by Jan Morris
And then again, gift packaging, sweet though it may be with red ribbons and holly, can be a perfect curse to get into – can it not? – and is surely yet another unnecessary contribution to the developed world’s mountain of garbage. One of my favourite scenes in film comedy, from the movie Love Actually, has Rowan Atkinson as a department store assistant packing up a gift. What a time he takes! With what infinite delicacy he folds the paper, ornamentally ties the twine, smooths the packaging and at last offers it to the customer with a sublimely ingratiating smirk. He has made of the job, as he might say, a tiny work of art.
But it is destined only to be impatiently torn apart, scrumpled and thrown away, as the heedless recipient scrambles for her booty.
Moral: There is none. Like it or not, we’ve never had it so good.
DAY 74
Scraped, torn and shabby inside the door of my car are two paperback volumes of Michel de Montaigne’s collected essays. They live there permanently, and I love them. I have them at home in two much better hardback editions, but these old friends, shoved rudely but conveniently beside my driving seat, are dearer to me.
This is because to my mind they are the very best antidote to boredom. I do not read them, of course, while I am driving, but the moment I am held up, because of roadworks or traffic lights, because I am waiting to meet somebody’s train or because I’ve dropped Elizabeth off at the hairdressers, the moment I switch my engine off – ha! – I scrabble happily for my Montaigne. The two old volumes, which I have had almost as long as the car itself, were one volume once, but I tore it into two halves to get them into the door pocket, and since they are a very tight fit still, poor things, they have a sort of brave, uncomplaining look to them that I find extra endearing.
Of course, they might be made for dipping into. Was there ever another writer anywhere more instantly readable and friendly? What do I feel like reading about while I wait? Liars? Idleness? Pedantry? The Power of the Imagination? The Custom of Wearing Clothes? Names? War Horses? The Education of Children? Anger? Cowardice? The Disadvantage of Greatness?
All these, and a hundred more, are waiting there for my contemplation, but better still, Michel is waiting there too, and there was never a kinder, cleverer and more beguiling companion to share ideas with, while the old Honda gratefully takes a breather.
DAY 75
Wales is rarely associated with commercial capitalism, but the names of several great London stores remember the enterprise of expatriate money-makers long ago, and when Welsh people go in for it on their home ground the result can be admirable. This is because they often manage to make it at once homely, efficient and profitable.
Take an example up the road from us. Twenty years ago a farming family there decided to extend their property and exploit their inherited skills by starting a garden centre. This is now a complex of five or six large greenhouses surrounded by flowerbeds, equipped with all modern devices and chock-a-block full of every garden plant under the sun. At Christmas the centre becomes in part a delightfully illuminated sort of grotto.
It is much more than that, though. A generation later, the family added to the complex an agreeable small restaurant, and this has turned the whole project into a very cheerful sort of institution. The key to its success is a homely Welsh kind of sophistication. Staff or customers, nearly everyone in the place seems to know somebody else. Multitudinous children whizz about in search of ice creams, fondly supervised by proud mums and lenient, talkative dads. Familiar members of the farm family attend the counters or serve the tables, helpings are generous, a bookstall in one corner offers a cornucopia of paperbacks about Wales, and the Welsh language predominates.
That’s the way to do it! I don’t know, of course, how much money it makes. I always feel it gives as much pleasure to its owners as it does to its customers, but then I suppose that’s the nature of capitalism – at least when the employees, the third party so to speak, are all in the family, all at home, and all Welsh too.
DAY 76
This Diary of Thoughts deliberately does not concern itself with world affairs, politics or ideologies, but aims (if it has an aim) simply to record my personal meditations, datelessly.
Today it has a date – 31 January 2017 – because it marks the end of the first tumultuous week of the American presidency of Donald Trump, and I feel the need to record my own responses to his eruption into all our consciousnesses. What do I think of him this morning?
The look of him I detest, and the voice, and the crude vocabulary, and the bigotries, and the headlong, show-off decisions.
The style of him I rather admire, because it is basically apolitical. He throws himself into those decisions as though he alone has the power of authority, without the trammels of the constitution or the complexities of legality, showing the brash, all-American filmic confidence, party politics apparently disregarded, that obviously won him his election.
Do I trust him? No.
But in the long run, will he be a successful president? I rather think he may. Think of the grasping Saul: a single vision on the road to Damascus improbably made a saint of him, and perhaps this brash plutocrat, this showy TV star, this Trump Towers exhibitionist with the golden elevator will meet the angels of his own better self during the four years of his presidential journey.
Do I really think that?
I don’t know. Tomorrow is another dateless day.
DAY 77
I am big on premonitions. Sometimes they prove true, sometimes not. Nearly twenty years ago I returned from a world journey feeling that something dire was about to happen to the world. The very next day, the World Trade Center in New York was attacked by terrorists, and we entered a new zeitgeist.
