I left our house in Brittany, a place I love, on a February Sunday evening with the nearly new moon in a sharp sky. I left it with the stove alight, the glass doors closed, the ventilator shut so it would go more slowly, a wood fire burning for no-one in a locked house, lasting a few more hours into the time between now and when we come back. And took my melancholy away with me. You feel the muscle pulling and it hurts, but at least it shows you’ve achieved a connection with a place, there’s a hectare and a half of France you care about in a long-term way, in all weathers, at all seasons, in all moods.

The last day of ’94 marks the beginning of my first serious attempt to write a regular diary. I’m 43, time is passing, and so many things happen, small and large, which seem noteworthy at the time, but then, through my laziness or the press of other concerns, get forgotten about and wasted. I’ve no idea how the diary will turn out, whether I shall manage to keep it regularly, nor quite how frank it’s going to be. You’re supposed to be able to write exactly what you like in a diary, but some of my private thoughts are unprintable — I expect most people are the same — and would embarrass me and/or hurt other people if they read them. I definitely don’t want the diary to be an act of auto-analysis or auto-confession, therefore, and I’m probably accepting, before I’ve even started, that a measure of self-censorship will operate much of the time. One thing I’m sure about is style. This is going to be off-duty writing. The rest of the writing I do, at work or when I get round to producing a poem, is above all careful. People congratulate me sometimes on the finished-ness of what I write; not much drafting apparent, and it’s tight and well made. I know that’s true, and I want this to be different. I want to turn it out quickly, with concentration, yes, but without the constant self-monitoring of the other writing. It won’t matter if I use the same word accidentally in successive sentences, or if I use a cliché because I can’t think of a more original or individual way of saying something. If you’re supposed to be writing a diary but in fact it’s an attempt at belles-lettres, you can’t possibly be sincere. You’re constantly thinking about a potential public readership, and the joke in The Importance of Being Earnest about the young girl’s private thoughts and feelings applies. (Also Wilde’s remark about taking his diary with him everywhere in order to have something sensational to read on the train.)

I planted three trees in the wood this afternoon with Albert, my friend and gardener: an oak, a beech and a fir. Albert remarked, when we’d finished, that that was enough work for one year, and it was too late for anyone who hadn’t done enough work this year to make up for it now.

This has been the year of liberation in South Africa — the most important positive political event of the year, a defining moment in my politically conscious lifetime, like the fall of the Berlin Wall in ’89. There is a four-month-old ceasefire in Northern Ireland. Continuing inter-ethnic slaughter in Bosnia shows how ineffective are the actions of outsiders — UN, USA or EU — when the combatants haven’t finished their quarrel. There has been a similar but briefer and much bloodier slaughter in Rwanda. Boris Yeltsin has stupidly been killing people whom he claims to be Russian, in Chechnya, because some of them want to be independent. The most fragile and flawed peace treaty is just holding together in Israel and Palestine. There is peace between Israel and Jordan. The political system in the USA has been seen at its most ineffective and wasteful; two years ago the people voted for a president offering more interventionist government, proposing to reduce inequality, to have a national health service, to restrict the sale of guns to private citizens, and now they vote for a majority in Congress who are against all of these things. The Conservative government in the UK is as disreputable and unpopular as any British government has ever been, stumbling from corruption scandal to sex scandal to internal warfare over Britain’s place in Europe. The Labour Party is enjoying great popularity, especially under its new leader Tony Blair, who looks and talks like a person able to persuade the undecided, the crucial proportion of those who voted Conservative when Neil Kinnock was Labour leader in ’92, to vote Labour next time.

In Italy, a nightmare of Orwellian proportions almost became reality. Disgusted by the corruption and ineptitude of the leaders and parties who represented the post-war settlement, the electorate jumped out of the frying pan into the fire, and brought into power Silvio Berlusconi, a media mogul with an immense business empire which includes control of half the country’s television stations and several of its newspapers. The people took his bait, just as they took Mussolini’s bait, in a naïve longing for a strong man to sort out their problems. Into the coalition government with Berlusconi’s newly formed party came the fascists and the populist/separatist Northern League. It was a recipe for disaster, but fortunately Berlusconi’s own corruption, plus his inexperience in governing, plus the steadfastness of the judges investigating corruption in the country, plus the fact that now, in an advanced EU, it’s not as easy to run an autarchic, brain-washing strong state as it was in the ’30s, all combined to bring down the Berlusconi government just before Christmas. It’s impossible to say what will happen next. The trouble is, there doesn’t seem to be, yet, an attractive, well organised, untainted centre-left grouping big enough to provide an alternative potential government.

This is written in the car park on the French side of the Channel Tunnel. We’re waiting to be called on to the midnight shuttle. We came over in the tunnel last week, five days after the car service had opened for business. My appreciation of the technical magnificence of the achievement was diminished by the persistent, noisy efforts of the operators to make you leave your car and buy duty-free goods before boarding the train, which was delayed by an hour with no explanation given. The French grammar and accent of the ‘bilingual’ train driver welcoming us aboard were tremendously entertaining, really the worst French I’ve ever heard used in a public announcement. Then we were mysteriously told, in English, that ‘due to adverse weather conditions, you will be travelling back to front’. No French translation of this information was attempted.

Today we’ve driven for seven and a half hours from Kerfontaine. A long way, but not too much of a strain, with so many big, well-engineered, dual-carriageway roads in France now. What a distance France has come since 1969, when I first drove here, when the routes nationales, roads of romance and expectation, straight, lined with poplars, had nonetheless a murderous effect on springs and shock absorbers, and signs reminded you every few kilometres of the danger of nids de poule. Whenever I see and use the latest improvement in the road system, I’m torn between gratitude that it gets me somewhere more quickly, with less strain, and regret for the latest swathe of countryside which has disappeared under the concrete and tarmac. At least France is so big that it can take the expansion of the road system without making me fear that there will be nothing left of rural remoteness when this great period of building is finished. That is what I fear in England, especially in the south, and it’s one of the reasons why I’m sure I won’t grow old there. Too many bad decisions have been made. Too many roads lead to too many retail parks, as Larkin gloomily predicted in his poem Going, Going.

We’ve boarded the shuttle, and now we’re under the sea. The chef de train this time is French, and I must try to be fair to my English chef de train last week, and decide whether tonight’s English grammar and accent are worse or better than last week’s French. I have to discount the fact that to me, an Englishman, a bad French accent in the mouth of an English person is gross and embarrassing, whereas the reverse sounds charming and a good try. Are the French equivalently charmed by my compatriot having a good try? Or nauseated? It ought to be possible to answer this question with a degree of sociolinguistic objectivity, and perhaps someone has already done so. Subjectively, I think the Frenchman is making a better stab at bilingualism, as he races us between land masses last united in the most recent ice age, than did the Englishman.

The train ride is utterly smooth and almost silent, swaying a little on a continuous rail. The only sound is the breath of the air supply.

Russia stupidly and criminally continues to attack Chechnya, with hundreds dead on both sides in the fighting and bombing. Yeltsin must be finished, surely, after this display. Meanwhile, Clinton faces an all-Republican congress determined to undo everything he stands for in 100 days. We shall see, but the pinnacles of power in Russia and the USA seem draughty and dangerous places at the moment.

It rained almost constantly in January, and the new month begins with more rain. There are very bad floods on the Continent; they’re moving 250,000 people out of their homes in Holland. Here we have lesser but still severe flood problems. And a political crisis has appeared out of nowhere.

Someone has leaked to The Times the details of the still secret proposals being discussed between London and Dublin for the future government of Northern Ireland. The proposals envisage Dublin having more say over Northern Ireland’s affairs than the Unionists would like. Predictable outrage from the Unionists over what they see as betrayal. Major is clearly and understandably fearful that this will destroy the whole peace process, so he went on television and radio this evening for five minutes with an appeal to the people of Northern Ireland not to panic, and promising that no deal will be done without their consent. Support from all parties in parliament except the Unionists. We have to keep our fingers crossed. The leaker looks like someone who wants to derail the peace process. I’m sympathetic to Major about this. It’s the only policy he’s got which I agree with, and he knows it would do a great deal for his otherwise dreadful standing if he could secure a permanent, agreed peace. But it also shows how habitual it is for governments to mislead. The current proposals are further-reaching than any which the Government was previously prepared to admit they were contemplating. About a year ago, the Government had to admit they’d been talking to the IRA, when they had previously denied that they were.

It’s morning London time, but it’s 5.30 in the afternoon where we are, skirting down the west coast of the Malaysian peninsula at 893 kph. There’s a wonderful computerised map system on the little television monitor you can pull out from your seat. It shows you exactly where you are. The map progressively changes all the way. Then it tells you how fast you’re going, height, air temperature outside (currently –39ºC, even though we’re in the tropics), distance from departure (we’re 10,142 kilometres from London) and amount of time left before arrival. In 45 minutes we shall reach Singapore. A brief stop there, then on to Melbourne, arriving at six o’clock in the morning tomorrow. The passage of time, accelerated going this way round the earth, means that meals get combined. We’ve just been given brunch, but I only had the br bit, and not the unch. Last night’s supper was excellent — smoked salmon, good beef, salad with proper French dressing, champagne all the way. And champagne this morning with the br. How will they keep me down on the farm once I have seen Paree? Having travelled business class on a long-haul flight for the first time, going back to economy in future suddenly seems unthinkable.

It’s nice to be going to a conference (about children’s television) with the speeches already written. I might fiddle with them a bit depending on the mood I pick up and the kind of audience it looks likely to be, but they won’t throw tomatoes if I deliver them as they are. So I can enjoy myself.

Conferencing — one of the great scams of the privileged. The Straits of Molucca narrow beneath us.

Here I am on the Perth-Singapore hop of the journey home. 35,000 feet, well out over the Indian Ocean, heading towards Indonesia. The brilliant map on my little TV screen shows us pointing at Djakarta, with 1,696 km already covered from Perth. We flew up the WA coast for about an hour, before leaving it at a place called Shark Bay, where the coastline becomes complicated and fractured, with long spits of land, islands, and huge inlets of the sea. I have a wonderful window seat: loads of leg-room, champagne, the newspapers. It’s a lovely afternoon. Small clouds 20,000 feet below cast shadows on a calm, flat, lightly wrinkled sea…

It’s now dark over the forests of Sumatra. There are few lights. I can see big swollen rivers with swampy brown flood plains. Some areas must be plantations — rubber, perhaps — because there are regular grids of straight dirt roads enclosing rectangles of dark green. Sumatra used to seem to me, as a child, the final exotic place. You couldn’t get further away from Hampshire or Bromley, Kent. There be tigers. Now here it is: quartered, connected by local flights, our position above it pinpointed. Global technology is the latest and greatest coloniser. It will change the world more completely than the British or the Dutch ever did.

Slept long over the Bay of Bengal, India, the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, Iran, Turkey, and woke up on the Black Sea coast north of Ankara. While crossing Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Belgium and now the English Channel I’ve been reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles, with its intense sense of locality. Strange to be skipping so lightly over countries and continents while Tess and Angel Clare move only from field to dairy and back. Dorset is a little unidentified bit on my computerised TV map.

Conferencing again, this time with my commissioning colleagues at Channel 4. The huge, nearly new hotel building on the edge of Bracknell is execrable: everything disastrous and irretrievable that we’ve done to southern England. In the car park this morning were dozens of brand-new models of a 24-valve Ford sports car called Probe. It was as if a platoon of Martians had landed on this God-forsaken square of tarmac. In the hotel, Ford Credit was having a conference. Squads of young men, all looking the same, all dressed the same in sweatshirts with the company logo on, were discussing how to sell more Fords, preferably ones with 24 valves to use up the earth’s oil as quickly as possible. When I went out for some fresh air at five o’clock, they’d all taken off again to their home planet.

I’ve had a day in Belfast. Flying back now over the southern tip of the Isle of Man. A beautiful afternoon, broken cloud, the Irish Sea deep blue and calm.

At Aldegrove airport when we landed this morning, there was a group of about ten hares playing on one of the grass patches in between the runways. They squared up to each other and did indeed seem to box, as they are supposed to. I wonder if their ears are affected by the aircraft noise. Saw only one, and a rabbit, as we took off this afternoon.

Belfast continues to feel more peaceful, more normal, every time I go there, thank God. Long may it last. Peter Logue, my friend and Channel 4’s education officer in Northern Ireland, said that a man was shot in the head in west Belfast last night, but the police were anxious to say that it was an ‘ordinary’ gangster shooting, not paramilitary. Everyone is hoping that the longer normality persists, the harder it will be for hardliners on both sides to resume hostilities.

Easter holidays. Left London at six on Tuesday morning. Kent looked superb in spring green, with morning mist in all the valleys. The easiest of crossings through the tunnel, smooth, quiet, quick and, above all, requiring no contact with the other humans in transit, and then the French countryside looking equally glorious all the way to Paris. Every tree in leaf or blossom. The new Eurostar trains raced past us along the stretch where the line runs next to the autoroute. Wonderful technological confidence — and there were cowslips growing profusely in the few metres of grass between road and railway. At one moment, I glanced across at a First World War cemetery — a French one, the crosses in tight rows, the tricolore hanging over them, the neat surrounding wall, and then, above the cemetery, a train slipped by at 300 kilometres per hour. The tragic beginning and optimistic ending of France’s 20th century, framed in the same window.

After four magnificently indulgent days in Paris, we drove down here yesterday, and were immediately invited out to the poshest hotel in the area, the Château Locguénolé near Hennebont, where Mike Raleigh and Sue Goldie, and their friends Jo and Huw, who’d been staying at Kerfontaine last week, had gone for the night once we arrived. Ate another dinner in the grand manner. Home at 1.30 in a taxi.

Today has passed in that getting-to-know-you-again way I go through on arriving at Kerfontaine. Two slow, detailed walks around the gardens, one in the morning with Helen, one in the afternoon with Albert. Discussion of the improvements since I was here last. The place looks sensational. Wild flowers everywhere, the fruit trees coming into blossom, the vegetable garden half planted already. At lunchtime it was properly, seriously warm, and we ate outside, an unusually healthy lunch accompanied by mineral water, and including radishes from the garden (grown by Albert sous le tunnel — his early-season construction of flexible rods and plastic sheeting) and watercress from a trickle stream in the wood. Radishes always remind me of the poem by Wallace Stevens about Sainte Ursule, the one where God feels sexy, and eating wild watercress reminds me of Sweeney Astray in Seamus Heaney’s translation.

Today to Belfast, to approve the last of the Irish Scientists and Inventors series which David Hammond is making for us. David said he went to a wake last night. Though the dead man was there, being paid dutiful respect, the main focus of attention, particularly from the women, was a double pram containing two beautiful bonny twin baby boys.  Their blushing and proud young parents stood next to them. Appropriate gushings and cooings.  At last an old farmer came over, who had managed cattle all his life.  He looked down into the pram, and said to the father, ‘Twin boys, are they?’  The young man nodded.  The farmer asked, ‘Are ye thinking of keeping both of them?’ David said that the humour was a bit dry for the proud father, who became confused.

Yesterday I was preoccupied with the Labour party special conference on Clause 4. By the time the day arrived, the result was not in doubt, and Blair got his big majority (65%) for replacing Clause 4. He won the vote in the constituencies by 27% to 3%; equally satisfyingly, he won the union vote by 38% to 31%. The Tories and the Liberals went around trying to pretend that the affair was of no great significance, but (as Andrew Rawnsley said in today’s Observer) just imagine what they would have been saying if Blair had lost, or won with a bare majority. It is an historic moment, despite the fact that the new statement of aims and values is linguistically undistinguished (I could have written a much more memorable statement saying the same thing), because Labour’s philosophical statement is now realistic. I think that terrifies the Tories in their hearts.

An extraordinary week has gone by. The most extraordinary thing has been the weather. It’s been hot — a glorious, full, premature heat, bursting through the windows, climbing up the walls, radiating from the buildings and the traffic, making everyone feel the lassitude of summer when it’s still spring. This has continued, day after day, from 1 May — as if on cue — to today when it is still fine but cooler than the first seven days.

There have been two big political events in the past week. On 4 May, Labour won a crushing victory in local elections in England and Wales, annihilating the Tories on a scale never seen before, turning them into the marginal party of local government. They now control only eight district councils, four London boroughs and one county in England. In Wales and Scotland, they control nothing at all. The scale and the joy of it are awesome — the Tories are clearly numbed and ashamed in a way they’ve never been before. Of course, they’re still holed up in the Palace of Westminster with a small majority, but they’re seriously contemplating defeat in a general election within two years, and Labour are looking relaxed and confident under Blair, as they have rarely done during my politically conscious lifetime.

The second event was the election of Chirac yesterday as president of France. It was the result that most people had predicted in recent weeks, but still a disappointment after Jospin had done so unexpectedly well in the first round. Chirac got just over 52%, Jospin just under 48%, so in the end it was an old-fashioned right/left fight. Jospin comes out of it very well, no longer the dull figure I thought him to be when he first emerged as the socialist candidate. He has vigour, integrity and humour, and will certainly now be the commanding figure in the French socialist party through to the next Assemblée elections in three years’ time. It’s not impossible to envisage a cohabitation in reverse then, with a socialist-dominated Assemblée, possibly under a Jospin premiership, living with a Gaullist president. Chirac remains for me the most untrustworthy of politicians, willing to say anything to suit the turn of the times, unclear about detail, and profoundly uncaring about the poor, the unemployed, the marginal. But you have to admit that Mitterrand, on whom I pinned such high hopes in ’81, has failed to help these groups too. He hasn’t been, for years, a socialist in any meaningful sense, and the terrible rate of unemployment (12% of the active population), the 15% vote for Le Pen, the cynicism of the electorate about the morality of the governing class, are legacies of his presidency. There was a long and depressing piece in Saturday’s Guardian suggesting, in effect, that we were looking at the end of a politician who has always been an opportunist, from his association in the ’30s with far-right Catholic groups through to the scandals which overtook his second term.

Today has been a bank holiday, and the three-day weekend a national celebration of the 50th anniversary of victory in Europe. The Queen Mother appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace with her daughters, just as she did on 8 May 1945, at precisely the same time of day (twenty to one). Helen and I were in Regent’s Park at the time, pushing her aunt Eva round in her wheelchair, causing her to become less grumpy than she was when we went round to see her. We saw the fly-past of the famous aeroplanes of the Second World War — Swordfishes, Spitfires, Lancasters, Wellingtons — and then a formation of modern jets spewing red, white and blue smoke. This evening I caught the six o’clock news on the radio, and was moved by the sound of Vera Lynn singing ‘There’ll be bluebirds over …’ from the palace balcony. If I had been of fighting age at the time of the war I would certainly have fought, though I’m grateful that I’ve never had to and it doesn’t look as if I ever will.

Flying from Inverness to London after two days on the island of Lewis and Harris. It was the first time I’d been to the Hebrides. I was looking at some programmes in Gaelic made by Calum Ferguson. When I arrived at Stornoway, Calum took me straight to his office where, with a break for lunch, we got through the business by four. Then he drove me up through the north of the island. It is austere and bare. The modern houses are not charming. They are functional. The crofts often look a mess, with rubbish and rusting machinery lying around them. You can see that the people have had a hard history, and that prettification is not important. We visited the Callanish Stones, a wonderful Stonehenge-like group of standing stones, in the shape of a Celtic cross, erected about 5,000 years ago. Then the remains of a beautiful double-walled tapering dry-stone tower called a broch, many examples of which were built in the west of Scotland and on the islands, probably as fortified defences against the Romans. Beautiful double-walled tapering tower. Then we saw a black house, one of a few remaining examples of the traditional dwelling house of the people, made of stone, wooden rafters with a thatched roof, held down by a fishing net weighted with stones. This one was open to the public. I paid £1.50 to see how the poor people used to live. It gave me a powerful impression of the simplicity, the bareness, the closeness of their lives. Then on to the Butt of Lewis, made famous by its inclusion in the litany of the shipping forecast. The sea and the cliffs were awesome, even on a quiet spring evening. I don’t think I’ve ever had a clearer impression of the wild Atlantic, and I can imagine it would be stupendous to try to get close to the edge when a winter storm was blowing. The rocks were black, with hundreds of gulls nesting, and the sea washed menacingly between them. The lighthouse is of brick and the buildings behind it are beautifully kept, newly painted in white and yellow.

This morning Calum drove me down to the south of the island. It was spectacularly beautiful. After getting to Tairbeart, we went on around Harris on the Golden Road, with wonderful views across the sea to Skye, and the magical sight of the little inland freshwater lochs. There were sheep and lambs everywhere on the road, some black-faced and some all white. Through Leverburgh (so named in 1923 in honour of Cheshire soap manufacturer Lord Leverhulme, who bought Lewis-with-Harris in 1918), and then up the west coast road, past luminous white sandy beaches, deserted. Lunched at the Harris Hotel at Tairbeart, then drove back up the east coast of Lewis, past Loch Seaforth, a big sea loch, via a deviation to a tiny seaside village where until a few years ago there was no road at all. The only access had been by sea or by a precipitous path from Tairbeart over a mountain and around a cliff, where at one place the path hung right over the sea. The postman came from Tairbeart every two days with letters, and after a few years applied to head office in Edinburgh for a rise in pay, in view of the exceptionally arduous nature of his round. Application refused. After much protest locally, Edinburgh sent a man to walk the path with the postman. Halfway along the path, at the particularly terrifying point, the Edinburgh man was transfixed with fear, and could go neither forward nor back. The postman went on to the village, arranged for a boat to sail round to a place below where the unfortunate official was, returned with a rope, and lowered the official on the rope to the boat, which then sailed back to Tairbeart. The postman got his rise.

On the road up from the village to rejoin the main road, as we were looking down at Loch Seaforth, the car was suddenly surrounded by sheep. Calum turned the engine off, and began a conversation in Gaelic with the shepherd, who leaned in through my window. Sitting between them, I turned my head back and forth from one to the other. I speak no Gaelic, but I could tell that there was some robustness in the exchange, and both men pointed at the sea from time to time. After a while, the talk ended, the sheep and the shepherd moved on, and we drove on. ‘What were you saying?’ I asked. Calum said, ‘I said to him, “Have the salmon arrived in the loch yet?” He said to me, “There are no salmon in this loch, except those in cages. The wild ones haven’t been seen since they put the cages there for the farming.” I said to him, “Yes, they have. Last July, I was at this place with my wife, and we counted the dorsal fins of twenty wild salmon in a short space below.” He said to me, “No, you couldn’t have.” I said to him, “Well, we did.”’ Calum said no more, as if that were sufficient explanation. I said to Calum, ‘Why didn’t he believe you?’ Calum looked at me as if I were a bit dim. ‘The locals don’t want to share the wild salmon with visitors.’

I pointed to some islets off the coast, and asked what they were called. ‘The Shiant Islands,’ said Calum. ‘Shiant means blessed.’ ‘Are they inhabited?’ I asked. ‘Oh yes, and it’s a wonderful place to live. There’s no baldness there.’

It was a beautiful slow flight from Stornoway to Inverness, across the sea and the Western Highlands. I walked straight off that little plane on to the London plane. The Scottish mountains are magnificent from the air — still with patches of snow on the tops and in the crevices.

On Sunday I went with Helen to see mum and dad. In the evening we went for a walk in Wootton Wood to look at the bluebells, fading now, but still impressive in their masses everywhere. I remembered that when I was 17 I had walked in that wood at this time of year with Dan Dickey, an inspirational teacher at school. Dan was driving me back from the annual black-tie dinner in Cambridge to which old boys of the school who were studying there invited the headmaster, some of the teachers and the head boy (me in 1969). It was well after midnight by the time we got back to Wootton. Dan said he used to go to Wootton Wood as a young man to hear the nightingales. He suggested we do the same. (Dan was evidently heterosexual, married with children he adored, deeply in love with his wife; no question of anything other than the pure idealistic romance of hearing birdsong.) We stumbled about the wood at one in the morning in our tuxedos, a man in his 50s and a boy of 17. We squatted on the ground and said nothing for half an hour. Eventually we gave it up as a bad job. Dan laughed as we drove away — ‘Nothing but a fucking creaking gate, John. Typical. Should have known better than to try to reinvent lost youth’ — before he dropped me home.

I told Paul Ashton this story and he gave me back the following story of Edward Lucie-Smith, the poet, who worked for a long time at the BBC. Lucie-Smith was an expert ornithologist, and he was always complaining about the inadequacy of the BBC’s standard sound recording of a nightingale’s song. One May, he persuaded the head of BBC sound archives to let him take a two-man crew plus tape-recorder out to a wood in Oxfordshire where he knew that nightingales sang reliably. The three men waited for hours in the wood in the night. Nothing. Eventually, Lucie-Smith said he needed to take a leak. Off he went into the dark. A few moments after he had disappeared, the sound recordists heard the most exquisite birdsong, and had the presence of mind — though neither was an ornithologist — to switch on the tape recorder. Soon after the song had ceased, Lucie-Smith reappeared, buttoning up his fly, and asking excitedly, ‘Did you get that? Wasn’t it wonderful? The perfect nightingale song.’ They drove back to London, pleased with their night’s work, and that recording replaced the discredited previous recording as the BBC’s standard nightingale song. It was only years later, when Lucie-Smith retired from the BBC, that he let it be known that, weary of waiting, he had provided a more-than-plausible human imitation of the nightingale’s song while supposedly having gone off for a piss.

The government is in grotesque difficulties over the report of the Nolan Committee into standards of behaviour in Parliament. Most Conservatives can’t seem to understand that the majority of the public regards it as immoral that MPs should have jobs besides that for which the taxpayer pays them. They think it impertinent that the public should want to know what these extra jobs are and how much they earn from them. They produce astonishing arguments to the effect that it won’t be possible to get high-calibre people into Parliament unless they’re allowed to go on earning multiple salaries. It shows how far out of touch most Tory MPs, young and old, are with the working conditions and attitudes of most of the people they govern. I would give MPs a substantial straightforward pay rise, from the £32,000 spot salary they get at the moment to a starting salary of £45,000, rising on an incremental scale from there. They would then be earning about what the head of a large comprehensive school earns. I would stop the ridiculous practice of giving them money to employ their own secretaries and researchers, and simply say that MPs are entitled to so much secretarial and research help each, paid directly and not through the MP. And I would ban the holding of continuous paid jobs in addition to the job of being an MP. I don’t think you can stop people being paid for writing books or articles or giving lectures or appearing on TV. I get paid a few hundred a year for my visiting professorship at Nottingham, and I go there about three times a year on C4’s time, and I don’t think I’m doing anything wrong. But it ought simply to be regarded as a breach of contract for MPs to be doing continuous day jobs in addition to that for which they were elected.

In Tusla in Bosnia last Thursday evening a Serb shell exploded in the street, killing 71 people, many of them young people sitting outside cafés, enjoying the sunshine. An act of casual barbarity. The Bosnian Serbs have also taken to kidnapping UN soldiers and using them as hostages to deter UN raids against their weapons drops. The EU, the UN and NATO meet frantically to try to agree policy and to issue declarations, but it has been clear for a long time now (maybe it was obvious in ’92, when the war in Bosnia started) that international troop deployments are helpless to prevent the crimes against humanity which are being committed in Bosnia, overwhelmingly by the Serbs against the rest. I’ve come to the conclusion in the last few days that there should be full-scale military action in Bosnia — an international invasion, if you want to call it that — to halt the fighting immediately, to impose an international government, a sort of UN protectorate, for the time being, following by discussion about how Bosnia can be governed as a multi-ethnic, multi-religious country which is a whole country, where the different ethnic groups (who will each no doubt continue to be concentrated in particular areas of the country) can nonetheless participate in the democratic processes of a single civil state. The attempt to chop Bosnia up into ethnically defined cantons is absurd; it amounts to the outsider countries, with David Owen as their representative, doing with good intentions what the Serbs have been doing with evil intentions in their ethnic cleansing.

I’m halfway through Zlata’s Diary, written between 1991 and 1993 in Sarejevo, a simple and touching account by Zlata Filipovic of events leading up to and during the siege. She was aged 11 and 12 when she wrote it; it describes the horrors she and her parents experienced there. She frequently asks, in effect, ‘Why don’t those with the power do something?’ There is no satisfactory answer to that question at the moment.

Politically, the dreadful situation in Serbia continues, with the Serbs taking hundreds of UN soldiers hostage. It shows how helpless the UN is in the face of true ferocity. The Serbs kill small numbers of civilians almost daily as they shell towns. Western diplomacy is concentrating on trying to prise Milosevic of Serbia away from the Bosnian Serbs, in return for lifting sanctions against Serbia. Educated and expert opinion is completely split over whether UN troops, including the British contingent, should remain or withdraw. We haven’t yet got to the point where an international force like the UN can act decisively, with moral authority, when there is a flagrant and sustained violation of human rights, recognised by almost everybody in the world except the group committing it. There is still the feeling that this is a private matter which we shouldn’t interfere with, rather as there used to be in the days when the police wouldn’t intervene to stop husbands beating up their wives because it was ‘a matter between husband and wife’.

An intriguing piece of news which I caught while driving to the pub: Scott of the Scott Inquiry into arms sales to Iraq has felt the need to make a statement insisting on the independence and propriety of his inquiry, and saying that it wouldn’t be blown off course by pressure from any quarter; in other words, this executive is doing all it can to discredit an inquiry which it can see is likely to cause a scandal as big as anything during these recent corrupt years. At the other end of the scale of political significance, a Tory MP, Nicholas Scott (no relation to Scott of the Scott Inquiry), drove his car into another car which hit a third car, which ran over a little boy. Scott ran away, was later arrested, breathalysed, and detained overnight. A lot of the population, me included, believe that’s how you can expect most (not all) Tory MPs to behave. It’s the reality behind ‘back to basics’ and family values.

Politically, things are moving fast. Labour continues unceremoniously to drop old baggage: it wants to get rid of trade union sponsorship of MPs, it will reduce the union share of conference votes to 50% by next year’s conference, and there is talk today of it changing its policy on grant-maintained schools so that instead of taking them back into LEA control, it effectively turns all schools into grant-maintained schools, at which point presumably their name would change. I don’t know what I think about that, because then the responsibility which LEAs would have for local education would be so narrow in scope that it hardly seems worth having local political machinery to control it. Might as well have a national educational bureaucracy with local offices.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives lurch even deeper into division and scandal. The latest tonight: Jonathan Aitken, wealthy friend of gun runners, member of the Cabinet, was a director of a company which supplied Iran, indirectly through Singapore, with weapons during the Iran-Iraq war, despite a British embargo. There’s one of these major revelations almost every week at the moment; it is only their frequency which dulls the power to shock.

John Major dropped a bombshell on Thursday. He resigned a leader of the Tory party — though not as Prime Minister — in order to have a ‘back-me or sack-me’ confrontation with the malcontents on his own benches. It was a genuine surprise, a political coup de théatre, which gained him much praise in the media and in popular opinion. But no-one outside parliament knows what the outcome will be. He might: win handsomely, and lead the Tories into the next general election, which I think he will still lose; win meagrely in the first round, face a challenge from Michael Heseltine (whose last chance it is), win against Heseltine in the second round, unconvincingly, and limp to the next election, losing even more heavily; lose against Heseltine in the second round, in which case Heseltine would narrow the Labour lead (but I think Labour would still win the election). Those are the only options I can see. Portillo daren’t risk losing the ’97 general election as leader, and would rather the Tories lost then, so that he could stand as a political saviour after that loss, and contest the election in 2002 or whenever. So I don’t see a leadership challenge from Portillo in ’95. The good thing from our point of view is that Portillo is such an unattractive figure to the undecided middle ground of voters that he will have difficulty winning a general election, though he might win the party leadership. This is Blair’s great talent; he’s a party leader, with the confidence of most (by no means all) of the committed, who has an appeal beyond the committed into the shifting affections of those who decide elections in the UK.

Then, yesterday, Douglas Hurd announced his retirement as Foreign Secretary when the new leader’s re-shuffle comes in July, ‘so as not to entangle my future with that of the Prime Minister’. What did he mean? Was he nobly sacrificing himself, so that Major’s chances wouldn’t be hurt too much by his association with a known wet and toff? Anyhow, we’re in for a pantomime between now and 5 July, and it’s wonderful to see a Government which has inflicted so much damage on our country since 1979 in such a state of confusion and self-destructiveness. The whirligigs of time...

On Monday, John Redwood, a Thatcherite ideologue, resigned as Secretary of State for Wales and opened a leadership campaign against Major. His appeal is: never join a single European currency, provide immediate tax cuts ‘by cutting waste’, bring back hanging, stop the sell-off of the Royal Yacht, improve the state of the housing market by restoring tax breaks on mortgages. In other words, he thinks that clear leadership, however innumerate economically, together with immediate benefits for the kinds of people who voted Thatcher in ’79, ’83 and ’87, will restore the party’s fortunes. Cleverly mixed into the package are nods in the direction of small hospitals and schools, having more teachers, nurses and doctors and fewer administrators. It’s a ragbag of populist appeals, and couldn’t possibly constitute a programme for government. Some of the far-right Conservatives — the sort who would be in the National Front in France or the MSI in Italy — have clustered around Redwood. I think his bid will fail, despite the attraction of hanging and yachting to a certain kind of Conservative. So my three options in last Saturday’s entry are still in place, though I admit I didn’t envisage a member of the cabinet standing against Major in the first round. The irritating thing from our point of view is that you see much less of Labour on the television screen, and I think that does us harm, even though the Tories may well be doing themselves even more harm with this extraordinary display of internecine loathing.

Three solid days at the office. Lots of detailed business. Outside, the days have been the most perfect an English summer has to offer: very warm, but with a breeze all day, strengthening at evening, the sky a delicate blue with a little grey in it, and all the trees and flowers still looking fresh and vigorous after the winter rain and the cold weather in the first half of this month.

The contest between Major and Redwood continues. If you look into the minds and eyes of the Redwood camp, you see a fascist party in waiting. There isn’t any danger that a fascist party will come to power in the UK, but I can see how, if events fell out in a particular way and the Conservative party split, with the pro-Europeans and the wets forming one faction (and perhaps combining with the Liberals), the other faction would be free to reveal itself in its true colours, which are fascist. A British version of fascism, of course, but with all fascism’s essential characteristics: extreme nationalism, hatred of foreigners (Portillo’s speech of a few months ago about foreigners buying their A-levels), brandishing of the symbols of national glory (the Royal Yacht), and socially violent and repressive legislation (hanging, slashing of the welfare state). I still think Major will win on Tuesday, and things will be just the same as they were before he resigned as leader, except that Redwood will be one more prick outside the tent pissing in.

Politically, the main event of last week was John Major’s success in being re-elected leader of the Conservative party. It was the result we wanted. The serious danger to us was the election of Heseltine in a second round. Major won 66% of the vote, and has seen off that common-sense wisdom about Tory leaders being ‘fatally wounded’ if a substantial minority doesn’t give its support. In future, a win by the rules will be regarded as a win. Major then conducted a clever re-shuffle the next day, in which he gave his right wing nothing, and invented a special job for Heseltine as his deputy and ‘First Secretary of State’. It’s pretty hard to understand what Heseltine will do, and it’s an obvious move to try to benefit from Heseltine’s popularity by offering two for the price of one at the top. It won’t work. There’s lots of trouble up ahead in the autumn, notably the report of the Scott Inquiry into government duplicity over selling arms to Iraq while officially branding Saddam Hussein an evil dictator and a bully who should be stood up to.

The situation in Bosnia remains a deep source of shame and embarrassment to the powerful Western governments. The Serbs have now overrun all the UN ‘safe areas’ except one; so the pretence that the UN was making the areas safe from invasion by the Serbs has been shown to be false. The Serbs have committed countless vile acts against the population of Bosnia, far outnumbering the vile acts committed against them. Meanwhile, the Bosnian government is prevented from obtaining arms to defend itself properly and to have a chance of taking back the land it has lost. It seems that the UN and NATO can’t decide on the command structure for the troops they have in Bosnia. In a future period, when the concept of international responsibility to challenge genocide is more easily accepted, I hope we will never allow the equivalent of the Serbs to get away with what the Serbs have done in Bosnia. But we are now still constrained by the idea that because it’s a foreign country, it’s none of our business. And of course none of our vital interests are at stake, so we shrug. I don’t deny that the presence of international troops there has saved many lives and alleviated much suffering. But the limitations on their actions show the hypocritical halfway stage of international responsibility we’re at. Either Bosnia is full of savages, and they should be allowed to slaughter each other to their hearts’ content: or, when genocide is beyond doubt, an overwhelming international force should go in to prevent further atrocity, impose a peace, and sit there until a stable political solution can be negotiated.

The English summer will have surpassed itself, even if it stops now. Day has succeeded day in a brilliant progression of sun and heat, all day, every day. Each morning promises more of the same as I walk to the bus stop. By lunchtime, and throughout the afternoon, there is the serious Mediterranean-style heat which reminds me of July and August in Italy in the 80s. You can sit out all evening, and at night I lie naked, uncovered on the top of the bed, with the window wide open, and don’t wake up feeling chilly until dawn, if at all. There are humid days which make people ill-tempered and oppressed, but most of the days are of dry heat, with a little breeze occasionally, and they are perfect. It’s the best summer I can remember since 1975 and 1976: a privilege, a blessing, unlimited, pressed down and running over, and I salute it as such.

Last Monday, Helen went to John Lewis to look for one of those café-table parasols for us to take to France. They had the umbrella part, which she bought, but no base.

This morning Helen and I drove to Brixton, picked up her niece Evania, and I dropped the two of them at Waterloo, where they took the train to France. I then made the mistake of deciding that I would complete the purchase of the parasol which Helen had started last Monday, by looking for the base that she hadn’t been able to get. I toured London in the great heat, chasing after this absurd piece of leisure junk — a parasol base to fit the 36mm post which I had measured. After three hours, I thought I’d found what I wanted at Harrods. It was weighty. When I got it home, the post was too thick for the base. I must have measured it wrongly. Back to Harrods. I carried this great lump of concrete encased in white plastic back up to the second floor, together with the post this time so as to make no further mistake, and eventually, with the help of the entire staff of the garden furniture department, found a base with a larger hole, shop-soiled and therefore with a mean 10% discount, which fitted. Stumbled back to the car with base and post, resting the base on convenient flat surfaces whenever they presented themselves, with thoughts of ‘44-year-old heart-attack man collapses in heat carrying heavy weight’ running through my mind, but with that pig-headed determination which comes over me when I find myself engaged in a piece of stupid and unnecessary consumerism, wasting an exquisite summer Saturday: at least get what you went out for.

The Balkan war has developed significantly, with the powerful Croatian army retaking a section of territory called Krajina, which the Serbs had invaded. I’m relieved. The Bosnian Serbs have begun quarrelling amongst themselves, with their leader sacking his military commander and the commander refusing to be sacked. The Bosnian government is trying to retake Bihac, a little pocket of land in the west of the country: good. I’d like to see Croatia resuming most if not all of its former borders, Bosnia asserting its sovereignty by force if necessary, and Serbia retreating to borders close to where it was before the war started. Many lives will have been lost, much misery caused, much hatred stored up for the future perhaps; but at least Serbian expansionism and atrocities will not have been rewarded. I understand how the Serbs hate the Croats because of their puppet Nazi government during the Second World War, but that doesn’t excuse their actions since 1991.

Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb. At a ceremony in the city, the mayor of Hiroshima is going to apologise for Japanese actions during the war. He’s a hero.

There was something on the radio yesterday about Croatia, which I should have put in yesterday’s entry. The tourist trade on the coast of Croatia — on the Istrian peninsula, and on the islands — is doing fine. British tourists fly in and out on their package holidays and enjoy themselves and rub factor 15 sun block into each other and go to discos. The only complaint is that it’s a bit too hot, so wonderful is the summer Europe is having. Seven hours’ drive away — but not very far as the crow flies — the ancient hatreds are being exercised, and bodies litter the streets of Knin. It looks as if the Croats will retake the whole of Krajina, though with great difficulty. The Bosnian forces in Bihac have punched outwards through Krajina, cutting it in two. I’m interested to know what will happen now to the huge area of Bosnia reoccupied by the Serbs. And another thing (especially after what I’ve written recently about the arms embargo): why are all parties except the Bosnian government apparently able to bypass the embargo? I read today that the Croat attack is equipped with weapons bought from the old Warsaw Pact countries. No effective embargo there. The Bosnian Serb leadership looks as if it may be about to self-destruct through internal rivalry, as I wrote yesterday, but they seem able to get their hands on weapons. Only the Bosnian government is incapacitated by inadequate fire power. It seems quite hypocritical to insist on the official maintenance of an embargo when the party which has been least guilty of atrocities and which has greatest cause for complaint is the only party which is denied the means to defend itself and to reclaim land which it legitimately owns.

Tapas bar, Stan Getz on the tape machine, diary to write, poetry to read, espresso, brandy… ¿qué tal, hombre, qué tal? The answer is: not bad at all.

A satisfying, end-of-termish feel at work today. Paul and I finished the annual round of letters to production companies about next year’s commissions, and cleared out redundant tapes, paper and books. The three-week holiday is coming up.

