brilliant but unconventional pathologist, Chas Androssoff.

Performance artist August Stockyard, attention-seeking heir to a media and property empire, dies in typically theatrical fashion, after making the bequest of adjoining houses to his pregnant girlfriend, Cressida, and to his former comrade-in-arms, Louise Moon.

But was August's demise simple suicide or was it the result of a kinky sex game that went wrong? Had he cleverly planned to shame his distant father and take revenge on his ruthless uncle, the obese and grasping millionaire who now had his eye on Louise?

Or was it a game from the grave, pitting Cressida and Louisa in a fight to the death as reluctant and mismatched neighbours?

Excerpt: http://www.bewrite.net/bookshop/excerpts/pincushion.htm
About the Author: http://www.bewrite.net/authors/anne_morgellyn.htm

All BeWrite Books are available from: BeWrite Books, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Angus & Robertson and other online booksellers and to order from high street bookshops.

Print ISBN: 978-1-905202-82-9
eBook ISBN: 978-1-905202-83-6
Price: £6.99
Pages: 188

UNDER THE NOTE....

2008-08-14T11:08:00.000-07:00

I could not resist this commentary by the MD of our local choral society. On their summer performance of Elgar's love-it-or-hate it magnum opus, 'The Dream of Geronitus', he writes:

"Let's get the depressing bit out of the way, and not to beat about the bush. Up in the west gallery the Bridgeman Singers detracted from the overall performance, and indeed spoilt it in places. In 2000, this chamber choir provided the semi-chorus for us with true intonation and reliable rhythms, staying with the main body of performers steadfastly and contributing an atmosphere of magic and confidence, but I am at a loss to fathom out what has happened since then; I had taken them as 'read' and feel let down, as do many others. After living and breathing 'Gerontius' for the last year or so, it is depressing beyond description to have an otherwise splendid performance marred by such slipshod singing, which has absolutely no place anywhere near us. I invited them, so I am to blame, but on the day there was simply nothing that I could do to improve matters which were essentially beyond my control, what a shame.

"But on to better things, the vast huge majority of the performance...was magnificent. We had a magnificent orchestra, led by the indefatigable Malcolm Latchen, who did sterling work beyond the call of everyday professional musical life; cobbling this work together on such minimal rehearsal time is quite a strain on everyone...When thinking about the finances of such a large orchestra as this, it is worth bearing in mind that each individual player (most of whom make their living from music) was paid less than half the hourly rate of a supply teacher, or not a lot more than a heating engineer or plumber will charge for a call out fee with the first half an hours (sic) work, or half the hourly rate that we paid to our decorator recently..."

"...The great C major chorus on 'Praise to the Holiest' worked a treat, one needs to go into more detail than that - it was lovely. The Angel's Farewell was a little disappointing, due to the inexperience of the lady soloist (despite her lovely voice) and the happenings in the west gallery, but it did have sensitive and shapely areas, including the very end, and it is worth noting that it took a long time before someone broke the silence by applauding - which is what I wanted..."

JOHN'S JOHN

2008-07-10T07:13:00.000-07:00

It is Beatles Day today in Liverpool (great city of my birth and misspent youth). To commemorate this, the BBC website is offering a picture tour of John Lennon's home, 'Mendips', in Menlove Avenue, where he lived with his Auntie Mimi. The pictures are odd, to say the least; and even to an untrained eye like mine (and I am the world's worst photographer), there is evidence of a certain cack-handedness.

Anyway, the link below takes you straight to John's John.

http://www.bbc.co.uk:80/liverpool/content/image_galleries/beatles_lennonhouse_gallery.shtml?12

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MEN OF VISION

2008-07-08T11:50:00.000-07:00

Balancing the absurd short-sightedness of women like my neighbour next-door-but-one (overheard today shouting over the fence at the deaf nonogenarian next door: 'The tree (that is the millenium oak referred to in previous posting) will soon be down dear. Off with its head...Only eight weeks to go...'), is the spectacular altruism of Rotarian and ex-Royal Navy search and rescue diver Tom Henderson, founder of Shelterbox. Back in 1999, when he was watching reports of a natural disaster on the TV, Tom saw aid workers dropping bread and other items for survivors, who were obliged to scramble and hustle to get provisions. Realising that these people had lost pretty much everything - their homes, their livelihoods, in many cases, their loved ones, he felt it a was a loss too far to see them forgoing their dignity as well. To help restore that dignity, he founded Shelterbox as a Rotary Club project, based in Helston, Cornwall, not realising at the time that this would become one of the world's leading humanitarian relief organisations. The boxes in question, each costing around £490, contain a tent (shelter), essential tools and cooking equipment, etc to sustain an extended family of up to ten people for up to six months.

I wandered around the vast warehouse used by the charity at the fantastically named Water-Ma-Trout industrial estate. One of our party (a teacher, too) asked if the eponymous boxes could not be more 'environmentally friendly'. With gentle patience, our guide explained that the plastic containers had a vital use as water reservoirs for the recipients, once the contents had been unpacked and the shelter pitched. The idea was that they filled the box with water, threw in the water purification tablets (which cannot, for some unfathomable reason, clear US customs because they are classified as 'a food'!) and - survived. Clearly, the eco-friendly cardboard box would not serve such a vital aim. Clearly, and sadly, the eco option is often one that only cosseted westerners can afford to contemplate. When choice is limited to dying of thirst or staying alive, the plastic box comes into the fore.

www.shelterbox.org

Go there!

MILLENIUM OAKS

2008-07-06T11:11:00.000-07:00

Back from two cracking week ends, the first at Dartington Hall, Totnes, where I had the unexpected pleasure of watching a performance of Shakespeare's 'King John' in the garden - rarely performed these days, although this excellent production by The Playgoers group begged the question why; the second in Bristol, where it finally became clear to me why so many media and literary types left London for the city in the 1980s (the splendours of Georgian Clifton, the vibrancy of the St Paul's Carnival, etc, etc, etc). Then I opened my mail.