It is not just a new spirit of the age that I sense is brewing now; it is a fundamental revision of all the ages, and we are witnessing now its very first elementary stirrings. A few days back, I recorded in this diary an infinitely vague, imprecise but nagging feeling that I must myself enter some altogether new kind of existence, and perhaps that was premonitory? Certainly, it seems to me that during all our lifetimes, and reaching a climax now, mankind has been unconsciously preparing itself for some immense renewal – in the elimination of sexual differences, for example, in the gradual abolition of the Nation-State, in the new command of cyberspace and, above all, in the terrific revolution that is artificial intelligence, our own fateful step towards Creation. These are portents more drastic by far than mere suggestions of a new zeitgeist – as the Industrial Revolution was, say, or the World Trade Center tragedy, or going to the moon. And what does my premonition suggest to me about these colossal developments? Only this, ignorant agnostic that I am: that surely, surely, there must be some almighty Power, some Soul (immortal, invisible, God only wise, as the Christian hymn has it) with a vast eternal Plan (as Tevye suggests in Fiddler on the Roof); and that the final zeitgeist of all zeitgeists will then be unveiled for us, if ever we can master its meaning.
Until then, Keep Smiling, friend – ‘Immortal, Invisible, God Only Knows’.
DAY 78
If he had plenty of money, wrote the poet Browning, he would choose to live in a house in a city square. ‘Ah,’ said he, ‘such a life, such a life, as one leads at the window there!’
I half agree with him. From our windows, front and back, we can only expect to see trees, birds and sheep, plus the occasional car or tractor, and I would not have it otherwise. It is undeniable, though, that one of my great pleasures is to have coffee with my Elizabeth in a particular window seat of a café in Porthmadog and watch our small world go by. The window looks out directly at a pedestrian crossing, so that every few minutes the passing traffic is going to stop for a moment, and a cluster of people assemble at the pavement’s edge, waiting for the lights to change. So I have a chance to assess our version of the life out there.
Some of it, of course, consists of our own neighbours, and we are able to observe that Mrs S looks particularly spritely that morning, or that old W o
bviously got out of the wrong side of his bed … More often they are strangers, and then we are able to conjecture. ‘Happy in marriage, don’t you think?’ ‘Just getting over a tiff?’ ‘What a bore, to have to lead that poor dog everywhere on a lead.’ ‘Goodness, the grocery bag should keep them going, and they’re plump enough already.’ ‘That old dear will have to hurry if she wants to get across before the lights change. Oh no, good, it’s OK, that nice-looking youth is going to help her – surely he’s the Ws’ boy, isn’t he? What an excellent family they are, except perhaps for …’
But hang about. A small climax arises. Few of those people notice us noticing them, but here is a covey of four or five small children, with two determined women, in and around a perambulator. When the light changes and they step off the pavement to cross the street, the children one and all look up at our window, straight in the eye at us. We wave at them, and then our little world erupts in merriment. Violently they wave back, one and all, laughing and making funny faces at us, while their harassed mothers gamely continue their passage across the street, sometimes pausing to pick up a dropped glove or teddy bear and offering us wry sisterly laughs too.
And so they pass out of our sight, the lights change again and the traffic resumes. We finish our coffee and, laughing too, pack up our own purchases to go home. ‘Ah,’ we say to ourselves, ‘what a slice of life it was, what a lively little corner of the world, that we saw at the window there!’
DAY 79
I have been in tremulous, transcendent mood during the last few days, searching in my mind for some denouement, I know not what. The very world seems so uncertain of itself, mired in discord great and petty, short of conviction or objective, lurching from headline to headline, rumorous, squabbling and variously timid and arrogant. Is some Second Coming coming? Where should I look? What should I hope for? Is there a God after all?
Into this mental quagmire there has fallen a new edition of Wordsworth’s immense poem The Prelude, with a commission to review it for a magazine. During the past few days, I have reread the whole of this work, often aloud, and I have ended, if not restored or reassured about the state of the world, at least enchanted by the magic of the verse – partly, of course, by the music of it, the lilts and the rhythms, but chiefly by what I take to be its own moral conclusion, namely that existence itself, as expressed in its simplest and kindest natural forms, is the ultimate meaning of life, and our own grandest recompense.
Wordsworth, bless his heart, seemed to conclude that if there is a God, Nature is the breath of it, and Art its language. If so, then one of the divine messengers must surely be the Poet, even when he writes in blank verse, and in three hundred pages of iambic pentameter.
DAY 80
We lost our heroic Norwegian cat Ibsen some time ago, and it really was like saying goodbye to an old and trusted friend. When, among the ornaments in a gardening shop the other day, we saw a lifelike cat replica, we immediately bought it as a sort of stand-in.
It is really not in the least like Ibsen, but it is quite astonishingly like a cat. It is made of concrete, I am told, probably in China, reconstructed by some miraculous photographic technique and now for ever sleeping snugly in a corner of our sofa. I cannot get out of my mind the illusion that it really is alive, and still often reach down to stroke it or murmur comradely endearments. It reminds me of some little couplets I wrote years ago in tribute not to a particular cat, but to the idea of a cat, cat in the abstract. So here they are, as they appeared in Richard Adams’s anthology Occasional Poets (1986):
Move over, says the Cat, nine-tenths of the bed are mine.
