It’s rum to think it was only last weekend us crime-ficcies were living it up at the Bristol Crimefest. It seems a lot longer away. For one thing, the weather’s changed to intermittent driving rain and cold – just as I was thinking of breaking out the barbie, too. (Does anyone else, on a historical note, remember that comment of Jasper Carrot’s, referring to the Australian take on life in medieval France? “Open another tinnie of wine and throw another saint on the Barbie.”)
One of the highlights of the weekend was John Curran, Matthew Pritchard and Marcel Berlins talking about John’s new book, The Secret Notebooks of Agatha Christie. It was a really fascinating conversation. John Curran has spent ages working through the notes Agatha Christie left as she jotted down ideas for stories. Her handwriting was pretty hard to read apparently, and the notes weren’t in any particular order, so he’s done some very solid hard work in getting them into an order that a reader can really understand. I’ve ordered a copy from Amazon and am eagerly awaiting for it to arrive. Matthew Pritchard is, of course, Agatha Christie’s grandson, and was able to bring some fascinating family insights to bear in response to Marcel Berlins’ intelligent questions. Marcel Berlins is the former crime reviewer of The Times and a perfect choice to conduct the panel. One nice little sidelight was in response to the question about Mrs Ariadne Oliver. Ariadne Oliver is one of Agatha Christie’s best creations. Agatha Christie wasn’t a “comic” writer as such, but there’s an awful lot of humour in her books and when Mrs Oliver hoves into sight, you know there’s a some light-hearted moments in store. She can be serious, of course – she’s not a comic turn – but she does find the humour in situations. It’s always said that Mrs Oliver is Agatha Christie’s pen-portrait of herself, and all three on the panel confirmed that was, indeed, how Agatha Christie saw the agreeable Ariadne Oliver. Matthew Pritchard, after listening to what the others had to say, threw in another likeness – his grandmother loved apples! Poirot reflects (in Mrs McGinty’s Dead, I think) that apples and Ariadne Oliver always go together.
One contribution to the discussion came from Yours Truly. It was apology from a close friend of mine, Terry Thompson, who had met Agatha Christie in circumstances which he never really forgot. (Or got over, either, but you’ll see why in a minute.) Poor old Terry died some time ago, but this was his story.
He was a young student for the priesthood at the time and was delighted when one of his college friends invited him to a private dinner where Agatha Christie was to be a fellow-guest. She was very old and found walking difficult, so she got about in what, in her books, she always called “A wheeled chair”. She asked Terry, who she liked, to take her for a walk in the chair after dinner. Terry leapt to it, and soon this young student from Birkenhead was pushing one of England’s foremost writers down a fairly steep hill in the grounds of an English country house. It was a very steep hill; and Terry couldn’t find the brake. To his horror, the chair started to go faster and faster and pretty soon the chair was rattling down the hill with Terry ineffectively hanging on the back. (Think cartoons here; that gives the right sort of image!)
Well, he more or less knew what was going to happen and it did. The front wheel of the chair hit a stone and (again, think cartoons) Agatha Christie was precipitated out of her chair, sailed through the air and came to earth in a bush. Utterly horrified and full of apologies, Terry unpicked her from the foliage. Dame Agatha, a real lady, didn’t blame him – much. Terry, with his tail very much between his legs, pushed her up the hill and back to the safety of the dining-table. Agatha Christie, he was sorry to learn, died a few months afterwards, and he always wondered if he was The Man Who Had Killed Agatha Christie. Such is the unfeeling quality of human nature, that everyone, Dame Agatha’s grandson included, greeted this tale of woe with unseemly mirth! And, apparently, even Dame Agatha herself laughed. But afterwards, I imagine.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Crimefest
And so to Bristol, for a bakingly hot weekend of crime. Last weekend was the annual Crimefest run by Myles Allfrey and Adrian Muller and I, for one, would like to say a big thank-you to them for making such a brilliant weekend possible. Quite frankly, the thought of organising a convention on this scale makes me want to climb a tree and pull it up after me, but Myles and Adrian sale through and even (gosh!) look as if they’re enjoying it.
