Thinking Again
Page 8
She wrote nearly all of it in instalments for the New Yorker in the 1960s, and immersed herself absolutely, issue after issue, in every aspect of the city’s life. Now I don’t for a moment claim that I could do the job as brilliantly as she did, but it does seem to me that she dealt with the endless spectacle of Manhattan in somewhat the same way as I have been reflecting on life in a small Welsh neighbourhood in these daily jottings.
Don’t laugh! But think of the wealth of material Manhattan offered for her column, minutiae to grand slam, day after day, as she roamed that terrific metropolis! And compare it with my snatches of local gossip, or my own laboured thoughts during my thousand paces of exercise along our lane at Llanystumdwy!
Yes, I am green with envy of the Long-Winded Lady …
DAY 81
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My dear Elizabeth, being under the weather, yesterday received the following get-well card from a granddaughter, ten years old this very day, passing on the advice of a benign elephant:
Elephant’s a friend of mine. Elephant says, ‘Get well, Nan,
Eat and drink as well as rest.’
Dr Elephant knows best.
He certainly seems to be an educated sort of pachyderm, doesn’t he? Nevertheless, I am replying thus on the child’s behalf:
Well, dear Dr Jumbo, of course it’s nice to be told,
But I cannot resist retorting, if I may be so bold,
One needs no elementary advice when one is TEN YEARS OLD!
DAY 82
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I would not wish to be a news editor today (assuming that such people still exist in this age of the blog, the tweet and social media). It would be like being flooded, I think, by a hot, stinking tide of events from every corner of the world (I nearly wrote ‘the known world’, but of course there is no unknown corner of the world nowadays …).
Anyway, as I was saying, I would not like the job nowadays, when thousands of spectacularly newsworthy things are happening every day and everywhere. This very morning, for example, I find in my paper a veritable host of news items, each one of which might have been an excitement during my own time in the business: items about, for instance, alleged Russian interference in British politics, US sanctions upon Iran, lethal floods in Italy, votes against national independence in New Caledonia, opposition politicians jailed in Bahrain, Christian pilgrims killed in Egypt, wild boars scavenging in Barcelona and people-smuggling in Yemen. Most challenging of all, perhaps, for harassed subeditors might be the news that an American woman in the United States has been luring armed police to the homes of Asian families in Manchester, England, claiming that they are abusing children …
‘OK, OK,’ as they used to say in the newsrooms as they prepared to go home. ‘That’s enough, put the old lady to bed.’
DAY 83
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Here’s a lovely thing that has happened to me. When they made my first collection of these diary pieces into a book, I added a dedication, thus:
For
One and All
Kindlily
(and yes, there is such a word!)
Well, last night I went into town in a misty, rainy dusk to collect a load of firewood, and as I began to load it up a vague, burly figure emerged unexpectedly out of the half-light to carry it all to the car for me. I don’t know who he was. I didn’t recognize him – could hardly see him really – and when he finished the job he just melted into the mist again without a word. I called after him through the darkness to thank him for his great kindness, and after a pause his voice came back to me there.
‘I try to behave kindlily,’ it said, and then after another pause, more faintly still:
‘And yes, there is such a word.’
Never in half a century of the writing life have I been so delightfully quoted.
DAY 84
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On Idyllism
When people ask me how to get to our house, I tell them to come straight up the lane and through the farmyard, and Trefan Morys is the house immediately on the right, opposite the big elm, with the white cupola and weathervane on its roof. How idyllic it sounds, doesn’t it, with the farmyard and the elm? But I’ll tell you what the farmyard contains at this very moment, shall I? It’s a bit muddy and slippery today, but I’ll pop out with my walking stick and see.
Well, it’s autumn grass-harvest time in twenty-first-century Wales, and the yard is cluttered to every corner with the effluvia of twenty-first-century agriculture. There are black canvas bags piled one on top of the other full of silage, and there are sheds packed tight with hay bales, and miscellaneous trailers and tractors all over the place, and huge tanker trucks, and random varieties of mechanism attached to one another, and the occasional four-wheel quad bike blasting here and there. Where is the idyllism? I might well wonder on behalf of our visitors, as I retreat on my stick to our garden gate opposite the old elm.
Wait! Just as I get there one of those bikes, with a chug of its engine and a squeak of its brakes, pulls up beside me, and one of our lifelong friends and neighbours jumps off his saddle with a kind laugh to open the gate for me.
Idyllism: the peculiar nature of a scene or situation (Oxford English Dictionary).
DAY 85
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I’ve always rather liked the word ‘topsy-turvy’, and for that matter the concept of it, and sometimes improbable topsy-turvydom certainly can be delightful. For instance, there could hardly be a more entertaining item of news than today’s report that in the village of Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant, not far from us, a gigantic bronze statue of a chorus girl, nine and a half tons of her, twenty-three feet tall, is at this very moment being completed by the ancient process (it says) of lost-wax casting. Surely nobody can complain about that kind of improbability?
