Jul 10

Day 10 – All the World’s a Stage

And I Marched Back Down Again…

I presume you recall Julie Andrews carolling away about the hills being alive and all that? Can I remind you that she was trilling away on top of a mountain. They kidded us that this was in Switzerland but I am sure it wasn’t…It was sited just outside Macclesfield and I have just climbed the bloody thing three times.

It happened like this I was plodding up this ghastly road – the sort of road that Kafka’s castle was on. – and when I turned round Jane had vanished. I grew convinced that she must have scooted ahead of me when I was preoccupied with the meaning of life or sex or death, happy little soul that am, but even when the road straightened out Jane was nowhere to be seen. Then an efficient looking lady walked towards me from down the hill and she told me Jane was nowhere to be seen.

I thought I had better wait and asked the woman that, if she saw Jane – small, with a vast straw hat… she is held together with bits of string, – to please give her this simple message:

“It’s all your fault!”

Like a demolition contractor, I like to get my retaliation in first.

Jane then sent me a text that reads; “sorry …come back to the bridge.”

When I got back to her the efficient lady had just delivered my pithy message.

Rare for Jane to admit fault.

I thought I wouldn’t rub it in, magnanimity is my middle name, so we walked in silence, until she said twenty minutes later;

“That was your fault…if you had done what I asked you to do then you would never have gone on as you did.” And on she went, “Darling, you have no idea.” What a diamond edge she can give that word when cross!

I was too out of breath to argue.

A Good Read

“I saw Sue Gibbs’ beautiful memoir ”The Call of the Litany Bird” in our host’s bookshelf today. It’s beautifully written and a must read for all those who recall Zimbabwe’s history with affection and sadness. Readers can get it on Amazon.

All the World’s a Stage

We are nothing like as confident as (we hope) the world thinks we are. Fortunately, most people take us at face value, and have little clue as to what’s going on beneath our cobbled-together facade. I learned some years ago that we should never take people at face value. Often we make lazy and foolish judgements about others based on the most superficial knowledge, and we are frequently wrong.

Time and again, I have convinced myself that so and so actively dislikes me and is purposefully cutting me dead only to find that instead he or she was preoccupied with problems or is in fact deeply shy. Further down the line, you often discover that the same person is actually delightful company and shares your passion for, say, poetry. It’s clear we should always reserve judgement.

Often we are so used to our own façade, we are only dimly aware that it exists. I am reasonably self aware, and I am convinced that if people knew what I was really like, I would be a friendless man. When this feeling overwhelms me, I try to follow Julie Andrew’s sugary advice: I hold my head up high, whistle a little tune and hope no one is watching me too carefully.

However, on occasion I become convinced that someone can laser through my cover. For example, I am positive a lady at church has me sized up and that she profoundly dislikes what she sees. I can tell by the way her expression slightly alters when she spots me; her head seems to shake and she frowns slightly – I know she knows. Whenever this happens, my mouth dries and my hands grow slightly damp. Mentally I begin to stammer the sort of apologies we used to make as inky-fingered fourth-formers when confronted by the head of house for smoking or other immoral behaviour.

Home Truths
The root is fear. P.G. Woodhouse suggested that if a telegram were to be sent to say 30 vicars at random reading, “Flee, all is discovered,” they would all instantly depart.

I have never thought that particularly funny because I think it’s probably true. I have often imagined my office door opening to reveal two men in striped suits silently standing there. I see myself nodding, then rising to tidy my desk. Not a word is uttered because I know it’s pointless. The fact that I am a complete fraud has at last been discovered.

Not for the first time either. I recall that when I was in the army, I bought dinner for a girlfriend in a smart London restaurant. I was young and gauche, and she was very pretty. I was out to impress – I talked incessantly and I was sure that at the end of the meal she thought I was Mr Wonderful.

When the coffee arrived, an older man strolled up and sat down at out table uninvited. I was about to protest when he sneered, “Just shut up! You have ruined my meal with your bragging stories. Everyone here was laughing at you. You are a dreadful little upstart and you should be ashamed of yourself!”

Then he turned to my girlfriend and advised, “And you are far too intelligent and attractive to be going out with a jerk like him, get yourself another boyfriend.”

I’m afraid to say she took his advice. It took me some time to recover…

Heart’s Desire
Men, particularly men, ought to be careful. I have a friend – let’s call him Mark – who was as faithful to his wife, Judy, as a randy ferret. He was known in the army as the “guided muscle” and he lived up to his reputation right royally. He was clearly deeply insecure and he filled his emptiness and loneliness with casual sex with whomever he could. He even convinced himself that his long-suffering wife was wholly unaware of his philandering, but of course she knew all about his hobby from day one. It would seem that most wives have something of a talent for spotting the signs of womanising and drawing the obvious conclusions.

Of course, the fact that Mark was a serial fornicator was well known to the couple’s circle too – after all he had made passes at most of the wives. Despite this, Judy decided to keep her husband’s infidelity a “secret” for years. While her four precious children were still growing up, she believed the best way she could protect them would be to turn a blind eye to her husband’s behaviour.

However, on the very day the youngest child left university, Judy announced that she had had enough of the evasions, lies and humiliation, and she wanted a divorce. Mark was gobsmacked but after he had recovered his equanimity he tried to play hardball by saying he couldn’t care less and would at once move in with his latest mistress.

“Fine,” responded Judy. “Do what you like but I still want a divorce.”

Off went Mark to tell his mistress that their fling was now a permanent relationship.

“Permanence is the last thing I need,” she laughed. “I cherish my independence too much – our twice-a-month motel meeting is all I want out of this.”

My pal has ended up completely alone in a grotty Clapham flat. It should be a warning to us all really: be careful what you wish for. As the old saying goes, there is only one thing worse than not getting your heart’s desire and that is getting it.

Jul 09

Day 9 – The Guide Dog and the Elephants

What a dreary morning! After someone drove into the car a funny little light went on which we think we must be seen to by the official agent; this has introduced a degree of uncertainty into the proceedings. We have decided to take each day as it comes, and on we plod as we await the prognosis about the car.

Guide Dog
I walked into a shopping arcade with Dinah on a lead. Shoppers billed and cooed and Dinah then decided to give one helpless old lady one of her more exuberant greetings – the Dinah “Hello” – consists of her giving a wild war cry and leaping three feet in the air, launching herself at whatever target presents itself, before sticking her vast tongue into their ear. When the old lady had been picked up and had more or less recovered, a bossy official announced to me that “dogs are prohibited”, but then he saw how old and decrepit I am for he then said: “I presume she is a Guide Dog?” I just walked on. How he could imagine that the fool Dinah, who had just flattened a passing pensioner, could guide anyone beats me.

–

Am I allowed a little sneer? Okay it’s just a little one. One of the things we note as we flog along is that often the smaller the detached house, the larger the gates with gold topped spear heads. Some of the smaller houses parade lion statues on their walls with abrupt notices: “ Strictly Private: Keep Out!” with speaker phones to pour even more discouragment on the hapless herds of the impertinent. The subtext is “I am considerably richer than you are, you peasant!” I am reminded of the saying “big hat; no cattle”, or as Sylvio Berlascone might say:“Nice mink: no knickers.”

—
A Privilege 
Each day brings a fresh surprise and Sunday evening was a special treat. I knew the name “Honeyford” but, such is the speed of events, I couldn’t recall where.

Angela Honeyford is the widow of the great Ray, who died two years ago. He died too late to see his prescient forecast, that multiculturism makes no sense, accepted by all leading respected political parties .

