Thinking Again

by Jan Morris

  As this mood took over, I thought I would defy the weather for half an hour and treat myself to a coffee down in Cricieth. First, though, there was just one extremely long, particularly charming reader’s letter to answer. So to cap my day’s duty I sent its author a grateful reply by e-mail, meticulously, at a proper detailed length, correcting my errors and thanking her so much for liking my book. Then, fine, the old Honda ran me downtown for an agreeable post-duty break at the No. 46 Coffee Shop on the High Street. My job was done! The weather was still ghastly, it was true, the wind still howled, but the dear old Type R rumbled me cheerfully home again, and I returned to my library well content.

  But another message awaited me on my computer screen. This is what it said: ‘We have been unable to deliver your message. No mx record found for domain,’ together with a few hundred words of cyber-gobbledegook. All my self-satisfaction instantly fizzled out, all my complacency was punctured … And do you know why it was? Because I had left out a single letter ‘e’ in the recipient’s address. That’s why! I must write that long, courteous, beautifully composed final letter all over again!

  ‘To hell with it,’ I swore, ‘to hell with ’em all,’ and I threw my damned book into the wastepaper basket. I decided never to write another one, to sell the house, civil-divorce Elizabeth, disinherit the family, scrap the old Honda (about time too) and emigrate to Patagonia to grow turnips for a living.

  Well, no, I didn’t really, but you will know what I mean. Thanks for your company anyway. Now I must get back to work …

  DAY 105

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  A journalist is coming tomorrow to write an interview with me for the New York Times, and my publishers are naturally grateful for the publicity. So am I, of course, not least because that grand old paper has been good to me for many years. Usually on such occasions a photographer comes too, and after a restaurant lunch we come up to Trefan Morys, my eighteenth-century ex-stable homestead, for a camera session – the whole always a pleasant little event, I hope for us all.

  This morning, though, I had doubts. Two very old ladies we are now, Elizabeth and I, living alone at Trefan Morys, and today it dawned upon me that the old place is decidedly, after a couple of hundred years, finally past its best. It really is an awful mess now – nightmarishly cluttered, run down, undusted, with miscellaneous chipped ornaments, unexplained bits and pieces, half-forgotten mementos, indecipherable scripts and lamps that don’t work all over the place. There are ancient rugs to trip over (some with maps underneath them, to keep them flat), here a bust of the Buddha, there Queen Victoria, a model American train at the top of the stairs, and the whole constituting all in all, I suspect, a passable forecast of Chaos.

  Even the kindest photographer, it seemed to me at breakfast today, could not make Trefan Morys 2019 look very appealing. I told the Times we’d stick to lunch at Dylan’s by the sea.

  All the same, this afternoon, over our tea (Earl Grey, with cream biscuits and strawberry jam), Elizabeth and I, as we munched, took stock of our surroundings, and once again, as always, thought to each other, well, it may be dingy, but what a fascinating structure we do inhabit, as it were, behind the scenes! Trefan Morys is really just one big sort of allegory, half overwhelmed with books that may look disordered but are lovingly arranged, and everywhere we contemplate there are interesting things to rediscover: letters tucked in volumes from a lifetime of the writing and wandering life; sketches of curious origin; stacks of gramophone records ancient and modern; portraits from several generations; reminders and mementos of two lifetimes and half a full century of mingled experience.

  But no, the quality of suggestion is not photographical, and I look forward to our lunch with the NYT.

  DAY 106

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  As you may have noticed, I am big on allegory, allegory big and small, and this morning it occurs to me that today, early in March 2019, we are one and all living inside an ultimate one. I see from the Oxford Dictionary that in 1382 Wyclif wrote of allegory as being a ‘ghostly understanding’, and that’s the meaning I prefer for the word. I am beginning to feel, in a ghostly way, that we are approaching the end of all things.

