After lunch

This year's Women of Dumfries and Galloway lunch at Easterbrook Hall, Dumfries yesterday prompted many thoughts. The object of the lunch - raising money for educational purposes - was achieved. So many applied for tickets that the number turned away almost equalled the number of us who sat down. Is it unfair to comment that Sarah Mackie, a young farmer-turned-director of Tesco's 'Scottish office' might have sourced a professional speechwriter to provide her with a lip-licking speech instead of what she delivered: her CV? Anne Widdecombe was on her fifth speaking engagement of the week, and what she delivered was a well-polished series of jokes. To her great credit, she insisted on a 'Q and A' with the audience, a first apparently for the Women of D&G (what??why ever had this not been a staple for years?). She also spent a great deal of lunch time circulating around the tables, a real pro in the best sense of the word.

Today started on a sad note, with news of the death of C, an old friend. He had burned the candle at both ends, so when his lifestyle finally caught up with him we, his family and friends, could not be surprised, but he will be missed for his kindness, his enjoyment of life and for helping us celebrate the moment despite the sadness that underlay his partying.

..and lunch with Anne Widdecombe

A busy day today. Went at 9.0am with my grandson Zac aged 4 to Small and Tall, his nursery and was told sternly to 'stop singing' on our way. I was married to a musician and both our daughters trained to sing professionally. What an irony that I sound like a corncrake. I am in my 'nines' for lunch today with Anne Widdecombe in Dumfries at the 2012 The Women of Dumfries and Galloway lunch. Meanhile, I am waiting in for Martin Tabor of Land Use Consultants in Glasgow, to whom I loaned my collection of archaeology and other history books about the Upper Clyde Valley. He and I are working with a small group of residents to provide visitors to the area with facilities and information about an area rich in all sorts of relics. One of my favourite hidden monuments is to the railway workers who died of cholera building what is now known as the main West coast line. They were buried in a mass grave, only sanctified years later by a belated visit from the Bishop of Glasgow or some senior cleric - I will have to re-visit it to check. That area of south Lanarkshire, where I used to live, is packed with fascinating sites that people usually whizz past on their way north. We aim to slow them down and encourage them to stop, or encourage day visitors, with a series of stunning architect-designed shelters and stop-off points accessible by Segways, bikes or on foot. Our leaflets for Beyond the Garden Gate will be available in the next few days, as well as a press release.

Fatherland

Thanks to The Writer's Almanac online for the following:

It's the birthday of novelist Robert Harris, born in Nottingham, England (1957). In 1987, he was working as an investigative journalist when he decided to take a vacation in Italy. He was lying on the beach, listening to the German tourists talking all around him, when he suddenly imagined that he was living in the victorious German empire. He got up and went swimming in the ocean, and by the time he came back to shore, he had an outline for a novel about what the world would be like if the Nazis had won World War II. That novel was Fatherland (1991), and it became an international best-seller.
Harris went on to write many other books, including Enigma (1995), about British code breakers during World War II, and Archangel (1998), about the search for a secret Stalin diary. His most recent novel is The Fear Index (2011).
Harris said, "It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you're forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else."

Harris took his readers to a darker place in The Ghost (2007), which suggests that the wife of a UK Prime Minister resembling Tony Blair was a CIA agent who kills her husband. The film version by Roman Polanski won many awards and bears re-viewing for its bleak aesthetic and spare, downbeat script.

Politics

I enjoyed attending the UKIP conference in Skegness yesterday, much as I enjoy watching BBCTV's Question Time, with the important difference that at the UKIP conference you could actually discuss the issues with the speakers both at sessions and in the intervals between sessions.

Coincidentally, today is the anniversary in 1797, of a peaceful transfer of power, for the first time in the US modern times, from George Washington the first president of the United States to John Adams. George Washington was overheard to say to his successor:
'Ay! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!'"

There were convincing arguments made at the Skegness UKIP conference for: Britain being better off out of the European Union(by former Treasury advisor Professor Tim Congdon, supported by IMF data) ; lower taxes; business, particularly small business and sole traders; grammar schools; law and order; a points system for immigration such as that used in Canada, Australia and the USA; retention of the United Kingdom and 'common sense'. All of these are perfectly tenable points of view, possibly mainstream in the public if not at Westminster or Holyrood. Nigel Farage devoted most of his address to the conference to an impressive plea for UK government intervention in the case of a businessman extradited to prison in America without the US authorities submitting any evidence to a British court - a clear violation of habeus corpus.

I left Skegness glad to have witnessed, and taken part in a corner of, the UK democratic process on a weekend when Russians are going to polls in an election that many voters seem justified in fearing will be fixed.

A Bad Hotel Experience

Connoisseurs of the genre may appreciate the following account of my stay in Skegness last night:

After a rail journey lasting eight hours with three changes of train, I arrived at the entrance to the hotel, at 5.30pm on Friday March 2. As I entered the gravel forecourt, I was disheartened to see that most of the the gold lettering that once bore the hotel's name on the right hand side of the wall had fallen off except for two letters hanging at a lopsided angle. I went to check in just in time to hear the assistant behind the reception desk tell another arriving guest on no account was he to ring the bell beside which there was a notice ‘Ring Bell For Assistance’.

“It’s been one of those days” she said by way of explanation.

