by Jan Morris
Well, you may sneer, but I wish we still had old Winston to steer us through. Nowadays he is often reviled as a crude nationalist warmonger, and of course he had his blind spots and fallible prejudices, but Churchill the imperialist it was who nevertheless could write, in the prime of the Raj, about the evil side of Empire, ‘the foul path of imperialism’ and its ‘sordid appetites’. In short, he was an honest, cultured, artistic, frankly fallible, courageous, gifted and entertaining gentleman, and in the absence of any divine interventionist, it seems to me that an honest, cultured, artistic, frankly fallible, courageous, gifted and entertaining gent is just the messiah the poor British need today.
Any candidates in mind?
DAY 115
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The first lambs of 2019 are emerging into the world, poor little devils. No wonder, having taken a look at the place, they so soon hurry back to their mums’ udders.
DAY 116
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Conscience, as the man said, makes cowards of us all, and it certainly makes a wimp of me.
I’ve been getting a great deal of mail lately, for one reason and another. The earlier volume of this diary was published, and lots and lots of people wrote letters or sent e-mails about it, and then many more wrote kindly about dementia, and ageing friends shared their emotions, and total strangers expressed their good wishes, and all in all, it seemed to me, half the world was getting in touch with me, morning after morning, and I was replying to them afternoon after afternoon, until the other day I switched off and replied to no more.
Conscience, my adviser, took note, and now I am beset by ineffectual pangs of remorse. Of course I know I should have replied to all those friendly messages, and of course I know that if I tried hard enough, I could probably find some of their addresses and write gratefully to them now, but no, I’m a wimp now, a whining wimp.
‘Who asked them to write, anyway?’ my rival advocate Beelzebub slyly suggests, and he does have a point, doesn’t he? But ‘Get thee behind me,’ Conscience has summoned up the guts to retort, and at least I am sitting down now to compose this apologia …
DAY 117
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I have never met the golfer Tiger Woods, and doubtless never shall, but I like him very much. Partly, of course, I admire him for his professional skills and tenacity, but chiefly I like him for himself. I like the style of him, and I very much like the fact that his very existence makes the whole wretched obsession with race seem absurd. When Woods raises his club to drive, surely only the very crudest of oafs could either thrill or shudder because of what colour he is. By and large, even the oafs seem to agree that in this case at least, a man’s a man for all that.
Of course history and circumstance have fostered racial bigotry, and of course generations of American southerners and British imperialists were not responsible for their prejudices. There are plenty of ignorant bigots still around, though, to spout their unkind idiocies, and that’s why Tiger Woods is the man for me!!
DAY 118
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Well, Notre-Dame did not entirely burn down yesterday, but it very nearly did, and it has lost lots of its treasures. It is heartening that the whole world today seems to be rejoicing at the escape and mourning the damage that was done to the grand old structure (minus, of course, the usual scum of profiteers, publicity-seekers and social-media bores). Not everybody loves France or the French, not everyone has been to Paris, but to my mind what we are really all honouring now, anyway, is the beauty of a suggestion – not even a conviction, but an idea, or an instinct. Just for once we have responded to a universal mystic call, and if there is a God, he must surely be pleased that the numen of one of his myriad holy places has brought out the best in most of us. Amen!
DAY 119
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Here’s an odd little juxtaposition of memories for you, if you can be bothered to read it. A charming small boy came to Trefan Morys with his parents today, and pottering about the kitchen came across a blue china figure of a hen, apparently sitting on her eggs. He lifted her up, and I heard his laughing cry of discovery across the room – it was not eggs she was hatching, but cornflakes!
Instantly, I heard in my mind an echo from fifty or sixty years ago, when I was on a guided tour of the White House in Washington, and when I heard a similar cry of discovery from one of my fellow tourists. What she had found was on one of the plates in a cabinet of the presidential china. ‘Just what I thought,’ I heard her cry, then and in twisted echo again this morning, ‘– chipped!’
Chicken eggs and presidential crockery – tenuous but tenacious are the wisps of memory!
DAY 120
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A cheerful-sounding phone call this morning from a dear old friend and contemporary, but as so often these days, the cheerfulness was disguised. She chatted a bit, as usual, of this and that, but gradually eased our talk around to her real news: that one more elderly friend of both of us had died in the night.
Believe me, when you get to my age, it is a regular tolling of the bell, and it probably makes many of us wonder if it is worth living so long – all too often we’ve outlived our usefulness, and even, in a way, our identities. But I’ve plugged this gloomy thought often enough in this diary, I know, and I here and now promise, before I go out for my day’s exercise, that I won’t once breathe the word ‘euthanasia’ again (even if I’ve spelt it right).
DAY 121
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Easter morning 2019, and what do the world’s headlines have for us on this day of happy celebration, a day to be shared by people of all religious faiths, or none at all, as a festival of holiday?