It’s a different matter, though, when topsy-turvydom seems to be taking over the human condition at large, and it feels to me that we are in that very state of mind this morning. Whoever we are, it seems, wherever we are, whatever our faith or political conviction, we simply don’t know what is going on. The ramifications of economics as of diplomacy are beyond us; half of what we are told we don’t believe and the other half we don’t trust. And if some species of political messiah offers us salvation, well, Hitler did just that for the Germans long years ago, and men of his kind seem to be the chief candidates for succession now.
And yet, and yet, there are millions upon millions of decent people around the globe – in my opinion, far more good people than bad – a grand majority whose immense power lies latent, untapped in the governance of our affairs.
Topsy-turvynance in excelsis!
DAY 86
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Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive
officiously to keep alive.
Who wrote that? Arthur Clough, in 1861, and the lines have come into my mind because of our kitchen clock. It is a dear old grandfather clock, put together a couple of centuries ago by a local craftsman, Mr John Parry of Tremadog, and ornamented with pastoral scenes of grazing sheep, blossoms, etc. I am very fond of it, but horologically it is past its best and is complemented by a severely functional modernist clock on the other side of the kitchen, governed by radio waves from its makers in Germany and almost alarmingly reliable.
Now I hate to report it, but last Saturday Mr John Parry of Tremadog’s dear old timepiece somehow lost the movement of its hands and tells us the time no more. We must rely on that modernist miracle over there by the wash basin. And what shall we do, after all these years, with Mr John Parry of Tremadog’s legacy?
Well, what does Clough tell us? One need not strive to keep alive, and indeed I shan’t strive to get that old clock mended, because it will always be alive for me in another sense – in its ever-genial presence there, in the fond reminders it embodies
, silently now but teeming with suggestion, and in the presence of Mr John Parry of Tremadog himself, enjoying a rest after a long and useful lifetime.
No, I won’t strive. Tick on, old friend, if only silently, and thanks a lot anyway.
DAY 87
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This register of thoughts is becoming a register of epitaphs – yesterday my dear old kitchen clock, today the 41st president of the USA. I suppose it’s inevitable, given my own time of life. Even my dear old Honda is booked in for a final assessment, and by the nature of things a sense of impending closure now begins to drift through Trefan Morys itself.
I particularly grieve, though, to say my formal farewells to President George Herbert Walker Bush, because although I never met him, we were contemporaries in more than one sense. We were almost the same age, the values he stood for were my values too, and the country he represented I loved and respected almost as my own. In the Cold War years of my own prime the so-called Special Relationship between Britain and America was no mere wishfulness, but was itself a kind of Great Power in an uncertain world, and Bush was its real president.
I shall be sneered at for saying it, but the values I respected in him were the traditional values of the American Gentleman, and alas they no longer govern his nation and so set some standard for the Western world. He was, everyone seems to agree, straight, frank, brave, kind and friendly – in short, gentlemanly American, and I wish to God he was with us still. Don’t you?
DAY 88
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Here’s another confession – they crop up in my thinking now and then. The other day, you may remember, I applied a quotation from the poet Arthur Clough – ‘Thou … need’st not strive officiously to keep alive’ – to the condition of my dear old kitchen clock, which is patently on its last legs.
Well, I cheated you, sort of … I was really recalling those lines not in relation to a grandfather clock, but in relation to me. I can never quite remember whether I am ninety-two or ninety-three years old, but I was certainly born in 1926 and am, in my own opinion, well past my sell-by date. Affection and good manners, of course, require you to deny it, but I should know, and I assure you that if I were to kick the proverbial bucket when I finish this entry, it might be sad, but it would be logically sensible.
Admit it! There are too many old people in the world today, and as scientists and sociologists generally admit, the strain of it is as profoundly deleterious as climate change, so ominously threatening the human condition itself.
Of course, I am not advocating euthanasia. Of course, like that of nearly every other ninety-two/three-year-old, my death would be mourned. I am only stating as a fact that people are living too long in the world today, and the earth would be a better place if more of us left a bit earlier, including me. Of course, we must not kill, but officiousness should have no part in it – ‘officiousness’, an excellent word which means, the OED tells me, the assertion of authority in an annoying, domineering way, though the Americans put it better in Webster’s, which suggests ‘volunteering one’s services when they are neither asked for nor needed’.
That’s just my idle thought about it all – not asked for, I admit, and certainly not needed.
DAY 89
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My admirable housemaster at Lancing College, eighty-odd years ago, used to play classical music for us on his gramophone in the evenings, and I have never forgotten one critical observation of his. ‘The only thing wrong with Beethoven’s symphonies’, he told us one day, ‘is that they don’t know when to stop.’
Well, I was all of twelve years old then, and I admired him for an obviously cheeky opinion, such as schoolmasters, in my experience, did not often allow themselves to express. I could imagine his colleagues in the senior common room exclaiming, ‘Really, Handford, is that the kind of thing you teach your chaps? About Beethoven?’ Besides, I agreed with my housemaster. I thought then, and I think now, that some of Beethoven’s majestic works really do go on too long, with their endless false endings and repetitive conclusions. There, too, I am still with the late Mr Handford, MA.
