by Jan Morris
Of course, I am talking nonsense. But there we are – that’s What the Butler Showed to me!
DAY 172
My heart bleeds today for the Royal Navy.
An anecdote I cherish from the Second World War concerns the simultaneous arrival at some port or other of two warships, one from the US Navy, one from the RN. ‘Good morning!’ the cheerful American commander is supposed to have signalled. ‘How’s the world’s second-biggest navy this morning?’ ‘Fine, thanks,’ replies the British ship. ‘How’s the second-best?’
Only a friendly joke, but it rang pathetic when it came into my mind this morning, because the news contained yet another ignominy for the British navy. Not only, of course, is it now infinitely smaller than the gigantic American fleet, but it would be a crazed patriot indeed who would claim it to be better.
So much seems to have gone wrong with it lately – collisions, breakdowns, over-costings, errors. As an awful example take the Type 45 destroyers, trumpeted in the 1960s as the new backbone of the fleet. First there were going to be twelve of them, then eight, and finally only six put to sea, three years late and vastly over cost. Never mind, said the First Sea Lord, they were the Navy’s most capable destroyers ever … Unfortunately, their engines and propellers kept going wrong and they so overheated that they could not be used in hot climates, so that they have spent most of their time in port, sometimes all six at the same time.
And then this morning I heard on the news that the aircraft carrier Queen Elizabeth, brand-new flagship of the British fleet, had sprung a leak. Sprung a leak! She is the biggest and most expensive vessel ever built for the Royal Navy, the third to carry the name, and she was accepted into service only the other day by the Queen of England in a vastly ostentatious dockside ceremony. At 70,000 tons and a cost of several billion pounds, perhaps she deserved hyperbole, and I suspect the leak was not really as comical as it sounds, but I fear all the same that she may really represent a sad last hurrah of an ancient and magnificent tradition, one that I have always cherished.
Yesterday I piled up some bags of logs on the floor of our library, to be taken upstairs today for our wood-burning stove, and when I started on the job just now I happened to notice that the bags totally obscured a row of books in one bookcase. Guess what they were? Right first time. A History of the Royal Navy in seven proud and splendid volumes.
Sprung a leak? Laugh? I could have cried.
DAY 173
One morning in 1956, when my family and I lived on our houseboat Saphir, on the Nile, in Cairo, the mail turned up as we were having breakfast on the deck with a visiting guest. It included a package from London, and when I opened it, with rising excitement, I found it to contain the very, very first copy of my very, very first book, Coast to Coast (Faber and Faber, 271pp, 21s.). Our guest watched my pleasure as I unwrapped it, and then laughingly said, ‘As long as you live, you’ll never have another moment quite like this!’
Well, she was wrong. This morning, half a century on, when we sat at our luncheon table in Wales there arrived in the mail my very first copy of my very latest book, Battleship Yamato (Pallas Athene, 112pp, £9.79). I have published forty-odd books by now, a couple are on the stocks and Fabers are waiting to publish another posthumously, but the unwrapping of Yamato has excited me just as much today as did the arrival of Coast to Coast all those years ago, and so has every single one of those books since then!
If our guest of the Saphir happens to read this, I hope she is amused; but like the houseboat itself, she long ago sank, and must be laughing, dear soul, somewhere else …
DAY 174
In memoriam: the Aardvark and five Meerkat brothers who died in a fire during their unforgivable captivity at the London Zoo, 23 December 2017.
DAY 175
Christmas 2017 has come and gone, and Scrooge with it. I must admit that during the last few days I have all too often felt him a comrade. ‘Bah!’ I have growled to myself when yet another Christmas Special has appeared in my TV screen, or yet another greetings card has turned out to be grossly commercial, or scrawled by some infinitely remote acquaintance whose signature I cannot read and who provides no return address. My conscience has been provoked by the thought that I have been too stingy with my presents to grandchildren, nephews and nieces. ‘Humbug!’ I have sworn when those damned Jingle Bells rang yet again through the drizzly day of celebration.
But Boxing Day dawned glorious, and when I went down to our beach I found the whole world in generous festivity, children dashing about on modernistic roller skates, indulgent dads throwing stones into the sea for the entertainment of their dogs, mothers laughingly gossiping, people I hardly knew asking after the family, people I did not know at all just saying hullo, balloons blowing about and the odd brave jogger determinedly jogging anyway.
At the end of the beach I came across an Indian, all alone, standing above the pebbles gazing out to sea. There was nothing to be seen out there, only mist and distant hills, but when I wished him good morning he just smiled gently, and looking out across the waves again, quietly murmured, ‘Glorious.’
‘God bless us every one,’ cried Tiny Tim happily, and I went on my way humming.
DAY 176
Here, on the last day of 2017, is my personal portent for the future.
Puzzled by the use in the media of the word ‘millennials’, for the first time in my life I turned to artificial intelligence to tell me what it meant. Speaking into my computer I asked Siri, the cybernetic information service, what millennials were, and in a trice some gentlemanly mechanism explained that they were people born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s. I needed no dictionary or encyclopedia. Instantly, in a flash, artificial intelligence had given me my answer, and given me my portent too.
