by Jan Morris
All in all, if I am to go by those old pictures, it looks a bold, confident, self-sufficient and enviable little community back there, so far from the centre of things, where a little society sure of its origins, its loyalties, its culture, its language and its abilities thrived before the deracinating world fell upon it.
Of course, there is much that is good still in Tremadog down the road, much kindness and decency; what is lost is the creative buoyancy of identity that, just for a few generations, history allowed it.
DAY 47
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Football has dominated almost everything in the last couple of days, because of the international World Cup contest going on in Russia and dominating TV screens from Moscow to Llanystumdwy, Wales, by way of Timbuktu. I have been watching it all half mesmerized, and it has implanted some new growths into my jumbled foliage of feelings concerning nationalism, patriotism, etc., so hang about, please, while I sort them out.
First, I am repelled, as I have always been, by the crazy flag-waving, chanting and general grotesquerie that characterizes the behaviour of crowds at international games of association football – soccer, that is, whose rules were first codified in Warwickshire, England, in 1863, and which is played, the rules say, ‘by kicking a ball into the opponent’s goal’.
Dear God, though, since 1863 it has evidently evolved in its upper grades, so to speak, into dizzy displays of skill and exhibitionism, that ball streaking madly here and there across the field, fought and slithered and tumbled for, projected by feet or heads, with virtuoso exhibitions of foresight and inexplicable whistle-blowings, and only very occasionally kicked into that opponent’s goal. I hardly know what is going on, but I have to admit that at the World Cup tournament 2018, I have succumbed to football’s fascination …
More to my point today, though, I have come to see soccer, in this its ultimate grade, as an instrument of good. Those vast, silly crowds, so far as I can see, are preposterously elated when their chosen team wins, but they do not seem embittered when it is beaten, and nor do the players themselves – down-hearted, perhaps, but not apparently vindictive. I take it that this is partly because soccer has become so truly internationalized. Professional players are swapped not just from team to team, but from country to country, so that local heroes are often not local at all, but for a transfer fee have come direct from Timbuktu Rovers, say, to Llanystumdwy Hotspurs, or vice versa.
And then again, and more importantly, the evil and preposterous prejudice of racism goes all to pot, if you are a football fan: for as far as I can see, every leading team in this great international tournament includes players of several colours, and in this, as in all else, their presence is merely a matter of common sense – or opportunism!
But most telling of all, I have come this week to recognize international football as a kind of universal solace. The world lacks comfort these days – lacks shelter, lacks certainties and loyalties, the props of religion and the reassurance of comradeship. In the vast, wildly enthusiastic crowds of the World Cup, during the last few days, I like to think I have been seeing the world itself enjoying, without always knowing it, the friendship and comfort of humanity itself.
DAY 48
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A good American friend wrote to me the other day from New York, and for once in my life I disagreed with him. He was writing about the forthcoming visit to Britain of President Trump, and in particular about a wheeze that the president’s critics here are preparing for his reception. Somebody has made a balloon caricature of him, a great big yellow smirking thing, nearly twenty feet tall, which portrays him as an angry nappied baby and is going to float over London during his stay – not in greeting nor even in joke, but obviously in blatant contempt.
My always fastidious New Yorker evidently approves of this gesture, and of course I understand why. My own ignorant view of Trump’s presidency remains ambivalent, but I can well understand why every single American I know detests the man and his policies, and might easily approve of the baby balloon. I’m sure millions of Britons will approve of it too – the lord mayor of London himself has specifically given it his blessing. I am not, however, one of them.
I believe that civility should prevail in public as in private affairs – unless, of course, the preposterous primitivism of war intervenes. President Trump is coming to Britain at the invitation of our prime minister, our temporal chief citizen, and he is going to be received by Queen Elizabeth, the allegorical embodiment of our nation itself. I am myself a republican Welsh separatist, but I can see the grace in all this, and I believe that kind manners should prevail between nations as between humans.
I told my old friend as much, and he replied compellingly. Good taste and decency had no meaning in the case, said he, because Trump himself disdained them, and mockery was the one valid tool to use against him. But he is a true American gentleman himself, and he ended his retort thus: ‘If I cannot convince you, that’s OK, because I will love you even more for standing up for what you believe is right.’
How would the president cope with that, I wonder?
DAY 49
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Well, President Trump has come and gone from our shores, leaving behind the usual baffled responses! He behaved, during his few days here, outrageously and ingratiatingly, with clumsy grace and with crudity, like an oaf, like an adolescent, and all together with that mixture of the brash, the incredible, the inscrutable and the unforeseeable that makes him, one has to admit, much the most interesting of today’s world leaders. Like him or loathe him, despise him or just throw up your hands in despair at his policies, there is no denying the fascination of Donald John Trump.