Yes, in lives and comfort, the ratio’s one to nine.
My Cat is Sleep made flesh and fur:
Is death itself a Purr?
Oh, oh, the crime of the claw, the Kraken eye!
It is only a game: may the best mouse die.
I watch through all th’Eternity of the Soul,
In case – in case – ah, Ecstasy – the heap gives forth
A Mole.
(© Jan Morris and Ibsen, 1986)
DAY 81
‘You are about to close two tabs,’ my computer has just warned me. ‘Are you sure you want to continue?’ It often says things like this. Sometimes it informs me that something I am writing is for reading only, and sometimes it lets me know that I am about to close a further four tabs. I have no idea what it’s all about. What is a tab, and what is going to happen if I lose one?
It is sad to admit it, I suppose, but I am more or less cyber-illiterate. Children an eighth of my age understand the lingo better than I do, and are very nice about it too, and never laugh at my incompetence or resent having to put me straight. ‘Do you see that red button at the top right of the screen? Well, press that and at the same time keep the hold button down – no, the hold button, the one next to it – that’s it – now press Shift, and there you are! You see? Nothing to it! Any time!’
I very much like this sharing of skills between the generations, in my experience so kindly demonstrated, and wonder if it could foretell some profounder distribution of human responsibilities? More power to Youth? Less authority for Maturity? I can’t imagine how, but then the young are better at imagining things than I am …
DAY 82
Most small towns in the islands of Britain have ancient origins, and generally display the evidence. Ancient churches abound. Sometimes there is a castle to see, or an old manor house, and there is sure to be a local historian around to tell you all about it.
Cricieth (sic – it’s Welsh), our little town on Cardigan Bay in north-west Wales, is no exception. It has an ancient ruined castle on a seafront promontory and a storied history of war and seafaring, and since I have lived nearby for seventy years you might suppose it could offer me nothing new. Every now and then, though, I come across some aspect of the little town, some grace note, that gives me a new sense of intimacy, and today, walking off a vinous lunch, I came across such a suggestive detail. I cannot claim grace for it, because it was really hardly more than a rubbishy backyard, but it still seemed to me wonderfully evocative of the town’s storied past.
Cricieth was transformed in the nineteenth century by the arrival of the railway from England, which transformed it into a tourist destination and buried much of it in Victorian and later reconstructions. Here and there medieval cottages remain, lovingly restored, but what I came across today was a shabby and neglected patch of scrubland, in the heart of the town, which generations of developers seem to have overlooked. I stood there transfixed in the afternoon silence, because it seemed to me that I had strayed into the Middle Ages. The old cans and broken bottles that lay about had surely been left there by roistering herring fishermen, or been thrown out, I thought, by skivvies from the castle up the hill. The broken-down sheds had been commandeered, I imagined, by the besieging soldiers of Owain Glyndwˆ r himself, and perhaps some of the odd bric-a-brac lying around was memorial to their gusto.
Nobody broke the spell for me. There was no noise. The breeze that blew the rubbish about seemed to me authentically medieval, and it was only when I left the place, and found the level crossing gates open to let the two carriages of the 2.30 for Porthmadog chug through, that I decided I would have another cappuccino after all.
DAY 83
I am feline by instinct, and in general I’m not awfully fond of dogs. I don’t like the smell of them, I hate being licked by them, I resent being barked at, bitten by or scared by them, and I despise them for their slavish acceptance of domestic mastery. However, there are times when I am almost sentimentally reconciled to the creatures, and yesterday was one of them.
It was a fine brisk sunny morning when I went for my exercise along the promenade, and the whole beach was alive with Dogs. They were of all sorts and breeds, big and small, and freed for once of their leads they not only scampered all over the pebbles, chasing things, but actually rushed frenziedly into the incoming tide-waves, emerging only to shake salt water all over thei
r owners and sending children screaming out of range.
As I leant on the railing above watching the scene, I thought what a bore it must be to have to take those animals out for exercise each morning, to feed them and clear up their excrement and brush their wretched bristles off the sofa and get somebody to look after them when I wanted an evening to myself. What a world away, I thought, from the civilization of the Cats! But no. The more I watched the scene, the more I looked at the faces around and below me, human and canine too, the more I realized that a genuine spirit of affection, and even gratitude, linked the species there. The children loved being splashed, and the dogs loved splashing them. The grown-ups felt young again as they retreated laughing from the spray, and laughed up at me too, to share the fun.
And on the promenade beside me, I realized, were many solitary elderly people, with terriers and lapdogs at their feet, who were watching the goings-on with genuine affection, with pride and with gratitude. I saw then that they wouldn’t in the least mind clearing up the shit, or sending the eiderdown to the cleaners again, or taking darling Pongo out for his exercise in the drizzle, or arranging yet again for an evening dog-sitter. I realized that I was witnessing an unwitting reconciliation of species, a shared celebration and a declaration of understanding.