Ray was the first-class head of a school in Bradford. In 1984 he spoke out against the Asian community who were determined to ensure that their children, whilst enjoying British social and political privelege, were to be educated with the values of the Indian sub-continent intact.

Honeyford saw that, if we are to preserve the future of our country, we have to integrate our recently arrived minorities through a shared school curriculum and a secular rule of law that protects women and girls from the kind of abuse which he saw daily.

There was an easily predictable explosion with placards denouncing Ray Honeyford as “Ray-cist”. He was forced to resign. The educational establishment lost one of its most humane and public-spirited representatives. He continued to protest against the educational establishment’s plans to remove all signs of patriotism from our schools and erase the memory of England from the cultural record.

Ray was heroic and a gentle man who was prepared to pay the price of truthfulness at a time of lies.

It’s a privilege to be the guest of this man’s widow.

–

Elephants in the Room
We are a couple of spacewalkers with sticks clicking down a long tarmac road. It’s slanting with rain. The sky has elephant-coloured clouds chasing towards us and we have a gloomy, sodden hour to go before we plan to stop.

Then, before long, the elephants flee and we can see enough blue to make a sailor’s trousers. Then, after we turn down a steep track that rises and falls over fields, the day transforms into a sunny Turner pastoral oil painting.

We believe fondly that the people who are running the country aren’t totally stupid, that those who rule over us are working with a sense of history and common-sense, that they have access to the best advisors available to make our country significantly freer, more prosperous and contented than, say, before both the world wars that dominated the last century.

We are commemorating the beginning of the first world war. It’s not a long time ago in terms of world history but of course it’s as relevent as the Roman invasion to many of today’s young, who couldn’t care less what either were about.

But, imagine for a minute you are the shade from a northern soldier and you have risen from your grave, in which you have lain these past one hundred years. You fought for freedom, for King and country. Simple stuff, perhaps, but your family was comforted that you did not die in vain.

You revisit your home town and take a look at your old school. You find they are teaching English as a foreign language. The first language is not German, which it might be if we had lost either of the world wars, but Urdu! And many of the children believe they are living in an alien country, and some have been taught that women are inferior to men, and that white women are no better than prositutes. They are taught that their culture is superior in every way to that of their host country.

As you clamber back into your grave you might be forgiven for wondering why you bothered to fight at all…

Rogers and Hammerstein observed in ther musical “South Pacific” , “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear, you’ve got to be taught from year to year, it’s got to be drummed into your dear little ear, you’ve got to be carefully taught. You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late, before you are six or seven or eight. To hate all the people your relatives hate, you’ve got to be carefully taught.”

How has this happened?

We walk on. The clouds have returned.

Jul 08

Day 8 – Your Place or Mine

Today was a trial. Someone backed into our car: it poured with rain and we were soaked; the dog seems to think it was a bird and “flew” out of the car window (fortunately unhurt); we got lost and wandered for what seemed like hours getting increasingly frustrated. But we are postive! We have arrived unhurt, battered but unbowed and it’s amazing what a gin and tonic can do. .

We walked from Strand to Swinton and then to Eccles and on to Trafford. We started down a wooded valley. The noise from the M62 is simply terrible and we had to shout to make ourselves heard. I suppose residents get used to it but we both found the relentless noise stressful.

When we emerged we were walking through some of the bleakest urban areas in the U.K. When the mills died many of the aspirant youth left leaving the helpless and aged behind. Many of the streets resonate with little hope and loneliness.

A shop as we passsed was advertising “clean manure.” I have now seen everything.

We passed a plump girl of about ten (I reckon) gnawing a Mars Bar and drinking a bright yellow sugary drink.

As readers of past blogs will have read I have commented on “flab” Britain before, but I have to say that they look at least 20 per cent worse today than they did four years ago when we started walking. The men are as plumped up as the women with their vast paunches creating small bow waves as they plod along.

We stayed with a retired doctor who told us that no one feels able to say anything to the obese for fear of giving offence.

So we have check mate. We have a conspiracy of silence in which heart conditions and diabetes are allowed to flourish. This creates misery for the sufferers… and vast bills for the taxpayers via our overburdened NHS.
The other acute concern is that fat children mix with other fat children, so playgrounds are today thronged with overweight children. So, I suppose, being the fat kid on the block is today the norm. The thin kid is the freak.

We walk through a thick scattering of litter clogging the paths, the drains and the gardens. Many of the windows are plastered with the cross of St George and posters parading “England”. Who will break the ghastly news to them that we lost weeks ago?

Its easy to sneer and laugh at obesity and squalor. As someone who has enjoyed privelege in my life I should be careful. I was taken to task in the last walk by a man who had just read one of my harsher descriptions of urban deprivation. “I wonder,” he said gently,” what silent and courageous work goes on in these unhappy circumstances.”

Of course he was right.

Your Place or Mine?

Today, one of our young walkers regaled me with details of the opportunities afforded nowadays by two “apps” that facilitate immediate bonking. One is “Blendr” for heterosexuals, while “Grindr” caters for the homosexual community.

He told me that he had used one of the apps. I commented that the whole thing seemed an empty experience to me. He replied: “Yes I suppose it is but, as empty experiences go, it was one of the best!”

Bim Bam…
Apparently when you walk into a pub in any major urban centre, there will be plenty of people in the immediate vicinity who are “up for it”, that is, to avail themselves of immediate sex with someone they have never met before. It’s the ultimate immediate gratification. The apps use the user’s mobile’s location device to show them who – within the surrounding area – may be feeling similarly inclined. The two lucky people then swap text messages and can meet to swiftly look each other up and down. If they fancy what they see, then it’s “your place or mine”? Then off the pair trot to commit the capital deed, and it’s another notch on the bedstead and “Bim-Bam, thank you Mam”.

Well I suppose it’s a tad better than hooking… no actual money changes hands. But this way of gaining satisfaction offers no commitment, no romance and no respect. People are treated as objects of convenience. Would I own shares in either of the two sites? Are they any worse than “Wonga?” I wonder, does the Anglican Church own shares inadvertently in either Blendr or Grindr? Perhaps it’s better not to ask!

I scowl with disapproval. I wonder what women, in their heart of hearts, truly feel about this sort of thing. In my day, women were said to be the gentler sex and humankind doesn’t change much, if at all. I know some women claim this sexual upheaval or revolution is liberating and wonderful, but perhaps it’s just that they’re keen to be seen as “laddish” and popular, the sort of girls who are “up for anything”. And the majority usually follows the example set by their peer group.

Nineteen Sixty-three
If I was still young, then who knows how I would react? Or you, dear reader? I missed it all by a whisker. It was Philip Larkin who summed things up succinctly:

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.

So that’s that! I discuss my thoughts with Jane, and we both agree that the great Maurice Chevalier had a point when he sang in Gigi, “I’m glad I’m not young anymore.”

Commitment
Recently, I went to watch our three-year old granddaughter, Amelie, dancing in a school show. Her parents warned us she might not actually muster the courage to appear on stage, but she did – and of course, she was a triumph! She whirled and rolled and pranced, and we were thrilled that she was brave enough to perform. It was a great breakthrough for her.

However, the other performers were not exactly Darcy Bussell. In fact, to be cruel, there were some adult dancers who were downright ungainly. I sniggered at them. What a farce! How could they make such a public spectacle of themselves?

Then I saw that there some of the children on stage had Down’s syndrome. I suddenly realised that this was a hugely important occasion for them and that the older dancers I had been sneering at were their teachers. I then wondered to myself how much time, toil and tears – and sheer love – had been invested in this performance. I was watching a triumph of love and devoted care over acute disability. It was awesome and as I have never spent even a single minute helping Down’s children, I realised that my cynical, hard-nosed, snotty attitude was a downright disgrace. I felt deeply ashamed of myself and the memory lingers still.