It seems yet another new (and unwelcome) neighbour (a witch-like woman with a sinister black cat) has logged a planning application to fell one of the ancient oaks behind our bungalows and radically reduce another by 3 metres, which, translated, means more than twelve feet off the whole circumference of the canopy. The trees, around which the gardens of these humble properties, built in 1967, had to be accommodated (not, note, the other way around - even in those years of planning horrors that were the Nineteen Sixties), have been in situ for hundreds of years. They are home to squadrons of birds and squirrels, and other forms of wildlife clearly depend on their eco system. They are, moreover, in the public domain, sited on a strip of land maintained by council operatives who mow the verges, and thus, it seems to me, are not in the ownership of anyone, least of all the flowing grey-haired witch with cat, who moved in less than a year ago; but she likes to parade about in a tiny turquoise bikini (not a good look for a woman in her fifties - even though her figure is still good), and objects to the shade they cast on her garden. They cast even more shade on my immediate neighbour, a widow of 93, who has tolerated the oaken canopy above her house for twenty three years. They even cast partial shade over mine - but I like it! Shade isn't dangerous; it's just shade; and it appalls me to think that some individual can breeze into an area and lobby to have an ancient tree - an English oak, for God's sake, the symbol of our nation (rudely annexed by the Conservative Party - but that's another rant) cut down because she doesn't like the view. There is a principle I remember from my law school days: caveat emptor (let the buyer beware). Why choose a property that abutts two wonderful, ancient oaks if you don't like their shade? I'm afraid the sinister answer points to the fact that certain witch-like individuals (and there are too many around these days - too many certainly alive and kicking in Truro) believe that their right to stamp whatever ghastly imprint they can make on an area (like a fouling cat) overrides the rest of the long-term community's rights to enjoy two wonderful old trees.

I bet if they'd been yew, or any other of those witchy trees, the troll would have let them be.

Anyway, I have taken a deep breath, resorted to cool legal arguments and logged my objections. Three years ago, my arguments (for conservation and the preservation of an important local visual amenity) saved a bank of ancient birches from being decimated by a proposed new build of flats and garages, which was thrown out at appeal. The Planning Inspector then upheld the principle that community needs overrode those of selfish, short-sighted individuals. I have cited that one in my fight for the oaks - because it will be a fight: I sense that witchy-woman is brazen. But reason, sound argument, and bloody-minded common sense will, I trust, prevail.

Meanwhile, if I could string her from a high branch of the highest oak with her revolting pussy (yeah, dreadful pun, I know), doused with tar and covered with all the feathers of all the songbirds her evil cat has murdered, I would. I would pelt her with garlic bulbs until she capitulated. Would that I only could!

MURDER BY FOUR

2008-06-22T08:23:00.001-07:00

Here's the link to my piece on the MB4 site - for writers by writers:

http://murderby4.blogspot.com/2008/06/finding-form.html

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THIS WRITING LIFE...

2008-06-18T05:49:00.000-07:00

Distinguished poet and novelist, Don (DM) Thomas, a dear friend of mine whom I admire immensely for his intellectual generosity, honesty (and proper Cornish hospitality) has this note on his website:

'A writer's life is largely a solitary one; therefore I like communicating with my readers. Let me know how you feel about anything of mine you have read, and I will respond. I'll try to answer any questions you may have concerning the book or poem. I would also welcome your views.'

This seems like opening the floodgates to me; but Don's instincts are absolutely right here, for what is writing if not open communication - and an open invitation to communicate?

His links are:

www.dmthomasonline.com

www.don-whitehotel.blogspot.com

Fathers' Day

2008-06-15T11:20:00.001-07:00

I've titled this Fathers', as opposed to Father's, day, because I have always thought of it as a plural sort of celebration; and, anyway, my father is dead, so he can't, strictly speaking, have a father's day anymore. But I have been thinking of him, especially after reading some very moving tributes to their fathers from, respectively, Kathy Lette, Richard Branson, and Gordon Brown in The Telegraph yesterday. Kathy Lette wrote about her 'undemonstrative' father, who showed his love in practical ways, like servicing her car for her. I used to criticise my father too for a certain emotional coldness; but now I see that that was absolutely not the case at all. My father once drove down to Cornwall with a gas cooker in the boot of his car for Cara, his first grandchild, and me. He stayed overnight, and I cooked him a huge fried breakfast, for which he was very grateful, before he drove back to Cheshire again (I don't quite know what the hurry was there - but he had to get back). He used to stop over and see me quite often when I lived in London and he was down on business. One night, as he was escorting me back to Primrose Hill on the Tube, he took my hand and commented how small and fragile my hands were. And, when I wrote to say I was giving up my law studies to write, he wrote back to say that he had always thought I would become a writer. He also wrote that he too might have had the energy once to follow his dream, but, as one (he) got older, responsibilites and the lull of a 'settled life' took over. When my grandma (his mother) died, and I was clearing her house in Truro for him, I found a long long letter from my father to his parents when he made a long business trip to Japan in the 1960s. I wish I had kept it since it recorded his vivid impressions of that very alien culture; but I still have the brilliantly painted kimono he brought me, and a shabby porcelain-faced geisha doll which sits on top of my piano. My mother recently commented that Pa had hated his business trips to the USA, but I remember his postcard to me from San Franscisco, where he had driven - alone - from Georgetown, Washington DC, through the Carolinas and westwards through New Mexico (Albaquerque) in a hired car: this shy, stooping man asking for sandwiches and gas in his quiet British accent. 'I am sitting on Fisherman's Wharf,' he wrote, 'before the biggest ice cream I have ever seen.' That did not sound like a man who did not value his trips abroad. That was a man who had tasted freedom.

Before he died, he had visited Greece for the first time where he chose an icon of St Anne for me. I had fixed it here, in my new house, which he generously helped me to buy, and where I had lived for only three weeks before the call came at six pm one evening that my father was dead. Just like that. A light going out. An absolutely random thing. But I was angry with him for a long time for exiting the stage like that. I had things to say to him still. Once, I said to him: 'When God made you, Pa, he broke the mould,' which made him gurgle with pleasure. But there were things I didn't say, also. Far too many unsaid things. Like how much I loved him.

A Word about Mole

2008-05-17T14:06:00.000-07:00

I should explain (a month or so after the event) what Mole is doing on this blog (see previous posting, 'Mole at Large'). Mole, aged thirteen and a half, has accompanied Cara and me on every trip we have made in Europe and the USA since 1997. That's not bad going for a knitted toy I bought for two pounds at a Truro Cathedral sale in December 1994, the month before Cara was born. Mole has been thrown on the ground in the Parc de Versailles, where the three-year old Cara thought it funny to task my retired French step-parent's patience (a retired army colonel as well) by getting him to stoop in the dust and retrieve the little varmint. Mole has sampled Hungarian champagne in Budapest, courtesy of The Gellert Hotel on my 43rd birthday, and Guinness in the Isaac Butt pub in Dublin. Mole has slept in a gay men's guesthouse in Boston, Mass, (where I broke the shower - I have a tendency to break people's showers) and in the superdeluxe 5 star Hotel Real in Santander, a haunt of the Spanish royal family.

That's enough about Mole - for now. I should wash his blue suit, I guess. We have darned him several times; but he still doesn't look any better!