Writing, as it’s often said, is a lonely business. That’s perfectly true in my case, mainly, I suspect, because if anyone tries to make it a sociable business by coming in and nattering to me while I’m working, I tend to bite their head off. So it’s really great to get together with a crowd of other partial serial hermits and blow off steam.
How Crimefest works is that every published author gets a panel which they share (thank God) with three other writers and a moderator. My panel was moderated by the incredibly competent Edward Marston, author of tons of books, including the railway series which are fun about Inspector Colbeck, a mid 19th Century policeman with a penchant for railways, Rebecca Jenkins, author of The Duke’s Agent, an 18th Century mystery which I’m halfway through and enjoying very much and Andrew Taylor, who, despite being by any standards a star, is a very modest man and a very good speaker. The discussion was called “Centuries of Murder” and allowed all sorts of musings on why, with modern conveniences to hand, we should bump people off in the past. Dunno really. It’s more fun that way I suppose and you don’t have to bother about DNA and stuff.
Duty done, I was able to sit back, relax and watch everyone else do the work. The amazing thing is how well-informed everyone seems and what active lives folk have had. Take Linda Regan, for instance. As well as being a writer she’s an actress who’s starred in The Bill and Holby City, Pat McIntosh who’s a palaeontologist, Zoe Sharp who’s action woman personified and Michael Stanley, who’s two people really, both retired South African professors, who have tracked lions, fly aircraft and fought bush fires. Sometimes I think I haven’t tried hard enough. Having industrial amounts of children and going to Tesco’s doesn’t seen as exciting somehow.
But, of course, the real pleasure of any weekend like this is meeting old friends and making new ones. J.G. Goodhind (Jeannie to her friends) is always fun to meet up with and like the living embodiment of her character, Honey Driver. Less corpses perhaps – but that’s a social plus, really. Dinner beckoned and a group of us hit Bristol. I was trying to drag my fellow diners into the 21st Century by showing them my ipod. Marvel, I said, at its neatness, its compactness etc, etc. Prithee, look and I will even use it as a video camera. Well, that fell flat. Without a handy teenage I couldn’t get to play the damn thing. Huh. Never mind, I said, brightening, there’s tons of music on it. Play me something you think I’d like, said Rebecca Jenkins. Okey-doke. I selected a classical piece, George Butterworth’s Banks of Green Willow. How about you, Suzette, I said, proffering the instrument to Suzette Hill. Now Suzette’s got an incredibly expressive face. As she listened, that incredibly expressive fisog turned to horror and she ripped the earphones out with a shudder. “Disgusting,” she said with deep feeling. Well, dash it, my music selection’s not as bad as all that. It was the Jazz standard Sway I was playing. “I know,” she said in a sort of heartfelt way. “Bend with me, sway with me? Well, really.” I felt just like Bouncer the dog encountering Maurice the cat and if you’ve read Suzette’s books you’ll know exactly what I mean. Meow!
Writing, as it’s often said, is a lonely business. That’s perfectly true in my case, mainly, I suspect, because if anyone tries to make it a sociable business by coming in and nattering to me while I’m working, I tend to bite their head off. So it’s really great to get together with a crowd of other partial serial hermits and blow off steam.
How Crimefest works is that every published author gets a panel which they share (thank God) with three other writers and a moderator. My panel was moderated by the incredibly competent Edward Marston, author of tons of books, including the railway series which are fun about Inspector Colbeck, a mid 19th Century policeman with a penchant for railways, Rebecca Jenkins, author of The Duke’s Agent, an 18th Century mystery which I’m halfway through and enjoying very much and Andrew Taylor, who, despite being by any standards a star, is a very modest man and a very good speaker. The discussion was called “Centuries of Murder” and allowed all sorts of musings on why, with modern conveniences to hand, we should bump people off in the past. Dunno really. It’s more fun that way I suppose and you don’t have to bother about DNA and stuff.
