Notebook
Someone really ought to warn members of the Royal Family to be more prudent before they use their prestige to appeal for public Charity, The Prince of Wales's request on i Sunday for every man, woman and child n the country to stump up for his so-called Jubilee Fund was pitifully woolly. Snippets t):( film showing young people driving lifeboats or cripples riding horses, were hardly an indication that the purpose of this vast fund-raising project had been properly thought through. Even so, it is scarcely likely to prove as embarrassing as the appalling gaffe after the Aberfan disaster in 1966, when Princess Margaret appealed for tiqs for the children of the stricken village. It seems no one had told her that the point ah°0t Aberfan was that most of the children Of the village were dead. I gather that millIons of teddies and Leggo sets rotted in a Swansea warehouse for years.
The horrible vision of that vast oil slick shrnIading out across the North Sea brings ;,.ae' two memories. The first is of that helpless week in 1967, when we all waited "iPless as the tens of thousands of tons of oil spilled out from the Torrey Canyon, While Generalissimo Wilson (starring in his inost absurd-ever role) dithered about on the Land's End cliffs, wondering when to r?nd in the dive bombers'. The second, for ls a month early in 1974 when I submerged myself in literature about the oil industry, preparing to write two long articles for the Observer about North Sea oil (still at that time an almost entirely thing subject to most people). The which struck me most forcibly about the history of oil was how it always seemed to a curse attached to it. It is extraordinary narY how many of those who 'struck it rich ended up either bankrupt and totally miserle, Or just totally miserable, like that old r12.onster John D. Rockefeller. Those who discover black gold should never rejoice too Lc)c.'n there is always a terrible price to be tyoalci, and it seems we are now beginning (all O Predictably) to pay the price for our "orth Sea Bubble'.
I,have recently been reading with enormous Pleasure a volume of the letters of Marsilio icIno, chief of the fifteenth-century Flore ti nt neo-Platonists. Undoubtedly these letoers, comprise one of the 'spiritual classics' f the past thousand years, and will there!ore not be to everyone's taste (as I was able s ay to Sir Alfred Ayer in a television s_tucho on Sunday, 'I would highly recomwmend them, but not to you!' ) but their calm, h.ise understanding of the deeper reaches of r"man nature are of infinite contemporary eui evance. The neo-Platonists have been making something of a quiet come-back in recent years. I was first introduced to them by John Vyvyan's superb trilogy of books on Shakespeare, one of which, Shakespeare and the Idea of Platonic Love, showed convincingly how some of the plays were influenced by neo-Platonic ideas. Robert Donnington, the musicologist who is probably most widely known for his Jungian analysis of Wagner's Ring, once told me of his fascination at finding how extraordinarily similar was the neo-Platonist view of human personality to that of Jung (and of the part played by those ideas in shaping the earliest operas). It is good to know that a second volume of Marsilio's letters is to be published in November.
Incidentally, sc" impressed was Ito find such an unexpected, handsomely-produced and still comparatively cheap (0.50) book that I wondered who could have been sensible enough to publish it. The trail finally led me to two tiny upper rooms in Fleet Street, where I discovered a very amiable young man called Christopher Shepheard Walwyn who set up his own publishing house five years ago, has since published some thirty books, and is now making a modest profit. He summed up his philosophy as simply a desire to publish 'books which are books, with some lasting value, as opposed to the ninety per cent of non-books which are most of what comes out nowadays'. This has led him to produce such widely disparate volumes as a hand-written edition of Shakespeare's sonnets, a manual on how to build dolls' houses, and a beautiful little book by a remarkable man called Archie Hill, describing how he came to terms with the death of his crippled stepson. All success to such an imaginative publisher.
In the past year or two I have come across some pretty hair-raising examples of lawyers charging ludicrous fees for doing very little work. A friend of mine, for instance, was recently incensed by a joking reference to him in the Spectator, which if taken literally could have been regarded as libellous. He wanted an apology, and by virtue of a certain amount of hard work, and telephoning over a weekend, I was able to arrange with the Editor of the Spectator that one would go in the following week. Unfortunately, my friend had already been fixed by the legal department of the BBC, for whom he works, with an appointment to see acertain solicitor who obtains a great deal of business from the BBC. The appointment was strictly speaking quite unnecessary, as all the groundwork had already been done — but, h'aving made the date, my friend thought he should keep it. He went round to this gentleman's private house, where they spent some half an hour agreeing the final terms of the statement. In return for this modest service, the solicitor asked from the Spectator the staggering sum of £125 plus VAT. It is true that after making this extraordinary demand he then proceeded to make work for himself by indulging in pompous protests to the effect that one unimportant word had been left out of the agreed statement (including a claim that his client was '.extremely annoyed', which had no basis in truth). But I fear the only moral of the tale is that, wherever possible, one should steer clear of these people.
I bought my first, yellow-cover copy of the cricket-lover's annual Bible, Wisden, in Dartmouth, Devon, in August 1947, just as Denis Compton was reaching his sixteenth hundred of the season, and Bill Edrich was racing him to excel Tom Hayward's fortyyear-old record of 3516 runs. Its price was 7s 6d. As this year's first-class season opened (or failed to open) amid sheets of rain, at least one consolation is that Wisden is now available at the beginning of the season (at the hideous price of £3.75). This year's edition nostalgically records the wonderful season of 'the Great Drought', when England was crushed by the West Indies and my own team Somerset heroically failed to win its first-ever competition by one run, on the last ball of the John Player League (I remember following the final overs of the game while driving up the Ml.
The new Wisden also records the Indians' triumph over the West Indies last April, by scoring more than 400 runs in the fourth innings (at least we shall never again have to hear Trevor Bailey or Jim Laker intoning that 'this of course has only been done once in history, at Leeds in 1948'). But we shall have to wait until next year for a description of that wonderful Centenary Test Match in Melbourne, not to mention the sad breaking, after forty-four years, of Holmes and Sutcliffe's record stand of 555 for the first wicket.
Christopher Booker
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