He is like some baffling missile from outer space, sweeping in and out of our terrestrial atmosphere and leaving chunks of radioactive substances lying around (his incongruously graceful First Lady fastidiously steps around them, and the various monarchs and lesser statesmen of his passing pretend not to notice …). As for me, I remain in hope. Trump has not come to Wales, and I remain aloof from the distasteful public receptions that thousands of English and Scottish protesters have given him. His racial policies sound detestable, his political methods dubious, but still I cannot help instinctively thinking that if President Trump’s first incumbency has been a nightmare, his second four years may even yet prove his period of power to have been, on balance, a good deed in a very naughty world.
But don’t listen to me. It may well be, as old Donald might say, Fake News.
DAY 50
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Here’s an astonishment. I was telling somebody yesterday about my dear Elizabeth’s dementia – rightly or wrongly, I feel letting people know about it is best for us all – and he astonishingly replied, ‘Oh yes, my cat’s got it.’
Feline dementia! So it seems. The cat, having eaten a hearty meal, immediately demanded more, but when it was supplied, showed not the slightest interest in it. Dementia, was the perfectly serious diagnosis of my informant’s vet – the animal was not, it seems, particularly greedy, but had totally forgotten that it had just eaten.
I told Elizabeth the tale, but she did not seem particularly interested, and as a matter of fact I couldn’t quite remember myself whether it was nearly lunchtime then, or if we’d just had supper. Is dementia catching?
DAY 51
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I generally buy our wine from the venerable, admirable and non-profit-making Wine Society, founded in 1874 as the International Exhibition Co-Operative Wine Society Limited, and still in its prime. Its enthralling catalogue turns up regularly and offers me a vast variety of wines from around the known world, all sure to be excellent, and to be delivered within a few days. What could be more convenient for a vinous pensioner like me?
And do I take advantage of it? Of course I don’t. I simply can’t be bothered. I just order the so
ciety’s mixed dozens of whites and reds, just like that, taking no notice of vintages and such, and telling the society that if I’m not at home, would their delivery men kindly leave the stuff in the shed with the blue door in the yard.
And yet, and yet … Actually, I do have some pernickety wine preferences, to be mentally indulged with that catalogue when the order’s gone. Sentimentally, I would really like always to have wines from places I know and love – Baccolo Appassimento, for instance, from the Veneto, its spicy character achieved, the catalogue tells me, by partial air-drying of the grapes, or a bottle of the Lebanon’s celestial Château Musar, or a Shiraz from dear old Stellenbosch, or an honest Californian Zinfandel (‘deliciously gluggable’, says the catalogue), or something lovely from Down Under, or a bottle from the Three Choirs Vineyard in Gloucestershire, which I always used to stop off at when I drove down from Wales to Oxford.
And then again, as a sucker for the crudest kinds of retsina, as drunk long ago in lively Greek taverns, I would be intrigued to try what is described as a completely new concept of the dear old stuff – ‘delicate, fruity and herby’! Delicate? Fruity? Retsina? Wow!
Never mind. I’m just too lazy. The order’s gone, anyway, and any day now those wine boxes will faithfully turn up from the International Exhibition folk, a dozen whites and a dozen reds, as per usual.
DAY 52
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Micah the Prophet got it right! Who was Micah the Prophet, and what particular God or version of a God was he a prophet of? Search me, but today I came across this quotation from him, which I wish to endorse: ‘What does the Lord require of you, but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?’
Micah was dead right there, in my opinion, and it makes me wonder if he wasn’t the same prophet, under a nom de plume perhaps, as the one who said to his audience somewhere else, apropos of an example of decent behaviour, ‘Go, and do thou likewise.’
But does it matter anyway to what particular divinity, sub-divinity or heresy Micah owed his allegiance? I think not, and I think kindness is its own God, oblivious to period, creed, dogma or dispute.
Here endeth today’s Lesson!
DAY 53
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From my viewpoint, as an old observer far away in rural Wales, young urban England generally looks unlovely, ravaged and debased by the civic miseries of our time: by hooliganism and violence and racism, by obsessions with computers and mobile phones and reality TV and drugs and celebrity, by the general disintegration of family life and the nation’s pitiful decline in its world status. From here, as I say, compared with how I remember it long ago young England seems decidedly unappealing.
Yesterday, though, I stopped off for coffee in our local equivalent of what the Americans used to call an ice-cream parlour, and there, as a lifelong professional busybody, I drew different conclusions. It was a half-term school holiday, and the place was chock-a-block full of families from our nearest English cities – Liverpool and Manchester, probably Birmingham too, big industrial cities which had spewed out their inhabitants for a trip to the rural seaside.
Well, I very soon concluded, young England wasn’t so degenerate after all. I was hemmed in by it at my table there, deafened by the din of it all, slightly baffled by the jargon and the attitudes, but unarguably exhilarated. So these were the city children I had read about, the unfortunate young generation of Brexit Britain! They looked to me vivacious, amused, polite to the elderly and generally healthy. I greatly enjoyed the racket of that café, the racial variety and the vigour.
