Best friends back in the days of newsprint

I left school many decades ago with the sole distinction of editing the magazine for my last three years. I applied to join the Sunday Times group in the pre-Thomson, let alone pre-Murdoch, days when it was still Kemsley Newspapers, on their Cardiff-based three-and-a-half-year training course.

Competition was fierce for high-flying graduates, but there was also a course for hopeful school-leavers, strangely tempted by the prospect of a place on the bottom rung of the editorial ladder. They started at £7 a week, and spent their days being bellowed at by a bad-tempered, 60 untipped Players Navy Cut Medium a day Chief Sub-Editor.

He led a grim gang of grizzled senior subs who summoned a copy boy – the only lower form of life than the junior reporter – for strong mugs of tea or coffee every other hour, and woe betide the copy boy if there were not two big spoons of sugar properly stirred. Some of these old buggers had served through World War 2 and the younger generation jumped to their commands.

A former chief-sub ran the daily training scheme in the bowels of the building where, to the vibrating thunder of the adjacent presses rolling out a new edition every two hours, we learnt newspaper practice and style and were required to work up to a very fast shorthand rate indeed in the first six months before we were released to cover juvenile courts in the outside world.

Most were from Cardiff and South Wales, able to survive from home with their mothers’ help and so to exist on the £7 a week wage. The rest of us initially paid 37s 6d a week for a battered bedsit halfway down the Newport Road where trolley buses hissed and flashed deep into the night. I soon found equally poverty-stricken colleagues desperate to share a cavernous, cold but cheap flat in one of Cardiff’s less salubrious parts.

The newsroom of the South Wales Echo evening paper was large, shared by the reporters and sub-editors of the flourishing evening Echo by day, followed by the first of the more solemn Western Mail morning paper crowd after lunch, and on Sundays the Empire News (bit of bunce for the racier boys on the other two papers seeking a spot of freelance earning).

But to begin at the beginning: it was a daunting first Monday morning for a teenager from prim South East England suburbia among the Welsh and a good many other accents of those rushing to carry out the orders of the terrifying news editor, Walter Grossey. I was warmed to be greeted by my neighbour in the newsroom in a voice which was not only relaxed, friendly and welcoming, but bore strains very similar to my own.

His name was Steve Whiting, nephew of the great Evening Standard sportswriter George Whiting, and he kindly helped me to make the hourly police calls throughout South Wales, the first task bellowed at me by the alarming Mr Grossey who, my genial new neighbour informed me, was actually a lovely little fella, specially in the Queen’s Vaults after work (this was to prove totally true, on many occasions).

We made the police check calls together. He appeared to be on Christian name terms with every policeman in South Wales, while my stuttered nervous inquiries were pretty pale in comparison to his familiar exchanges. In the hours that followed on that tremulous, first day there were many other daily chores bewildering to a newcomer with which he cheerfully helped me.

He put the phone down after one of these sessions and breezily exchanged insults with a passing sportswriter, from which I gathered he was a devoted follower of Chelsea FC. My heart quickened at this. My only true Chelsea friends were those I met at Stamford Bridge for 90 minutes every fortnight. And at last I had found one right here in this seething, alien newsroom in South Wales. Steve and I had an instant bond.

We found a table in the canteen, generally alive with talk of Welsh rugby, whose triumphs in the old Arms Park were played a line-out ball’s throw from our building. I discovered his easy familiarity with everyone was simply due to his cordial nature. In fact, he too was a junior and had started only the year before we met. We had almost identical backgrounds. Not only were our Fulham-raised families (Chelsea is actually in Fulham, dear newcomers) steeped in love of their local teams – Chelsea first, Fulham next for more relaxed relief every other week – but we discovered we were actually born within a very few hours of each other!

And the one other passion which almost eclipsed our devotion to Chelsea was cricket. Our youthful cricketing lives hardly matched. My own years bumbling as a slow left arm bowler, generally batting last at school and club level, were way behind his as an aggressive opening bat for Kings College School, Wimbledon, and Mitcham CC. And in summers that followed he played top-class club cricket for Barry with players of Glamorgan county standard, while my personal playing fixture list was a good deal more eccentric. We did play together once for the colourful Western Mail and Echo XI with an opening partnership of 50. He scored 49 of them. My run came when he called for a sharp single to give him back the strike.

So Chelsea and cricket bound us together in a thousand moments during and after work. We enjoyed the closest of friendships, travelling by day and night to all Chelsea’s’s home and away games, specially when relegation threatened, which it generally did, in his battered Morris Minor which I much preferred to the old Vespa scooter on which we toured magistrates courts and quarter sessions. I believe his wife found it an even greater improvement.

These expeditions almost came to a tragic end. My main function on the nocturnal drives back from Chelsea games home and away was to keep him awake at the wheel with witty repartee. On one of these occasion I promptly fell asleep heavily on his shoulder, in mid repartee. He forgave me instantly, well, eventually, once we had pushed the car back through the ploughed field and the large hole we had made in the thick hedge.

If one of us was at a loose end we frequently attended each other’s stories to pass the time and share deep discussions on Chelsea’s latest disaster. On one story he drove us to a car showroom in the city where they were proudly unveiling to the press the motoring sensation of the age: the revolutionary Mini! It is impossible to convey the sensation caused by the unveiling of this astonishing little car.

So Steve wrote his enthusiastic piece on the very first Mini in South Wales and the subject was excitedly discussed in newsrooms and bars. He looked thoughtful and the next morning he went back and, with the obliging help of a hire purchase company, bought the very first Mini in South Wales. The polished showroom manager was not happy, but could only oblige. For the next few weeks of our truanting football excursions back across England, motoring enthusiasts, passers-by and and policemen rushed over and and begged to see under the bonnet.

We eventually left Cardiff to return to London when, to Steve’s huge hilarity, I won a national award as allegedly the young journalist of the year and we decided to move on. We worked together on a restaurant and hotel magazine edited by a mutual drinking friend, principally writing reviews of gargantuan lunches and dinners for a few months, before our professional ways parted. He joined the old pre-Murdoch Sun as a sports writer, going on to become their senior cricket correspondent with all the consequent world travel from India and Pakistan to the West Indies, Australia and New Zealand. I was now editing a small film magazine and was totally absorbed in cinema in general and heady location trips in particular, when not writing a series of very lightweight alleged thrillers at weekends.

No chance to meet up at Chelsea games now, and when we did eventually lunch at the Red Lion off Fleet Street we spent three long, very happy hours discussing Cardiff years and we parted amicably as ever, but we both sensed that our lives were so different that we were unlikely to meet again. Our paths would not cross.

And indeed they never did. We were the very closest personal friends for precisely one decade, our twenties. Occasionally his name would appear in the media: in India, on active writing duty for The Sun, he had a famous fight with England’s most prominent cricketer, the later-to-be noble Lord Botham, who flourished a  meaty fist under Steve’s nose in a  taxi after a day’s Test play in India and promised “outside, you get this,” – to the alarm of England skipper Mike Gatting, also in the cab. The ensuing fight was apparently something of a comical wrestling match. Accounts of this little skirmish appeared in odd cricket memoirs years later and thus revealed to me the cause of the conflict. Steve had told the later to be noble lord that he was no more than a glorified club cricketer. Not his usual sound judgement.

Other very rare passing references to Steve Whiting over the years were more alarming. His wife Viv died tragically with deep vein thrombosis after one of their long-haul flights back to Australia. I only read the story many years later. And a further reference came in an account of a memorial service to a famous cricketing figure when the writer observed that those present had included “the indefatigable Steve Whiting in his wheelchair.” He had MS. He died last year, I have only just discovered, no doubt mourned by his friends and family and oh so belatedly by me, so many years after we last met.

