DIARY
CRAIG BROWN Iwas staying in Norfolk for Easter. The Easter Sunday national newspapers were full of lengthy follow-up pieces on the life sentence given to the Norfolk farmer Tony Martin after he shot dead a 16-year-old intruder. As there was nothing new to say, most of them tried to paint a picture of the Norfolk character based largely on this one pump-action-shotgun-wielding hermit, whose entire house was lit by a single 15- watt bulb. The Norfolkians — or should that be the Norfolk? — were then charac- terised as solitary, stubborn, xenophobic, hot-headed, etc., etc. This all made my stay in Norfolk slightly nervy. I found myself walking backwards, eyes darting to and fro, out of even the cheeriest village shop. Is Norfolk set to become one of those coun- ties, like Surrey or Yorkshire or most of Wales, about which everyone can be rude? (Another is Cornwall: I was once told by a publisher that any manuscript in an enve- lope postmarked Cornwall went straight into the bin.) It all seems a little unfair. After the murders by Fred and Rosemary West, newspapers didn't suggest there was something typically Gloucestershire about the couple, nor did they suggest that other Gloucestershire inhabitants — Jilly Coop- er, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent and so forth — were the type to harbour Corpses beneath their patios. Norfolk's most distinguished inhabitants are the Queen and Prince Philip, but they can hardly be said to be typical. Or can they? There is, I suppose, a certain gruff, almost Martinesque, quality to Prince Philip. But last weekend the trees around Sandring- ham remained mercifully free of look-out ladders, the corgis were not yet replaced With Rottweilers and, though Her Majesty is known to be tight-fisted with the house- keeping, I feel sure the Sandringham chan- deliers still boast more than a solitary 15- watt bulb.
Am. idst horsey folk at the Fakenham Point-to-point on Easter Monday, my mind kept going back to a passage in a new book called Elizabeth: Behind Palace Doors. The author interviewed John Barratt, Lord Mountbatten's private secretary, who, he Claims, 'revealed that Mountbatten achieved sexual satisfaction on his ponies'. The book goes on to say that Mountbatten had a groom called Mary, whose contract Specified that she had to go out riding twice a week with him, and that 'whenever Mountbatten rode out with the lively Mary or any of his other girlfriends, he always wore a condom, and all the staff knew this.' Could this be true? I couldn't help noticing that many of the Norfolk point-to-pointers Sported inscrutable smiles but I had put it down to a profitable day's betting. Horses and horse-riding have always struck me as defiantly unsexy. One need only think of the showy-off way horses have of lifting up the top bit of their tails before issuing forth great dollops of dung. Perhaps the horse- lobby see this as coquettish, but it leaves me quite cold. And after these revelations, should John Barratt continue to describe himself as Mountbatten's private secre- tary? Privates secretary might be rather more the ticket.
Reaction to the Tony Martin case has revealed many of my more namby-pamby friends as wolves in sheep's clothing. I am a soft-on-crime man myself, so I have been taken aback by how many easy-going liber- als, most of them women, have told me that the burglar got what he deserved. On the other hand, those who argue against Martin are equally harsh. Most point to the squalor in which he lived — concrete floors littered with mouldy milk bottles and old fridges, discarded electrical goods and other gubbins — as proof that he was off his rocker. These people were scarily quick to forge a link between a failure to dust and a propensity to murder. The same hap- pened following the conviction of Dr Harold Shipman, whose hoovering, it is said, left a lot to be desired. Yet lots of us live in similarly scruffy conditions. My own house is so full of litter that walking across the kitchen produces a crunch-spiat sound as ballpoint pens and orange-juice cartons shatter underfoot, yet I have yet to got this one for stress!' succumb to the temptations of homicide. In fact, many murderers, particularly arson- ists, are as neat as new pins: murder can be as much about asserting control as about losing it.
Martin, the reports tell us, 'kept him- self to himself, which, in the world of jour- nalism, is always a tell-tale sign that some- one is a murderer. If ever I were to be made an editor, my first task would be to ban the flabbiest clichés in modern journal- ism. From the literary pages, I would oust the ubiquitous cliché that so-and-so 'writes like an angel'. It's an expression that pre- supposes an angel would be worth reading, whereas it is more likely that he would be fluffy and sanctimonious, like Dr Carey with feathers. I would also ban the book- reviewing cliché that says that an author writes 'like X on speed', the X being any- one from Jack Kerouac to Barbara Cart- land. It can't be long before someone is described as writing like an angel on speed. I would spike all articles beginning or end- ing with the phrase 'Eat your heart out . .. ', every use of the prefix `La' for force- ful or busty women (La Rantzen, La Pol- lard), and I would put a blanket ban on all royal pieces carrying the phrase 'right royal' (a right royal laugh, a right royal bust-up). In newspaper diaries, the word 'ouch', gen- erally employed as a one-word sentence, would be out, as would the phrase 'red faces all round'. The Spectator is by and large innocent of such infelicities, but sometimes its columnists pass off laziness for sophistication. 'I think it was La Rochefoucauld who said. . . ' or 'if memo- ry serves, it was the divine Hazlitt who . . . ' they write. How odd to affect savoir-faire by boasting ignorance. If they don't know, why not look it up? And if they do, why do they pretend they don't?
Over Easter, I was leafing through hol- iday brochures. Like cookery books and the Counny Life property pages, they are a sort of porn for the middle-aged middle class. The most frequently off-putting phrase for villa rentals is 'the owner lives next door', which they try to take the sting out of by adding 'should you need her assistance at any time'. This strikes the same chilling, Bates Motel-ish note as The Good Hotel Guide's 'expect a warm welcome from this intensely personal family hotel'. Pull of character' is another one to avoid, though 'full of characters' would, I suppose, be even worse. It all makes one yearn for a hotel wholly without character, or a villa owned by a multi-national conglomerate, justly proud of its long and devoted tradi- tion of indifference.
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