by Jan Morris
JAN MORRIS
THINKING AGAIN
With Kind Regards to Everyone
DAY 1
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Ave et Vale?
My indulgent publishers, in both London and New York, published the first 188 of these diary entries in book form. Since entry 188 ended cheerfully but distinctly elegiacally, it occurred to me that perhaps that was the moment to stop writing my diary altogether.
However I am a strong believer in the strength of Routine, and conceiving and writing these inconsequential little pieces has become virtually mechanical in itself, like many another petty compulsion. My mother, who was partly of Quaker stock, would never dream of placing another volume on top of her Bible, and pagan agnostic that I am, I still find myself involuntarily touching wood (i.e. touching the wood of the Cross) to avert bad luck. And I don’t know about you, but in my everyday affairs too there are personal routines, edging into such superstitions, that I feel I must honour.
For example nothing would induce me to go to bed without calling a last Goodnight to my Elizabeth, and at this moment I really have to re-read another chapter of dear old Anna Karenina before I turn the lights out. Rain or shine, sleet or snow, I have to perform my daily walk (and the worse the weather, the more strict the compulsion), while indulging in Wednesday’s allotted marmalade at Tuesday’s breakfast really would be more blasphemous than merely irreverent.
And this daily diary has edged its way into the roster. It has become a pleasant part of my life – not a duty, nor even a chore, but a happy few minutes each day whenever I feel like it. Whether or not it goes well (and I know when it doesn’t), I offer it to my readers, as to myself, with doubts and apologies often, but always with a smug conviction of Routine honoured.
So there it is. Not Vale just yet!
DAY 2
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For most people around the world, it seems to me, these weeks around the beginning of spring 2018 have been one long, disorienting cock-up, and it has knocked many of our disciplines askew … Tragedy to farce, incompetence to despotism, uncertainty to arrogance, all that is most miserable about the human condition seems to have entangled all our lives as the winter ends. The weather hasn’t helped either, what with typhoons and forest fires and unprecedented snowfalls all over the place – schools closed, electric power failed, trains and flights cancelled, melting snow turned maliciously into floods. Nature itself seems to have had enough of us, and has told us so.
Worst of all, though, has been the way humanity has turned upon itself. Across the globe in these unhappy weeks there have been reports of corruptions and cruelties, killings, betrayals, reputations ruined and sneaky disclosures gleefully trumpeted. Is nobody decent any more? Can I not trust my neighbour? Where’s God gone, if there is one? We don’t know, we don’t know, and there’s the trouble. We have no certainties any more, no heroes to trust, no Way (in mystic capital letters) and no Destination.
But perhaps you will forgive me, on this wretched day, if I propagate an old thesis of my own once more. It is this: that the simplest and easiest of virtues, Kindness, can offer all of us not only a Way through the imbroglio, but a Destination too.
DAY 3
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It being a sunny, boisterous day, for a change, I went for my thousand morning paces along the nearby waterfront of Pwllheli, where a hundred yachts are moored now and where long ago fleets of merchant schooners came and went.
My tune for the day, part whistled, part sort of sung to myself, was a song called ‘Over There’, which George M. Cohan wrote in 1917 to support American intervention in the European war. It’s a fine confident march with a fine confident lyric, composed in the days when an American soldier posted overseas might be sure of a welcome wherever he went. He knew that whatever cause he was sent to support would be a just cause, and it was only proper that, as Cohan hymned it, he should not come home till it was over over there:
Over there, over there …
The Yanks are coming
… And we won’t come back till it’s
over over there!
Cohan died in 1942, so he did not live to know the irony that attends the song now, but as I walk I sing it anyway, if only in my mind’s ear, to remember the greater days of a nobler nation.
DAY 4
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Necrophilia is not one of my failings, but I do like graveyards and memorial stones and such. I long ago wrote our own gravestone epitaph, which reads as follows: ‘HERE ARE TWO FRIENDS, JAN AND ELIZABETH MORRIS, AT THE END OF ONE LIFE’. The inscribed stone awaits the day under the stairs, and will eventually be laid upon an islet we own in the river Dwyfor below our house, smilingly to crack and crumble into nothing.
Lots of people, of course, of every religious persuasion, do not want your standard hearse, wreath, sermon and cemetery kind of end, and near us here there is a place dedicated to burials of a very much simpler kind. It is a patch of conifer woodland, off a quiet country road, which shows no apparent sign of being consecrated or, for that matter, of being a burial place at all. I went there for the first time the other day, because it sounded like rather my sort of necropolis, but, alas, found it more disturbing than comforting. The wood was certainly peaceful, as I wandered through its shades. There was nobody else about, and no sound but the breath of the wind through the trees. At first there seemed to be no sign of human exploitation either, but gradually I realized that here and there, half hidden among the tree trunks, were small rough-cut stones with names on them, and occasional small bunches of flowers. It was as though my eyes were just getting used to the dark and silent peacefulness – those few scores of stones, scattered silent all among the trees, with their occasional remembrances …
But they were occasional. Those flowers were few, those names were often far off the track and had a lonely feel. There was peace, that’s for sure, but it was like a peace of neglect, or even forgetfulness. Nature was all around that patch of wood, but it felt to me like Nature uninterested, and I found myself, as I returned to the car and the road, pining unexpectedly for a homely old gravestone with a rhyme from a hymn on it, a loving, simple message and a fresh bunch of shop-bought tulips, wrapped in cellophane.