I have no doubt that all the immense heavings and stirrings in the world today, the challenges and the triumphs, the anxieties, the tragedies, the visionary movements, the risings and fallings of nations and the hopes of ideologies – all are insignificant beside the gigantic prospects of artificial intelligence. Already we have cars that can drive themselves, robots that can outplay chess grandmasters or engage humans in sensible conversation, and within the next few years robots will be putting hundreds of thousands of people out of jobs and throwing the world economy out of kilter.
We, the humans, have achieved all this, and I have no doubt that before long we shall have succeeded in giving our robot surrogates feelings too, and creative faculties, and a full range of emotions, until in the end they achieve autonomy and can do without us.
And then what? We shall have succeeded in creating ourselves, and for me that fateful crescendo began when Siri told me this morning what millennials are, and I said ‘Thank you.’
DAY 177
In memoriam: the thirteen monkeys who died in a fire at the monkey house of the Woburn Safari Park in Bedfordshire, unforgivably far from their homeland, on 2 January 2018.
DAY 178
The News from America
I woke up today with a challenging bump.
Whom do I trust? Is it Bannon or Trump?
Who is this Wolff, who has written that book?
Tillerson, Kushner – are they worth a look?
Should I stick with The Times, for reliable views,
Or is Twitter the place to keep up with the news?
‘And where’s Uncle Sam?’ half-awake I inquire –
‘Why on earth is he floundering there in the mire?’
I had no reply, so went back to my sleep.
To hell with it all – it will keep, it will keep.
DAY 179
The News from London
I got up this morning and heard something sinister:
Plotters had plots to remove our prime minister!
Some were against her because of her Brexit,
Others (bad rhymers) called her dyslexic.
They claimed that our nation could never be great
If she was commanding the Ship of the
State,
And said that her running of the economy
Might well have come straight out of old Deuteronomy.
(From the Bible, they meant – as much as to say
That all was too much for poor Mrs May!)
And to tell you the truth I am not at all sure
Which opinion is phony,
Which judgement is pure …
So over my breakfast I’d rather recall
When we thought our poor country the greatest of all.
And then I shall sing, while my coffee’s still hot
Britain, Britannia, best of the lot!
DAY 180
Since the start of 2018, in our particular corner of Wales, we have been seeing rainbows – such rainbows! Vivid rainbows, shimmering rainbows, rainbows dominant, rainbows gentle and apparently permanent – until, of course, as all things magic do, they falter and fade and disappear.
I have never seen such rainbows before, and several times, when I have glimpsed one through my window, I have jumped into my car and gone in search of it – and do you know, honestly, I have very, very nearly reached the patch of glimmering glory where the rainbow ends and the pot of gold lies – quite close sometimes, just at the end of the lane, just over the river, just behind the Parrys’ farmyard – until, ah, just before I reach it, it is never there after all …
But believe me, when the rainbow deigns to visit our corner of Wales and displays itself in full resplendence against our background of bare mountain and empty sea, no Beethoven or Turner, no Shakespeare or Grecian architect could outshine its inspiration. Just now, as I thought about this little paean, it occurred to me to play my recording of Judy Garland singing Harold Arlen’s ‘Over the Rainbow’ in 1939, and the tears have come into my eyes.
DAY 181
Self-pity is seldom attractive, and lately I have been feeling shamefully sorry for myself. The other day I pulled out of a broadcast I was going to do for the BBC, simply because I did not feel up to it – as I feebly excused myself. I told them that old age, shaky health, fading powers and personal anxieties had persuaded me that it was time to opt out, and they were very nice about it and said they quite understood.
What a miserable surrender that was, and I pulled out of several other commitments too, and declined some new engagements, and in general behaved as though I was about to retire from public view. And today? Well, today I half regret it, but only half. I was right in some of my assessments, alas, but wrong in others.
Poor me, on a cusp – between vigour and exhaustion, between pride and regret, between life and … Well, after all, I am in my ninety-second year …
Oh, do shut up. Talk about maudlin! See you next time.
DAY 182
On my recent birthday my beloved son Twm and his love Gwyneth wrote for me a celebratory song entitled ‘Kindness and Marmalade’, recognizing that those two commodities have played crucial parts in my life.
You may laugh, but it is true. As to kindness, well, I have been boring people till kingdom come with my conviction that it is the ultimate virtue, embracing all others, understood by everyone, recognized by most religions and a pleasure to practise.
A devotion to marmalade is perhaps less comprehensible, but for many years I have been an addict of that cult too. During half a lifetime of travel, I took a pot of marmalade wherever I went, in war as in peace, in pleasure as in frenzy. In 1953, I took a jar of Cooper’s Oxford to assist my reportage of the first ascent of Mount Everest, and at a hundred foreign breakfasts I have preferred my own condiments to theirs.