When words fail, music speaks

2008-05-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

In Redruth again this week to observe a music therapist in session: a humbling experience. Six children, all with cerebral palsy, some with few words in their repertoire, some none at all. Robin began by touring the room with an African percussion instrument, spending a moment by each child while he 'put the music into them'. They all responded on some level: one boy, who could not articulate a sound, by stretching out his arms. The silent little girl sitting next to me began to cry as the session drew to a close - an eloquent response indeed. It made me think - again - of music as the most universal of human exchanges. Words are territorial, fancy parcels of received meaning. But everyone understands music - perhaps it is innate. Robin told me of a child he works with who was born 'without eyes'. But she can dream. The way she articulates her dreams is by pursing her lips and singing in a high pitched, wonderful way - like a dolphin, maybe, or a whale: an otherworldly sound. We none of us know what we are until life challenges us in some way. We none of us know what we might become.

Off the Boil in Paris

2008-04-27T06:42:00.000-07:00

Just back from a tenth anniversary trip to Paris, the tenth anniversary, that is, since I first took my daughter to the self-styled 'City of Light'. Actually, there are several cities that call themselves that, including Springfield, Massachussetts, which, far from being light-filled, must be one of the most benighted cities I have ever set foot in...But I digress.

Paris to me now is more familiar (and therefore infinitely less exotic) than Prescot, the uninspiring Lancashire town where I was born but haven't set foot in for nearly forty years. I suppose, once you start becoming jaded with and cynical about Paris, you are sliding dangerously into a state where you are royally pissed off with life in general. I'm not quite there yet . For instance, I don't feel like that about London. But London has an energy, a buzz, a sense of moving forward. Paris seems stuck in a time-warp, which, I suppose, is part of its eternal charm. It is beautiful, yes. Who could sit on the quais on the Isle Saint-Louis on a balmy April afternoon and begrudge the overwhelming beauty of Paris? But for me, this time, the real beauty was in the unexpected and unfamiliar sight of the Canal Saint-Martin, a newly boho-ed (or Bo-Bobo-ed, as the French say - an amalgamation of bon chic bon genre (posh) and boho (bohemian) gentrification. Walking a few blocks east from the seedy Boulevard de Strasbourg, where we were staying (conveniently close to the Gare du Nord), we came across a newly landscaped city park bearing the sign, 'Paris respire'. And this was certainly the case, with the evening sunshine playing on the cleaned-up waters of the canal, beside which young people, purposeful and energised, were sitting and drinking. If I lived in Paris again (and I have lived there three times in my current limited lifetime), I would seek out a base near the Canal Saint-Martin in what used to be the horribly un-chic tenth district. My daughter, of course (bless her), is still captivated by the sights of the fourth, fifth, seventh and first - Notre Dame and the Pyramid du Louvre and the blocks around the Jardin de Luxembourg and University. The joy for me, this time, was seeing Paris through her eyes, my own having lost the rose-tinted specs. I hope she gets to live there too one day. Everyone should have a shot at living in Paris, even if it's only for a month, even the month of August when they surely must place a restriction on the number of tourists entering the museums. It is still only April, and still we would have queued at least an hour for tickets to clock the Impressionist jewels in the Musee d'Orsay. When I first visited Paris, some forty years ago (God!), the big tourist groups crowding out the Mona Lisa were mostly Americans and Japanese; now they are Eastern Europeans, Russians and Poles and Romanians, all having their shot at Paris. And best of luck to them, too.

The only real downer was the lack of hot water in the hotel on the evening we arrived. But were offered a free breakfast (not much of a compensation, given the bread and jam nature of the French petit dejeuner), and the water was hot again the following evening. I made do with boiling water in my trusty travel kettle (a must in France - in fact, France is the only country it gets to visit these days) and splashing my muckiest bits, my irritation with the antiquarian plumbing and the rubber ham and croissant quickly dispelling as soon as we were out on the boulevard where there was an utterly surprising and captivating number of wig shops. (Why? For the Afro-French ladies living in the district? For the filles de joie of Saint-Denis? ) Sod the hot water - we were in Paris.

BAD Boys in Sofia

2008-04-27T05:47:00.000-07:00

From Terry Webb, a cautionary tale about getting lost, locked out, and legless in the Bulgarian capital. This makes travelling abroad with Saga (for which the BAD boys - all officially 'retired' - should qualify) look like a trip to the garden centre. It also gives Stanley and the rest of the Barmy Army on their eternal cricketing junkets a very fair run for their money!

