DIARY
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER This first week in September is always a melancholy moment in the English year, as we stand poised uneasily between the fading of summer and the cricket season and the sound of the conference season creaking despondently into gear, threaten- mg us with a return to all the autumnal gloom of politics. As I sit down in Somer- set to begin this diary, while the rain floods down on the runner beans outside my window and my family returns sodden from a forlorn bid to spend a day on the beach at Weymouth, my thoughts are dominated almost inevitably by nostalgia and the weather. Looking back over this particular summer I am struck by how many of its memories seem to have been of battling bravely for our pleasures against the weather, and yet how many good moments there have been — from a rare sundrenched day walking over the Rhinogs in north Wales in May, and the sound of wood warblers and ring ousels, to a recent and more typical struggle through a rain- storm across the North Yorkshire moors. Somehow a little sunshine has kept on breaking in, as on my most luminous moment of recent weeks — sitting in Blythburgh church to hear Rostropovich play three of the Bach 'cello suites, while a golden evening sunlight filtering through the 15th-century windows lit up the bleached timbers of the angel roof. It was unforgettable.
The appalling weather has brought other consolations. To add to the gaiety of the nation, for instance, I hope that the BBC's Saturday morning farming pro- gramme will shortly be replaying an inter- view broadcast in late July. Talking of the prospects for this year's harvest, after four bumper yields in a row, a farmer was boasting that, whatever August's weather held in store, we could undoubtedly look forward to another record. Thanks to modern technology, he claimed, Britain's farmers 'have finally become independent of the weather'. Scarcely had this hubristic remark been uttered than the wheat and barley were lying in black strips in the field and we began to hear that this year's yield would be down between ten and 15 per cent. After all the gloom and doom about the 'worst August in memory', it was however something of an anti-climax when the Met Office this week released the official verdict. Was it the wettest August `since records were kept'? Since 1880? Apparently no — only since 1980, a mere six years ago.
Ayear or two back I was tempted to coin the phrase 'creative nostalgia' to describe the most obvious source of crea- tive inspiration in our culture today. In music, in architecture, from sackbuts to steam fairs, from Covent Garden to corn dollies, never before in history can so much energy have gone into preserving and recreating the past. The way this wave of `creative nostalgia' seems almost to have got out of hand was borne in on us last Saturday when we visited the town of Frome, which was celebrating its 1300th anniversary by staging a 'mediaeval fair'. The same liberal spirit that allowed the year 685 to be considered as belonging to the Middle Ages (presumably 'Dark Ages Fair' would not have had the same ring) inspired the whole event. The narrow streets and stairways of Frome's 17th- century 'old town' were crammed with stalls, sideshows and anorak-clad visitors. A stall selling 'Elizabethan Mead' stood across the road from a group of Round- heads and Cavaliers standing by the 18th- century cannon. A minstrel sang Jacobean ballads just down the street from a dancing bear. The sound of a hurdy-gurdy vied with the strains of a lone violinist bravely playing Victorian drawing-room ballads. Despite the stall offering 'wholemeal pas- ties heated up on a mediaeval microwave', just about the only period not represented, except by a few costumed revellers, was the Middle Ages. Looking through the drizzle at a display of brightly-coloured • bannerets and gonfalons' decorating a 17th-century wall, my wife gallantly tried to evoke a comparison with Siena. But thoughts of the pageantry of the palio only brought to mind just what splendid energy `creative nostalgia' can still arouse in those European cities where the genuine mediaeval traditions of street life have miraculously survived.
Although the Times obituary of Baro- ness Sharp fulsomely extolled her as having had 'all the hard sense of a man, with the intuitions of a woman added', it tactfully did not mention the most lasting monu- ment to her years as head of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government in the late Fifties and early Sixties — her unswerving support for the policies of comprehensive redevelopment and the building of tower blocks which in those years wrecked so many of Britain's cities. I once in the Seventies had the pleasure of driving her through central London, past many of the planning causes celebres of those years. Again and again as she looked at some architectural disaster which she had played a combative part in pushing through, she would cheerfully admit: 'That one was a mistake.'
Too late for the Spectator cricket quiz, but when did a side last win an innings victory in a Test match with its third- highest scoring batsman only managing to make 16? The quirky ups and downs of the Oval Test seemed somehow an appropriate end to a series which, for all its splendours and surprises, left many question marks. Drifting agreeably down the Kennet and Avon Canal last week, I was challenged by Max Hastings as to whether I would stand by my claim in these pages at the beginning of the season that for the first time in history a World XI might not contain any English or Australian player. Back in April most observers would probably have pre- dicted that the strongest English claims in this summer's series would be made by Gooch, followed by Lamb, with his three centuries last year against the West Indies, and Botham as an all-rounder. Instead it has been Gower's summer, with Botham only maintaining his claim to a place on his bowling. But obviously all final nomina- tions for a World XI must rest on the outcome of events this winter, when we see how England's new match-winning morale fares against the post-Clive Lloyd West Indians, rather than an Australian side sadly weakened by 'the South African factor'. It is all very well to hail Ellison as the new Alex Bedser, not to mention Edmonds and Emburey as the new Laker and Lock, but what we desperately need, after trying four or five likely candidates, is a real fast bowler.
When I.recently spent several even- ings pasting six years-worth of family photographs into albums, I was alarmed to see how young we all looked only a few years ago. For anyone worrying about the ravages of advancing age, perhaps the most consoling news of the week was that Mr Jimmy Knapp, the embattled and white- haired railwaymen's leader, is not yet 45. David Gower may have twitted Peter West that he could scarcely be expected to recall England's Ashes victory at the Oval in 1953 since he was still four years from being born, but for those of us who can remember that day only too vividly, Mr Knapp's appearance has done wonders for morale.
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