Croatia has virtually finished re-taking the Krajina. Thousands of Serb refugees are travelling across Serb-held Bosnia, hoping to find a refuge in Serbia itself. Croatia is speaking in bellicose terms about re-taking eastern Slavonia, the area of rich farmland and oil wells west of the Danube. The Serbs seized it in 1991. There’s no moral reason why the Croats shouldn’t take it back. The Croat leadership is fiercely nationalist, and the scenes of marching soldiers on the news this evening — and the way the soldiers marched — reminded us of whose side they were on 50 years ago, but there’s no doubt that Serbia violated established and internationally recognised borders in 1991. The big question is: what will happen to Bosnia? Will the Croats help the Bosnian government to force the Serbs back to Serbia? Or will they do a deal with their great enemy, a kind of miniature Hitler-Stalin pact (not that that lasted) and dismember most of Bosnia?

I drove to Kerfontaine with Anne Seeley on the 12^th, arriving at the tunnel at six in the morning. The bilingual driver this time spoke estuary English and tunnel French. We reached Kerfontaine at eight in the evening. The three of us have had a week of heat, leisure and pleasure. Kerfontaine looks magnificent; Albert has laboured to impressive effect in the garden and the wood. We are in the midst of a luxurious, fully mature summer that strides into the second half of August with no sign of breaking. Tomatoes, cucumbers, strawberries, melons, onions, potatoes, carrots, beetroot, beans are all in ripe profusion, though I’m glad to say that the situation is more under control than in previous summers because we’ve halved the size of the vegetable garden: slightly smaller quantities, and more emphasis on vegetables that will keep. It used to be like the wonderful passage in one of Garrison Keillor’s pieces in Lake Woebegone Days, where he describes the season of glut, and tomatoes and courgettes take on a sinister character in the minds of the inhabitants of the town, threatening to break into houses and swaggering around the streets in mobs.

Today we drove to Nantes airport with Annie. She flew back to London and we continued down to the Charente, to Stephen Eyers’s house near Aubeterre.

Stephen’s house, a 300-year-old double-fronted stone farmhouse, is gracious and substantial, and in need of a lot of work. Later this afternoon he and I are going to discuss with a builder arrangements for putting in a bathroom and kitchen. This morning we strolled around Aubeterre, a pretty little town which looks more Italian than French. It’s on a hillside. The houses are in sandy brown stone under clay-tiled roofs. The place has presence and poise. I like to see small, cared-for walled gardens, full of flowers, fruit trees, lines of tomatoes: that sense of huddle and contiguity you get in these ancient places, as if every available square metre of space has been put to use. And I like the variation of levels: to admire the square while standing in it at one moment, and a few minutes later to look up at the back gardens of the shops bordering the square from a pathway below, their wooden verandahs covered with bright plants in hanging baskets.

This is our last night of the summer in Kerfontaine. It has been a magnificent, no-holds-barred, cup-runneth-over summer, as splendid a season as I can remember in my lifetime, as good as ’76, ’75 and my remote eight-year-old memory of ’59. Yesterday evening was entrancing as we drove up the lane in the direction of Lorient for a meal at Arnaud’s restaurant. A waxing, falling half moon stood over a stripped corn field, with a few crows circling, and the sun, red and full, was there too, further down the field and at about half the moon’s height. The relaxed countryside, dry and cool, fell away towards the Scorff and rose again on the other side of the river. Brittany is an exquisitely beautiful, bucolic part of France. There have been times when I have wondered whether we have played too safe in buying a house here, and thought perhaps that we should have gone for something more remote and truly la France profonde — the Auvergne or the Lot or the south-west — but this summer I have felt quite content to be here. Brittany is both beautiful and culturally and ethnically complex and interesting.

Yesterday, Helen and I came to Wootton for mum’s and my brother Mark’s birthdays. We had a good, jolly meal last night. Dad made me laugh a lot after dinner, telling us about the time he and our uncle Bill sailed a dinghy from Calais to Dover, in dense fog in September 1951. They were making way in a light wind, but unable to see anything, and alarmed by the heavy hootings of big ships not far away, when they passed Florence Chadwick, swimming in the opposite direction. Florence Chadwick’s minders, in a little boat behind her, asked dad and Bill whether they were all right for Calais. Dad and Bill were able to reassure them. It was the co-incidence, in all that sea and in a fog so thick you could hardly see beyond the tip of your finger, of passing so close to a cross-channel swimmer that you could talk to her minders for a moment, and, even more, of knowing immediately who she was. I’d never heard of her. ‘Florence Chadwick, oh yes, she was always crossing the channel at that time, well known for it.’ Made her sound like a ferry. Dad had wisely bought a compass in the Tottenham Court Road before going to Dover, crossing the channel on a real ferry, and finding Bill in Calais. He used it so skilfully in the fog that, after sailing all day, ‘We got to a point where the fog seemed thicker than ever, until I realised it was Dover harbour wall.’

Interesting development in Bosnia, with the Americans proudly announcing that a resolution of the conflict is near, on the basis of a 51%/49% confederal division of the country: the 49% being the Serb area. All parties agreed to this at a meeting in Geneva. However, the Bosnian government is now making dramatic territorial gains in the west of the country, and may soon be in a position to take Banya Luka, the Serb stronghold in the central north. NATO and the UN need to decide tonight whether to resume air strikes against the Serbs in the east, for not withdrawing enough weapons 20 kilometres from Sarajevo. The Serb military leadership is in some confusion, with their chief thug, Mladic, in hospital having kidney stones removed (how banality intervenes in these huge tragedies). If I were the Bosnian government I would want to keep the impetus to regain territory going as long and as far as I could. There is only one right answer for Bosnia, which is a unified, multi-ethnic state, as a man, about my age, sitting on a hospital bed without a right arm, said on the Channel 4 News.

In Bosnia, the tables have been turned completely, with the Muslims and the Croats continuing to retake huge chunks of territory rapidly, and the Serbs in confusion. There’s a dangerous moment coming, when the Bosnian government will rightly feel the desire to retake all the remaining territory held by the Serbs, risking an invasion by Serbia itself. The Americans continue dashing back and forth between the parties, claiming agreements and compromises, but nothing is sure.

We’re having a week’s holiday in the village of Monticello, above L’Ile Rousse, in the north-west of Corsica. The village has definition and coherence, the sense of something made and remade over centuries, so it all looks a piece even though it’s many pieces. The apartment is in a building at one end of the square. At the other end is the church; the square also has fountains, a bar/hotel/restaurant and a shop. Monticello is spectacularly situated, with a wonderful view down to L’Ile Rousse and the sea, and equally impressive views around and behind to the hills. It seems a prosperous little place, and I should think quite a number of the houses and flats are holiday homes, but there was no sense of out-of-season desolation here today. People came and went on their business, children climbed the hill to the school in a big chattering group at ten past eight. We were up early this morning because there was no water when we arrived yesterday, and Gilbert the plumber came first thing to see what the trouble was. By a piece of good luck, just as we were agreeing that the problem was probably with the stopcocks in the road (responsibility of the water company), the man from the water company (well known to the plumber, of course) drove by. The plumber flagged him down, and he investigated. It turned out that some builders who had recently been working in a neighbouring apartment, and who had needed to turn off the water supply there, not knowing which stopcock was for which flat, had simply turned off all four of a group in the road outside the house. So the man from the water company turned them all on again, and that was it. We had showers, and went to the shop and bought breakfast, which we ate on the terrace in the warm sunshine. Then Helen’s brother Adam and I walked up through the village, admiring every building and in particular the school with its high playground connected to the schoolroom by a little bridge, before coming out above the village at the cemetery. The cemetery was of the sort which makes you think, ‘Well, if I have to die, I wouldn’t mind ending up here,’ and I said as much aloud to the woman who, with her husband, was tending the place. She, anxious to be helpful, said, ‘Well, monsieur, that may be possible. You would need to register. Apply to the mairie.’ Then we scrambled up above the cemetery through the maquis to a high rock overlooking everything, and the scents for which Corsica is famous were suddenly all around us, every time we brushed against or trod on a bush.

This afternoon I swam in the Mediterranean from a deserted beach. Wonderfully invigorating, with waves. Two years ago I swam in the Mediterranean at this time of year. That was off the north coast of Cyprus, where the water was warmer but didn’t do anything. Today was perfect.

This apartment belongs to Frank and Polly Muir, and I’m writing this at Frank Muir’s writing desk. As you somehow might expect from the man’s public persona, the desk is a beautiful piece of antique furniture, with a leather top and a blotting sheet, and with two lamps casting the perfect amount of light on to the page.

Today was another day of clear autumn sunshine, and after breakfast we drove inland, into the hills, through villages called Belgodère, Palasca, Occhiatana, Ville-di-Paraso, Olmi-Cappella, Speloncato. The scenery is spectacular: jagged mountains rise suddenly out of green valleys, the hillsides are covered with wild herbs and flowering bushes, eagles circle overhead. The villages all look as villages in wild places should look. The buildings are vernacular and right for their place — they charm as well as serve. There is no sense of loss, as alas I feel so often in England about the damage inflicted by the buildings of the last 50 years. And there was no-one about! We found a romantic place for lunch, and ate outside, under sweet chestnut trees which dropped their fruit all around us. We consumed thick soupe Corse (bacon, potatoes, cabbage, basil), sirloin steak and chips or, in my case, wild boar and gratin de pommes de terre, with two bottles of the wonderful local red. The pièce de resistance came at the end of the meal. A bottle of grappa was brought, unrequested, to the table with the coffee, contained in a solid block of ice with only its neck sticking out, with various fruits and flowers trapped in the ice for decoration. We were advised to pour the grappa into our coffee cups once we had finished the coffee. Sensational. The block of ice sat there on the table amid the debris of the meal, losing its frosted exterior where my hands had held it, but still quite solid after half an hour in the admittedly gentle sunshine.

To try to deal with the food we had taken on, we walked straight up the hillside above the restaurant, and were immediately in terraced fields amid mature oaks widely spaced out, where cows grazed. The land rose, walled field after walled field, a sort of mystical parkland, until we broke out above the tree line into a meadow of wild thyme, and turned back and looked straight across the valley to the dramatic steep mountain ridge opposite. Then we descended to the car and took a tiny road up over the mountains which we had circumnavigated earlier in the day, and crossed a high pass which gave us a vertiginous view back to L’Ile Rousse and the coast. We drove down and home through the enchanted countryside in the dusk, saying nothing.

Had a good long swim in the sea this morning, before lunching on mussels and chips in L'Ile Rousse. Then we drove to Lumio, a village most of the way towards Calvi, with a wonderful view over the bay of Calvi. We walked around, admiring the genius of building, little stepped streets winding under tiny pedestrian bridges joining one house to another, brilliant flowering plants hanging down walls, and on one slope, facing south-west over the bay, orange and lemon trees with good crops of nearly ripe fruit. Back to Monticello about five and, for the first time this week, I yielded to the sweet temptation of a siesta, waking in the dark when the church clock struck seven.

Today is our last day in Monticello. This morning I walked over the back of the hill and climbed up a ridge until I had a place with a full-scale view of the first inland valley. It was as hot as it has been all week. A pair of eagles circled overhead, calling to each other. A little train, its rattle announcing its arrival across great distances and at a volume out of all proportion to the train’s size (one coach), made its circuitous way along the remarkable single-track railway which goes to places in the mountains you wouldn’t think railways could get to. Then I walked back to Monticello, where a funeral had taken place and the mourners stood about in groups, dressed with a minimum of formality (the occasional black jacket and tie, but mostly just their best jeans and smart casual shirts), while the bell rang continually. I drove down to our beach to meet the others, who had walked down earlier, and took my last swim in the sea for 1995. A south-westerly on-shore wind brought waves big enough to make the swim energetic, and I went a long way out and enjoyed the sun on the water and sight of the sand and the rocks far below me. Then we came back and ate a cold lunch on the terrace, and did the housework. Now the weather is changing — perhaps a significant seasonal change, with low clouds drifting over from the south, and no horizon out at sea. Plane tomorrow at 11.30.

I’ve come to my parents’ house for the day.

I’m changing to a different shape and size of notebook for a bad reason. On the afternoon of Monday 2 September, having come back from our Brittany holiday the previous Friday, I took the 5.15pm Eurostar from Waterloo to Paris, so that I could watch the filming of part of a new French series the following day. For most of the journey, I just looked out of the window, and when we emerged from the tunnel and accelerated to 300 kilometres per hour, I was content to let the villages and fields and roads fly by as we hurtled across the northern French plain. During the long section when the line runs beside the autoroute, I enjoyed overtaking even the fastest cars at double their speed. About half an hour before we arrived at the Gare du Nord, I picked up my notebook and wrote a few pages about the last days of the holiday and why I was returning to France so soon. When we arrived in Paris, bang on time, I gathered up my belongings — case, newspapers, novel, pens, passport, ticket, jacket. I put the newspapers, novel, pens, passport and tickets in the case. I donned the jacket and left the train. I must have left the notebook on the seat. I took a taxi to the hotel where I always stay in Paris, on the Boulevard Berthier in the 17^th. They gave me an attic room, perfectly comfortable, with a large bathroom containing a writing table and with a view of the Eiffel Tower. I had a bath, thinking about where I would go for dinner, and opened the case for a clean shirt, socks, underwear. I noticed that the notebook wasn’t there.

I checked the room carefully, trying to restrain panic. I ran down eight flights of stairs and along to the taxi rank. Back to the Gare du Nord. The driver chose a route which took us ten minutes longer than the first journey had taken. Red lights all the way. At the station, the staff on the barrier said that the train had just left to go to the sidings to be cleaned. They showed me up to an office in the rafters of the building. Sympathetic staff there telephoned the sidings, and described a black notebook containing écritures anglaises in coach 2 seat 55. The cleaners, they told me, were mainly illiterate immigrants, and there was a danger one of them would throw the notebook away with the discarded newspapers. They suggested I telephone the next day.

I took my third taxi of the evening back to the hotel. I walked up to the room and lay on the bed, in despair. My appetite had gone. After an hour, I switched the light off.

The notebook had been new at the beginning of last November. It was three quarters full, and contained all my off-duty writing (diary entries and poetry) since getting back from Corsica at the end of last October. I remember the first entry in it, written cheerfully in a bar in Dublin, discussing among other things the pleasure of beginning to write in a new book, joking about the brand: ‘The Alwych notebook, with its proudly announced “all-weather cover”, is designed for the intrepid observer of life who needs to be able to record an aperçu in a cloudburst.’ Since then, I had taken the book to Rio de Janeiro in March and written about that amazing place. It had come with me on five trips to France and on numerous business jaunts around Britain and Ireland. I had tried to sort out what I had thought about political events domestic and foreign. I had recorded fair days and foul. I had worked on about nine poems, some new, most old and in need of improvement. During the three-week summer holiday in France I had spent whole days with it at the writing table in the bedroom. It was a companion, and only the second notebook I had had since I commenced writing a diary on New Year’s Eve 1994. There was a hole where it had been, and my own carelessness was responsible for the loss.

I telephoned twice the next day. Nothing. The work which had brought me to Paris was to watch the recording of some French/English sketches starring two very good comedians, Antoine de Caunes and Eddie Izzard. I wasn’t in the mood to go, but I went anyway, and found myself laughing even though I was miserable. At the Gare du Nord that evening, I left my name and address with the same office staff from the night before, who were full of kindness. I sat down on the concourse, with an hour to wait before the London train departed, and opened this notebook, which I was carrying for business notes, and began to write out the poems which had been in the lost notebook. They were all there in the memory, and by the time I was halfway back to London they were on paper again. Then I worked on the last poem, which I had left unfinished in Brittany, until we reached Waterloo.

From now on, I’m going to put off-duty writing into these big Black n’ Red notebooks, which will, I hope, be harder to lose because clumsier to carry round. Another advantage is that you can write a longer line in a freer hand with less sense of cramp. The left-hand page early on in the Alwych is particularly awkward.

To say that the loss of the notebook is one of the worst things that has happened to me is to admit that nothing very bad has ever happened to me. But the experience was, briefly, a minor bereavement, however absurd that may sound. It was the physical separation and the sense of waste, the idea of my book being tossed into a plastic bag with beer cans and sandwich packaging and that day’s newspapers, it was that which hurt, and the thought that I had abandoned the physical object which above all I valued.

One co-incidence: in the last entry in the lost notebook I wrote about Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a novel I had read during the summer holiday which moved me so much that I cried. During my second telephone call to the Gare du Nord from the television studio, the man in the office raised my hopes momentarily by saying yes, there was a book there written in English, and then dashed them when he brought the book to the phone. It had a blue cover, he said, and was a printed novel: Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

Current political news. Bill Clinton will win the US presidential election at a walk. Thank goodness. It’s remarkable that the Republican Party managed to put up such a catastrophic candidate. Boris Yeltsin, gravely ill, has sacked Alexander Lebed, the egomaniac security chief and former rival he bought off after the first round of the presidential elections in June. Lebed is too big for his boots. He says he will challenge all comers for the presidency next time round. He might win. I don’t think he’ll stage a coup in the meantime. If he does win the presidency, we’ll see whether he is another tsar or a Western-influenced pragmatic politician. I suspect the latter. It’s more difficult for big countries to ignore world opinion these days, although China and Indonesia are two cases where scandalous human rights abuses are winked at by the Western democracies because of the huge business we’re doing with them. Anyway, Russia is a terrifyingly unstable country: part Mafia fiefdom, part gigantic Harvard Business School economic experiment, part sullen no-longer-imperial no-longer-super power, with a restless army which the state can’t afford to pay.

Last week was the memorial service for the victims of the tragedy at Dunblane, and this week Lord Cullen published his recommendations on gun control, school security and pooling information on dangerous people who want to work with children. The Government’s proposals, announced immediately after the Cullen Report was published, go further even than Cullen’s radical recommendations. All handguns will be banned, except .22 pistols, which must be kept in secure armouries in gun clubs. Labour wants to go further, and ban handguns outright. The Government’s position is startling for a party so deeply associated with shooting, and shows how powerful public opinion, once aroused and (nearly) united, can be when exerted a few months before an election.

Karen Brown, my friend and boss at Channel 4, lost her mother a fortnight ago, so she was away from work for a week. I went to see her last Wednesday to say I was sorry for her trouble. She told me that the death had been expected and prepared for, that the family had been there when it happened, and that the funeral, in a simple Low Church in Scotland, had been what it should have been. She said that her mother had been a keen horsewoman, but hadn’t been able to ride for months. Her horse had spent the year grazing in a field, and had always stayed away from the house. As Karen’s mother was dying, the horse for the first time came right up to the house, under the bedroom window, and offered a great snort, so loud that Karen asked her mother if she had heard it. Her mother said yes, she had, and then the horse snorted again, just as loud, so there was no doubt that the mother heard it. Then the horse went away back to the far end of the field, where it had stayed for months, and a couple of hours later Karen’s mother died.

I’m getting tired of friends telling me that there’s no difference between the policies of the Conservative and Labour parties, now that (as they put it) New Labour is so right-wing. So I’m going to list, for my own satisfaction and so that I can win the argument next time it comes up, the Labour policies for government which the Conservatives would never implement.

1. Abolition of hereditary peers’ right to sit in the House of Lords
2. Introduction of a Freedom of Information Act
3. Incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law
4. Introduction of a minimum wage
5. Participation in the social chapter of the Maastricht Treaty
6. Devolution of power to Scotland and Wales
7. Allowing local authorities to spend capital receipts from sale of council houses on buying or building more council houses
8. Reducing the size of infant classes
9. Increasing nursery provision while abolishing the current voucher system
10. Maintaining the comprehensive principle, however flawed in practice, for secondary education, rather than moving further towards selection
11. Getting rid of the internal market in the NHS
12. Taxing the privatised utilities, over and above the standard level of corporation tax, on the enormous profits they’ve made since privatisation
13. Halting the privatisation programme (including the Tory plan to privatise C4) (and maybe reversing it here and there?)
14. Active participation in the EU, with a predisposition towards having a single currency if convergence criteria are met
15. Abolition of most of the quangos which have taken over many of the functions of local government; reviving local government.

That’s 15. I’d hoped I could get to 20. There are other areas, such as laws on refugees, industrial investment, regional policy, public transport, where I could hardly imagine Labour being as disastrous as the Tories have been, but where I can’t name particular policies. I might add to this list between now and the election.

It is a wild night. ‘Gusty emotions on wet roads on autumn nights’ — Wallace Stevens. I’ve driven to the pub. The wind is strong enough to pull at the steering wheel on the short trip down St Pancras Way, along Crowndale Road, up Camden High Street and left into Delancey Street, and great heaps of plane leaves cover the gutters and pavements. The pub is pleasantly quiet because of the weather.

World news is grim at the moment. A fearful catastrophe threatens in central Africa, where eastern Zaire is now touched by the tribal conflicts which brought genocide to Rwanda two years ago and have damaged Burundi since. In Afghanistan, a fundamentalist Islamic group, the Taliban, controls Kabul and is oppressing the women, mediaeval style. There are also clashes in Pakistan between the government and Muslim fundamentalists. Same trouble in Algeria. A dreadful political deadlock between the Israeli government and the Palestinians has brought many unnecessary deaths since Likud won the elections in the summer.

Here, debate and legislation about banning handguns has been followed by similar debate about banning knives being sold as weapons. The news tells us that some schools are out of control. All the political parties have discovered religion; all are publicly concerned about a decline in morality, drawing attention to specific atrocities such as that of the 15-year-old schoolgirl who was kidnapped in Birmingham and raped by three Asian men. The Government’s legislative programme between now and the election is more concerned to try to identify differences between it and Labour, for example over minimum jail sentences for specified crimes, than to legislate where legislation is needed, for example over controlling paedophiles (which Labour would of course support). It’s engaged in end-of-term, exhausted, desperate throws of the dice which even it suspects are too late. Its only real hope lies in the improving state of the economy, which will give Kenneth Clarke the opportunity to knock another penny off income tax on 26 November. Meanwhile, the state totters.

Heavy but satisfactory office day. Nothing much to report. Today the government published an education bill proposing more selection in secondary schools. Its advisory body on the curriculum published proposals designed to improve the teaching of morality in schools. Yesterday the Secretary of State for Education said on the Today programme that she was in favour of corporal punishment in schools. She had forgotten that this is now against the law. Within an hour, the prime minister phoned her to say she was out of line, and issued a statement implicitly rebuking her. By the evening, the Secretary of State was reduced to saying that there was a difference of personal view between her and the PM, but that this would not affect government policy.

A government whose policies have done more to destroy social cohesion and individuals’ sense of mutual social responsibility than any in my lifetime is trying at the eleventh hour to find tokens of morality to distract the public’s attention from its destructiveness.

Last week was boring but generally cheerful at work. Friday was an exquisite bright day in London. Paul and I went to lunch with Norman Burrows, whose office is in the South Lambeth Road. Norman always supplies industrial quantities of delicious smoked salmon and a very good white wine, and we walked back across Vauxhall Bridge in high good humour, Paul pointing out the great bronze statues on the outside of the bridge, four on either side, which I’d never noticed before. They looked like muses of the arts and one of them held on her palm a beautiful and sexy miniature of a female nude — a sculpture held by a sculpture. So many times I have walked or driven over that bridge, unaware of the beauties to be beheld by leaning over the parapet. Helen’s brother Adam, who teaches sailing on the river just by there, knew the statues well when I spoke to him about them in the evening.

An article about Adam appeared in the travel section of The Sunday Times a few weeks ago, written by a man whom he had taught to drive a powerboat. It was funny, and its highlight was the description of an emergency stop which Adam was teaching his pupil to do. The pupil’s first attempt was so sudden, complete and effective that Adam was projected out of the boat and into the water. For a moment, the pupil, who was looking away from Adam when he performed the manoeuvre, had no idea where his teacher had disappeared to. Then he had to rescue him, using procedures that Adam had taught him only a few minutes earlier.

After admiring the statues, Paul and I spent half an hour in The Tate Gallery. We intended to look at only two paintings, one each. Mine was Samuel Palmer’s Coming from Evening Church. His was Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Teller’s Masterstroke. Both paintings, viewed close up and on impulse, are works of awesome genius, as are one or two other things we were distracted by, like Epstein’s statue of Jacob wrestling with the angel, and we walked out of the gallery and back to the office in a state of exhilaration.

This week about 350 people perished when two aeroplanes collided in the air near Delhi. The situation in Zaire and Rwanda continues perilous, with thousands of people dying of hunger and disease or at the hands of murderous armed gangs. But an unexpected event occurred on Friday when the Hutu militia, who had been responsible for the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and who were holding other, non-extremist Hutus hostage in the refugee camps in eastern Zaire, were defeated by rebels from the Zairean army, and fled. The Hutu hostages were able to go home, which they have since been doing in their hundreds of thousands. So the immense catastrophe which was feared may be avoided.

I’m in the pub early on Saturday evening, surrounded by young people. This place used to be a quiet extension sitting room for old guys like me who like peace. It is now a style venue. There were even bouncers on the door the other night (one male, one female, dress identical [black fatigues and an earring]).

Labour has won two important rounds in the pre-election jousting. Last weekend, they announced that they would have a referendum on the single currency, if in government they wanted to recommend it to the public. This put the Tories on the defensive, because it’s now not easy for them to distinguish themselves from Labour on the issue, except in the respect that Labour is more positive in principle about the single currency. Major is getting himself into deep difficulties by denying the House of Commons the right to debate the single currency, his own right wing having ambushed a committee where some technical Euro-papers about monetary union were being considered, an act which has raised the level of the argument about the single currency to a stand-off between the executive and the legislature. Labour is delighted, of course, having just got its own policy on the single currency clarified. Secondly, Labour now has a formidable propaganda and media-relations machine in high gear in Millbank Tower, which was able largely to neutralise a preposterous set of Tory claims that Labour was about to spend £30 billion as soon as it got into power. There’s a cold-eyed cunning about Labour which I whole-heartedly admire, because I’ve had enough of us being the good guys who lose.

The great Gaelic poet Sorley Maclean has died. Reading the obituary reminded me of that focused pride in language and community which I always encounter in Scotland, Ireland and Wales when I go there, and which doesn’t exist in the same way in England, because the English have been the uneasy victors in the struggles which have racked these islands over centuries. And because there are more of us English, getting the focus is more difficult.

I’ve had a short day in Dublin. Came over this morning to look at five little programmes about animals, for infants, each featuring an animated story about an animal (wren, bull, spider, cat, worm [as in the laidly worm]) and scientific film about the animal in its habitat. All very good.

Tuesday was budget day. Kenneth Clarke knocked a penny off income tax as from next April, and then disguised the depth of the Government’s debt difficulties with a confusing and contradictory mixture of rises and cuts. The most unfair part of it was the announcement of extra expenditure on education, most of which will have to be raised by local councils (nearly all Labour controlled) through the council tax. Blair and Brown have been very good in response, banging home the message that the Tories have eroded our public services and industrial base, and have claimed to be reducing taxation so as to set enterprise free, while in fact putting taxes up both as a proportion of GDP and as a proportion of most individuals’ incomes. I like to see us not being outwitted in the propaganda war on tax like we were last time.

Yesterday evening an Irishman called Ned Price came and repaired some plumbing in our kitchen. I’ve known him since 1975, when he worked on my uncle’s house in Albert Street, where I lived then. I told him I was coming to Dublin today. He said he has a house at Bray, south of the city. He had recently been there, attending to the funeral of his aunt. ‘Did she live over there?’ I asked. ‘No, no, she lived in Camden Town.’ He then explained that a lot of London-based Irish people like to be buried in Ireland, partly for sentimental reasons and partly because the Catholic Church until quite recently disapproved of cremation, which is now the only means of disposal of bodies you can easily arrange in London. ‘You know, John,’ he said, ‘it costs a thousand pounds to travel over there if you’re dead. You can go for £59 Ryanair if you’re living. The body doesn’t even take up a seat. They stow it in the hold with the baggage.’ He did a brilliant job and asked for £10. The part must have cost him more than that. I gave him £20, and brought him and his wife a drink in the Spread Eagle later on.

I must write down a story which David James told me the other week, before I forget it. A middle-aged, childless, married couple of limited imagination, who live in the village in Herefordshire where his parents live, went to Blackpool for a second honeymoon. This event caused comment in the village, because the couple had never been anywhere on holiday. They had little money. No-one had any memory of their first honeymoon. People had privately speculated on their sex life, and decided it was likely to be uneventful or even non-existent. Going to Blackpool for a second honeymoon was a brave if embarrassingly kitsch thing to do. It seemed they were making a dash for something. A few days after their departure, but more than a week before they were expected back, they returned to the village in a taxi from Hereford station, she with a broken leg in plaster from ankle to thigh. Somehow (and how these details emerged I don’t know) the following story got about. They had taken their reserved room in Blackpool. It was modestly comfortable, with a double bed but no bathroom. The two bathrooms which the residents shared were down the corridor. On their first evening there, before dinner, the husband went to take a bath. A few minutes later, the wife followed him in her dressing gown, thinking perhaps that they might take the bath together. She opened the bathroom door, and saw the naked man she took to be her husband leaning over the bath testing the temperature of the water with his hand. She went quietly up to him, slipped her hand between his legs, bounced his testicles on her fingers and was just playfully saying ‘Jingle bells, jingle bells,’ when he rapidly turned round, and was not her husband. The stranger’s expression of astonishment and indignation met hers of astonishment and shame, and she ran out of the bathroom, along the corridor and down the stairs, in the irrational belief that he was following her. While descending the stairs at too great a speed, she lost her footing, fell, and broke her leg. Her husband, who was in the bath in the bathroom next door to that where the awful encounter had occurred, had to get out in response to the boarding-house manager’s knock and be told that his wife had suffered an accident. He quickly dried himself and dressed, by which time the ambulance had arrived to take her and him to the hospital. He slept alone in the boarding house for two or three nights while she remained in the hospital. When she was able to travel, they went straight from the hospital to Blackpool station, he having checked out of the boarding house first, to spare her the embarrassment of returning there.

In Basel, staying at the Hilton Hotel, writing this at a comfortable desk in my room on the seventh floor, and looking straight out of the window over the city. The afternoon is heavily overcast, without wind, and the temperature about zero. I arrived this morning from London for an education conference of the European Broadcasting Union. These events are almost completely valueless in helping me to do my job better, but they do offer the enjoyable opportunity to visit foreign cities at my employer’s expense. Sometimes, we do a co-production deal which means we can make programmes which we wouldn’t have been able to afford by ourselves.

This week has been gloriously catastrophic for the government. It may come to be regarded as the week when the Conservatives irredeemably lost their chance of winning the next election. On Monday The Daily Telegraph reported that the Prime Minister was about to rule out joining a single European currency during the lifetime of the next parliament. The Chancellor, who was in Brussels that day negotiating to keep the government’s current wait-and-see policy in place, is reported to have been surprised and enraged to hear this. Secret comings and goings between Major, Clarke and Heseltine culminated in a crisp and unambiguous answer by Major to Tony Blair’s question the next day: yes, the current wait-and-see policy is still definitely in place. Eurosceptics’ turn to be enraged. It seems that Mawhinney, the party chairman, and some of his young men at Conservative Central Office had been briefing journalists in such a way as to promote the rule-it-out line, and to destabilise Clarke. None of Mawhinney’s business, of course. Clarke went to lunch with a journalist on Wednesday, and two bottles of red wine were drunk. Clarke told the journalist he had told Mawhinney to tell his kids to get their scooters off his lawn. Off the record or not, this remark got into the public domain the next day. Much laughter all round for the Europhiles, the media and us. Thursday night’s meeting of the 1922 Committee saw a spectacular row between the two wings of backbenchers.

Meanwhile, scrutiny of Clarke’s budget had turned up the startling fact that the government was proposing to cut the pensions of ex-servicemen, especially those who are going deaf. A letter from Peter Lilley, the normally very dry Secretary of State for Social Services, to William Waldegrave, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, was leaked. It said, ‘This is going to look terribly bad. Can’t we stop it? How am I supposed to present this?’ No answer from Waldegrave. Tony Blair had a brilliant outing at Question Time on Thursday, pummelling Major to the point where the PM was reduced to incoherent and shrill abuse of his attacker. Deep gloom on the benches behind Major. ‘What a policy for the patriotic party to be offering its old soldiers and their widows,’ the knights of the shires were thinking. Then, yesterday, one of the knights of the shires, or rather of a bit of Middlesex which was long ago overrun by semi-detached houses, flipped. He had enough of the Department of Health’s prevarications and broken promises about whether or not they were going to close the casualty department of Edgware Hospital. They are. So he said he wouldn’t consider himself subject to the whip, though he didn’t formally resign the whip because that would have meant he couldn’t stand as a Tory MP at the next election. He is now officially counted with the opposition, so Major heads a minority government. Next week, Labour will win the Barnsley by-election. There needs to be a by-election in a Tory seat by February or March. The budget has not done the Tories any good in the polls — rather the reverse. David Willetts, the Postmaster General and party brainbox, may have to resign if a Select Committee decides that, when he was a whip, he tried improperly to influence a previous Select Committee on MPs’ behaviour when it was debating what should be done about Neil Hamilton’s habit of accepting money to ask questions in parliament, and enjoying the lavish hospitality at the Paris Ritz of a rich man with an axe to grind that he wanted grinding at Westminster. (Hamilton was a trade minister when he resigned.)

All in all, it’s a profoundly satisfying spectacle. (But steady on the moralising, here in the Basel Hilton.)

A woman from French Swiss TV told me the French word for what we in British television call a rough-cut. They call it un ours, a bear. Wonderful.

Been Euro-debating for two days. I haven’t seen the sun since last Friday. The grey cloud has stayed put.

Basel has the best public transport system of any European city I know. There are so many trams, seemingly going in all directions all the time, that the private traffic is always light. And the system works on honesty. We were given a four-day pass, so we can hop on and off at will, but no-one ever seems to check. I remarked as much to Zofia, an immense Polish woman who has worked for Polish TV for 34 years, as we were travelling downtown to eat last night. She said it wouldn’t work in Warsaw. ‘When I was a child in the war, there was no point in being honest to the Germans. Later, there was no point in being honest to the Communists. We’ve got out of the habit.’ ‘Is there any point in being honest to the current government?’ I asked. ‘Perhaps. It’s too early to say.’

Came back from Basel yesterday, and went to Belfast today.

How do you sustain any sense of the mystery of life when you live on an estate of semi-detached houses in the crook of the M4 and M25, surrounded by light industrial workshops? As I fly over that place, I’m looking at hutches.

Christmas morning at my parents’ house. A bright, cold day. The weather has been shining and frozen hard since Saturday. I enjoy the pleasant leisure of this morning every year: get up about 10, have a bath, do some light food preparation (on this occasion, cleaning the sprouts) while mum and dad are in church. The turkey is gurgling in the oven. Last night my sister Mary made two kinds of stuffing for it, and I made brandy butter for the Christmas pudding.

Two days ago I was standing at the flower stall on the corner of Parkway and Camden High Street, buying some yellow tulips. A man whom I’ve known by sight for 20 years greeted me cheerily. ‘Do you get in there much these days?’ he asked (meaning The Spread Eagle). ‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘but I’ve been away a lot recently.’ Then we talked and laughed about how the pub has become a noisy meeting place for the young, whereas — as I wrote a few days ago — it used to be an extension sitting room for the middle-aged. He: ‘I looked around the other night, there was about a hundred people in there, and I thought, I’m the oldest person in here.’ I: ‘I was going in the other day, early on Saturday evening, and these two bouncers, one male, one female, looked me up and down. They must have thought, old geyser wants to come in and read The Guardian. Won’t give us any trouble.’ We had a good laugh. Standing there in the sharp winter night with our coats and hats on, I thought how satisfactory it is that I could have that conversation with a man whose name I didn’t even know, because we both qualify as old Camden Town hands who recognise each other.

We arrived at Kerfontaine this morning. Have just been for a marvellous walk round the place, on a bright, still, frozen-hard afternoon. The ground underfoot crackles with frost. The piles of dead leaves which Albert has heaped up here and there have the solidity of stone. Kerfontaine looks terrific: beautifully cared for, ordered yet constantly surprising. As he said he would in the summer, Albert has cut down several of the unproductive trees, which year after year yielded half a dozen wrinkly and unappetising apples, and replaced them with saplings of old French varieties he has been raising in the potager. He has continued his task, now several years old, of clearing the dead stumps of trees blown down in the ’87 hurricane. He explodes the stumps with home-made gunpowder concocted of sugar and fertiliser. The work is nearly finished, and as you gaze across the wood you see how handsome his management has made it. The low sun dazzled us as we looked from the top of the wood down to the stream. On the clump of rocks in the far corner of the wood there were crops of icicles — the spring, now frozen, which usually flows out of cracks in the rocks — each making its magic, haphazard shape.

Today was dazzling, freezing cold. We went to lunch by the sea at Guidel-Plages. Fish, a bottle of Quincy, cheese, half a bottle of Bordeaux, then (in my case) an old Armagnac with the coffee, and the sun blazing in over the estuary. Afterwards we walked by the sea. The puddles of sea water on the rocks had frozen. No wind. Minimal waves. The sand gripped our boots in the below-zero cold while the red sun dipped below the horizon out to sea. Then we drove home in the twilight and made a fire and read. I’m reading Alec Guinness’s diary My Name Escapes Me, which Helen gave me as one of my Christmas presents and which I also gave to Stephen Eyers for his. I shall finish it because it’s entertaining, but Sir Alec turns out to be a crotchety right-wing Catholic, and not the older version of his good friend Alan Bennett which I hoped he would be. Alec, you shouldn’t mope when you’re old, about failing eyesight and hearing and needing to pee often, not and get paid royalties for it, at any rate.

Because of my bereavement as referred to in the entry of 15 September, I have no record of the first eight months of this year, so I’m going to try to summarise those months over the next few days. I can deal quickly with January and February, because I can’t remember anything about them apart from my very enjoyable trip to France in mid-February with Stephen Eyers. We rented a van and took stuff down from our London houses to our French houses: a triangular trip. When we drove off the overnight boat at Ouistrahem, there was thick snow. We were two hours getting from Ouistrahem into Caen and out the other side. The road signs were all covered with snow. We chanced our arm beyond Caen and took a small road which seemed to be pointing south, all the main roads being clogged with traffic, and it worked. We drove slowly but unhindered between beautiful wind-blown sculptures of snow on the hedges. About 10 kilometres south of Caen the snow thinned, and thereafter we drove at normal speed all the way down to the Charente. We spent two nights staying with a neighbour of Stephen’s while we bought building materials for Stephen’s house. Then we drove up here, stopping at Jarnac to see Mitterrand’s grave. Whatever manoeuvres, compromises and even corruption Mitterrand was involved in during his political career, he remains a hero of mine because he was a statesman who believed firmly in the state, national and local, and in our responsibilities to each other in the communities in which we live and are active. He was the opposite of Mrs Thatcher in that respect; she only believed in our right as individuals to become wealthier. Also Mitterrand once very clearly said, in response to the recent rise of racism in France, that the French must respect the diversity of people who had the right to call themselves French, and must love the children of immigrants as they loved their own. He said this a few years after Thatcher had said how she could understand the fears of the British people at being swamped by an alien tide. His grave in the family vault is simple: his name and his dates.

The main event in March was my trip to Rio de Janeiro. I was there for a week, helping the Ministry of Education to develop their schools television service. The city overwhelmed me with its beauty and its grotesque social divisions. My hotel was on Copacabana Beach, and on the Friday night, late, I strolled the length of the beach, entranced by the groups of young people at drinks kiosks sambaing gently and elegantly to music from radios, or energetically playing volleyball on the sand. I rapidly learned to enjoy a drink called caipirinha, made with cachaça, lemons, crushed ice and sugar. On the Saturday lunchtime I was taken to a posh hotel on Ipanema Beach and given a wonderful lunch called feijoida, which means beans, but which is more than that: an enormous buffet of many stewed meats in sauces, most spicy, with bean stews, relishes and rice. You help yourself. I drank several caipirinhas with it and looked through the window at the world-famous beach, full of nearly nude people enjoying their weekend. A samba band played for us. Later that afternoon one of my hosts, Lia, the Latin American women’s bridge champion, took me up the Corcovado mountain to see the great statue of Christ the Redeemer. Magnificent. I had previously thought of it as gigantic and nothing more, but it’s a piece of pure modernism, with clean and noble lines. The view over the city is spectacular. You see why Rio is one of the world’s great ports, with the narrow neck into the harbour and a huge expanse of calm inland water. The Sugar Loaf mountain stands at the south end of the harbour entrance, and a couple of days later I went up that too. The Sugar Loaf is just one of the mountains and hills, still partly covered with tropical rain forest, in the midst of the city.

On the Sunday, another of my hosts, Sueli, took me out of town and down the coast to lunch at a quiet fishing village. We sat by the water, had delicious fresh spiced fish with cold beers, and watched the many fishing boats riding at anchor on the rest day, while little egrets sat on them or dived for food. It was the sort of spot you don’t get anywhere in western Europe now, because it still had complete authenticity as a working village, and was simply pretty rather than prettified. I knew I was somewhere special and of itself.