"The apartment was splendid. A generous size with all that
could be wished including a bar, DVD player, satellite TV and splendid views to
the snow covered mountains.. Very warm and comfortable on the fourth floor
of a block built in about 1920. The lift proclaimed: “I am 73 years old.
Please treat me with respect.”
We did our shopping in the little local store just across the
road. No one spoke English but mime worked quite well until we ran out
of toilet paper. To avoid an international incident, at this point, Brian
did resort to providing an (unused) sample. The couple who ran the store
were most helpful. The request for tea produced an armful of speciality teas
from which to choose.
On the first day we did what we normally do. Set out to find the
Tourist information office which was listed in our guide. We spent all
day from 10.00 am ‘till 6.00 pm but failed. The map we were given showed
the English translation of the street names. The street' signs were in
Bulgarian Cyrillic text. Even the locals could not show us where we were on our
map. Asking at up market hotels where we were fairly sure there would be
English speakers failed to help with all saying that there was no tourist
information office in Sofia. Even when we showed them a picture in our
guide! However the efforts were rewarded by our working up a ravenous
thirst.
We resorted to sampling the local beers. The evening
passed pleasantly enough visiting the local bars. Back at the ranch we watched a
DVD of Blot on the Landscape which I had brought with me. It ran for almost
an hour before breaking down. Still, this allowed us extra drinking
time for which we must be grateful.
We woke up to the fabulous views from our windows gradually disappearing.
Scaffolding was being erected around the building. By lunch
time the view had disappeared completely as the typical sheeting with
pictures, common on the continent, was hung all around. However, this
saved us having to draw the curtains for the remainder of our stay.
The following day we resolved not to be beaten and set off
once again on a mission… to find the T. I. office. Yet another day of
failure. Resorted to bars and beer to raise our spirits. A good meal at the
Irish bar. Good to feel at home for an hour or so !
Day three. Off to find … yes.. the T I office. Determined not to
be bested. This time with the benefit of transport on the trams and
buses as we had at last managed to find out how and where to buy tickets.
Also we decide to try to arrange a train or bus trip to Plodiv, the second city
of Bulgaria. By lunch time we had still not found the T I but we knew we
were very close. Gerry and Brain decided that the impressive building nearby
would house someone important - English speaking and intelligent. Ten
minutes later they returned having been held at gun point, X-rayed, frisked
and searched. The impressive building turned out to be the National Courts
of Justice ! However as predicted there was intelligent life there and
they directed them to small office half hidden by scaffolding and the
ubiquitous sheeting with pictures and … success the tourist information office!
It wasn't worth the three-day search. They were of little
use to us but very keen to give us enough guide books to fill a coffin.
Clearly they had had not customers for a month and had to reach
targets, which they did in just ten minutes with us. Amazingly they even
objected to us taking photographs of the office to prove that it did exist. We took
one anyway.
Flushed with success, we decided to push the boat out and eat
in “The Russian” restaurant that evening. However we upset the head waiter
by refusing his suggestion that we should start the meal with a vodka AT £20 a shot!
“But is the Russian tradition," he insisted.” Not aT £20 a shot we explained politely.
The meal turned out to be less than memorable after that rejection, with noticeably poor attention from the
waiter, who then proceeded to remove one glass of wine from our bottle,
“because it was next to the cork”, and placed it on a table across the
room. Brian succeeded in retrieving it, without getting caught, so we had
the full bottle in the end and free entertainment (Cossack dancers). A good value experience, in the end.
Next day we set out to find the main rail and bus station which we
had been told shared the same site. We took the tram no12 as instructed
and found ourselves about ten miles from the city in a rubbish ridden
derelict factory site having missed the correct stop. It was good to see the
other side of Sofia.
We retraced our steps and arrived at the main train and bus station
turned out to be a massive new build but empty. The result of European
cash without the local infrastructure to man or service it. The old stations
nearby were still in use. Confronted with twenty queues all headed by
indecipherable place names we headed for the “Information Desk” only to
be greeted by No English! No English” Nearby two American students with
back packs were similarly bemused. “We have travelled all over the world and
nowhere has it been so difficult to find our way around” they said.
We were relieved that that it was not just us. - We were beginning to think that we should not
be let out on our own. We gave up on getting to Plodiv which would not
have been very exciting anyway and decided to book a taxi to take us to the
mountains and a ski resort on Sunday our last day and something really
exciting to look forward to.
The following day we did touristy things like looking at the
national centre for culture, which turned out to be an indoor market,
and some churches . We also found a real ale pub with its own brewery.
Things were really beginning to shape up!
That evening on the way out the lights on our staircase had
failed so I went back for a torch. There were very loud knocking sounds coming
from the lift, but it was 73 years old, so we were not unduly concerned. On
the first landing there was a head of a young lady at about floor level in
the lift and she seemed to be quite friendly and was shouting greetings in
Bulgarian and waving us goodbye. On the next landing were some feet at
about ceiling level, so we discretely averted our gaze. Most impressive
just how friendly some of the Bulgarians seemed to be.
A good hour was spent trying to find bar listed in the guide
book as having nine different beers on tap. But it was packed smoky when we got there, and both Brian
and myself decided to give it a miss and return home without Gerry, who was determined to stick it out.
On our return, we found that we had both sets of keys and
Gerry was left with none, but given that there was a door entry phone at
street level did not concern ourselves unduly until around 11.30, when there was a knocking
on our door. An angry Gerry had been out side in the street for over an
hour. The door entry phone was not working as it was on the same
circuit as the stairway lights! He had rung my mobile but it was in a jacket
pocket in my wardrobe. Brian’s was, as usual, switched off to save the battery.
Next day a Saturday, I gave my keys to Gerry as if anyone was
going to stay out it would be him. I reported this to Brian as we left
the apartment. Gerry locked up and followed us to the street. On his
arrival he reported that he could not double lock the door. However, as Gerry had
not used the keys before we decided not to trudge back uo four floors to
check as we knew the door was self locking.
We arrived back at the flat at about 7.30 that evening and
found that we were unable to get into the flat. The keys which Gerry had did
not seem to work. I asked Brian for his keys to try. But he had not brought
them with him ! Only one thing to do in these circumstances. Have a beer! No
Passports. Very little cash. No flight tickets for the return early on
Monday morning and just a Sunday to sort things out. While Gerry and
Brian checked out the beer I walked to the office of the rental company only,
not unexpectedly, as it was Saturday evening, closed. Plan A, B, C, D and
E were discussed and all rejected as they all involved a considerable
degree of discomfort. We decided to place ourselves in the hands of anyone who
a) spoke English and b)was sympathetic to three grumpy old men. Not
something we felt too confident of finding. Most unusually, we were wrong ! Our
saviour came in the form of a restaurateur we stumbled upon in just 5
minutes only yards from the bar.
We found ourselves in pleasant hotel 2 miles from the centre
and had a splendid meal (I think) and plenty of beer and
wine. Much phoning back to Hazel at back at HQ and with her very able (what
would we have done without her?), help made arrangements for a locksmith to
meet us on the following day. (How sensible of Brian to save his
phone batteries for emergencies.)
Sunday arrived and so did the locksmith only an hour or so
after the promised time; and he took just two hours to get in. Brian had left
the other set of keys in the door. This is a common problem in Bulgaria we
were told. So not our fault after all.
This delay resulted in the planned trip to the mountains by
taxi being aborted. However it was very hot and sunny, so it would not have
been a good day for a long taxi ride. Also the ski resort would have
probably been crowded!

Earth Magic

2008-03-31T13:44:00.001-07:00

Got a magical Lady Day (25 March) card from Amber S
by Penwith-based artist, Sarah Vivian. It certainly
conjures the spirit of West Cornwall, being the image
of a standing stone that is, well, more than just a stone.
From certain angles, it's a shape-shifter, a sprite
(or Piskey, since we're in Penwith) with a
honey-coloured face. Cleverly done. It reminds me of
Turner's Colossus, although the images and style are
very different: it's all about perception - now you
see it, now you don't. Is it a giant in the sky, or is
it clouds? Is it a sprite in the grass, or just a hunk
of Cornish granite? But granite radiates. The land
down in Penwith crackles with a most peculiar energy.
Most peculiar.

The following link to Sarah Vivian's website with
details of the exhibition she is holding jointly with
Japanese painter of 'a fey other world' (in Amber's
words), Izumio Mori. I shall check them out. It will
be good to drive down to Morvah in early April, when
the sea wind is sharp and the light clear. My old
friend, Jackie Blackthorn, who lost her life to cancer
some fourteen years ago now, used to say she could
hear the ghosts of the Old Ones at night sometimes in
the ancient Celtic fields above Penwith. Maybe she is
with them now.

http://www.sarahvivian.com/galleries.html
http://www.izumiomori.co.uk/paintings.htm

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Good Friday with the Barmy Army

2008-03-28T18:34:00.001-07:00

This was sent to me by my friend, Stan, 'the ever fresh 71 year old travelling marvel' with terminal wanderlust. It says a lot about the blokeish world of
cricket (and Rosie O'Grady's not so pukka pies):

"Matthew Hoggard opened the batting for the Barmy Army
against a Hawke Bay eleven in Nelson Park yesterday
and was bowled first ball by a well flighted off
spinner. The pavilion appeared to be the only place
selling beer in town, Good Friday meaning most places
remained closed for the day. However, if it's a beer
or three you want, Mr Guy is your man. You can sign
yourself in at the Retired Serviceman's Association
and then pints are available for only 4 dollars. You
all stand up when the bugle sounds at 6 pm to remember
the fallen comrades and then you get on with the
party. There's no point missing out just because it's
Good Friday, after all Friday is Women's Darts Night
and when the ladies came out with their arrows
sharpened, us lads scattered from the snooker tables
pretty quickly to the safety of the restaurant area.