  In the UK it goes almost without saying that we are approaching the end of Britain, let alone England. Do you remember, not so long ago, what used to be called, at once in respect and revilement, ‘the Establishment’? It was a misty and half-sinister entity, at once social, economic and intellectual, that was said to constitute an inner governing class in Britain. Like or loathe it, the Establishment seemed all-potent, pervading every aspect of life, and in those days still evidently so firm that nothing could budge it, not fascism or communism or liberal conviction.

  Well, when you did last hear the name of the Establishment? It is shattered and lost, and to my mind with it has gone, for better or for worse, that ingrained sense of cohesion that gave the kingdom its sinewy confidence. Not long ago – remember? – Britain’s position among the nations seemed to most of us irremovable. Now, citizens of the UK, I am told, are frequently emigrating to stabler countries – Ireland, say, or Norway, or New Zealand – and the very idea of Great Britain is increasingly unconvincing.

  Greater by far, though, and infinitely more suggestive, is the growing conviction that the world itself is coming to an end. It is not just creative fancy, this, not just the ghostly understanding that Wyclif (and I) have recognized. It is not even just conjecture, but scientific near-certainty, as the looming threats of climate change, poisonous contaminations, tidal withdrawals, terrorisms and threats of nuclear extermination circulate among … among … among … well, among people who know about these things, as against those of us who think they sense them.

  It may be only a ghostly understanding, but in my book it’s allegory.

  DAY 107

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  Here’s a smile to say goodnight. I was standing this afternoon on the waterfront down at Cricieth, surveying, as so often, the sea, the sunset and the little town around me. With me was a charming young American woman on her first visit to these parts. ‘Tell me,’ she said, pointing to our fourteenth-century castle on its commanding hill above the sea, hallowed to the memory of generations of Welsh kings, warriors and patriot heroes, ‘tell me,’ said she, ‘is that new?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ I think I told her.

  DAY 108

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  There is a word I think I shall adopt to express my general mood as the world, you and I lurch into the spring of 2019 – our general mood, I think you will agree, loitering somewhere between despair and resentment about the state of almost everything. In my whole life, during which as an all-too-prolific writer I must have used or misused several thousand words of the English language, I have never yet used the word ‘mordant’. Perhaps I should? Is that the one I want?

  No. ‘Mordant’, the Compact Oxford Dictionary tells me, means ‘sharply sarcastic’, which is not at all what I need. In its full, fifteen-volume version the OED goes further, adding references to the word meaning ‘a petty spirit of detraction’ and quoting the Spectator, 1854, as saying that Lord Salisbury was, as usual, very mordant in his tone towards Mr Gladstone.

  I want none of these meanings for my word. What I feel the need for is an abstract noun that expresses some more general, perhaps more mystical and less bitter response to the human condition, and so I propose to invent the word ‘mordancy’.

  Of course, the multi-volume OED has got there first. It says there already is such a word, and defines mordancy as ‘a petty spirit of detraction’. But that’s not what I want at all. No, mordancy is defined, in the Occasional Jan Morris Lexicon (2019), as ‘a regretful but essentially kind-hearted conception of universal bewilderment’.

  There! Mordancy. By all means use it yourselves!

  DAY 109

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>   There is no pretending that writing this daily diary is as easy as it used to be, if only because, as the years roll by, I have less to write about, and the affairs of the great world itself, viewed from my remote little watchtower, seem ever more squalidly repetitive. Nevertheless, as any diarist will confirm, I’m sure, keeping the diurnal memoir is an unfailing pleasure. The dullest day is enlivened for me when I sit down to write mine, and if it’s not always much fun for you, the hapless reader of my prattle, well, tough!

  I’ve got a whole bookcase of diary writings downstairs, from Pepys, of course, and sweet Francis Kilvert to George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, and it seems to me that those chroniclers all got great pleasure from the practice, if only perhaps from the thought that in keeping journals they were writing future books.