They made me work pretty hard in return for these delights. I thought I was going to be doing business around a table with about a dozen people. When I got there I found that about a hundred people had been invited to a four-day conference in a small theatre, and that I was to lecture to them non-stop. I sat up late every night in the hotel room in my underpants, night temperature 26 degrees, scribbling speeches. I didn’t have enough words of my own to fill so many hours, so on two or three occasions I made the conference discuss in small groups some ideas I gave them. Standard stuff for me, but they thought it was revolutionary. ‘Where did you get this method from?’ they asked. I searched back among the many influences of 20 years ago, and named one: ‘Paulo Freire’. Of course Paulo Freire is one of their national heroes, and has recently been minister of education in São Paulo. But none of them knew anything about these teaching methods.

On the last night I essayed one of Rio’s night clubs, hoping to see some stylish nudity. I chose something too much on the main tourist circuit, because it was jolly rather than sexy. There were some very beautiful brown girls, with shapely breasts and loins and long legs, but they kept their breasts and loins firmly covered with diamante bikinis, and their legs enclosed in fine but visible nylon tights. Afterwards I took a taxi back to the hotel. The driver drove the length of Ipanema and Copacabana Beaches ignoring dozens of red lights along the way.

On the final day, to my great relief, my hosts decided that work could stop at lunchtime. So I just did one session (transmissional rather than Paulo Freire method — showing a selection of programmes I’d brought from London) and was then given a delicious farewell meal before being taken to the airport by Claudio, my driver. The next morning I was at Channel 4.

Rio represents the choice that so many great cities and countries in the poorer world face. Either they will slowly and painfully pursue the social democratic path, putting in place education and health systems, improving housing, roads and sewers, trying to enforce fair taxation, investing in industry and farming; or they will be overwhelmed by the incoherent but legitimate rage of the millions crammed into the favelas or sleeping on mats under road bridges, their children walking between the lines of clogged traffic all day, selling cigarettes, lighters, oranges, nuts, anything; by the rage of these people at the vast gap between them and those sitting with me in the restaurants and bars of Copacabana and Ipanema. In this second case, military power would once again replace the elected government, and the future would be dreadful. You realise in Rio what a side-show rich Europe is likely to be in the 21st century. The epoch-making decisions will concern Latin America, Africa, Asia, and they will be decisions about reduction of inequalities, control of population, and care of the environment.

Happy New Year! Today and yesterday have been freezing cold bright days, frost permanently in the grass and hedges. The icicles are solid on the rocks in the corner of the wood. The stream runs energetically enough, but there are globules of ice attached to rocks where the water makes a detour through a narrow mouth by the little island. Where brambles hang in the stream, trails of ice, sometimes clear, sometimes frosted, hang with them.

Last night we dined here, the two of us, as usual. I cooked (insofar as cooking was necessary): oysters, coquilles St. Jacques ready prepared from the fishmonger, lamb cutlets with peas and mashed potatoes, cheese and salad, Christmas pudding and brandy butter. Champagne with the first two courses, claret with the next two, brandy with the last. To bed about one, in the dark, because the electricity unexpectedly cut out. This morning I established, with our neighbour Jean’s help, that there’s nothing wrong with our fuses, so I rang EdF and they’re sending someone. Unfortunately we have to cancel the New Year’s Day lunch which we were hoping to have at Guidel-Plages, so we can be in for the EdF man. The open fire tries its best against the cold, but you feel the difference instantly when there are no electric radiators working. I write by the light from the windows, and hope the EdF man will be here before dark.

Yesterday, while I was buying oysters from my man next to the church in Plouay, I had one of those spiritual moments where you are beside yourself, moments of ecstasy in the strict etymological sense. It was provoked by some music they were playing on the public address system. It was romantic but serious and quite modern violin music, of the sort you might get in a film by Eric Rohmer. The temperature was well below zero, my man’s red hands, the end of one finger missing, were counting out the flat oysters three by three, and there was a sense of bustle and excitement around as people shopped for their St Sylvestre supper. Here was I, aged 45, in the middle of life, standing where I wanted to be, doing what I wanted to do. The moment being marked by music. Driving home in the dark, we turned right into the long lane that runs down to our house, and saw a man up a ladder shining a strong torch into one of the old cider-apple trees which stand in the middle of the field. I suppose he was cutting some mistletoe for the party later.

The man from EdF has come and fixed the electricity. A main fuse had blown inside one of the boxes with a lead seal. The call-out system has worked well, as it so often does in a country not yet completely overrun by privatisation and artificially constructed competition enabling us all to play shops with each other. My chances of getting London Electricity to come to our flat in London on New Year’s Day, within a few hours of being called out, and replace a part for no charge and with great civility, are nil. And I’m not

‘The idiot who praises in enthusiastic tone
Every century but this and every country but his own.’

More catching up: there was loads and loads of C4 work when I got back from Brazil. Soon after that it was Easter and Helen and I came to Kerfontaine for nine days. The spring flowers were profuse; brighter and more various than I can remember before. On Easter Tuesday, we drove to the extreme south-western tip of Finistère, to a village called St Guénolé, where after a good lunch in the Hôtel de la Mer we watched immense Atlantic waves crashing against the rocks, while the wind blew and a warm sun made it easy and delightful to stand for the best part of an hour and be awed.

We came again for a week at the end of May, which is perhaps the best of all seasons to be here; the weather already warm, the bluebells out in the wood, the light evenings seemingly endless in this most westerly part of the central European time zone.

In June I went with Paul to Lugano for another EBU conference. (In the summer the venue moves around Europe; in December it’s always Basel.) The flight on a small Swissair plane over the Alps from Zurich to Lugano was spectacular: the great brown mountains below and around us, a cloudless blue sky, comfortable leather seats in an uncrowded plane, glasses of champagne and cheese straws brought to us by delightful young women. The canton of Ticino seems ideally to combine Swiss orderliness and wealth with the style and gaiety of Italianate culture and the Italian language. The weather was hot. The hotel had a swimming pool. I drank neat little cold beers out of slim glasses and gazed up at the chestnut forests. There have been times when I have worked harder. On the last evening the whole company went to Bellinzona to dine in a restaurant in the ancient castle which presides over one of the great north-south Alpine routes. A fresh wind blew down from the mountains around the castle keep where we had apéritifs; I can’t remember anything about the content of the dinner, but it was all delicious, and accompanied by the local Merlots, red and white, also delicious, with grappa afterwards. The flight back over the Alps the next day, this time to Basel, was just as magnificent as the flight down, and adorned by similar pleasures.

The situation in Serbia is at a critical point. Milosevic and his wife are being exposed as the last of the East European dictators, most of whom fell in 1989. There are daily and nightly demonstrations by the opposition, looking very much like those in Prague and Bucharest seven years ago. Milosevic has a large and potentially violent police under his control, and it’s too early to say whether he will crush the protestors or they will topple him. But there’s a feeling in the country that the arrival of a proper democracy is a piece of unfinished business in the region, business which was interrupted by the falling apart of Yugoslavia and the wars accompanying that. Milosevic, of course, is the principal villain in igniting the hatred that has cost so many thousands of lives and caused such unspeakable misery and loss. His megalomania for a greater Serbia, with him in charge, makes him in effect the most evil leader in contemporary Europe. Having failed in his objective, he is trying to preserve Serbia and Montenegro as a pre-’89 Communist dictatorship. I find myself feeling that he and his wife deserve the summary executions that Ceausescu and his wife suffered, although the better part of me knows that he should be given a fair trial (which will take years and cost enormous amounts of money) is he is toppled and arrested.

Since I last wrote about politics, Labour has achieved a position where, seven and a half weeks before the election (which will be on 1 May, though there’s been no official announcement yet) all commentators expect them to win. Discussion turns on the size of the majority. The upper limit of speculation is not far short of 300, which would be astonishing. For some reason I have the figure of 110 in my head. There could yet be more catastrophes for the Conservatives between now and the election, in that there is still plenty of scandal, sexual and financial, which hasn’t come out, and there are some disgruntled people (ex-Tory establishment) who want to settle scores while they can still hurt their enemies (who were formerly their collaborators). Blair is anxious to stop Labour sounding complacent. Cook made a minor mistake last week when he spoke of a forthcoming landslide victory. I don’t think it’ll matter too much, set next to the mistakes the Tories are making. Tebbit heaps foul and personal abuse on Heseltine in print. Every day brings more examples of the comic incompetence of Douglas Hogg, the agriculture minister. Sir George Gardiner, the wildly right-wing MP for Reigate, who has been deselected by his constituency party as the candidate for the next election, has joined the Referendum Party, a small group of xenophobes held together by the billionaire Sir James Goldsmith. Despite all this, there’s still a fear in me that the deep traditional rightward bias of the UK electorate will reassert itself at the eleventh hour. God, I hope not. I don’t think so. In my calm, lucid periods, in the daylight, I don’t think so.

Major has called the election. An campaign of six and a half weeks, twice as long as necessary, will now follow.

Just back from a week in France, which was enchanting. The wonderful weather gave a strange, trance-like feel to our stay there. It was hot day after day. Primroses abounded in the meadow. We went to eat in the usual places. It was quiet in the week after Easter — no French people on holiday. An idyll. I rearranged some poems.

Since we've been back, my obsession has been the election. It’s the most important of my lifetime, in the sense that the outcome will set a direction for the rest of my active life. If Labour wins with a big majority, there’s the possibility that it will have at least 10 years in power, enough time to make a defining shift in the country’s politics. If Labour loses, it would be a sign that the group of uncommitted voters who decide UK elections remains stubbornly stupid, forgetful or selfish, and that the mildest social democratic alternative has no chance of prevailing, even given the most favourable of circumstances at election time. I had a moment this morning, when one poll showed Labour’s lead collapsing in a week from 14 to five points, when I thought my nightmare was coming true. The poll was for The Guardian; the report was on its front page. I ran back into the newsagent and bought The Daily Telegraph, because The Guardian report said that a poll in the Telegraph showed Labour’s lead extended to 21 points. I needed the consolation — something I never thought the Telegraph would give me.

Tonight’s polls give Labour leads of 19 and 20 points.

The Conservative rally, such as it has been, came out of a complete catastrophe from their point of view: a rebellion among about 200 backbenchers and a handful of junior ministers, who said in their manifesto addresses that they would never accept a single European currency. This contradicted the party line, which is to decide nearer the time when a decision has to be made. Major was forced to plead with his own party for unity at a morning press conference and then, in a hastily recorded election broadcast replacing that planned last Wednesday evening, appeal to Conservative voters to trust him. A shambles. But the unexpected revelation of the extent of Europhobia in the party seemed to excite the same latent feeling in a section of the electorate, and the Conservatives, having done everything they could up to that point to avoid talking about Europe, knowing the depth of their divisions, suddenly began to talk about it constantly. Blair was obliged to try to limit the damage by presenting himself as much more Eurosceptic and nationalistic than I think he actually is.

Tomorrow we vote. I’m sure that Blair will be Prime Minister on Friday, and so is just about everyone else. It’s hard to believe that the socially wickedest and economically most incompetent government of my lifetime is about to end. I’m 45 and, by most definitions, middle-aged. When Thatcher won in 1979 I was 27. The most vigorous though not necessarily the most influential years of my life have been spent under a government I have hated, first and foremost because it has made Britain a more divided country. We have a new poor whose desperation and sense of isolation from mainstream society are unprecedented since the invention of the welfare state. Despite Thatcher’s, Major’s and their chancellors’ extravagant claims of economic renaissance, the average annual growth in GDP since 1979 is lower than in any other 18-year-period since 1945. That lowly average conceals the terrifying depths of two recessions, sandwiching the unsustainable heights of a credit-led boom. The acuteness of the economic incompetence is only apparent, however, when we remember that during this period we have had North Sea oil, and we have had privatisation: two enormous and unrepeatable financial bonuses — the second of them in most cases ideologically repugnant to me — which would have enabled any halfway competent administration to invest in the future of Britain’s wealth-creating effort without encountering the familiar devils of inflation, mass unemployment and balance of payments difficulties on too large a scale. Kenneth Clarke, easily the most able chancellor Thatcher or Major has had, has made a good fist of the situation he inherited since our summary ejection from the exchange rate mechanism on 16 September 1992, but only by increasing taxes by the largest amount seen in peacetime this century, and by doubling the national debt. And he can say on a television programme last Sunday that, really, there’s no such thing as deep poverty in this country any more. I watched him say that after having put in four hours of canvassing on the Maiden Lane estate during the afternoon. The Maiden Lane estate is a 15-minute walk from our flat, because you have to traverse three sides of a square on the road to get there. As the crow flies it’s a quarter of a mile, and easily visible from our kitchen window. Most of the people who live there exist in squalor and despair. It is a different planet, a planet not without tenderness, dignity, virtue and humour, but one which also speaks neglect, violence, ugliness, anger, the sense of a shambles, a shame, a waste, a dreadful fucking awful cock-up and shit-bag why have we come to this oh God why have we come to this? When I canvas for the Labour Party I try to explain to the people why they have come to this. And in my heart I am in a rage that they have come to this when there was no need.

We voted, and the most astonishing, wonderful thing happened. Labour has won a huge overall majority of 179. It holds 419 of the 659 seats in the new House of Commons. The Conservatives lost more than half their MPs. They are now down to 164. The Liberals have more than doubled their total, to 46. The scale of the change is awesome, potentially epoch-making. There is the possibility that, for a generation to come, Britain could be governed by a progressive party (or coalition of parties, if the Liberals were invited into government at a future election where Labour won a smaller majority) which will realise the proper purpose of politics: to give organised reality to the best instincts of the human heart and the human reason. Not often in life have I been as excited or joyful as I was on Thursday night at about 10.30pm. I had been knocking up for Frank Dobson until 9. I went home and had some dinner. At 10 o’clock I turned on the BBC election programme to hear their exit poll announce a Labour landslide. I gazed at the words on the screen. Knowing that no results would be announced for a couple of hours, I came to the Spread Eagle and stood outside in the soft warm night, the night of May Day, and felt an exquisite combination of triumph and revenge. This is our moment, I kept thinking. This is it. Now Labour must govern well. Then I went back home and watched the television until 10 to 6 on Friday morning. It was a procession, a picaresque long play of wonderment. Labour and the Liberals just marched into Tory territory and kicked them out. There is not a Tory MP in Scotland, nor in Wales. There are only a handful of Tories in the English cities. The Tory party is now an English rural party, but not even wholly that. They’ve been driven out of the south-west of England, mainly by the Liberals. They’ve been driven out of small-town-and-some-countryside constituencies in the Midlands and south-east of England, mainly by Labour. Shrewsbury is Labour. Shrewsbury! Thatcher’s Essex went Labour. Worcester went Labour.

I predicted an overall majority of 110 on 10 March. I turn out to have been over-cautious, but I was closer than anyone else I’ve spoken to, and two or three newspaper articles I’ve read say that Blair and his circle thought the majority would be between 30 and 40. So I feel smug about my judgement.

It’s the long May Day weekend. The world has tilted in a good direction. I’m happy to be alive.

It’s Sunday evening of the May Day weekend, and the exhilaration hasn’t worn off yet. I keep thinking about Thursday’s victory again, and the pleasure comes flooding back. The despatch of seven Tory cabinet ministers, and especially Portillo. The arrival of over 100 women in the Commons, a critical mass which must change the culture of the place forever. The sense that renewal is possible, whatever negotiation, compromise and manoeuvre have been necessary to gain the power to achieve that renewal.

Blair has named his cabinet. Brown and Darling at the Treasury, Cook at the Foreign Office, Mo Mowlam in Northern Ireland, Dewar in Scotland, Frank Dobson at Health, Chris Smith at National Heritage (grotesque name - should be changed to Arts, Culture and Media), Blunkett at Education, Robertson at Defence, Clare Short fully rehabilitated as Secretary of State for International Development: all these will be excellent. I retain my doubts about Straw’s ability to speak or act with imagination and style: he’s Home Secretary. Cunningham, one of the last of an older generation of machine politicians who really shouldn’t encumber us, is at Agriculture. Blair has been a good boy and followed the rules which say that an incoming Labour PM should only appoint the Cabinet from the membership of the Shadow Cabinet. The big risk is the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott. His great value is that he represents Labour’s link with working-class people, and in that respect he is a necessary counter-weight to Blair. He did a brilliant job during the campaign. He has every right to be Deputy Prime Minister, but I would have combined that title with Chairman of the Party and simply put him in charge of the continuing reform of the Party’s structures: membership, conference, NEC, policy groups. Blair has combined Environment and Transport, and thrown in the English regions, and put Prescott in charge of all that, with numerous ministers under him. I fear the new ministry may be too vast and clumsy to be effective, and I don’t know whether or not Prescott has the brain power to make it work properly. I admit he was excellent as Shadow Minister for Transport. Harriet Harman has Social Security, as expected, but the really imaginative move is to make Frank Field her number two. He is a maverick thinker about all aspects of pension and benefits, and he understands and cares deeply about the causes and effects of poverty. A brilliant choice.

Since last I wrote, Labour has been getting on with the business of governing at an exhilarating rate. How foolish were they who said there would be no difference in government between the Tories and a reformed Labour Party. In no particular order other than as they come to mind: they’ve restored trade union rights at GCHQ; they’ve said that a Nepali boy who lives with a millionaire foster-father who brought him to England in fulfilment of a promise to the boy’s dead father, who saved the man’s life, can stay here (Michael Howard was on the point of sending him back to Nepal); they’ve reformed Prime Minister’s question time (one half-hour session on Wednesdays instead of two 15-minute sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays, with none of the nonsense about asking the PM for his engagements that day); to the amazement of the City, they’ve given virtual independence to the Bank of England to set interest rates; they’ve said that foreign policy must take account of ethical and environmental considerations; they published 22 (or is it 24 or 26?) bills in the Queen’s Speech on Wednesday, all pointing in the right direction, which will keep Parliament fully occupied for the next 18 months; they’ve said they’ll rejoin UNESCO.

And it goes on. They’re going to ban tobacco advertising, including the sponsorship of sports by tobacco companies. Gordon Brown yesterday stunned the financial world for the second time; he’s going to have one overarching body enforcing the statutory regulation of all financial services, including banks and Lloyd’s. An immense change. I watched the first new-style Prime Minister’s Question Time live this afternoon. Blair took the opportunity of a no doubt planted question from one of his back-benchers to announce that at last we’re going to stop selling landmines…

… and we’re going to stop the nursery voucher scheme at the end of this term and supply a free nursery place for every four-year-old from September, whether in state, voluntary or private nurseries. I shall become boring if I go on like this. It’s just the exhilaration of living under a government which keeps doing the right things, and doing them with such relish and élan.

And I forgot: we’re going to join the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty, incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights into British law, ban the use and ownership of handguns, have a minimum wage. Blair’s officials are talking to Sinn Fein, but Blair himself said last week that Northern Ireland would remain in the UK for the foreseeable future. It he can reassure both sides sufficiently, and introduce some sort of joint sovereignty for the Province, there’s just a chance he may be able to pull off a settlement.

It’s a rainy evening at Heathrow and the plane is backing out from Gate 20 at Terminal 1. We’re going to Budapest. It’ll be my second visit to that amazing city, an Austro-Hungarian, art-nouveau treasure with Stalinist brutalism and now capitalist modernism and post-modernism tacked on. It’s a place racing as fast as possible towards its dream of being one of the stars of the new Europe, switched into the global network. I’m going to look at the work of an animation studio, one of the many in Eastern Europe which fell idle when Communism ended, whose impressive skill and cheapness the West has been happy to exploit. It’s making three programmes in a series of ten about the world’s main religions.

A young man called Waheed Alli rang me up about three weeks ago. Karen Brown gave him my name. He’s part of that jeunesse dorée in the inner circles of New Labour, with access to Tony Blair’s private office and to several Cabinet ministers. He’s also rich, and said he had paid for all the transport for Blair and his entourage during the election campaign. He wanted to pick my brains about education policy, so I said I’d write him a paper, which I’ve done. I was encouraged to think the unthinkable, but I found that the unthinkable wasn’t generally within my scope. I wrote down a set of simple suggestions — 30 pages or so — on curriculum, assessment, standards and resources. I sent the paper to Waheed, and to Liz Allen, my good friend who’s the education policy officer in the Labour Party. We’ll see if anything happens which bears any resemblance to what I wrote.

Good things the government has done since the last entry: passed the law which will allow local councils to spend their receipts from sales of council houses on buying and/or repairing more council houses; promised to honour the commitment at the Rio summit five years ago to reduce by 2010 carbon dioxide emissions to a level 20% below their 1990 level (a tall order — most countries aren’t promising anything like that); inched closer to peace in Northern Ireland (despite the dreadful murder by the IRA of two policemen last week), by getting the Ulster Unionists to agree to parallel decommissioning of paramilitary weapons while inclusive talks take place; mooted the possibility of making the London Underground some kind of trust, so it can borrow on the capital markets for investment without getting into trouble with the Treasury; given a boost to the British film industry by providing money from the Lottery and offering a new tax deal, like the one in Ireland which has so stimulated film production there.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Aitken, ex-Cabinet minister in the last government and ex-MP, has fallen into disgrace almost as deep as that which into which John Profumo fell at the end of the previous long period of Tory power. He started a libel action against The Guardian and Granada Television, which had accused him of accepting lavish hospitality at the Paris Ritz from rich Saudi businessmen when he was a minister in the defence department. Saudi Arabia is of course a big buyer of British arms. Last week he withdrew the libel action, and was shown to be a persistent liar, prepared to perjure himself under oath in the High Court, prepared to implicate his wife and even his teenage daughter in his evasions. His wife left him. He has resigned from the Privy Council. The police are considering whether to prosecute him for perjury and conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. It is sweet that such a symbol of Tory arrogance in power should be brought so publicly low. The Conservatives have elected a new leader, William Hague. I have nothing against the man; he is a political pygmy. I don’t imagine he frightens Blair at all. It’s a measure of the Tories’ disarray that they couldn’t see that the only leader who might rescue them from oblivion was Kenneth Clarke. But Clarke made the fatal miscalculation of announcing a preposterous alliance with Redwood, his sworn enemy over Europe, on the day before the third round of voting. He would have done better to have gone it alone, though he probably still wouldn’t have won.

I’m in Poznan, a city in the west of Poland, to look at more rough-cuts of animated programmes about the major religions of the world. It’s a co-production with S4C, the Welsh-language channel. We flew over last night from Heathrow, changing planes at Warsaw. It’s a beautiful day: summer on the central European plain, although there have been dreadful floods with dozens of deaths in the south of the country. Poland was invited to join NATO last week. It wants to join the EU at the earliest opportunity. Like Hungary, it is a country changing at breakneck speed, lunging towards a market-driven, globally open economy. The people I’ve met are full of hope, excitement and relief, scarcely able to believe that some dreadful catastrophe will not overtake them again after a brief period of freedom. From 1945 to 1989 the Poles were governed by Communists. The period is remembered with contempt, as a time when immense sacrifices were asked of the people in return for an eventual bright future which never arrived. Meanwhile, the countries of Western Europe were transforming themselves from the drab ruins of the Second World War into the brightly coloured, flawed but confident social democracies I know so well. ‘For us, all the colours were grey,’ said my host André today. Between 1939 and 1945 the country was under the tyranny of the Nazis. Between 1919 and 1939 there was independence. Before that, stretching far back into the nineteenth century, the country was carved up between the Russians, the Germans and the Austrians. Poland has been bartered, dismembered, redefined, used by others. Auschwitz is on its soil. The major current democratic political contest is between the former Communists (now a modernising, internationally-minded free-market government) and Solidarity (the former independent trade-union movement, now a nationalist, Catholic, socially authoritarian and reactionary opposition). Conventional left/right definitions and associations of social attitude with political position don’t work here.

Yesterday I visited the animation studio. Part of one of the programmes is being done in salt animation — an unusual technique in which beautiful designs of coloured salt are changed a little every photo-frame by being brushed, stroked or blown. I stared at one of the several salt portraits which had completed its purpose. A man held a bow at full stretch, the arrow about to shoot. Hundreds of photographs had been taken as the panel had been infinitesimally moved hundreds of times through a few seconds of action. The animator, who had taken ten hours to produce the original design, and then many more to see it through its passage of movement, shook the panel when I had finished admiring it, and it was suddenly just a scattering of coloured salt. I was shocked.

In the evening we visited the splendid square in the middle of the old town, enclosed by beautiful 17th-century houses painted in subtle but contrasting colours. Sitting on the steps of the church, playing a guitar and singing through a microphone, was a poet whom our hosts immediately recognised as one of the great rebel artists of Poland. His songs had been banned during the time of the Communists. Now he continued to criticise hypocrisy, greed and corruption in capitalist Poland. ‘Always the outsider,’ said André. I couldn’t understand a word, but the man was clearly a master performer, singing his own songs with perfect clarity and with tenderness, anger or humour. He had complete control of the guitar, which he played simply. You had the impression he could have impressed with a show of virtuosity in his playing, but chose not to. A big crowd stood listening, moved. They knew what he was saying.

Last night my friends Chris Grace and Penelope Middelboe from S4C took me out to dinner, in the same beautiful square we went to the night before. Eggs with caviar, stuffed roast duck with dumplings, fruit and ice cream. Beer, wine and vodka. After half a lifetime ignoring vodka, I discover that a freezing cold Polish brand called Bison is delicious. And another discovery: why had I had an ignorant stereotype all my life of the eastern European woman as dumpy and dour? As we sat on the terrace in the evening sunshine, a succession of gorgeous, tall, leggy, laughing women passed us, until Chris and I could no longer forbear comment. For the rest of the evening, Penelope kept look-out: ‘Here comes another one, boys.’

I’m on the six o’clock morning flight from Poznan to Warsaw. On my left, a river shines in the morning sun. It has swollen and burst. The land for a few kilometres on either side of the river has unexpected lakes and pools of water. The floods in the south of the country have been truly disastrous. Everywhere in Poznan there have been collecting points for food, water and blankets, and people have been coming round asking for money for the relief effort. One of my hosts said to me two nights ago, ‘It is terrible, but we accept this disaster as something which happens in all countries. We hope we never again see the other kind of disaster. Of those we have had enough.’

The government announced devolution proposals for Wales and Scotland this week. The Scottish ones are truly historic: the most significant change in the relationship between Scotland and England since the 1707 Act of Union. Sir Ron Dearing produced his third mighty report on the education system. He’s done schools, further education and now higher education. The most controversial proposal is to introduce tuition fees and to remove maintenance grants. Students will take out loans, repayable over up to 23 years, to pay for their maintenance and up to £1000 per year of tuition fees. I’m sorry about it, but I think it’s inevitable, given the number of students in higher education and the cost. I disapprove of the means-tested element in the calculation of the tuition fee. I would have made everybody pay the same, rich or poor, but arrange for early repayment at 0% interest of an affordable proportion of a graduate’s salary. So teachers or priests could pay less than merchant bankers or barristers.

We’ve been in Suffolk for the weekend. Today was a beautiful English summer day: warm not hot, a little breeze, high white clouds moving irregularly across the wide sky. We walked around the lanes of Letheringham after lunch. Two swans sat quietly on the weedy stream which runs through the parish. The wheat is ripe and turning from brown toward grey. We returned to London easily and swiftly on the train.

Stephen Eyers rang when I got home. He’s bought a mobile phone and wanted to tell me the number. He’s taking it to France next week so he can be in easy contact with his elderly mum in Bournemouth. He was amused by the romantic word which the mobile phone companies use for when you take the phone out of the national jurisdiction where you bought it. They call it roaming. We agreed that the companies should have a special cheap evening tariff for phoning when abroad, called roaming in the gloaming.

On Saturday evening Helen and I drove down to Wells to hear Graham Caldbeck conduct the Somerset Chamber Choir in its annual concert in the cathedral. Amid some beautiful seventeenth-century Venetian church music, there were two unforgettable modern British pieces: Sacred Songs by James McMillan, using poetic texts about political oppression in South America; and Thunder Entered Her by John Tavener, about Mary’s conception of Christ. A mystical study of a significant bonk, as I said to Helen. We drove straight back to London after the concert in the lovely mothy cool night.

I’ve been back at work since 1 September. Before that, Helen and I had three weeks in France. Bronwyn and Stephen Mellor were with us at Kerfontaine for five days. We went down to Stephen Eyers’s house in the Charente for four days. The last 12 days we were back at Kerfontaine alone. Beautiful weather: the calm, steady, quiet days of later summer. I did very little. A great bout of idleness came on me. Afternoon sleeps downstairs with the door open and the birds singing outside. Afternoon sleeps on a rug on the lawn with the Test match droning on at the edge of consciousness. The usual evening meals in the usual places. The most spiritual experience was in the river Dronne down at Aubeterre when we were with Stephen and Theresa. It was just a long swim down a reedy river, for the best part of an hour, and in that time, in the middle of the holiday, with not a care, I completely lost touch with the practicalities and obligations which preoccupy and discipline the mind normally, and I dreamt. You could say I meditated, though without the prior intention to do so. Anyhow, the mind came out of the river relaxed, and remained so for the rest of the holiday.

It got a big jolt at precisely 10 o’clock French time on the morning of Sunday 31 August, a few kilometres south of Boulogne, when we turned on the 9 o’clock BBC news. Princess Diana had been killed in a car crash in Paris the night before. The BBC was broadcasting in the special solemn mode reserved for rare occasions. The national anthem was played immediately after the simple announcement of the event, and before more details were given. Whether the anthem should have been played, according to strict protocol, for a divorced princess who no longer held a royal title, I cannot say. The days since Diana’s death have been filled with constitutional dilemmas for those whose job or whose perceived expertise it is to say what should be done. These days have been amongst the most extraordinary in my and many millions of people’s lives. A sense of shock, grief, anger and loss has engulfed the entire United Kingdom, me included. When we got home at lunchtime on that Sunday I turned on the television and watched it for about six hours. Last Saturday, the day of the funeral, I watched from the moment the horse-drawn gun carriage came out of Kensington Palace to the moment, nearly seven hours later, when the hearse disappeared into the grounds of Althorp House in Northamptonshire.

It became clear last week that Diana, with all her faults, stood for a way of being which millions loved and admired, and by which they were fascinated. They lined up with her, in death: with spontaneity, with affection, with classless style, with openness. She was a multi-millionairess who kept company with presidents, princes (though not, latterly, the Prince of Wales), pop stars, arbiters of international fashion. She also cared for AIDS sufferers, land-mine victims, lepers, the homeless, drug addicts. The scale of her good actions, privately carried out, became apparent as more and more people testified to them. Soon we realised that she was the royal figure whom the royalist majority would have wanted to represent them if they had ever been offered the choice. Thinking back to the troubled marriage and the divorce, doubters and those who had never thought much about the matter before suddenly saw an innocent naïve genius of the heart on whom the House of Windsor had brought nothing but sorrow, a beautiful woman whom most of our media had cruelly hunted and exposed, a challenger to a stiff, outdated, class-obsessed, repressed, unimaginative ancien régime.

It has been the common folk who have grieved most openly, and who have called most insistently for proper remembrance. Buckingham Palace, St James’s Palace, Westminster Abbey and Parliament Square, and most of all Kensington Palace have been clogged and adorned by millions of flowers, messages and tokens of love.

The funeral saw the starkest open challenge to the monarchy and to the monarch that has occurred in my lifetime. Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, stood in the pulpit in Westminster Abbey and rebuked the Queen, sitting a few feet from him, for having deprived Diana of her royal title at the time of divorce. He contrasted the dull dutifulness and fixed traditions which the House of Windsor represents with his dead sister’s free and generous spirit. He promised, vainly no doubt, to protect his nephews, including the heir to the throne, from the too heavy influence of the family of his ex-in-laws. He also, savagely but less controversially, attacked the newspapers which he believes effectively hunted his sister to death. At the end of the speech, the congregation clapped — inspired, it is said, by the sound of clapping from outside the cathedral and in Hyde Park, where thousands were watching on giant television screens. Astonishing. The monarch was criticised and challenged to her face in Westminster Abbey, and then the people clapped. The fact that Charles Spencer turns out to have as dysfunctional a private life as any in the family he was attacking, that the Queen is his godmother, that he sold photographs of his baby son and heir to Hello! magazine for a lot of money: none of this blurred the clarity of his message in the minds of the people. The people had already voiced their impatience with the royal family’s slowness and apparent reluctance to pay tribute to Diana, to make symbolic gestures of grief. On the day before the funeral, the Queen made a short live broadcast from Buckingham Palace. On the day of the funeral, the Union Jack flew at half-mast over the Palace for the first time ever. It had taken the royal household that long since the death to reverse a convention whereby the Union Jack is not permitted to hang at half-mast over the royal palaces, since monarchy is supposed to be continuous. The Queen walked out to a gate of Buckingham Palace with others of her family and bowed her head as the coffin passed. These acts satisfied some people completely, most people only partially. But when they clapped as Charles Spencer resumed his place in the Abbey nave after his speech of tribute to his sister, they were saying, ‘Not enough. Change significantly, permanently, or we may call for a republic more quickly than you have ever imagined.’

Writing this, I realise why I, a republican, have become so emotionally caught up in Diana’s death and its aftermath. It is because of my sister. My sister Mary committed herself at the age of 19 to a much older man. Her decision caused her profound and prolonged unhappiness. Diana made the same wrong move at the same age to an older man, who was from the start unfaithful to her. (I will grant Charles that he was only 12 years older than Diana, not more than 20, as with my sister and her husband, and I fully grant that marriages with big age gaps can be as happy as any.) But Diana was unhappy throughout her marriage, and is now dead. Psycho-babblers would say that I projected on to her my feelings of protectiveness for my sister, and I guess they would be right.

The onerous demands of my job bring me to Cannes on an exquisite late-summer afternoon. It is just after five, the temperature between warm and hot, the climate made perfect by a light breeze off the sea. I have walked around La Croisette, and am now sitting on one of the blue municipal chairs at the eastern end of the bay, by one of the ports de plaisance, looking across the water towards the Palais des Festivals. I’m here for MIPCOM, the twice-yearly international television market. Tonight, I’m going to help launch the series of 10 animated films telling stories from the world’s great religions, which I wrote about earlier in the summer. The series is selling well already inside the market hall.

Conditions at this moment are just about perfect. It remains an astonishment to me that I, a comprehensive-school English teacher, should find myself in a place such as this, with my time, my transport, my board and lodging paid by my employer, watching the lucky people of the Côte d’Azur continuing to enjoy their long summer while all Europe north of here has settled for autumn and gone back to work.

I’ve had a busy four weeks. The most touching moment of the month arose from two programmes which Paul had commissioned about ecstasy, featuring the true story of a lovely boy called Daniel Ashton (no relation of Paul’s), who died at the age of 17 after taking ecstasy and amphetamines in a night-club in Blackpool. We gave the boy’s mother, sister and brother a private screening before transmission. I’ve never before seen real life and a representation of real life so poignantly brought together at such close quarters. The first of the programmes was a drama written by Paula Milne, and at the end of it the mother and sister wept. ‘It was so like him,’ said the mother. ‘I couldn’t believe it wasn’t him.’ They approved of the drama whole-heartedly. The second programme, a documentary, they liked too with the reservation that in their opinion one sequence seemed to condone the use of the drug. We changed the section, in consideration of their feelings, even though the programme didn’t condone the use of ecstasy, but was trying to be realistic about the fact that between five and 20 million tablets are taken in the UK every month.

After 24 hours in Cannes, I drove across to see my sister, who’s now living in the village of Viens, the next commune to where she used to be. It’s a quiet, compact hilltop place, looking across the valley to the Lubéron. The house is about 200 years old, and much of the village is older. Narrow streets and tiny alleys, little traffic within the walls. A grocer, a baker, a bar/restaurant, a shop selling honey.

We’ve come to Viens for four days. It’s Friday afternoon. The weather is perfect: blue sky, little or no wind, and the temperature high enough for me to sit outside with comfort during the afternoons. This morning we went for a walk in the Gorge d’Opedette, a ravine in the next commune where you scramble straight down with the help of chains and handrails, and then walk along the almost dry river bed for a couple of kilometres before ascending as abruptly as you descended. The grey rock is covered with little oaks and sycamores, their leaves deep yellow and bright red in the sunshine. Afterwards we had cold rosé and a ham sandwich at the bar in the village of Opedette.

The main political event at home in the last month has been a bit of confusion in the Government over the single currency. It’s the first serious mistake Labour has made, and it was all completely avoidable. Gordon Brown was first quoted in the press as hinting that he was keen on joining a single currency sooner rather than later. The stock market soared and the pound fell. Three weeks later, he was quoted as hinting the opposite: there were major economic reasons whey we wouldn’t join a single currency during this parliament. The stock market fell and the pound soared. The Conservatives awoke from their gloom and torpor and briefly scored a few points in accusing the government of irresponsible inconsistency. Finally, Brown made a statement to the Commons last Monday — the first day back after the summer recess — which settled the matter. We won’t go in during this parliament, but we want to go in early in the next, assuming the euro is proving a success in Europe, and we’ll have a referendum with a Government recommendation to vote yes. The Conservatives collapsed back into their post-election half-life, the Government having spoken definitely and with confidence. But the problem was press secretaries, briefing newspapers off the record and seeming to contradict themselves from one week to the next. I don’t like the system of unattributable briefing. It smacks of the bad old politics. I don’t care much for the characters of Blair’s and Brown’s press secretaries either. They’re cunning and plausible wide boys, hustlers who were useful when Labour was in opposition and was trying to ingratiate itself with the right-wing press, but who are not using the right methods now we are the Government with an enormous majority. There’s not enough dignity. Charlie Whelan, Brown’s press secretary, was overheard by some Liberal Democrats barking policy into his mobile phone in the Red Lion pub opposite the Treasury.

Each Government department should have a press secretary who announces policy, on the record, orally or in writing, and who can be quoted. No press secretary should make any statement unless authorised by a minister, who should also be named in the statement. I don’t understand why we don’t do things openly. I read on Wednesday that Blair has initiated a review of press briefings. Good. I hope the decision is to abolish unattributable briefings completely. We nearly tripped over our own shoelaces about this, and the galling thing is that the Government was actually doing everything right so far as proper policy-making is concerned. As soon as we won the election, Brown asked the Treasury to do a detailed study on our prospects for joining the single currency. The Treasury reported about a fortnight ago. Brown’s Commons statement was largely based on the findings of the report, and on the correct political realisation that there’s so much else to do which is important that we don’t want to risk our popularity over the single currency until we’ve won another election.

Mary has a pretty black kitten called Midnight. It’s about two months old, full of playfulness and curiosity. It watches the particles of dust in the air by the window when the sun shines though the glass. It plays with everything which rolls or dangles or waggles, like naked toes coming down the stairs in the morning. It loves company and interaction. It begins to purr loudly, like a little engine, as soon I touch it. It’s a complete awestruck intelligence, finding the world and all that’s in it just profoundly interesting.

Sunday morning in Viens. I’m on a stone seat just outside the village walls, next to the château. There is a wonderful view to the south-east, down into a valley of lavender fields, of fields of ploughed earth, of oak woods, a quarry. Then up past the Gorge d’Opedette where we were on Friday, through thick woodland more remote from here, to high hills forming the horizon. The sun is warm. To my left, oaks, sloes and crab apples along the side of the road are heavy with fruit. A wasp buzzes around my feet. I’ve heard of midwinter spring. This is more like mid-autumn summer, or the St Martin’s summer described in The Leopard, that wonderful book.

On Friday evening we went to dine with friends of Mary’s, and saw, on the drives there and back, a hare, a fox, an owl, and five wild boar. On the way there, the hare was sitting at the side of the road and leapt into the hedge. A few minutes later the fox did the same thing. A few minutes later the owl flew from bough to bough of a tree overhanging the road. On the way back, the first boar, an adult male, crossed the road in front of us, followed by two young boars, followed by an adult female, followed after a short pause by another adult male, the largest and oldest. Spectacular. As Mary said, it was like a scene from Jean de la Fontaine. I’d only seen a boar once before, in Umbria in 1989, and that was just a small one.

Yesterday Helen and I went to the weekly market at Apt. It’s a wonderful event, which I remember from January when I was here during Mary’s crisis. Stalls fill the whole town, all its squares and alleys, selling sausages, cheeses, olives, vegetables, fish, flowers, plants, crockery, wine, second-hand books, music, linen. We bought a sausage to take home, and some crevettes and lasagne with truffles for lunch. Four lettuces for 10 francs. A bottle of red and a bottle of white, local. The lunch was delicious and I had an hour’s siesta afterwards, with the kitten sleeping on my neck.

A man with a travelling alembic is at Viens. It’s parked just outside the walls, and there’s a heap of discarded grape skins beside it, sometimes still steaming from the distilling process. A strong smell of spirit hangs in the air around. People bring their grape skins and get their allowance of eau de vie. This is an ancient custom, which will die when the owner of the alembic dies, because the right to distil in this way may no longer be transferred to the next generation.

On the way to New York for the International Emmys, in which one of the programmes I’ve been looking after — Wise Up, produced by my good friend Mick Robertson — is nominated for best children’s programme.

The Government has experienced its worst crisis since being elected. Before the election, it said it would ban tobacco advertising. Good. After the election, it said it would include sponsorship in its definition of advertising. Better. Then it said it would exempt motor racing from the sponsorship ban, claiming that the sport would only go elsewhere if prohibited from relying on tobacco sponsorship in the UK, and that television viewers would see the same amount of tobacco advertising being broadcast from abroad. Then it emerged that the man who controls motor racing in the UK had given Labour a million pounds and wanted to give it some more. The sleaze-free new Labour dawn suddenly looked a grubby morning. Tony Blair appeared on television last Sunday and apologised for the way the information had come to the public. He insisted there was no corruption. The events were coincidences in time, not causally connected.

