Diary
The dull thing about January is having nothing to read, unless you happen to be planning an extremely mediocre holiday with a major tour operator. Magazines are little more than brochures at this time of year, and newspapers even worse, full of musty plaudits about island-hopping in Greece, exhumed from files where they've festered since last summer. The authors of these travel pieces are invariably un- knowns. Newspapers in January are rather like the sales: all the usual, courteous staff disappear to be replaced by inarticulate `casuals' who are unfamiliar with the house style. Poor travel writing is worse than any other kind of poor writing, but it is not so much the quality of prose that I object to as the opinions expressed. Two 'quality' Sun- day papers last week ran articles about the Tunisian resort of Bizerta, and both re- commended it. Yet Bizerta is a miserable place, very industrialised, and the last town in North Africa likely to delight readers. Neither writer mentioned the Martyrs' cemetry in the Kasbah or the mosque of Bab el-Jedid, which are the only sites worth seeing. Presumably the writers had been on `freebie' holidays to Bizerta and were now getting their own back by recom- mending it. But it is a mean trick to play on readers. January seems, in any case, a strange time to write about summer holi- days. Statistics presumably exist proving that people really are wavering between Chios and Porto Ercole, but nobody I know is doing so. The prevailing trend, as they say in the travel business, is towards snap decisions dictated by bargain fares. The peculiar thing about air fares, how- ever, is that travel now seems to cost the same whatever your destination. There is a sandwich board in the Fulham Road near St Stephen's Hospital which displays the latest prices, and they are all £290, whether you want to go to Vancouver, Nairobi, Lusaka or Singapore. It is the same princi- ple as in a restaurant: that the bill always adds up to £40-for-two whether you choose duckling or clear soup. So one might just as well go somewhere exotic as to Bizerta. It is, incidentally, worth noting which countries are advertising themselves most vigorously, since this generally indicates that they are either recovering from a war or anticipating one. Sri Lanka and Thai- land have been active; so has Beirut, though I fear it will take more than copywriting about leatherwork in the souk to lure holidamakers back to the Lebanon. Closer to home, the city of Stoke-on-Trent has decided to promote itself as a holiday destination. The current issue of the Radio Times carries an advertisement exhorting us to `tour the potteries and hunt for bargains in the factory shops'. The biggest
campaigns of all, however, are for pack- ages to Greece (`Don't leave your holiday in the lap of the gods') and Turkey. Both countries have also been the target for a spate of terribly bad travel articles, so the Aegean is probably an area to avoid unless you are a war correspondent.
Not that there will be any shortage of war correspondents if fighting does break out so close to home. The film The Killing Fields has made war reporting rather faddish, and half the people I meet seem to be reading the foreign news pages for the first time in years, looking for a convenient skirmish. I saw the film this week and thought it very good, though I do not hold with the general view that New York Times journalist Sydney Schanberg was exceedingly brave; helicopters were always standing by to chauffeur him up- country, and to deliver him home again, and his dispatches were mostly descriptive and did not necessitate tedious interviews with people he might meet again. The worst thing about journalism, I find, is having to talk to people you dislike; not, it is true, for all that long, but long enough for their personality to impress itself upon you. When I used to report parties the bit I dreaded most was asking people who they were, and who their companion sharing a joke on the proverbial stairs could possibly be. Most did not mind at all and might even have been pleased. But there is always one person who takes ludicrous umbrage, ex- ploding from his chair amidst a barrage of grisini sticks. Anybody who has done a stint of party reportage could be forgiven for thinking, at least temporarily, that he would have little trouble with the Khmer Rouge. It would be much more pleasant sheltering with Schanberg in a Coca-Cola warehouse in Kampuchea during an air raid, than covering the Horse and Hound Ball at the Café Royal. Unfortunately, like war Auberon Waugh will resume his column next week. correspondents, party reporters are after- wards afflicted with bouts of shingles and maudlin introspection, so that many, even the best of them, never wholly recover from their particular baptism of fire.
rr his grumble is not an important one as 1 Spectator grumbles go, but it has irked me for several months and I want to squeeze it into my last diary. It concerns the new protocol at petrol stations whereby you are expected to know the number of your pump when you go to pay. Frankly it never occurs to me to memorise the num- ber (which is sited on a pole, several yards above eye-level) so I simply say, `The yellow car at the end, please, roughly £10, I think.' Which number?' asks the dead- beat behind the glass partition, hardly bothering to look up. `The yellow car at the end,' I repeat, and so it goes on. One gets so little help at petrol stations these days that you would think, in a forecourt of only eight pumps, the `attendant' could at least manage to learn which bay is which. The worst service station for this is at Newport Pagnell on the Ml, where I was put into such a foul mood that I was forced into the Little Chef for a non-alcoholic lager.
Not enough has been made of the unlikely `twinning' of Slough with Bhopal. I have never visited Bhopal, scene of the poison gas accident at the Union Carbide plant, but Slough I know well from the days when I canvassed there for the Liberal Party with the present editor of the Spectator. Both towns have deserved reputations for being nasty, but it still seems commendable of Slough borough council to choose such an unprepossessing `twin'. Were I mayor of Slough I would try to twin with somewhere like Biarritz or Palermo, where the weather and food are good and you could look forward to lavish civic hospitality. Equally extraordinary, though, is the fact that the burghers of Bhopal want to twin with Slough. Indian civil servants are well versed in traditional British poetry, and must be familiar with Betjeman's sentiments about the place. Unfriendly bombs have, in a macabre way, already fallen on Bhopal, and it is amazing that they now wish to compound their anxieties by entertaining the corporation of Slough. Twinning is, in any case, a pretty silly idea. It is always irritating, when arriving at a village in the heart of Kent, to learn that it is the half-sister of St Amand or Acheux-en-Amienois. The worst coun- ties for twinning are East Sussex and Gloucestershire. Sussex towns seem to favour twinning with places on the Brittany coast; Royal Gloucestershire natgrally enough prefers Teutonic associations. I have always put twinning in the same category as foreign exchanges, when schoolchildren are forced to have sulky French boys to stay who spoil their holi- days.
Nicholas Coleridge
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