I have tried to write a tribute to him here. But truth to tell, all I can inadequately say is that he was my first and very best friend for the most enjoyable formative years of my life, his company always bringing laughter, life and adventure. I made many dear friends in a long career in journalism, but there was never one to match Steve Whiting and I still mark my birthday as of course his too, with a nostalgic drink or three, and I always will.

Steve Whiting (front right) and me (front left) in the South Wales Echo newsroom, 1960.

Thank you very much, Madam!

My title text above, dearly beloved, was one of my wife’s most familiar cries at the steering wheel whenever another lady motorist cut her up, tailgated her, or in her indignant opinion interfered with her own generally careful, but occasionally cavalier driving style.

For some years this page carried a generally light-hearted weekly blog, eventually grinding to a halt when my eye condition largely ruled out reading and writing. Modern technology came up with some ingenious solutions, but I felt Literature could probably survive my loss.

It has taken the loss of a very different kind to prod me back into action. When my wife, Denise, died this week after a long and immensely brave battle with cancer, there was such an immediate flood of sympathetic replies to tweets from me, Richard and Naomi, that I decided Denise deserved a longer tribute from a constantly cared-for husband. I can imagine her rolling her eyes at such a rare distinction.

Denise was brought up in remote and rural Norfolk with sparse school, social and transport facilities, and she and her brother left school bright but unfulfilled. They both set off into the big wide world at tender ages to find careers with opportunities for the education they were denied and for a wider outlook on life. He joined the Army at 16 as a boy soldier. Years later he would leave as a Major with a wide experience of action abroad. He also became an expert underwater diver and instructor and while still serving, wrote authoritative books on diving, enthusiastically received by specialists and keen amateurs alike.

Denise, with the help of her mother, an ex-nurse, chose the medical profession. She trained with spectacular success at the Canadian Red Cross Memorial Hospital in Taplow, my own local family hospital by chance, and when qualified found the place she wanted, a London teaching hospital, the Westminster. At 23 she became the youngest ward sister there, concentrating on cancer care, an area she continued to explore with a wide range of jobs and specialist qualifications, including a degree which she somehow fitted in during evenings and rare weekends off.

Our early married years were spent at her flat opposite Edgware Road tube station from where we could share the delights of our beloved London, which she nobly even extended to coming to all Chelsea home matches with me. But enjoyable as football, French food and films, theatre, and concerts were, she decided firmly that a family was next on the agenda, so farewell London.

About three hours after I reluctantly agreed, as I always did, she had found a three-bedroom terraced house in Kent, fixed a viewing, arranged the joint mortgage and we were moving in before the Man United game had arrived on the Chelsea fixture list. This pattern was to be repeated at regular intervals over the decades. Richard and Naomi arrived strictly on Denise’s schedule, just over a year apart. I literally wept with joy as the arrival of Naomi completed the happy family package, although I should have known that Denise had probably organised this too.

To her intense pride, Richard more than obliged academically with a first class honours degree followed by an MA with distinction. She was slightly taken aback when Naomi, after a range of school play successes at Tonbridge Grammar, and at Tonbridge School where the boys welcomed her enthusiastically, shrugged off her academic aspirations to take an acting degree. Later, rather than waiting for parts to arrive, she went out and found the live performances she loved, and when the acting became a comedy career with gigs from Hollywood to all across Europe, Denise enormously enjoyed the excitement of it all.

And so we lived happily ever after – well, with the odd health difficulty somehow overcome. Denise, in between increasing hospital responsibilities, created her final dream garden, complete with pond – which she dug out vigorously herself – over 24 years at our last home here in Robertsbridge, where she has just died after a long fight against a cruelly aggressive cancer. We celebrated 50 years together last month, the last 44 of them married.

I never knew anyone apply themselves with more determination to any task in question, most of them involving helping somebody who needed her. Surviving patients might ring at any time of the day or night. Today, house and garden are strangely silent without her, but, my word, her spirit will live on here. Thank you very much, Madam. For absolutely everything.

No Need for The Last Post

I could hardly leave this blog displaying a Christmas entry like a sad piece of glittery wrapping paper lurking under the sofa among a few pine needles, so this is a more appropriate way of ending the regular monthly postings, on a gloriously fine, sunny morning, just before our dumpy mop-haired, lying leader finally drags us out of our long and hard-fought place in the European family where we so belonged.

The reason for the blog’s hiatus is more logical than our bloody-minded rejection of Brussels: eye injections fight a fine rearguard action, but typing more than the briefest tweet even half-accurately is a heavy-breathing business now and anyway I have surely exhausted the number of ways in which I can describe my remarkably lazy but happy honing of the art of doing really very little indeed. Compared with me, Zola the cat is a blurry fur-ball of vibrant energy and she gets up at 11 on a good morning.

Since editing the school magazine I have always had a regular writing deadline of some sort in my life and the blog was the last one, but in the post-Brexit dystopia I will still need to surface occasionally with a smirk and a snigger, if only to spare the cat my endless chatter to which she listens amiably, with the odd yawn. I will always have an audience of at least one.

Songs of Praise for Cats at Christmas

I suppose a Christmas blog is due now that the tree and house are decorated so beautifully.  My own contribution to it all is certainly very clear – to me any rate, although some might see it as a negative one: I made an immense effort to stay out of the way while the work went on which has certainly led to a higher level of festive artistry.

I was unavoidably unavailable. As regular tweeting friends will know, I have had to maintain a close vigil on the fish pond from the armchair in the window after I singlehandedly foiled a daring daylight raid by a marauding heron who may well have been flying a bold Pathfinder solo mission in the spirit of Air Vice-Marshal Don Bennett – a far from distant neighbour to our Thames Valley childhood home – and who  could well return to guide in reinforcements any time.  I like herons and this scruffy, scrawny individual looked as if he could be sleeping rough, bless him, but the fish deserve my protection.

I really needed a keen-eyed Observer Corps detachment to keep watch with me since I am now as misty-eyed as dear Mole and inclined to drop off into the odd nap, like grave old Badger (the appalling Toad now lives at No 10), but the entire company was busy with decorating duties. I later found the view of the pond, like most look-out points, was even better when elevated, from my bedroom – well, from my bed actually. There were less distracting sounds of merrymaking to be heard when prone upstairs which helped my keen concentration from the crows’ nest of pillows.

So the fish, we hope, endure, the house looks lovely, I am refreshed from delightful naps and there has not been the regular crunching of delicate glass ornaments shattering under my feet as I do my dutiful decorating bit at the tree. I bet they missed me though. I generally have an entertaining and nostalgic anecdote about each tree decoration emerging from the box since they cover pretty well my entire life right up to the angel on top who must be pretty well as old as I am since I can remember my mother first making and installing her. Everyone drafted in on decorating fatigues will certainly have missed my accompanying commentary of merry memories – and the one who observed that doing the tree without me in one hour with no arguments, anecdotes or breakages at all had saved a great deal of time and trouble this year was clearly jesting. I laughed anyway.