I want to believe him. But it has been a bad, bad mess. I don’t understand why it wasn’t possible to say that all sports would eventually have to look to sources other than tobacco companies for sponsorship, but that some sports would take longer to achieve this than others. The word ‘exemption’ was the problem, before the news about Bernie Ecclestone’s donation. Richard Branson, in whose aeroplane I am flying, is the epitome of the glamorous classless modern businessman who has come round to supporting Labour, and Blair gave him the task of finding alternative sources of sports sponsorship, to replace tobacco. Branson said that he would withdraw from the job unless the Government clarified its intentions and satisfied him that there had been no corruption. The affair has accelerated investigations into the best way of funding political parties, but it hasn’t itself been properly resolved yet, because no-one has said that motor racing will eventually be tobacco-free, even if later than other sports.

Fortunately, the two by-elections last Thursday give no comfort to the Conservatives whatever. In Winchester, their candidate Gerry Malone lost on 1 May by two votes. He complained that there had been improper practices. Bad loser, thought the people, and when a judge said the contest could be re-run, they waited and voted for the Liberal Democrat by a majority of over 20,000. In Beckenham, where the Tory MP resigned because he had persistently been having an affair with a 19-year-old, his replacement scraped in by just over 1,000 votes. Beckenham! Labour was second in that contest, and we might have won it but for the tobacco sponsorship business.

A long gap since I last wrote. I had two excellent days in New York, and one in Connecticut. Spent Sunday walking miles and miles around the city. In the morning, I went to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on the upper west side, to see if my old Cambridge friend Paul Halley were still the organist there. He had left five years ago, but they gave me his telephone number in Connecticut. I rang and there he was! We arranged to meet on the Tuesday. Mick Robertson arrived on Sunday evening, and we went up to Harlem and ate Hispanic food. In fact, we had gone up looking for a soul-food restaurant I thought I remembered from 12 years ago, but I couldn’t find it. The Croatian taxi driver wondered what two Englishmen were doing in a rough part of town, when there were so many perfectly reputable places to eat in safer vicinities. The restaurant we settled for was cheap, friendly and noisy, staffed entirely by boys and girls who looked like the cast of West Side Story, as logically they might.

On Monday more walking, and I bought Helen an Italian sweater in Saks Fifth Avenue. In the evening we went to the Emmy ceremony, and we won. It was an exhilarating moment. Afterwards we went to a bar at 52nd Street and 2nd Avenue where the drinks were free all night. People kept coming up and wanting to stroke the bauble, to lift it. Someone told me a funny story about how he was in a lift in Los Angeles with a colleague who had won an Oscar the night before. They were on their way to bed. The colleague was carrying the trophy in his hand, quite casually now, having owned it for several hours. An elderly American couple got into the lift. When the woman noticed the Oscar, she asked if it were a real one. When told that it was, she fainted. The lift had to return to the ground floor so that staff could revive her.

I went to bed about 3.30 and got up four hours later. I took the train from Penn Station to Hudson, a little town in upstate New York. It was a two-hour ride, following the magnificent Hudson River all the way. I waited for five minutes outside the station building, and then Paul turned up. We drove for an hour through the snowy wooded countryside to his house in Norfolk, Connecticut.

Paul and I were very close friends at Cambridge. Then we went our separate ways, and didn’t meet up again until 1985, in New York. He was then living in a flat next to the cathedral with his wife Penny and three children. I spent a day or two there, and a day with them in their beautiful house in another part of Connecticut. It was late May, and hot. There was a lake nearby for swimming and sailing. I remember our time together with perfect pleasure.

Now Paul and Penny have separated, and he is with another woman called Meg. They live in a large, gracious clapboard house in woodland. Paul is becoming well known as a composer. He gave me three of his CDs. He also plays piano with a group called the Paul Winter Consort. He conducts an adult chamber choir and a children’s choir. He and Meg are starting a music publishing business. I was only with him for about four hours: an hour driving to the house, two hours there, and an hour driving to another town where I got on a bus which took me to JFK airport. But we rediscovered as relaxed and direct a friendship as ever.

Paul wears his immense musical talent easily, and is as interested in my world as I am in his. It was a beautiful meeting.

The overnight flight from JFK to Heathrow was uncomfortable. I switched from Terminal 4 to Terminal 1, where I met Paul Ashton, and we went straight off to Ireland to look at the rough cut of a film. I stayed in Dublin that night, slept well, flew to Glasgow the next morning for the annual C4 meeting with producers from Scotland and Northern Ireland, and got home finally on the Thursday night.

The week at Kerfontaine has passed too quickly, as these short holidays always do. Last night there was a mighty storm. I’ve never heard anything like it. (I was out of London during the great storm of October ’87.) The damage this morning was nowhere near as severe as it was, here and in the south of England, 10 years ago. But we have lost one handsome mature fir tree, uprooted completely, and a large pine is without the upper half of its trunk. It was a shock to walk out this morning and see these great plants lying in the meadow. The noise last night was so great at the height of the storm that it was impossible to distinguish individual sounds. It was unlike a violent storm of lesser ferocity. For a moment it was as if a huge aeroplane, engines at full throttle, was passing just overhead. There was a sensation of pure power. That was the wind. Then rain in solid sheets. Then hail. Then explosions of brilliant lightning and claps of thunder which shook the house, solid granite as it is. But not a single tile has been dislodged from the roof, and it’s as dry as a bone inside. The electricity came back on at about 4.30 this afternoon. So our suffering has been slight. I don’t like to lose trees, though. When you own land where much of the beauty is in the trees, you’re jealous of all of them.

Tomorrow we’re going home, but via a night in Paris at our favourite hotel, to sugar the pill. The last time I was at that hotel was when I left my diary in the train at the Gare du Nord. I’ll try to avoid a repeat performance.

We had an exquisite night in Paris. Arrived about 8, were shown to one of our favourite rooms in the Hôtel de Banville, bathed. Then took a brief walk in the mild, clear evening, the quarter moon bright above us, before deciding to dine at Petrus, one of the fish restaurants on the Place Péreire. Delicious food, a splendid pink champagne called Philipponnat, a ’65 Armagnac at the end. Then back to the exquisite sexiness of the bedroom, marred only by the fact that the supposed grand lit in fact contained two single mattresses pushed together, instead of one double mattress. The split down the middle inconveniences love-making and sleeping. I complained about it the next morning to my old friend the manager, much to Helen’s embarrassment. He said that about half the rooms had such an arrangement, enabling the hotel to offer twin beds when customers asked for that. I said that, notwithstanding, un grand lit should imply un grand matelas, and we agreed that I should be very specific in stating my requirements in future.

The conversation made me think of a story I heard on the radio years ago, about an English woman travelling alone in France. She stopped for the night at a small hotel in the remote countryside. The owner showed her a room, which she accepted. He went downstairs, returned with her luggage, and left her. A few minutes later, she came down unhappily to the lobby, and spoke to the owner in her best French: ‘S’il vous plaît, monsieur, il n’y a pas de matelot sur mon lit.’ The owner was tempted to smile, but knew exactly what the woman meant, so restrained himself and courteously explained that the beds in this hotel didn’t have separate mattresses; the part you lay down on was made in a single piece. The woman was still not happy. ‘Oui, monsieur, mais en Angleterre il y a toujours un matelot sur le lit.’ And off she went upstairs. Once she was out of earshot, an old lady, the owner’s mother, who had been sitting quietly in the corner, knitting, looked at her son and said, ‘Ah, les Anglais! Quelle nation maritime!’

We got home at lunchtime on Sunday, the tunnel whisking us painlessly under a tempestuous channel.

On Friday afternoon, I took the train from Liverpool (where I had been at the annual conference of the Association for Science Education) to Shrewsbury, changing at Crewe. It was a beautiful afternoon, and I felt my old love for the Shropshire countryside rekindled as we ambled between the flooded fields with the sun streaming horizontally through the windows. I was reading the Lyrical Ballads, because yesterday I performed, with Andrew Bannerman, a selection of them which he had made, linked by a commentary he had written. The occasion was the 200th anniversary of Coleridge’s visit to Shrewsbury, and of the sermon he preached on the second Sunday of January 1798 in the Unitarian chapel there. The train stopped at Wem, where Coleridge stayed with Hazlitt at Hazlitt’s father’s house, the elder Hazlitt being the Unitarian minister in the town. Looking out of the window, I thought how little the place had changed these two centuries. Wem always looks scruffy and forlorn, with a few pretty brick houses trying unsuccessfully to cheer the place up. The younger Hazlitt and Coleridge walked to Shrewsbury, and Hazlitt heard Coleridge preach. He was amazed at Coleridge’s eloquence. He wrote: ‘As he gave out his text [which was “And he went up into the mountain to pray Himself alone”], his voice rose like a stream of rich distilled perfumes, and when he came to the last words, which he pronounced loud, deep and distinct, it seems to me as if the sounds had echoed from the bottom of the human heart, and as if that prayer might have floated in solemn silence through the universe.’

To commemorate this event, some of Shrewsbury’s most active citizens, including Andrew, had organised a weekend of lectures and performances. Michael Foot was the guest of honour; he was booked to speak in the Unitarian chapel on the Friday night, and again on the Sunday morning, as part of a special service there.

I rehearsed with Andrew all Friday evening and all day Saturday. Our performance on the Saturday evening, though I say it myself, was something of a triumph. About 100 people received it enthusiastically. We did ‘The Ancient Mariner’ (complete), ‘Lines written at a Small Distance from my House’, ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, ‘We are Seven’, ‘The Idiot Boy’ and ‘Tintern Abbey’. Andrew’s commentary was informative, apt and beautifully composed. Michael Foot was in the front row, with his ancient dog Disraeli, from whom he is inseparable. Whether out of eccentricity, or simple desire to encourage, or (as I wondered then but don’t think now) as a result of some kind of speech palsy, Michael punctuated our entire performance with grunts and murmurs, expressions of support and approval which we soon got used to, as did the rest of the audience, but which were a bit distracting to begin with. Disraeli stood up a few times and shifted his 18-year-old hindquarters worryingly. When he did this, Michael simply wrapped the dog’s lead more tightly around his own leg.

After the performance, Andrew and I went out to meet some of our admiring audience. Michael had left a message, saying how much he had enjoyed the performance, but that he had gone back to his hotel, being tired and anticipating the effort of his work the next morning. He hoped to see us there. We went back to Andrew’s for a delicious supper; to bed about three, feeling terribly pleased with ourselves.

At the service the next morning, before a full congregation, made up I guess of about one third regulars and two thirds visitors, Michael gave a short lecture, mainly about Hazlitt. But in the middle of it he mentioned the Lyrical Ballads, and then declared that never, in all his life, had he heard any of the poems performed as well as he had the previous evening; in fact, it was highly unlikely that they had ever been so well performed since they were written; in fact, it was very probable that the previous evening’s performers had rendered the poems better than had Wordsworth and Coleridge themselves (‘for poets are often not the best performers of their own work’). Andrew shed tears. After the service, over refreshments in the chapel meeting room upstairs, I told Michael that he had been a hero of mine for 30 years, and that never, if I lived to be as old as he was now, or older, would anyone pay me a compliment I valued as highly as that he had paid us.

‘Bannerman and Richmond better readers than Wordsworth and Coleridge — Foot.’

I got on the train on the Sunday evening, tired out. I kept thinking I ought to write this diary, train journeys being ideal circumstances for diary writing, but I couldn’t summon up the energy. After we changed at Wolverhampton, a young woman got on and sat down opposite me. She immediately pulled out an exercise book and began to write, at high speed and without hesitation. I could see from reading upside down that it was some kind of love diary, or perhaps a novel in love letters. At the beginning of every entry, she wrote ‘Baby’ or ‘Hey baby’ or ‘Ooh baby’. Inspired by her fluency, I pulled out my diary and began to write myself, though I couldn’t match her rate of words per minute. Thus until Euston.

Here at a European market for educational television.

The series of animated programmes about world religions, some of which I saw in preparation in Hungary and Poland last summer, was first broadcast in its Welsh-language version by S4C last Christmas and New Year. In making a programme about some of the events in the life of Mohammed, we had been careful to take advice from experts on Islam, including Muslim clerics, so as not to show or say anything which would give offence to Muslims. At about the time of the S4C transmission, a group of zealots based at the Finsbury Park mosque heard about the programme, made contact with Chris Grace, the director of animation at S4C, and asked to see a tape of its English-language version. Chris, in a spirit of open-minded liberality which he recognises, in retrospect, was perhaps naïve, sent them one. Once the zealots had seen the programme, they forbade us to broadcast it, declaring it blasphemous, and threatened to bomb Channel 4 on the day of its first transmission if we did go ahead. They then obtained from a university in Egypt, a centre of Islamic learning, a fatwa reinforcing their ban. Paul discussed the problem with the bosses at Channel 4, who were unanimous that the broadcast should go ahead. We told the police. In the days leading up to broadcast, the viewer enquiries line at Channel 4 received many calls, especially from Muslim women, imploring us not to show the programme. It was clear that an information network involving some of the mosques with fundamentalist leaders was working efficiently, and that imams there had been instructing the faithful to protest.

I wasn’t in the Channel 4 building on the day of broadcast. No bomb went off. In the days after broadcast, we received a few phone calls from brave women, some of whom who had phoned beforehand, congratulating us on the programme, saying how glad they were that their religion had been presented in such a knowledgeable and sympathetic way, and apologising for their previous call. They had been misled, they said. We received no phone call criticising the programme.

So far as I know, the fatwa still stands.

The best moment of today was between 4.30 and 5.15. I’d gone to Tullio’s for a haircut. He was busy and told me to come back in an hour. I walked up to the park. It was so green after last night’s solid rain, and bright. I just wandered amongst the wonderful trees near the Parkway entrance, admiring chestnuts, ashes, beeches. How the chestnut flowers are tight and hard. How the ash flowers are spindly, frothy with magenta points at the ends of their fronds. How you can stroke the smooth trunk of a young beech, feel its sturdiness, its health. There are alders, oaks. All the trees stand in the deep green spread of grass, and the wind was strong today, the clouds moved fast.

Today is an historic day in Ireland. It’s now seven o’clock in the evening UK time, and about an hour and a half ago the negotiating parties in Northern Ireland announced an agreement on a text, 67 pages long, outlining the constitutional future of Northern Ireland, including arrangements for an elected assembly in the province, for a North-South Council of Ministers, for a ‘Council of the Isles’ linking the NI assembly with the future Scottish parliament, Welsh assembly, UK and Irish governments, for the release of paramilitary prisoners and the decommissioning of weapons, for changes to the policing system, for amendments to the UK’s Government of Ireland Act 1920 and to the Irish Republic’s constitution. The document will be sent to every household in both parts of Ireland. There will be a referendum on it on 22 May, and elections to the new assembly in June. The parties stayed up all night, and there were moments when it looked as if the talks would break down. But there it is, agreed. Amazing.

It is quite the most remarkable political achievement for the Blair government since it came to power. More importantly, it is one of those moments in an adult lifetime when you know that history is being made before your eyes. If the agreement holds — and I think it will — the most grievous site of violence, pain and division in UK domestic politics this century could become a place where people can get on with their lives, bring up their children, have their moments of joy and sadness, just like the rest of us.

The negotiations have been going on for months, but the official deadline for their conclusion was midnight between Thursday and Friday. Blair was there from Tuesday, as was Bertie Ahern, the Irish Prime Minister. It looks as if they shuttled back and forth between the parties as they debated the text which George Mitchell, the chairman of the talks, produced. I think the Unionists had the hardest time accepting the document, in particular the idea that, through the North-South assembly, the Republic would have some say, however limited, in the affairs of the province. I imagine that Blair did a lot to persuade David Trimble, the Unionist leader, to take the political gamble of displeasing some of his hard-line colleagues, risking a revolt even. There were a couple of moments on Thursday when it looked as if the Unionists might walk away. The midnight deadline came and went, and they all went on talking most of the night, and came to an agreement I think about five in the morning. When I turned on the radio at 8.00am UK time, the BBC was reporting that the deal was done, though there was no official pronouncement. I think there must have been further difficulties during the day, while they printed the document, because the official statement by all of the parties didn’t come until after five. But in the end they all stood up and said, ‘Yes, we’ll do this.’ It’s the most wonderful triumph for peace and common sense over bigotry and violence. It’s a constitutional compromise, and a complex one, but there is no other way through.

The agreement cleared its first and perhaps its most difficult hurdle this afternoon when the Ulster Unionist party executive approved it, despite dissent.

The scale of the triumph for Blair personally is enormous. It doesn’t fall to many of us, even to political leaders, to evidently change the world for the better, and I think he has done that.

We went to the Musée Marmottan this morning to look at the Monets, lunched in the 16th, walked in the Bois de Boulogne, went into the Jardins de la Bagatelle, admired the tulips, daffodils, cherry blossom, the trees all in leaf. I fell asleep in front of the orangerie, with Lindsay James. David and she are with us here. They’re expecting a baby, and are very happy.

We drove down to Kerfontaine this afternoon. French countryside looking wonderful; bright green after all the rain, cowslips and primroses everywhere in the verges. Not much traffic — everyone who had gone away for Easter had got there. The weather the full April mixture. It’s freezing cold when the clouds cover the sun, with blasts of rain and hail. When the sun comes out it’s warm and everything shines like paradise.

I read an English paper when I got here. The thing that held up the agreement on Friday afternoon was the Unionists’ worry that Gerry Adams might be allowed on to the executive of the new Northern Ireland Assembly before the IRA had started decommissioning its arms stock. Trimble wanted a piece of linkage to be put into the agreement specifically denying Adams a place on the executive until the weapons were being handed in. Blair said no: the same rules would apply to Catholic and Protestant paramilitary groups, and the presumption was that decommissioning would be simultaneous with the setting up of the Assembly and the appointment of the executive. He gave Trimble a letter promising to press for a change in the rules of the Assembly if Adams participated in the business of the executive before decommissioning was under way. And he phoned Bill Clinton and asked him to phone Trimble to encourage him to make the final step. Which Clinton did, and Trimble did.

I find myself exhilarated, as an outsider with a close interest in and deep love for both parts of Ireland. We’ve made one series promoting Education for Mutual Understanding (as they call it in the province), and we’re going to make three more for next school year. I’ve been to Northern Ireland many times on business, and I count Peter Logue, the C4 Schools education officer there, a close friend. I’m delighted for him, and looking forward to talking to him about it all.

The newspaper said that the mood of ordinary people in Northern Ireland is not one of exhilaration, more of deep wariness, a reluctance to believe that peace has really arrived. I can understand that. There will be a bitterly fought referendum campaign, with the DUP, disaffected sections of the UUP and small extremist groups on both sides against. But I think there will be a resounding yes to the proposals. It needs to be resounding — at least 70%, I would say — to give full legitimacy to the agreement, and to marginalise those who would wreck it. I’m afraid there will still be some deaths. But the achievement this Easter is hope, and I can’t help thinking about the symbolism of it: Easter 1916, Easter 1998. Two kinds of Christian belief agreeing to try to live together in peace, as the great Christian feast of hope and regeneration passes.

An Apprentice Boys march in Derry today passed off peacefully — a good sign. The question of handing in weapons is becoming important now, with the Unionists worried that the IRA’s obligation to hand in its weapons is too vaguely expressed in the agreement. They don’t want their leader sitting down in any executive with Sinn Fein until some decommissioning has been seen to take place. But as John Hume said on the radio at lunchtime, the important question is whether anybody will use weapons, not whether they are rusting in a loft or in a field somewhere. It’s going to be a difficult few months, with the biggest doubt being whether the majority of Unionist opinion will support the deal. Strange really, because the Unionists have had to give up a great deal less than have the Nationalists.

Seamus Heaney, writing in the Irish Times on Saturday: ‘If revolution is the kicking down of a rotten door, evolution is more like pushing the stone from the mouth of the tomb. There is an Easter energy about it, a sense of arrival rather than wreckage. And what is nonpareil about the new conditions is the promise they offer of a new covenant between people living in this country. For once, and at long last, the language of the Bible can be appropriated by those with a vision of the future rather than those who sing the battle hymns of the past.’

The situation in Ireland is holding. The two largest Protestant paramilitary organisations voted for the peace deal. Sinn Fein has another conference on 10 May to decide its official position. It’s obvious that Adams and McGuinness want the party to say yes, but there are a lot of uncompromising republicans who have to be placated, if not convinced. Meanwhile, extremist Protestant paramilitaries have killed two or three Catholics since Good Friday, in a dreadful stupid effort to provoke a backlash which could bring the deal down. So far, there has been no revenge from equivalent Catholic organisations.

The referendum held in Northern Ireland last Friday produced a vote in favour of the Good Friday agreement, by a percentage of 71.12% to 28.88%, on a turn-out of about 81%. It was a wonderful result. It gives authority to the agreement and it opens up the possibility that the basis of politics in Northern Ireland might become non-sectarian, like politics in Britain. Most important, if the assembly which will be elected on 25 June proves effective, if arms are given up, if prisoners are released without provoking violent revenge from victims’ friends and families (three big ifs), there is the extraordinary prospect of the people of Northern Ireland coming to live ordinary lives, with ordinary joys and sorrows, like the rest of us. On the same day as the Northern Ireland referendum, the Republic of Ireland voted by a huge percentage (94.5% to 5.5%), on a lower turn-out of about 55%, to abandon its territorial claim to the North. That was an equally impressive result, and shows how much the Republic has grown up these 25 years, since it’s been in the EU. It’s moving fast in a modern, secular direction, and cares less for old tribal wars or fixed definitions of nationhood.

We spent the late May bank holiday weekend in Shrewsbury, with Andrew and Annie Bannerman. The county looked entrancing in its unofficial beauty, its sense of lostness, just when you thought everywhere had been completely discovered and organised. A lane in the south of the county, somewhere near Bishop’s Castle, had campion, stitchwort and wild geranium, as well as cow parsley and buttercup.

On the way back from Stockholm, where Paul and I have been since Tuesday, at the annual European Broadcasting Union education conference. This afternoon, before coming to the airport, we went to the Historical Museum, where I bought a necklace in the Viking style for Helen, and to the Vasa Museum, where there is an enormous wooden war ship with that name. On 10 August 1628 it sank in Stockholm harbour on its maiden voyage. It must have been one of the biggest ships in the world at the time. The king wanted it huge and high. The shipwright told the king it was dangerously unbalanced, especially with the new heavy cannon aboard. The king insisted. Down it went. In the 1950s, largely thanks to the enthusiasm of one man, it was raised. It is a splendid, awe-inspiring vessel, its great wooden hull adorned with wooden sculptures, the wood preserved for 330 years in the brackish waters of the harbour. Splendid and awe-inspiring, and fatally flawed.

From 35,000 feet the clouds at half our height cast their oblique shadows on the calm, wrinkled sea.

When you’re in an airport people are at their least attractive. They’re anxious, sweating lumps of need, creatures whose requirement to eat, drink, urinate, defecate, spend money, telephone and flick through magazines makes you see them as a planner, an actuary or a mortuary technician might see them; not as a priest might see them, or a lover.

The first elections to the new Northern Ireland Assembly were held on 22 June. Via a complex system of proportional representation, the people elected an Assembly of 108 people. Of these, an adequate majority wants the Assembly and the Good Friday agreement to work. That majority should be able to pass all votes, however much Paisley and the other nay-sayers may protest and filibuster. So far, so good. However, for several days now Orangemen have been trying to march down the Catholic Garvaghy Road on their way back from a church parade at Drumcree. The Parades Commission has forbidden them from taking this route. There is a huge gathering of loyalists in the fields around Portadown and Drumcree. Amongst them are some who see this as their chance to cripple the agreement, and reverse all the political progress (to them, betrayal) of recent months. It’s a momentous challenge for Blair, Mowlem and everybody on the ‘Yes’ side. Because the political achievement so far has been so exhilarating, the Government knows it cannot yield to this pressure. Meanwhile, three young boys, brothers, were burnt to death last night in a house on a Protestant estate at Ballymoney. They were killed by Protestant rioters who knew that their mother was a Catholic, although they were being brought up as Protestants. It’s the most gruesome extreme of a regular pattern of intimidation of Catholics at this time of year. For the yea-sayers, it’s a matter of holding on grimly to the gains.

To the outsider, the whole fuss leading up to 12 July each year looks so bizarre, so completely outmoded as a form of cultural statement. ‘I want to continue, symbolically, to remind you that we’re top dogs, we run this show, we beat you in 1690, we’ll beat you again now if you give us an excuse.’

I’m at my parents’ house, writing at a desk looking out over the back garden. There’s a violent wind blowing; more a wind of March or November than of July. It poured with rain most of yesterday and until about four o’clock this afternoon. Since the beginning of June there’s been no summer. There have been two or three bright days here and there, but no steady settled period of heat and calm. No mood of summer. I have a vague feeling that this is one of the eccentric weather patterns occurring all over the world, and our fault.

A good effect of the dreadful murders I wrote about last Sunday has been to destroy the momentum of the Orange demonstration at Drumcree. Until last Saturday night, the marching of Orangemen looked capable of challenging the consensus around the agreement and the new Assembly (though not destroying it). Now, there’s little stomach for the fight. Several of the Orangemen’s own leaders have told them to go home.

Peter Logue told me on the phone the other day that he, a man of nearly 50, was stopped by 15-year-olds at a roadblock. They demanded to know his name and his business. Madness. The astonishing arrogance of ignorant children who think, wrongly, that history is on their side.

I finished work last Friday 31 July, and the next morning we came, via the Channel Tunnel and Charles de Gaulle Airport, to Vietnam. Slept surprisingly well on the plane. Touched down at Bangkok for an hour, and then on to Ho Chi Minh City, over the plains of Cambodia, where the world’s worst genocide since the Second World War took place. An hour’s hop, a tomato juice, a curious gaze from the window. Taxiing at Ho Chi Minh, we passed the extensive ugly remnants (bunkers, concrete helicopter shelters) of what must have been a huge American base during the war and, in a corner, abandoned and rusting Russian civil aircraft from the immediate post-war period. Put not your trust in princes.

An alert taxi driver in the crowd outside the airport took us effortlessly to his car, and drove us to the Hotel Majestic. The drive was one of those experiences of rarity, novelty. There are few private cars in Vietnam, and a profusion of bicycles and motorcycles. The motorcycles are mainly not the speed machines of the West, but the Honda 50 and equivalent. There are a few of the newly-chic Piaggios and Lambrettas. So everyone moves at about 20mph. It’s companionable. People converse. The few four-wheeled vehicles — lorries, buses, taxis including ours, the very rare imported BMW — hoot all the time, not as a rebuke but as a warning. Remarkable feats of steering and last-second avoidance of collision are achieved constantly, and as normal. You might see a family of four on one bicycle, as long as the children are still small. Exquisite girls and young women, on the backs of motorcycles driven by men, sit astride if wearing trousers — either Western-style, or with the trouser part of the Vietnamese women’s costume, and an upper tunic — or side-saddle and cross-legged if wearing a dress. Exquisite single girls and women driving their own motorcycles often wear long gloves up to and above the elbow, and masks over their faces up to the eyes. Protection from the sun, not modesty. The women seem liberated. Straw hats, not rustic but elegantly styled with a flower motif at the back, are common.

The Majestic deserves its name. It’s true art deco inside and out, on a grand scale, overlooking the Saigon river. They’ve restored it recently. Occupying our room was like moving into a museum of furniture and décor. The high-backed wooden chairs, the neat modern leather armchairs, were 60 or 70 years old, not just good imitations of that period. Ditto the coloured tiles around the mirrors in the bathroom, and the bath itself. There was a curved writing table, of good size, with a brass and frosted-glass lamp standing on its marqueterie top, that made me want to check in for six months and write an important novel, working regular hours, six a day, six days a week. The balcony gave on to the boulevard beside the river, fully flowing in both directions with two-wheeled traffic. We dined in the open-air restaurant on the top floor (same view) and then went walking along the boulevard. There are parks with hundreds of benches between the road and the river. On each of them sat a courting couple, hand in hand, or his arm round her waist, or — very occasionally — in an embrace, but not moving, simply sitting close in a pose of longing. And in front of each couple, often with the boy’s feet resting on it, the motorcycle. A little bit further down the boulevard, there are cafés with hundreds of outside seats like double deck-chairs, all facing the river. Because we were behind the seats, and Vietnamese are generally small people, the deck-chairs seemed empty. But standing next to each was the tell-tale motorcycle. The cafés were full, but the lighting was poor and there was almost no noise. We went back to our splendid room with its bed wide enough for at least three of the courting couples, the bed surrounded by a large deco motif of an heroic woman driving a chariot, and slept until eight.

Later that morning, the taxi back to the airport, paid for in local currency (about 13,000 dong to the dollar, 20,000 to the pound), cost a third of that the previous day, when we had paid in dollars. The flight from Ho Chi Minh to Nha Trang — 75 minutes in a modern Fokker propeller plane, not flying too high — was magnificent, on a clear day with small white clouds below us. First we saw the Mekong delta, a huge network of silver rivers and canals threading the thousands of rice fields. Later, we crossed high, forested hills, some with neat terracing on their lower slopes. At the end of the flight, we descended the hills to the coastal plain, flew over Nha Trang and out to sea, made a turn over the islands in the bay, the sea a general deep blue but green turquoise at the islands’ shores, and landed.

The Ana Mandara Beach Resort is top-of-the-range tasteful ‘vernacular’. A complex of low pavilions faces the sea. Ours gives straight on to the beach. We have every luxury. Bright orange flowers blossom in the little garden in front of me. Huge butterflies feed on the flowers. Conical thatched canopies provide shade on the beach for lounging Japanese, French, Italians, English. The Vietnamese staff are charmingly attentive but not excessively deferential. On Monday evening we took cyclos (pedal-cycle taxis, one person per taxi) into town, which is at the north end of the beach, and where the reality of ordinary life in a medium-sized town in a poor country intrudes. It was exciting to be pedalled around in the flux of the traffic, smiling back at the curious, friendly gazes of townspeople on the move or sitting outside their houses and shops in family groups. Our drivers gave us a tour of the town before depositing us at the Lac Canh restaurant, where we ate crab soup with asparagus, sizzled beef cubes in black bean sauce, big prawns in chilli sauce, rice, mangoes and dragon fruit, with Vietnamese beer, for 100,000 dong — a fiver. The drivers waited at the end of the street while we ate. It was raining when we’d finished, and they pedalled us home protected by the cyclos’ waterproof covering, with a narrow peep-hole to see ahead. It was like being a baby in a pram.

Yesterday was Helen’s 50th birthday. We rose at nine, breakfasted. Then Helen had a long massage, from which she emerged slightly pale and sticky with baby oil. The masseuse had probed sites of tension Helen didn’t know she had. After that we had fresh coconut juice at the bar, and walked 100 yards to the Italian restaurant next door to the hotel, also overlooking the beach, where the bruschetta and pasta are excellent. We said to each other how nice it would be to go out around the islands on a boat, so after lunch I enquired at reception, and ten minutes later we were off, just the two of us, on a blue boat with two crew. We sailed for four hours around the islands, passing little shoreline villages. Most of the houses are the simplest of shacks, but there are some solider, nicely designed, attractively painted houses. I pointed these out to Dung, who was in charge of the boat. ‘These people have children overseas,’ he said. Near the villages are family graves, again brightly painted. Boys played football on each beach. Electricity comes from wind generators. Most of the houses, including the simplest, have television masts. Dung said that there is a school on each of the larger islands. The teacher sails across from Nha Trang every day. But there are no roads, only paths over the hills. No motor vehicles of any kind, except the fishing boats which provide the islanders’ income. I noticed also that some of the slopes above the villages had been partly cleared of the wild growth, and eucalyptus, banana and coconut trees had been planted. During the afternoon we saw flying fish, zebra fish and jellyfish. Dung taught me some words of Vietnamese, which he wrote in this book when we got back to shore. It was the most perfect, thrilling and romantic time. We landed on the shore by the hotel as it was getting dark. I was so pleased to have arranged an exceptional experience for Helen on her birthday. We had baths and dined on seafood around the swimming pool, by the light of flares.

And the next day, we did more or less the same thing! This time Dung and his boat driver took us the other way, north along the coastline. We passed the shacks crowded around the mouth of the river at Nha Trang, and on around headlands which we can see from the hotel, which hide deep inlets of sea. Then we sailed straight across the mouth of the bay to the back of the island where we had been the day before. We stopped in a little bay where there was another village — same thing as yesterday, including boys playing football — and Dung and I climbed off the boat to swim. Both of us were immediately stung by jellyfish, so it wasn’t quite the idyllic moment of natural pleasure I had been planning. But we sailed back to the hotel cheerfully enough, again landing in the dusk.

We dined on Thai food in the evening, which was very hot, so we drank several cans of beer with it. Feeling rather heavy afterwards, we went for a walk along the seafront road outside the hotel. The walk reminded me of the story of the Buddha as a young prince, whose father ordered that he be kept inside the walled grounds of the palace, and experience only pleasure in the beauty of his surroundings. Even the dying flowers on bushes were to be removed by servants every day, so the prince only saw flowers in bud or full bloom. One day the prince, seeing the gate of the palace compound, insisted that his personal servant drive him outside. In the town beyond the walls, the prince saw poverty, ugliness, old age and death. Ana Mandara is as close to the prince’s father’s palace as I am ever likely to get. The seafront road outside had plenty of poverty and ugliness, though we saw no death and little old age (the people on the streets were mainly young). Piles of rubbish left on patches of waste ground. An ancient diesel lorry, stationary, engine running and pumping black fumes into the night air. People by the roadside trying to make a living, at ten o’clock at night, selling a can of Pepsi or a packet of soap.

The rest of the holiday passed happily and memorably. One day we hired a taxi and drove to a place called Doc Let, about 40 kilometres north of Nha Trang. Here was the perfect tropical beach: an arc of bay; clear, warm turquoise water; white, soft, gently shelving sand. It was Saturday, and there were busloads of Vietnamese families who’d come for a day out by the sea. We walked up the beach a little, and found a spot in the shade of a palm, and I went swimming. Exquisite. As I was swimming, I looked back and saw that a group of Vietnamese women in their conical straw hats had come and sat next to Helen. When I emerged from the water, they offered me a massage, which I accepted. There was a little boy with them, selling two coconuts. I bought them both, one after the other. Coconut juice and an all-over massage, administered by three women at once, on Doc Let beach, is an experience of multiple pleasure. Then it came on to rain, and we took the taxi back to Nha Trang, with the oldest of the masseuses sitting in the front seat, delighted with her luck in getting a lift to her house.

The next day, our last full day before flying back to Ho Chi Minh, I went out alone on Dung’s boat. Just him and me. It had rained, and was overcast, and Helen didn’t fancy it. We went straight out to two little islands on the horizon, uninhabited except by birds. Most of the birds are swifts, thousands of them wheeling and screaming around the islands’ rocky faces. They supply the nests which go into bird’s nest soup, an expensive delicacy in the region. I think men only go there at one or perhaps two seasons of the year to collect the nests: a precipitous feat. There were little shacks where the collectors shelter. The islands have a magical wildness, surrounded by deep, black water. Dung stopped the boat behind the second island and I dived in naked and swam around for ten minutes. It was a perfect moment. I kept thinking, ‘This is it. This is what you came here for. Experiences don’t come better than this, swimming naked off a boat in the black, warm water, in the lee of the island, with the swifts crying overhead.’

I had underestimated the time it would take to get back to Nha Trang, so it was dark when we arrived. Helen was angry because she was worried. I had missed an appointment for drinks with the hotel manager at seven. He had been very good and kept her spirits up.

The next afternoon we flew back to Ho Chi Minh, and stayed once again at the Majestic. On this occasion they gave us a suite. The interior was as on the previous occasion: just three times the size. I have never experienced such Babylonian luxury. We walked out to eat at a restaurant called The Lemon Grass: very good, hot Vietnamese food. On the way there I bought a copy of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, his novel set in the city, from a disabled street vendor. Life had not dealt this man many high cards, I thought as I unwrapped it from its plastic in the restaurant. It was a cheaply pirated copy of the Penguin paperback edition, legible but not attractive to read. I put it on one side and then forgot it when we left. It had cost me 50,000 dong (£2.50), and probably represented a very good sale for the man.

The next day our plane to Paris didn’t leave until the evening, so we had all day in the city. We hired two cyclos and rode around. The drivers took us to Cholon Market, in the Chinese area some five kilometres from downtown Ho Chi Minh. It is a huge warren of alleys selling everything edible, wearable and useable. A Western health and safety inspector would regard it as a disaster. I had an overwhelming sense of the imperative of commerce. Thousands of people, in tiny spaces, making a living. On the way back from the market were endless streets where people were doing a similar thing, but one step up the economic ladder. Rows of shops selling electrical goods. Dozens of bored young men sitting next to their piles of boxed-up television sets and food mixers, waiting for the one sale that would make their day.

We went to the Revolutionary Museum, which told the story of the fight for independence from the French, the war against the Americans, and the achievements of the government since. Because the building was being repaired and the ground floor was temporarily empty, we had to content ourselves with post-1954 history, on the first floor. The display was poor, the text only in Vietnamese, but the message of struggle and eventual triumph was clear. A thought struck me while I was in there, arising from two separate pieces of information I’d read in our guidebook. Ho Chi Minh, a man I broadly regard as a hero, developed his anti-colonial and communist thesis whilst travelling the world, and particularly in London and then Paris, where he contributed articles to L’Humanité, and moved in socialist and communist circles. I regard him as a hero because, despite the evident failure of Marxism-Leninism as a viable permanent means of organising societies, Ho Chi Minh’s achievement against the French and then the Americans is one of the century’s great examples of leadership against oppression. Elsewhere in the guidebook, it says that a younger man, Pol Pot, was also profoundly impressed by the orthodox Marxism of the French Communist Party when he was on a scholarship in Paris between 1949 and 1953. He returned to Cambodia with the intention of leading his country in the struggle for freedom, and we know what happened between 1975 and 1979. The Vietnamese army, after their final triumph against the Americans, had to invade Cambodia to put a stop to the slaughter. Two leaders, same ideological inspiration, different results. Of course, this is to say nothing of the catastrophic role which America played in the region from 1954 until 1975, but the comparison is still a fair one. The limits of ideology. The need for ideology to be realised with humanity.

Then we went back to the hotel for lunch. A little shopping in the afternoon — silk wearables for Helen — and the taxi to the airport. 14 hours later, we were in Paris.

It was an unforgettable trip. I carry with me three strong impressions: the beauty and fertility of the land; the kindness and the spirit of the people; and the daunting challenge facing the Vietnamese government in the immediate future. Marxism-Leninism is no match these days for Panasonic and Philips. The younger people see very clearly on their televisions the opportunities for self-improvement, and the strides that their neighbours in Singapore, Thailand and Taiwan are making. Children working abroad send or bring back surplus income which must look like a fortune to those stuck on incomes of the equivalent of 40 dollars a month, as my boatman was. (And he regarded himself as above the middle range of income.) And yet Ho Chi Minh City is not the polluted, grid-locked chaos of Bangkok, Djakarta or Manila. Vietnam hasn’t destroyed the beauty of its coastline by allowing foreign companies to build as they wish. The paternalistic, outmoded ideology maybe has a chance of steering balanced development slowly and without bottlenecks. The country needs the usual things: a good health service, decent affordable housing, more investment in the education system and the transport infrastructure. It needs steady growth in responsible exploitation of raw materials and in agriculture, where it should retain more added value in the country. In tourism, it should continue to cater for a smaller number of richer foreigners, like us. And it needs more factories turning out advanced products, or components for advanced products, to absorb some of the young people coming on to the labour market and to give families the opportunity of a second income. All this sounds like a World Bank report, but I reckon it’s true. I noticed in the English-language newspaper on our last day that Brian Wilson, one of our DTI ministers, was in town, doing some business on oil and gas and setting up a subsidiary of the Prudential. In the same paper, I saw that Volvo is selling its modern buses to the country for the first time. In poorer countries all over the world (I remember feeling exactly the same thing in Brazil) the choice is clear: go for the social democratic entitlements — education, health care, housing, transport, employment; reduce inequalities; care for the environment; or face disaster. Easier said than done.

Last Saturday a bomb exploded in Omagh, Northern Ireland, killing 28 people who were going about their ordinary business. It was planted by a lunatic fringe Republican group called the Real IRA. It was the most destructive single atrocity since the troubles began. All we can hope is that the political structures put in place this year will hold, and in particular that the Republicans within the peace deal — the IRA itself and Sinn Fein — will use their contacts to expose the remaining murderers on the outer flanks of the Republican movement. Even so, this autumn in the Northern Ireland Assembly will be difficult, with Paisley and his coalition of nay-sayers doing their best to obstruct progress and to undermine trust.