  Sometimes, though, like me, they got satisfaction from the maintenance of a discipline, and it seems that one such was Sir Walter Scott, that writer of mighty novels. One day in 1829 he failed to keep his diary for a couple of days, and so lost heart, he said, ‘to make it up for many a month’.

  I know how bad he felt, but anyway, nothing much happened to him for a time, and when he summoned up the resolve to start the diary again, he thought the hiatus months had been hardly worth writing about anyway.

  But the peremptory satisfaction of Discipline prevailed with Sir Walter, as it does with me. ‘Hang it!’ he wrote. ‘I hate to be beat, so here goes for better behaviour.’ And he picked up his pen again, thought up an entry, just as I have now returned smugly to my computer screen, and so, like me again, basked in Order’s Piety.

  DAY 110

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  Half the world seems to be snarled up in the labyrinth that is Brexit, and from far and wide friends, acquaintances and just casual readers of mine send me their messages of sympathy for the appalling mess we British have got ourselves into – even the Scots and Welsh among us, who have always thought of ourselves as separate communities anyway. Nobody can escape the quagmire.

  Except perhaps people like my dear old Elizabeth, who now half lives in the separate, cursed dominion of dementia. I remarked to her this morning, as I contemplated the day’s televised complexities, that people of our age will never outlive the tangles of Brexit; but, bless her soul, she cheerfully told me she has never heard of it.

  Brexit vs dementia. There is no denying that in my life now the temporal miseries of the one are as inescapable as the weird evils of the other. Between two harmless old souls like us who have lived together and loved one another for half a long lifetime, suddenly a strange curtain falls and a long, sweet relationship is ruptured, if only by petty irritations. And in our case at least, the worst of it is that I, the mere partner of the affliction, is the one more insidiously affected.

  You have perhaps heard how trying it is to live with a dementia sufferer, however long and affectionate the acquaintance. I suppose most people generally manage well enough. They understand their partner’s situation, do not blame them for it, and adjust their own behaviour accordingly. Some of us, though, fail in this response, and try as I may, I am all too often one of them, and so encounter the most truly insidious power of dementia: namely, that its effects can be transferable.

  In moments of exasperation, when Elizabeth’s behaviour can be most unconsciously irritating, I can be unforgivably cruel. I use words and phrases I despise, adopt rude attitudes that are not my own and think things I am ashamed to remember. It is a sort of momentary Satanic takeover, and as a lifelong agnostic, at such moments I do begin to suspect that while there may be no God, there surely must be, somewhere out there, a confoundedly cunning Devil …

  Fortunately, my ugly spasm does not last, and Elizabeth does not seem to notice. So now, having knocked off this splurge of a confession for you, I’m remorsefully going to take her out to lunch. But when I ask her where she’d like to go, and she replies, as she invariably does, for the millionth time, that just this once I must make up her mind for her, why do I always have to ask? – when she says that yet again, then, I admit it, a small gleam of Satanism does flicker in my mind …

  But with luck we shall enjoy the meal anyway.

  DAY 111

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  Today, at the very start of spring, when the daffodils are splurgeoning all over Trefan and All Fools’ Day is with us, an old friend in America has sent me a comic cartoon cover from the New Yorker. It depicts an unfortunate squawking cuckoo apparently being spewed in and out on a spring from the clock face of Big Ben. Alas, it is no joke, because it exactly satirizes the situation we in Britain – even in Wales and Scotland – all find ourselves in this morning, as we haplessly follow the apparently endless mechanics of the Brexit negotiations, in and out, twist and turn, to be jolted back time and again into Big bloody Ben.

  I suppose by now we must accept that we are at a nadir of our nation’s history – within my own lifetime deposed from a glorious climax to ignominy, from colossal self-respect to an American cartoon of a cuckoo clock at Westminster. Who would have believed it possible when I was young? Dear God, what would our fathers have thought, let alone our Victorian grandpapas?

  I asked my American friend not to rub it all in any deeper, and he kindly responded with some thoughts about President Trump.