So many Christmas memories of so many different homes, the first 20 in Buckinghamshire, complete with stockings on bed posts for my sister and me. My distinguished literary biographer – I have not approved one yet – may well have to add a footnote since the place where I was born and nurtured was many years later deemed to be in Berkshire after some tricky border manoeuvres by the powers that be or were, which I still find very confusing. ‘For cruel tis, said he, to steal my native county away from me’.  Everything that was sporting or youthful from football, hockey, cricket and athletics to spelling bees and earnest political sixth form debates was carried out on a Bucks v Berks basis and to discover suddenly decades later that we were apparently fighting on the wrong side was, although less dramatic than Tommy and Fritz playing football in No Man’s land on Christmas Day, bewildering.

The next 20 Christmas holidays were spent in Snowdonia where our parents had retired to a hillside overlooking the Dyfi Estuary.  Then came the joyous ones in Kent and Sussex with babies, toddlers, children. My sister Susan, with whom I shared all those magical childhood Christmas Days and whose title book from her The Dark is Rising sequence so illuminates this time of year, crossed the Atlantic and not only wrote so many glorious books there, but raised the American side of the family who are a source of not distant but constant pleasure to us here. Those favourite Christmas tree decorations include many that have made the reverse crossing from Massachusetts to us.

Zola the cat sends her festive greetings. She is not sending cards this year and largely ignored the festivities and decorations, after the usual first enormous gaping double-take at the sight of the glittering tree which had sprung up overnight in the living room. There is an element of displeasure evident at the decorations which are restricting her favourite position looking out through the front window, but she picks her way irritably but delicately through reindeer in snowstorms and assorted Santas, robins and Christmas cards until she reaches a point where she can glare at passing cats from a Cleopatra semi-recumbent position on glittering golden tinsel. ‘The sill she sat on like a burnish’d throne burn’d in the tree lights; her poop was beaten gold…‘  Thank you, Enobarbus, we’ll ring you.

Her predecessor, the great Guy, whom God preserve, entered into the spirit more thoroughly,  sharing anything from mince pies to tiny sausage rolls from his constant headbutting position on my recumbent chest in the armchair, and endured agonies of anticipation on Christmas mornings as the smell of roasting turkey sent him rolling around on the kitchen floor, almost going out of his mind at the seemingly endless wait for his lunch among an extraordinary range of delicious aromas.

He, like Zola, annoyingly had a far better record than I do when it came to knocking seasonal knickknacks on to the floor, as he too favoured finding a central position in the window, not so much to glare at neighbours’ passing cats as to leer at them. Neither was ever clumsy and Zola, dressed for the occasion in her own natural formal dinner jacket worn with dickie bow and white spats, adds a certainly Jeeves-like cool dignity to the occasion.

So we are all pretty well ready. I cannot, alas, speak for the fish who may or may not be holding their own banquet – fine food has been provided – at the bottom of the pond, depending on whether they have already provided one for the dastardly heron. I will send out advance parties of scouts in due course – it’s a little chilly out there for a man of my advanced years and tender susceptibilities and besides, I would have to put some shoes on.

Quite how long this blog will survive into 2020 is a matter of conjecture as the same waning eyesight that makes a hunt for the milk bottle top dropped on the kitchen floor an increasingly bad-tempered ten-minute safari with hands and knees and nose on the tiles, has also restricted my typing vision to a retweet or five while the going is good.  If blogs prove beyond me, that chosen biographer will explain the decline in my literary output in another footnote.

A very Merry Christmas and New Year to everyone, and may we all put the events of a dark 2019 behind us and find some light and serenity. As today marks the winter solstice, I will certainly be celebrating it by reading my sister’s The Shortest Day in the new Walkers Books edition illustrated by Carson Ellis, because no poem makes me more happy and hopeful. ‘Welcome Yule!’

Intimations of Mortality

A simple activity at a kitchen cupboard this morning filled me with profound and melancholy thoughts and rather more than vague intimations of my own mortality. I was about to change the little Marmite pot.

I was going to say I was performing the annual ceremony of the opening of a new jar, but I am pretty sure we are discussing a longer time span than that. I am the principal user in the household and my consumption is confined to a small dab on a slice of wholemeal toast when for reasons which are no business of yours I am feeling too delicate to contemplate a more hearty breakfast. The jar lasts a very long time.

Breaking the seal on the yellow top of the little pristine pot had suddenly entered the once empty, but soon to be filling up fast list of Things I Will Never Do Again in My Life. One definite example I have encountered in the last year was the already-chronicled not-a-dry-eye-on-the-doorstep moment when my car was taken away. New readers, a routine annual check with a eye consultant at the local hospital the previous day had revealed that alarming sight degeneration had brought my driving days to a palpitatingly abrupt end.

The Marmite pot comes into a less emotional, but still uncomfortable category. I am pretty sure I am not going to outlive it and already it has a pretty smug look. “You may outlast me, Sunshine, but when I’m gone who is going to want you?  You will end up in the bin, still in your largely unused prime,” I told it.  My family are all used to me addressing inanimate objects in the kitchen. The coffee machine takes some heavy vocal stick when, already panting for more water in its reservoir, it belches rudely and loudly if I press the button and it refuses to supply my drink. And don’t even mention the bloody blender who is an incredibly messy tearaway of a machine.

Mind you, coffee and thick milkshakes are the elixir of life and Marmite is not, but it has reminded me of my mortality very suddenly. It will soon be November and, Lord knows, that is a melancholy month. The clocks have gone back. It is dark three hours before drinks and dinner. (I still dress for dinner, you know. Oh yes. Old habits die hard –  and changing from a black T-shirt to an older one  with a colour scheme that can disguise stains from spilt ketchup or curry sauce is a wise move and keeps the long-expected, nostalgic day of the return of the plastic pelican bib last worn when I was two at bay for a while longer). The weather has given up all pretext of offering the golden autumn glow. It is grey winter. Sombre Remembrance Day and my birthday merge seamlessly in 24 hours.

But generally we are unaware when we are doing something for the last time. We wake up more thoughtfully than usual on each birthday morning that rolls up. In youth, we greet another year of our lives joyfully. Party time! Ring out those bells! At my time of life it is more of a doleful knell tolling. Between ourselves, there is a terrible possibility that I may already have eaten my last pie, pastry not being the ideal dietary routine for old codgers with Gaviscon in their pockets. I have almost certainly had my last swim in the sea, row in a boat or dash for a train, scrumped my last handful of Victoria plums from over No 19’s back fence – angry old bugger with no sense of humour at all – or seen my last Chelsea penalty shoot-out in a Champions League Final. Didier Drogba! That’s immortality.

I have had to abandon some activities with less reluctance than others. Gardening and home decorating come immediately to mind. I advise younger men on a quest for the loves of their lives to seek out women with a passion for wielding daisy dibbers and garden trowels, wallpaper brushes and power drills, and a general aptitude for electrical and plumbing jobs, although I all too often see that they have spurned my wise advice for shallower considerations. Quite by chance, I found someone who can do all the things I cannot, which means there are not a great many activities which I now have to sacrifice in my more mature years.

There are also activities which I must sorrowfully acknowledge that I never have and now never will experience and which must be rubbed off my to-do list: riding, skiing, surfing, squash, cage boxing, martial arts, the decathlon, doing more than ten press-ups, eating cockles, eels, macaroni cheese or sago pudding, listening to just one episode of The Archers, drinking sweet sherry or eggnog, and cleaning the oven, trekking across the Outback, finishing Ulysses or any Martin Amis or Will Self novel or watching a clip of Question Time, crossing Canada by train (Oh, I don’t know. I think I might still manage that one), dieting for more than ten days, doing stretching exercises to make me three inches taller, agreeing to be Senator Kamala Harris’s vice president (she’s not going to make it anyway), filling the O2 for five successive nights with random readings from my collected blogs, and telling Annie Lennox, Catherine Deneuve and Christine Lagarde, whom I have loyally followed from the IMF to the Central European Bank, that I am a married man of advanced years so they must try to forget me. You get the general idea.