The Show Must Go On
Some time ago, I employed a salesman whose Irish granny was taken gravely ill. He was away for 10 days, and each time I asked him when he was planning to return to his job, I was made to feel profoundly unsympathetic to his family’s plight. The good lady was 94, and as the salesman was neither her doctor nor the undertaker, I couldn’t stop wondering what he thought he was doing with his time?

My friend, Cassandra Jardine, one of the Telegraph Group’s leading writers, died two years ago aged 57. She left a husband and five children, some of whom were still young. Her actor husband had a part in a play at the time and never missed a performance.

Go figure as they say.

Jul 07

Day 7 – One Man’s Meat

We switchback out of Blackburn playing matador to the vast number of fancy cars that seem intent on goring us.
Half way down a precipitous hill and a mere foot away from the trafic rode a pretty little girl on a bike at great speed. I reckon she was about eight. I asked her if her mummy knew where she was and what she was doing? She nodded vaguely and gave me a gorgeous smile. Should I try and find her mum? Jane had gone on ahead. In the wake of all the publicity that surrounds old men and young girls a red hackle rose in my mind. Reader I settled for suggesting to her that she gets her mum at least to buy her a hard hat. Its a sad state of affairs that single men worry about helping young girls. Were my intentions noble? Of course they were, but you can’t prove a negative!

The Hosts with the Most
Three cheers for the hospitable Zane hosts who offer us such a warm welcome and so many unexpected kindnesses. In the last four walks we will have stayed with over 100 people. One of the main pleasures of the trip for both Jane and me is to meet such a wide variety of kind folk who are becoming friends.
It is invidious to name some, for if we do that, why not all? However Jane and I want to highlight the substantial number of heroic widows who keep on being positive, often in the face of considerable loneliness.

 

It is relatively easy to find friends to do something with but it is rarely possible to find people to do nothing with. We live in a world which is often indifferent to the plight of others. Without sounding preachy, when you next give a party why not ask a singleton along?. The numbers at dinner don’t have to be even. Guests usually come to eat and talk, not mate!

 

Richard the driver is a great asset. He took over from our national treasure Harry Campbell whom we much miss and who was a hard act to follow. Richard is a very different character and we have all become close friends, we laugh at the same sort of things. As a retired military man Richard is used to looking after unreliable, whining and often incompetent soldiers who leave things behind as a matter of routine and are often unruly and late, so he is well attuned to looking after us.
He does have the occasional fixation. He is insistent, for example, that one of our hosts’ relations is a serial killer because she has, so he says, the mad eyes of a Crippen! When we held a recent function in London he stalked up to me and whispered:
” There. Look! There she is again!”
He is convinced that she has buried her father in the rose bushes of her house. The poor woman looks wholly virtuous to Jane and me, but who knows? He may be right.

One Man’s Meat

“Ethical investment” has become fashionable and firms have been set up offering such a service. I saw Comic Relief as well as Amnesty International being pasted in a recent Panorama programme, allegedly for investing some of their reserves in what were deemed to be “unacceptable” investments.

The trouble is that this area is supremely subjective: what’s one man’s meat is another’s poison. Take one example: I happen to loathe everything to do with tobacco. Why? Because I watched both my parents die from smoking related illnesses. In my mother’s case, she suffered a hideous, choking death. Others are relaxed about the substance (I can’t think why, but there you go.)

Some people loathe defence companies while others shun firms related to alcohol. Personally, I am relaxed about defence and I am also open to investing in companies dealing with alcohol. Of course alcohol can be grossly abused, but then so can many things. For example, too much of the wrong kind of food can cause obesity or cars may be driven too fast. These products can be abused and may kill or cause social mayhem, so where do you draw the line?

Wonga Woes
The poor old Archbishop of Canterbury came spectacularly adrift when it was found that the Church had inadvertently invested in Wonga, the very business he had chosen to strongly criticise. He confessed that it gets increasingly complicated: most banks are involved in loaning money at high interest rates and charge clients Wonga-sized sums for taking brief unauthorised overdrafts. Even so called “respectable” businesses such as W.H. Smith sell pornographic magazines on their top shelves; most hotel groups have a porn channel in rooms that can easily be accessed by their residents; food companies often suck nutritious elements from products and replace them with fat or sugar; and then there are the finance houses…

Take a look at the PR firms and advertising agencies, which try and persuade us to buy things we don’t want with money we don’t have. Most accountants, however they strive to dress it up, are involved with tax avoidance. Many TV companies make a fortune from gaming companies, property companies often house companies involved in all sorts of derring-do and even derring-don’t, and so it goes on. Any company that is without sin can cast the first stone!

ZANE has a modest reserve for it’s impossible to run the charity properly without one. I have told our advisors that I dislike tobacco companies and obvious porn; with that in mind, their job is to make as much money as possible to expand ZANE’s work. I have a dreadful image of having to tell a starving pensioner or a child suffering from clubfoot that we can’t afford to help them because we have an “ethical” investment policy and we have run out of money.

Perhaps Mother Teresa, when facing yet another grinning rat with a gold tooth who was offering her a fat case full of grubby bank notes, had the best answer. “I will accept money from any source,” she is alleged to have said. “If it’s money from a wicked source, we will sanctify it by spending it on the poor.”

Twisting in the Wind
Even though I am not a close friend of Andrew Mitchell, his situation offends me. The police have spent thousands of hours investigating what went wrong; five policemen have been discharged for conduct unbecoming, and one has been jailed. The police Commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan Howe, has been obliged to offer Andrew a public apology.

Yet Andrew is still twisting slowly in the wind, his career more or less destroyed and now facing a defamation action financed by the ghastly Police Federation. Apparently Andrew accused a policeman of not telling the truth when he was accused of using the word “pleb”. If the Police Federation is going to finance all actions when the word of a policeman is brought into question, then presumably anyone who pleads “not guilty” when the evidence against him or her relies on police testimony is likely to face an action backed by the Federation. The courts will be busy indeed.

What fills me with profound disquiet is the extent of the police corruption that was surrounding Downing Street, for that is what it was. It’s not just a matter of a bent copper or two; there appears to have been a conspiracy on an industrial scale involving numerous policemen hell-bent on damaging the government and bringing down a cabinet minister if they could. Just like the Goodfellas – but without their looks or charm – they were prepared to do anything necessary to get the business done.

The gang might have succeeded if Andrew had not been angry, persistent and wealthy. He and Newsnight were able to investigate. Unfortunately for the conspirators, one of them was fool enough to invent a witness; then, like Humpty Dumpty, the whole shoddy enterprise had a great fall.

Various questions need answering:
1: It appears that Andrew received – to put it politely – limp-wristed assistance from the “anything for a quite life” Cabinet Secretary at Number Ten. Has there been an apology?
2: How many other police conspiracies are there out there against, for example, impoverished and unheard of members of ethnic minorities?
3: How many innocent people are languishing in the Nick who shouldn’t be?
4: Why should anyone believe a policeman again without corroborating evidence?
5: Various newspapers such as the Sun jumped on the anti-Mitchell bandwagon and sought to kick him senseless. When will they apologise?
6: Smelling blood in the water, various parliamentary colleagues put their snotty thumbs down when Andrew needed help. When will they apologise?
7: Ed Miliband: scathing, merciless and plain wrong. When will he apologise?
8: And last but not least, when will Andrew get a Cabinet job back?