Yesterday Andrew Bannerman and I did our second performance of the Lyrical Ballads show, in London to an audience of about 120 people, and it was again a success. This time Michael Foot came out with us when we appeared, and did an introduction in which he linked the dissenting, anti-establishment, pro-freedom-of-thought achievement of Coleridge and Wordsworth, at least in their early careers, with the importance of defending Salman Rushdie’s right to publish The Satanic Verses. The day before, Iran had substantially modified, though not withdrawn, the threat to kill Rushdie, and Michael had appeared on Channel 4 News, opposite a scowling Muslim cleric (who’d probably been involved, I thought, in that business over our schools programme about the life of Mohammed), with Jon Snow in between. I had seen the interview, and suggested the connection to Michael as we were waiting to go on. He made it work beautifully in his speech, with flashes of that mixture of learning and rhetorical power for which he is famous and will be remembered.

Last Friday afternoon Helen’s aunt Eva fell in her flat and broke her hip. She was taken into hospital, diagnosed, and operated on the next day. A large steel screw was put in. It was the NHS at its best; an expensive operation, promptly and skilfully performed by a team of experts, on an old woman with no money. She’s recovering in a ward high up in the new block of St Mary’s Hospital, with a splendid view south over the city.

A long gap. It is a brilliant day in New York. For the second year running, I’m here for the International Emmy awards; our drama Blabber Mouth and Sticky Beak is nominated. I’ve been promoted; I’m now commissioning editor, English regions, in addition to my schools job. In my new role, I’m supposed to increase production for C4 in England outside the M25. I’ve got too much work, but I’m cheerful. On Friday one of our primary science programmes won the Ministry of Education prize at the Japan Prize: best programme for primary schools. Blabber Mouth and Sticky Beak won best children’s drama at the Australian Film Institute awards two Fridays before that.

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, I tried to skate, on Central Park lake. It was a disaster. I just kept falling over, again and again. Around me, children nonchalantly sped by, chatting, performing elegant turns and tricks like skating backwards. Humiliating. I stuck at it for about two hours, but had to retire, bruised.

This afternoon I walked down the Hudson River shore from the end of 46th Street to the World Trade Centre. It was a perfect sunny afternoon, and mild like spring. They’re slowly creating a long thin park all the way from 59th Street to the Battery. It’ll be excellent when finished. At the moment, there are still great slabs of desolation where once were harbours.

We won the Emmy. It was, once again, an exhilarating experience: a moment of intense joy and relief when you hear the first syllables of the name of your show! And briefly you’re famous. Photo-opportunities. People coming up to you in bars to shake your hand and touch the trophy. Andrew Bethell and Sandy Balfour, the producers, Julian Kemp, the director, and I partied until four. Mick Robertson was there too, and gallantly joined in, even though this year his Wise Up programme — which I’d also commissioned — hadn’t won. (He’d won the International Emmy for Best Children’s Programme for the previous three years running, which is I should think an unrepeatable feat, and he took defeat on the chin. But I could see he wanted a fourth, as I would have done.)

Eva’s recuperation, by contrast with the operation, has showed the NHS at its least impressive. From St Mary’s, she was moved to St Charles, off Ladbroke Grove. There she was placed in a ward with a dozen other very old, frail and sometimes mad women, and abandoned. She was minded rather than nursed. On Sunday afternoon, we arrived to find her shivering and ill. Helen recognised the familiar symptoms of her chronic chest infection. No, no, said the staff nurse, nothing wrong with her. Helen insisted, so the nurse called the doctor, who immediately diagnosed a chest infection and prescribed antibiotics.

It’s true that Eva can be rude and peremptory. I think she may have tried to order the nurses hither and yon, in her large voice and small English, and they had taken against her.

Helen has been wonderful all autumn, a model of commitment and loving concern, but the daily visits to the hospital, the boredom, the narrow round of actions and conversations, are taking their toll on her. Eva is now well enough to leave the hospital if we can find the right place for her to go, and we both think that a return to her flat is too dangerous. We have visited two residential homes so far, and Helen’s been told of a third. In the second that we visited, in Barnet, about half of the residents are Greek Cypriot. It’s run by a charming Indian man called Raj, who has learned a commendable amount of Greek. It would be fine, but it’s a long way from Camden Town, through the traffic, for frequent visits. The third house is at Finsbury Park; much closer.

The old year has run away in a mass of work and Christmas festivities. 10 days before Christmas, Eva went into the residential home at Finsbury Park. It’s only 10 minutes’ drive from our flat. Several of the residents are Cypriot (Greek or Turkish). Some of the staff are Cypriot. They’re nice to Eva, and the place is clean and comfortable, though not luxurious. It’s definitely the best solution for a 91-year-old who is no longer safe in her own flat. But it has caused Helen much organisational trouble and emotional turmoil. For the first time, she and I spent Christmas in our flat together, with Eva. We managed, although a moody and confused old woman who needs to go the toilet every half hour is a sobering companion. On Boxing Day morning, I went out to visit Paul and Vicki, and then Martina, and came back to find that Helen had had enough of Eva, who had just launched a verbal assault on her because of our decision to visit France for a few days over New Year, so we took Eva back to Finsbury Park. She seemed relieved to be there, though worried in case someone might have taken her room. We left her. (We heard yesterday that she had fallen in her room and bruised the side of her face, and was suffering from a chest infection again, so they had taken her to the Whittington Hospital, where she was comfortable.)

All of this has taken its toll on Helen, who became ill as we drove to Paris on the 27th. We had a good day there with Glenda and Julian Walton (who had flown over from Birmingham that morning), culminating in supper at Bofinger. But it was a sick woman I drove to Brittany on the 28th, in pouring rain most of the way, and we went straight to the doctor in Plouay. Traccheitis: antibiotics, throat syrup, paracetemol, go to bed. So she did, and stayed there for three days, eating little, sleeping a lot. She’s much better today, though still coughing.

It’s been a beautiful day, after the wild, gloomy weather of recent weeks. This morning as I drove to Plouay, the winter corn was brilliant green against the deep brown of the sodden fields. The little stream by the road as you enter the town was full, splashing round its curves, and a local mist hung a metre or two above it. At lunchtime you could say that the sun was warm on the cheek. I went for a walk this afternoon, following our stream, the Ruisseau du Saint Sauveur, up past three water mills in the space of about two kilometres. Yesterday’s technology. You can see the mill-races and the systems of sluices which force some water in a narrow, straightish line to the mill, while the rest takes its time and its own way through fields below. One mill is still working (though not today) but it uses electricity. At the other two, the wheel, made of stone with iron spokes, was leaning against the wall where it had been left years ago.

This afternoon I helped Albert cut and wash leeks: his champion production. Then Helen and I drove down to Guidel-Plages. The sea was a massive, gruesome sight after the strong winds of the last few days, great rollers following one another to shore, the water the colour of dull jade and the foam atop the waves a dirty white. But the astonishing sight, which I don’t recall ever seeing before, was in the constitution and accumulation of that foam. It was like the foam in an enormous washing machine, or on the top of a giant’s pint of Guinness; more air than water, so that it stuck against the rocks and sand dunes, and was blown in flecks and gobbets by the strong wind off the sea, and glued to the sides of walls. All the way along the beach I walked beside and through an ethereal bedroll of wriggling, shifting whipped foam. Walking through it provoked almost no wetness. And the strangest of all was that the waves made of this foam crashed silently on to the beach. The quantity and depth of the waves was such that in a normal sea you would hurry up the beach away from them, half excited, half scared. But here, though the usual sound of a wild winter sea was audible about 50 metres distant, you stood in a silent turbulence of accumulated airy waves, the air in which left them still standing once the force of each wave had passed.

And here we are again at Easter.

A list of things which the Government has done or is legislating for since coming to power, which I approve of and which wouldn’t have happened under a Conservative government.

1. The introduction of a minimum wage. It started two days ago and will benefit about two million people, mainly women, immediately.
2. The promise of legislation to give ramblers the right to roam over vast tracts of privately owned land.
3. The granting of full UK passports to all the remaining overseas territories.
4. The abolition of the voting and sitting rights of most of the hereditary peers in the House of Lords.
5. The guarantee of an adequate minimum income, through the minimum wage and the tax systems, for families where at least one member is working.
6. The guarantee of an adequate minimum income for pensioners.
7. Devolved governments for Scotland and Wales.
8. The extraordinary progress towards peace in Northern Ireland. (Still not quite there, and to be fair to John Major, he was moving in the right direction, much more slowly.)
9. The bringing of grant-maintained schools back into a local education authority framework.
10. The huge extra sums being spent on education and health.
11. The incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into English law.
12. Independence for the Bank of England, and the establishment of a single Financial Services Agency.
13. The abolition, from next April, of mortgage tax relief.
14. Support for the principle of the UK adopting the euro.
15. Abolition of GP fund-holding and its replacement by a fairer system.
16. Signing the social chapter of the Maastricht Treaty, which will improve workers’ rights.
17. Sorting out the disgusting scandal of the mis-selling of private pension schemes during the Thatcher years.
18. Holding General Pinochet for as long as we have. Jack Straw still has to make a final decision.
19. Jack Straw’s decision to hold the inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence, with all the revelations that has produced.
20. Bringing the rights of part-time workers much closer to those of full-time workers.
21. Making the age for consent for homosexual men the same as that for heterosexual people.
22. Much greater financial support for the British film industry.
23. John Prescott’s decision that the great majority of new house building will be in urban areas.
24. The windfall tax on the privatised utilities, and the spending of it on a welfare-to-work scheme for the young and long-term unemployed. (I’m not sure yet how effective the scheme is proving, but it’s worth trying.)
25. The agreement of a total ban, over the next few years, on tobacco advertising, including sponsorship, in the EU (despite the dreadful cock-up over Bernie Ecclestone’s gift to the Labour Party).

The reason I find myself making this list — a longer version of one I made when Labour was still in opposition — is that I’m continually in conversation with people ready to criticise the Blair government, ready to say it has sold out, that things aren’t much different from what they were under the Tories. I remain convinced that, perhaps prosaically and perhaps piecemeal, things are becoming different. If politics is the attempt to give organised reality to the best instincts of the human heart and the human reason, Labour has made significant headway in that attempt. It’s not that I’m uncritical. Blair shouldn’t have given such glib and ready support to Clinton over the bombings in Sudan and Afghanistan last summer. I think Irvine is a liability. So is Mandelson, who I think will have to be sacked before long. When is the Freedom of Information Act coming? Why have we delayed banning fox hunting? But overall, the progress has been remarkable, and commentators too easily forget that governing is difficult. Organising a darts match or a one-day conference is difficult. Governing a country, even with a big parliamentary majority, must be fiendishly difficult.

NATO is currently engaged in a just but terrible war against Milosevic of Serbia, whose forces have committed dreadful atrocities against the Albanian people of Kosovo. Milosevic’s long-term aim is to remove all Albanians from Kosovo, either by killing them or forcing them into exile. NATO forces are bombing military targets in Serbia, Kosovo and Montenegro. Milosevic’s response has been to accelerate the terror in Kosovo. It is likely that his force has committed many massacres there in the last 10 days, to add to the dreadful record of the previous year. Bad weather has interrupted and slowed NATO’s bombing campaign. That has given the Serb forces an advantage in pursuing their work. The refugee crisis in Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro is the largest seen in Europe since the Second World War. I hope and expect that NATO will eventually expel all Serb forces from Kosovo, whether by air attack alone or with an invasion on the ground, will allow the Albanian Kosovans to reclaim their houses, or the ruins of their houses, in security, and that Kosovo will become an independent state. It will probably be necessary for NATO, or perhaps the UN, to declare it an international protectorate first, and leave a sufficient force there to prevent further attack from Serbia. I think Montenegro may need to claim independence from Serbia too.

Critics of NATO’s action have pointed to equally awful situations in recent times — in Rwanda, in Bosnia, in Chechnia, with the Kurds in Turkey — where those with the power to intervene have not used that power. To criticise the present action because of past failures to act seems to me an elementary failure of logic. Of course we should have intervened in Rwanda, and more effectively in Bosnia. It might have been just to intervene in Chechnia, but the danger of challenging an ex-superpower still in shaky possession of nuclear weapons made it impossible. As for the Kurds in Turkey, I don’t know. At least we have intervened to challenge Saddam Hussein’s treatment of the Kurds in Iraq. The point is that our failure sometimes in the past to act where we could and should have is not an argument against acting where we can and should now.

I’m sorry that the UN hasn’t explicitly authorised military action. I guess it couldn’t persuade Russia not to use its veto. But there have been numerous Security Council resolutions this year and last, condemning Milosevic’s barbarism, for example Resolution 1199 (23 September 1998): ‘Gravely concerned at the recent intense fighting in Kosovo and in particular the excessive and indiscriminate use of force by Serbian security forces and the Yugoslav Army which have resulted in numerous civilian casualties and, according to the estimate of the Secretary-General, the displacement of over 230,000 people from their homes…’ There is slowly coming into being an internationalist understanding that barbarity is not to be tolerated just because it occurs within the borders of a sovereign state. There are occasions, very rare occasions, on which international forces must intervene in the internal affairs of a sovereign state in order to challenge barbarity and to reverse barbaric actions. This is one of them.

The main event in Helen’s and my personal lives since January, when I last wrote in this book, is her aunt Eva’s death. Eve died in her sleep, in a nursing home in Finsbury Park, on the evening of 20 February, between 9 and 10. At 9 she was sleeping. At 10 she was dead. We were in Marseille, staying with Mary and her beautiful new man Jacques, who have moved there from Viens, and we didn’t know until we got back to London the following evening.

Eva was at Oak Lodge only for about two months. She was reduced, mentally and physically, to a point where life no longer held pleasure for her, nor for Helen in her effort to keep contact with her. It was hard to know whether or not she recognised Helen and me when we visited. She half-sat, half-lay in a chair. She was taken to bed early every evening, and given a sleeping pill. We couldn’t tell whether she was suffering from dementia, or whether she had taken a deliberate decision, which she stubbornly adhered to, to withdraw from normal human communication, as a statement of helpless rage at the choices we had made on her behalf.

Helen was very upset for a few days after Eva’s death, but then broke through to the correct realisation that Eva had had a long life, and that most of it had been happy and effective. Helen had fully repaid to Eva, over many years, the care she received from her as a child and young person. Now Helen is freer than she has been for a long time. No more daily, sometimes hourly, phone calls. No need to visit three or four times a week. No longer the sense of obligation, of never being able to do enough to satisfy Eva’s need for attention, which occupied the last years. Eva’s death is the end of a long chapter in Helen’s life, and of quite a long one in mine.

The war in Kosovo makes slow progress. (But it hasn’t yet been going a fortnight; how strange that remark would have sounded in the Second World War.) The refugees continue to flood into neighbouring countries. Some NATO states are arranging to give the refugees temporary asylum, but all are anxious not to appear to be helping Milosevic solve the problem he has created. I get the impression that the attitudes of the Western leaders have hardened to the point where only a complete withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo will now do. The NATO countries cannot afford to allow NATO to fail. I think they will have to put in ground troops to protect the returning Albanians. Whether those ground troops will need to fight their way in, or whether they’ll go in once the air bombardment has shattered Serb resistance, is too early to tell. I just hope the leaders don’t end up doing some kind of deal with the bastard, as was done in Bosnia. Milosevic’s eventual plan, whose fulfilment may finally have been prevented by the events of the last ten days, has always been a greater Serbia, ethnically pure, and consisting of Serbia proper, Montenegro, part or all of Kosovo, and the Serb statelet in Bosnia which he was allowed under the Dayton peace accord. Lebensraum for the heroic Serb race. I fear that ordinary Serbs will be led to disaster by the ambitions of their leader, as were ordinary Germans sixty years ago.

Last Thursday night, in the queer old-fashioned Hôtel Meurice in Calais, there was this nice touch when we went back up to the room after dinner: instead of After Eight mints, some stanzas from a poem by Gautier on the dressing table.

I thought I’d have a go at translating it.

The situation in Kosovo is awful. I fear that the massacre of Kosovans, overwhelmingly men, in the weeks since the NATO bombardment began, will be measured, when the truth is discovered, in hundreds of thousands. I think about 2,000 Kosovans were killed before that, from the time when Milosevic began his pogrom. I don’t doubt that we were right to challenge barbarism by force. If it turns out that Milosevic’s response to our action was to kill many times more people, more quickly, than he would have killed if we hadn’t intervened, we will be presented with the desperate truth that only immediate intervention on the ground, accepting many casualties on our side, would have stopped him straight away. Of course we shall stop him eventually, but in the meantime… Apart from that, a NATO bomber killed about 10 civilians by accident yesterday, trying to hit a bridge. The pilot had already triggered the mechanism to release his bomb on to the bridge when he saw that a train was approaching it. And today, bombing by one side or the other killed refugees (between 20 and 70) trying to reach Albania in carts. Serbia says it was NATO. NATO is tight-lipped this evening. It might have been the Serbs, or it might have been us by accident. It might have been that Serbia was putting the refugees deliberately close to a military convoy in the hope that NATO would kill them by accident, giving Serbia a big propaganda coup. We are in darkness in that part of Europe at the moment, though I think there will be a dramatic political solution of some kind when Milosevic has to give in. (An EU protectorate, guaranteed by NATO?)

As I feared three days ago, the refugees were killed by an American pilot who says he saw and fired at a military vehicle. Whether or not there was a military vehicle there too, the fact is that the missile hit a convoy of carts, and killed about 60 of the people we are trying to help. It is the worst moment, from NATO’s point of view, in the war so far. But the pilot’s own account of the devastation he saw before deciding to release the missile is an indication of the dreadful simplicity of Milosevic’s plan. His forces are simply burning all property belonging to Albanians in Kosovo, and killing, raping or expelling all the people. He wants to empty Kosovo of Albanians, so that he can then rebuild it and fill it with Serbs.

NATO will reverse this action. It is a matter of course that the most powerful military alliance in the world will have its way, given that there is no military opposition to it from outside Serbia, and given that the cause is just. But the longer we delay sending a ground force into Kosovo, and the longer the air bombardment is delayed by the cloudy weather, the worse will be the destruction and slaughter inflicted before Milosevic’s action can begin to be reversed.

On Friday morning I went to the funeral of Eddie Rosen, my friend Michael Rosen’s second son. Eddie died of meningitis at the age of 18. A dreadful event: fickle and brutal. There were at least 200 people there, and it was the most intense funeral I’ve been to. Very moving contributions — poems and reminiscences — from Eddie’s family and friends. A deep collective outpouring of grief. I haven’t seen Eddie since he was a baby, when we used to go to Michael and Susannah on Saturday evenings.

The funeral was at the City of London crematorium, and we went back to Michael’s home afterwards.

I said to Susannah that I remembered the baby, how he laughed all the time and how she had predicted, correctly, that he was going to be a joker. All the tributes said that he was a great wit. He left school (Haverstock) at 16, and went to work in stage crews at West End theatres. He was at Drury Lane when he died. He had written comedy scripts, which good judges said were truly funny, and that is perhaps what he would have gone on to do.

Kosovo continues in catastrophe. Milosevic’s forces continue to murder, rape and expel Albanians. NATO continues to bomb, and its targets have moved progressively away from the purely military to the civilian with some military significance. So they bombed the television station. They have bombed bridges and roads. And they continue, inevitably, to make dreadful errors from time to time. The other night they hit the Chinese embassy by accident, and killed three or four people. It was just about as bad a diplomatic blunder as they could have made. There have been big anti-British and anti-American demonstrations in China.

Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of refugees are now in Macedonia, Albania and Croatia. A few tens of thousands have been flown to western European countries. Germany has taken the most. We’ve taken very few so far, though we say we’re willing to take more.

Milosevic is edging towards NATO’s demands, very slowly. He doesn’t seem to realise that NATO, for its own reasons, can’t afford to compromise. It will eject Serbian forces, it will put in an armed international force, and it will see that the refugees return to their homes. If it doesn’t achieve these things, the most powerful military alliance in the history of the world will be shown to be impotent. The only questions are: will a ground invasion, contested, be necessary, and when? Or will diplomacy and Milosevic’s weakness mean that forces will eventually go in unchallenged?

Another dreadful apparent blunder in Kosovo. NATO bombed a place which they said was a military command centre. Serbia said they’d bombed a village. 82 people have been killed. Journalists arriving on the scene could see no sign that this could have been a legitimate military target. So the two versions are incompatible. After the bombing of the Chinese embassy, when NATO eventually admitted that they’d used an out-of-date map, the inclination to believe NATO’s version is weaker. Mary Robinson, the UN’s human rights commissioner, yesterday hit exactly the right note when she said that the NATO campaign had lost its moral focus. Too many mistakes. Too much blurring of military and civilian targets. She didn’t fail to put the major blame for the tragedy where it belongs — with Milosevic. But we’re in a grim period at the moment, where innocents are being slaughtered by both sides, and NATO’s promised outcomes are not in sight.

The Western European Union merged with the EU last week. Nobody much noticed. But it was significant, in that there now exists the European pillar of what could become the worldwide network of defence and security alliances about which I’ve sometimes written before. At its best, these alliances, some time well into the next century, could act decisively against tyranny of the sort we’ve seen in Iraq, in Rwanda, in East Timor, in Kosovo; equally important, the existence of the alliances could mean that potential tyrants would realise that they were not free to commit atrocities, without fear of punishment, just because they ruled a sovereign state.

Yesterday was my brother Mark’s wedding to his new wife Gill. The service, in a church in Bristol called The Ark, was charismatic, with a rock band. The congregation greeted the announcement that the couple were man and wife with prolonged applause and the letting off of exploding streamers. The band played When I’m 64 as the couple walked out. The reception was held in a girls’ private school near the Severn. We had provided the champagne, and had stowed 46 bottles in the fridge there the night before. When we arrived at the school after the wedding, the fridge turned out to not have been working. A large quantity of champagne was at the temperature of the warm spring day. On realising the trouble, we jammed the bottles into a chest freezer, which was working, and they were cold enough after 90 minutes. Thereafter, they had their effect, adding to the existing general atmosphere of charisma. There was a good band, and Helen and I jived all evening. Drove back to London on an empty motorway. Home about 1.30.

The Kosovo war has got to the stage where the Serbs are almost beaten as a military force, but NATO either can’t quite agree what to do next, or they’re keeping their intentions a secret under cover of apparent irresolution. Milosevic was today indicted as a war criminal by the UN. That’s significant. I think it must mean that Kosovo could never return to his governance. So either he must go or Kosovo must be severed from Yugoslavia, or both. Good. But the refugee crisis in the neighbouring states is very grave. There are great tented cities on the plains of both countries: lines and lines of stout canvas dwellings. Well organised. The people queue for food patiently, expecting to be served. They are served. Macedonia and Albania, poor countries both, have coped heroically overall, whatever local difficulties and anger there have been. It amazes me really that there has been no rioting by resentful local people.

The war in Kosovo may well have ended. The Serbs eventually signed an agreement under which their forces will withdraw to Serbia, and an international UN-approved force will move into Kosovo in order to protect returning refugees. There will then be a huge task of reconstruction. No doubt evidence of dreadful acts committed by the Serbs during the 11 weeks of the air war will be discovered. But the strategy has been successful. The answer to the question I asked on 11 May — whether ground forces will go in unchallenged — is: they will. So, though it was a tragedy that we had to go to war and though we killed some innocents accidentally in the war, we did insist that barbarism would not prevail in Europe. I hope it’s the last time in my lifetime that anyone tries it on our continent. And I hope the action sets a precedent which international organisations will follow increasingly. The fact that a state is sovereign should give no protection to those wishing to commit barbarism within that state.

All Serbian forces have now left Kosovo, and the war is officially over. Large teams of investigators are now studying the evidence of a rampage of evil, in which some Serbs killed, mutilated, wounded, raped, robbed, terrorised and expelled many Albanian Kosovans. The dreadful truth seems to be that the pace and intensity of the violence increased once the air war began. Current estimates are of about 10,000 murders, far fewer than I had feared. But it is the case that because of the air war, more Albanians have suffered during the period of the war than would have been the case if we hadn’t bombed. But if we hadn’t intervened, Milosevic would certainly have gone on to commit full-scale genocide against an entire people. It’s a cold calculation, but we have drawn a line.

It’s a perfect afternoon of early summer. The English countryside is lovely: fully in bloom, but young yet. From time to time, breathtaking quantities of poppies stain whole fields red. A simple, explicit thought occurred to me as I was coming up to Sheffield this morning, and I realise now that it's a thought I’ve been half-having all my life, but was always reluctant to say absolutely explicitly to myself. Most new (post-1900) building in this country is ugly. An assault on the landscape. Mostly, we build shelters as economically as possible, no matter what they look like. There are exceptions, thank God, but that’s not the point. The point is that the mass-produced building of this closing century, better of course in terms of comfort and amenity than any previous building for the common people, lacks charm. Somehow, it’s a relief to say that, like getting bad news out into the open. Britain industrialised first, has a large population on a small island, has a more liberal (in the market-versus-state sense) political system than do some other European countries, notably France. The result: much ugliness. In addition, and less tangibly, I wonder whether our builders and their workers, and the planners and committees standing behind them, have less of a sense of the comely than do their equivalents in other countries. Something in our culture and history, whatever our genius in other fields, equips us ill for the simple, central task of building shelters for the people which please the eye as well as keep the occupants warm and dry.

We’re in the midst of a spell of lovely hot weather. Helen and I spent the weekend in Suffolk with Peter Adams, as ever about this time of year. On Saturday afternoon we walked out along the salt marshes from Orford: the sun bright, the breeze strong and invigorating. Joyful. A good deal of the newer building in Framlingham, Aldeburgh, Southwold and the villages around there is fine, contradicting my gloomy pronouncement in the previous entry. I felt consoled. And of course the older building is wonderful. I shouldn’t forget that the older building which survives is, for the most part, the better building for richer people. The hovels have gone. Perhaps I would have felt the same about the hovels, if I had been travelling on a train in the 19th century, as I feel about the 20th-century housing estates now.

13 days into my holiday, and I’m feeling properly détendu. We’ve come down from Brittany to the Charente to stay with Stephen and Theresa, as we did two years ago. A perfect sense of summer calm, of being in the midst of rest. Last year’s work has dipped below the horizon. Next year’s has not yet appeared. (See how, for me, ‘year’ still means school year more than calendar year.) Today we went to Brantôme, a beautiful town in the Dordogne, encircled by the River Dronne. We lunched very well on the terrace of the Hôtel Chabrol, overlooking the river. I’ve just swum in the Dronne at Aubeterre, as I did two years ago. A cool green river, at evening. A kingfisher accompanied me all the way.

In front of me, the neighbour’s scruffy farmyard contains an astonishing profusion of poultry: hens in great variety, and an equal diversity of ducks, including the extraordinary Muscovy. All day they circulate around the shambolic outbuildings and rusting machinery, pecking, following each other in lines, fighting, fucking. Yesterday evening, drinking a Pimms and waiting to go out to dinner, I watched as several of the hens took lumps of flesh off a dead rat: not necessarily what the consumer has in mind when choosing free-range eggs in the supermarket.

The last days of the holiday brought the dreadful news that Ros Moger has died. She was a lovely person, one of our circle of ex-ILEA English teachers, a comrade. She was with her lover, Martin Buck, in Australia, and they stayed a few days with Bronwyn and Stephen Mellor in Perth before flying back home.

Bronwyn and Stephen saw them off at the airport. On the flight, I think about four hours from London, Ros suffered a coronary embolism, and died within a few minutes. Martin sat next to her body laid out along the back row of seats for the rest of the flight.

It is a truly dreadful event. Those long-haul 747s sum up everything democratic but banal about the modern world. The idea of your loved one dying, in front of you, while people fiddle with their in-flight entertainment systems or struggle to eat meals off plastic trays, is heart-breaking. Martin and Ros only met three or four years ago. For many years, while the rest of us had chosen our partners and settled down, Ros lived alone. She was tall, auburn-haired, beautiful, but she never met anybody she wanted to be with, so far as I know, until she met Martin. So they were only together briefly, and were very happy. Bronwyn said on the phone today that Ros had been radiant: in love, at the end of a good holiday, looking forward to what she would do when she got back. She would have been 50 in October, and was planning her birthday party. She came from a Wiltshire farming family, and was buried last Tuesday in the village churchyard, next to her father. Her mother survives her.

For the second time in the year, an international military force is being assembled in order to intervene in a country to put a stop to dreadful violations of human rights. This time it’s in East Timor, which voted overwhelmingly for independence from Indonesia in a UN referendum the other week. After that vote, militias opposed to independence, organised, encouraged, aided or connived at by the Indonesian military, committed atrocities against the civilian population. (The Indonesian military has been a big purchaser of arms from Britain in recent years. Since Labour came to power, we’ve reduced the supply significantly, but not comprehensively, as we should have done.) It’s another example of the arrogant assumption of military men that they can do what they like in their own country. There’s a slow awakening, around the world, that there are international coalitions which will put their weight in the balance against that assumption. Despite the horrors, events in both Kosovo and East Timor have optimistic implications. Only three and four months ago, some opposed to intervention in Kosovo were saying, ‘Why don’t they intervene in East Timor?’ Well, now it looks as though ‘they’ will.

There was an excellent long piece in The Guardian on Saturday by Edward Said, about Israel and Palestine. Said is 64 years old now, one of the West’s finest progressive intellectuals, struggling against leukaemia. I hadn’t realised how strongly he opposes the Oslo and Wye River peace accords. I was struck by the position he has now come to, which I have thought myself, that the only just answer in Israel and Palestine is a unified, secular, multi-confessional state in which Jews, Arabs and Christians live together across the whole area of present-day Israel, Gaza and the West Bank. Currently, we have apartheid and the prospect of an absurd misshapen Palestinian state: two lumps of territory joined only by a motorway. But I fear that the just answer is beyond hope, at least for many years, and that the compromise which Said rejects is the only step forward available.

Sunday evening, five to nine. Yesterday afternoon, we drove up to north Essex to stay with Alex McLeod and his partner Richard Beckley. Alex and Richard have been together now for 11 years. Richard has had a cottage near Finchingfield since 1962. It’s a corner of East Anglia I’ve never visited before, except that I went to Saffron Walden a few times when I was at Cambridge. Remote, open countryside, with the big East Anglian skies, but gently rolling too — the only bit of East Anglia that rolls. Alex and Richard are both in their 70s, and frailer than they were. Richard had a heart operation two years ago, and his sight is very poor. Alex doesn’t see well either, and has Parkinson’s Disease in its early stages. So they both live with bodies which are failing. I said to Helen as we drove up that the two physical attributes for which I am most grateful are a good strong bladder and excellent eyesight. I see people all around me now, including my own parents, facing old age and its woes. It induces in me a fervent gratitude that I’m in mid-life, still good-looking, and as fit as a fiddle.

I’m in the Isle of Man to look at the shooting of our film of Cinderella. Leslie Phillips is in the film, playing the aged retainer in the house which the step-mother invades. He was on the same plane coming over, and I went and said hello to him while we were waiting for our baggage at the airport. I took him out to dinner that evening. We had a great chat; he was charming. I thought how funny it was that I should be buying dinner and champagne for a man who had brought me such mirth as a child when I’d heard him on The Navy Lark all those years ago.

Last Tuesday, there was a rail accident at Ladbroke Grove, two miles outside Paddington. Two trains collided, because an outgoing stopping train to Wiltshire had crossed a signal at red and was travelling at 30 miles an hour down the line on which an express from Cheltenham was approaching Paddington at 70 miles an hour. At that moment I was driving along the elevated bit of the A40 on my way to Alperton to get the car serviced. A thick column of black smoke suddenly shot into the beautiful clear blue air about two miles away. I thought it must be an explosion at a factory. It was the diesel oil catching fire. It burnt at such a temperature (I read 1000 or 1200 degrees) that it reduced everyone and everything in one carriage to ash. Other carriages on both trains were also destroyed.

After wildly fluctuating estimates of the number of people dead, with some speculating that it may be as high as 170, it now looks as if the death toll will be about 40. Many others are injured, some critically, and some will be maimed for the rest of their lives. It will be impossible to identify the remains of many of the dead.

The event has had a traumatic effect on the nation. Most immediately, it has caused the public to resent the private, profit-making companies which run the rail system. The public always hated the privatisation of British Rail, but John Major’s government forced it through, and Labour decided it would be too expensive and time-consuming to reverse it. The national mood now is such that the most popular thing the government could do would be to announce the re-nationalisation of the railway. It finds itself with a big problem over its proposal to let Railtrack, which runs the railway track, signals and stations, take over several lines on the London Underground. It has a similar problem with its proposal to sell 51% of the air traffic control system to private owners.

Of the many poignant images and stories which have been seen and reported in the last few days, the most touching for me was one which I suppose will become a commonplace when these dreadful events occur, now that mobile phones are in widespread use. In the broken carriages — not, I presume, the incinerated carriage, but the others where the dead lay — all that could be heard, once the rescue services had given up hope of finding anyone else alive, was the warbling of telephones as friends and families hopelessly called people who would no longer press the green button and say ‘Hello?’.

This afternoon we’ve been up on a moor, shooting a scene which will be the last in the film. The wicked step-mother and her daughters, having been found out and banished, are seen walking away from the camera up a long track. Halfway along the track, as a final indignity, the step-mother breaks the heel on one of her high-heeled shoes. She takes it off, examines it, says, ‘Damn, I’ve broken a heel’, puts the shoe back on, and limps off up the track, supported by her daughters, one on either side.

It was freezing cold on the moor, with a strong wind. Kathleen Turner, who plays the step-mother, arrived after lunch in her cream Mercedes, its wheels slipping on the wet ground and its undercarriage scraping on the bumps. She will I think be wonderful in the finished film, but she has all the faults of which stars are often guilty, including a bloated ego and a short temper. She has given Beeban Kidron, the director, and Trevor Eve, the producer, a hard time. I’m told that she is also inclined to have a few drinks with lunch.

The scene took a long time to set up, and then we had to wait until the light was right. At last, Beeban shouted ‘Action!’ Off the three of them went. The heel of the doctored shoe obediently broke. Kathleen took the shoe off and examined it, said the line, put the shoe back on, and stumbled further up the track between Lucy Punch and Katrin Cartlidge. I think, but I don’t know, that Beeban had decided to take a little revenge on her spoilt star, because the take just went on and on and on. The wind was howling, and the three actors must have limped two hundred yards uphill away from us while the camera turned over. After what seemed an outrageous length of time, Beeban yelled ‘Cut!’ into the wind. Kathleen turned round immediately and yelled back, ‘Was that supposed to be some kind of a fucking joke?’ I was standing next to the sound man, a Mancunian who’d been in the business for 30 years, a real pro. He said, ‘She shouldn’t a’ joined if she couldn’t take a joke.’

A long time since I last wrote. On 1 November I took over from Paul Ashton as commissioning editor for schools programmes. Paul has moved sideways and now has responsibility for a number of big special projects, particularly in the rapidly growing area of digital media on the internet.

The seven weeks leading up to Christmas were the busiest of my working life so far. Cinderella was eventually broadcast on 1 January. I think it’s a beautiful piece of work. But the production seriously overspent in the autumn and the film had to be taken over by the bond company which had underwritten it. So it brought high stress with it right up to 17 December, when I took the finished tape from Trevor Eve in a rainy street in Soho, and personally delivered it to C4.

On Christmas Eve we drove to Paris, arriving about 11 in the evening. We spent a week there with Bronwyn and Stephen, in a capacious flat at 69 Boulevard de Courcelles, 8th arrondisement, near the Arc de Triomphe. They’ve swapped their house in Perth with the owners of the flat. We had a great time. I thought how very stylish it would be to be a resident of Paris. It’s a serious possibility for retirement. Everything is so available, and so well organised. Right opposite us was a branch of Hédiard, the posh épicerie fine. Down the street is a branch of Nicolas. Five minutes’ walk away there is a wonderful street market just off the Avenue des Ternes, with everything you could desire by the way of meat, fish, fruits de mer, vegetables and fruit. Numerous excellent bakers. Numerous wonderful florists. Splendid restaurants at all prices. The Parc Monceau 300 metres away. The Métro 100 metres away. The pleasure of being in Paris in a flat is quite different from that of being there in a hotel. You feel less of a tourist.

On 31 December, we went to Verdi’s Falstaff at the Bastille Opéra. Lots of fun, beautifully sung in that magnificent house. Then we took the Métro, packed with New Year/New Millennium revellers, up to Argentine, and walked by small roads round to the Trocadéro, where we found a perfect position gazing straight across the river at the Eiffel Tower, between the two parts of the Palais Chaillot. A friendly crowd of all generations waited in the mild dry night. At two minutes to midnight there began a firework display on the Eiffel Tower, the like of which I have never seen before and don’t expect to see again. Starting at the bottom, moving slowly up the tower, the display was of an accumulating scope and brilliance which sent the crowd into rapture. It lasted for about 12 minutes, and when it was over there was a moment of childish wonderment felt by everyone. Then four women of our age turned and embraced us, wishing us Bonne année, bonne santé! Everyone around was embracing. We made our way home through the back streets, replying Bonne année! to people calling down to us from the balconies. We consumed a supper of champagne, foie gras and smoked salmon, and went to bed about three.

The next day we said goodbye to Bronwyn and Stephen, and drove to Kerfontaine, where for another week we enjoyed the delights of that place in winter: log fires, and much civilian reading, as Harold Rosen likes to call it. I read the magnificent and dreadful Stalingrad, by Antony Beevor, and then finished ’Tis, Frank McCourt’s sequel to Angela’s Ashes, which isn’t as good as his first book.

Two catastrophic storms hit France while we were in Paris. The first, on Boxing Day, caused devastation along a swathe of the country from the Normandy coast across to Lorraine and into Germany. It passed through Paris at about seven in the morning. The second, two days later, struck the coast of France further south, in the Charente Maritime, and did equivalent damage roaring inland at that latitude. About 70 people died in the two storms. Millions of trees have been destroyed.

Kerfontaine was fortunate. It was at the southern edge of the first storm and the northern edge of the second. Only one tree was blown down, a four-trunked birch in the wood, which had already been blown down once, a year ago, and then had been blown back up again when a strong wind blew the other way. The tree has no deep roots, and is easily swayed, like certain persons I know. This time it will have to be chopped up.

Brittany has suffered a great catastrophe, however, in the pollution of its beaches by the fuel oil escaping from the wrecked tanker Erika. We lunched at Guidel-Plages on the first Thursday of the New Year, and Madame Cadieu told us how impressive had been the volunteer effort, co-ordinated by the local police and fire brigade, to clean up the Guidel beaches the week before. We walked on the beaches after lunch. There was one dead cormorant, covered in oil, and some dead starfish and sea anemones, but the sand was clean. There were stains of oil on all the rocks, which will have to be scrubbed off with detergent. That evening, however, watching the television news at Albert’s, we saw what it was like at a beach near La Baule, and what it had been like at Guidel and Fort Bloqué: a thick sticky carpet of oil, about eight inches thick, being pulled off the sand and dumped in lumps into trailers towed by tractors. Disgusting, and brought about by the desire of the rich oil companies, in this case Total/Elf/Fina, to save money by shipping its oil in old ships, flying flags of convenience, with poorly paid, non-unionised, non-European crews. The Erika didn’t collide with anything. It simply broke up in a rough sea because it was no longer seaworthy. The loss of life amongst seabirds has been the worst to have resulted from an oil spill since this scourge of the modern world began.

The extreme global fuss over the new millennium is all nonsense, because the new millennium won’t start until 1 January 2001. Hardy’s great poem The Darkling Thrush, dated 31 December 1900 and referring to ‘the Century’s corpse outleant’, had it right.

Paul’s birthday today. We lunched at L’Aubergine in Fulham — George, Stephanie, Sarah, Paul and me. Beautiful food and a nice big quiet table in the corner.

There’s been an interesting political development. Labour has lost a no-confidence vote in the Welsh Assembly, and Alun Michael has resigned as First Minister there. Rhodri Morgan, the man whom Labour’s high command prevented from becoming First Minister last year, will replace Michael. An educative jolt for Blair, I hope. You can’t control everything, and if you try to do so, people will take their revenge somehow. Labour refused to enter into a coalition in Wales either with the Liberals or with Plaid Cymru, and so were vulnerable. The fact that they didn’t get a commanding overall majority in the first place, so that they had even to contemplate a coalition or minority administration in a country where they are overwhelmingly the strongest party, was the result of the wrong choice of leader. They’re in a much weaker position there than they needed to be. But I don’t think it’ll hurt them in the long term, because with a more popular leader, and with the electorate seeing that overweening power has been taught a lesson, Labour’s natural popularity in Wales should reassert itself.

Unfortunately, it’s been the same story in London. Blair was so determined not to have Ken Livingstone as the first executive mayor of London that he made poor Frank Dobson stand against Livingstone in the contest for the Labour nomination. Frank narrowly won the nomination, and then resigned as Secretary of State for Health. I presume Blair forced him to. At this point Livingstone left the Labour Party and stood for election as an independent. I voted to nominate Frank because I know and admire him — he’s our local MP — and I think he would make the better mayor. I don’t think Livingstone, whatever his achievements at the GLC, is a collegiate politician. At the moment the polls say that it’s neck and neck between Dobson and Livingstone, but I think Livingstone will win handsomely. His campaign has been highly effective — articulate, well-judged — and Frank’s has been inept, as if he couldn’t say what he wanted to say. If he loses, he will have given up being a cabinet minister, for what? The back benches until the next election, and then the House of Lords? What a waste. You’re allowed two votes in this mayoral election, so I shall vote for Frank first, Ken second.