But to return to the Crock of Marmite: I know it is but the latest cruel reminder that the last traces of sand are fast running out of my personal egg-timer. Each World Cup could be my last – actually, that’s a very cheering thought, like General Elections. I find increasing numbers of former colleagues and friends tactlessly, possibly deliberately but generally peacefully pass on to the Great Newsroom in the Sky just as I am pondering mournfully on the time I have left. They know very well I have no sober suit suitable for funerals and only one rather garish tie. I used to have 50. “Wait!” I hear many of you cry out in sudden alarm. “You don’t mean there is even a chance that this could be your last blog!”

Well, I hope not, but perhaps it would be prudent to make them fortnightly, or even weekly. Ah, I sense a sudden dropping off of enthusiasm in the auditorium. Groaning even. Shame on you. How guilty you will feel if this should prove to be my last will and blog. Mind you, there are compensations. The increasing degeneration of my eyesight would seem a terrible tragedy if I were a younger man. As it is, driving and reading subtitles on foreign films apart, it causes me no great anguish or even inconvenience. On the contrary, it makes no difference now whether I am wearing glasses or not, whether working online or strolling through the local sheep fields. And the day may finally dawn when the dear old dodderer, sensing finality and gathering his family around him, can have a really huge meat and potato pie for a hearty breakfast, washed down with a magnum of vintage Dom Perignon. What a way to go.

A Passionate Desire

“Monday, Monday, so good to me
Monday mornin’, it was all I hoped it would be”

I would never have gone quite as far as the Mamas and the Papas, although I seem to remember the song changed its tune as it went on, Monday mornings proving a little fickle, but for 40 years I was lucky enough to be doing what I most enjoyed, and, as a bonus, if you write or edit for a living you can ostensibly carry on, even if the flow of work gradually becomes a trickle. You never acknowledge the word retirement is in your vocabulary.

Of course, if you are no longer writing books or editing magazines, there is remarkably little evidence that you are carrying on anything at all. “Oh, the odd bits of copy-editing for old friends and the occasional piece here and there,” you say airily in reply to the inevitable opening question, none of which would stand up to  close questioning from Congressman Adam Schiff and his intelligence committee. (I find Speaker Nancy Pelosi curiously attractive. It must be the power and the fact that she is at an interesting age now…)

At least the odd scrap keeps the self-deception going – try not to tug your cap peak humbly and kiss the knees of the benefactor who is offering – and of course there are always the two finished novels tucked away on file for the day when nostalgia comes back: hop-picking and hot metal evening newspapers probably not the most exciting prospects to the current book market and if they ever are, I will be long gone, far from the siren attraction of cheese scones and meat and potato pies.

But for those of you who are undeniably approaching retirem*** – that age when pressures of work are less exacting, Monday mornings will always be the strangest time of the week. You can go through the same shaving and showering routines followed by porridge and a large cup of strong coffee (by midday the decaff will be out again to wash down the first dispatch of pills). But then there is something of a hiatus. You have to open your own mail these days of course, instead of watching your secretary do it and wondering frantically what else you can do to keep her occupied.

This last problem vanished with the new technology when secretaries discovered that they could do all you did, probably much better, and if you turned your back on them for an hour were laying out fashion spreads and heaven knows what with such flair that you hurried to get them coffee and a sandwich while they were occupied so busily and profitably.

So on a Monday morning in your more mature years you open your own mail after breakfast, but since this could arrive at any time between 10am and 2.30pm, the paper knife you kept for 40 years is more likely to be employed prising open the three walnuts you found in the back of a drawer. Indeed, it is a wonder that the paper knife is not thick with rust since the overwhelming mass of the mail when it does come, is not for me at all. Certainly none of the parcels. Still, when I have done my mail and tea and coffee rounds, I find myself sitting here on a Monday morning, anxious not to go on Twitter and advertise to the world that I am starting another hectic week by retweeting engaging pictures of orangutans or singing the praises of Frank Lampard’s exciting new Chelsea side.

I am poised, ready for engagement. I actually have to go out this afternoon and have an important South Park catch-up binge booked for this evening, but the morning looks unlikely to drain my adrenaline levels, even in fury as the cat, in the absence of a flap, demands to come in and go out every three minutes and clearly has important assignments in the far shrubbery from the purposeful way she crosses the lawn each time. If I do not leap up to slide the door open she actually complains, the same vexed, impatient noise she makes if her  supper is late. Then I realise with a gasp of relief that the October blog is long overdue. I have something to do at the keyboard! Wahey!

There is a piano, complete with keyboard, in the living room, but it is so long since the piano tuner and his massive guide dog have been that the combination of stiff fingers and out of tunes wires would be too horrific to contemplate. The cat is none too fond of the lawn mower or appallingly noisy Dyson vacuum cleaner. Fortunately I have touched neither for some years so she frees me of blame for the racket they make, but she knows the piano is my fault. I have told her not to caterwaul in noisy protest at my exquisite Schubert impromptus and warned her that it may well lead to the reappearance of the tuner and his massive dog.

She knows this is an empty complaint as the last time they called the dog growled ominously at me but whimpered at the sight of her and sat meekly beside his master for an hour. When he ran through a few pieces afterwards to check on his tuning, both cat and dog listened in clear appreciation.

So here I sit with my blog to be written and I think you will agree that the first 900 words or so have been an impressive summary of the world situation through the admittedly failing eyes of a mature member of society. I do have a number of important points to make this month and if you will bear with me a little longer, I am sure at least one of them will come back to me at any second. I generally find I just have to consider a few key points and the flow returns.

I mean, if anyone found my appreciation of Speaker Nancy Pelosi a little tasteless – it was, of course purely a political matter – I am always happy to consider Senator Kamala Harris, feisty and fiery, so socially aware and committed and so gorgeous. Damn. Sorry. My last few readers will be trickling away. My interest in the extraordinary American scene, is, in fact, in no way due to the charms of female members of the Congress and Senate. It is almost entirely due to to a passionate desire to escape from the British political scene. If I were a sexist chauvinistic pig and were seeing both Washington and Westminster through the bleary, bloodshot eyes of a backbencher or a Farage fan, I would have to consider the feminine charms of Andrea Leadsom and Ann Widdecombe.

Actually on purely oratorical and political grounds, most of my favourite Commons members are women, from Joanna Cherry and Mhairi Black of the SNP to Caroline Lucas and Yvette Cooper, with dozens more to choose from, with honourable mentions for Anna Soubry for spirit and you’ll most certainly never catch me for a moment saying pretty good for 62, eh, eh?

I always steer clear of politics in this blog and am beginning to see the wisdom of that. It is yet another minefield. Anyway, my other favourite contributors to the Commons debates are men, another Scot in Ian Blackford and Dominic Grieve whose transformation from dry lawyer to passionate defender of democracy has naturally coincided with his disgraceful dismissal from the Tory party.

One clear disadvantage of considering anything political from a position of advancing years is that the Remainers, of whom I am still a devout member, are pretty well convinced that anyone in their sixties at the time of the referendum must be a bigoted old fool who detests foreigners, but at least are dying at a comfortingly rapid rate and will soon be dead and buried. In vain do we old trouts and codgers protest that Brexiteers come in all shapes and sizes and do not include the absolute bloody entire mature end of society.