SRI LANKA EXPLOSIONS: AT LEAST 100 KILLED AND HUNDREDS INJURED IN THREE CHURCHES AND THREE HOTELS
That’s what the news offers us this happy morn, and what more can I write? I can only add, with a bitter tinge of irony, that my Elizabeth was born and spent her happy childhood in Sri Lanka, in the days when it was British Ceylon … She is sitting now in the dappled sunshine of our garden, and has not taken in the ghastly Easter news from her birthplace.
I think I shall let it be, let it be …
DAY 122
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‘Let it be’ were the last words of yesterday’s diary entry, and in a very different context they shall be today’s first. Yesterday I was sparing dear old Elizabeth some ghastly news; today I am recording my own reluctant recognition that I am simply not competent, in my ninety-third year, to keep up with or even understand the world’s goings-on. The argot of the cyber-world is beyond me, and so are the complexities of world diplomacy, economics and skulduggery. What and who and where are the social-media pundits droning on about today – are they goodies or baddies, or just bores? Should I be concerned about the election in Venezuela? Where is Huawei, anyway? What is Netflix? I feel my very sensibilities are being hardened by the perpetual miseries of cruelties and famines and poverty and injustices, starving children, weeping mothers, homeless families and despairing old folk.
So, yes, today I shall let it all be. And tomorrow?
DAY 123
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Here’s an unnerving development to watch out for, if you are a writer like me and will one day reach a comparable age. I have developed an unhealthy addiction to reading my own books. Some I have entirely forgotten, some I admire and some I deplore, but there is no denying that I do enjoy the experience of encountering them again, like old acquaintances. The oldest among them is dated, I see, 1956, and is all about the USA; the latest is from 2018, and is all about me.
Some of them I know more or less by heart. Some, dear God, I wish I’d never thought of. But there we are, the rough with the smooth, and the rotten too!
DAY 124
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The power of words enthrals me. I have never until today used the word ‘Nadir’, although I have often, so to speak, admired it from afar – its simple elegance, its restraint, the shape and sound of it, its echoes of classical Arabic as against its mundane and depressing Anglo-American equivalent, ‘rock bottom’.
Well, this morning I reached my own Nadir. I needn’t analyse the causes; take my word for it, never before in my conscious life has everything seemed so entirely dreadful as it did then, personally, socially, financially, mentally and imaginatively. It was a Nadirian day, one might say if there were such an adjective, which there is now.
But you never know, do you? I stumbled upon a wonderfully curative noun in the dictionary this afternoon, and it entered my mind like a charm: ‘Elixir’, another word I’ve never used before, and another concept from the distant Arabic. Elixir offered me in magical potion the very spirit of promise and recompense, and marvellously restored my spirits … Elixir! I relished its sound and its shape in my imagination at teatime, gratefully employ it now, and invent in its honour a second brand-new adjective of the day:
Elixirian.
There! Nadirian! Elixirian! Get thee behind me, rock bottom!
DAY 125
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Today’s mundane activities strike me as characteristic of an old writer’s goings-on at the very start of the summer in Wales. They go like this:
Owls wake me, hooting insistently until dawn. From our terrace I see our first swallows of the season, but note there is still snow on Snowdon. At breakfast-time a solitary Typhoon fighter from the nearby RAF station sweeps low over us, ready no doubt to defend us from all evil, and I envy its pilot, as I always do.
The morning mail brings me a payment of royalties from the Chinese translation of a book I wrote in 1968, together with instructions about how to vote in the forthcoming European elections. One correspondent chides me for getting a quotation wrong, and a total stranger says he hopes he will not be intruding if he turns up at Trefan one morning next week just to say hullo.
During the morning a kind acquaintance knocks at the door with a pot of her excellent home-made marmalade, in just the consistency I prefer, and in the afternoon some terrific small relatives appear and play virtuoso ball games inside and outside the house. They talk to each other in Welsh that is far beyond my fading command of the language, but sympathetically translate for me when required. Cows come by for milking.
In fits and starts during the day I take my exercise (today a thousand paces along the Cricieth waterfront), answer letters and telephone calls, write this diary entry, read my current quota of War and Peace, and in the calm of the evening, after a ready-cooked supermarket supper, Elizabeth and I switch listlessly from TV channel to TV channel in search of something appealing.
Before I go to bed, though, I go outside and look at the stars. They wish me their usual cool, kindly and unearthly goodnights, and so comfortingly end my day. It has passed on and off in gleams and lurches, laughs and disappointments and nothings in particular – one all-too-ordinary day, at the start of an elderly writer’s summer in Wales, AD 2019.
DAY 126
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A glorious day today, and the splendid old sycamore that presides over our yard and garden looks quite particularly benign and self-satisfied. I’m grateful to it, as always, because for me the pleasure of the plant life of our domain comes chiefly from its shades and contrasts.