I am a professional instinctive (an abstract noun I have just invented, by the way), and wishful instinct rather than memory tells me that this noisy, undisciplined but lively young England is a lot more interesting than we were, when we were young and mobile-phoneless …
DAY 54
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There’s an old, old comedy on BBC TV which has lately been revived and caused some stir, because it was said to be perpetuating tired old patriotic emotions. It was called Dad’s Army, and it was all about the volunteer part-time force called the Home Guard, which came into being in the Second World War and was manned chiefly by people too old for active service. The programme was, to my mind, endearingly and farcically funny.
I have some right to judge it because I am, I suppose, at ninety-one one of the Home Guard’s few survivors. I was sixteen, going on seventeen, when I cut and ran from my boarding school and went home to Somerset to kill time more usefully before I could join the real army. I already had some vestigial military training in the school’s Officer Training Corps, so I was welcomed when I turned up, slightly underage, at the local Home Guard station and offered to enlist.
The Home Guard was not in the least farcical like Dad’s Army, but it was just as endearing. It had originally been called the Local Defence Volunteers, and it was rooted in its own patches of country. Most of our soldiers were veterans of the First World War, of all trades, professions and social backgrounds, and we were commanded by our local squire, himself a decorated lieutenant-colonel of 1914 vintage. We exercised once a week in quite vigorous infantry tactics, and we also, as I remember it, had our own cricket team. It was no joke. I have no doubt that if the Germans really had invaded, we would have been at least a nuisance to them.
Of course, I was a young romantic, and I can half remember to this day my adolescent emotions when I was posted with my ancient Lee-Enfield rifle to a hillside above the sea, looking across the Bristol Channel to the Welsh shore. ‘Let ’em all come! We’ll show them!’ I probably said to myself …
But they never did come, and before long I went off to another five years of other sorts of soldiering, in other kinds of places, until one day I became another sort of person too.
PS I love Dad’s Army still!
DAY 55
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Today, a surreal transatlantic exchange!
1. I reported to an American couple that all the castles in Wales were floodlit because a Welsh cyclist had won the Tour de France.
2. She e-mailed her congratulations and added that she had dreamed we should all go to Istanbul.
3. Why Istanbul? I inquired.
4. She didn’t know, she said.
5. I e-mailed, Istanbul, Istanbul. Why did Constantinople get the works?
6. He e-mailed that he remembered that song very well, and now he couldn’t get it out of his head. Had I some remedial substitute?
7. I said, Try Beethoven’s Fifth.
I haven’t heard from them since.
DAY 56
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Almost every day, it seems to me, the menace of Artificial Intelligence grows more menacing. Today we learn that a presidential occasion in Venezuela has been disrupted by an invasion of drones from neighbouring Colombia. It apparently did not succeed in its intentions, whatever they were, either because the drones simply blew up in mid-air or because they were shot down by Venezuelan snipers. Also, it is true, I suppose (I know nothing about these things), that they were ultimately controlled by human activists at Colombian bases. Nevertheless, yesterday the affairs of one nation were apparently disrupted by the actions of another, not by the use of simple rockets, let alone bombers or armies, but by the intervention of potentially autonomous machines, working for the moment in alliance with Homo sapiens.
It seems to me inevitable that such intelligent devices will, sooner or later, devise their own programmes, indulge their own prejudices, start their own wars, and that today’s South American squabble is yet another ominous warning of, as the man put it long ago, Things to Come.
DAY 57
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The milk had gone sour when I prepared breakfast this morning, the overnight weather having been thundery, so I jumped into the car and drove down to Cricieth to buy some
more. It would only take a few exhilarating minutes, I told myself, as the old Honda and I raced down the empty morning roads, singing as we went, picked up the milk and whizzed home.
I was wrong. Hardly had we reached our own front door again than I heard on the car radio the opening notes of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto, and I was trapped in my seat. Few works of the classical repertoire grip me more easily than this much-beloved old workhorse of a piece, so variedly grand and wistful, disturbing and reassuring, patrician and populist. Rachmaninov’s music was banned in Russia in the 1930s for representing the ‘decadent attitude of the lower middle classes’, and it’s just right for me.
And glued in my seat there, the concerto also took me, in my traveller’s romantic way, to a particular foreign place: the little Swiss town of Weggis, on Lake Lucerne, which we frequented for some years and which has left in my memory a marvellously jumbled mosaic of impressions: snowy mountains, placid Swiss waters, merry children and, above all, the comings and goings of lake steamers – graceful old white paddle boats with lordly captains and thumping antique engines …
Why do the emotions of the second piano concerto overlap in my mind with the pulse of the steamboats? Because, as it happens, Rachmaninov retired to a white house on the Lucerne shore, just up the coast from Weggis, and I like to think that perhaps he too may have responded to the beat of those very same venerable pistons.