There was even a band, though I'm certain the
Musician's Union might offer a different explanation
for the sound that was produced after 8 O'Clock.
Personally I reckon they were English chancers seeking
Political Asylum on the basis that they would be shot
if they ever returned to Blighty producing such a
terrible noise. Still they got Stan, the ever fresh 71
year old travelling marvel, shoes off and on the dance
floor, to rock around the clock and shake rattle and
roll. It was a strange way to spend the evening before
such a crucial Test Match for Michael Vaughan's
Endland side.

As the supporters took their seats in beautiful
sunshine before the toss, further stories emerged
about the Good Friday drinking regulations. Apparently
pubs were allowed to open in the evening, but you
could only buy a drink if you also paid for something
to eat. Hence at Rosie O'Grady's people were going up
to the bar and ordering three pints and a pie. By
10.30 pm there were so many piles of uneaten pies that
there was no space to put your glass down."

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Mole at Large

2008-03-28T18:05:00.001-07:00

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Good Friday

2008-03-21T07:25:00.000-07:00

Making the Good Friday visit to my grandparents' grave at Kenwyn, Truro, it occurred to me how much an inscription on a stone can tell about the relationship of the one buried beneath it to the ones who put it there - in perpetuity.

My grandparents are buried on a gently sloping hillside, with an idyllic view of Easter lambs and golden daffodils in the Cornish valley below. In the row below theirs is a grave whose inscription always moves me to tears. ('You're not crying, are you?' my daughter asked, as the March wind reddened my cheeks.) It's for Gisela, born 1923, in Westphalen, Germany, and reads: Bis uns wiedersehen, mein Schatz. If someone put that on my headstone, I'd be resting happy.

The nuns in the communal grave at the top of the slope have the formal but beautiful requiem, 'Lux eterna luceat eis'. A little further up are two 'beloved children'. And how said this one is, for Alan died, aged 7, in 1963, his sister Lynn, aged 12, in 1978. I thought about their parents, getting over Alan's death and trying for another child, a daughter this time, who arrived some three years later, only to be taken from them before she reached the age my daughter is now. Then there are the 'reunited' couples and the man who drowned while bathing at Perran Porth (sic) in 1812.

Then come the 'of aboves'. My grandma one of these: 'Also Edith, Wife of the Above'. There are some infants from the mid 1800s, too young, I guess, for their parents to have risked a bond with them, who are brothers and sisters 'of the above'. It reminded me of orphaned Pip, from 'Great Expectations', explaining to the convict, Magwich, that his mother is 'also Georgiana', an unknown quantity buried in a windswept grave on Romney Marsh. Commissioning the tag 'of the above' on someone's headstone is testament either to the inscriber's gross failure of imagination - or to something much worse: a coldness far more morbid than the remains on which it stands. Please God don't let me be 'of an above'. Let me be 'reunited' or 'beloved', or, best of all, 'Mein Schatz'. With light perpetual shining on me.

Ponsanooth Publishing

2008-03-18T01:38:00.000-07:00

Ponsanooth is a Cornish place name, meaning 'The Bridge of the Goose'. It's also the name of a new self-publishing house set up by Amber Smithwhite in a bright, blithe spirit of Celtic generosity. Amber bought ten numbers from ISBN (the minimum they will release) and gave the first one to a poet friend, Marianne Barber, whose collection, 'Strands' is out now under the Ponsanooth imprint. The remaining numbers will be used by Amber herself and by two other unpublished women writers, aged 50 plus, with Cornish connections. The books will be novels and novellas 'and not necessarily more poetry' (I like that).

Astrologer, Liz Hipkins, writes that Ponsanooth is a perfect name for a publishing house because:

'A bridge connects things and allows safe passage.'

'The goose is a totem to aid communication of the written word.'

'Goose stimulates the imagination and facilitates the process of writing.' (I like the idea of a goose - commonly used to signify dullness - being thought of as a muse.)

'The (goose) quill was once a standard writing implement.'

'Goose is the...symbol of fertility. The V formation of geese in flight symbolises an opening to new possibilities; its arrowhead shape new direction and an openness to new ideas.'

'It's crystal is quartz - a receiver and transmitter.'

Perfect!

The Ultimate Networker

2008-03-13T11:49:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Paris again soon, but yet again, I won't be there on Sunday, which is the day Jim Haynes invites anyone and everyone to dinner.

An American living in Paris since the time of the flower people (see www.jim-haynes.com), Jim keeps open house to like-minded souls on Sunday evenings almost every Sunday of the year (there's a modest charge for food and wine). That's a lot of Sundays, Jim, and a lot of guests have passed through the doors of that atelier. The last time I was there (which was before my daughter was born), I met two French actors, who tracked me to Cornwall, forcing me to pretend I was my 'mother in law' when I answered the phone. I don't like people dropping in unannounced, unless they are very old and very intimate friends, and these comedians were neither.

This makes me, I suppose, the world's worst networker. I have never been any good at it which, for a writer, or anyone working in the media, or any other profession, I guess, for that matter, is pretty disastrous. I remember standing like a lost soul at The London Film Festival premiere, to which I was first invited as an award-winning writer in 1989. The man I went with promptly abandoned me to talk to a famous Italian director; completely lacking in gumption, I hadn't the nerve to push out on my own into the sea of cocktail dresses and tuxes and network to save my life. Curious, really, since I had no problem asking people questions wearing my journalist's or teacher's hat. I just have a problem selling myself. There has always seemed to me to be something indecent in self promotion; I'm afraid of implying that I (not my skills) am for sale. I guess that's just a sort of self-defeating pride.

I was at an informal Society of Authors lunch today in a lovely hotel in Falmouth with misty moody views across the harbour (which, incidentally, is the third largest natural harbour in the world). I usually avoid writers' gatherings like the plague, since writers are the very worst - and most aggressive - sort of networkers (because the stakes are so low, because they have nothing to lose); but I went along at the invitation of a very old friend, who had sent me a copy of his book (It's A Dog's Life, by Noel Stuart - well worth getting hold of, too). No one networked. Everybody chatted and got along well; and, this being England, there was none of the smoking you get in Paris where delicious food is all too often ruined by the toxic atmosphere.