Duty done, I was able to sit back, relax and watch everyone else do the work. The amazing thing is how well-informed everyone seems and what active lives folk have had. Take Linda Regan, for instance. As well as being a writer she’s an actress who’s starred in The Bill and Holby City, Pat McIntosh who’s a palaeontologist, Zoe Sharp who’s action woman personified and Michael Stanley, who’s two people really, both retired South African professors, who have tracked lions, fly aircraft and fought bush fires. Sometimes I think I haven’t tried hard enough. Having industrial amounts of children and going to Tesco’s doesn’t seen as exciting somehow.
But, of course, the real pleasure of any weekend like this is meeting old friends and making new ones. J.G. Goodhind (Jeannie to her friends) is always fun to meet up with and like the living embodiment of her character, Honey Driver. Less corpses perhaps – but that’s a social plus, really. Dinner beckoned and a group of us hit Bristol. I was trying to drag my fellow diners into the 21st Century by showing them my ipod. Marvel, I said, at its neatness, its compactness etc, etc. Prithee, look and I will even use it as a video camera. Well, that fell flat. Without a handy teenage I couldn’t get to play the damn thing. Huh. Never mind, I said, brightening, there’s tons of music on it. Play me something you think I’d like, said Rebecca Jenkins. Okey-doke. I selected a classical piece, George Butterworth’s Banks of Green Willow. How about you, Suzette, I said, proffering the instrument to Suzette Hill. Now Suzette’s got an incredibly expressive face. As she listened, that incredibly expressive fisog turned to horror and she ripped the earphones out with a shudder. “Disgusting,” she said with deep feeling. Well, dash it, my music selection’s not as bad as all that. It was the Jazz standard Sway I was playing. “I know,” she said in a sort of heartfelt way. “Bend with me, sway with me? Well, really.” I felt just like Bouncer the dog encountering Maurice the cat and if you’ve read Suzette’s books you’ll know exactly what I mean. Meow!
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Take Your Partners...
My daughter Helen loves the Eighteenth Century. She is virtually word-perfect in Jane Austin, took us all on a (very) guided tour of Bath and, when she had to produce a presentation with pictures for her job application to the Nuclear Industry Graduates Programme, chose to do it on Eighteenth Century fashion. (Yes, yes, I know; nuclear power and fancy frocks don’t seem to have much in common, but the Grad scheme people were looking for depth of knowledge and presentation skills. Anyway, she got the job.) Last Christmas one of her “best” presents was a Georgian silver fruit knife and fork which I bought off ebay. That being the case, she’s been chuffed rotten this week when those old Eighteenth Century names, the Tories (aka Conservatives) and the Whigs (aka Liberal Democrats) have healed the differences of the last few centuries or so and come together in a love-in. David Cameron said it was “Time for change,” and, by jingo, he’s got it, even if it wasn’t quite the change he or anyone else had in mind.
A week, as we all know, is a long time in politics, but the speed at which the transition happened was amazing. John Stewart and his team on the Daily Show, the American political satirical show which we get a day late in Britain, had a procession of various news clips where the rapidity of the transfer was marvelled at. I loved John Oliver’s take on the transition. He quite correctly likened President Obama’s accession to power to a coronation which, with the vast crowds and adulation, it was. However, when we have a coronation it’s really a coronation with proper Queens and Kings and Crowns and choirs singing Zadok The Priest and so on, not a mere swapping-over of bureaucrats. So, minutes after Nick Clegg gave the thumbs-up to the alliance with David, it was David in the front door of Number 10, Gordon out the back, and by the way, have you cancelled the milk, turned the gas off and put the cat in its travelling basket?
The first time Britain had a collation government was in 1915. That was also a Liberal and Conservative partnership. The Liberal Asquith (nicknamed “Squiffy” for readily ascertainable reasons and who was afterwards replaced by Lloyd George) came together with the Conservatives.