After being asked to pay (by Mastercard) in advance for my two nights’ stay and having completed an arrival form, I was given a wooden numbered fob with electronic entry card and two keys attached and took the lift to the first floor (pressing ‘3’ in the lift as instructed by the receptionist). On exiting the lift, I entered the appropriate corridor to access my room; the aroma of cigarette smoke was faintly in evidence despite a ’no smoking’ sign on every door. I tried to open the door to my room via the electronic entry card, but failed. I left my case by the door and returned to the reception desk . The receptionist offered to help, adding ‘I may not be able to – it’s only my second week”. She also remarked on the smell of cigarette smoke in the corridor, before using one of the two keys to open the door to my room. I had chosen the hotel online because it offered a seaview from a balcony. On entry, there was a small sitting room with leather sofa, TV, tea-making equipment, a coffee table with a vase of white artificial lilies and an occasional chair of plastic woven basketweave. It was a fine evening, so I opened the balcony door onto a scruffy asbestos and brick balcony with a yellow artifical lily bizarrely attached to one of the wrought iron railings, three garden seats and an abandoned water bottle.

Through a connecting internal door was the bedroom with a companion to the occasional chair in the sitting room, a wardrobe, double bed, and, in the window alcove, a mahogany dressing table with matching dressing table mirror and stand, and a mahogany chair, upholstered in red nylon velvet, stained on the seat. Next to the bed was an antique bedside light on an ornamental brass base with a parchment shade ornamented with crystal drops and fringe of what looked like dead hair in spidery wisps, sitting on a tiny round bedside table. There was a pervasive and persistent stink of stale human body odour emanating from the ancient divan base of the bed, which (as I was later to discover) made sleep impossible.

The ensuite bathroom was a strange mixture of contemporary fittings, DIY and ancient stained lino. The signature style-setter however, was the grime-encrusted loop of the multiply-knotted string of the light pull.

I was due at the opening night dinner of the UKIP conference – the purpose of my visit to Skegness -, and from a cursory inspection of the dilapidated guest houses I had passed on my way on foot from the station, I decided I had no option but to stick it out for one night.

After a sleepless night, at 5.30am I went to make myself a cup of tea. I looked carefully at the first cup and saw a brown mark on the inside, which proved on scraping it with my finger nail to be a deposit left by the previous user.

I am checking out today.

Skegness

I'm off to Skegness today with my sceptical reporter's hat on. Appropriately, today is the birthday of a journalist and novelist I much admire: Tom Wolfe, born in Richmond, Virginia (1931). He wrote The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. He also wrote The Right Stuff (1979), about the American space program. Though he viewed nonfiction as the best way to comment on the really important things in life, he also wrote three novels: The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), A Man in Full (1998), and I am Charlotte Simmons (2004). His fourth novel, Back to Blood, is due out this year (2012).
In an essay published in 2007, Tom Wolfe argued that the newspaper industry would stand a much better chance of survival if newspaper editors encouraged reporters to "provide the emotional reality of the news, for it is the emotions, not the facts, that most engage and excite readers and in the end are the heart of most stories." He said journalists should use four literary devices in their work -- "to make the reader feel present in the scene described and even inside the skin of a particular character." They are: 1) constructing scenes; 2) dialogue -- lots of it; 3) carefully noting social status details, "everything from dress and furniture to the infinite status clues of speech"; and 4) point of view, "in the Henry Jamesian sense of putting the reader inside the mind of someone other than the writer." Well, I will try to follow Wolfe's advice.
For many years I have been curious to discover what makes UKIP, and their accident-prone leader Nigel Farage, tick. Are UKIP members Little Englanders or (worse) the NF in respectable disguise? I am going to have a long, hard look at them gathered in the Lincolnshire seaside resort made famous by the poster of a manic fisherman skipping over puddles in the sand. Will Skegness be bracing in a good way? The only way to find out is to go and put a metaphorical toe in the water.

I will report back tomorrow.

The Paper Garden

I am reading a very surprising book,The Paper Garden by Toronto-based author Molly Peacock, published by Bloomsbury. Why surprising? On the face of it, a book about Mrs Delaney, a real 18th century figure, who spent the last twenty years of her long life cutting out flowers from tissue paper and sticking them on black backgrounds might be a yawn. But the writing sparkles, it is written in colloquial - sometimes even slangy English, and the narrative covers far more than the protagonist's cut and paste technique. I am only on page 53, but I am beginning to see how this most unusual, clever, ground-breaking story is going to use this - quite literally - flimsy excuse to investigate subjects of enduring interest to us all, such as: marriage, ageing, families, friendship, the nature of art - in other words Life and all its challenges. Also, purely as an object, this is a beautifully-produced book, by Bloomsbury in association with The British Museum, with many pretty touches such as the typeface, expensive paper, lovely colour illustrations. A five star recommendation.

Now: a quiz question to which I genuinely wish to know the answer - where did all the woad go? We are told that our forebears decorated themselves with woad, a blue dye that is made by boiling up a plant. You would think that therefore the plant would still be found growing in many a corner of a British field or hedgerow. But no. It does not grow wild anywhere in Britain. If you need some blue woad dye, as we did 12 years ago for my younger daughter's wedding outfit 'something blue', (in her case a garter), woad seeds had to be bought and the tender plant cultivated. I will raise the question with our garden historians during Beyond the Garden Gate May 26/27.