Cut back to Jim Haynes.

The atmosphere there is (or was) toxic enough to give you emphysema. But Jim's parties, networking meccas though they may be, are one of those experiences one comes across in life that are worth seeking out and trying - if only the once. Jim Haynes brings strangers (and strange folk) together in his own time and space -and it is very much a living space. He risks far more of himself, blase though he may be about it all now, than do the Facebookers and other instant internet companions. You open your laptop and no one sees who you are (unless, of course, you've got your webcam wired). But opening your front door, like Jim does, to let the world in, you have to show your bona fides. You have to open your mouth an show your heart.

Cheers, Jim. Maybe next time...

Lion Aunts

2008-03-01T12:44:00.000-08:00

It's Mothers' Day tomorrow, but the person I would like to celebrate is my Aunt Valerie. She is not by anybody's standards a high achiever. She isn't beautiful or clever or well educated. She lives, in fact, in the house she grew up in, left in trust to me and my heartless brothers. She has worked as a lollipop lady at a local Catholic primary school since retiring from work as a secretary in a cable factory some fifteen years ago. At the age of 71 she has just ordered a new Ford Ka, apologising to me on the phone this morning for doing so. She had a vintage Mini, bought new about twenty five years ago, and with only about 40K miles on the clock (she only drives to the local town - a distance of two miles, or to the local park, even closer), but was ripped off by the garage man who told her it would be too expensive to repair the radiator, browbeating her into leaving the car with him gratis, as 'recompense' for the costs of scrapping it (I bet...). Why should she not have a brand new car? Why shouldn't she?

And I also celebrate Valerie's mother, my Nana Betty, who inspired in me a love of singing. She sang in musicals, put on by a Mrs Lyon (Mrs Lyon's Shows), and I used to sing the best tunes in the car on the way to North Wales, numbers from Carousel and Show Boat and South Pacific and Oklahoma. Oh, and Desert Song. Betty was crippled when she was a child after slipping on soapsuds on the kitchen flags and injuring her arm. Because there was no National Health Service in those days, the bone was never set properly, leaving her with a bump on the forearm and a jutting out elbow joint. I always thought this was just cosmetic, and her preference for three quarter length sleeve blouses an attempt to disguise the disfigurement. It was only when she died that I found out she hadn't been able to move the arm at all - even though she always seemed to be doing things with it. She was always doing for somebody. Aunt Valerie will get a lift with her neighbour tomorrow to put flowers on Betty's grave. Betty wanted to be buried with her beloved mother - a tiny matriarch, known as 'Mick'; but Mick had nine other children and there was no room in the grave for Betty's body, so her ashes were put there instead.

And finally, I celebrate my awesome Grandma Edith, born in 1905. She got herself an education at a time when women weren't expected to be educated. She went to business school and spoke French and German and ended up as personal assistant to a Bradford wool millionaire, attending tennis parties and tea dances at his mansion in the 1920s. She was captain of Cornwall Ladies' Golf team although she always said her sport was tennis. When she was widowed and blind and deaf (she went deaf at 27, though never let it inhibit her), she took her friend's advice and stoically confided in the fire. 'I've been in every capital in Europe,' she told me. 'I can't complain. And I've always been lucky, dear, always lucky.' I celebrate her for being formidable. For Having a Go. I wished that she and Betty had been living when I was diagnosed because I know that they would have been there for me, unconditionally. I think they were there, really. They still are.

To Lion Aunts and Grandmas everywhereI salute you.

Redruth 2

2008-02-25T16:13:00.000-08:00

In Redruth again, killing time before my singing lesson. A man in a van drew up alongside me in the carpark and handed me his parking ticket, still with an hour to run. Got two pairs of shoes for £20 (one pair originally £60) in yet another shop that is closing down. Truro is bleeding Redruth dry, but still those hearts of gold, as my friend DM Thomas calls Redruthers, keep on pumping.

It could not be more different to Budapest, where I was killing time last week before returning to Cornwall for what seems like interminable hospital treatment (someone here has been on it for six years, according to my oncologist...). And yet, and yet....In Lehel Ter market in Budapest District XIII (unlucky for some), people were selling the same kind of perfectly edible but, shall we say, aesthetically challenged veg as in the fruit shop in Redruth. Some of the Budapest carrots and turnips had been cut open lengthways - to show that they were good inside, my daughter said. Lehel Ter market is to the main market (Vasarcsarnok) on Szabasag (Freedom) Bridge) as Redruth is to Truro: a poor relation with a heart of gold - though Lehel Ter is extremely well patronised by locals with string bags. It's a sort of poor man's Pompidou Centre, modernist, with colourful struts, etc, but instead of peddling art or tourist tat, it sells useful things and Hungarian condiments - paprika and pickles and sour cream. The restored market arcade in Redruth is empty, maybe because the locals there find wool and dolls' houses less useful than knobbly carrots. They certainly saw off the sixty pound shoe shop. I suppose Pool Market (a sprawl of a covered market near the last working mine in Cornwall) is Redruth's Lehel Ter - its District Thirteen. Budapest is getting more expensive, now that Hungary is in the EU and seeking to join the Euro. Redruth wouldn't get in, of course, especially now that shoe shop has gone. Redruth is fast becoming what Budapest always refused to be: Eastern European. Shto dyelat? the Russians would say? What is to be done?

Liverpool City of Culture

2008-01-09T02:21:00.000-08:00

Made a pilgrimage to Liverpool on New Year's eve, the day before the town took the title of European City of Culture. It deserves the honour because it is a mighty place of culture, even now, with the port long in decline and the docks and Beatles long given over to theme parks. At the Museum at the (regenerated) Albert Dock, I was moved to tears by some of the memories people had posted up in the window: ' the salty tang at the Pier Head, the mud flats...' 'Sailing out into Liverpool Bay to all the distant corners of the Empire....' The sculptor, Antony Gormley, had written of 'the absolute, brutal honesty of the people and the magnificent buildings.'

It is a stupendous waterfront, not just because of the iconic architecture, but because of what it symbolises in terms of coming and going. It has an almost tangible spiritual reach across the ocean to other ports like New York and Boston - and Dublin, of course. In fact, Dublin and Boston (Mass) reminded me so much of Liverpool, I could almost smell it. But Liverpool is unique, both within the UK and outside it. Someone termed it 'the capital of itself.' Yes, it can be irritatingly self-regarding and sentimental (can't we all - and look at London and New York for that. Look at Paris!); but its honesty and rawness override that mawkishness. Going to school there in the 1970s, when it was in near terminal decline, I thought the place and the people unspeakably romantic, and I too remember sailing out of the port on The Uganda (later requisitioned as a troop ship in the Falklands War). We didn't have streamers or a band playing then on the quay, but it was still a sight for sore eyes.