Peeping Tom (Part II)
In my last walk commentary, I detailed the time when I was growing up in Edinburgh and how, during a game of hide and seek, I inadvertently witnessed one of my mother’s friends undressing while I was hiding in laundry basket. Sensitive readers will understand why it took me some years to recover from this ordeal. But only half the story was printed – I’m afraid another part of the saga landed on the editor’s floor.

Our Edinburgh home was a large looming Victorian house situated in the Morningside area next to the Cranley Girls’ boarding house. For many of my formative years, I spent a great deal of time perched on the bathroom hand basin gazing at the windows of the boarding house. I was desperately trying to see a girl – any girl – taking a bath. This was the only spot in the house that enabled me a view.

I was hopelessly unsuccessful. On one occasion, I saw a mottled face looking out and then I glimpsed a blurred figure, but it was all so indistinct that it only inflamed my imagination to fever pitch. The one thing I did once see with 20-20 clarity was a pair of navy blue bloomers hanging across the bathroom window, and then there was a mighty crack and the basin fell apart under my weight.

One of the ZANE staff read the story before it went to print. The telephone rang in my office.

“Oh Tom, what a terrible story” she objected. I asked what was wrong with it. “My mother went to Cranley”, she replied. “You may have glimpsed her without her knickers. That’s too terrible a thought to contemplate. I may have to resign.”

I attempted to pacify her. I had seen nothing, but she knew it wasn’t for want of trying. I thought I had succeeded in reassuring her, but then something happened between the story and the printers. Reader, she spiked it.

Well, now you know the full sorry tale – though you have to concede it’s a pretty tame tale by today’s standards!

Jul 06

Day 6 – Sorry, Blackburn, I’ve changed…

On Friday evening we arrived at the Nelson’s delightful house tired and sodden. The rain that fell relentlessly managed to leak into every cranny. It’s amazing what a hot bath and a good meal can do and I have to say we were shown great hospitality.

 

On Saturday we walked across the River Ribble on a glorious day that was so sparkling even the outskirts of Blackburn look quite civilised.

We ended up lost, charging through the lush vast gardens of an Indian magnate who owns Blackburn Plumbing and numerous other businesses besides. We were met by various daughters and other ladies who looked rather distraught when we suddenly arose from their herbaceous borders. When I explained who we were they relaxed and kept their huge dog tethered which, by the look of it, was just as well. The trouble is that we look like derelicts. Dinah our fool of a dog has eaten, with ferocious efficiency all the straps that hold our equipment on to our backs. General Jane has improvised “Heath Robinson” substitutes from bits of string which she keeps for a rainy day. This works well enough but makes us look like walking cat’s cradles and decidedly eccentric. Jane’s aunt collected string and when she died we found a box of bits of string labelled “too small to use” so perhaps Jane gets her string talents from her.

My right knee is giving me trouble. I strained it slightly at the outset of the walk and it has never really recovered. It is said that is you wake up over the age of sixty-five and you’re not hurting it means you are dead! But old age is creeping up inexorably and the best is not yet to come! The constant limitations and physical drawbacks of ageing are like being constantly punished for a series of crimes I have not committed.

Saying sorry

It’s not often you hear people saying “sorry” I recall a film “Love Story” with sumptuous Ali MacGraw years ago which said drivellingly that “being in love means never having to say you’re sorry”. It sounded great in that soppy film but, on reflection, what sort of bunkum is that? Being in love may mean never having to say sorry but being married means never saying anything else!

But when mistakes are made by people in business, hearing someone admit they “have cocked it up” and saying “sorry” is as rare as hen’s teeth.

It’s maddening! It’s not that I want to humiliate people; it’s just that, unless they say “sorry”, what guarantee is there that they have learned a lesson and won’t do it again?

I think they believe that if they publicly admit error and say “sorry” that deep down inside, fundamentally they are somehow diminished as a person. Perhaps pride is the problem? It usually is. The reality is that saying “sorry” is a strong and confident thing to do. Refusing to do so is weak.

 

 

Blackburn Rovers

 

We walk through Blackburn. I had no idea that it makes hilly San Francisco seem as flat as a billiard table. We wheezed up and down the streets like a couple of ancient cart horses.

An entire section of the city is apparently Muslim. I wonder if politicians intended that or whether it has occurred in a fit of an absence of mind? For the last thirty years few observers dared comment about the ability of communities to absorb the substantial numbers of new immigrants or question what was happening for fear of being labelled “raaacist!” Or a “Powelite.” Sir Andrew Green, past U.K. ambassador to Syria and in his retirement founder of the excellent “Migration Watch”, was routinely and disgracefully criticised whenever he pointed out the accurate immigration numbers and pinpointed where the new people were collecting. Let me be clear. Over the years immigration has been an excellent benefit for the U.K. Many of the Ugandan Asians for example have created fortunes to the benefit of the U.K. But the last Labour government simply lost control of the numbers of immigrants and so it now appears that there is confusion as to how many people came in and when. No one really knows. There is a vast statue of the great and one time M.P. Gladstone in the city centre. I wonder what he would say if he could see the city today?

 

An Englishman Abroad

 

Richard Ekins will be joining us for a day’s walking and that’s great news. He is a lecturer in law at St John’s College, Oxford and by his early thirties had written a number of learned books. Richard and his wife, Rebecca – just as bright as he is – wear their intellect lightly and are delightful company.

 

When I was a young man, I thought that only weak and stupid people were Christians. Then in time, I was privileged to befriend Michael Green (double first from Oxford), Alastair McGrath (double first in mathematics from Oxford), Donald Hay (Oxford Fellow and Tutor in economics) and Richard Ekins. I realised I had to review my prejudices. I am friends with four brilliant men who do not think that faith is something rather nice in a wishy-washy sort of way, but that it is the truth at the very core of their lives.

 

Shifting Sands

I was the odd man out. I spent well over half my life as a non-believer. For a long time, I was lost without knowing it. Of course, I thought I was free. Why would I adopt a set of rules that I thought would inhibit my life and limit my fun? I wanted a life that allowed fornication as a weekend recreation, so why would I voluntarily adopt rules that regard casual sex as a sin? As a non-believer, I rejoiced that I faced no questions of conscience:  no rules, except the constraints of custom, convention and the law. And I knew that for most purposes, these could be bent sufficiently to allow me ample leeway.

 

It was not until much later that fear began to shred what was left of my conscience. I knew I was free but I found that this freedom was causing me to walk in circles in an arid land from which there was no escape but inward – and this path led inexorably to a void in my heart. There were no foundations in my life, nothing but shifting sands: a nothing based on nothing. What was I? An accident of disorder, a walking plumbing machine ever going round and round…

 

How does one find belief? I knew no one who could tell me the secret. I asked several vicars with increasing desperation for the key; a number regarded me blankly and one foolishly chattered about the social Gospel. I grew ever more frantic. Was I lost? Had God forsaken me? Would he do so forever? Did he love me? This is the real terror. It’s terrible to be lost, finally abandoned.

 

A Curious Tale

My salvation came in the form of Kwaku Boateng, one-time Home Office Minister in Ghana. He was the father of Paul Boateng, a senior minister in the Blair Government, now Lord Boateng and once the UK’s High Commissioner to South Africa. Kwaku was then living in England and I met him on a flight to Washington D.C. In our stratified and class-ridden society, it had to be an uninhibited foreigner who had the perception to see my need, the courage to roundly humiliate me, and then the raw nerve to savagely kick-start me into belief. No Englishman could have done this. We are just too polite, too deferential, too nice and constrained by manners and overwhelmed by inhibition.