I was in Dublin for two days last week. We’re putting £800,000 into a magnificent project: filming all 19 of Samuel Beckett’s stage plays. RTE is putting in about £1 million, and the production company needs to find about another £2 million yet. Going forward in hope, they’ve already started filming. They’ve done What Where and Endgame. I met Michael Gambon and David Thewlis, who are Hamm and Clov in Endgame, and Conor McPherson, who directs it. He wrote The Weir, which I saw in London about a year ago. I told him it was one of the best experiences I’d had in the theatre in recent years. ‘Cheers,’ he said. He’s 28. Anyway, I’m looking after the project editorially for C4, and proud to be doing it.

Northern Ireland is very dicey at the moment. The IRA hasn’t handed in any weapons. The Unionists will not continue in the Assembly unless the IRA makes at least a gesture. Sinn Fein and the IRA say there was no requirement in the Good Friday agreement to hand over weapons, at least until May, and that the Unionists have created the crisis by imposing a unilateral ultimatum. David Trimble, on the other hand, would never have got his party to agree to take part in the Assembly without the safeguard of the ultimatum. So there’s a stand-off. Westminster will suspend the Assembly on Friday unless there’s some handing in of weapons, because it would rather the whole Assembly be suspended than that the Unionists resign from it. That way, there would be some stumbling progress towards decommissioning, and the Assembly could resume later. So runs the (only relatively) optimistic projection. The other way is back to darkness.

On the bus going to work today, I read a small piece in The Financial Times saying there was a worry that there might be a world-wide computer crash on this day. There had been an equivalent worry when the year 2000 started, since 1 January 2000 was the first day since the invention of computers when the year hadn’t begun with a 1. In the event, there had been no problem. Today, leap year day, they were worried because it was exceptional to have a leap year when the year ended with 00.

The article stirred a memory in me of something I had learned in primary school but hadn’t thought about since. Years ending in 00 are not leap years, even though they are divisible by 4. So why was today the 29th February?

When I got to work, I went into Paul’s office and put the problem to him. He is far in advance of me in the use of the internet (for one thing, he hath children), and within 10 minutes all was explained. We had printed out the Papal Bull, together with modern translations from the Latin into French and English, which required ‘all Christian kings and princes’ in Europe to introduce the Gregorian calendar as from autumn 1582, or as soon as possible thereafter. The Bull specified the 10 days to be lost from 1582, and the arrangements for the remembering of saints who would normally have been celebrated on those days. Most wonderfully, there was a precise instruction about years in the future ending in 00. Three in every four of these would henceforward not be leap years, but 1600, 2000, 2400 and so on would be. 29 February 2000, today, was actually named in the Bull. I was overwhelmed with admiration for the genius of the astronomers who had made so precise a calculation, and for the power of this new technology which had brought such an arcane and satisfying piece of information to us so speedily and effortlessly.

I went back to the internet today because last week’s revelations about leap years in the Gregorian calendar had stirred another primary-school memory: that of English people, a long time ago, marching and shouting, ‘Give us back our 11 days!’ I was immediately offered an embarrass de richesse of articles describing how, in 1752, people in London and several other English towns had taken to the streets in protest at what they thought was a shortening of their lives. In 1582, Protestant England had not been about to take orders from the Bishop of Rome, and so had carried on for another 170 years on the old Julian calendar. By the time the English government bowed to the mathematically inevitable, the problem of the distancing of the solar year from the calendar year had got worse, so that 11 days had to be taken out of the calendar instead of 10.

The thought strikes me that English people’s habitual suspicion of ‘Europe’ now has taken the place of our hatred of the Pope four hundred years ago.

It’s the week before Easter. The proper April in Brittany — sunshine and showers.

Last Friday I had one of the experiences of my life, in the course of the Beckett project. They were filming a short, late play called Catastrophe, which is set in a theatre. The shoot was in Wilton’s Music Hall off Cable Street, near where Helen and I used to live. The action of Catastrophe has a theatre director and his assistant arranging the appearance on the stage of a silent, still figure, an actor somehow reduced to a stage prop, who is called the protagonist. David Mamet was the real director. The theatre director was played by Harold Pinter, and the protagonist by John Gielgud. I went down to the shoot on the Friday afternoon, and watched filming for about two hours. During the course of that time Michael Colgan, one of the producers, told me that Gielgud’s agent, Duncan Heath, had told him the previous day that Gielgud had decided that this would definitely be his last professional performance. Today was his 96th birthday.

The first hour involved takes which didn’t require Gielgud in person, and they used a stand-in. Then he appeared in a wheelchair. I had lost track, as so often happens when great people quietly disappear from regular view towards the end of their lives, of how old and frail he has become. They lifted his wheelchair on to the stage, and when he needed to he got out of the wheelchair, with help, and stood with a stick while they prepared the shot, and then managed without the stick while they filmed. He worked for about an hour. The feeling of nervousness and reverence in the crew was palpable. Two or three mistakes were made, necessitating re-shooting, because the normally imperturbable riggers and electricians knew what a delicate and extraordinary moment this was. We were watching John Gielgud give the last performance of his career, a career which had spanned more than 80 years. We were witnessing the last representative of his great generation of actors saying goodnight. David Mamet directed him very gently, but with a precision which indicated that this was still a professional contract, not an old folks outing. When the shooting was done, there was a photo-session for a minute or two, with Gielgud back in his wheelchair, and Mamet, Pinter and the other actors standing around him. Then there was prolonged and spontaneous applause, and Gielgud left. It was deeply moving, and I kept thinking how extraordinary it was that in some way I was connected with this man’s last professional engagement.

Then, as if that wasn’t enough, Michael Colgan brought Pinter over to meet me. We had a two-minute conversation, with nothing extraordinary said, but I simply told him what an honour it was to meet him, and how much I had enjoyed The Room and Celebration, the double bill of his first and most recent plays, which are on at the Almeida at the moment. All in all, it was an extraordinary afternoon, and I returned to C4 for a humdrum meeting at 4.30 in a state of elation.

My great aunt Margaret broke her hip on her 86th birthday, 28 March. She was coming downstairs at about 7.00am as usual, to make tea, and she slipped on the third step from the bottom. Fortunately, mum and dad were staying, intending to help her celebrate her birthday, so they got her into the ambulance and to hospital with less distress than if she had been alone apart from my aunt Evelyn, who suffers from advanced multiple sclerosis and was waiting in bed for the carer to arrive.

Margaret had nearly a fortnight in hospital. I went down to see her one afternoon. She was as talkative as ever, with her usual lengthy retrospective grip on history, of the sort which regards the early 19th century as a few days ago. There was only one moment when I thought I detected a slight chink in the mental armour. We were in a familiar passage of conversation where she describes Ann Boleyn being courted by Henry the Eighth at Hever — ‘Of course, it was just a farm in those days’ — (I’ve no idea whether that’s true or not). She likes to connect Ann Boleyn with a person called Dorothy Bullen, whom she met about 30 years ago, who lived at Hever, and who had said in response to Margaret’s enquiry that she was indeed a relation. So when Margaret said, ‘And Henry used to like going down to Hever because there was a girl there he’d taken a fancy to,’ and I said, on cue, ‘That was Ann Boleyn, wasn’t it?’ she said, to my surprise, ‘I don’t know. It was some time ago.’

But she recovered herself and told me, as if for the first time, how her grandfather (born 1836, in the reign of William the Fourth, died 1930, and well remembered by her) used to tell her that his father (perhaps born about 1810?) used to tell him how, when he was a child, his father (perhaps born about 1785?), who was on the outdoor staff at Hever Castle, once brought home an orange, grown in the greenhouse at Hever and generously given to him by the head gardener, and how Margaret’s grandfather’s father’s father had rolled the orange the length of the little cottage where they lived, into the hands of his astonished son, who was playing on the floor.

At a conference. I’m in the bar of the Royal York Hotel: old-fashioned and comfortable. It’s 9.40 in the evening, and I’ve been writing solidly since 7.45 this morning. I’ve done a long talk to be delivered personally here tomorrow afternoon, and a shorter one to be delivered on my behalf in London tomorrow morning, which I’ve just sent over by fax. I don’t do as much uninterrupted discursive writing as I used to, and I must say it’s invigorating to remind myself I can still do it, still go through the travails and come out the other side saying to myself, ‘Hmm, you’re not a bad writer.’ You experience wretchedness when you lose your way for an hour, and have to double back and see where you went wrong (in my case it’s usually because I get too fancy in the argument). Then there’s the wonderful feeling of achievement and pride when you know you’re on the home straight.

This bar boasts that it has the best martinis in the city. I’m halfway down a classic gin and vermouth straight up with a twist of lemon, and it’s certainly the genuine article.

As soon as I got back from Toronto, Helen and I came to Cannes for the Film Festival. One of the Beckett films, Not I, directed by Neil Jordan and performed by Julianne Moore, was in competition in the Directors’ Fortnight. That evening we were in a little village above Cannes, where Not I was being shown to a local audience before a longer, more conventional narrative film. The audience didn’t get it. Most of them had probably never heard of Beckett. They were completely perplexed by the repetitive, incantatory monologue, in English with French sub-titles. After about 10 minutes they began to laugh and then to whistle. By the end of the film, Julianne Moore’s words were being drowned by a continuous barrage of hoots and jeers of derision.

I had been told by someone working at the Film Festival to be ready, as the representative of the Beckett project at this screening, to answer questions at the end of the film. Luckily for me, the organisation had failed to provide anyone to act as host for the evening, so there was no-one to call me on to the stage. We left the cinema before the main feature, and went and had dinner across the road. I felt proprietorial and hurt.

We had a wonderful time for the next two days in Cannes. Not I didn’t win the Directors’ Fortnight. I think both play and film are masterpieces.

Last Sunday, Paul and I watched the fourth day of the last Test between England and West Indies, from the C4 box at The Oval. This was a wonderful day, in which Atherton completed a long, watchful century against the best that Walsh and Ambrose could pitch to him, and in which we later saw those two great bowlers, arms across each other’s shoulders, leaving an English cricket field, as bowlers, for the last time. Atherton’s century set up the England win which came the next day, and which completed a truly wonderful series. The bowlers had predominated, for two Tests were won within three days and one within two, but it was tremendously exciting and played in the right spirit. When Ambrose and then Walsh came to the wicket on the Monday afternoon, as batsmen, with the West Indies position hopeless, the England team stood as a guard of honour and applauded them. It was a moving and heartening sight, for it showed that sport can still be played at the highest level of competitiveness and skill, without loss of respect for the opponent.

The last fortnight has seen dreadful blood-letting in Israel and the Palestinian lands. About 100 people have died, of whom nine tenths have been Palestinians. The peace process has halted. It is mainly Israel’s fault. I see no end to the conflict, as long as the Israeli government continues to operate apartheid policies in Gaza and the West Bank, and within Israel itself. The only immediate solution being considered is for the creation of a wretched divided Palestinian state, joined by motorway flyovers and corridors, with privileged reserves for the Jewish settlers on the most favoured parts of the West Bank. Neither side can contemplate compromise on the status of east Jerusalem. Arafat is corrupt, and his grip on power seems frailer by the day. The only long-term solution I can see, as I’ve written before, is one which I quite understand is not within the scope of real politics: to have a unified secular state, in which Jews, Muslims and Christians have equal rights, guaranteed by the state’s constitution, and whose boundaries would include Israel, Gaza, the West Bank and all of Jerusalem. Give the Golan Heights back to Syria. Stay out of Lebanon for ever. Invite the Palestinian diaspora to return, or pay them out of international funds to begin new permanent lives in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt or any other country they wish to go to. Guarantee rights of religious observance for all three faiths in Jerusalem and impose obligations on them to respect the observances of the other faiths.

It’s a pipe dream, I know. The cruellest political lesson of my lifetime is that of the agony brought about when religious difference and social injustice combine. That the Jews in Israel should be systematically promoting social injustice in a context of religious difference, in their own interest as they foolishly imagine, is the most dreadful of ironies after the Holocaust, even though the scale of their oppression of the Palestinians is only a tiny fraction of that which the Jewish people suffered in the Holocaust.

When you look back hundreds and thousands of years in that part of the world, what do you see? You see ethnically similar tribes of people inhabiting a parallelogram of land, and you see three of the world’s great religions emerging from that land. The three religions are all monotheistic, and have much else in common too, good and bad. And you see blood. As the wise and moderate Israeli justice minister said on the radio the other night: ‘In the end, we and the Palestinians have no option but to be neighbours.’ But the end is nowhere in sight.

This week on the morning bus I sat behind a young couple. They talked quietly and stroked each other. He got off at Cambridge Circus and looked up at her from the pavement, in the incessant rain, the bus standing at red lights, with such a clear smile of hope and love. And she smiled down. Then he crossed the road and began to walk up by the Palace Theatre, and turned round and smiled again and waved. The bus was still stationary in a traffic jam. She waved back with a little, shy movement of the hand, and then the bus moved off, and she settled into the seat, more room now, and turned her head away from him, looking east up Shaftesbury Avenue, and smiled an (as she thought) secret smile.

Last night England and Wales experienced their worst weather since the 1987 hurricane. It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as ’87 had been in the areas where that hurricane struck. But the effect last night was over a wider area. Tonight’s Channel 4 News took it for granted that extreme weather of this kind, occurring more and more frequently as it does, is the result of global warming. Michael Meacher, the environment minister, said so on the programme. It will need a few more serious shocks — catastrophes which will kill people, bring industrial societies to a halt, cost billions of pounds — to turn the tide of apathetic, individualistic public opinion towards support of strong international intervention to save the planet.

During September, there was a blockade of oil refineries, ostensibly by farmers and hauliers protesting about the high price of fuel. The blockade almost paralysed the country within days. Some of the farmers have genuine grievances about the poverty pay they now get for their work. Their woes stem from the grotesque effects of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, and from the BSE crisis, not from the price of diesel. The hauliers have a market problem, again not caused by government taxes: there are too many of them, so the price they can command for their labour has been diminishing. The protest was a new kind of direct action (new in this country — common enough in France), co-ordinated by mobile phones, and showed itself far more effective than constitutional dissent. A large section of public opinion supported the protest. Parliament, of course, was on holiday. And the most depressing thing was that Labour’s previously large, durable lead over the Conservatives disappeared overnight. Labour has since recovered a little, but the lead they’ve had since the last election will not, I think, be restored before the next.

Governing is difficult. The electorate is stupid and self-interested; at least, an electorally significant section of the electorate is. The government did exactly the right thing. It said it would not be held to ransom by direct action of this kind by an unrepresentative minority. It suffered a huge loss of popularity as a result. The protestors announced, as they called off their blockade following negotiations with officials of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, that they would resume it after 60 days if there were not a cut in fuel duty within that time. The 60 days will expire in about a fortnight. Next week, Gordon Brown will make his autumn financial statement. An armed forces minister announced today that the government is training soldiers to drive oil tankers. We may be in for a ‘Who governs Britain?’ stand-off. Will the Chancellor make concessions to those who want cheaper fuel, to buy peace and to prevent further loss of popularity? Or will he reflect that, unless we restrain our childish desire to burn the earth’s fossil fuels as fast as possible, we may be bringing upon ourselves disasters which will make a few days of queuing at petrol stations look like a trivial inconvenience?

I strongly suspect that, mixed in with farmers and hauliers whose feelings, however self-interested, were sincere, there were present in the mid-September blockade the following groups: racist organisations; oil companies enjoying the discomfort of a previously popular Labour government, and wishing to distract attention from their own huge profits, made whatever the price of crude oil; small-scale Conservative activists and sympathisers — Poujadistes in French political terminology — relishing the experience of fomenting civil strife, of causing the state to totter. I hope the government stands firm, whatever the immediate electoral consequences. There are things it could do, like substantially increasing pensioners’ incomes, re-nationalising the railways and abandoning the sale of 51% of air traffic control, which would be electorally popular (though expensive), and not hurt the planet.

Flying home from a conference. We’ve got to the point, somewhere over Croatia I think, where the cloud is thickening and there’s not much to see. We took off from Thessaloniki and soon crossed a mountain range which falls away abruptly into a valley, where a line of villages runs along the bottom of the further side of the mountains. The mountains mark the border between Greece and Macedonia (which the Greeks still unhelpfully insist on calling the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia — FYROM in my in-flight magazine). For about 20 minutes we flew over villages and towns, in Macedonia and then Albania, with a perfect view down, and I wasn’t able to make out a single moving vehicle. There must have been some, but after the economic frenzy of Greece, it was extraordinary to see how quiet these places are. Roads yellow, not black. Down there people are fighting, Slav versus Albanian, the old ethnic hatreds festering even in Macedonia, the former Yugoslav republic worthy of most credit for moving beyond the break-up of Yugoslavia without great bloodshed. (Of course there was no bloodshed in Slovenia either, but it was easier for the Slovenians as an ethnically homogenous people with no great historic hatreds.) It’s amazing, given the scale of the influx of Albanian refugees which Macedonia had to accommodate as a result of Milosevic’s barbarism in Kosovo in 1999, that it has managed to avoid war until now.

Bank Holiday weekend Sunday evening. The pleasant emotional confusion caused by the fact that Sunday evening doesn’t mean work tomorrow. The brain has habitual ways of feeling, states of humour, depending on whether it’s Friday night, Monday morning, the drive going on holiday, the drive coming back from holiday. It might be the same place, the same weather, the other circumstances of life might be the same, but you feel different. I know what I normally feel like on a Sunday at this time. Each moment tonight, when I think, This is how you should be feeling because it’s Sunday night, a reminder voice says, Yes, but tomorrow’s another day off. It doesn’t make me feel like I do when it’s Saturday or Friday night, but like it’s a time to itself, a rarity.

Tony Blair will announce the date of the general election this week. Everyone assumes 7 June. He has been proved right in his decision to postpone the election from 3 May, even by a short time, to allow the foot-and-mouth epidemic to diminish. It’s very hard to predict what will be the next Labour majority. The chance of us repeating a majority of a similar size is diminished by the fact that some people will stay at home because they assume that a Labour victory is certain anyway. But the chance of us retaining a majority of a similar size is increased by the fact that the Conservatives are in a wonderfully woeful state. They can’t wait to ditch their leader. They are demonstrably riven on the question of race, vainly trying to assert that they are an inclusive and tolerant party when some of their representatives will insist on saying racist things in public. So in the end, I think we’ll do very well again.

There are old know-alls like Roy Hattersley, Brian Gould and Peter Shore, whom I just caught on the C4 News complaining that Labour hadn’t been radical enough it its first term. Shore even said that it had been a miserable performance. How little these professionals seem to have learned about the realities of winning and keeping power. You can’t win and keep power as a centre-left government in the UK unless you pay attention to the concerns of the section of the electorate which decides elections. It’s obvious to me. We shall win the next election essentially because Gordon Brown has managed the economy brilliantly.

Labour won again, with one fewer seat than last time. The pleasure was intense, but it wasn’t the blissful dawn of 2 May 1997. William Hague immediately resigned as Conservative leader. So the Conservatives will now engage in another agonising leadership contest. Staring them in the face is the fact that, once again, if they choose Kenneth Clarke they’ll do better than with anyone else. But I bet they won’t have him.

Yesterday, a Saturday, was my 50th birthday. Helen organised a party for 50 people in a restaurant on the canal at Maida Vale. It was a wonderful do, with presents and good wishes and fuss. Helen had commissioned a series of speeches to be made in my honour: first from my father, then from my mother (both of these on my childhood), then from Peter Adams (university), then from Stephen Eyers (teaching together), then from Anne Seeley (long friendship), then from Andrew Bannerman (Shropshire), then from Paul Ashton (Channel 4). Paul is in Finland at the moment, so Andrew Bethell read Paul’s speech. I had known nothing of these plans, but I had written my own speech that afternoon, which I gave as a kind of reply.

At precisely seven o’clock this evening, I got out of a car outside the Castle Hotel, Bishop’s Castle, Shropshire, having watched a day’s filming of Double Act, our dramatisation of Jacqueline Wilson’s novel, which is being shot in and around Clun. The town clock struck its tinny notes. A cool day, blustery and with rain squalls, had softened to a sunny evening where the broken clouds drew their shadows across the surrounding hills. I stood and looked and listened. Peace.

I’ve been in South Africa a week now. It has been an astonishing experience. I’ve travelled only in one part of one province — the Western Cape — but the physical beauty of the place, and the diversity of that beauty, are breathtaking. Meanwhile, because South Africa has such political significance for me and for all my generation of the British left, I am viewing all this beauty in a particular way; asking myself what progress has been made in the nine and a half years since the country achieved democracy. That South Africa remains a place of deep divisions and disparities is all too obvious. The spacious, gracious, often stylish or, at the very least, comfortable housing belongs to white people. And I must say, knowing as I do that money alone is no guarantee of grace or style (witness most ‘executive’ developments in England), white South Africans in this part of the country have managed, mostly, to build with style and grace as well as on a scale which you would expect an elite to allow themselves. The housing for black people ranges from corrugated metal shacks, to wooden huts, to small dwellings made of bare breeze blocks, to — at the best, and obviously one of the achievements of the government since 1994 — small but pretty bungalows, in whitewashed breeze block, with roofs either tiled or in painted corrugated metal, having electricity, running water, little gardens and some space between one house and the next. But the ideal just described is rare, and even this is modest in the extreme by comparison with white people’s houses. The continuing reality for millions of black people is a tiny shack, one of hundreds or thousands packed together in great grim camps with narrow dirt tracks for streets, with no running water except from an external standpipe shared with scores of other families, and with toilets similarly shared.

I say that South Africa’s continuing divisions are all too obvious. Often they are, but sometimes you have to look for them. One of the most sinister aspects of the apartheid plan was the attempt to make black people’s housing invisible to the user of the country’s official roads (excellent, in my brief experience). Even today, the traveller is puzzled by the fact that there are huge settlements, glimpsed briefly from a road when its contour lets slip the reality, with no signs to them: no slip-roads with the names of these places properly displayed. You pass a place which must house tens of thousands of people, and think, ‘Where was that, then? How do I get to there?’ The answer was, ‘You’re not supposed to get to there. You’ve no need to.’ The scale of the challenge facing the government is formidable in all areas of social good for the majority: education, health care, employment, transport. But the physical task of constructing millions of acceptable dwellings, and their infrastructure, is the one which has struck me with awe.

I landed at Cape Town airport eight days ago. I had ordered, in advance, a Volkswagen Golf from a car rental firm. When I arrived at the firm’s desk, it had run out of Golfs, and offered me a Mercedes for the same price. I accepted. I nosed this great, comfortable, reassuring piece of rich man’s engineering around the car park, opening the windows and letting the warm wind blow through. A warm wind and a bright light on a November morning! I cruised into Cape Town on a fine dual carriageway, past some of the worst of the slums I’ve described above. There was Table Mountain, the sharp point of Signal Hill, and then I came over a rise and got a view of the great docks and Table Bay, with Robben Island in the distance. How extraordinary that this dreadful place is now a tourist attraction, with some of the former prisoners as guides. How bizarre history can be, and how sudden can be its twists. Friends in England had recommended that I visit the island while I was in Cape Town, but I didn’t.

The elevated road passed the city centre and descended to the seafront. Then I followed the sea for a few kilometres to Camps Bay, realising as I arrived that John Haycock, who had arranged my travel, had put me into one of the most beautiful and chic suburbs of the city. It has a brilliant white beach and luminous turquoise water. The guesthouse was perfect: comfortable without being luxurious, and when I opened the wooden doors of my room on to the terrace, there was the sea 300 metres away. I walked down to the strip of restaurants across the road from the beach and had lunch. Then I went back to the guesthouse and slept for three hours, having hardly slept at all on the plane. I woke up and showered, and had a beer on the terrace and watched the sun go down into the sea. I went out to another restaurant where the food was magnificent if over-generous, and walked back again and went to sleep.

The next morning, Friday, a taxi took me to Observatory, a district on the other side of the city. I sat for nine hours with four other people while we decided which 204 applicants for bursaries for university study, awarded by the Canon Collins Educational Trust for Southern Africa, would be successful. (The Trust’s work, since the liberation of South Africa, is to offer black and brown students in the country, and in some other countries in southern Africa, the opportunity to pursue higher education, something they would not otherwise be able to afford.) There had been 1500 applicants originally, and we were choosing from a short list of about 400. I was there because I and a group of friends in England administer two small funds, one in memory of Ros Moger, who died in 1999, and one in memory of Terry Furlong, who died in 2002. Our funds shelter within the Canon Collins Trust, and benefit from its charitable status. It gives a sense of how small we are within the Trust’s operation to say that seven of the 204 bursaries awarded were paid for from our funds. Still, it’s a good thing to be doing, and my day in Observatory was the business reason why I’m here.

That evening the same taxi returned me to Camps Bay. More seaside dining. When you turn round from the beach, there is a row of bare, sudden mountains called The Twelve Apostles. It is a place of wonderful beauty and immense privilege.

On Saturday I drove into the city centre, parked by the station, and wandered around. It was interesting to see an ordinary, busy Saturday in town: the market stalls, the open-air hairdressers doing good business, a mainly black community full of energy and seemingly thriving. I walked for about two hours, decided to skip lunch, and drove the car around Table Bay and up the coast northward. The dunes went on and on, the roads dead straight. After about half an hour I turned left to the sea at Silwerstroomstrand, and found a bleak esplanade stuck in the middle of nowhere. But the beach is beautiful, with white waves processing on to the sand, which is indeed silver. Black families were barbecuing sausages and steaks on fires lit in little concrete boxes provided for the purpose. Not much swimming. Probably South Africans think the sea is far too cold, especially so early in the summer. But it was a good sight to see: families enjoying themselves in an ordinary way at the weekend. I drove inland to the towns of Mamre and Atlantis — my first deliberate attempt to look at places off the tourist route. Both towns were depressing. When you see the tiny tin shacks near the airport you think, well, I hope one day soon they’ll demolish these completely, and it won’t take long to do. But the housing in these two towns is more substantial, while being deeply dreary and unloved. People will have to go on living there for years. Atlantis in particular looked like the very worst, most isolated council estate on the edge of Glasgow or Liverpool. But people waved cheerfully whenever I waved, and the white Mercedes didn’t attract a second glance.

I drove back to Camps Bay — an hour in time and a world apart. I sought out a restaurant not offering me immense quantities of fresh protein, of which I had had a surfeit since arriving, and found a kind-of-Greek place which was comfortable and quiet. I had a nice big wooden table to myself, and ate the old favourites of houmus, taramasalata and tsatsiki (half portions), followed by moussaka and salad. It was a relief to be able to finish the plates. The only problem was the excessive kindly attention. Two different people told me they would be my personal waiter for the evening, and the staff asked me I should think a dozen times if everything was all right.

The next day, Sunday, I left Camps Bay and drove down the Cape Peninsula. After Houts Bay, the road over Chapman’s Peak was closed. (I read all about it yesterday in the Cape Times. The dramatic cliff road was first opened in 1922. In recent years there have been dangerous rock falls which have required serious engineering. The road is due to reopen next month.) So I crossed the peninsula through Constantia, and then turned right over a mountain pass and came down to the coast on the eastern side of the peninsula, north of Simons Town, a little naval base which I drove through thinking of my grandfather, who used to come there with the Royal Navy. I carried on south on a beautiful mountain road, with wonderful views east across False Bay to the next headland at Hangklip. The southernmost part of Cape Peninsula is a national park and nature reserve, and you have to pay to get in. It is worth it. I don’t know whether I have ever seen a place so naturally beautiful. The Afrikaans name for the wild bushes which cover great expanses of the land is fynbos, ‘fine bush’, and the closest comparison I have seen in Europe is the maquis in Corsica, famously hauntingly scented, as is the fynbos. There was a deep blue sky; there were wild flighted birds of startling colours, ostriches, and the occasional group of baboons causing cars to stop and people to leap out and take photographs, despite notices saying that baboons are dangerous. I hadn’t realised before that the Cape of Good Hope is not the very bottom of the peninsula, but a couple of kilometres above that on the west side. Cape Point is the very bottom, and there are high sheer cliffs of the most wonderful beauty, where sea birds — maybe a kind of cormorant — were making nests on precipitous ledges. I walked up from the car park to the former lighthouse, and then down and round to the extreme tip of the peninsula, just above the present-day lighthouse. The whole place is a model of the correct management of beautiful and ecologically sensitive but popular tourist sites, down to the choice of material for the pathways and the benches. I was entranced. The sun shone and I felt great. I bought a sandwich and a bottle of water and sat on a rock and looked down at a little bay where there were penguins.

Then I drove back up the eastern side of the peninsula, back through Simons Town to Fishhoek and along False Bay towards Hermanus. It was while driving along that road that I kept looking to my left and seeing the settlements, over embankments beside the road, which told the other side of the story of this country. I passed through Hermanus and kept going towards Stanford. I gave a lift to an old man who talked non-stop in a language I didn’t recognise (not Afrikaans and it didn’t sound like Khosa — no clicks), but who was happy to be riding in a Mercedes. After half an hour he made a sign for me to stop, got out, bowed low, and walked away into the bush. I couldn’t see a house anywhere.

At about six I came to my second guest house, where I was to be for two nights. I tapped a code which I’d been given into a panel at the gate, and then drove on a sandy track across fynbos for about a kilometre. Wind moved the bushes. Apart from that there was complete silence. The place felt extraordinarily remote. Then the house came into view.

I was the only guest, and was served dinner in solitude by Val, the owner.

The next day, Monday, I retraced my drive along the sandy track, turned right outside the gate, drove down the road a few kilometres, turned right again, and came to the sea at a place called De Kelders. I was on one side of Walker Bay, which stretches right back round to Hermanus and beyond, and is perhaps the most beautiful sea bay I have ever seen. Continual processions of white waves followed each other to shore, the water blue with the opaque look which rough gems have when caught in lumps of rock. There were two whales, perhaps a hundred metres from shore, not more. The whales come in large numbers from Antarctica in the southern winter, to breed and give birth in the bays of this part of the South African coast. Almost all of them had left by the time I got there, but two were enough for me, and one in particular twisted and played in the water, holding its tail upright from time to time. I stood and watched until my wonderment and curiosity were satisfied. Then I walked along the bay, past the seaside houses awaiting their summer occupants, a few being painted and repaired by groups of workers in blue overalls. I went out on to the rocks as close as I could to the crashing water. I sat there for an hour and then walked back to the car and drove on south and east, on a straight road which just went on and on across bush, the only diversion being the sight, shocking to my eyes, of snakes squashed on the tarmac. I read that snakes seek out the tarred roads when it’s hot, because they like the intense heat that the tar gives off once the sun has been on it for a while, and so are often killed. I also heard that many drivers deliberately drive over the snakes, whether poisonous or not, for sport.

After about an hour on the tarred road, I came to a junction where the only choice was to turn back or proceed on dirt roads, so I carried on, more slowly, creating clouds of red dust behind me, and drove through wide expanses of farmland, where cattle and sheep grazed, with stands of eucalyptus trees which had extracted so much water from the ground that the earth below them was bare. Then I came out on to a tarred road again north of Struis Bay, and stopped on the edge of the town for petrol. I ate a pizza in the café next door, and read the Cape Times, which was encouraging national mourning and self-reproach because the Springboks had been easily beaten by the All Blacks the previous day in the quarter-finals of the rugby World Cup in Australia.

I went on down through L’Agulhas to Cape Agulhas, the most southerly point of Africa, and stood on the rocks there and again watched the waves processing steadily in, made bigger and fiercer by a strong wind off the sea. Then I drove back inland to Bredasdorp, across flat farmland, and turned left up into beautiful hilly country, where wheat was being harvested. Wheat is a winter crop in South Africa, and most of it had already been cut, the swathes of the harvester blades making regular, curving stripes on the vast hillsides. At Napier, white ladies in white clothing with broad-brimmed hats were playing bowls on a well-tended green. The bungalows were neat. Beyond the town were the shacks where the black people live. I carried on in the heat of late afternoon, up and up through high wheat fields, descended into a river valley where there was a vineyard and where onions were growing with the help of generous amounts of sprinkled water, and came back to Stanford.

That evening, before dinner, I had a conversation with Val in which I explained what I had been doing in Cape Town the previous Friday, and through that made it clear what my position had been towards the apartheid regime, and where my political sympathies now lay as the South African government struggles to address its immense inheritance of poverty and division. Val listened politely, but I could tell that she had been quite content to live and prosper under apartheid, and had no sense that she and her kind had been complicit in the perpetuation of an evil system. After dinner, I met her husband Tim for the first time, and encountered a male version of the same myopia. He was a handsome, tall, bearded man, with something of a Hemingway face, and he ran the South African branch of an American-owned firm which makes heat extractors. We started on the rugby, then switched to the state of the British and South African economies, and I was soon listening to him telling me that the difficulties facing the South African economy were principally to do with the inability of black people to show initiative, to respond to the wonderful opportunities they were now being offered. He cited numerous examples of the generosity of white-owned businesses such as his in funding amenities for black people — football stadiums complete with changing facilities and social clubs, for instance — which thrived as long as white people organised them, but which fell into disuse, amid factional rancour, as soon as the whites withdrew.

I became blunter and blunter in my contributions to the conversation, telling him finally that the poverty of the majority was a scandal for which the whites, whatever gestures some might now be making, carried full responsibility. He took this in his stride, telling me that if I thought black housing was bad here I should go to India, where the housing was even worse, because the brown people had been running the government for more than fifty years already. We shook hands and I went to bed.

The next morning Val drove me in their Land Rover around the sandy dunes of their nature reserve, and I saw tortoises, cape harriers and Val’s own little family of eland as we bumped through the grasses. She is a well-informed and thoughtful conservationist, with an admirable love of beauty and diversity in nature. When I remarked that a Land Rover must be an essential vehicle in this kind of terrain, she agreed of course, and added, ‘And it’s very useful for carrying labour around.’ By that impersonal noun she meant the black workers who were rebuilding another house on the reserve which she and Tim hoped to sell to rich Germans as a holiday home. At the end of our drive, before I took my leave, I asked her whether there was anyone in the current government for whom she had respect. She named Trevor Samuels, the finance minister, and two others whose names I have forgotten, including I think the minister for tourism. She was scornful of Mbeki and contemptuous of the health minister, stumbling over her double-barrelled African name with a ‘…or whatever her name is’. She mentioned particularly Mbeki’s initial refusal to admit that South Africa has a huge HIV and AIDS problem, a refusal which, I agreed, had been unstatesmanlike and foolish. I said that I thought the government had changed its position since. I had read an article by the health minister in the Cape Times the previous day (it appeared after the laments about the rugby), fully acknowledging the scale of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Val said that Mbeki knew that South Africa had too many people, and that he had hoped that, by pretending that HIV/AIDS was not a big problem, many of them would die quickly, easing the demand for housing and water. He had had to change his position because of the international outcry at what he had originally said.

I left, amazed that Val could impute to the president of her country such wickedness of motive. It was that remark, more than any other which Val and Tim had made over the previous two days, which gave me a sense of the gulf between the previously ascendant white community and the inclusive government under which that community is now obliged — most of them reluctantly — to live.

I drove that day to Franschoek, back over breathtakingly beautiful rolling hills, the last of the wheat being harvested, up and up until I came to a great dam, the largest of the dams supplying Cape Town. The huge lake is surrounded by fruit orchards and vineyards. Mountains rise above the cultivated slopes, and in the hot sunshine, under a deep blue sky, the place could be the Garden of Eden, until you see little groups of black workers busy picking fruit while a white overseer stands right beside them, belly hanging over belt, doing nothing except sometimes talking on a mobile phone, just making sure that ‘the labour’ doesn’t slack. After the lake I drove higher still, over a mountain pass where I stopped and admired the great grey peaks, the upland meadows, the cape harriers soaring, before descending to the Franschoek valley. Franschoek is a privileged, pretty town, too complacent and cute for my liking. Famous vineyards line the roads of the valley. I’m staying at a guesthouse belonging to one such, between Franschoek and Paarl. I have a comfortable suite of three rooms, including a substantial living room with writing table and good light, where I’ve written this.

After two nights and the intervening day in the vineyard guesthouse, I went on through Paarl and Wellington. It was strange to me, going through Wellington in the heat, to see municipal workers slinging the town’s Christmas decorations between the lamp-posts. Then up over another wonderful mountain pass, describing a semi-circle until I was heading south towards Hermon. The farm where I was to stay on my last night, Bartholomeus Klip, is nearby. About 20 kilometres north of Hermon I picked up a hitch-hiker, perhaps my sixth (all black — I didn’t see a white hitch-hiker) since the monologuist last Sunday. The others had all been friendly, but it had been hard to get a proper conversation going, even if their English had been good. I had asked one woman whether life was better for black people than it had been 10 years ago. ‘I think so,’ she had said doubtfully, ‘but things are very expensive.’

This man was different. He was a water treatment engineer. He had been working since six that morning at a dam nearby (a smaller dam than the one I had passed on Tuesday, but still substantial, and also supplying Cape Town). It was about 2.30 in the afternoon when I picked him up. The temperature was 33º. He was a skilled man doing an important job: making sure that the inhabitants of Cape Town had clean water. Despite this, he was required to depend on the occasional and unreliable shared taxi service to get to and from his place of work, or to hitch lifts. He told me that if I hadn’t come along, he might have got a lift from someone else. Failing that, a shared taxi would arrive about four. He was articulate about the political situation in his country. An ANC member himself, he recognised that the government had made mistakes, and included some ‘not very good’ ministers. Corruption did exist, he admitted. But the ANC was nonetheless the only party which, in the foreseeable future, would be able to give the country a sense of unity, make any progress on the huge tasks facing it, and ‘control violence’. I knew this already, but it was reassuring to have an impressive representative of the new South Africa confirm it.

I left him at his tiny but gracious house outside Hermon. We shook hands and he invited me to come and see him there again. I wondered how long it would be before a water treatment engineer, an employee of the water supply company for the Western Cape, had his own van to drive.

Ten minutes later I was on a dirt road leading across wide plains of cut wheat and fynbos to Bartholomeus Klip. The original farmhouse has been made into guest rooms offering a high standard of old-fashioned comfort, verging on the luxurious. I was in time for tea, and I’m not sure whether I’ve ever drunk better tea, from a large silver teapot, or eaten more delicious buttered scones with home-made jam. At 4.30 I climbed into the back of an open-topped Land Rover and was driven, in the company of two other tourists — a couple from Camberley, Surrey, self-made successes in the double-glazing business, and experienced, even blasé safari-goers — around the huge expanse of fynbos which the farm includes. We narrowly avoided squashing a cape cobra about two metres long, which then made off through the grass. We saw a secretary bird, gnus, ostriches, antelopes various, and five geometric tortoises. The geometric is South Africa’s rarest tortoise. I had read at Val’s farm that there are only about 5,000 geometrics in existence. Bartholomeus Klip claims to have 3,000 on its land. Even so, our guide and driver, a young woman with a qualification in ecologically responsible land management, and obviously well informed, said we were very fortunate to see five geometrics in the space of two hours. She had never seen so many on one outing before. She told us not to pick them up. They urinate as a defence mechanism, and can become badly dehydrated and even die as a result.

The flat land is bordered to the east by an abrupt range of mountains, where there are leopards. We got back to the farmhouse in time to watch the effect of the sunset on the mountains, which turn an intense shade of pink for about five minutes. This while drinking a local and delicious Sauvignon Blanc, gazing across a lake as flocks of white birds flew in strict formations to their roosts. Then bath, then dinner, which was easily the best I’d eaten in South Africa, and I’d had some good ones.

This morning I drove slowly towards the airport, stopping at Paarl to find a present for Helen. None of the jewellers, in this land of gold and diamonds, had anything I liked. It was all the fussy, over-ornate stuff I remember adorning the fingers of ladies (not my mother’s) in England in the 1950s. I was about to give up when I came across a shop selling antique jewellery, and bought a pendant in rose gold, with little rubies and diamonds, about a hundred years old.

Then the airport, then twelve hours of acute discomfort, then English rain.

I shall go back to South Africa, and I must visit Johannesburg and some of the other cities. I’m well aware that I’ve done the equivalent of flying to Nice, driving along the coast and up into the hills of Provence for a few days, and then making generalisations about France. But I’ve seen enough to understand the scale of the challenge facing government and people, and to sense the terrifying possibility that it could still all go wrong. If ever a country needed great statesmanship at home, and permanent, sympathetic, practical engagement and support from abroad, South Africa needs these for decades to come. It is the economic powerhouse and it could be the political beacon for the whole region of southern and central Africa. Probably, it will maintain its economic role and develop its political role. That is what we must hope for, while not complacently assuming that, once a nation moves from darkness into light, it will stay there. There are too many examples — among them Zimbabwe — to the contrary.

Peter Adams on the phone. In retirement now as a priest, he still helps out with services when asked, as retired priests usually do. Yesterday he did the Ash Wednesday services, 11.30 and 8, at a parish somewhere in south London, because his friend the Revd Anthony Quartermain had gone to Portugal for a week’s golf, to get away from the wretched weather, and had forgotten that Lent was beginning!

I’ve been reading two or three poems, chosen at random from an anthology, aloud to Helen each night in bed before we go to sleep. I know that she hates Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’ with ferocious intensity, not I think because she has a worked-out feminist objection to the poem (legitimate as that position might be) on the grounds that it does seem to suggest that Leda began to acquiesce in, even to enjoy, the rape, but because she finds the description of the act physically revolting, and in particular the lines

‘How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from the loosening thighs?’