DAY 5
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Well, you must take my word for it, I did record a Thought for today, but when I re-read it the entry turned out to be so footling that I have expunged it with a muttered curse.
DAY 6
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Talking of words, have you used ‘algorithm’ lately? It has only recently entered my ken, and seems to be on the make. The moment it enters my reading matter, on the screen or on the page, I am wary: I fear that there is discomfort to come, either because the reading matter is going to be too intellectual for me, or because the use of the noun (assuming it is a noun) portends pretensions to come. It’s a pity, because I like the word itself, with its graceful shape and obvious Arab origins, but alas it is not yet my style.
Not yet. In the meantime, I have been exploring it. It means, the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on my desk tells me, a set of rules used in problem-solving operations; or, as Webster’s puts it, the art of calculating with any species of notation.
Of course the big Oxford downstairs, in all the swank of its fourteen volumes, has more to say about the word: for a start, that it doesn’t exist, having ‘passed through many pseudo-etymological perversions’ as a mere corruption of ‘algorist’. There are heaps of varied interpretations and explanations on the Web, but I have reached the suspicion that often enough people who use the word don’t real
ly know much more than I do about its meaning.
Never mind. ‘Algorithm’ is a lovely word, a noble, graceful word, and it moves me to learn that it comes (I don’t quite know how) from the ninth-century surname of Abu Ja’far Mohammed Ben Musa. I can’t find him in my Encyclopedia of Islam, but I think I’ll start using the word myself, algoristically, just to amuse him.
DAY 7
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Today’s news concerned, as it so often does, President Trump of the USA. Since his election he has seldom been out of our thoughts, has he not? This morning it seems he has done something good, I forget exactly what. It may turn out to be bad anyway, and by the time you read this you will, of course, know the result better than I do, but I venture now to record once more my own feelings about this equivocal man. I have always rather liked his political style, as against his personal ideals, which are almost grotesquely crude. He states his political case, whatever it is, boldly and unpretentiously to his own particular audience, and to hell with everyone else. It is an All-American way: America First! Make America Great Again! As one with a sneaking sympathy for patriotism, whatever flag it flies, I respond to this approach as instinctively as any redneck bigot.
Then again, although I loathe Trump’s attitude to women, I think there is something forgivably childlike to his behaviour, like the sulks and outbursts of a spoilt schoolboy. He must, I know, be a man of true abilities – how else could he have assembled his immense financial holdings? He’s no fool, and in his political relationships he really does remind me of a precocious pupil cocking the snook at his elders and betters. Many a foolish adolescent grows up to be a responsible adult, and many a lesser villain repents his sins.
I can hardly think of Donald Trump as a great statesman. Can you? Surely not, but I can just imagine history remembering him as Trump the Redeemed.
Please God!
DAY 8
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A breathless hush (to borrow a phrase I’ve always liked from dear old Henry Newbolt), a breathless hush hung over our lane this morning, when I set off on my statutory one thousand paces in the aftermath of the worst storm we’ve had for years.
The newspapers dubbed it the Beast from the East, because it reached us from somewhere like Siberia and until yesterday raged mercilessly all over our islands, causing miscellaneous havoc and unhappiness almost everywhere. Off I went on this bleak morning after to survey the effects of it, and what I mostly found was hush. I met nobody, I saw nobody. I felt all alone in the world, and the ground all around me was littered with toppled trees and broken branches, patches of broken glass and the occasional soggily abandoned agricultural carton. I felt like giving up, opting out, abandoning the land so wasted and forlorn, leaving it all to the birds and beasts and searching for some other way …
But no. There were a few bedraggled sheep munching in one of the Parrys’ fields, and presently, as I walked on, birds began to call, first the usual anonymous kind of burbling, but then sporadic snatches of legitimate birdsong, and finally salvos from a brazen pair of woodpeckers, the machine-gunners of Nature – the first I have heard in 2018! They changed my mood in an instant. I quickened my step, turned at the end of the lane and started for home; and as I walked now I whistled my chosen marching tune of the day, which awoke the woodland around me and made even the bare branches rustle.