 

We should remember that Jesus never said “Blessed be the nice”, and Kwaku was anything but nice. He screamed at me relentlessly about sin and salvation. I was astonished and embarrassed but then I knew instinctively the man was right – it was as if the bits of a jigsaw were falling into place. He stuck his face into mine, and made me repent and make a commitment. He refused to let me rest until I had grovelled to his satisfaction. In fact, I think that at the time I said what he wanted just to shut him up. I didn’t realise that his ministry would have the most profound effect on me. It may sound very strange (it is strange), but Kawaku proved to be the catalyst that radically changed my life and the life of my family.

 

A few years ago, I was on a business trip to Ghana and was asked to preach in the cathedral in Accra. During my talk, I mentioned the role Kwaku had played in my life, though I had not seen him for 20 years. After the service, a young man told me he knew where Kwaku lived and would I like to see him again? I was led to the far reaches of Accra’s back streets and a scruffy men’s lodging house. When Kwaku saw me, a vast smile crossed his face. I thanked him profoundly and we prayed. It became clear he was ill and I heard soon after my visit that he had died. His son Paul later told me that each time he gave his father money, Kwaku simply gave it away. He may not have been the best family man in the world but he performed a remarkable service for me.

 

It’s a curious and very un-English story! But it’s one that happens to be true…

 

 

 

 

Jul 04

Day 5 – Manners Maketh Man

As soon as we set off a team of flies like paparazzi home in on me and zip about my head – not Jane’s – for the rest of the day, why not Jane? I edge towards her. In the hope a few will be attracted to her but no such luck. What do the flies know that I don’t?
The first part of the morning was spent in Arcadia. We walked through a beautiful farm straight out of one of my childhood dream books: “Pinner Potter Meadow”.

 

Pinner Potter Meadow
We travelled through the Entwhistle farms, through light green and lush fields on which jigged a scattering of lambs on spindly legs; cows stood waiting to be stroked; we scrambled down small thickly shrouded valleys; thickly tufted emerald coloured trees stood proudly like sentinels as they nodded a whispered greeting to one another.

Then the landscape radically changed; we walked under vast rapidly darkening slatey skies. We forked left onto a road that divided light green and brown speckled moorland that stretched to the horizon. On my left stood dark and gloomy buildings like the set in Jamaica Inn. On each side of the flat moor sprouted shapeless bastard shrubs like acne: thousands of anaemic thistles like tiny triffids shivered in the soft air. We crawled up Grizedale Fell and then, chests heaving, we strode towards Calder Fell.

One of the Zane donors told me that he had decided not to continue to support  us because he had met a beneficiary of ours and didn’t like him!

What an extraordinary admission. The good Samaritan didn’t make the man who had been set on by thieves complete a questionnaire to establish whether he was politically correct and “likeable” before helping him. He helped him because he needed help. When Oxfam assists, say, the Syrian families they don’t only help the deserving ones. They help all who are in need irrespective of their alleged moral standing. If only help is to be given to worthy and kind and virtuous people, who will help us when we are in need?

A Formidable Lady

Jane is remarkable. When I married her Humphrey Scott Plummer, her father, told me that he had set up the so called JD Club named after his Johnston Douglas female aunts who were like Scottish versions of Wilde’s lady Bracknell.

Jane is a formidable organiser and tends, dare I say it, to take after them. In other words, she is a tad bossy. In fact she gets to be more like General Montgomery each day that passes.

If David Cameron wants to use her as, for example, an EU envoy then she would surprise us all. She would charge into the office of Herr Junker and out would go all his gin bottles for starters. Then she would grab president Hollande and out would go all his mistresses. She would then get him to lose a couple of stone. It’s a good job Berlasconi has already bitten the dust or she would set about him. She would do all this with great charm.

It’s a good job much of her focus is spent on our fool dog or she might spend even more time sorting me out!

 

  

Manners Maketh Man

 

We live in rude times. Occasionally, I make gifts of money to members of the younger generation – probably not much in the scheme of things, but every little helps. Usually I receive an enthusiastic thank you letter, but not always. From time to time, I hear sweet nothing.

 

Imagine that! I was brought up strictly, and made – absolutely made – to write thank you letters, so much so that thanking is part of my DNA. But some of the young (and it is almost always the young) do not bother. They should reply even for the most selfish of reasons, because the gifts will certainly stop if they don’t! So that is one example of bad manners.

 

Henry Who?

My phone rang as we were walking today. A soon as I answered, a voice started speaking on the presumption that I was bound to know the caller’s identity. I realised who it was as the conversation developed, but just to make a point I asked who was speaking? “Henry of course!” said the voice. But why should Henry presume he is unique in my life?

 

Of course, the trouble is that Henry doesn’t know how irritating he is. He’s all of a pattern with the people who arrive at a meeting, dump their miserable mobiles on the table and then wait expectantly for a call. This is a statement proclaiming, “I am far more important than you are.” Just as annoying is the theatre or train station clerk who suddenly answers a ringing phone while speaking to you. I am always tempted to lean over and cut off the call, though I am sure that would be regarded as committing some sort of assault.

 

How brutalised gentle manners have become. A vicar friend told me that he was used to phones ringing during memorial services. “But,” he went on, “I can never get used to people answering calls during the eulogy!”

 

Then there are the maddening people who come up to you at a party and say, “I’ll bet you won’t remember me?” The trouble is they do mind when I have to admit they are quite right. I am not good at matching names with faces when I see people out of context. It’s far better when you meet someone to presume they are as mentally challenged as yourself, and to put them out of their misery by immediately volunteering your name.

 

Each year, we receive Christmas cards from John and Mary? Who the heck are they? And why do they presume they are so famous? I suppose it’s a sort of vanity. I recall when I was an MP, aged crones used to fix me with an ancient eye and demand that I hazard a guess at their age? “At least 110,” I would say (if I knew they were Labour voters, that is).

 

Edith Sitwell once told a friend, “We arrived in the Cafe Royal and, my dear, it became absolutely clear that the head waiter had no idea who we were! We were forced to tell him.”

 

“And who were you?” came the cold reply.

 

Who’s Name-Dropping?

Former head of the army Lord Inge once told me that in a meeting he was interrupted by a secretary saying, “Number 10 on the line!”

 

“Number 10 where?” he replied testily.

 

I wish I had such speed of mind. I always think of neat replies weeks later.

 

Name-dropping can backfire. Noel Coward once strode into the Savoy Grill with a friend. He spotted an acquaintance at a table and introduced his friend with the words, “Harry, meet my very good friend, the King of Norway”.

 

The king leant forward with a lazy smile and said, “King of Sweden actually!”

 

Here to Help

As you may already know, Jane founded the Community Emergency Foodbank (CEF) in Oxford some six years ago. Since then, Jane and her team have provided food for over 11,000 people.

 

Food banks have become a political hot potato. Inevitably, there are some who want to beat the government round the head on grounds of “growing food poverty”, the implication being that if benefits were increased then the need for food banks would diminish. I’m not so sure. Food banks have been a vital and growing service in Germany for many years, so the need is not unique to the UK.

 

But the political row rumbles on for politics is often not so much about issues as about making noises. To blame the increasing need for food banks on an “uncaring” government is a convenient sound bite.