The poem makes her shudder, and not as in ‘A shudder in the loins’. The other night, coming upon it as I flicked through the book, out of pure mischief I began to read, in a sing-song, bedtime-story voice:

‘A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl…’

and that was as far as I got before howls of protest curtailed the reading, and I looked for something more suitable. As a penance, I’ve written a sonnet called ‘Leda Ponders Yeats’s Sonnet’, in which Leda comprehensively demolishes Yeats’s suggestion that she consented to the rape.

This is a Saturday evening flight from Rio de Janeiro to Belém, a city on the estuary of the Amazon. It will take three hours. My friends Len Brown, Jay Johnston and I have comfortable seats with the extra leg room by the emergency exit, so we’re cheerful. The plane is no more than half full.

Belém is just south of the equator, on the southern bank of the southern branch of the river. The island which divides the two branches is about the size of Belgium, and each of the branches about the width of the English Channel between Dover and Calais.

Although we took off only ten minutes ago, there are absolutely no lights below us now. Brazil is a country of huge activity and huger empty spaces.

We arrived in Rio last Sunday morning. It’s my second trip to Brazil. Len’s friend Roger, an English inhabitant of the city for 25 years, picked us up at the airport and took us to his house, right under Corcovado. We ate a leisurely breakfast in his beautiful garden, and then he drove us to the Copacabana Palace Hotel, where we’ve been for the last six nights. The Copacabana Palace is, I should think, the best hotel in Rio; certainly the most stylish. We have experienced luxury.

My business reason for being here is the 4th World Summit on Media for Children and Adolescents. I’ve been to all four of these events: Melbourne in ’95, London (which I helped to organise) in ’98, Thessaloniki in ’01 and now this. About 2,000 people were there. The conferences are a focus for people involved in the production of television and other media for children and young people who want in some way to resist the homogeneity and cultural narrowness which purely market-driven productions, mainly coming from America, would impose on the world. Diversity, relevance to local cultures and needs, indigenous production: these are the watchwords. It’s bound to be a campaign with many defeats, but there are some victories too. I was at this conference to give two talks: one about dramas I have commissioned in and about Northern Ireland; and one about Making It, a co-produced series of short films celebrating children’s creative ingenuity in Brazil, South Africa, Australia, Jamaica and the UK.

In the evenings we’ve started with caiparinhas, then eaten magnificently, with a heavy emphasis on roast meat, and then gone to night clubs. On Tuesday we visited a samba place in Lapa called Carioca da Gema (Rio to the Core), where a five-piece band — large and small guitar, drums, keyboard and clarinet — played with dazzling skill, rather intellectually with a jazz influence. The dancing was perfect, proper samba, performed by some couples of exquisite beauty, but also by others on whom the years had taken their toll. All achieved heights of elegance and sensuality at which one could only gape.

On Thursday we were at another place in Lapa (name forgotten) where the music was more basic and popular, and where freer forms of dancing were tolerated. There we joined in with no embarrassment. The pleasure was at its height when a two-man camera crew invaded the place, presumably with the consent of the management, perhaps filming for some travelogue to be shown by an airline. The atmosphere of uninhibited night life they hoped to capture immediately shrivelled and died. The only dancers left on the floor were foreigners. We left. Roger and I went on to a great rough dance hall, where we stood and watched a big crowd, on the eve of a public holiday, enjoying a very loud band playing what Roger called ‘heavy metal forró’. Forró is a style of music from the north-east of the country, properly played with accordion, triangle and one drum. This band had big amplification, saxophones, guitars, electric accordion, full drum set and no triangle. Couples danced wildly but skilfully between the tables.

Today I flew in a helicopter for the first time in my life. We took off from Barra, a huge suburb of Rio to the west, followed the coast back to Leblón, Ipanema, Copacabana, around the Sugar Loaf, up to Corcovado where we flew twice round Christ the Redeemer, then straight over the forest behind Rio back to Barra. It was an exhilarating, beautiful experience. The aircraft was small — only four seats — with perfect views and a smooth ride. I sat in the front next to the pilot. Breathtaking.

Then we went to a cachaça shop in Leblón and tasted a few samples. Len and I bought a bottle each for ourselves and I bought one for Roger. After that we went to eat feijoada at the Cesar Park on Ipanema beach, as I did last time I was in Rio. Delicious. Like Mr Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, I love all the base parts of animals. In feijoada, tripe, pigs’ ears, pigs’ trotters and ox tongues are stewed to perfect tenderness.

We have two nights in Belém, and on Monday fly about 800 kilometres inland to Santarém, a smaller town on the Amazon, where its mighty tributary the Tapajós joins the main river. We have five nights there, with trips on the Amazon and into the forest. It’s going to be a serious adventure.

We landed at Belém and walked through its beautiful new airport: the height of architectural style and confidence. It stands for the coming world, one can hope. It was a rainy night. The taxi took us into town along a road stuck in the present world of poverty and limitation. Lines of ugly shacks, built without any kind of plan; rusting and peeling signs for shops and garages and workshops; poor people simply squatting or standing by the road, with nothing to do late on a Saturday night other than be there; frequent tiny bars where two or three men gathered at the counter under a single light. Our hotel was drab, with dark wood fittings, furniture which had aspired to modernity forty years ago, and economy in the use of electricity. But the rooms (suites rather — we could afford them) were clean, and the showers and air-conditioning worked.

It was after eleven by the time we had dumped our stuff. We went round the corner, looking for a livelier place than the hotel for a drink, and immediately came upon a bar belonging to the coming world. Well-dressed people, smart casual, mainly young but with some older ones there too, were enjoying a Saturday night of a kind familiar to us. We stayed until two.

The next day I slept late, and met Len and Jay at the Resto das Docas, where I got my first view of the Amazon. Brown. The piece of river where Belém is situated is not even the main southern channel, I now discover; this inlet runs round into that channel a little to the north; but the water I was looking at was still wider than any river I have ever seen. A long forested island is visible seven or eight kilometres across it.

A section of the old dock buildings has been beautifully restored and turned into restaurants, cafés and a museum. Again, the coming world. We went back there for lunch later, and the place was full of our kind of people, economically; their children well dressed, at leisure on Sunday, with enough money to eat out, and new cars — nothing extravagant — in the car park outside.

Between coffee and lunch we walked through the markets next to the restored buildings, and saw the old world which is still the reality for most. At scores of tiny stalls, people had cereals, spices, fruit, meat and fish for sale. There wasn’t much custom, but they needed to stay open for what they could get. Round the side of the covered fish market was a little wharf, surrounded by painted houses and shops which had been pretty once, and could be again, but suffered from lack of money. Some poor people lay around in the shade, on benches or sacks, with nothing to do. Several kindly passers-by warned us that it was dangerous to stroll too far from what they called ‘movement’. While we were amongst people, we were safe. If we began exploring remoter streets where no-one was, we might be unlucky and meet thugs with knives or guns. We took the advice.

After lunch, we went back to the hotel for showers and siestas, and then returned to the river at 5.30 for a boat trip. We sailed around the promontory of Belém, looking at the wharves and the houses of the very poor sticking out into the river on stilts. It began to rain quite hard, and when the boat turned round after three quarters of an hour and sailed further out into the channel for the return leg of the trip, it was possible, looking across in the direction of the now invisible long island, to experience total darkness in a way I almost never do: thick cloud, so no moon or stars, heavy rain in big drops, no lights beyond our boat; just soft black night pressing in.

We flew to Santarém yesterday morning. It took an hour. Before the plane got above the clouds, you could see the complexity of the river system: tributaries and tributaries of tributaries, winding creeks, and every island covered in green forest, except for tiny isolated settlements, one house here, two or three there, next to the water and with only the water for transport.

At Santarém airport we hired a Toyota Hilux, a strong vehicle with four-wheel drive, to make possible some exploration on dirt roads. Our hotel, the Amazon Park, is a grotesque edifice on the edge of the town, opened in 1974 and then owned by Varig, Brazil’s major airline. The hotel was a symbol of the government’s determination to open up the Amazon to agriculture, mining and business generally. There are hundreds of rooms, ranged in an arc, all facing the river. The place looks to have had almost no maintenance since it was opened. My room is like a generously proportioned cell in an open prison. There is no decoration. Lino tiles peel from the floor. There are three single beds of basic design. The fridge and the air-conditioning make a lot of noise between them. But they work, and so does the shower, and the sheets are clean.

Last night we drove into town and parked on the waterfront. Scores of wooden boats were moored there, filling with people on their way to outlying villages up, down and across the river. I thought how experienced the pilots must be to navigate the boats in complete darkness between islands and along narrow channels to their destinations. On one boat, a boy lay with his head in his girlfriend’s lap, sending a text message. The display of his mobile phone glowed in the dark.

We ate what we could of a delicious but too large fish supper in the air-conditioned Mascote restaurant, and finished with ice-cream and cachaça on the terrace outside. A shoe-shine boy came to us. None of us wanted our suede boots cleaned, but we gave him some coins and asked him about his life. He was one of seven children, he told us, of whom the eldest was 23. He was ten, and not the youngest. He would work until ten o’clock, and then go home to bed. He attended school in the mornings. Schooling is provided on a shift system. He studied arithmetic, Portuguese and geography.

He was a beautiful boy: cheerful, humorous and well nourished. He didn’t feel exploited because he was walking around at night with his shoe-shine box, trying to earn some money. He was glad to be helping his family.

Today we drove out of Santarém in a south-westerly direction on a good tarmac road which was once part of the Trans-Amazonian Highway. After a few kilometres, big pot-holes slowed our progress. We came to a sign announcing the immense distances to Rio, São Paulo, Brasilia, Porto Alegre and other places. Len remembered the sign from when he was here 26 years ago. The roads which did for a while link the Amazon to the great cities of the south have not been maintained. The tarmac runs out, the dirt roads are only passable in the dry season, and there are places where the forest has begun to cover them over again.

The irony for tourists like us, in a car, and wishing to see the rain forest, is that the very fact that we are on a road means that the rain forest has been pushed back. Up and down the road, on both sides, are shacks, bars, shops, churches and petrol stations — a long thin ribbon of clearance. The effect of the clearance is generally ugly. The cultivation behind and between the buildings does not look to be a success. There is little sign, from the road, of substantial crops.

We turned off the tarmac road and drove along dirt roads to Bel Terra. We approached the town along an avenue of shacks, each with its yard. In each yard is a satellite dish. The principal means of transport are bicycles, motorbikes, buses and, still, a few horses and carts. We saw two or three cars only. The town was founded in the 1930s, the second of two experimental settlements built by the Ford Motor Company to house the workers and managers at the rubber plantations which the company had established nearby. The plantations were failures. They lost Ford a lot of money, and it sold them to the Brazilian government in 1945.

At the centre of Bel Terra, the former managers’ dwellings are proper clapboard houses. The road is paved, there is a park with concrete benches, and the main church is far bigger than a place of this size would normally merit. You are in the ghost of a paternalist capitalist experiment. It’s as if a small town in America had suffered a draining-away of money, so all the Americans left. Time passed and the weeds grew. In the Americans’ place came poor people from another country.

We descended to the bank of the Tapajós, where we had a picnic. I got a bottle of beer from a bar near the river. In this most remote place, the woman greeted me as if she saw me every day.

Today we took a light aeroplane — a four-seat Cessna — and flew across the Amazon. It was possible to see clearly the point where the waters of the Tapajós join those of the Amazon. The Tapajós is steely blue and the Amazon reddish brown. At the point where we crossed, the Amazon must be a hundred kilometres wide. There are islands, slicks of land, and places in this rainy season where you’re not sure whether you’re looking at land or water. There is a broad central channel, itself perhaps forty kilometres wide. I only really understood the Amazon, as a geographical phenomenon, in seeing it from the air this morning. It is a water world, a huge slow force containing its own masses of land, not — as smaller rivers are — a channel of water contained by land. The land within the water was intensely green. There were occasional single houses, utterly remote. There were solitary eagles, flocks of buzzards, and one dramatically white flock of egrets, turning itself inside out, bright against the brighter green below. It was all a spectacular example of the physical beauty of the world.

We buzzed around the town of Alenquer, on the north bank, with its grid pattern of dirt streets, and looked down at the church, the public buildings, the waterfront, the houses, the football field, the very few cars, the larger number of motorbikes, a bus or two; then flew east to Monte Alegre, where we landed. A man drove us in an ancient car down to the waterfront, where we had juice in the bar of the brand new and immensely stylish boat station: a small but brilliant example of the best contemporary public architecture. Brasil avança, said the construction notice board. ‘Not yet inaugurated,’ said our driver proudly. He drove us back up through the town, through the market, past the bus station, where very old buses were waiting to take people to villages along the north bank of the Amazon and inland.

We recrossed the river, coming again to the south bank perhaps twenty kilometres east of Santarém, and kept flying south. Now we saw, with a perfect clarity which hadn’t been possible during our road trip yesterday, evidence of what is happening to the Amazon rain forest. It is still there, in enormous quantity, but the scale and effectiveness of the invasion by agribusiness is terrifying. Where we flew, soya fields are everywhere. This land, which was once forest, has been cleared completely. It is nude. It might be in East Anglia or northern France. The soya producers are serious; they intend to make their investment pay. On the other hand, the clearances which have been made by peasant farmers, such as those we saw yesterday, look mostly to have failed. There are rectangles of land where secondary wild growth is returning; nowhere near the height of the original forest yet, but growing. I don’t know whether the returning growth, left alone, can eventually become forest again, with the full bio-diversity of the original.

Nor do I know, I’m afraid, who’s winning the struggle of words and actions between the federal and state governments, the big-money, industrial-scale invaders of the forest, the representatives of the people of the Amazon region, and the international organisations concerned about the forest’s destruction. I don’t know whether we’re heading relentlessly for a global environmental disaster, or whether a sustainable compromise can be agreed. Poor people need work. They have a right to prosper and enjoy their lives, like the young families in Belém who were enjoying theirs, like we enjoy ours. Governments in rich countries, as well as international organisations, have a responsibility to help them do this without destroying a mighty piece of nature on whose continuing existence we all depend.

This morning we went to a travel agent in Santarém and arranged an afternoon boat trip out amongst the islands. Then we drove to Alter do Chao, a pretty village on the Tapajós, which is obviously popular with Brazilian tourists and weekenders. It’s about 45 minutes from Santarém, on a good road. There are numerous shops offering craftwork and ecological information.

After a bowl of soup back at the hotel, we boarded our boat. It was big enough for a dozen people, so it was very comfortable with only three of us there, plus Neles our guide, who spoke excellent English, plus a boy who drove the boat. We sailed into the channel, and immediately saw clearly the line where the waters of the Tapajós meet those of the Amazon, as we had seen yesterday from the air. The line is absolutely abrupt: the grey-blue Tapajós side by side with the red-brown Amazon. Neles said that the waters slide along side by side like this for several kilometres before they begin to mix. The Amazon is colder than the Tapajós, which keeps the waters apart. (I’m not sure of the physics of this, but I took his word for it.)

After admiring the phenomenon for a few minutes, we went further out into the river and sailed between two long islands. It being the rainy season, the islands were flooded. The houses we had seen from the air yesterday are built on stilts. Some are simple shacks; some quite spacious dwellings. Neles told us that the people keep cattle on the islands in the dry season. Now, the cattle are on the high land behind Santarém. Most of the people are with them there; only a few continue to live on the islands in the wet season. We saw a little church and a community centre which also serves as a school. The tables and chairs were roped up near the ceiling, out of the water.

The islands are places of quiet but intense beauty at this time of the year. Green is everywhere. There are white and grey egrets, small green parrots, grey herons, black herons with yellow stripes (these called tiger herons), weaver birds, and bright red and yellow waders shaped like moorhens.

We stopped the boat, moored it to a tree, and proceeded by canoe. Flowering weed was thick on the water, and Neles and the boy had to paddle hard. We came to a thick grove of trees, the water covering perhaps two metres of their trunks, and paddled underneath them. In the course of the next hour we saw an anaconda, four sloths and a family of marmoset monkeys. Others in the boat saw a racoon; I missed it. We heard but did not see two iguanas falling from branches into the water, one narrowly missing the canoe. This in the stealthy quiet as we pushed our way between the flooded trees.

The anaconda was at the top of a tree, wrapped around its uppermost branches. It was not big by anaconda standards; it was big by any other snake standards. It had eaten quite recently, and would remain up the tree for about two weeks, out of harm’s way, digesting. The sloths were also up trees, doing nothing. Their name and reputation are deserved. They eat the leaves of the trees in which they sit, when they need to. They come down every few days to relieve themselves, and then go up again. I asked how often they mate. Neles said that they mate as often as necessary to maintain the species, but not more. ‘Unlike people,’ I said. ‘Unlike Brazilians,’ he said. ‘I don’t know about Europeans.’

The monkeys swung noisily through the trees. The boy imitated the call of a baby monkey in distress, which brought them closer for a minute, puzzled. Then they moved on, performing astonishing feats of agility, as if gravity doesn’t exist for them.

We left the grove of trees, paddled across more thick weed and rejoined the channel between the two islands. We stopped by some giant water lilies. I felt how strong they are, pressing down on one with my hand. They will support a small alligator. Alligators are plentiful here, though one is much more likely to see them by night than by day. They are not generally dangerous; they tend to flee from people. Crocodiles are rarer. They will attack unprovoked, so people shoot them.

We passed a house, and Neles and the boy spoke to a man sitting there. He was not well. He had been across to the town a few weeks ago. Being unused to traffic, he had been hit by a car. They had taken him to hospital for an operation, and released blood from his stomach. But he could not move his shoulder. His wife sat beside him, saying nothing. The voices carried softly and clearly across the water.

We found the bigger boat again, and crossed back to Santarém in the twilight. The meeting of the waters was not visible by colour in this light, but a line of bubbles and some turbulence showed where it was.

Today, with Neles again and a driver called Chico, we drove south from Santarém to a huge chunk of rain forest, called the Tapajós Forest, which is conserved as a national park. The trip on the tarmac road took about 75 minutes. Then we turned right and followed a good earth road for about five kilometres through the forest. We came to a clearing, where there was one substantial house and some shacks. A forest guide was waiting for us. He led us off into the forest, where we walked for three hours.

Neles used the words jungle and forest interchangeably. To me, the word jungle has always connoted a place of impassably dense vegetation. This jungle was not like that. Because the top canopy of great trees reduces light below, the lowest vegetation is not especially thick. It would be possible to walk, or at least scramble, in any direction. An inexperienced walker would become lost in the forest immediately. Everywhere the light is that of the interior of a cathedral in daytime. It filters and shoots from above, sometimes hitting the forest floor, usually not.

The ground was wet everywhere. The place was quiet. A few birds called, and we saw monkeys once. The forest guide showed us the tracks of wild pigs. There are jaguars, but you would be very fortunate, or unfortunate, to see one, and an encounter would be most likely at night. (My guidebook says that when Santarém was first settled by the Portuguese in the 17th century, its inhabitants closed their doors and remained inside at night, while jaguars prowled the streets.) The forest guide did carry a pistol as well as a knife. The knife he used for cutting overhanging branches and harvesting fruit. He filled a plastic bag with large brown fruit which Neles called butter fruit. It needs cooking, and is then delicious, so Neles said, though fatty. The forest guide also cut a large slab of bark from one tree. Neles said that the bark would be boiled, and its essence made into an infusion which, when drunk, shrinks and removes tumours, including cancerous ones. He offered the striking piece of information that when the Portuguese arrived in the Brazilian forest for the first time, European medicine knew about a hundred effective cures for illnesses. The people they encountered knew about four hundred. Many of those four hundred are now amongst the stock-in-trade of first-world medicine.

We admired several enormous trees which are two and three hundred years old, and one giant which may be a thousand years old. We saw some brightly coloured caterpillars. The forest guide picked up one large armoured beetle, about two centimetres square, which performs the useful task of eating faeces, and turning them into sweet soil. Cattle farmers pay good money for these beetles. They leave them to breed in their fields, where they eat the cattle dung, preventing flies from hatching and attacking the cattle.

Overall, the forest is not a place of bright colour. The shades are of green and brown. Occasionally, you see a red or white flower, which is striking for its rarity. There are dark-blue butterflies, about four times the size of the largest butterfly I’ve seen in Europe. We ate several fruits offered by the forest guide. One had an intense concentration of vitamin C; another was full of calcium and zinc.

So we took a short walk in the world’s largest rain forest; a place on whose survival the world’s future as a hospitable place for humans probably depends.

We’re now on our way back from the Amazon back to Rio. Santarém to Manaus; change of planes; Manaus to Rio via Brasilia. It has been an amazing week. The people of the Amazon whom we have met have been, without exception, welcoming, courteous, humorous and relaxed. I saw, thanks to our trips by air, water and land, enough of the place to understand its essentials, geographically, ecologically and economically.

One is left with a sense of awe at the challenge Brazil, and the Amazon region in particular, face in balancing the country’s legitimate desire to enrich its poor people, to create a larger middle class, to become the great power in the world which it could be, given its wealth in natural resources, the diversity and scale of its industry and agriculture, and the size of its population; against the single, central fact that it possesses, in the Amazon rain forest and river system, a unique and precious place which must not be much more damaged than it is already, or catastrophe will ensue.

Here I am in the bar where Vinícius de Moraes wrote (or had the inspiration for writing?) one of the most famous popular songs in history. The place is on a corner; the street outside which goes to the sea is named after the writer. Until this trip, I had an image of two middle-aged men, de Moraes and Antonio Jobim, the composer, sitting in the bar together, with a beer each, and seeing the vision of insouciant loveliness passing them without a sideways glance on her way to the beach (the sea is only a short block from here; I can see it from where I’m sitting), and both being filled with the melancholy of age and hopeless sexual longing. But I heard the other day that de Moraes was in here alone, and only gave the words to Jobim two years after he wrote them. No doubt the truth is documented somewhere. Anyhow, considering the fame of the song, the place is admirably restrained in its exploitation of the association. It bears the song’s name, changed from something else; the song’s first verse — score and words — is on a plaque on the wall outside and on a board inside, and you can buy a tee-shirt displaying the same words and music. There are a few framed black-and-white photographs. But that’s it. Somehow, the restraint is part of the style, which in my little experience is true of samba and bossa nova generally. The music, and the dancing that goes with it, are demonstrations of controlled intensity conducted in a small space.

Anyhow, the girls still pass, and sometimes I see one who has the same quality of self-possession, of beauty carried casually, as that which disarmed de Moraes; and I feel similarly disarmed.

I’ve had a wonderful time in Brazil. I’ll be back.

It is early autumn in Brittany, but still hot. It rained throughout August. Now it is perfect weather; calm, steady sunshine, but with a breeze to take off the full force of the heat. On each of the last few days, I have said to myself, ‘This is the perfect day. They don’t come better than this.’

On 15 August, while we were in England, Rosa phoned to say that Albert had died. [See the chapter called Kerfontaine and Albert in my memoir.]

We went back to Britain for eleven days in August. First we flew to Edinburgh, rented a car and drove up to Inverness-shire, for the wedding of our friends Carol Blake and David Mellor. We spent six nights in a comfortable hotel near Grantown-on-Spey. I’d never been to the highlands of Scotland before, apart from a 24-hour trip to Cromarty on Channel 4 business. I was quite enchanted by its beauty, and by its emptiness. We drove around every day except the wedding day, including one long day when we crossed to Wester Ross, and saw the magical sight, in the rain, of the Cuillin mountains on Skye rising above a level of cloud which hung over the island across the sea. On another day, we drove around the Black Isle in the sunshine, the fields full of ripe oats, barley and wheat, and stopped and admired Cromarty, and looked at the oil rigs standing in a row down the Cromarty Firth, about to be or having been maintained or repaired. On another day we went east, and another day south, up and down and around in Moray and Aberdeenshire. The combination of true wildness on the heather-clad moors, and the fields of crops, waiting to be cut, stirring in the warm breeze lower down the hills, was beautiful and satisfying.

We stopped and studied two bridges. One crosses the Spey at Craigellachie. It was built by Thomas Telford, no less, in 1814. It has a single iron arch, and two stone castellated pillars at each end. Of course it reminded me of the iron bridge at Ironbridge, and I wondered how many iron bridges had been built in the interval between the construction of the very first and that of Craigellachie bridge. The other bridge crosses the Don at Strathdon. It has a single narrow stone arch, and there is an inscription at the apex of the arch: Built 1715 by John Forbes of Inverernan. Both bridges are perfectly beautiful, simple structures, ‘strong through tension’, as Seamus Heaney puts it in a little poem in Electric Light.

After seeing something of the Highlands, we flew from Inverness to Luton, rented another car, and spent four days celebrating my father’s 80th birthday in Wootton. All five children turned up, plus partners and children, so there were about 20 people there for the main meal on the Saturday evening. We gave dad a bicycle. He had had his old one for a very long time, and it was worn out, unlike him.

Twelve days ago, I went to New York, because The Illustrated Mum, the drama I commissioned in my last months at Channel 4, had been nominated for an International Emmy. This was the third time I’d been to the Emmy ceremony. I took a Saturday morning plane with some colleagues who had worked on the film. About an hour into the flight I was taken suddenly and violently ill. I thought the plane had lurched, because I lost any sense of balance, but it hadn’t. I began to vomit, and continued to do so regularly for the remaining six hours of the flight, even when there was nothing left in me but stomach bile. I had no strength in my legs; couldn’t stand up. My head lolled. Every time I tried to lift it up, I desired to vomit again. I remained leaning forward in something like the brace position, with a big plastic bag hooked on to my wrists.

My friends feared that I might have had a heart attack. I knew that I hadn’t, because I had no pains in my chest. But the experience was awful. I just about staggered off the plane at JFK, two friends holding me before and behind, and collapsed into a wheel-chair. I was whisked along private corridors, head still lolling, friends following. Doors were unlocked and re-locked. We emerged at the front of the customs and immigration queue, where despite my condition I was fingerprinted and photographed like everyone else. Outside the terminal building, an ambulance waited. I was laid out on the stretcher in the ambulance, and an oxygen mask was clamped over my mouth.

Had this misfortune not overtaken me, I would have gone with the others straight to Manhattan to give a seminar about the making of the film. The producer, the director and Michelle Collins, the principal actor, were essential to this session. So we agreed that Michelle’s fiancé Parry, whom I hadn’t met before, would come with me in the ambulance, while the others went on to Manhattan.

We were at the local hospital in Queen’s within ten minutes. I was wheeled into the ER, which was just like ER in the television series of that name, except that I didn’t hear any high-speed shouting of medical instructions. People walked, not ran. But the physical environment, with its functional surfaces, bare of adornment; the sense of a multiplicity of tasks being undertaken simultaneously by many doctors, nurses, technicians, cleaners, all coming and going, criss-crossing each other; the constant, delicate and sometimes fraught interactions with patients, in pain, under stress, angry, frightened or just plain awkward and rude: that was all there.

For the next five hours I was sampled and examined by a succession of doctors and nurses. After about two hours I ceased to vomit. Once the doctors had established that there was nothing wrong with my heart, they offered two diagnoses. Either I had a virus in that part of the head which controls balance — apparently a common condition which people don’t much notice except when being shaken about on some means of transport; or, more likely, I had been poisoned. I agreed that the poison had probably been in a large can of tomato juice I had drunk on the plane, having refused the dreadful meal American Airlines offered me. I had vaguely thought at the time that the taste wasn’t the freshest, but I was writing something, not paying much attention to the drink, and had finished it anyway.

Parry stayed faithfully with me throughout this time; or rather, he stayed as long as he was permitted to, since the rules of the ER were that visitors could only remain with their friends or family for 15 minutes in every hour. I guess the staff have to do some pretty unpleasant things to people in there, and they don’t want the laity fainting all over the place. During one of Parry’s 45-minute absences, the doctors decided to keep me in the hospital overnight. So all my clothes and other belongings, which had been dumped on the lower shelf of my trolley when I had been admitted and undressed, were put into three large plastic bags, each marked ‘Personal Property’ in big black capital letters. At about that time, I became desperate for a pee, but was still not able to walk. So a nurse brought me a urine bottle, and then closed the curtains around the place where they had parked the trolley, for modesty. At the same time, she put the plastic bags outside the curtains, to be collected by the porters who were going to move me. Just after this, Parry came back, to see the curtains closed around me, and the worldly possessions I had had with me stacked outside. He assumed the worst. As I was trying, completely unsuccessfully, to pee sideways into a urine bottle, his white face appeared between the curtains. ‘Thank God you’re all right,’ he said. ‘I hardly know you.’ Even the mirth this provoked in me was not enough to set the urine flowing, and I had to wait another hour or so, until the ability to walk returned to me, before relieving my agonised bladder.

Some time later, I was wheeled upstairs to an ordinary ward, and Parry went on to the hotel. Having eaten nothing for a night and a day, and having expelled absolutely everything from the system from the day before that, I was ravenous. The tuna sandwich waiting for me by my bed tasted like the best thing I had ever eaten.

The next day a doctor came to see me and told me I could leave. I was well. It must have been food poisoning. Two other friends who had worked on The Illustrated Mum, who had arrived in New York a few days earlier, came to get me. I stepped out with them into a quiet Sunday morning in a part of New York I might never otherwise have seen in my life. I was wobbly but fine. We took the subway to Manhattan. My luggage from the plane was in the hotel room. I had a bath, washed my hair, put on clean clothes and went out to lunch, feeling that I had rejoined the living.

We won the Emmy. Afterwards, we went to the New York branch of Soho House and drank champagne until late. The next day, I walked around by myself, savouring the quiet feeling of achievement, and gave myself a delicious solitary lunch at a comfortable, old-world restaurant next to the Museum of Modern Art. Gazpacho was on the menu, and I thought I’d try it, to dispel any lingering fear of tomatoes (and to check that I hadn’t suddenly become allergic to them). Delicious, and no ill effects.

There was no malaise on the flight back that night. I mentioned to a steward the problem I had had on the way across, and asked for some extra sick bags to reassure myself. A kind man across the cabin, overhearing what I said and seeing my height, offered to swap seats with me, so I had a seat in the aisle in front of an emergency exit, with the extra leg room. I read and wrote all the way to London. I have always loved the names of the navigation points which you are shown on the TV screens on planes, and which guide the flight. I wrote them all down, approximately in the order they appeared: New York, Halifax, Godlhab (which is in Greenland), Goose Bay, Madrid, St John’s, San Juan, Miami, Casablanca, St George, Dakar, Ungava Bay, Bogotá, Lima, Rekyavik, Freetown, Boston, Fortaleza, Panama, Belém (which I visited in April), Luanda, Glasgow, Dublin, London, Lisbon, Berlin, Kinshasa, Cork, Athens, Belfast, Vienna, Cairo, Exeter, Shannon, Turin, Algiers, Milan, Brest, St Helier, Cardiff, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Bournemouth, Rome, Tunis, Killarney, Berlin, Addis Ababa, Rennes, Wexford, Tours, Caen, Plymouth, Stockholm, Munich, Naples, Aberystwyth, Le Havre, Lille, Liverpool, Coventry, Oxford, Bristol, Luton, Brighton, Gwent, Windsor, Marseille, Amsterdam, Norwich, Chartwell, Cambridge, Rotterdam, Cologne, Zurich, Stonehenge, Winchester. What a mixture of the famous and the unheard-of, the romantic and the banal! Names across a hemisphere helping to squeeze a lemon pip on an exact flight path through the night. I thought I might try to turn them into some kind of found poem, but I haven’t done anything about it.

It’s been a beautiful day. Green is everywhere. Cherry blossom is at its brightest, and the lilac is out. Clouds travel in unique, never repeated formations across a sky which is deeper blue overhead, paler blue towards the horizon. We’ve just passed that place near Rugby where the railway, the canal and the M1 run side by side. There’s a little yellow stone church squashed between the canal and the railway. First, in the 1780s, the navvies came by and built the canal, raised on an embankment so close to the church that travellers on boats could and can peer through the east window. Fifty years later, the navvies’ grandsons came by and built the railway, raised on another embankment so close to the church that travellers on trains could and can glance through the west window, although — even when the railway was new — they were travelling too fast to peer. 120 years after that, the navvies’ grandsons’ descendants and their machines came and built the M1 on a third embankment 200 yards east of the canal. Drivers and their passengers could and can glance at the church, but are too far away and moving too fast to see anything through the east window.

Although the objective impact of the M1’s arrival on the peace of the place was far greater than those of the railway and the canal, the earlier arrivals must I suppose have been a greater shock to the feelings and habits of mind of the people there at the time. Rural England had never known anything like it. By the 1950s, sensibilities were callused.

Over the last two years, we’ve had major works done at Kerfontaine, and last week they were completed. At the back of the house, there is now a beautiful new study, with an oak parquet floor and French windows looking out over a wooden terrasse and down the garden. The French windows and the Velux in the roof let in lots of light. The two armchairs which my great-aunt Margaret gave me 30 years ago have been splendidly restored by a local ébéniste working in partnership with a tapissier. The chairs are about 115 years old, in walnut, a wedding present to my great-grandparents.

The room occupies the space which once was the cave where Albert stored Kerfontaine’s fruit and vegetables and kept his tools. The inner wall is the cave wall, cleaned up and with the joints re-pointed in a honey-coloured cement mortar. I have a stout big writing table, nothing fussy, easily accommodating the computer, papers, notebooks and dictionaries. There is a phone point next to me, so the internet is at hand, though we’re still on the old dial-up system. ‘Le haut débit [broadband] n’est pas encore arrivé dans les communes rurales,’ says my man at France Télécom. (I remember how I allowed myself to become irritated at the slowness of dial-up one afternoon in an internet café at Santarém, 500 miles up the Amazon, until I bethought myself.) Albert’s vegetable garden has become a lawn. We’ve kept the hedge. In the winter it’ll be planted with flowering trees and shrubs. I have no desire to grow vegetables myself; too much work, and in any case I like buying them at Plouay market on Mondays.

Next year I’ll put a plaque carrying Albert’s name, dates and a sentence on the wall which he built around the spring in the wood.

We arrived at Kerfontaine yesterday. We stayed on Tuesday night in a hotel near Rouen. Yesterday we drove through Normandy on a brilliant freezing day, with snow all around. The landscape was spectacular: woodland and fields and half-timbered farms all shining white. Each branch of each tree carried its thick load of snow: Every branch big with it, as Hardy wrote. But his poem is called Snow in the Suburbs. This was snow in the full, open, sweeping countryside, with great uninterrupted rectangles dazzling the eye.

I’m recovering from a major operation. At the beginning of January, I began to feel an intense, burning pain in the left leg, from buttock down to the back of the ankle. It was particularly bad in the mornings, when I had difficulty getting out of bed and stepping into the bath-tub to have a shower. The doctor gave me a fortnight’s course of anti-inflammatory pills, thinking that I might have an inflamed nerve. I took these, but they did no good. Rather than go back to the doctor, I went to a chiropractor in Paddington, to whom Helen had gone about five years ago with sciatica, and who had cured her by manipulation. He is a jovial South African called Ashton Vice. He manipulated me, quite robustly, over about eight sessions in four weeks. On two occasions he put acupuncture needles into me. (I had no idea they were so long — about three inches — and he pushed them all the way in at various points on my left buttock and leg. I felt nothing, except once, when I had a sensation like a sharp electric shock.)

These treatments did not help either, or only marginally. Ashton and I agreed that if he had been going to cure me, I would already have started to feel better. He was sure that the problem lay in the lumbar region of the spine, where something was transferring pain down the nerves of my left leg. I should have an MRI scan.

I decided that I was going to use private medicine, if I could afford it, and get the condition diagnosed and treated as quickly as possible. (Ashton was private, of course, but his charges were modest — £40 a session.) I went to an MRI centre in Harley Street, recommended by Ashton, and climbed into the machine. For 25 minutes it took pictures of my body from the neck down to the tops of the legs. As I lay there, I thought with pride that my father had played a major part in the development of MRI in the 1960s and 1970s, though he had worked on smaller machines, called quantity analysers, which measured certain constituents of foodstuffs. He could put a small piece of chocolate in the machine, for example, and it would tell him immediately how much fat was in it. Peter Mansfield and his team at Nottingham University (my father’s old university) had gone on to invent the MRI machine which has so revolutionised the diagnosis of the ills of the body, for which Mansfield quite rightly received a knighthood and the Nobel Prize. My father took Mansfield one of his own magnets to try in one of the early prototypes of Mansfield’s machine, but Mansfield needed more powerful electro-magnets than were available to my father. Nonetheless, I thought, I might not be lying in this machine now if my father hadn’t done that early work. Charge: £350.

The MRI report and pictures told Ashton and me that I had a major extrusion of the L4/L5 disc — the disc between the fourth and fifth vertebrae of the lumbar section of the spine — which was pushing into the theca, the sac containing the roots of the nerves which run down my left leg. Ashton said I should consult a certain neurosurgeon, a Mr Afshar, also in Harley Street, immediately. I visited Mr Afshar a few days later. He examined me, made me try to push my left big toe against his hand (I had no force there, unlike in my right big toe), and tapped me with a reflex hammer below the knee cap (immediate reflex) and on the Achilles tendon (no reflex at all). He read the MRI report. Then we looked together at the pictures. The problem was obvious. The discal hernia was sticking so far out into my spinal canal that it looked like the Pont d’Avignon from the air.

Mr Afshar told me it was likely, leaving aside the pain I was in, that if I didn’t do anything about the hernia, it would in the next year begin to cause permanent damage to the nerves in my left leg. They would atrophy, and I would lose mobility in that leg. He recommended a micro-endoscopic discectomy. He personally performs about 100 of these operations a year. He told me that there is a very high chance of complete recovery. Complications occur in about 2% of cases.

This conversation took place on Thursday 23 March. We went to see his secretary. If I wished, he could do the operation the following Wednesday evening. He would charge £1500. The anaesthetist would charge £500. Five nights in The London Clinic, a private hospital adjacent to his consulting rooms, would cost £5400; each subsequent 24 hours would be another £640. I walked back to my office at Teachers TV in Berners Street and thought about the matter for an hour. Then I phoned and said I would have it done.

During the days between the decision and the operation I was frightened. I knew I was doing the right thing; I had absolute confidence in Mr Afshar, who, apart from being evidently at the top of his profession, was a charming man, with none of that overbearing arrogance which afflicts some of those with consulting rooms in Harley Street. Nonetheless, someone was going to be messing about in my spine with a sharp instrument, and I kept having the thought that a grave-faced Mr Afshar would come to me in my room the day after the operation and tell me, with great regret, that something had gone wrong and I would never walk again.

I didn’t want to tell Helen that I was frightened. I told her simply that I was worried. On the Monday afternoon, at work, I told Vanessa Linden that I was frightened, and once I had used the word aloud to someone else, the fear diminished and then departed.

I went into The London Clinic on the Wednesday afternoon. At about 6.30, Mr Afshar appeared with the consent form. I signed. I donned a gown, and walked down to the operating theatre, in the basement of the building, with a nurse. I lay on a trolley, and the anaesthetist, Dr Devros, put opiates in my arm. I thought about the last time I had had an anaesthetic, in Farnborough Hospital, Kent, in 1962, when my appendix had been removed. On that occasion, the surgeon had told me to count to ten. I had got to three…

The next thing I knew, I was waking up on the trolley, and Mr Afshar was smiling and saying that the operation had been a complete success. I waggled my left leg, and I could tell immediately that he was right. I had been unconscious for no more than 90 minutes. I made roguish remarks to the nurses who were putting morphine into one arm, a saline drip into the other, and oxygen up my nose. They smiled indulgently, having seen and heard such nonsense many times before. With childish pride, I began telling them how my father had invented the MRI machine. They smiled some more. Once fully hooked up to my life-support systems, I was pushed out of the operating theatre to the lift, and taken to my room on the sixth floor. I felt good. I spoke to Helen on the phone.

I don’t think I slept at all that night, but I didn’t mind. I just lay there, knowing that the anaesthetics were still in me, and that the morphine must be having some effect, and thought how wonderful it was that I had just had this done, so quickly, and that I was going to be all right.

Mr Afshar had made a vertical cut in my flesh, about three inches long, following the lumbar section of the spine. Then, using a microscopic probe remotely controlled, he had pushed aside the nerves and muscles in the vicinity of the extrusion. Once the probe was at the site of the extrusion, it simply dug it away, I imagine like a tiny JCB shovel. The consistency of the matter which had herniated, said Mr Afshar, was like that of crab meat. (Dr Vice had described it as toothpaste.) The discs in the spine have two parts. There is the tough outer ring, known as the annulus fibrosus, and the crab-meat- or toothpaste-like inner core, known as the nucleus pulposus. My problem had been that the nucleus pulposus of my L4/L5 disc had been squeezed under or over or through its annulus fibrosus. When Mr Afshar’s probe had taken away the extrusion, it ventured inside the annulus fibrosus (I think he said that it got in through a tiny hole in the ring) and removed the remaining nucleus pulposus too, to avoid the possibility that that might herniate in the future.