Now that I am mostly at home in Wales, as Twm and Gwyneth recognized, I have not neglected the old loyalty. By now, I admit, there is an element of superstition to my marmaladia. Seven jars are aligned on our kitchen dresser, one for each day of the week, and each is different – all brewed, if that’s the verb, in Wales, some home-made by friends, some just from Welsh companies, but each one individual in taste as in association.
I eat from them in strict order, Monday to Sunday, and just occasionally I get the day wrong, and my toast gets marmalade from Ty Newydd, say, when it should be from Caffi’r Tyddyn, or vice versa. This is a black discovery for me, and I expect a day of bad luck to follow. Then again, I admit to moments of faithlessness in occasionally enjoying barbarisms like lemon or even whisky flavourings in my marmalades.
Such heresies must expect retaliation, unless I expiate them by sincere apologies to the marmagods. But they are sure to forgive me anyway. Their congregations are none too large, and they can hardly afford to be vindictive …
DAY 183
The news that on British Airways first-class passengers are no longer to have flowers on their tables strikes me poignantly, and reminds me of the happy days I spent, in the 1950s and 1960s, wandering the world in airliners at other people’s expense. It is true that the publishers and magazine editors who were my benefactors generally sent me by business or club class, but in those days they were sufficiently pretentious anyway, and for the most part I travelled lordlily (yes, there is such a word – I’ve just looked it up).
For example, I see from my package of old mementos that when one day I flew by Pan Am to Hong Kong, the luncheon menu offered me not merely a Filet Mignon, but sautéed eggplant and Diet Coke too, while United Airline’s Tasteful Sampling included Breast of Duck enhanced by Chives and Lingonberry. When Virgin Atlantic once flew me to New York, I lunched upon a Medley of Steamed Lobster and Halibut, with a Sacher Torte to follow, and I shall never forget afternoon tea with British Airways on my way to Miami – a croissant filled with smoked turkey and tuna fish, garnished with radish, egg and mustard-flavour filling, and followed by fruit cake with peanut cookie and chocolate.
You see? We knew how to fly in those days, did we not?! I can laugh at the pretensions now, but I look back at it all with affection. Who could resist a tot of United Airline’s Royal Lochnagar whisky, coming as it did from ‘a tiny distillery no more than a stone’s throw from the royal castle at Balmoral’? And who could fail to hang on to the delightful little keepsakes that came with the cuisine if we were crossing the Atlantic on the ultimate airliner, British Airways’ Concorde – the most beautiful and, alas, one of the least successful flying machines ever built?
I have two of them before me now, both proudly marked with the Concorde emblem. One is a beautifully packed set of playing cards, the other an exquisite little monogrammed notebook. I have never used the playing cards nor written a single word in the notebook.
DAY 184
About Inventions
When I was a cadet at Sandhurst in the closing phase of the Second World War, I invented a device which was something to do with gunnery in tanks in action. I forget exactly what it was, but it was awfully clever. It concerned, I think, communications between a tank commander, viewing the battle scene with his head stuck out of the turret, and the gunner below him inside the tank. However, nobody seemed impressed by the device, whatever it was, and so it became the first of my unsuccessful inventions.
The second also concerned tank warfare. This was a way of making absolutely certain that the open iron hatch of a tank did not close with a bang when it went over a bump, and its failure was vividly demonstrated to me when the hatch of the Sherman tank I was commanding on some exercise shut so violently upon my left hand that I can still see the distortion of my fingers, seventy years on.
More ambitiously in my inventing career, it seemed to me that when mankind first defied space and sent rockets here and there in the universe, a homely opportunity was wasted. In one of my spasms of brilliance it occurred to me that if the world really was round, as was generally thought in those days, and was constantly rotating, one could send a passenger rocket up into space, pause it while the revolving earth reached the desired spot below, and then land it and its passengers safely in Timbuktu, Newfoundland or Heathrow.
This idea was greeted with uniform derision, but here is one last invention which seems to me at once practica
l and desirable. When I drive from my house into Cricieth, our nearest town, I reach a three-way junction. I can turn right or left, or go straight over. My indicator, of course, will flicker left or right, but it has no way of warning pedestrians or traffic that I am going straight ahead.
I suggest having a three-way indicator, so to speak, in every car. I have touted this invention around for half a century, without response, so if somebody at Honda. co.uk reads this, here is a message direct from my friend and companion Honda Civic Type R, 2006 vintage, age 106,000 miles:
PLEASE SAVE ME FROM IGNOMINY IN MY OLD AGE BY FITTING ME WITH A THREEWAY TRAFFIC INDICATOR, AS ADVOCATED BY J. MORRIS.
LOVE AND THANKS IN ADVANCE FROM L432 WJC
DAY 185
I don’t know about you, but recent events suggest to me that we stand upon one of the final cusps of human history, when everything we know is on the brink of change. The instincts of zeitgeist, the rivalries of States or cultures, the squabbles of politicians, the squalid ambitions of capitalists and even the compensations of religion seem to me almost comical considered in the perspective of our times.