 

In fact, the reasons for the growth of food banks are complex. In 2012/13, Jane and her team fed some 3,300 people and distributed 40,000 items of food, an increase of 70 per cent on the previous year. Welfare reform has left gaps and I hope these will be corrected in time. However, in the unlikely event that the provision of welfare benefits was to be substantially increased, the need for food banks would continue unabated because no government of any stripe could create a system of relief that caters for the many human dramas – prison, gambling, drugs, desertion, sudden job loss and the gaps in benefit provision created by changing circumstances – that afflict families. Further, the substantial publicity surrounding the rise of food banks in general means that people are now more aware of the service, leading to increased demand.

 

In fact the provision of food is a very efficient way of distributing emergency aid. It cannot be smoked, drunk or gambled away and I reckon that CEF is here to stay.

 

We have been asked if it would be a good idea for government to become directly involved, but I think that would be disastrous. Great movements like Alcoholics Anonymous, the Salvation Army – and ZANE – should grow from the ground up, not from the top down. Ronald Reagan’s old line, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’” has an element of truth in it.

 

This is one service much best left to volunteers.

 

 

Jul 03

Day 4 – No Offence!

We have just walked from Quernmore to Abbeystead. We climbed over high moorland and at the high point we could see Blackpool tower on the far left towards Barrow in Furness on the right. To our front was spread a magnificent view of Morecambe Bay. We squelched through acres of farmyard muck and up and down numerous fields with Janet Kenyon a lovely person. She works as a nurse for half of each year in Bulawayo and she knows our team who works there well .

 

An Altercation

 

Jane and I had an altercation. We walked in parallel down the Lune and it was a delight, miles of beautiful gunmetal water flecked with silver. After four or so miles we needed to cross.

Jane found a crossing place and I went on a few hundred yards and found another. Dinah, our fool dog, for some reason came with me. Jane had the dog lead.

There were cows and sheep in front of me so I was stuck. Jane was nowhere to be seen. She rang me repeatedly but the ring tone on my Blackberry is clearly defective.

I waited for her with growing impatience. She waited for me with growing irritation!

When we finally met up Jane tore into me for being a fool. I tore into her for being a fool. We ranted away until we were purple, so I said:

“That’s it. I propose never to speak to you again!” Just like a child. Jane looked rather surprised.

Then we started to laugh. Then a kiss. That was it.

Good thing laughter. It sorts out nonsense. Nothing matters very much and most things don’t matter at all.

 

 

A Good Book

 

I have just finished a fine, insightful and sensitive book called “No Place to Belong”by Ann Warren, it is a must read for all of us who had problems when young. It is a miracle that Ann, who was more or less abandoned, has survived with a sense of forgiveness and humour. You can get it on Amazon.

 

No Offence!

 

It’s so easy to either bless or offend people without realising the effect of your words and actions. For example, some time ago I was flying back from Washington D.C. – on the terminal bus at Heathrow, I struck up a conversation with a man who told me about a problem he had. Of course, other people’s difficulties are so much easier to resolve then your own, and although I can’t remember the precise details, I recall suggesting a few novel ways of sorting out the matter. I then forgot all about it, as one does.

 

Months later, a total stranger approached me at a party and said, “I’ve been looking for you because you were so kind and wise, and the advice you gave me helped me enormously – so thank you!” I walked tall for weeks.

 

On another occasion, I was hosting an official party at the Milton Keynes Health Authority where I was chairman. Out of the blue, a stranger pinned me with a laser eye and announced, “I’ve been looking for you to tell you what a rude prick you are! You walked into my surgery the other day with a group of people and you totally ignored me. You never even said hullo! You are the rudest person I’ve ever met.”

 

Boom boom! On one occasion, I was the cause of some good, while on the other, well, to put it politely, wholly the reverse. Each time, I was wholly unaware of the “Tom effect”.

 

The Art of Banter

Years ago, Julian Critchley, an MP colleague of mine, told me that the only safe pastime in public life is to suck boiled sweeties. I have a complementary point: the only safe conversation you can have with strangers is to discuss the weather.

 

Banter is designed to kick-start dead conversations or new relationships into some sort of life. Each time it is deployed, you can’t avoid running a risk. This kind of raillery may cement a relationship, or it might blow one apart. It involves living dangerously, and this is especially true for the British – after all, we are probably the most reticent nation on Earth. However, the world would be a far poorer place without banter and we would laugh much less.

 

I am an enthusiastic banterer, an art I learned at school and during my army days. In the past, it has protected me from shyness, but these days, I usually turn to banter just to liven up living. On the whole, it’s a gentle affair, just an attempt to make a stranger smile and respond. Most of the time, it goes down well… but sometimes it can be woefully misunderstood, and then I am obliged to send yet another bunch of flowers and do a bit of grovelling.

 

A Biblical Blunder

A while ago, I sat next to a pleasant young lady at a group lunch following a lecture. She is the wife of a vicar and we had an inconsequential conversation, discussing various people we both vaguely knew.

 

Then perhaps the discussion flagged, for I asked her about the circumstances in which she had met her husband. She replied, “We’ve been married for two years, and I have known him for four.”

 

I then reposted part of an old line from the television sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News: “But I am sure you did not know him then in the Biblical sense.” The remark seemed funny when I first heard it and it must have stuck in my Teflon mind. There the conversation ended – I thought happily – and we both turned to talk to other people.

 

A few days later, I received an indignant email from this lady’s husband implying that I had questioned her over matters that no man should ever question a young woman, i.e. her sex life. For several minutes, I was completely nonplussed, and then slowly I resurrected the conversation and worked out where the misunderstanding lay. My joke had clearly backfired and morphed into my asking a complete stranger as to when she started to have sex. If this had been the case, it would have been the grossest possible intrusion, and why on earth would I choose to be so bad mannered?

 

Of course, if someone does not get a harmless joke, there’s no point trying to explain it. You can wonder why the woman hadn’t the wit to ask me to explain the comment at the time. However, if you want to get out of a hole, stop digging. I immediately apologised.

 

Naff Dad

On another occasion, I was out shopping with my daughter Clare, looking for a present for Jane. I think I would rather commit ritual suicide rather than shop regularly, but sometimes I have to brace myself, think of England and just carry on.

 

In order to alleviate the boredom of it all, I asked the two perfectly ordinary assistants at the till, “Who’s the boss?” They both looked blank, so I (unwisely) raised the gear. “And which of you has the brains?”

 

It was hopeless. One of the ladies gave me a cold stare. All she had to do was to say, “I do and my friend is daft,” and perhaps her friend might say, “Rubbish, I have the brains,” and off we would go with a bit of banter – something, anything, to liven up a dull interlude. But no, it was like talking to a brace of prison warders.

 

Outside the shop, Clare put the boot in: “God, you are an embarrassing father! How could you be so naff? They both thought you were out on day release!”

 

Perhaps she was right – she usually is.

 

The Duke Effect

You have to be careful, for banter can be woefully misunderstood – as the poor Duke of Edinburgh discovered when he once talked about “slitty-eyed Chinese”. On another occasion, he saw a tangle of electrical wires and remarked, “It must have been an Indian who put that together”. A minor international dispute resulted. It was only banter but the Duke found himself in the headlines. When you have to talk to thousands of people you are bound to make the occasional slip-up.

 

Nicknames are a form of banter. One of my friends was a member of a polo club and one of the leading players was an Indian nicknamed “Dusty”. No one minded, and apparently Dusty had been called that all his life. But when the Daily Mail picked up on it, the nickname morphed into a racial slur. How I hate political correctness.

 

The late Sir Robin Day, the so called “Grand Inquisitor” and the Jeremy Paxman of 30 years ago, used to cause considerable offence at dinner parties when, to get a conversation going, he was known to turn to the lady sitting next to him and ask, “Do you prefer sexual intercourse first thing in the morning or last thing at night?”