In an odd echo of today, Britain became a much more international place. The Belgians had a whole colony in Richmond-on-Thames where an arsenal, staffed by Belgians, was built. Australian, Canadian and South African soldiers were a common sight, Brighton Pavilion was turned over to house recuperating Indian troops and Americans played baseball in Arsenal football stadium. Incidentally, Asquith and Lloyd George would have been a gift to a modern tabloid. Lloyd George was notorious for his roving eye and Asquith made a habit of writing all the day’s secrets to his mistress, Venetia Stanley every evening. And he put the letters in the ordinary post. And they were delivered about two hours later. Wow. Just imagine if he’d had email!
Despite everything (such as the biggest war yet staged, air-raids, industrial strife, Ireland on the boil etc., etc.,) the government did okay. With the new collation government only a few days into its term of office, I find that an oddly cheering thought.
A week, as we all know, is a long time in politics, but the speed at which the transition happened was amazing. John Stewart and his team on the Daily Show, the American political satirical show which we get a day late in Britain, had a procession of various news clips where the rapidity of the transfer was marvelled at. I loved John Oliver’s take on the transition. He quite correctly likened President Obama’s accession to power to a coronation which, with the vast crowds and adulation, it was. However, when we have a coronation it’s really a coronation with proper Queens and Kings and Crowns and choirs singing Zadok The Priest and so on, not a mere swapping-over of bureaucrats. So, minutes after Nick Clegg gave the thumbs-up to the alliance with David, it was David in the front door of Number 10, Gordon out the back, and by the way, have you cancelled the milk, turned the gas off and put the cat in its travelling basket?
The first time Britain had a collation government was in 1915. That was also a Liberal and Conservative partnership. The Liberal Asquith (nicknamed “Squiffy” for readily ascertainable reasons and who was afterwards replaced by Lloyd George) came together with the Conservatives.
In an odd echo of today, Britain became a much more international place. The Belgians had a whole colony in Richmond-on-Thames where an arsenal, staffed by Belgians, was built. Australian, Canadian and South African soldiers were a common sight, Brighton Pavilion was turned over to house recuperating Indian troops and Americans played baseball in Arsenal football stadium. Incidentally, Asquith and Lloyd George would have been a gift to a modern tabloid. Lloyd George was notorious for his roving eye and Asquith made a habit of writing all the day’s secrets to his mistress, Venetia Stanley every evening. And he put the letters in the ordinary post. And they were delivered about two hours later. Wow. Just imagine if he’d had email!
Despite everything (such as the biggest war yet staged, air-raids, industrial strife, Ireland on the boil etc., etc.,) the government did okay. With the new collation government only a few days into its term of office, I find that an oddly cheering thought.
Sunday, May 9, 2010
Virtually elected
So the election has finally happened. The Nation Decides said the poster advertising the Manchester Evening News last Thursday. As a matter of fact, the Nation sort of went Hmmm. Choice? How about None Of The Above. The weird thing is that Gordo, (whose smile is easily one of the funniest things on TV – it clearly sneaks up on him when he’s not expecting it) is still at Number 10. He moved in without being elected and, now his party has polled fewer votes than Dynamite Dave, he’s still not going anywhere.
The election coverage was a happy hunting ground for anyone with a sense of humour. Jeremy Vine moved into a virtual world where he virtually paved the road outside Number 10 and only broke off to wander up and down a virtual staircase hung with virtual portraits of former leaders of hung parliaments. Every time he spoke, red, yellow and blue lines shot out of his fingers like some sort of psychedelic Spiderman and, when it finally began to penetrate that Nick Clegg, far from sweeping to a comfortable second, was being sent back to the basket, a man in the studio worried himself stupid about when was the best time to Activate The Queen.
Now many cutting remarks have been made about the way the Queen waves. True enough, it does have a faint air of the mechanical arm about it, but that’s a long way from suggesting that she’s been Activated. My picture of her at the end of a long day Queening is that she kicks her shoes off and asks Philip to put the kettle on, not, as this startling image suggested, that the Duke of Edinburgh flips open a panel and presses the off switch. Does the Queen have a standby button so she’s ready to be Activated at any time or is the plug removed entirely so she has to warm up?
I think we should be told.