People look broodingly at me in the streets, clearly considering I am one of the old fools responsible for the shady Brexit referendum result, and cheered at the thought that I will soon be cleanly cremated and out of the way, vote and all. I cavort and leap among the sheep if I am coming back the rural way, but you can see even from a distance that the younger passers-by are not convinced.

If they could see all the colourful magnets on our fridge-freezer –  Budapest, Bucharest, Heidelberg, Vienna, Zurich, Tallinn, Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, Crete, Antalya, Utrecht, Hollywood – then they would know not all old shudderers are inward-looking and insular. What? No, well, we haven’t actually been to all those places, but my daughter has taken her comedic talents there to great effect and brought the magnets back for us to make our kitchen look creatively cosmopolitan. Admittedly she took a classical acting degree before she turned to stand up comedy. But who broadened her mind to the world of comedy by exposing her to South Park at the outrageous age of nine (I know. I still feel the guilt. She could have been an interpreter or a diplomat) when she fell in love with Eric Cartman at first sight. Yes, a little credit here, please. I think it is due.

I could find a further thousand illustrations of the open-mindedness of many old codgers, but fortunately have passed my 1,500 word limit and the massive, home-made shepherds’ pie has to go in the oven (feeding the whole family and no cheese on top to keep the calorie count down), so I must leave you. It is an exceptionally big pie and I may need to sneak a rest in before I set off for the afternoon. These Mondays – absolutely exhausting.

More Going Than Coming

My widely admired blog – I found a sixth follower just now – occasionally wanders from its avowed intention of offering warnings and advice on coping with advancing years.

Only last month I was distracted by the quavering cockerel next door and wandered down another diversion full of potholes in the road. No fear of that this month as just now three of my most echoing sneezes not only put up two pheasants and a pigeon from the deep shrubbery, but cowed the cock into totally silent submission.

Of course the wandering attention is in itself a reminder of those mental potholes which, post austerity, can apparently no longer be re-covered with a fine new layer of high-tech silent surface and a smooth rolling, but have to be patched up laboriously by two old men with rusty shovels and some sticky tar. I am subject to a great deal of rough patching up these days. 

The fact is that for all my jolly helpful and practical suggestions of how to while away these years usefully and rewardingly, I have always failed as an old shudderer to confront the only activity which earned me a living: writing. I had a number of very lightweight thrillers published and translated as a young writer, but marriage, fatherhood and editing assorted papers and magazines were all a wonderful excuse to set fiction-writing aside until the golden years of relative peace when surely I would write the days away in the setting sunshine.

Mary Wesley was a particularly encouraging example, settling down to write fiction in the last two decades of her long life and proceeding to write ten accomplished novels with sales in millions.

I have, of course, done nothing of the kind and at a time when the new technology has encouraged millions of people to complete books, whether for self-publication or even commercial success, I have spent most of my mature years lying on beaches or under trees, along benches at village cricket matches, nose deep in the work of others – at least until the shades of wet macular degeneration closed in and gave me an excuse for even more laziness.

I can still read in rationed doses which is just as well as this month sees the publication of Girl, the latest from Edna O’Brien, who happens to be 88. It is nearly 60 years since The Country Girls and she is still writing beautifully and now even more powerfully about the plight of trapped women, this time all too literally.

She presumably followed, like the rest of us,  the plight of the tragic hundreds of schoolgirls abducted in Nigeria by the Boko Harem terrorists. Fiction can be much more effective than three minutes of television news clips so of course off she went to Nigeria to find the families and some of the girls who escaped. The result sounds a tremendous novel which I will track down. Four years ago she wrote a novel about Serbian war crimes. I wonder what she will be writing in her nineties.

For the rest of us, writing seems such a natural activity in the relative freedom of alleged retirement. I did spend the first two years of mine writing two novels for children, but decided the age gap – gulf, chasm – between generations was too great and so I remain the sole reader of them both.

There then follows the inevitable year of guilt at procrastination and lack of creativity. But be of  good cheer, if your keyboard remains inactive save for Twitter and other social media diversions, you can still enjoy all over again the books on your shelves. In my case this can mean a trip to see my son who has even more bookshelves which boast, among many hundreds of other graver volumes which helped him to win academic distinctions, all Richmal Crompton’s William books, Geoffrey Willans’ and Ronald Searle’s  records of Nigel Molesworth’s schooldays, Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole chronicles and a host of other old favourites to be rediscovered from youth by the simple old codger with the failing eyesight. Reading is more of an effort for my gallant, scar-tissued eyes now, but luckily he is a kindly soul and also takes great pleasure in reading many of them aloud to me as we chortle together.

And, an extra delight, he also immensely enjoys reading me books written even before my generation, mostly by P.G.Wodehouse. Alone, I can read e-books on Kindle, listen to talking books read wonderfully by Martin Jarvis and hundreds of others but, best of all, I can still read my favourites myself – with a powerful light.

So if you are looking forward to retirement and a sustained burst of creative literary activity, then long may you flourish. If the creative cogs are grinding to a halt, take pleasure in all the written treasures out there. Of course, you could always start a podcast, or even a blog. It doesn’t matter if you are the only reader. You can roar with laughter at your own wit or sob pitifully at your misfortunes. You’ll find you make a great audience for yourself.

His voys was murier than the murie orgon

I rose at cock crow this fine sunny August morning. What? Yes, I did, too!  I will explain. My next-door neighbour, the headmistress whom I find slightly intimidating, not the fellow veteran Chelsea fan on the other side with whom I have shared elation and frustration, invested in some chickens a year or so ago.

We were very happy about this. I like to wake slowly to the gentle clucking of contented, only occasionally squabbling or scandalising chickens. It reminds me of waking on fine August mornings in a score of enchanting rural holiday cottages  in Snowdonia, Devon and Cornwall. My wife used to keep chickens and goats in her Norfolk countryside childhood, not to mention a pig called Charlie, and my son has inherited her love of them. I once devoted most of a blog to poultry, particularly to the delightful and striking Poland. We visited chickens, pigs and goats on a nearby rare breeds farm recently. My  son and daughter send me fine pictures of others.

No better way to wake than to this pleasing rural sound. Some weeks ago, however, their gentle gossiping and quiet quarrelling was intermingled with a newcomer’s curious husky coughing, modest and almost apologetic, which was eventually just about discernible as the start of an embarrassed cock crow, the first syllable and a half of a cockadoodle. The triumphant crescendo of the final ‘doo!’ was entirely absent. The call had a low, dying fall.

As I shaved that morning by the open bathroom window my own early morning death rattle of a cough provided a sombre counterpoint to the not so clarion call of the world’s most depressed sounding cockerel.

A few mornings later when his comatose crowing reached such levels of gloom as to drive me almost to tears, I hurried to fetch my wife to the bathroom so that she should share this depressing experience. She too was reduced to tears but of laughter at the poor fellow’s dejected reveille and I fancied I heard an element of more derisive laughter among the chickens around him.

I can see them, but not him, so cannot comment on his physical condition, but I imagine it is excellent. They are good people and would only have bought a fine young cockerel approaching his prime to reign over their flock, but he is simply not equipped with the correct crowing equipment. He seems to need bigger batteries.

Now imagine if he were Chaucer’s Chanticleer himself, strutting arrogantly round their garden.