  DAY 112

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  Feeling in a rather embarrassingly hail-fellow-well-met sort of mood today, I set off on my statutory thousand-pace exercise along the seafront promenade with Mendelssohn’s jolly ‘Wedding March’ as my mental theme. It goes with a swing from the start – does it not? – with ‘Here comes the Bride’, and I strode along to its rhythm, smiling ingratiatingly to one and all.

  After a while, though, ‘Here comes the Bride’ began to pall, and I could not for the life of me remember what came next in that joyous ensemble. So being, as I confessed to you, in a tiresomely effusive frame of mind, as I strode on I accosted suitable pedestrians coming the other way, sang the first bit of the tune and asked in my best boisterous manner if they could tell me what came next. Their replies were sometimes just astonished by so queer an accost, sometimes slightly affronted, sometimes more or less incredulous, but generally speaking, I must say, gently amused. Only one middle-aged couple took me seriously, thought deeply and gave me, as I later found, the correct and complex musical answer (not unconnected with Wagner).

  I hope I was polite and suitably grateful to all of them, but looking back at the episode now from the sedate seclusion of my library, I am not fond of myself. I don’t much like people of the hail-fellow kind, especially when they’re me.

  DAY 113

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  A touch of farce on a bad day yesterday (for at this juncture in March 2019, you may remember if you’re old enough, every day has been bad for almost everyone on earth). I had taken my dear old Honda Type R into a garage for what I fear must be its final cosmetic makeover. Mechanically, it is as fit as ever, but even I am a bit ashamed of its multitudinous scrapes, dents and rusted scars.

  The obliging garage people lent me a quite nice little blue Citroën to be going on with, and since the morning, if nothing else, was quite pleasant, I decided to take Elizabeth to a botanic centre, a few miles up the road, where they serve decent coffee. I drove the little Citroën rather gingerly, strange and complicated as it was to me, but I made it to the coffee place happily enough and parked in the empty car park there.

  Until we prepared to get out of the car and found – lo! – that we were locked inside it. No amount of pulling knobs, fiddling with levers or pressing buttons could open those doors for us, until at last another car turned up and a kindly couple, responding to our farcical gestures of despair, laughingly opened the doors from the outside.

  Well, it would have been laughs all the way, if it had not been that when we had drunk our coffee and returned to the Citroën, no amount of pulling knobs, fiddling with lev
ers or pressing buttons would make its engine start, and because we had only popped out for that coffee with a few coins, I had left at home in my handbag the name and address of the Citroën’s garage owner. We went inside the garden centre again and had another coffee and another … We were stuck, were we not, two old ladies not knowing what to do, but gradually as time passed it all developed into comedy. Not only the staff of the place, but all the other customers chimed in too, offering advice, finding telephone numbers, suggesting names, asking questions, offering coffee; and when at last, by somebody’s magical intervention, I don’t know who, two mechanics from the Citroën’s garage turned up, and with lengthy tinkerings and examinations at last made the engine start – well, by then, we were grateful friends with one and all, and before we drove off home, with the whole place still laughing, the people of the botanic centre gave us a coffee, with sandwiches too, on the house. I prayed to God as I cautiously drove the nice little car home, not at all sure what buttons or pedals to press, but by the time we had got safely back to Trefan, dear old Elizabeth had entirely forgotten the episode …

  And now the rejuvenated Honda is home again too, and smiling all over its face.

  DAY 114

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  I suppose half the world, this morning, is yearning for a Saviour, as mankind (and animal-kind too) stumbles on through the morass of miseries that engorges us one and all. Perhaps, in Britain anyway, we feel it most if we are very old and can remember this country’s halcyon years after the Second World War, when we were basking still in the glow of victory and the hope of happiness. Of course, it was part illusion and we were very young, but it was not all fraud – from our prime part in the reborn United Nations to the visionary National Health Service, things really were looking up for Great Britain, and many of us, young and old, simpletons and sophisticates alike, felt we had been brought to this by a Saviour.