So it was not, as I rather expected, echoes from The Waste Land that saw me home to lunch, but a buoyant word of encouragement from old Henry Newbolt. ‘Play up!’ I heard his fastidious Victorian timbre reach me again, as I put my stick back in the rack. ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’
DAY 9
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It has been a horrible day, as it happens, all cold drizzle and wind and sudden fierce rain squalls, but was I deterred from my daily habits? Certainly not. Just as duty calls me to write this diary, so after a lifetime of travel and challenge I arrogantly pride myself on my one thousand diurnal paces, come what weather may, and scorn those who stay whimpering indoors.
On the other hand, I am constantly astonished, and rebuked, by the variety of people I regularly meet out there as I swagger through squall and blizzard on our seafront. They are often just as old as I am, and all of them are at least as resilient. There are those, of course, who are prisoners of their dogs, obliged to give them their daily exercise, throw stones into the sea for them and play monotonous, footling games that confirm my preference for cats. And there are those like me who walk out there as a matter of personal compulsion, or perhaps in obeyance of doctors’ orders.
Most of them, though, are there simply because they want to be, and those are the ones I admire. How admirable are the mums and dads who cheerfully cavort with their robust young families, while the water streams down the necks of their mackintoshes. How truly heroic the old lady who regularly turns up in her wheelchair, chuckling wryly in the rain! The children themselves, one and all, exult in the wet mess and flounder of everything, and make me feel that one day they will rule us well.
So my conceit is by no means tempered by the fact that a multitude, young and old, is at least as hardy as I am. On the contrary, I am proud to know myself a member of it, and to feel as Henry V did, when he sympathized with gentlemen comfortably in bed when they might have been out there with him, winning the Battle of Agincourt!
DAY 10
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Glimpses of Literary Life
As an ageing littérateur I sometimes find it necessary to pursue payment for my work. This was the case recently in the matter of a really rather remarkable essay, concerning hyperbole in religious poesy of the English Middle Ages (or something like that). I had delivered it to its commissioning magazine several weeks before, had apparently not been paid for it, and thought it time to investigate the matter through my bank.
Well, I call it ‘my bank’ because it used to have a branch in our local town, until they abandoned that and obliged us all, even artistes of a certain age, to make a highly inconvenient bus or car journey to somewhere else altogether. A polite telephone operator regrets, anyway, that an unusual flow of customer business is delaying things this morning, and says how truly sorry she is for the consequent delay, which, as she rightly says, is inconveniencing so many of their tremendously valued clients. A profound silence now falls upon my inquiry. All I want to find out is whether I have been paid the modest fee I am expecting for that essay (especially imaginative, though I say it myself, in discussing the use of simile in the work of the Venerable Bede). Has the magazine used it or not? When at last a man at the bank comes on the line and asks if he can help me, I quote him the six-digit number I had extracted from an all-but-illegible scratch card they had sent me long ago, and my fifteen-digit customer number, and my Motivation Code in duplicate, and my sixteen-digit card number, and my nine-digit security number, and my preference code, and my account numbers. And then the whole lot all over again, because there was one letter too many in the second rendition of my Motivation Code.
There is a long silence. Then the operator returns. ‘I’m putting you through to Remainder Accounts,’ I think she says, in an understanding sort of way, for in the meantime she has discovered my date of birth, ‘and it has been a pleasure assisting you, Jan’ (for senior citizens should preferably be addressed by first names). Silence returns, interrupted only by intermittent blips and hiccups, until I decide to call it a day. ‘Thank you for your kind help anyway,’ I tell her, and she says it is always a pleasure to be of service to valued clients.
I still don’t know if they have used my essay, but I do hope they will – it really is rather insightful. In any case, it’s not the money I care about. Of course not. It is satisfaction enough to remember that alone I wrote that particularly sympathetic passage, near the end of page 8, about the influence of Cotswold folk music upon Early English canticles.
DAY 11
Fairly early in the morning these days aircraft often begin playing around in the skies above these parts, and their noise enlivens my wakening hours. It is not the steady drone of airliners on their way to Dublin or New York, nor the busy, useful clatter of helicopters, but decidedly more exciting morning calls, I always like to think, from young men up there practising their flying technique.
Only today did I discover more about them. Sitting in the waiting room of our local health clinic, waiting to have my ears syringed, from a selection of magazines mostly about symptoms and treatments I came across one with a colour photograph of a fighter aircraft on the cover. What a surprise! It turned out to be the house magazine, so to speak, of a military airfield not far from us, and from it I gathered more about the causes of those morning goings-on – advanced readiness, I now assumed, for our defence against bad people.
I am all for that, of course, but the happiest thing I discovered from that journal, before I was called to surgery, was this: that among the aircraft lately manoeuvring so exhilaratingly above my head had been a visiting squadron from Switzerland! Friendly Swiss fighters over Wales! Could anything be happier?
I thought of stealing the magazine from the clinic, just to show friends that I wasn’t romancing or hallucinating, but no, I thought that would be letting the standards of the side down.
DAY 12
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When long ago my youth was ending, and I came home from abroad with some cash in my pocket, I resolved for the first time in my life to buy a brand-new car.