On the domestic front, my old pal, Angela Churm came for the weekend and we celebrated by opening a bottle of champagne. (Yo! Love that noise as the cork comes out.) Dom Pierre Pérignon, (who was my sort of monk) called out, the night he invented champagne, “Come quickly! I am drinking stars!” He wasn’t, obviously a man to undersell his products. Oddly enough, although he was a Benedictine, he didn’t invent Benedictine. And why were we popping corks? Because Angela had a TV show screened Wot She Wrote. It was an episode of the mid-day soap, Doctors that we’d recorded and we watched it together, hence the champers. It was an excellent episode and the good news is that she’s got a commission for another. So that’s another bottle, then. Glug!
The election coverage was a happy hunting ground for anyone with a sense of humour. Jeremy Vine moved into a virtual world where he virtually paved the road outside Number 10 and only broke off to wander up and down a virtual staircase hung with virtual portraits of former leaders of hung parliaments. Every time he spoke, red, yellow and blue lines shot out of his fingers like some sort of psychedelic Spiderman and, when it finally began to penetrate that Nick Clegg, far from sweeping to a comfortable second, was being sent back to the basket, a man in the studio worried himself stupid about when was the best time to Activate The Queen.
Now many cutting remarks have been made about the way the Queen waves. True enough, it does have a faint air of the mechanical arm about it, but that’s a long way from suggesting that she’s been Activated. My picture of her at the end of a long day Queening is that she kicks her shoes off and asks Philip to put the kettle on, not, as this startling image suggested, that the Duke of Edinburgh flips open a panel and presses the off switch. Does the Queen have a standby button so she’s ready to be Activated at any time or is the plug removed entirely so she has to warm up?
I think we should be told.
On the domestic front, my old pal, Angela Churm came for the weekend and we celebrated by opening a bottle of champagne. (Yo! Love that noise as the cork comes out.) Dom Pierre Pérignon, (who was my sort of monk) called out, the night he invented champagne, “Come quickly! I am drinking stars!” He wasn’t, obviously a man to undersell his products. Oddly enough, although he was a Benedictine, he didn’t invent Benedictine. And why were we popping corks? Because Angela had a TV show screened Wot She Wrote. It was an episode of the mid-day soap, Doctors that we’d recorded and we watched it together, hence the champers. It was an excellent episode and the good news is that she’s got a commission for another. So that’s another bottle, then. Glug!
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Jerusalem
Politicians and promises are in the air this week, with the election finally upon us. Come Friday morning we’ll know if it’s Got To Be Gordon’s, as the gin advert used to say or if Clegg-mania prevailed or if a Blue Note has been struck. At church this morning we were enjoined to vote and even, in a not-so-subliminal message, sang Jerusalem as the final hymn.
Well, I never mind singing Jerusalem. The words, by William Blake, are definitely odd but fuzzily inspiring and the tune’s great. Not so long ago, in this corner of England’s Mountains Green, we were surrounded with dark, satanic mills and there’s still plenty of factory chimneys left to remind us all of the thick smogs and the gritty taste in the air caused by lots of soot in the atmosphere. (I grew up thinking that all public buildings were made of black stone; it was a real shock when, after the Clean Air Acts, they were sandblasted and turned into honey-coloured sandstone and white Portland Stone.)
But promises… One innovation of recent years is the huge increase of students studying at university and they’re promised an awful lot.
Well, I’m delighted to say that daughter Helen, who graduated last year from Royal Holloway, University of London, finally managed to find a “proper” job. We got the news at the beginning of the week that she’s been successful in getting on a graduate trainee scheme, one of the fortunate final 30 out of 1,500 applicants.
Hallelujah! That meant an outbreak of cards, cake and a bottle or so of champagne, it was such brilliant news.
I can’t think of any recent graduate who hasn’t found it a real slog. It used to be much easier to get a graduate-type job. Naturally, with far fewer graduates chasing them!