The early-summer colours are lovely, of course – bright blues and yellows and pinks massed in banks and bushes, brazen in bold patches and shamelessly showing off their splendours down the banks of the lane. It is the inner suggestiveness of the scene, though, the hints and proposals and errors, that gives me my own magics, courtesy of that grand old sycamore.
For example, if you look through its shady lower branches, you will see far away, in distant sunshine, the suggestion of some other country altogether far, far away, where altogether foreign peoples must surely be living and loving, with hybrid snakes, or unicorns.
And then again, at your very feet, in the damp blackness of the turf among the roots of the sycamore, who knows what is going on down there? Worms may be confessing, beetles may be at war, or there may be strange slugs or caterpillars unknown to science. Who knows? And all these surmises and astonishments, these glimpses of the arcane, emerge from the shade of that grand old sycamore, which doesn’t give a damn anyway, and stands there serene, majestic and, I hope, amused by the kaleidoscope of life itself, in truth or in dream …
But my mind wanders. What was I saying? I must be getting old.
DAY 127
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I almost decided yesterday, as I concluded Day 126 of this performance, to bring the curtain down, write ‘Finis’ or call ‘Time, Gentlemen, please!’ I rather liked the idea that the poet Marvell suggested for his racier divinities – of concluding life’s career motionless in a tree, e.g. in yesterday’s sycamore! But no, as he also reminds me, it’s a wondrous life is this I lead, so here we go again.
It’s a lovely morning once more, and my theme today is one of gratitude. I walk with a stick nowadays, my balance being wobbly, and it is heart-warming how this declaration of infirmity is greeted by one and all – not just by my dear Welsh fellow citizens, but by unlikely strangers wherever I go. Gigantic lorries stop to let me cross the street! Wild, uncouth youths keep doors open for me! Men with nasty faces help me up steps, and evident harridans offer me gaps in queues.
I can offer these benefactors nothing in return. We shall never see each other again. Just the stick does it, and they are simply honouring the instincts of their own hearts and confirming my own conviction that the human race everywhere essentially prefers to be decent.
DAY 128
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One of the very best men I have ever known is a nonconformist minister almost exactly the same age as I am – which means, in my own agnostic view, that it’s probably nearly time to pack our bags for a final exit. He would certainly not agree, being a profoundly dedicated Christian still famously active in his cause.
Like everyone else, I greatly admire him and his dear wife. Their lives have been rich, rewarding and distinguished, but not without sorrows, and as a hot sceptic I think they are lovely examples of an opposite persuasion, gently practising what they preach.
Nevertheless, I was not surprised to learn last week that this good man had collapsed and been taken to hospital. Holy he undoubtedly is, but in my view the grim reaper recognizes no faiths and no merits, and the news came as no shock to me. Twice I called his dear partner for news of his condition, and twice the prognosis was as I expected – even the truest and most faithful of Christians is not immune to Nature. I rang twice more, and each time the end seemed closer, but when I rang for the fifth time, the response was different. Not only was the answering voice almost chirpily nonchalant, it was also unmistakably the voice of my dear old friend himself, not dying at all, not despairing in the least, but home from the hospital, faithful as always to his beliefs, and no doubt confident anyway, as his doctrine assures him, of another life to come.
Of course he is going to go in the end, like you and me and everyone else, but just for a moment or two, when I heard his cheerful voice that afternoon – just for a moment I wavered in my scepticism …
DAY 129
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I cannot deny that I find it harder every year to get up in the morning, but I have learnt to cheer the ordeal by making it an old-school, all-American occasion.
This I achieve through the medium of the first American I ever met. Eighty-odd years ago, towards the end of the Second World War, I was waiting to join the British Army by working as a temporary cub reporter on a newspaper in Bristol. One day there arrived at that war-ravaged seaport, in a
convoy from New York, an American Army road show, on a morale-building tour. I was detailed by the Western Daily Press to interview the show’s producer, and so I became briefly acquainted with Irving Berlin.
He was delightfully kind to his callow interviewer, my very, very first American, and he remains to this day my ideal archetypal citizen of the great republic. He had worked his way from being a singing waiter in a New York Chinese restaurant to being both the composer and the lyricist of songs that are loved and sung around the world to this day – literally hundreds of them in the collected volume of his works that I have in my library now.
And among those Irving Berlin songs is my morning reveille, from the show he brought to Bristol that day, which cheerfully assures its soldier audience that one day the wretched bugler who wakes them up each morning, like the guy who wakes him up, is going to be murdered on their behalf.
Of course I don’t feel murderous. On the contrary. Already that merrily sardonic lyric, with its irresistible tune, has got me out of bed singing and feeling musically young, and in a particularly American way – Irving Berlin’s way, an old American way, that is, from the glory days of the Great Republic, when it still felt young too, and proud of itself, singing among friends in the morning.