9August1995

London: Tuesday 9th August 1995
My dear folks,

The oaken voices of a Welsh choir rise reassuringly around me, singing seamless songs of yearning. They share a transcendent quality with the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos whose equally plaintive Gregorian chant likewise quietens the soul. Lullabies for grown ups! We need them.

It's been a fairly horrible week. To begin with, I misread the rota & thought I was working nights when I was meant to be working days. I was rudely woken at nine on Tuesday morning by my editor saying I should have been on duty at eight - his 2nd call; I'd slept through the 1st. Since I'd only got to bed at four, I was not in a mood to leap on my bike & make amends. But that's what I did, landing gritty-eyed on the bulletin-an-hour hamster-wheel that spins relentlessly. Then, for reasons largely out of my control, my bulletins hit a series of unrelated disasters. I struggled to hold them together, feeling like a pilot whose aircraft is lurching out of control. It leeches the energy out of you. By the end of my 2nd shift today, I was wobbly kneed.

The Croatian offensive in Krajina has dominated the output, a horrible story if ever there was one. Whatever the rights & wrongs, the scenes of vast, desperate refugee hordes are outright depressing - as if those black & white films shot at the end of World War Two had suddenly burst into colour. Like the Serbs before them, the Croat soldiers have been doing some vile things, keeping the UN & the media at a distance while they went about their business. Today they opened fire at close range on BBC journalists filming a burning village, killing one & wounding two - and then blamed the attack on rogue Serbs. But this was a mere footnote in the grim story of ancient hatreds being seared into another generation - who in time will inflict their own reprisals. Add to this graphic footage of Nagasaki, being commemorated 50 years after the event. All in all, I was very pleased to get home this evening & not in a mood mollify a ravenous Mavis who was waiting impatient & ankle-butting on the mat.

I had made a slow start earlier in the week on reducing the sheer volume of items that clutter the flat & my life. Like cunning armies of old, they exaggerate their numbers by calculated dispersal. For years, my annual culls have spared the numerous albums & magazines that track my earlier years. This time, I decided they had to go & crawled into "the nook" to retrieve them from the shelves. Before the slaughter, I looked every one through to save any page or picture of particular importance. Few were spared. Out went the ranked pupils of St Agnes School, a 5 year old TEB still spottable; out went the school photos, the matric magazine, the Air Force Gymnasium records, the innumerable group shots of Brother Terence with class or sports-team.

When I was done, I felt that I had lost part of my history, cast off like old clothes. A pile of empty albums & shredded photos lay around me. I couldn't bear just to throw the photos away. They were private & not to be shared with strangers. Each one had to be cut up & rendered unrecognisable. Yet even from the jigsaw, familiar faces stared out at me; school mates, pupils I taught, most of their names instantly recallable. If only I could remember my colleagues' names as clearly; I am constantly being surprised by people who greet me in the corridors - an old man's affliction.

Thursday : Thank you Jones, Mum & Cathy for your faxes. I am able in an instant to transport myself to the Quinta or Merrowdown or Hambach. I could clearly see Cathy mopping up after her flood & wished, like Mother, that we could have some of her water. Britain is nearly as dry as Portugal. Regional water companies are imposing hosepipe bans & seeking stronger measures. The public is outraged. These companies are now privatised & highly profitable & there is a wide-spread feeling that they would do better to spend more of their money fixing leaking pipes & less stuffing shareholders' wallets. Certainly, water, where it is metered, is grown very expensive. Londoners still pay flat charges for water & sewage, for which I am grateful.

Mum, I have come across reports before of the drug that is meant to overcome jetlag but, as the article you sent me recounts, it has yet to hit the market. For people like me who are always crashing reversing their body clock it would be a real boon. I suspect it will appear just as I prepare to retire. Cathy, I note your report of the stress Rolf is under again. Penny Mason says the same thing about Richard. Bren is in the same position. I had a letter from Barbara's brother, Robbie, earlier this week in which he describes the dramas of a month-long production breakdown at the cement factory he manages. The cause is a key piece of equipment which has been repaired & failed again three times in a row. He says the Lesotho Highlands water project which is in danger of coming to a halt as a result of the breakdown. There must be an easier way!

I have twice today sat down in the TV chair and crashed for half an hour. My week must be catching up with me. It didn't improve earlier in the day when I cycled up to Sainsbury's to top up my supplies. I locked the bike to the cycle railings specially provided and returned to find it minus its saddle - a common London complaint. A gang of black adolescents on bikes was hanging around the canal entrance to the parking ground and my suspicions fell upon them. Knowing that I'd get no joy from them, I ignored them & cycled away sans saddle, taking a route towards the cycle shop that brought me back to the tow-path a few hundred yards away. Who do I meet but the gang who are cycling down the path, one of whom has just dropped a saddle he's been carrying. There was a short confrontation. I recovered my saddle & the gang cycled off. End of story. Does nothing for race relations, I have to tell you.

There's been lots on TV here about a British inventor who has constructed a radio that works without electrical power or batteries, something I should have thought impossible but which clearly is not. It winds up, like a toy duck. The radio is now being manufactured at a factory in Cape Town & there were shots of the assembly line & a meeting with Nelson Mandela who was duly impressed. How the energy from the big coiled spring inside is converted into electrical energy is beyond me. But it clearly is.

The Oxford Guide to English has just declared that it is okay to ignore many rules of grammar. It's the sort of hot potato the media just love & there's much consequent huffing & puffing over what is correctly ignorable & what not. I confess I had a call from a bank manager's secretary earlier this week in response to a note I had sent her asking her to bank a cheque. She was puzzled by the note. When I took a look at what I had written, I was baffled myself as I admitted to her. I put it down to bodyclock strain. The secretary, a lively sort, suspected that I'd had a few drinks. She didn't know what of, she confided, but asked if she could have a bottle too. If only!