His voys was murier than the murie orgon
On messe-dayes, that in the chirche gon.
Wel sikerer was his crowing in his logge,
Than is a clokke, or an abbey orlogge.
By nature he crew eche ascencioun
Of the equynoxial in thilke toun;
For what degrees fifteen weren ascended,
Thanne crew he, that it myghte nat been amended.
His coomb was redder than the fyn coral,
And batailled, as it were a castel wal.
His byle was blak, and as the jeet it shoon,
Lyke asure were hise legged and his toon,
His nayles whiter than the lylye flour,
And lyke the burned gold was his colour.
This gentil cok hadded in his governaunce
Sevene hennes, for to doon al his plesaunce,
Whiche were hise sustres and his paramours.

Well, wonderful, wonderful stuff.  I would crane right out of the bathroom window to see and hear that. The paramours would be fulfilled and cooing at his accomplishments, but can you imagine the full throated crowing at sunrise! Cockadoodledooooo at five in the morning! Dear Lord above!  So I realise that we are doubly blessed in not only having a peaceful flock of chickens just outside our windows,  but also a cockerel whose sotto voce crowing is hardly audible. And as an extra bonus he is a lazy devil and rarely starts before eight anyway.

So, as I was saying, I rose at cock crow today and as the sun blazed in and the chickens murmured outside I remembered those lovely August holiday mornings in the West Country and Wales which I have described before in this blog. You thought you were in for another endless lyrical rhapsody on the fishing fleet leaving Mevagissey harbour at sunset, low tide on the beautiful Dyfi or Mawddach estuaries, rolling green and purple Devon hills, or clotted cream puddings in the Exmoor farmhouse between Combe Martin and Lynmouth.

So sorry, very nearly sliding back into dreamland again. In fact, I suppose the magic of all those childhood and in later decades parenting holidays lay in the sense of timelessness that swam over them. No school, no work, no worries, no deadlines, no demands.

But paradoxically that same sense was ever present during the first eleven years of my life. No rolling purple hills, sparkling seas, mystical mountains, clotted cream delights for 50 weeks of the year. A large wooden hut near Slough, crammed with 50 children, steam rising from slowly drying out, too thin, gabardine raincoats, a smelly smoking coke stove in winter keeping the thin blue milk in crates unpleasantly warm, may sound grim, but was in fact full of delights.

The year I crossed the playing fields (they were large open spaces where children could play traditional games and rounders and cricket and football… Most of the children were very active, fit and slim) from the infants to the primary school, the headmaster tried out a new staff scheme. At the end of each school year, the teacher would move on with the class to the next Year.

I realise now, of course, that if you had a diabolical teacher or one who seemed determined to make your life miserable, then this could have been disastrous news. But the idea was that teacher and class would move on together for four years like a happy family, in increasingly affectionate knowledge of each other.  And in those days of real austerity and strict rationing when pleasures were simple and fleeting, but deep, it worked wonderfully well.

I do take the point from the more cynical among you that much depended on the quality and personality of the teacher. Mine was firm, but funny, commanding, but compassionate and really no different in any essential details from my own mother. Every day was a delight.

What? Her name? Hardly relevant, I think. Why? Oh very well, yes, as a matter of fact, she was my own mother. But that was not her fault, or mine. So every morning I said goodbye with a loving hug at the back door and prepared to walk to school with sanctimonious little Tony Morton, who went to Sunday school and was censorious about my general colloquial turns of phrase. All the way.

And halfway along our walk we would be overtaken by my mother, pedalling majestically past on her upright, iron-framed bike with baskets front and back piled high with marked exercise books, gazing sternly ahead, dressing gown replaced by navy blue suit.

Like the others, I would eventually be greeted at the hut door, no hug this time, by the class teacher who only ever lost her sense of propriety a touch when she was collecting dinner money at Monday registration and realised she had forgotten to give me mine so had to dive into her handbag to find it. She didn’t always have it.

We went on countless class trips from London Docks to the Zoo, from canal voyages near Regent’s Park, to the climax of the year, the Mars Bar factory visit. The wife of the school head was secretary to the actual Mr Mars.  There really was a Mr Mars! We knew each other like a large family, although there were occasional confusing moments. I remember one evening at home, while heavily concentrating  on demolishing my pudding, shooting my hand up and asking: “Please, is there seconds of the ginger pudding, Mrs Cooper?”

I particularly liked the last day of term when, in addition to the pleasure and excitement of breaking up, like everyone else I collected my report in a sealed envelope as we filed past her desk, then solemnly handed it to her to open  with a butter knife in the kitchen at home an hour later.

“It still says you talk too much in class.”

“That’s just that teacher again, always finding fault with me. Not fair.”

I think it is fair to say the other 49 were equally happy. Under her expert teaching, nearly  all of us were bundled off to grammar and high schools at 11 and she caught up with the rest when she moved on as deputy head to the local secondary modern, overseeing transfers to technical schools and late developer moves to grammar schools, but above all making her existing classes of children happy and fulfilled and eventually finding careers. The school selection system was not her fault or ours either. And comprehensives were coming.

There was one distinct disadvantage to being taught solely by one’s own loving mother for four long years. It ill prepared me for: “Cooper! You miserable, good-for-nothing idle lout! Forget your dinner money one more time and you go without lunches for a week. You expect me to pay for your gristly grub, you greedy little weasel? Detention! I heard that, insolent boy! Double detention!”

My appreciation of a fine sunny morning was not supposed to turn into a tribute to my mother. She would not have approved. But whenever I was at home in August during my parents’ 20 years of retirement in her family village home, high on a hillside overlooking the sea at Aberdyfi,  there would be an occasional procession up the steep stone steps from sea level of former pupils, now mothers and fathers of all ages whom she had taught and helped up to 30 or far more years earlier who had somehow tracked her down from 250 miles away to her retirement. She always recognised them as she opened the door, whether they were bald or white-haired, still slender or enormous. The hugs were heartfelt.

Enjoy your August anyway, home or abroad, working or flopping. And if your Mum is still around, childminding or baking or ironing or snoring by the pool, give her a hug while you have the chance. She almost certainly deserves it.

Idle Thoughts Of An Idle Fellow Or Has Someone Already Used That?

Yes, all right, Annunziata, we all know it was Jerome K.  Jerome and spit out that disgusting chewing gum at once. No, do not stick it under your desk lid. Do they still have desks with lids?  I suppose not. And gum? They probably sniff coke up through blotting paper tubes. Blotting paper? It was this pink, absorbent paper which you used to dab your wet inky manuscript and then ping inky pellets across the room with your bendy ruler – oh never mind.

Where were we? Jerome K. Jerome: crafty move for a writer to use his name twice, doubling the chance of it being remembered, or perhaps he was christened that way, mocked by his fellows like Major Major  which reminds me, I like the way Catch 22, which I still reread, has started on Channel 4. George Clooney not just a handsome face. I wouldn’t have wanted to be that good-looking anyway. Admiring glances on the train up to Charing Cross would have embarrassed me. I pass among you unseen, like the ghost I may all too soon become.

Those of you paying attention and not fiddling with your phones may have noticed a distinct change of style in this blog already. As the title suggests, I am adopting a more meandering approach. Not that I claim it is has been a trenchant and purposeful column these past years, but  there was occasionally a theme of sorts, a semblance of useful advice on growing old disgracefully yet discreetly, and generally somehow staying alive.

My latest discovery which I pass on to experts in the field of geriatrics is that concentrating the mind on a subject for up to an hour becomes beyond the powers of the waning brain cells. Do bear that in mind next time dear old Great Uncle Dudley pours custard on his chilli con carne or asks why English cricketers are wearing coloured pyjamas numbered like footballers’ which Ted Dexter or David Gower would not have been seen dead in unless they were finest silk.