 

Now, I wonder what the vicar’s reaction would have been if I’d put that question to his wife?

 

 

 

Jul 02

Day 3 – Ozzies, Hacking and Horses

We had supper at the Wheatsheaf in Beetham and we were served by a delightful waitress called Jacqueline (Jax). Jax is the heroine of the day. She looks about 38 and she is a high class copper-bottomed grafter. To pay her way she works full time in a “Help the Aged” charity shop in Milnthorpe and serving us in the pub is her second job. She is amusing and uncomplaining and hard working and a credit to society. I hope her boyfriend realises how lucky he is to have her in his life and binds her to him with hoops of steel.

 

Our new dog is bounding along and to our surprise she seemed happy to walk the whole way. I still find I call her “Leah” from time to time and not “Dinah”.

 

ZANE Down Under

 

Two years ago Michael Carter, Jane and I flogged our way round Australia drumming up support from the diaspora who had left Zimbabwe or fled. Since then Michael, and an excellent team working with Steve Pullman, have worked hard and built a worthwhile network and a steady stream of funding. We are very grateful to all ZANE supporters “down under “. Could we also ask any of our donors in the UK who may have family or friends in Australia to suggest that they consider supporting the ZANE Australia initiative.

ZANE Australia has its own logo and website so please see: www.zaneaustralia.org.au

 

Hacking the Dinner Party Conversation

 

I knew I was in for trouble a few nights ago when I said at dinner that I was sorry for Andy Coulson! It’s not that I condone illegality, because I don’t. It’s rather “There but for the grace of God go I”. Hacking has been going on for decades- remember squidgygate when Diana and James Gilbey’s rather odd mobile conversations were crudely hacked- few complained about hacking then because they were laughing too much. But suddenly after the Milly Dowler case it all went too far, water turned to ice and hacking became a hot issue. Poor Coulson has been left holding the package in pass the parcel with a stony-faced world staring at him, and all of them are out to condemn him.

Hypocritical sods, most of them. Take this for a sample: at an Oxfordshire dinner party a woman hissed that crime doesn’t pay and that Coulson deserves everything he gets.

“I have no sympathy for law breakers,” she hissed to approving nods around the table.

I happen to know that this twice-divorced lady boasted to me once (when she was half-pissed) that she shunted her speeding points to her last husband-but-one as a matter of routine. I also know that when her mother died the old lady’s precious porcelain collection mysteriously went missing, neatly avoiding inheritance tax.

I hope her deserted husband does not spill the beans about the points and the china.

If he does, she can be assured I will stay by her as I hope Coulson’s pals stay by him.

We all fall short, some of us by miles.

 

Kicking the Can

 

Whilst on a legal theme, last night we discussed why people who must know at the outset of their trials that they have no chance of a “not guilty” verdict string out the agony for as long as possible. Chris Huhne and his ex-wife Vicky Pryce are clearly cases in point. Why did they play it so long? You may also wonder at the length of time the cases regarding phone hacking have taken to come to conclusion. Why didn’t the guilty just throw in the towel and face the music?

 

From the Horse’s Mouth

I will tell you why. There once was a king who was a sour old thing. More than anything this miserable monarch longed to laugh, so he commanded that all the comics in his kingdom be rounded up and each be allowed 10 minutes to amuse him. As an added incentive, the comedians were warned that if they failed to elicit laughter, their heads would be immediately cut off.

 

The comedians performed all day, and after each attempt the king sat po-faced and sullen on his throne. Meanwhile, the gruesome pile of heads grew higher and higher. At the day’s end, just one comic – accompanied by a horse – remained.

 

“Oh king,” the man proclaimed, “I have no wish to die. May I suggest a deal. If my horse can be persuaded to tell you a funny story within 24 hours, will you spare my life?”

 

The king’s lips twitched with some appreciation at this offer and he agreed. “Yes, that sounds amusing,” he growled. “You have 24 hours. Set the clocks!”

 

The comic and his horse were dragged into a cellar. The gaoler, who had listened to the exchange, scratched his head with wonder and asked: “What on earth are you playing at? It’s crystal clear to anyone that your horse is a horse, and dozy one at that, and it will never speak. Why are you such a time-wasting fool?”

 

The comic replied, “It’s easy. I have bought 24 hours. In that time, the king might die, I might die… or the horse might talk.”

 

Now you know why people with apparently no hope choose to kick the can down the road. And remember you read it here first.

 

War and Peace

 

A few miles along our route, we pass through Kirkby Lonsdale. The town’s war memorial declares, “They shall never be forgotten.” Oh really? The single wreath on display is old and tattered. Of course, 2014 marks the hundredth anniversary of the start of the 1914 war, the so-called Great War. It was supposed to be the war to end all wars, though it shattered a generation whose memories have now glided into history. I can’t help wondering if “we will remember them” is a reality or a cliché?

 

Could such a war happen again? Of course, not in the same way – but man is every bit as violent and wicked as he ever has been. What are the potential Hitlers, Stalins and bin Ladens doing with their lives now? Psychopaths are still being born, and when they grow up will they be content as building society managers? It’s a tad unlikely. How can we ensure their lives will not generate carnage on an industrial scale? Is there any evidence that man has grown wiser with the passing of time? From time to time, I read commentaries on ghastly catastrophes such as the Syrian war: “That should not happen in the twenty-first century,” say some. How fatuous is that? Why on earth shouldn’t it happen today?

 

We pass a lovely church and find a shop in a nearby street selling crosses and small statues. I suppose that nowadays many people who visit churches have no idea what they are really for, so instead of making time for prayer or reflection they buy tat instead.

 

I double back and enter the church. A guide is chattering to a disinterested group, half of them studying mobile devices as they fumble up the aisle. A girl at the back of the group is flicking through Hello! I watch her poring over the magazine’s airbrushed celebrities, the eleventh-century church ignored. Such are her preferences.

 

Suddenly, I am overcome by the need to get away from people, and dart into the Lady Chapel. A sign on the wall reads, “And underneath are the everlasting arms.” The truth of these words leaps out at me, rising above the murmur of noisy street traffic and muttering voices. I feel the assurance of a peace so profound that the madness of the world seems absorbed by it.

 

 

Jul 01

Day 2 – Gone with the Wind

Hunt the Slipper

 

Each time we try and start to walk on time we are disadvantaged to find our shoes have been liberated by Dinah so we have to hunt the slipper all over the garden. Dinah thinks this a great game! She has also perfected the skill of tripping me up, which she does simply by winding the long lead round my legs so I am swaying unsteadily and immobile while she stares challengingly at me with her vast red tongue hanging out,

 

The highlight of today was Ruskin’s view outside Kirkby Lonsdale which has to be one of the most attractive small towns in Merrie England,

 

Two lovely walkers come with us and one drove all the way from Newcastle to do so

 

 

Gone with the Wind

 

Jane and I are now at an age when we could host rooms full of friends and relatives whom we have loved deeply and who are now dead. This culling appears to be a slow but inexorable process. The cast list of our lives remains static for a long time then suddenly the grim reaper plays catch-up and cuts down half a dozen with a single swish of his scythe. And these individuals have not “passed away” or been “gathered” – they are bloody well dead. Dickens was not being morbid when he described Scrooge’s late business partner, Marley, as “dead as a doornail”.

 

Yet, I find the absence of these loved ones an outrage. I can see their faces sometimes and we speak in my dreams. At unexpected moments, a voice catches me unawares, or a place, a smell, a picture or a snatch of music triggers a vivid memory. I can feel a presence so powerfully, it’s as if that person was with me still. But of course, I’m dreaming – they have gone with the wind.

