DIARY
This time last week local election fer- vour rose to nearly room temperature in our neck of the woods. We did not receive any canvassers personally, though I know several people who had friends who did, but I did at least get a visit from the Jehovah's Witnesses. Unfortunately, they had no candidate standing and seemed to have a very hazy election policy, involving going back to basics and behaving very well, and little else. When they claimed that God was their party leader, I felt it was time to call a halt. 'I have come to a private arrangement with God,' I said. 'I pretend He does not exist and He pretends I do not exist.' The first time I was eligible to vote I was living in North Kensington. The first and only party that leafleted me was Plaid Cymru. Optimistic, considering I was 200 miles from the nearest Welsh Nationalist candidate. Actually, I had just moved down from Wrexham in Denbigh- shire to London, and my mail was being forwarded from North Wales, but it has left me with an impression ever since that local government elections are a mystery. I now live in a village near Bath, but just across the border from Avon in Wiltshire — in fact, I live so much on country borders that the medical practice I am attached to has three surgeries, one in Avon, one in Wiltshire and one in Somer- set. Chris Patten lives about a mile away, but in a different constituency. I suppose I could go to his clinic to find out who my MP is. There were no Welsh Nationalists standing round here, but the Liberal Democrats, my next choice, did encoura- gingly well everywhere except in Bath, where the Conservatives held on to their near lead. Chris Patten must be heartily relieved. It's a funny old place, Bath. When I first arrived near here, I was told by several people that its position at the bottom of a bowl of surrounding hills caused a sort of heaviness in the air, so that an inertia descended upon the place and made everyone a bit sluggish. And vote Tory. Jan Morris, in her book on great cities, maintains Bath is not a city at all, merely a country town with the facade of a city. It tries to behave like a city, she said, but as it is run by small businessmen and narrow-minded locals, the result is blink- ered and suffocating. I once heard her read out this passage in Bath, at a literary dinner where I was the other speaker, and I remember laughing out loud at the cheek of it. I think I was the only person in the Pump Room who did laugh, as the place was full of the people who ran Bath . . .
In my younger days I willingly sat up into the night to watch the first election results coming in. This time, one look at the contorted faces of Snow, Sissons and MILES KINGTON Dimbleby was enough to send me to bed. When Peter Sissons turns his hard eyes on a party politician and asks: 'Do you think this makes a June election more or less likely?', I have the horrifying impression that a) he wants to know the answer, b) he thinks he is going to get one. If either is true, he must be mad. The advent of Sissons has ended a long-running battle in my house. My wife loved Robin Day's Question Time, and I hated it. Come Thursday evening, she would embed her- self in cushions and watch ringmaster Day take his thoroughbreds through their paces, while I would watch aghast over her shoulder as the party hacks mouthed the party line and scored invisible points off each other. Anyway, after a hard day's work my wife would slide asleep before the programme was a quarter of an hour old, but my fascinated disapproval would keep me awake to the end, hoping against hope that something brilliant would be said or someone would change their mind on air. That was the theme of the battle: why should I have to watch the programme I hated while my wife slept through the programme she loved? Now Mr Sissons has arrived and the whole thing is so much more clearly a party political pantomime that neither of us wants to watch.
We still give Any Questions on radio an earful, though, and although it is nearly as party political there are sometimes rewards. The most recent was the joyful sound of Des Wilson saying to Kenneth Baker, apropos the poll tax, 'When do politicians ever say sorry about anything?' Baker started patiently to wheel out the answer he had no doubt been fully briefed to wheel out, all about the mathematical calculations of the poll tax and their readjustments, occasionally punctuated by Des Wilson in the background crying, like an impatient seagull, 'When do politicians every say sorry about anything?' The point Des Wilson was missing what that this was Kenneth Baker's way of saying sorry. In other words, they never do. One reason I keep my ear cocked to the radio is that, as a radio reviewer, I never know what I will pick up by accident. Theoretically I need never switch on at all — the BBC sends me a cornucopia of advance tapes every week, which form piles round the house as if Peter Palumbo had been in overnight putting up little tower blocks. Occasionally they fall over with a crash on the piles of newspapers which I am going to do some- thing about as soon as I have sorted out those piles of tapes. But I still switch on the radio and find myself, for instance, listen- ing fascinated to an explanation of why gnats form a swarm. (They are all males, hundreds of them, attracting females for mating with the noise of their wing-beats. Isn't there a bit of a stampede when the first females arrive? Oh yes, was the answer, not a pretty sight.) This morning at 6.30, getting up early to do this diary, I turned on Radio 3 and found — Open University, presumably — a talk on Bra- que's and Picasso's business arrangements. Nothing about their paintings, just about their contracts. Fascinating. Forget the diary. Did you know that Braque signed his stuff away exclusively, just like a young rock star, and was paid by the square yard? Fascinating. I could bore for Wiltshire.
My annual rediscovery of Clementi has come round again. I have a pile of music on the piano which I aimlessly sight-read through, never practising any- thing quite well enough, and about once a year I come back to Clementi. He used to live just down the road from me in Notting Hill, though admittedly 150 years earlier, quite unaware that his reputation as a composer would be tarnished for ever by a) having his pieces forced on piano pupils b) Mozart's bitchiness in a letter home. But hidden in his sonatas there is some ravishing stuff, full of quirky ideas, and in his Gradus ad Parnassum there is at least one piece among the dross which I think is perfect. I once mentioned this to Andre Previn in the days when I met such people at Punch lunches. Years later I was taken aback to get a postcard from him which said: 'I have just played through Clementi to see if there was anything in what you said. I don't think there is.' We haven't communicated since, but I have just played through Clementi again, and I think Andre Previn is wrong. Muzio Clementi had a strange life before he ended up in Notting Hill. As a talented 16-year-old in his native Rome he was spotted by Peter Beckford (fox-hunting, heterosexual brother of the more famous William) and brought back to the West Country to learn his art in secret before being sprung on the London public. Then he became a piano manufacturer as well as a composer, and toured Europe selling the pianos he played on. It would make a great talk at 6.30 on the radio.
Previous page
