Sunday 1 January Happy New Year!
Youth, large, lusty, loving—youth full of grace, force, fascination,
Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force,
fascination?
Walt Whitman
It's been good to have Liz staying with us over the holiday period. She seemed very glad to be here, enjoying a rest from her demanding job, while her loving parents waited on her hand and foot (well, not quite). But now she has left, and I have the use of my computer again.
Christmas passed off pretty much exactly as usual. We had our Chinese friend Francesca and her daughter Fiona over for Christmas lunch, which consisted of the traditional roast turkey with all the trimmings (chestnut stuffing, cranberry sauce, bread sauce, sausages wrapped in bacon, roast potatoes and parsnips, Brussels sprouts – why is it that so many people dislike sprouts? They are one of my favourite vegetables), followed by Christmas pudding with brandy butter and cream, finishing with fruit and chocolates, and washed down with a glass of champagne and a bottle or so of Chateauneuf-du-Pape. In other words, more calories than we normally consume in a week. On Boxing Day we were invited for lunch with our friends Lorraine and David. On Wednesday we took Francesca and Fiona for a day of retail therapy at Boundary Mill. The drive to Boundary Mill is a very attractive route across the Pennines, which we were hoping to see covered with snow. In fact, the snow that had been with us for a couple of days had all melted overnight, but the hills were still looking very attractive in the pale winter sun low on the horizon. On Thursday our friends Gill and Roger came for lunch, and yesterday another pair of friends, Stephanie and François, came for supper and stayed overnight so that we could toast the new year at midnight.
So, a new year starts today, and it is a fairly significant one for us. I have my 65th birthday in a couple of weeks, and Mary has hers in December. We also celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary in April. With my first retirement pension cheque due to arrive at the end of this month I can scarcely avoid the realisation that old age is beginning to creep up on me. But I take heart from the Walt Whitman quotation at the top of the page. As long as one is blessed with reasonably good health, there's no reason why old age should not be as active and rewarding as youth. In fact, according to a recent survey in Saga magazine, the age at which people feel most satisfied with their life is 70. According to this survey, after a childhood peak, the satisfaction index declines steadily from the late teenage years until it hits a low around the age of 40. Then it starts to rise until the maximum at 70.
The good news, then, is that I'm due to get more and more contented with life for the next five years. The only sobering thought is that the Saga people are already targeting me with free copies of their magazine. They know how old I am, even if I usually try to turn a blind eye to it.
Wednesday 4 January
BBC2 is broadcasting a three-part adaptation of Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty next September, with Dan Stevens (pictured right) in the lead role. That reminds me that I have been meaning to give a brief review of this book, which I read last month. So here goes [warning: some spoilers ahead].
It's no surprise that this book won the Booker prize in 2004, despite stiff competition from Colm Tóibín's The Master. I think it's Hollinghurst's best book to date, and one of the most rewarding novels I have read for a long time. It centres on the life of Nick Guest, a gay Oxford graduate coming to terms with life in London in the 1980s, the era of "greed is good". Hollinghurst captures the atmosphere of this period perfectly. As an impoverished research student from a modest background, Nick relies on the generous patronage of his grossly wealthy, upper-crust friends while working in a desultory way on his PhD thesis (on Henry James's The Spoils of Poynton). The overall theme of the book is a tragic one, with both of Nick's lovers dying of Aids and a premonition on the final page that he may do so too. But most of the book is high comedy, especially the big set pieces such as the coke-fuelled 21st birthday party of Nick's friend Toby, and another party later in the book where an equally stoned Nick gets to dance with an unnamed female Prime Minister who talks and behaves uncannily like You-Know-Who.
Some people have compared The Line of Beauty with Brideshead Revisited, and it's certainly true that Hollinghurst precisely catches the attitudes of the landed gentry, their casual racism, homophobia and philistinism, and their patronising condescension towards middle-class Nick. Most of the way through the book these attitudes are kept in the background, but in the denouement a scandal brings them viciously to the surface.
The last time I enjoyed a book as much as this was Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys. I can't give a higher recommendation than that.
Tuesday 17 January
I'm proud to share a birthday with Benjamin Franklin. What's more, today is a rather special one for both of us. He (or rather his admirers) will be celebrating his 300th. I'm a mere 65, but then I do have the advantage of still being alive.
Franklin was indeed an admirable man, famous both as a scientist (for his experiments with electricity) and as a politician (for his role in drawing up the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution). Yet for most of his life he was not a revolutionary. He believed that the American colonies owed their allegiance to the king, but that they should govern themselves, and cooperate for their own self-defence, while remaining loyal to the crown. However, this did not go down well, either with the colonists or with the British authorities.
Above all, he was pragmatic. He was a lifelong vegetarian. But on a voyage from Boston to London his ship was becalmed and food was running short. The sailors began fishing for cod, and Franklin wrote in his autobiography
It smelt admirably well. I balanced some time between Principle and Inclination: till I recollected, that when the Fish were opened, I saw smaller Fish taken out of their stomachs:– Then, thought I, if you eat one another, I don't see why we mayn't eat you. So I din'd upon Cod very heartily ... So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for every thing one has in mind to do.