Anyway, my thanks to  Jerome K Jerome for the plagiarism. It now occurs to me, of course – these things generally take ten minutes to sink in – that my vibrant and pulsating readership may never have heard of him apart from Three Men in a Boat. I still re-read Three Men on the Bummel with great pleasure when I can find the high powered reading lamp and the biggest magnifying glass. And Idle Thoughts remains a really enjoyable and available collection of pieces a century on. You can add it to your Kindle free at this very moment. Free!

I feel quite toned up this morning basking in glorious sunshine through the open windows. The cat, delighted by so much accessibility, is making more entrances and exits than a character in a Feydeau farce. A brisk session of washing up, drying and putting away keeps me in good mental and physical trim. My increasingly murky Mr Magoo vision, which liberates one from wearing the appropriate glasses or indeed wearing them at all, combined with fingers which may lack the flexibility of earlier years make this opening operation of the day full of lively interest.

For example, barely an hour ago, attempting to put away the cut-glass Chelsea whisky tumbler from the directors’ box on the top shelf of the cupboard, eyes and fingers failed the test and sent the glass tumbling towards the hard stone floor. Mind also failing the test, I foolishly but triumphantly flung myself across the kitchen to take a brilliant first slip catch right in front of the indignant wicket-keeper, Zola the cat in full biscuit-eating mode.

Realising that it was going to take me several minutes to resume standing after this glorious feat, I fairly milked the applause from the roaring Lords crowd, doffing my cap with a flourish from a prone position in front of the pavilion as my daughter arrived home and without comment stepped over me to get to the fridge. I appreciate that she is the one with the classical acting degree who travels the land and indeed the Continent and beyond in the cause of comedy. Her repertoire includes a one-woman show, but then much of my finest work is also accomplished solo, although without an audience.

I am uneasily aware that there may occasionally be an audience. As the years pass, my mishaps multiply and I find I am more apt, when alone, to berate more loudly or angrily than I would have done in my prime, even when a new junior brought back fruit scones instead of cheese ones to my important executive desk for my lunch. At home, when the French windows are open the sound of my rage (“Oh you stupid old fool. Messy idiot! Jacket potato with cheese on the new rug, face down! You need putting down!”) may drift across the gardens and my  neighbours could well be convinced I am brutally bullying some poor, dear old dad in my care. Which I am, in a sense. Still, they must tell themselves it would have to be the oldest dad in Britain or probably the world.

I just checked out what my father’s age would be today and find I was right. He could have lived on to fame and fortune. When one passes through the sub-editing and then eventually editing years, checking out is very much the watchword in the last line of defence. What a doddle it is these days in the world of Google. In my young days, the great oracle and fountainhead of the Western Mail and South Wales Echo worldwide information centre was the Chief Librarian, Sydney Graves.

If, despite special dispensation, you disappeared for long in the files rooms, rummaging through massive bound back issues, thousands of immaculately filed packets of cuttings and photographs and stacks of reference books, Sydney would appear round the corner. His expression was generally severe and might have frightened a newcomer into assuming he had dallied too long or was thought to be up to something, but in fact Syd would either direct you to the exact source you needed or, more frequently, simply supply the answer to your problem immediately. He knew everything. I would have backed him against Google, had it existed then.

When he was not running the cuttings library, master of all he commanded, among the big scissors and the glue pots, and providing the desperate diggers for information with crucial help as edition deadlines loomed, he also operated as a popular journalist himself. He wrote as Jack High, master of the world of Welsh bowls, on the various sports pages and as a Liverpudlian – one would never have called him a Scouser – had a wonderful line in deadpan humour which often sent me scuttling off to his library for light relief when things were getting a little heated in the newsroom.

My other reason for frequently using it as an enjoyable retreat was that Chief Librarian Graves was a devout worshipper of Liverpool Football Club and, as usual, knowing everything, soon established that I was a crazed Chelsea follower. I don’t doubt that he has been looking back on this last season from the Great Cuttings Library in the Sky – there will be a bowling green, too – and saluting Liverpool’s long awaited restoration as  Champions of Europe. He probably had a word in the right quarters and arranged it.

But the reason that I as a Chelsea fan had no reason to fear confronting a Liverpool fan in his den was that in those dim, distant days the proud Reds were anchored in the old Second Division. We, of course, were in the First, but I was never a snob about it, perhaps just a touch condescending at times. Then to his delight, in one dreadful season Chelsea slumped even lower in the league than usual and Liverpool, under a new regime laid down by a gravel-voiced Scottish ex-Preston North End player called Bill Shankly, began to flourish again in their lower division.

My closest friend on the paper, Steve Whiting, later to become cricket correspondent of The Sun,  shared not only his exact birthday with me but also an equal passion for Chelsea for local family reasons similar to mine, and as relegation threatened we vowed to see out every game until we were safe. Unfortunately, despite our active and vocal support, the slump and defeats continued and my habit of falling asleep on the long, late-night drives in his Mini back to Cardiff, which also infuriated him, meant we had to abandon our ambitious programme when he drove through a hedge somewhere deep in Gloucestershire while I snored happily beside him.

Chelsea’s sad relegation and Liverpool’s triumphant promotion delighted the Chief Librarian and on the first Monday morning after the end of season he loitered with intent at the lifts entrance in the main hall so that he could usher others in and proclaim “Going up – except for this gentleman who is going down so will be taking the stairs.”  For many months in library, corridor, canteen or newsroom, and once from the top deck of a passing bus, he did his tiresome imitation, with sound effects, of two lifts passing, one going up and the other plunging down. Once I sent a young copy boy to the library when I needed information but received a beautifully written little note saying that it could only be provided in person, face to face. It was decorated with a neat sketch of two lifts passing.

Today my fingertips can check any fact in the world in a split second, assuming they can roughly locate the right positions on the keyboard and if I watch my Twitter very carefully I can steer fairly clear of Liverpool who are rightly still feeling pretty triumphant despite failing to win the league for an astonishing 29 years. Nearly three decades! They did come desperately close when we visited them at Anfield in 2014 but captain Stevie Gerrard slipped and fell  spectacularly on his bum, allowing Demba Ba to score. “BaBaBa!” we bleated like demented sheep. God was clearly teasing Sydney Graves. The video can be easily revisited, filed under Stevie’s Slip. I have it on a loop.

I don’t know how football sneaked in here in midsummer. Sarah Shaw went home with her Noddy lunchbox many paragraphs ago,  but these are now the mumblings of an idle fellow on a lovely sunny day and I must go out and do some of the vital activities before this dramatic one-day heatwave really dawns.  

Choice of clothing on the lower half of the body may mean changes as the temperature rises remorselessly. Before the bold donning of shorts in the afternoon, I must find one of my large, looser, cooler pairs of trousers. While the cat continues her crazy sequence of Feydeau exits and entrances left, right and over the sink, I am all too aware that these larger trousers are a little too loose around the waistband and I will soon be making my contribution to a rather broader farce in the style with which Brian Rix filled the Whitehall Theatre in decades after the war.

Mine may be even a touch broader as taking my wife’s breakfast upstairs on a tray with both hands occupied offers no support for the trousers which then descend to my ankles halfway up the stairs, almost causing a fatal but highly comical pratfall which Brian Rix would have envied. The Whitehall audiences would erupt in laughter, while mine just rolls her eyes at my shuffling entrance with porridge and with trousers round my ankles.

