DIARY
NICHOLAS COLERIDGE An almost invisible newspaper item, buried at the very bottom of a 'world' section, listed Iranian targets recently bombed or shelled by the Iraqis. One is Surmaq (pronounced like Zermatt, their sole resemblance), a one-dog village near Abadeh on the main desert road from Isfahan to Shiraz. Goodness knows which Reuters tape the list was found on, or why anybody thought to publish it; presumably it was snatched up at the eleventh hour to fill a tiny hole in the page make-up. One thing I am sure of is that I am one of the few people in England who noticed the fate of Surmaq. I am also the most delighted. Surmaq is the nastiest village in Iran. On one side of the road is an arcade of decrepit shops, on the other an abattoir and an empty hotel. Hitch-hiking with friends through Iran in 1977, we asked to be dropped off at the hotel for the night. The proprietor, whose repulsively scarred sto- mach protruded from his vest, refused to provide us with supper because it was Ramadan. When we pointed out that we were Christians and exempt, we were given a histrionic lecture on Islamic fun- damentalism. Frightened and hungry, we retreated upstairs to our rooms, where only a thorough rearrangement of truckle beds against doors deterred the owner's homosexual advances. At breakfast the next morning, when a large tip secured a mound of revolting carrot jam that was the only food in the village, I made some praising remark about a poster of the Shah and Empress Farah hanging above recep- tion. The owner mimed a throat-cutting action for the Shah, and a dirtier one for his wife. Since then I have often wondered about the Surmaq hotel and what has become of its horrible patron. I hope he wasn't killed, but it is rather satisfying that a stray Iraqi bomb should have drifted into the empty dining-room, and flattened his larder of carrot jam.
Ispent the weekend reading For Love & Money, a new collection of writing and journalism by Jonathan Raban covering the years 1969-1987. It is the best-written book I have read for ages; whatever the subject, he has something clever and thoughtful to say about it. There is a long sequence of essays about Evelyn Waugh in which Raban describes the difficulty of reading his novels without being pre- judiced by Waugh's irritable melancholia and spiteful misanthropy: 'It has become harder and harder to read them without finding them being elbowed off the table by the importunate character of Waugh himself.' Curiously enough I have some- times felt rather the same about Jonathan Raban. On the five or six occasions that I've met him, usually late at night at other people's parties, I have found him difficult. Although always initially friendly, he is much more left-wing and argumentative than I am, and his sniping at the Govern- ment makes me bristle like Major Blood- nock, so that when I began reading this book I was half on the look out for seditious sentiments. But it is so dazzlingly well done that after two or three pages the importunate character of Raban doesn't elbow one off the table at all. What it does is elbow one's conscience as a journalist. The time that Jonathan Raban must have spent on an article like 'Christmas in Bournemouth', about spending the Christ- mas holiday in an hotel on the cliffs surrounded by old people, is awesome; his ear for dialogue is better than anyone else doing this kind of writing. But what I admire most of all is Raban's ability to fuse a sociological 'overview' with a feeling for real people. All the Sunday newspapers this weekend were full of airy sociology, ingenious constructions built like card housqs without a single spark of real humapity to lend them credence; just patteffis of words on the page about yuppies and youth culture which didn't actually mean anything at all. After For Love & Money they seemed to read very shallowly.
Iam astonished by the level of humbug among my friends about the teaching of Latin. Contemporaries I recall at school grinding their teeth in misery as they failed to grasp the principles of gerundives, are now pompously attacking Kenneth Baker's core curriculum for its apparent downgrad- ing of classics. I was taught Latin for ten years, from the age of six to 15, at the end of which I failed to pass even an 0 level in the subject. At my prep school alone, which had a reputation as a good Latin school, I spent 1,200 hours with my nose tucked inside the Shorter Latin Primer (15 terms x ten weeks x eight periods). In all, I was taught Latin for 1,585 hours of my life. They were hours of unrelieved frustra- tion and wasted time, since nothing that I learnt has been of even the most tangential use since. What is so satisfying is that I guessed as a child that Latin would lead nowhere, but was continually told that I would see its purpose in retrospect. Now it is retrospect, and I still regret the wasted time. How I would love to have those 1,585 hours all over again, and spend them reading good books in plain English under a shady tree.
In my diary last week I mentioned the current glut in amateur travel articles about Tibet and Cuba. Since then I have been asked why I missed Eastern Turkey off the list. This was a mistake, since Eastern Turkey is coming up fast on the inside, with articles about Erzerum, Lake Van, Mount Ararat and Nemrut Dagi arriving by every post. Of these by far the most popular is Nemrut Dagi. It is rather terrible having to explain to a writer that there is nothing particularly original about Nemrut Dagi, since the difficulties of visiting these colossal statues are prodi- gious. They were built by Mithradates I and his son Antiochus I, and erected on the terraces cut into a mountain top in the middle of nowhere. There are five statues, of Apollo, Fortuna, Zeus, Antiochus and Heracles, and their enormous heads have toppled off their bodies on to the ground. Nemrut Dagi is such a mysterious place that it is hardly surprising that people who visit it want to write an article; it is just a pity that so many people do. About a month ago I was visited in my office by a tall ex-army officer wearing a long black overcoat. Would we be interested, he asked, in an exclusive article about the statues of Nemrut Dagi? Unfortunately not, I replied, we already have plenty of those. Then would you, he asked, like to buy a chunk of the statues instead. He opened his briefcase and produced a large rounded piece of stone, about the size of a gym shoe. This, he said, was one of Zeus's toe-nails, which he had personally chipped off the statue and smuggled out of Turkey. The price, he said, was £750. When I declined the offer, he disappeared into the Soho night with his briefcase full of articles and a giant 30sc toenail.
Athoroughly gloomy lunch in a fish restaurant with a merchant banking friend. He had spent the morning estimating the number of redundancies likely to hit the City before Christmas and come up with the astounding figure of 15,000. Then he made another list in which he'd worked out logically which friends would lose their jobs. The loser list, to his dismay, included himself. Perhaps, he suggested, we would like to commission an article from him about those amazing giant statues at Nem- rut Dagi in Eastern Turkey.
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