At one time, of course, being a graduate was a fairly big deal. So few people went to university, that they really were a privileged group and creamed off the really desirable and sometimes well-paid jobs. Well, the courses haven’t, despite what some grumblers say, got easier, but there are far more students than there used to be. Helen’s been working, of course, but only as an office temp. The government (here come the promises) are very keen to tell us all how much extra graduates earn than non-graduates. Well, I suppose they might, but getting a degree, as so many have found out, is very far from being the fairy dust or magic wand politicians depict it as.
For a start, University is expensive. There are student loans at a good rate of interest, but they do have to be paid back. Then, to make an obvious but sometimes overlooked point, while a student is at university, they’re not earning anything. That’s three or four years with no income while contemporaries are bringing in a salary. These aren’t grumbles, just statements, and it’s a rare student who can complete the course without a big slug of help from home.
It helps, as a student’s parent, to know how a university works. Just because you’ve done a course in – say – Graphic Design or Creative Writing, doesn’t mean you’re going to be a Graphic Designer or any sort of Writer. Or a Forensic Scientist or lawyer or archaeologist. Sometimes politicians talk as if it does, but it’s simply not true. A degree, by itself, is good but most training schemes insist on a 2:1 (which represents a huge amount of work and considerable talent on the student’s part) – and some sort of post-graduate training is almost always necessary.
So where does that leave the politicians’ promises? True? Yes – but, as with most things, you have to read the small print. The devil, as William Blake might very well have thought, is in the detail.
Well, I never mind singing Jerusalem. The words, by William Blake, are definitely odd but fuzzily inspiring and the tune’s great. Not so long ago, in this corner of England’s Mountains Green, we were surrounded with dark, satanic mills and there’s still plenty of factory chimneys left to remind us all of the thick smogs and the gritty taste in the air caused by lots of soot in the atmosphere. (I grew up thinking that all public buildings were made of black stone; it was a real shock when, after the Clean Air Acts, they were sandblasted and turned into honey-coloured sandstone and white Portland Stone.)
But promises… One innovation of recent years is the huge increase of students studying at university and they’re promised an awful lot.
Well, I’m delighted to say that daughter Helen, who graduated last year from Royal Holloway, University of London, finally managed to find a “proper” job. We got the news at the beginning of the week that she’s been successful in getting on a graduate trainee scheme, one of the fortunate final 30 out of 1,500 applicants.
Hallelujah! That meant an outbreak of cards, cake and a bottle or so of champagne, it was such brilliant news.
I can’t think of any recent graduate who hasn’t found it a real slog. It used to be much easier to get a graduate-type job. Naturally, with far fewer graduates chasing them!
At one time, of course, being a graduate was a fairly big deal. So few people went to university, that they really were a privileged group and creamed off the really desirable and sometimes well-paid jobs. Well, the courses haven’t, despite what some grumblers say, got easier, but there are far more students than there used to be. Helen’s been working, of course, but only as an office temp. The government (here come the promises) are very keen to tell us all how much extra graduates earn than non-graduates. Well, I suppose they might, but getting a degree, as so many have found out, is very far from being the fairy dust or magic wand politicians depict it as.
For a start, University is expensive. There are student loans at a good rate of interest, but they do have to be paid back. Then, to make an obvious but sometimes overlooked point, while a student is at university, they’re not earning anything. That’s three or four years with no income while contemporaries are bringing in a salary. These aren’t grumbles, just statements, and it’s a rare student who can complete the course without a big slug of help from home.
It helps, as a student’s parent, to know how a university works. Just because you’ve done a course in – say – Graphic Design or Creative Writing, doesn’t mean you’re going to be a Graphic Designer or any sort of Writer. Or a Forensic Scientist or lawyer or archaeologist. Sometimes politicians talk as if it does, but it’s simply not true. A degree, by itself, is good but most training schemes insist on a 2:1 (which represents a huge amount of work and considerable talent on the student’s part) – and some sort of post-graduate training is almost always necessary.
So where does that leave the politicians’ promises? True? Yes – but, as with most things, you have to read the small print. The devil, as William Blake might very well have thought, is in the detail.
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