Years later, I had a romantic experience in Liverpool, kissed by a TV cameraman at the top of Bold Street after we had spent some of our per diem expenses at a Chinese restaurant before returning to the Adelphi. We kissed all the way back to the hotel, cheered by locals telling him to,' go at it, big man.' Then we stopped. It was just the spur of the moment. One of those things. We were making a film about the regeneration of the city post the anti-Thatcher riots of the 1980s, when the old Rialto cinema was burnt to the ground near Upper Parliament Street and Liverpool almost became a socialist republic. At least it stood up for itself. At least it shouted. Those few days I spent there filming showed me how far I had really travelled away from it ('which part of America are you from then?' asked a man I interviewed on the ferry), and how absolutely removed it was from London.

I could just about see the fireworks from my mother's hilltop window in Cheshire, but I wish I had been in the thick of the celebrations in Liverpool itself, fifteen miles away, along the Mersey. I thought it wasn't my party any more, but in a way, I suppose it was because Liverpool formed me more than any other city I have lived in (and I have lived in some great ones - London, Paris, Alexandria). It taught me to stick my head above the parapet, reach out to other worlds. And sail away.

Diary of a Nobody

2008-01-04T10:27:00.000-08:00

This glorious book, by George and Weedon Grossmith, which I've just re-read under the comfort blanket sheltering me from my annual Heavy Cold, should give heart and inspiration to all new year bloggers and chroniclers, wherever they may be.

(Quote)

'Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see - because I do not happen to be a 'Somebody' - why my diary should not be interesting. My only regret is that I did not commence it when I was a youth.

CHARLES POOTER,
The Laurels,
Brickfield Terrace,
Holloway.

The name Pooter is much more apposite than 'blogger'. The World Wide Web could have been created with Pooter in mind - a global network of pooters.

Happy pootering!

Too Many People

2007-12-21T10:20:00.000-08:00

There are too many homeless people on the streets of Truro. There are too many second home owners sitting in their cars on the M5 and A30, massing for the Christmas exodus. There are too many cancer patients at the oncology and haemotology centres at The Royal Cornwall Hospital. There are too many fat cats and I'm-alright-Jacks, and too many little match girls, shivering as they wait for punters in the frost. There are too many empty churches and reconstructed rectories. There are too many turkeys and way too many mince pies.

Took two coats down to the crisis appeal at the cathedral. Two old coats that had kept me warm for far too long, and far too long ago. I wore them on trips between Helsinki and St Petersburg (then Leningrad), and they kept me warm in twenty degrees of frost.

Then I gathered together my hoard of shampoos and contitioners and body lotions and handcream and moisturiser samples, garnered from four and five star hotels in Europe and the USA these last few years and put them in a gold-coloued tote bag, marked for the attention of homeless women. And it isn't enough.

Anybody can be homeless. Anybody. Even those mortgage-free people like me. Anybody can be homeless. A couple of weeks ago, I saw a report about a former news journalist, who had co-anchored the national news on occasion, but still managed to run up more than two hundred thousand pounds worth of debt. He's homeless now. And children are homeless, And mentally ill people. And vulnerable young women. And ex married couples, homelessly single, sleeping in their cars and office floors. In the old days, vicarages used to open their doors to the homeless, but now there's aren't many vicarages running as homes for the clergy (there aren't many stipended clergy), so shelters are opened by social workers for eight days over the Christmas season. There aren't enough social workers. There aren't enough shelters.

The Bishop of Truro, who always gives an apposite address, said the message of Christmas was: 'Don't be afraid.' Fear not, said the Angel, for I bring you tidings of great joy. The greatest joy for me was giving two old coats and a hoard of unwanted toiletries. I looked in my wardrobe and counted eight coats altogether, not counting the two in the trunk which I gave away, and my grandma's old furs, waiting for my daughter to give them a decent burial. That's too many coats for anyone. But still there aren't enough coats...

Middle Aged Texters...

2007-12-11T04:54:00.000-08:00

U-tube post sent to me by Neil, my editor, this morning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRBIVRwvUeE

I'm the one who can't open the book!

Tales from school

2007-12-06T05:45:00.000-08:00

I am still reeling from the shock of the parents' evening at my daughter's school this week. Not because it was shocking. On the contrary, it was deeply underwhelming, particularly the discussion of how literature is taught. They look at bits of things: 'extracts' of Victorian novels; sound bites from broadsheet newspapers, comparing these with the miniature bite-size mouthfuls from the redtops. At least I came away enlightened about that. Now I know how the redtops have gained such an almighty readership. The punters are trained for it, at school, by looking at bits of things. I'm not too much of a snob to look at redtops. In fact, I enjoy looking through all those bitty magazines you find in hospital waiting rooms

(which is a convenient link to my new blog

http:/topicofcancer.blogger.com)

'Chat' is an exemplary title, for instance, since it encapsulates the skimpy sound-bite nature of the content. It's like looking into a parallel world of enhanced breasts and celebrity fashion gaffes (and other gaffes) and people who had their brothers' babies, or whose babies grew up to be serial killers or rapists. All in bite-sized, easily digestible chunks. With no analysis. And no demanding words above three syllables.

I thought my daughter's expectations should be greater than these - not because of snobbery or elitism but because of the SHEER BOREDOM that a diet of chit-chat imposes on enquiring minds. It's worse than boredom after a while. It becomes what the old Victorians might have called 'ennui', and the postmodernists 'anomie'. Whatever you call it, it deadens the soul.

Why read extracts of Great Expectations? Why not stick your toe in the water and tackle the whole thing? Because, I was told, children could not be expected to read 'those long Victorian novels'. Not all children, maybe, but limiting all of them to extracts sends out the message that extracts are all you need to digest the themes and issues of the day. It tells my daughter, for instance (who had already read Great Expectations, because she found it on the shelf at home) that she needn't bother in future, thank you very much, but she should pipe up more in class because the English GCSE assessment is as much about SPEAKING as it is about reading and writing! (As an A level examiner, who resigned in despair from a Board that refused to penalise lapses in basic English usage, such as simple apostrophe use, this shouldn't really surprise me...)

But edcuational nonsense aside, the real issue is far more serious, because this system seems to be fitting up kids for a lifetime of soundbites and extracts. And where the hell is literature in that? When I was thirteen, I looked forward to losing myself in a long Victorian novel - Jayne Eyre, say - or even Great Expectations. The novel, according to that great French master of the form, Stendhal, is a mirror held up along a highway. Sometimes it reflects the sky above, sometimes the mud below your feet. The point is all about the journey. Extracts, on the other hand, are a hide into nothing. A short fix before you get your teeth looked at or your blood pressure taken. A trip to nowhere.