That's the true voice of the Age of Reason. There's a lot to be said for being a reasonable Creature.
Apart from having the same birthday, the other thing I have in common with Ben Franklin is a connection with the University of Pennsylvania. His connection with it is admittedly closer than mine, since he founded this great institution and my only link with it is that I spent five years there, one as a student and four as a visiting professor. But they were five of the happiest years of my life, and I have to be grateful to Benjamin Franklin for founding a university that has meant so much to me.
When I lived in Philadelphia I used to enjoy exploring the city's parks and squares. But I never went to Franklin Square, a miserably neglected open space in one of the most unsavoury parts of the city, described here as being "generally shunned by all but the homeless ... litter-strewn and dangerous." It is a sad irony that Franklin, who advocated environmental reform including a regular trash collection scheme for the city, should be commemorated in such a way. But it seems that the city of Philadelphia has finally woken up to its responsibilities and is cleaning up the park as part of the Franklin tricentennial celebrations.
For my 65th birthday no city parks are being renovated. But I do start to get the state retirement pension, which will provide a modest supplement to my university pension. For the next nine months I also get paid for the teaching that I do, although in practice all the teaching was concentrated into the first semester so I shall get paid for doing nothing. This will all help to fund our trip to South Africa next month.
Mary asked some while ago what I would like for a birthday present. We usually restrict ourselves to small, token presents for birthdays and Christmas, so I didn't want to propose anything extravagant. But then it emerged that for her 65th birthday present later this year Mary would like a trip to Japan (although we'll delay actually going there until cherry blossom time next year). This made me think I could be a bit more ambitious in suggesting a present for me. So what I asked for was the 60-CD set of Harnoncourt's recordings of the complete Bach sacred cantatas. That will keep me happy in the evenings for a long time. The only problem is to find space on the bookshelves for 60 more CDs.
Saturday 28 January
This has been a trying week. I knew from the start that I wasn't going to enjoy it, because it's exam time. I had 130 papers to grade and only three days in which to get it all done. That was an unrealistic deadline, and in fact it was a couple of days overdue by the time I had completed the job. The only consolation is that this is the last time I'll ever have to do that. Marking exams is the one part of my job that I have never liked.
A bad week was made worse by the fact that I came down with a very heavy cold. For the past week I have had a thick head, a congested nose and a sore throat and have been feeling generally miserable. I suppose that's fairly good timing: if you're going to feel miserable with a cold, it might as well happen when you're already feeling fed up with having to mark great piles of exam scripts. Better that it should happen now than next month when we're away on holiday. In fact, I'm a bit anxious that Mary may catch it from me and be suffering from it while we're in South Africa. We're both keeping our fingers crossed about that, and she's taking all kinds of prophylactic medications.
There's not much you can do to treat a cold, other than to stay warm, take plenty of hot drinks and ease the discomfort with a dose of paracetamol at bedtime. But sometimes a cold goes down onto the chest and turns into bronchitis. Then there's no alternative but to go to the doctor for an antibiotic. On Thursday evening I started coughing and wheezing and I knew that bronchitis was developing. So yesterday morning I went to the doctor's and got a prescription for a course of amoxicillin. It's a fairly high dose, a 500mg capsule three times a day, and it's making me feel dopey. Today I didn't want to do anything but sit and read the paper, nodding off to sleep from time to time. But the cough is considerably better already, and I'm sure it will have cleared up completely by the time we leave for Cape Town next Wednesday.
Tuesday 31 January
So what happened to that long, bitterly cold winter that they were forecasting all autumn? January has been dry, calm and mild, with not a trace of snow and not even much in the way of frosts. There's still the possibility that things will change dramatically in February, but we don't care! Tomorrow we're off to Cape Town, where it's sunny and 28°C today, with a forecast that it's going to get even warmer in the next few days.
Actually, the forecasters weren't that wrong. There has been an unusually cold air mass over eastern Europe, but the easterly wind flow that was supposed to carry it this way has not been quite as as strong as they predicted, fortunately.
We'll be in South Africa for the whole of February, spending a week in Cape Town, then driving eastwards along the coast following the Garden Route, to the Kariega game reserve, where we're staying for a couple of days. After that we'll make our way back to Cape Town by a more inland route, stopping in some of the national parks and ending up in the wine country with a couple of nights in Franschhoek, a little town which was settled by Huguenots and has a large Huguenot monument. I'm looking forward to seeing this because my ancestors were Huguenots, emigrating to England from France or Belgium four or five hundred years ago when protestants were being persecuted there.
We have to leave home at some ungodly hour tomorrow to catch the 6 a.m. flight from Leeds to Amsterdam and then on to Cape Town. I'll be back online some time in March to make you all wildly jealous with accounts of how we fared (I hope).
Added later. Steve phoned to wish us a good trip. He said that they have had four or five inches of snow. In the town where they live, in southern Spain, this is almost unheard of, and the authorities have no idea how to handle it. They have no snowploughs, so they sent out a roadroller to crush the snow. Of course, this had the effect of turning the main street into an icerink. School was cancelled, and the kids spent the day laughing at motorists sliding helplessly all over the place.
