Notebook
To those looking for economies I recommend strongly giving up the Sunday Papers. In the good old days we all used to take the Sunday Times and the Observer. Then came the Sunday Telegraph which meant three 'heavies'. Most people have by now managed to cut down to only one — the most popular being the Sunday Times. But is it worth 22p? Cancellation would mean an annual saving of i12:32 — a small sum perhaps but in these times every little helps. What has made the Observer and the Sunday Times unappealing is their enormous bulk. A newspaper is something you should be able to read briskly through and then put to one side. The Sunday papers come in so many different sections that one can never be sure that one has finished. You pick over it all day like the carcass of a bird on a plate hoping that somewhere in a forgotten corner you might find a tasty bit of nourishment. The best thing is to kick the habit completely. Of course I myself cheat by getting the Sunday papers in my office on Monday. But a Sunday paper on Monday has lost all of its allure.
The bread strike has again revealed how set in our ways we all are. Many working men and women need bread for a sandwich lunch but most people can make do with a substitute. Why then do they queue for hours to get a loaf of bread? I feel a bit smug on this question having spent a backbreaking but enjoyable day last week digging up potatoes. There is no more gratifying task. It is the nearest you get to a child's dream of digging treasure up out of the ground. Our potatoes have the rather fey name of Desiree and are bright red — real Pommes de terre. Opinions differ on what to do with thern.once dug up. Some people advise storing hem in sacks but my most up to date book, Your Kitchen Garden says sacks should be avoided on the grounds that one rotten potato will ruin the lot. Where gardening matters are concerned 1 usually rely on The English Gardener by William Cohbett. Out of print for about 150 years this bibliophile's item is in fact a very helpful and practical guide, as well as being the best written of all gardening books. On the subject of potatoes Cobbett says. 'When taken up they should if the weather will Pejmit be suffered to dry in the sun; all the dirt should be rubbed clean from them; they should then be placed in a cellar, in a barn, or in some place to which no frost can approach; if you can ascertain the degree of warmth just necessary to keep a baby from Perishing from cold, you know precisely the precautions required to preserve a potato above ground.' On a recent BBC wireless chat show in which I took part, Albert Finney, that great actor, said that he never pays any attention to what the critics say about his work. It has been said many times before by .innumerable actors, writers, musicians, etc and whenever I hear it I never quite believe it. Having just published a book and having sworn long beforehand to remain thoroughly indifferent to the notices, I still find myself feverishly turning to the review pages to see what they have to say about it. As it happens the critics have been very favourable, but why should I care a hoot about them, favourable or not? Much, for example, as I like and admire Maurice Richardson who has written a long and generally appreciative piece in the T.L.S., do I value the old boy's opinion on my work all that much? If I met him in the pub and he told me he liked or disliked the book would it mean anything to me? The honest answer is very little. So why should it matter so much when the opinion is put into print? The answer I suppose is vanity and the desire we all have to be praised in public no matter by whom. In the last result one's own opinion is the only one that counts. It is enough for me that my book has made me laugh and also cry and that it has had the same effect on my wife and a close friend, Andrew Gsn-iond. This is not really a tribute to me but to the chief character in the book, Hugh Kingsmill.
What Is slightly unnerving is to be asked, as I have been by critics and one or two friends, why I ever wrote the book in the first place, a question also raised in these pages by Auberon Waugh. Why does anyone write a book? How can they afford to? This autumn hundreds and hundreds of new books will be on sale, most of which will make little or no money for their poor • authors. Why do we do it? I know journalists are supposed to hanker for hard covers after years of ephemeral newsprint. But the explanation is more subtle than that. C.S. Lewis, I think, said that he only started writing books when he hadn't anything left to read, Samuel Butler that he wrote in order to have something to read in his old age. 'When the roof leaks', wrote that great Irish columnist Myles na Gopaleen, 'and the piano needs tuning, when the geyser explodes. .what do I do? I send for the expert, the trained man and leave the solution of my problem to him. . .When I want anything to read, however, I usually write it myself'.
To me the Russian pianist Sviatoslav Richter has always been a semi-mythical figure. Two of his records of Brahms' 2nd Piano Concerto and Schumann's Fantasiestucke, — are among my most frequently played and are of definite Desert Island Disc calibre. I had a picture of him living in seclusion in the middle of a pine forest, and seldom venturing into the outside world. To hear him in the flesh therefore on Sunday playing Beethoven's C minor Concerto at the Albert Hall was cause for great excitement.This was the first time he has played with an orchestra in Britain for sixteen years. Richter is much younger than I expected — in his early sixties — quite undistinguished in appearance, with a chin thrust forward and a disconcertingly bored expression on his face when he is not playing.
I confess to a slight feeling of un — Christian glee reading about the mass attack on the 'paedophiles' outside their abortive meeting in Holborn on Monday night, It serves them right not so much for being 'paedophiles', but for having a meeting about it. As Michael Heath has observed in a cartoon, 'paedophiles' used to be known more simply as 'dirty old men'. Perhaps as dirty old men they do no great harm to the community, compared with other classes of criminal. Why can they not be content with going about their disgusting practices as best they may? Why do they have to band themselves together to form an organisation with all the idiotic panoply of collective action — committees, minutes and boring speeches by so-called experts? Meanwhile 1 can see a day shortly coming when the editor of the Sunday Express, Mr Auberon Waugh and myself remain the only people in Britain outside the National Front who remain 100 per cent opposed to pooves, be they 'gay', 'paedophile' or whatever euphemistic word they care to choose. We have long given up any hope of the Churches standing firm on the issue. I note that the 'paedophiles' champion, my near namesake Father Ingram, was told not to attend the 'paedophile' movement. But he remains a Dominican priest.
Richard Ing ram s
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