But, but … He was only a schoolmaster, after all, and I was only a child! Who were the two of us then, or since, to dispute the judgement of an immortal genius? I still think some of Beethoven’s masterpieces drag on a bit, but dear God, whose artistic taste is likely to be superior, mine or his? Or even my excellent housemaster’s?
DAY 90
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O dear, it’s almost Christmas again, looming with sham holly over the calendar and casting old curmudgeons like me into our usual foreboding. It’s not that I begrudge family, friends and neighbours their festivities; it’s just that I am simply not up to it, physically, mentally, temperamentally and, yes, morally. I am no good at Christmas.
It may be partly because during the formative years of my childhood, I was professionally engaged far from home. And this was because I was a boy chorister at the college of Christ Church, Oxford, whose chapel is also, as it historically happens, the cathedral of the Anglican diocese of Oxford. Don’t ask me why – I’ve long ago forgotten. I only know that as a result, I spent a string of my childhood Christmases hard at it in choir stalls and practice rooms, rather than festively around a Yuletide conifer. (Yuletide? Yuletide – old Norse, they tell me, and who am I to doubt?)
Anyway, I have never for a moment regretted or resented my absence from the high jinks. On the contrary, those Christmases far from home amidst the dreaming spires have remained high points of my life’s long memory. It is not just the simple holiness of them that delighted me then and warms me still; it was the grand artistic legend of it all, the beauty of the music and the touching tale, the dear old scholarly clergymen who, knowing us small choristers to be far from home and family, did their best to make it up for us with quaint games and small gifts.
In short, it was a glimpse of something beautiful in itself, beyond rituals or jollities around the Christmas tree. It was a distillation of goodness among beautiful buildings and kind strangers, and when, a few days later, I found myself at home among my dear family, I loved them all the more for that other world I had been visiting, and ate with greedy gratitude the plum cake they had saved for me.
DAY 91
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There is no denying the onset of senility, whether you put it down to Alzheimer’s or just plain old age, and Christmas 2018 has brought it home to me with a thud. I have progeny at large in several parts of the world, the eldest of them now pensionable themselves. More to the Christmassy point, I have many grandchildren of Yuletide age, and for the life of me I can’t always remember their names. Isn’t that awful? It’s true that I hardly know many of them. True, too, that by the nature of things, probably most of them have nothing whatsoever in common with me. But so what? Those young or youngish persons, far away or down the road, share my blood, heritage and responsibility, and I am ashamed that sometimes I can’t even name them …
But anyway, I’ve slipped a modest banknote into each of the young ones’ Christmas cards, and I only hope I’ve got their names and addresses right.
DAY 92
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Well, Christmas 2018 has come and gone, with its usual challenges and delights, and today is 1 January 2019, in all possibility my final New Year’s Day, and Elizabeth’s too. She ignores the fact and just soldiers on. I make the most of it.
Of course I exploit the experience of old age. It is grist for a writer’s mill, and watching my own decline, making fun of it, exploring its ironies and its moments of beauty – all this helps to soften the undeniable tragedy of death, and partly compensates for its sadnesses. I am often comical in old age, and if other people kindly look the other way when I make some ridiculous error or perform some preposterous gaffe, I prefer to find it funny. I have been disgr
acefully self-centred all my life, and it’s only proper nowadays that the joke’s generally on me! But it’s not a joke at all. Laughable though it may sometimes seem, the truth is, of course, that I am approaching one of the tremendous mysteries of existence, when I must say goodbye at last to my dear old partner – herself ahead of me in our explorations – to my children and all my friends, every one of whom I can now see, with my ancient mystic eyes, clambering somewhere behind me on the steep rocky track to Nowhere. Some of them are laughing, some are crying, but they are all coming my way too.
Keep smiling, anyway. It may not be to Nowhere at all! It may be to Angels and mercy and kindness and white wine, with toasted crumpets for tea. I do hope so, don’t you? Keep in touch, anyway, and watch out for holes in the road!
DAY 93
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There’s a lot in the paper today about the idea of Frenchness, as embodied in the French language, once the lingua franca of a world empire, and still employed around the globe, it is alleged, as a post-imperial instrument of French supremacy and self-esteem. I have not heard of a parallel among the vociferous criticisms of the British imperial legacies, have you? Perhaps the spread of the English language has simply gone too far, so that generations now astir have simply forgotten its imperial pedigree. It is still an issue, though, here in Wales, where perhaps half a million people (I am guessing) habitually use their own ancient language, Cymraeg, beside a population of three million who use the tongue of their ancient conquerors, and all-too-immediate neighbours, the Anglo-Saxon English. The struggle for the survival of Cymraeg, a most beautiful and sophisticated medium, is still endemic here.