One of the unexpected pleasures of Parkinson’s is doing something for nothing, The debate about this is apparently inexhaustible. The pros and cons need not concern us but the reality is the blog, the snippets for the Martock Leveller and anything to do with promoting the books. As for the money which doesn’t alas accompany such things there simply isn’t any. The blog would be compromised and the local publications too necessarily small – it’s a fact of life, I think, that this is so but it is and you pays your money. That said I wish there were money but I derive a loy of enjoyment from both, r4repite the lack of dosh. I think it separates the men from the goats in a writing sense. I am in the hands of the doctors of course one of whom is referred by Penny who insists that I am brain-damaged. To which I counter by pointing out that when I make a perfectly fair – to me anyway – point she is entitled to say ‘bullshit’ and ignore the valid point I was trying to make. Oh well. When I step out of line it is dementia but when she…oh well she never does and it is the small hours of the night and I have just had a cup of tea with Betjeman.
“John Betjeman, that balding bard/ believes that Britain is becoming marred by buildings which are ill-designed and of the unconsidered kind. He adds with ill-concealed derision that once or twice some crass decision has led to…” The Express, for whom I worked on staff got the whole interview in similar vein but B to whom I sent it protested that it was mere doggerel and set his daughter in the case. Cressida a friend of Derek Marks the Express editor did as she was told and Derek pulled it. My original was accepted by Murray for their archive. A pity as I had rather liked the bard over our cup of tea pace Lecky Bruce head of English at Sherborne who had found him in a third class compartment thumbing a rhyming dictionary. Richard Eyre once said on Desert Island Discs words to the effect that Lecky taught him all he knew about English and talking of tea I wonder whatever happened to Sam Twining who once held the royal warrant for tea and whom I first met researching an official book on the warrant. That was when I first met Hugh Faulkener a Scot and retired naval lieutenant commander who ran the warrant holders. Hugh’s passion was golf but I never played with him preferring to play with P Howard in darkest Ayrshire. Philip was Literary editor of the Times and I remember him buying one of my books at Penzance railway station. He pronounced it “Not bad” which was high praise coming from him as he once came to the CWA when I was running t and claimed never to read crime. The book was crime but my mother who loved her little boy didn’t like his crime novels. My mama who once complained that you got a better class of death in the Times which was why she took it preferred her death real not fictitious and definitely not in the family.
As I say, I’m in the hands of doctors which is a place determined by one’s beliefs. I take a dimmish view of the profession though not such a dim one as my younger brother and he’s dead! Anyway I accept the proviso that one’s views of doctors depends on personal prejudice but I would add in my defence that I am over seventy have four children and six grandchildren and have had a number of books published. Since we’re talking about life expectancy of between say sixty and ninety with corresponding performance my case, as they say, rests.
If I were a shrink I think I would relish the thought that I had a novelist as a patient and would try to read all the patient’s books in order to establish what went wrong, and when/…in the small hours of this morning I received an instruction to drop this regular blog. I don’t know where it came from – boffins probably – and I am normally inclined to take such instructions seriously. Nevertheless I’m reluctant to do this for all sorts of reason. I normally accept instructions contrary to the received wisdom, or at least without taking it into account. There is never any question of refusing to accept on grounds of provenance. The question of where such instruction comes from is neither here nor there.
A friend from Truro is going to be 80 and his wife has been eliciting verse and the best I could do was sombrero to sort of rhyme with the Cornish capital. I duly and badly sent this and other rhymes to Penny who later claimed to have no knowledge of sombrero. I was convinced I was dementing but it was the wife’s mistake. To my eternal discredit I felt rather pleased by this.
/Work comes into three categories – unpaid, paid and talking. The first need not concern us here but the second two are a matter of some moment. 2) even in a fallow year such as this several hundred pounds are generated by books and journalism. I must earn more money but Penny is sort of opposed to my methods of doing so.More work for Emma = bad luck! Seriously though I have decided a first-hand account of, by and for dementia sufferers using this blog as a basis. You have been warned and on the basis,spurious, but what the hell, on that basis I have formed an informal lunch club for members of the Glastonbury group of get louders. Don’t worry there’s no agenda and it is genuinely informal. And on informality which were there was a birthday recently There is a moral lurking in there which is that if it moves an old English person will form a club from it! You heard it here.