Still, postmen and parcel couriers seem to enjoy the moment when I reach out for a packet at the front door and the summer trousers begin to descend to half-mast and then the kneecaps emerge. People always used to say that farce was very much a matter of comic timing, but I think the Rix style, which I have effortlessly kept alive into the 21^st Century, is more a matter of trousers coming down all the time. Sarah Shaw has missed all this golden material with her early departure.

But back to those vital activities: I must prepare a light lunch, partly in deference to the already sweltering weather, partly because I plan a Big Dinner. I have to find an extra large napkin to keep ketchup off my new fetching pastel blue leisure shirt from M&S who interestingly are also providing the main contents of the dinner which must be cold and exclude all use of the oven and therefore will have to be on a considerable scale.  I pretty well cleared the Food Hall out with tasty snacks in bulk so supply should meet demand. I have Champagne in the fridge in case Frank Lampard signs tonight. More meanderings next month if  I can find my way back to this keyboard and enough room to sit before it.

Never Use One Word When You Could Use Ten, Or Have I Got That The Wrong Way Round?

You know when you have an irritating fleck of loose skin on your lower lip and you nip it away neatly with your teeth, only to discover that it was not as loose as you had supposed, so you inadvertently rip off a full centimetre of skin which was not ready to abandon ship at all,  leaving a very tender stretch indeed which, even though the pain is admittedly not at morphine level, is now a greater irritation than the one which you originally set out to eradicate, while every time you sip a hot coffee or a neat scotch or chew on a salt-beef sandwich it comes back to sting you. You know?

That was only a 120 word introductory sentence, and you should have seen it just now before I started adding a few commas here and there. Actually I preferred the flow of the sentence before I added them. It fairly rattled along like a Scarlatti sonata as played by me at the age of 15 to impress the girl next door through the wall. It certainly did make an impression as admittedly some months later she pulled up on her bike beside mine at traffic lights and said “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you play the piano much too fast and it murders absolutely everything” before pedalling away with a pleasant smile of beautiful cherry-red lips and perfect gleaming teeth.

Good Lord, that second paragraph was even longer and progress is still not remarkable. I was trained as a young evening newspaper reporter at an impressionable age by irascible, white-haired news editors and chief sub-editors to keep my introductions as brief as possible while conveying the what, who, where, when, why of the story. The white hair was in colourful contrast to the red to purple range of their furious features should you choose not to follow their instructions so I jolly well did as I was told.

For my first years as a young news reporter I wrote, and I suspect spoke in my terror, in a sort of telegramese, never wasting a word and conveying a purpose with every one I used. This did not come naturally. The only telegram-speak with which I was familiar was that used by William Boot in every young journalist’s favourite book of the time, Evelyn Waugh’s immortal Scoop and the humour of that, even I could see, lay in the fact that Boot never used one word when he could use ten, all sent racing down expensive overseas wire systems not in terse, much abbreviated cabled grunts, but in the leisurely conversational tone one would expect from a man who was more familiar in supplying his newspaper’s nature notes from the countryside than civil war dispatches from Africa.

I spent a good many hours in courts, which I found engrossing, covering anything from the old circuit Assizes and Quarter Sessions down to Magistrates Courts, particularly enjoyable when presided over by the then Cardiff Stipendiary Magistrate Mr Guy Sixsmith, only matched in later years by Mr St John Harmsworth in Greenwich and Woolwich courts. Both men had a wonderful ear for the headline-commanding phrase delivered just in time for the next edition of the Echo, Evening Standard, News or Star which was much appreciated in the press box.  But when it came to providing colour, I was prisoner to the whims and words of magistrates and judges.  I was confined to a precis of the recounted facts. I could not stray far there.

I was only allowed to drift on to the feature pages when famine, plague or pestilence had reduced the feature-writing room to a skeleton staff and even then they were careful to confine me to pretty dry stuff where statistical studies were writ large. So it was a stroke of great good fortune when I heard that Mr Gwyn Thomas, Spanish teacher at Barry Grammar School for 20 years, was retiring from teaching decades early to pursue a full-time career as a writer and might be persuaded to enlarge on the subject over a pint or two in the corner of the saloon bar.

He enlarged on a great many other subjects over three hours, our pints virtually untouched and I was entranced, as I knew I would be.  What I had supposed might make a three-par piece for The Stroller diary flowed on and on as my eccentric Pitman’s shorthand, at last recognising genius when it heard it, kept gamely on. There was no writing to be done. It was Gwyn Thomas talking and the next morning the choleric white-haired chief sub-editor cleared a whole page of the broadsheet Friday editions for the piece. The retiring Spanish master had unwittingly even provided the heading with an exultant burst of song “Bye Bye Blackboard!”

It was generally agreed to be the best piece I had ever written, but I took the all too rare compliments with an uneasy and large pinch of salt. I knew that virtually every word of the piece, direct or summarised, was supplied entirely by Gwyn Thomas.  Like a lot of Englishmen with a generous flow of Welsh blood running through my veins from my mother’s family, I speak hardly a word of Welsh, but some of my favourite writers, whom I truly love, are Welshmen writing in English, a good many of them named Thomas. Dylan Thomas was by the time of that interview with Gwyn ten years into his posthumous prime and the Welsh writing in English were one of the subjects we discussed that night. R.S. Thomas, austere, indeed bleak, poet of the Welsh hill farmers and paradoxically bitter critic of the Anglicisation of Wales and the Welsh, is still one of my favourite poets.

Gwyn Thomas, in the years that followed his retirement from teaching, took a very different path from R.S. Thomas!  He found some success in the theatre before becoming a regular feature on Parkinson and other major chat shows, in Punch, on the Today programme in its heyday – his memorable piece there on the Aberfan tragedy is still available online and easy to find.  But his Ustinov-like television chat show turn as the English-speaking voice of the valleys was only one aspect of him. The mass popularity did not dilute the talent. His writing continued. His radio broadcasts, his short stories, his novels – so many so sadly out of print despite some heroic Welsh efforts to revive them – all his work, written or spoken, will always be well worth  tracking down, happy or sad, savagely ironic or sublimely funny.

Although I was already a devoted reader, I sensed as I clawed my desperate shorthand down into my scruffy notebook that night, the magic of a wonderful way with words, spoken in the voice of the youngest of 12 children born to a miner’s wife in poverty-stricken Cwmmer in the Rhondda Valley, the lilting voice as hypnotic as the flow of words. His mother died when he was six. His sister had to take her place, using food-banks when she had to. He took a scholarship to Oxford – he hated it – became a teacher and then a writer, and was compared, on the centenary of his birth by a Professor of English Literature to my other two favourite ironic novelists of the time, Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis.

“Nothing wrong with long words and sentences, boy, you just have to know what you’re doing,” said the chief sub-editor as the first edition came up from the print hall.

Now what has all this to do with biting skin off your lower lip in that interminable introduction, I hear you cry. Ah well, what I was getting round to saying, and am nearly there in 1,500 words, thanks to your patience, is that this long overdue blog lacks further news of an old codger’s life, as the English political system sinks into the Channel to the chortling delight of the vile Farage, because nothing has been happening here.  I do have another eye injection due tomorrow, but the only actual event to report is that I nibbled that skin off my lower lip the other day. It was very painful, too. But it has healed. Life goes on – for a while anyway.

Gwyn Thomas. A bronze bust of him was unveiled in the main foyer of the New Theatre, Cardiff, by Sir Anthony Hopkins, a personal friend who played him in Alan Plater’s adaptation of Selected Exits.