A Town Tale

2007-11-17T03:10:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I was in Redruth, a town that seems to be dying. It is as different from London, or even Truro, Cornwall's 'capital', as it could be; and yet, in many unexpected ways, it has more life than either.

Sixty years ago, in 1947, my father was transferred to the grammar school in Redruth, after spending the War in rural Wales. Like me, commuting the wrong way from Truro now (in my case, for my weekly singing lesson), he took a bus through villages that must then have been alive with tin workers and their dependents to the epicentre of Cornwall's industrial heartland. Redruth, then, was Cornwall's core, its beating heart. Now, it's like a heart on bypass.

The shops are empty. Even though it costs a mere forty pence to park for an hour, the Tesco carpark, on the outskirts of town, (where supermarkets always seem to crouch, incidentally, like a besieging force), is free. There is even a bus. The EU funds that have been pumped into the heart of the town, to regenerate the beautiful and atmospheric old marketplace and Fore Street, cannot ressucitate a body that is ailing - and failing, for want of new blood. But would Reduth have died without these funds, these regeneration committees, these bureaucrats? No, I don't think so.

I went into Warrens', a bakery-cum-cafe, and had a cup of tea and a donut for less that the price of a single cup of tea in Truro, or a third of a cup of tea in the metropolis. In fact, in Harrods Food Hall cafe a couple of weeks ago, I paid ten pounds for a pot of tea and two stale pastries. My daughter had a glass of tap water which, I assumed, was free. The thought of what I had paid for that snack made me ashamed when I overheard the conversation in Warrens'.

They were talking about a local woman, in her twenties, who worked in a chip shop but had hazarded a fiver on the national lottery and won a million. The woman behind the counter was impressed. 'But,' she said. 'Could you afford to lose a fiver?' The consensus seemed to be no. The topic then turned to a programme currently running on BBC2 called 'The Secret Millionaire', a pretty nice concept for reality TV (which so often deals in ugly human exchanges) in which a self-made millionare visits some poor, run down community, looking for people to help. The programme ends with the rich person returning in his/her usual daywear of Armani suits and Rolex watch to make their charitable gifts. It is affectingly and sensitively done, and although the concept is at least a series old now, it never fails to touch and surprise. Well, the people in Warrens' thought it was wonderful - in the fullest sense of the word. They were full of wonder that such a concept could exist at all.

I was full of wonder when, having asked for a custard tart with my tea and been told there were none, the woman who could not afford to lose a fiver went out of her way to grant my wish: 'Not to worry, my handsome - I'll find you something with custard in.' It's been a long time since anyone called me 'my handsome' or gone out of their way to anticipate my needs in a simple transaction like that. 'I can see your face light up,' she said, so pleased to have granted my wish. And it was quite wonderful, on a cold day, in a terminally ailing town. The custard in that donut was like liquid gold.

2007-11-14T01:25:00.000-08:00

2007-11-13T04:20:00.000-08:00

Where do stories come from? I suppose always as a response to something. EDDIE (my first) came out of my response to the death of my father, and also from a sense of outrage at Thatcherite policies which had been steadily brewing inside me since the (now long ago) 1980s. London at the time was a schizophrenic place to be - yuppies and dinkies and other City boys on the one hand and Socialist Workers and IRA on the other. I remember the IRA collecting subs from punters in Kilburn pubs - you could smoke in pubs those days. I also remember being evacuated from my school in Liverpool all throughout the previous decade - once in gym kit (aertex blouse and bluebottle knickers...). I used to go to the Tuesday evening soirees of my Belsize Park neighbour, Dr Helena Bakova, a Theosophist and painter who compared big and small states to tarantulas - I'm not sure why. Her son, Alex, had schizophrenia, and used to scare me on the stairs, although he was a pussy cat at heart, like many in similar states of mental distress. The Bakovs were refugees from Russia (Revolution - in the case of the mother) and Prague (Nazis - in the case of Alex) and had lived on a fixed rent since the 1940s. When the current landlord (a well- known labour MP and compatriot of Neil Kinnock) bought the house and moved into the basement with his American wife and children, he did up all the top flats, including mine, but left the Bakovs to stew. Which they did very nicely. When I left for Egypt, which was probably a mistake, Alex took care of my cat; and then I got a letter, much later, from his mother to say that Small-Cat missed me: 'she is silent and shy'.

EDITH (my second) came partly as a response to this experience, and also to my long-lost friend Roy Norman, a fellow Liverpool native (like me - although Roy was a true scouser), completely obsessed by The Beatles, John Lennon in particular. When we were all living at Cotleigh Road, West Hampsted, in the early 80s, Roy would spend his days on watch outside the bins at the Abbey Road Studios nearby. Sometimes he got loot - bills, bankstatements, other personal detritus, although he would never have dreamed of using it illegally. Data protection laws and identity theft were still things belonging to the future.

And PINCUSHION (out next year in BeWrite Books) is a response to the stupidity of wasted lives - aimless lives, celebrity flim-flam. The obsession with body image is another schizophrenic symptom of Western society. We have the pincushions on the one hand (the pierced and studded, the sado-masochist Torture Garden crowd, the posturers in rubber pants) and the fake boob and botox brigade on the other. It always amazed me how anyone could voluntarily go under the knife because their sense of self was pinned so closely to their outer shells. I was always terrified of the knife, but then I had to go under it for an operation to save me from the cancer that was eating up my right breast. Prosthetics then became a fact of life. But I should so hate it to show...

And there were more before that: CHATEAU KERNUZ, a response to my life in France before I lost all sense of innocence. And having that script funded by the European Script Fund was definitely too much too soon. I was paid 7000 ecus - a currency which didn't actually exist, although my bank manager was delighted to open a foreign account for me, and I used the money to travel to the Caribbean... LEGALLY BOUND came from my longstanding obsession with Regent's Park, still one of my favourite spaces in the world: an oasis in a chaotic city. The other playscripts were pretentious treatments of the stories in Metamorphoses, as though filching plots from Ovid might have give some serious weight to my work. They got me professional readings and studio productions, even a residency - but, as usual, there wasn't any money in it. But a lot of theatre writing is like that - what the favourite of my characters, Eddie Kronenberg, would call 'meretricious.'

That's quite enough for today. Chin chin, as Eddie would say...

2007-11-13T03:45:00.000-08:00

For author profile of Anne Morgellyn, link to

http://www.bewrite.net/authors/anne_morgellyn.htm

2007-11-13T03:37:00.000-08:00