21September1995

London: 21st September 1995
My dear folks,

Friday night. There’s a Welsh choir filling the study with Celtic harmonies. My guests, John & Olive, are watching TV in the lounge. Mavis is curled up on Olive’s lap. I have three gruelling nights behind me & a brief pause before three more. The pace on the breakfast current affairs programme to which I have moved is very different from News. Now, the deadline is 5 a.m. each weekday morning. Two teams work around the clock to prepare the 3 hours of material required - news, features, business, sport & weather.

It feels like building a new aeroplane every day & taking off while you are still gluing the wings on. Thursday was our first team effort & the flight was turbulent. Hell, but we bumped around. This morning was smoother. The programme is fast moving, complex & full of international opt-in & opt-out points which one is meant to hit with split second precision. Not easy! The hardest part is lengthy debriefings when one is just aching for sleep. There are a couple of insufferable know-alls who drive us frantic.

Britain is hedged in by low-pressure areas. We’d been warned to expect a deluge. The first drops were falling when I took the car in to work last night to avoid getting soaked. As it happened, I barely had to use the windscreen wipers going or coming. The skies still promised rain when I tumbled into bed. When I awoke this afternoon, a warm sun was shining in one the west while ominous black clouds mustered their forces in the east. I calculated, correctly, that I could make it into town before the storm arrived - to seek a long-awaited software package that has just arrived on the scene. (MSWorks95).

The city centre was full of congested streets & impatient motorists. Cycling was efficient but no fun. Upper Tottenham Court Road is a brash market place of appliance & computer shops, nearly all run by Asians. Most shops have two prices, marked price and “best price” which you have to ask for and haggle over. Only two had the software I was after - it’s in great demand - & I got it, at best price, from the second. It’s now installed & hovers like an attentive butler in the background, with an array of devices which it proffers each time I glance up.

Annelize (thank you for your letter) swears by her Apple Mac, like other Apple Mac owners I’ve met. But in spite of their acknowledged superior technology they screwed up their marketing strategy & are paying the price. Bill Gates rules supreme. His software muscles are bigger. A scientist warned us this week that machines are rapidly overtaking the intelligence of their makers & that role-reversal is only a matter of time. As he pointed out, the history of the treatment meted out by earth’s most intelligent species to lesser species is not benign, & humans ought to take note.

While I’m on letters, let me thank you, cousin Jonathan, for your letter and wish you every success in your move from Kokstad to Cape Town. I do hope the new practice works out. Judy’s recent email family update on the Cape Town scene also much appreciated. And thank you Kevin, for your fax from Canada. My sympathies for your sufferings at the hands of that plague of unctuous lawyers. Must be really bad if they’ve displaced the press as your favourite hate figures. Far be it from me to defend the rat pack, but I suspect that hacks & lawyers populate only the outer fringes of Hades. It’s the Maxwells and Milosevices who are deep inside the oven, at least in Bobo’s world. I’ll tell you about Bobo some other time.

Saturday morning

Down comes the rain. There were a few drops as I watered the patio garden this morning. Outside, the trees are steadily losing their leaves which pile up on the pavements. Autumn is writ large on the horizon. I’m grateful for an end to muggy days & street noise that mark the height of summer. John and Olive have taken themselves off down the river to see the Thames Barrier. Yesterday they spent three hours exploring the Belfast, the huge cruiser moored in the Thames, now a relic and threatened with the breakers’ yard as it’s losing money. I got to sleep in the early hours & dreamed that a thief had stolen half of my bike’s handle bars. Mavis woke me. So I breakfasted before returning to bed for a couple more hours’ kip. Feels so much better!

I’ve a modest return from the taxman in today’s post. So nice! It’s not really the amount that matters, more the knowledge that he’s paying you rather than vice versa. There was also a four-page letter from a couple in Florida who had addressed a previous letter to 90 Shirland Road in a bid to discover if a distant relative still lived here. I made the mistake of replying. Now I’ve had the whole family history, written out in long hand, plus a dollar bill, presumably to cover my postage. Astonishing! A fax from Iris in Pietersburg also poured out of the machine this morning. My thoughts have been much with you, Aunt, and with Mum and her wretched back.

I watched a long programme last night on the recent history of the former Yugoslavia, with frequent breaks for live discussions with some of the key figures. What’s been happening there bothers me; breaks out of the “that’s work” pigeon hole in which I dump the world’s disasters at the end of the day. I can defensively shunt Afghanistan or Rwanda aside as victims of a vicious cycle of primitive factional feuding. But the Balkans are in Europe, populated by Europeans, gracious hosts to the Sarajevo Winter Olympics. And the genocidal behaviour of both sides has had Hitler and Stalin stamped all over it. Imagine if five thousand Brits or Americans or Canadians were shot down in cold blood & shovelled into a mass grave. Makes me suspicious of patriots & shudder at nationalisms.

There’s a great furore over the Last Night at the Proms, taking place this evening & traditionally broadcast live. It’s become a flag waving occasion in which the Albert Hall resounds to Land of Hope and Glory (“God who made us mighty, Make us mightier yet”.) The occasion has degenerated, in the view of the organiser into an undisciplined party in which the actual music is ruined by the klaxons, horns, whistles & exploding balloons of the revellers. So tonight’s audience - who’ve long since begun queuing up - face being searched if they look potentially unruly or display suspicious bulges - quite unheard of.

Has the (re)marriage of (wheelchair-bound MS sufferer & “Brief History of Time” author) Professor Steven Hawking, been noted in your neck of the woods? To his former nurse! His adult children from his previous marriage boycotted the ceremony. The amazing universe is not limited to the black holes Hawking spent so much time trying to understand & describe.