DIARY A. N.
WILSON
Aclerical acquaintance of mine in Gloucestershire who had married a rich woman called Grace Something always used to recite the General Thanksgiving at every service in his church. Village gossip had it that the reason for this was that the prayer gives thanks 'for the means of Grace'. Here in Wales, where I am staying, I gather that in the neighbouring village there is a family who put comparable emphasis on any prayer which begins, `Grant, we beseech thee, 0 Lord'. So vigor- ously do they assert the word 'grant' that laughter has been known to break out in the congregation. The Welsh equivalent of the Grundys on the Archers, this family are known to be adepts at claiming EEC grants. At lunch today, another Welsh neighbour tells us that he believes member- ship of the EEC has destroyed the morality of the small Welsh farmer. `If a field is 4.8 hectares, they don't get the grant; if it is 5.8, they do get the grant, so of course all the small fields hereabouts are written down as being 5.8 hectares. The inspectors from Brussels are never going to come down and measure the Powells' field. But, if you added together all the 5.8 hectares for which grants are being claimed on behalf of Welsh farmers, you would get a land mass larger than the size of Wales.' He listed other fiddles which the new order encouraged. The one I liked best was, `Driving over to Swansea to buy their wives new shoes, and getting the shoe shop to write them down as Wellington boots — an allowable agricultural expenditure.'
There is much talk here of the new Welsh Language Act, which should be passed in the next session of Parliament. The old act gave the right to Welsh speak- ers to be tried, or to fill in official docu- ments, in their own language, which seems only fair. The new act presupposes that anyone living in Wales speaks Welsh as their first language, and gives them the freedom to opt for English. That puts a dif- ferent complexion on matters altogether. Even before the passing of this act, things were reaching a farcical state. For example, persons with only a minimal knowledge of Welsh were insisting on being tried in Welsh when they came up before the beak, just to be cussed. I talked to a magistrate about this last weekend. He has reasonably good conversational Welsh, but it is not good enough to conduct a clever argument with lawyers, who have to be brought over from Aberystwyth (since the local solicitors do not have sufficiently good Welsh to do the job). The public expense involved may be imagined. Meanwhile, BAs from the University of Wales are almost the only graduates in the United Kingdom who need never fear unemployment. The new Welsh Language Act, to be effectual, will require an additional 6,000 Welsh-speaking public employees. And, in Brussels, all the EEC regulations — the Common Agricul- tural Policy documents, the Maastricht Treaty and so forth — and all the forms and all the bureaucratic procedures need to be translated into Welsh, by the terms of the new act. Jobs for those with third-class degrees in theology from Bangor who hap- pen to have fluent Welsh.
The Church in Wales was rather quick- er off the mark than the Church of England in ordaining women, though they do not yet have women priests, only deacons. Whatev- er the theological rights or wrongs of this, no one seems to have worked out how to address the female clergy. The elderly rela- tive with whom I am staying asked the new incumbent and was told, `Just call me Rhi- annon.' But,' as my aged friend says, 'if I just call her Rhiannon, that is tantamount to asking her to call me Dorothy.' It could be said that in a Christian Church it was reasonable to use Christian names. I have noticed, for example, that bishops have increasingly dropped the use of their sur- name, and in a recent diocesan newspaper for the diocese of Norwich the bishop is referred to throughout as 'Bishop Peter'. I perused this document from cover to cover to try to find out the man's surname and could not do so. But this does not remove the social awkwardness. Many people, Christian or not, do not wish to be addressed by their first name by functionar- ies — priests, doctors, social workers whom they have never met before. I sup- pose that, just as the older generation of clergy were all called 'Mr Smith', the logical thing to do is to call female priests 'Miss Smith'. But I foretell that it will lead to a further spread of the indiscriminate use of Christian names. The English unwillingness to recognise genius is a perpetual source of annoyance to geniuses, such as Jonathan Miller, who periodically exclaim that they are going to Work or live abroad where they feel appre- ciated. One usually thinks that such figures can look after themselves, and that there are some advantages to living in a country where no one takes art quite as seriously as it deserves to be taken. In the case of young genius, however, I feel rather differently. Frederick Stocken is a composer who is only 25 years old, and he has already received an astonishing amount of vilifica- tion from the music critics. His offence is to have composed music which is instantly accessible to the untrained ear. His latest composition, 'A Lament for Bosnia', went on sale this week and was greeted with a predictably snide response in — I regret to say — the newspaper where I work, the Evening Standard. When I play this piece of music to myself, which I have now done often already, I think of it not as parody or pastiche, but wholly original, modern music. Yet it is music which makes me believe that a new Sibelius or a new Elgar has been born. Try it. Only about a fiver for the CD (on the Chatsworth label FCC 0001) and half the proceeds go to the Feed the Children appeal.
While on the subject of critics, I have in mind an observation made in this diary not long ago by Max Hastings (`Diary', 31 July), to the effect that no critic dared attack the so-called fashionable modern novelists — Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd et al — for fear of meeting them or their friends on the cocktail-party circuit. It made me think that the editor of the Daily Telegraph had not read the reviews of Amis fils's last book, Time's Arrow, the ingenious one which tells the story of a Nazi back to front, and which I much admired. Nearly all the reviews I read said it was preten- tious, or that it trivialised the subject or that it was — yawn, yawn — anti-Semitic. Now along comes Peter Ackroyd with his House of Doctor Dee, which I think his best novel to date and, in the phrase, 'could not put down'. Having turned to the critics, I don't think I have ever read such a torrent of abuse, which one took to be reviews not of his book but of the cheque he was paid to write it. (The wittiest attack imagined Ackroyd's next book would be about a modern literary agent who went back in time and was besieged by the spirit of Gen- eral Gordon.) But what bitches they have all been, the critics! They might go to the same cocktail parties and dinners as Max Hastings, and some of them might even get paid by him, but I doubt whether they are bosom pals of Martin and Peter.
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