 

Dying and Done For…

When people die, what happens to all their work and activity? Where does it go? I have a small photograph of my mother set in a silver frame. She must have been about 11 or so when it was taken; she is playing with a straw and giving a half smile. She was a deeply emotional woman and perhaps the fact she grew up without a father made it hard for her to express her feelings. In her youth, she was beautiful, talented and carefree until the experiences of wartime, betrayal and a broken marriage conspired to batter some of the innocence and joy from her.

 

After my father died relatively young – few fully recovered after being gassed during the First World War – there was little money to go around. In order to pay for schooling and the rest of the bills, Mum morphed into a highly successful scriptwriter and crossword compiler. For 25 years, she wrote the music and scripts for the Edinburgh, Glasgow and Newcastle pantomimes. Today her scripts lie forgotten, filed away in slim, neat envelopes buried in a grey trunk. Yet in her day, Mum’s clever scripts filled theatres and she made thousands of people laugh. She achieved all this as well as bringing up three children. This was before she coughed her lungs and life away in a slow and hideous death by courtesy of British American Tobacco (the outfit which, now I think of it, comprehensively did for my father too.)

 

Just before she died, when I was very busy being an MP, I managed to find a little time to fly to Edinburgh to see her. It was a shocking trip. My once magnificent and very able mother lay in a room surrounded by the ghastly apparatus of cancer: ranks of pills, bottles and potions. She had shrunk from nine to about four stone, and lay inert like a large bird as the illness pitilessly scraped the flesh away from her body. She was half drunk on morphine and her frightened, grey eyes stared large from her ravaged, parchment face. My mother was mentally acute and she knew exactly what was happening. She would gather herself for an immense effort, muttering softly between harsh breaths; then a fit of coughing would silence her and she would slump exhausted between the pillows. I heard a few whispers. In my despair at her plight, I wanted to give her a morphine overdose but I didn’t know how. If I could, though, I think I would have helped to end her suffering, for she was dying and to hell with the consequences. Then I wept, for it was far too late for me to restore our relationship to what it might have been. I could do nothing for Mum, for dying is a lonely business. As I watched her lying there, all the laughter, struggles and the achievements of her life seemed to slip away.

 

Now of course my mother is dead, but where have the laughter and love gone? Do the lines from Betjeman’s poem “Song of Nightclub Proprietess” sum it up?

 

But I’m dying now and done for,

What on earth was all the fun for?

For I’m old and ill and terrified and tight.

 

Does my mother’s striving and achievements make any difference to anything at all? Of course it’s now family history and of no interest to anyone except me, but I want to know. No wonder people drink and take drugs in order to hide the pain, despair and the utter randomness of it all. And then at Mum’s funeral, the bloody vicar got her name wrong.

 

Rage, Rage…

Some years ago, I went to Las Vegas and I saw an astonishing act where someone managed to make an elephant disappear on the stage. I am not a complete fool and of course I understand that the elephant disappears once a night on weekdays and twice on Saturdays, and that we are happy participants in a neat illusion. But the vanishing act of my parents, my relatives and so many of my friends troubles me. Are they such stuff as dreams are made of and is our little life really rounded in a sleep?

 

What happens in the great unknown to people with no faith? My mother was not a “believer” as tidy-minded Christians would have it, and I suppose some of them will think at worst she has gone to hell, or at best tell me, “God in His wisdom knows best.” But I don’t think Mum ever met anyone who knew the first thing about the Gospel so she ended up as a sort of wishy-washy, hand-me-down Anglican. So, where is she now? It’s as if God has pulled off a monstrous vanishing trick and I worry about it more than words can express. Dylan Thomas wrote, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” – if anything, he understates my anguish for my mother by a country mile.

 

I told Jane about my sense of outrage. Being the Scottish farmer’s daughter with Presbyterian instincts that she is, she finds my anguish ludicrous. She never wastes time fretting about such “nonsense” and acknowledges that since so much is wrapped in a mystery, we are best to shut up and just get on with it.

 

“What’s the point in agonising about this sort of thing?” Jane asks. “The grandchildren have to be picked up from school and there are bills to be paid. We all do the best we can Dear, so stop wittering on in such a self-indulgent way.”

 

Okay, okay… to some extent, of course Jane is right. Life is as it is, and death completes the circle. All this I know… but still, I find the absence of the people I love an outrage. Perhaps the final paragraph of George Eliot’s Middlemarch sums it up well enough:

 

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as the might have been, is half owing to the numbers who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

 

That will have to do for the time being… have another drink?

Jun 30

Day 1 – Mad Dogs Beginnings, Sad Dog Endings

And so it begins…Recall if you will the ski jumps at the winter Olympics whereby the skier hurtles down what appears to be a cliff and then climbs precipitately up the other side. This is roughly what we have been negotiating as we leave Ambleside on the first leg of “Mad Dogs”. I have been muttering about the paternity of the psychopath who constructed the route!

In mitigation it is achingly beautiful and reminds me of the Venetian doge who said, “Why should I travel when I have already arrived?”

Leah and DinahMany ZANE supporters who have been kind enough to follow our walks will remember that we had a much loved Staffie – Leah – who walked with us from Edinburgh to London, from Land’s End to London, from York to Canterbury, and then from Holyhead to Oxford.

Loyal little Leah flogged a total of over 1,200 miles for the poorest of the poor in Zimbabwe. However, it became horribly clear during the last walk that she was unwell and struggling to keep up. She made it to the aptly named Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford, but was squatting unsuccessfully to pee every couple of minutes and was obviously in growing discomfort. On our return home, we took Leah to the vet only to be told she was dying from cancer of the womb. Leah was in a lot of pain and we had to make an awful decision.

Jane and I are sure that Leah instinctively knew when her final day arrived on 9 August last year. She walked gently round the house sniffing all her old haunts, and then she lay down in our sitting room and waited patiently for us to take her to the vet. She seemed resigned and forgiving. It was a ghastly drive as we made our way into Woodstock with Leah slowly licking my hands. Once there, she lay in the back of my car with her head on my knees. Her brown, liquid eyes looked up at me trustingly as the vet injected her. Leah collapsed at once, so her death was more or less instantaneous.

Jane and I felt like traitors. Leah trusted us implicitly and look what we arranged for her. Dog lovers will understand these feelings – although ending our pet’s suffering was the right thing to do, her death was a profoundly miserable occasion and I felt that we were somehow betraying her trust. All those joyful memories and happy times, all that unquestioning loyalty and affection, all those walks crowded in to make us weep at her passing. We buried her deep by the big tree at the bottom of our garden.


The Young Pretender 

We now have Dinah, another Staffie (champagne in colour). The first thing I did after she skittered into the house was to take her to Leah’s grave and she explored it with some interest. Silly really, but I think she might have felt in the core of her tiny being by a sort of doggy osmosis that she was next in a strong line of considerable nobility. She has a lot to live up to.

Dinah started her life here as the mistress of destruction. She managed to disconnect our internet connection by chewing through the cable, trimmed a valuable rug, nibbled my wallet and destroyed two 20-pound notes. She also ate through what we foolishly believed was an indestructible dog bed. However, Dinah is a joy. She stares at me with such concentrated adoration that I pray I will live up to her high opinion of me.

For Dinah’s first few walks, I called out, “Leah! Leah, Come here!” before pausing as the memories flooded back. Then I had to shake myself.

Oh get on with it you big girl’s blouse. Leah is dead: long live Dinah!