I recovered rapidly. On the Thursday afternoon, Mr Afshar visited and said that I could manage without morphine, saline drip or oxygen. I was disconnected. On the Friday, I went for my first walk, along the corridor with a physiotherapist. On the Saturday morning, joy of joys, a nurse took me to a walk-in shower room, and I had a shower and washed my hair. On the Sunday morning, after three days of constipation brought about by the anaesthetics, the morphine and my lack of mobility, I had such an enormous bowel movement that I found myself humming the Hallelujah Chorus immediately afterwards. These acts made me feel l’homme moyen sensuel once again.

The only cause for concern during this period was that my temperature kept shooting up during the evenings. The doctors and nurses worried that an infection might have got into the body during the operation. They gave me antibiotic pills. These made me nauseous, and I was sick in the middle of the night between Friday and Saturday. I took no more antibiotics on Saturday, but during that evening my temperature went up again. I said to Rosie the nurse that I’d really rather avoid the pills. Was there some other way I could take antibiotics? Well, she said, I could put them into your bottom. I thought about this for a few minutes, and then rang for her and said all right. While she was away getting the equipment, I thought how unpleasant it must be for a nurse to put something into a patient’s rectum when that part wasn’t completely clean, so just to be sure I got up and washed myself. I was lying back on the bed when Rosie reappeared. She told me to lie on my side. I did so and, to be helpful, raised my upper leg away from my lower, so the anus was more accessible. ‘No, no,’ she said, ‘you don’t need to do that.’ I lowered the leg, puzzled, and the next thing I knew was an intense pain as she pressed a syringe into my buttock, a long, long way, until she found a muscle. My reactions were mixed at this point. There was the relief at my misunderstanding, and at the knowledge that I wasn’t going to have to suffer the indignity of a suppository introduced into my anus. And there was the recognition that this injection was causing me worse pain than anything I had suffered since arriving in the hospital. I felt like a horse being put down. I told Rosie what I thought she had been going to do to me, and we had a good laugh.

I slept well that night, and after the triumph of the bowels the following morning, I felt ready for anything. But then Rosie came in prepared to give me another injection. ‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘I thought one would be it!’ ‘Four times a day,’ she said, ‘just like the pills.’ ‘I’ll go back on the pills,’ I said, ‘and see if I tolerate them any better.’ ‘OK,’ she said. I did, and this time I felt no sickness, thank God.

The care I received during my six days and nights in The London Clinic was superb. I knew I was jumping the NHS queue, but I just decided to do it. All the staff — doctors, nurses, the providers of the excellent food, the cleaners — were cheerful and unstressed. They had enough work, but not too much. They had time to talk. They were enthusiastic observers of and participants in my recovery. I had my own room, looking out over the Marylebone Road towards Regents Park, with bathroom ensuite (though the walk-in shower was down the corridor), so I had precious privacy. My own television and radio. Visitors welcome at any time of day. I could turn out the light when I wanted to sleep at night, not when someone else decided it was bedtime. It was the way things ought to be — and could be in a rich country like ours — for all sick people, but aren’t.

Helen was simply wonderful. She came every day, bringing newspapers and books, and stayed for hours, feeding me when I was still horizontal, not talking when there was nothing to talk about, just being there, reading or writing or arranging the constantly arriving bouquets of flowers. The best book she brought was Seamus Heaney’s new collection District and Circle, which I read with intense pleasure and admiration, a gift, a blessing, lying on my back and holding it up as if to the light.

Stephen Eyers came and took me home on the Tuesday morning. I lowered myself stiffly into the front passenger seat of a hired saloon car for the short trip to Camden Town, and hauled myself stiffly out at the street door of our flats. Helen was there, and I walked up the two flights of stairs slowly but without difficulty. The three of us had coffee, toast and jam, which tasted exquisite.

Since then, I’ve had the pleasant, enforced regime of convalescence. Every day I’ve walked around Regents Park, watching as the spring has gathered momentum. The chestnut leaves stick up into the air for a day or two after birth, and then fall downwards, intensely green and limp with life. Chestnut flowers are stiff green cones of bud to begin with. Then the florets open, from the bottom upwards, their colour between white and the palest of yellows, with tiny pink lines on them. Sycamore flowers are green even when open — the only green flowers I know. As April has passed, limes, planes, oaks and ashes have stirred in turn. Once a tree is minded to put forth its leaves, the process is quick — three days at the most. If the weather is warm, leaves can appear between one day’s visit and the next.

I’m in good shape.

On Christmas Eve, the day we arrived here, I walked down into the wood and cut branches of holly, which I intertwined in the old wooden plate-racks above the fireplace in the house. It felt significant. For the first time, we were spending Christmas in our own place, rather than — as nearly always throughout my adult life — with my parents.

It was a relief and a liberation: no fixed traditions (must have turkey, must listen to King’s College, Cambridge carol service), no management of difficult emotional weather, none of the melancholy which always assails me at Christmas because I find the carols unbearably sad, because my parents have invested their whole lives, now coming to an end, in a religious fancy whose most intense celebration is at Christmas, and of course I love them while knowing that none of it is true. For once I could be what I am: a grown-up who is now sure that Darwin was right, sure that the whole of religion is an invention of humans once they got to a stage of evolution where self-consciousness was possible, and who, appalled by the realisation that there is birth, life and death and that is all, turned away from such a dreadful truth and invented comforts in the form of saviours and an afterlife (and, in the case of Christianity, a choice of heaven and hell to keep people in order). Last year I looked up yule on the internet, and was glad to read about the ancients, who had a more permanent reason, in the northern hemisphere, for a celebration in late December; the days had arrived at their shortest and would now lengthen. The sun would recover its strength. They sat around their fires with the beer they had brewed, and told stories. That seems to me a reasonable thing to do. One can celebrate the winter solstice, 1500 and more years later, even though the mighty superstructure of Christianity and now commerce sits on top of it.

On Christmas Day we got up late, had a lovely ordinary breakfast, and went up to greet our neighbours and give them presents. (When we had arrived the previous day, there was a card, an orchid and a bottle of Côteaux du Layon from them waiting for us in the fireplace. The card was written in perfect English, and said ‘Welcome to your first Christmas at Kerfontaine’.) Then we drove down to the sea at Fort Bloqué, and walked along the beach. The drive was like a dream; we were the only car on the road. The entirety of France was at lunch. The weather was overcast and perfectly still. Tiny waves. Not a breath of wind. Cold but not freezing. We walked for a couple of hours, I marvelling at how happy I was because, whatever I was feeling, I was allowed to feel it. No obligations of any kind. And what I was feeling was simply self-possession, self-awareness, gratitude at being fit and well after illness, an adult in love with my surroundings and the person next to me. Little grey and black seabirds wheeled and screamed in groups, feeding at the water’s edge. Millions of tiny mussels clung to the rocks. A few people began to appear after their lunches. We drove home, banked up the fire, poured glasses of sherry and opened our presents. Then we made and ate the meal: oysters, foie gras, guinea-fowl, Christmas pudding; champagne, claret and the Côteaux du Layon. We sat and read until about one o’clock. It was a wonderful day; easily the best Christmas Day I have had.

The poetry harvest in 2006 was pretty good by my modest standards. I make it 17, including translations: ‘Away for the Week — One More Thing’ (originally called ‘Difficulties of Translation’), ‘Rough Winds’, ‘Up All Night’, ‘Aloft’, ‘Arts Minister Briefs Journalists’, ‘Car Wash’, a translation of Montale’s ‘I limoni’ (finished finally after many years), ‘Cut Cornfield’, a translation of Dante’s ‘Guido i’ vorrei’, ‘Paul, I should like’ (a sonnet to Paul Ashton which I hope will be the first in a series, each addressed to a friend after the manner of ‘Guido i’ vorrei’ — an idea Paul suggested to me a couple of years ago), ‘Epiphany 2006’, ‘The Twelfth of July’, ‘The Squirrel and the Conkers’, ‘Desolate’, a tribute to my friend Alex McLeod, who died in November, ‘Christmas Atheist’ and ‘Pupil to Teacher’.

The last-mentioned poem, which I wrote in the summer, refers to one of the best things I did this year. In early July, just before we came away, I finally resumed contact with my English teacher Peter Hetherington, the person who, more than anybody, created the person I have been as an adult, through his inspirational influence on me between the ages of 14 and 18. I telephoned. There he was. The conversation was easy. I went round to his house at Bletsoe in Bedfordshire one warm evening. When he had taught me he had been a bachelor. He has married since. I didn’t meet his wife Monica that evening; she was out at a sixth-form dance at Bedford Modern School, the school where Peter and I met, where Peter and she met later when she went to teach there, which she still does. (The four of us are going out together in January.) I met Peter’s son and son’s girlfriend: both delightful. Then Peter and I walked down to the pub and spent three hours talking over a meal. It was the most perfect example of how no barriers exist between truly kindred spirits, even though nearly 40 years had passed since our last proper conversation. (I have seen him a couple of times in the interim, but with others at old boys’ get-togethers — not real meetings.) I told him, soberly and seriously at the beginning of the evening, that he had been a great, great teacher, and that I owed him, intellectually and in terms of the stance on life I had taken since I had left school, more than I owed to anyone else. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘that is a heavy responsibility. You were a great pupil.’ The wonderful thing about the content of our conversation that evening is that though it was of course partly retrospective, filling in essential information about events in the ‘great gap of time since first we were dissever’d’ (he quoted the line; I had been Florizel in his production of The Winter’s Tale in 1967), the talk was mainly about now. And our beliefs, our sensibilities, just chimed and chimed.

I gave Peter two presents that night. One was a DVD set of Beckett on Film. [As I wrote in the first chapter of my memoir,] Peter had introduced me to Beckett in autumn 1966, near the beginning of the A-Level English course. We had first read King Lear, which was on the syllabus. Then he said, ‘Right, now we’re going to read a play which isn’t on the syllabus. It’s called Waiting for Godot. I believe that it and Lear are the two greatest plays written in English in the last 500 years.’ This was an extraordinary and thrilling thing to be told at the age of 15. Later, I realised what a bold judgement it had been, only 11 years after the play had first been performed in England, to overwhelming critical derision (the exception being Harold Hobson, who — I read in 2005 on the 50th anniversary of Peter Hall’s production — wrote in support of the play and the production week after week in The Sunday Times).

The second present was my poems. Later that summer, Peter wrote to me in France to say that he had really enjoyed them, and that it was a very fine collection. This made me immensely proud, and I wrote back to tell him so, enclosing the poem Pupil to Teacher, which I had written in tribute to him.

Alex McLeod died on 4 November. The Parkinson’s Disease from which he had suffered for about 10 years had reduced him to virtual helplessness at the end. I had power of attorney over his affairs. He was in a nursing home at Great Dunmow, the fourth he had been in during the two and a half years since he gave up his flat in Hackney and stopped living independently. Richard Beckley was with him in the home until the last few weeks, when Richard quite rightly accepted the offer of a flat in sheltered accommodation round the corner. He still saw Alex for long periods every day. Richard was Alex’s partner for 15 years, and you would not find a more shining example of practical, caring and constant love during Alex’s illness. It wasn’t just that Richard attended to Alex’s personal needs, making sure that he had the kind of extra food and drink that he liked, buying his clothes, arranging trips out; it was also that he fought endless battles with the management of the homes Alex was in, against laziness, inefficiency and forgetfulness in the provision of the routine care Alex was supposed to get, and — amazingly — sometimes the actual unkindness of some of the staff. Alex was paying an enormous amount of money for his care — around £800 a week — and I don’t think he ever got value for what he paid. As ever in organisations, some of the staff were wonderful. But one home in particular, the newest and shiniest of them, at Sawbridgeworth, which at a cursory glance seemed to represent exactly what care of the elderly and infirm should be like — nice rooms with plenty of light, wide corridors, no smell of age or piss — and which supposedly specialised in looking after people with neurological illnesses, was in fact guilty of scandalous neglect of Alex. The medication on which he depended rarely arrived on time; the food was disgusting. Richard battled every day to get the place to do for Alex what it had contracted to do, and was charging him so much for.

The Great Dunmow home was easily the best, though not perfect. Several of the staff there really loved Alex, and he appreciated that.

At the funeral, Alex’s wife Miriam read the famous passage from Ecclesiastes, beginning ‘To everything there is a season…’ Andrew, Alex’s son, delivered a moving tribute. I read a poem I had written:

My mother has been suffering for about 10 years now from a distressing and progressively worsening condition called systemic scleroderma. This means that the inner digestive tract, all the way through the body, is hardening and losing its porosity. The most grievous effect of the degeneration is that food, when arriving in the gut, isn’t broken down by enzymes as it should be; it sits there and rots, causing pain and bloating of the stomach, and provoking frequent episodes of diarrhoea. Mother gets much of her nutrition now in liquid form, through a tube into the stomach, though she can take some food in the usual way as long as she’s very careful about what and how much she eats. She is weak and thin, and spends more and more time in bed. My father has cared for her with patient devotion all this time. Meanwhile, he is beginning to show early signs of some kind of dementia, in occasional loss of short-term memory and periods of confusion. Last month, he fainted while he was in church, and was taken to hospital. He stayed in for one night. The doctors diagnosed an aortic aneurism: as I understand it, a ballooning of the aorta, the main artery carrying blood from the heart. I flew back to England for a few days. An aneurism of the aorta is a serious condition which can mean sudden death if the aneurism bursts. Dad’s going to see two heart specialists, next week and the week after, and he’ll know then whether an operation is possible or desirable, or whether he must take medicine, or just live quietly.

It must be because of my parents’ failing powers that I think a lot about death these days. It’s a complete waste of time, but I can’t stop doing it. When I light the fire here, which I have done a few times this cold summer, I think about my own body in the crematorium oven. I imagine it yielding to the flames, boiling and bursting. It will happen on a particular date in the not-too-distant future. When I’m driving along by myself, I dwell dolefully on how insignificant are the achievements of my life so far, and on how little of lasting worth I am likely to achieve in the years left to me. I was never like this before. I was always a practical, positive person. Perhaps it’s also because — as must happen when you get to middle age — serious or mortal illness sometimes seems to be all around: my parents; Alex McLeod, who died last November; his partner Richard Beckley, who now has lung cancer; Harold Rosen, who’s just has an operation to remove a cancerous tumour from his colon, and is very poorly; and friends of my own age with non-Hodgkin’s lyphoma and myeloma. Another reason is that, when I see my parents being irritable with each other, despite the deep love between them, stuck together as they are in a narrow space of habit and routine, I suspect that doubt must be in even their minds about whether there is anything after death. All the joyous certainty of 40 and 50 years ago is falling away. Are they really going to meet Jesus the moment their heart stops beating, or on the Last Day? Of course they’re not. I read a beautiful article in Le Monde yesterday about a bee, fossilised in amber, bearing the pollen of orchids on its back. The bee lived between 15 and 20 million years ago, in the Dominican Republic, which wasn’t a republic then. The scientists who have studied it now believe that orchids appeared on earth between 76 and 84 million years ago. There was an enlarged photograph of the bee. The specks of orchid pollen were quite clear on its back. Breathtaking. It’s that kind of knowledge that I want, bracing knowledge that makes me face up to my fate, get on with my life and enjoy it and do the things I want to do, not mope about with gloomy bits of philosophising, still tainted by all the religious rubbish which I thought I had got rid of good and proper.

In a moment of wild and foolish optimism in September, I began to write a post-script to the chapter on politics in my memoir.

‘To descend from the grand and general to the personal and particular, Gordon Brown’s performance since he took over as prime minister from Tony Blair at the end of June makes me sure I was right to stick with the Labour Party. He’s been brilliant. Since he took over, he’s had to deal with and respond to attempted terrorist outrages, widespread flooding, a foot-and-mouth outbreak and the continuing tragedy of children being killed by other children in the poorer parts of our cities. It hasn’t been a quiet summer. His actions and his tone have been just right. He sounds like a statesman. Apart from unforeseen events, he has made some planned announcements, notably to give more power to parliament vis-à-vis the executive, which are wise and truly democratic. I like his cabinet appointments. He has given some ministerial and advisory posts to people outside the Labour Party, which not everybody approved of, but which I think was imaginative and inclusive. He made the Liberals look foolish by offering to give Paddy Ashdown a Cabinet post, only for Ming Campbell to refuse the offer (the best recent example I know in politics of a drowning man refusing the offer of a lifebelt). He took his family holiday in Dorset, England, rather than in Italy with the Berlusconis, as the Blairs once did, to their shame. I heard a Conservative woman activist, with the kind of cut-glass accent which it’s easy to forget still exists in parts of the shires, describe him as having gravitas, in sorrowful contrast, so far as she was concerned, to the leader of her own party. If I were a Conservative, I’d be worried.’

I didn’t get any further than that before events overtook me. How wrong can you be? It just shows that I can’t bear to abandon myself to the kind of political scepticism — ‘a plague on all their houses’ — which is the position so many of my friends have come to. But in the light of events since I wrote that paragraph, I can justly be accused of terminal political naivety, of wanting my leaders to be better people than they are.

In October, the lunatic idea began to be discussed that Gordon Brown might call a snap general election, which — it was suggested — would take advantage of the honeymoon he was enjoying with the electorate, and give him his own five-year term. It was obvious to me that the one way in which Brown might throw away his popularity would be to do just that. The electorate would conclude that, despite the brave words Brown had said about humility and service when he entered Number 10, here was another prime minister just toying with them. Instead of crushing talk of an election immediately, Brown allowed the chatter to continue until it overwhelmed Labour’s party conference. At the Conservative conference the following week, Cameron gave a very good speech, in which he told Brown he was ready to take him on. Brown made the terrible decision to go to Iraq during the Tory conference, which — whatever his real motives for going there — looked as if he was visiting the soldiers simply in order to attract media attention away from the Tories. Then an opinion poll gave the Conservatives their best showing for a long time, and Brown was forced to announce that there wouldn’t be an election after all. Nobody believed him when he said his decision hadn’t been affected by the Conservatives’ good conference and good poll showing. He managed to look weak and calculating at the same time; the opposite of the way he had looked only a month previously.

Meanwhile, the difficulties in the summer of the Northern Rock bank — certainly not the fault of the government — have become graver and graver. In order to keep the bank afloat, the Bank of England has been lending it money. So far, we the taxpayers have lent a bank, whose difficulties were the result of reckless management by already rich men who wanted to make themselves richer, about £25 billion. People better informed than I, like Will Hutton, say the government should have nationalised the bank for a while in order to straighten it out. That sounds sensible to me. Instead, the government is trying to find a private bidder for Northern Rock. This isn’t proving easy. And there is now an enormous amount of money owing to the exchequer, with no certainty about when or even whether it’s going to be paid back. This has made the government a sitting duck for partisan attacks from the Tories on grounds of economic incompetence.

Next, a different kind of incompetence — culpable but farcical — came to light when we heard that a junior civil servant in Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs had sent two CDs containing the names, addresses and bank details of the 25 million people in households receiving child benefit to the National Audit Office, in the ordinary internal mail, with no special care to protect them, and that the CDs had gone missing. Again, definitely not the government’s fault, but a significant emergency nonetheless. So far I haven’t heard of anyone suffering as a result of their personal details falling into the wrong hands. But it’s the kind of cock-up which makes a government look inept; and it’s easy — though probably nonsense — for the opposition to say that government cuts to HMRC make this sort of thing more likely to happen.

But now to the worst. The ‘cash for honours’ police enquiry in the last months of the Blair government failed to bring a case to court. Cash had changed hands; honours had been handed out. But to legally prove a causal connection between those two events, for any individual donor or lender, would have been too difficult. I’m sure that a few people close to Blair were mighty relieved.

Brown was going to be a new broom; his government would be clean. The people would be able to trust their leaders at last.

Last Monday, the general secretary of the Labour Party, Peter Watt, resigned. A rich property developer had been giving money to the party through proxies, which is illegal. Watt claimed that, although he knew this was going on, he did not know it was illegal. Nobody believes this. Watt was one of the handful of people in the country whose job it was to know what political parties are and are not allowed to do by way of accepting donations.

Jon Mendelsohn, the man whom Gordon Brown had appointed to be Labour’s general election fund-raiser, replacing Tony Blair’s Lord Levy, then admitted that he had known what the property developer, David Abrahams, had been doing. He pleaded that he was ‘unhappy’ with the arrangement, though he had been assured by Watt that it was legal, and that he had been going to meet Abrahams to tell him that he wanted the proxy payments to stop. Again, nobody believes this.

What is certain is that Labour has been accepting illegal gifts. This is a disastrous state of affairs. There will be a police enquiry. Labour has been breaking its own law — the law which it passed in 2000 to try to clean up the funding of political parties in the light of the profound corruption of the Thatcher and Major years.

The government has gone from an absolutely dominating position in the three months since Brown became prime minister to a position where, if there were to be an election tomorrow, there would be a big Tory victory. Of course, Brown doesn’t have to call an election until the spring of 2010, and a lot can happen between then and now. But whereas I was sure, a year ago, that once Brown became PM, the electorate would give him the rest of the uncompleted parliament and then one more full one — in other words, a clear run until 2013 at the earliest — I now think he’ll struggle to retain power after 2010.

We had a good weekend in Norfolk, staying with Adam and Hazel, who’ve moved up there in retirement, having greatly enlarged and improved the cottage they’ve owned for 25 years. On Saturday, a beautiful bright cold day, we walked on the huge beach at Holkham, and then admired the countless thousands of migrating geese feeding and resting on the marshes inland from the dunes: an extraordinary sight and sound.

We came here last Saturday.

In November and December, I took my father three times to St George’s Hospital, Tooting. He needed an operation on the abdominal aortic aneurism which had been discovered in August. The first visit was to meet the surgeon, who explained that there was a one in twenty chance that dad would die during the operation; but that there was, in any one year, a one in three chance that the aneurism would burst, which would be fatal. So it was an easy choice to make. The second visit was for preliminary tests and to tie off blood to one of dad’s buttocks; he stayed in one night. The third visit was for the main operation, when he stayed in six nights. I visited him every evening during this visit. We read poetry to each other. He had taken two books into hospital: the Bible and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I wondered, but didn’t ask him, whether the choice of those two amounted to an each-way bet on the existence of a hereafter.

The operation was successful. It was performed in Tooting because that hospital is at the moment the only place in the country which does a micro-surgical version of the procedure to replace an aneurised abdominal aorta with a stent. I was shown a stent; shaped like a diviner’s rod, it’s a cylinder about a centimetre in diameter and about five long, made of I’m not sure what material (it looked like compressed cardboard, but can’t be), enclosed by a metal mesh which reminded me of fish-net stockings. The top attaches to the tissue of the aorta coming down from the heart; the two openings at the bottom attach to the main arteries going down into each leg. The really clever thing about it is that when it is introduced into the body, through a small cut in the groin, and then guided into position with the help of a wire poked through a small cut in the other groin, it’s tightly compressed. When it’s in exactly the right place (the manoeuvre is remotely observed on a TV screen), it’s somehow twisted and expands to its full width. At each of the three ends, the metal mesh pops outward diagonally to form wings which press against the interior of the good tissue, creating a blood-tight seal. Thereafter, the blood flows through the stent, and the aneurised tissue outside it is redundant. At least, I think that’s it. Amazing.

In the early hours of 16 December, Richard Beckley died in St Clare’s Hospice in Harlow. His lung cancer had progressed, and the radiotherapy he had borne during the autumn hadn’t had much effect. I had seen him on the afternoon of the 15th. He was perfectly clear in his mind, although he could hardly talk. He was on oxygen, and all his effort was going into breathing. The breath was thick and noisy. His eyes were closed most of the time. I told him everything I could think to say, and reminded him of some good times we had had together; especially the week last April he had spent with us at Kerfontaine. I recounted a few of the funny bits from a biography of Tennyson I was reading. He laughed. I read him a poem of Rilke, Frühling ist wiedergekommen, in the German, then the English translation, then the German again. We had been going to have a seminar on Rilke, so he could explain to me some of the poems I can’t understand. (He taught German at King’s College, London all his career.) Then I held his hand for an hour. Once he opened his eyes, and smiled intensely at me. At last I left, because I had to get back to Tooting. I told Richard I would be round to see him early the following week, and he nodded and smiled, but we both knew that was unlikely. That evening, his godson Peter phoned to say that the hospice had told him to come urgently if he wished to be with Richard at the end. Peter went with his wife Maria, and they sat with Richard for the few hours until he died.

Later that morning, I took dad home. I was standing at the foot of his bed, waiting for him to be discharged, when a consultant and his junior, a young woman, came round. While the consultant was looking at dad, the junior came over to me and said, ‘We lost a couple last night in here. But this one should be all right,’ pointing at dad. ‘He’s pretty fit for his age.’ ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I replied. ‘What do you think?’ she asked. I said that I didn’t have a medical opinion, but that speaking as the patient’s son, I knew he’d always looked after himself. She blushed violently, having taken me for another doctor, and apologised in some confusion. I told her how flattered I was that I looked like a consultant. I suppose I was wearing the sort of smart casual clothes that doctors wear when doing rounds at the weekend.

Helen and I went to Wootton for Christmas, which was the usual mixture of feelings I’ve described in the past, the absence of which I so celebrated a year ago. The best part was Boxing Day morning, when Helen stayed with mum, and dad and I went for a circular drive around the north Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire villages in the bright sunlight: Bromham, Oakley, Pavenham, Carlton, Harrold, Lavendon, Cold Brayfield, Turvey, Newton Blossomville, Hardmead (nothing there but a little church, a rectory certainly not lived in by the rector, and a row of council houses), Astwood, Cranfield, and home.

Straight after Richard’s funeral on 28 December, we drove to the Channel Tunnel and stopped the night at a hotel in Montreuil-sur-Mer. It was already half past ten, but our host said we could have a meal if we chose quickly, which we did. There, in the lovely dining room before a bright fire, I had tournedos and Helen had veal kidneys, with a bottle of Beaujolais. When I asked for un petit cognac after the meal, our host said, ‘Petit ou normale? Vous ne conduisez plus ce soir.’ Normale was enormous. We slept until ten, and then spent an hour getting food in the Saturday market in that wonderful big square in the town. We bought a guinea-fowl from the smallest stall; the woman had two birds left, plucked but still bloody, and a choice of three or four vegetables with damp mud on them: about as far from supermarket presentation standards as conceivable. Then we drove here, arriving about half past seven.

All the food was delicious.

I’m here at this time of year for the second year running, for an utterly foolish and self-indulgent reason. I accompany Arnaud Beauvais, our restaurateur friend in Lorient, to the annual trade exhibition of Loire wines, held at the Parc des Expositions, a great shed at the edge of the town. Last year we tasted about 200 wines in the course of two days, spitting as we went. This year I expect it’ll be the same: gargling and expectorating samples of Fiefs Vendéens, Vouvray, Sancerre, Quincy, Savennières, Chinon… up and down the river and its tributaries. We start in the morning on dry whites, move to rosés just before lunch, then on to reds in the early afternoon, finishing with sweet wines about four o’clock. We eat only a sandwich at lunchtime. By the end of the working day, although not at all drunk, we are high on the fumes of the wines which have entered the chambers of our brains. And, despite our best intentions, the sweet wines are generally so delicious that it’s impossible to resist swallowing a few mouthfuls. So we hardly require an apéritif before dinner, though we have one anyway, in a different restaurant each night, each place carefully chosen by Arnaud, where of course we do go on to drink the wine, pleasurably uncorseting ourselves after the day’s restraint.

For Arnaud, this is serious business. He makes written notes on every wine he tastes, and gives each a star rating out of five. He has a stock of about 11,000 bottles back in Lorient, constantly being depleted by the restaurant’s customers, and needing to be topped up. He has regular and trusted suppliers, so he knows where he’s going amongst the 500 or so stands. We are not grazing randomly. The vignerons he meets greet him as a friend and colleague. On se tutoie. After tasting each supplier’s full range, starting with last year’s hopeful and immature offering, and moving back through tongue sensations of greater and greater complexity and distinction, the purchasing is done with perfect informality. Arnaud says how many bottles he would like of each of his chosen vintages, and approximately when he wants the goods delivered. The vigneron writes his order down. That’s it. No money will change hands until the wine arrives in Lorient. Trust is everything. My good fortune is that I’m allowed to buy at the same prices that he pays. My wine is delivered to the restaurant, in separate boxes, and I pick it up at Easter or in the summer, and send off my cheques then. The mark-up on wine bought in a restaurant by the diner is enormous, as is well known. I buy perhaps 50 bottles of the best wines of the region, to Arnaud’s several hundred, and pay between three and seven euros a bottle, delivery included. Arnaud generously asks me for my opinion on each wine, although the gesture is like my asking for his views on endogenous growth theory or the state of leg-spin bowling in England. I do my best to vary the short series of adjectives I produce on each occasion, but by mid-afternoon my stock of reasonable descriptors is exhausted, even in a foreign language I speak rather well, and if I’m not careful I lurch into absurd poeticisms, especially about the demi-secs and the moëlleux, which cause Arnaud to look at me with an expression of smiling tolerance, but not to be able to concur with and build on my contributions in the way that companions in conversation usually do.

One thing I almost never do: criticise a wine. I did make an exception last year, when Arnaud allowed himself to stray from his usual well-trodden paths to visit the stand of a friend of a friend, who flattered himself that he was a pioneer in challenging France’s image as the stuffy grande dame of world wine-making, and in promoting un look more likely to appeal to the young and unsophisticated consumer. The result was a red called Vin Rude, sporting a label which would not have been out of place on the top shelf at a newsagent. Arnaud was polite to the friend of the friend, but for once made no written record of the tasting. When we were well out of earshot we agreed that Vin Rude had been disgusting. Whether it will become the tipple of enough former lager drinkers to help reverse France’s steadily declining share of world wine sales, I doubt.

This morning I walked down from the flat to the magnificent St Pancras International station: ten minutes. I passed through check-in and passport control: two minutes. I stood in the beautiful, spare, spacious undercroft (a word I didn’t know until ten days ago, when I read it in an article describing the project; the internet told me in seconds that croft here is nothing to do with small Scottish farms, but is a shift from crypt, subterranean room), had a coffee, and escalated to the platform. The mighty arch has been superbly restored and painted. The central part of its span has new clear glass, so this morning’s blue sky beamed luminously through. Brilliant. The train left bang on time, of course. It almost immediately goes into a series of tunnels, travelling at such speed that when you emerge at the first recognisable place, after only a few minutes, you are already at Dagenham. Travellers’ horses in flat fields. Then you’re under the ascending carriageway of the Dartford Bridge, then in another tunnel under the Thames before a brief stop at the newly-built Ebbsfleet station (there’s no there there), then you charge through Kent, then you’re under the sea, and it’s France and Gare du Nord seemingly in no time, such is the wonderment of it. Straight under Paris in the métro, and I was at Gare Montparnasse in time to be able to leave the crushing, gloomy place and have a glass of wine and a croque monsieur in a proper bar across the road. Then on to a TGV which delivered me to Angers in an hour and 35 minutes, bang on time of course. At one moment I looked up from reading and saw great white wind turbines, their sails turning in the stiff wind, standing in a wide field of green winter corn, the sky gently azure above, with high cloud, and I felt briefly optimistic about the world after I’m dead.

The most notable thing to have occurred since I last wrote is that in the late evening of Monday 14 January, dad was again taken seriously ill, this time at home. He fell over and couldn’t get up. His speech was incoherent. The following morning, after a visit from the doctor, he was taken into hospital in Bedford with a suspected stroke. Mary flew over from Marseille that day. I met her in London and we drove straight to the hospital.

Dad was in hospital for eight days. It turned out that he’d suffered only a TIA, a transient ischaemic attack, commonly known as a mini-stroke. He was for two or three days deeply confused, and there was some loss of mobility in his right arm. But a TIA doesn’t leave any permanent damage in the brain; once the little blood clot which had briefly denied oxygen to the brain has dispersed, the patient is no worse off than before the attack. There is no treatment: only the prescription of precautionary drugs which thin the blood, making future clotting less likely.

I brought dad home on Wednesday 23 January. That day, we had a lengthy meeting with a social worker and a district nurse. The result is that mum will get an enhanced level of publicly-provided care, which will take the pressure off dad. This extra care hasn’t actually turned up yet, the wheels of administration turning as slowly as they do, but it is promised. However, the best development with regard to care has occurred as a result of a suggestion which my brother Andy made. A recently retired nurse called Joyce Bavington, known to Andy, who lives in the village and who has known of mum and dad for a long time, is happy to earn a bit of money to enhance her pension. She now comes in twice a day, morning and evening. In the morning she prepares breakfast; in the evening she helps mum and dad to get to bed. She makes sure they’re both taking the right pills at the right time. She gives them steady emotional support, and they know they can ring her any time if there’s an emergency. She, plus the carer who comes in later in the morning to help mum shower and get dressed, plus the five volunteer ladies from the church who come in at tea-time Monday to Friday to make tea, plus Judy who cleans on Friday mornings, constitute an adequate amount of care. The extra publicly-funded care which should come soon will provide someone to make lunch. I hope all of this will allow mum and dad to stay in their house, at least for the time being and possibly for the rest of their lives, which is what they want.

Here I am at the Gare du Nord, on my way back from the wine-tasting. This place and my notebooks are for ever associated in my mind because of the catastrophe which befell me in 1996, when I left a precious notebook full of writing on the train, having arrived here from London. I am now neurotically careful whenever travelling with notebooks.

The last two days have been, as they were last year, immensely pleasurable and self-indulgent. Arnaud and I remained stringently sober throughout our perambulations at the exhibition, spitting as we went. Mainly, we visited the same stands as last year: all small independent growers, all Arnaud’s friends. We tasted Vouvray, Savennières, Cheverny, Côteaux du Layon, Chaume, Mareuil, Haut-Poitou, Sancerre, Reuilly, Saumur-Champigny. I think I spent just short of 1500 euros, though I’ve only had to shell out a third of that on the spot. The rest I’ll pay in April or in the summer. It sounds a lot. It is a lot. But over the course of a year it may constitute a kind a saving, since I won’t be buying much wine at high street prices. Thus I justify my extravagance to myself.

On all three evenings we ate in good restaurants in Angers, Arnaud generously paying for two of the three meals and, as I discovered this morning when leaving the hotel, settling the hotel bill as well. He was away by seven o’clock, we having got to bed about half past one. I slept until nearly ten, and awoke to find that the rains of the last two days had cleared away, leaving a washed blue sky with a few small clouds. Standing on the platform at Angers, the sun was agreeably warm on my face: the earliest stirrings of spring.

Now we’re tearing across the northern French plain at 180 mph. Everyone in this full carriage is quiet. What is it about French TGVs which, on the whole and leaving rugby and stag weekends on one side, cause people to behave so much more considerately with regard to others’ peace than they tend to on English trains? Perhaps it’s wonderment at the sheer speed. Perhaps the continuous low roar of the wheels on the track is effective in muffling voices.

The flat quiet countryside slips by. In stands of deciduous woodland, the leafless branches are precise against the sky…

I fell asleep after Lille (it must have been the little carafe of Côtes du Rhône I had with the plat du jour in the brasserie at the Gard du Nord) and woke up in England. After a short stop at Ashford, the train is now galloping towards London. We cross over the Medway as the sun descends towards the slack fired water. We slide under the Thames next to the Dartford Bridge. The guard welcomes us to London and wishes us a good evening with the train still in sight of the bridge. Extraordinary. Now comes the long tunnel, taken at full speed, and we’re there, under the arch of St Pancras. Suburbia negated in a twinkling. It’s one of the great engineering achievements of the world. Telford, Brunel and the Stephensons would have approved. We’re on time, of course.

I’m sitting in the Reading Room of the London Library. I’ve been a member here for two or three years. Until now, Paul Ashton has paid for my membership as a very generous annual birthday present, in response to my having bought him three years’ membership (with a bit of help from Channel 4 colleagues) when he left the channel in 2002. Before Christmas, there was a big increase in the Library’s annual subscription fee, causing Tom Stoppard, the president, to write an apologetic letter to members. Paul asked me whether he might from now on choose a different birthday present for me. I said of course. But then, when my subscription came up for renewal, the question arose: was I willing to pay £375 a year myself to continue my membership? I almost decided that this was a ridiculous luxury; I threw the papers in the bin at work. But then I pulled them out again, realised that I could pay in monthly instalments at no extra charge, decided that £31.25 a month to have a place in central London where I am absolutely guaranteed silence (not to mention access to a few thousand good books) is a modest cost, filled in the papers and sent them off. I then recalled that my membership card had been in the wallet which I lost in the autumn, so I came down this morning and was given a replacement. Here I am.

I like it here. I approve of the silence which all in the room maintain. The slight traffic noise from St James’s Square doesn’t bother me at all. The light is good, and the simple pleasure of having a writing desk, uncluttered, at the right height, with a comfortable but firm upright chair to sit on, is worth much.

As soon as I have written the paragraph above, a young woman sits down next to me, causing a certain amount of disturbance as she deposits three library books, her handbag and a bottle of mineral water on her desk. The last of these, as I know from the ‘Reading Room Etiquette’ notice stuck on each desk, is the only form of food or drink allowed in the RR. Then the young woman takes from her handbag a tin containing, as I see when she opens it, some kind of sweetmeat — it might be Turkish Delight and nuts, covered in powdered sugar — which she begins to eat with a spoon which she has also taken from the bag. I glance at her with the mildest and briefest expression of disapproval, as if I have been a regular in the RR since the time of Tennyson and Carlyle. My glance is sufficient censure to cause her to move, with handbag, snack, water and books, to another part of the room. She settles herself there with further minor disturbance. Looking across, I can see that she is continuing furtively to eat. In addition, she has begun to write on a lap-top computer, also produced from the handbag. It is a big bag. According to the rules of the Library, electronic writing machines may only be used in the RR’s North Bay, which is straight ahead of me through double doors with glass panels. I can see people tapping away in there. Writers in the RR proper must use older means of making marks. So this woman is simultaneously guilty of one breach of RR etiquette and one of Library rules. I decide against reporting her to the young attendant, who would have to go across and reprove the member, risking bad feeling and possibly a scene: an unwelcome duty amid the tranquillity of the morning. The woman is not really distracting me (except that she obviously is, or why would I have written so much about her?) despite the occasional clink of spoon on tin.

Now that I’m paying for my membership by direct debit, I expect I shall remain a member for ever, unless I become so poor in retirement that I can’t even afford silence (or, as this morning, the next thing to it). The older you get, the lower the one-off price of life membership. I’m grateful that I’m still young enough for life membership to be way beyond my means, but I imagine that a time comes, for an older person with some savings, when it’s worth making an optimistic gamble on longevity, reflecting perhaps that the outlay of those few thousand pounds is a good reason, in moments of despair, to go on living.

We’re enjoying a series of days of perfect sunshine. Each day is cold, clear and blue. The nights are still and frosty, with a gibbous moon. The trees stand calmly straight, accepting the afternoon warmth and the night chill. They wait for longer light and higher temperatures, but I expect that this interval of midwinter spring will hasten the arrival of leaf in March or April.

My niece Tess, aged 8, arrived from Marseille on Friday evening. She’s going to stay with us for a week: the last week of Mary’s and Jacques’s three-week honeymoon in India. She is a delight. She has exquisite manners; she is easy to please; she will eat anything; she is interested in everything; she has an unexpected gift for comic mime and improvisation. We love her.

On Saturday we walked in the park and spent half an hour in the children’s playground: something that parents of young children spend great slabs of their lives doing, but a novelty for us. Noticeable in the playground were single fathers with their offspring. I guess we were looking at divorcees’ access: Saturday morning, pick up child, go to park, let child play, move on later to Macdonald’s or Pizza Express. The small sample of fathers who were there on Saturday were not impressive parents. They spent the time on the phone to adult friends, making social arrangements not related to their children. When the children interrupted them with a perfectly reasonable request (‘Daddy, push me on the swings’), they were irritable at being distracted from their call. Minor pieces of misbehaviour (child scuffs trainers through soft-landing material under climbing frame) were scolded aggressively or with a light cuff to the head. There was one obviously caring dad there; unfortunately he didn’t have much grasp of the laws of physics. His little boy wanted a go on the roundabout, which was spinning round as fast as another adult, a mum, had been able to push it for her child, who was already aboard. The dad carried his boy to the roundabout, leaned over it and dropped the boy on, expecting him to grab one of the rails. The little boy, of course, couldn’t get a grip immediately, and was catapulted straight off on to the surrounding soft-landing material by the centrifugal force. He didn’t cry, to his great credit and possibly to that of the soft-landing material (although I know there’s a debate about whether we’ve made children’s playgrounds too safe — ‘We need to let them discover their own limits,’ some say). He got up and declared in a public voice, ‘I’m not doing that again.’

Then we walked on and admired the ducks, moorhens, geese and herons on the lake. Tess was interested to see the great unwieldy herons manoeuvring on to their wide shallow nests in the tops of the trees, carrying sticks in their beaks. We walked all round the park in the freezing sunshine. Tess from Marseille wasn’t fully equipped for these temperatures, so we went to Marks and Spencer and bought her a hat, gloves and scarf to go with the coat and boots she already had. We shopped for food and went home and had lunch. We watched a football game (FA Cup 5th round — Manchester United 4, Arsenal 0 — Helen needed counselling) and later we went to Daphne’s Restaurant for dinner. Anna, who owns Daphne’s with her son Nicholas, speaks very good French, having been a French teacher at Pimlico School for many years. When she discovered that Tess is from Marseille, she brought Marcel Berlins, journalist, broadcaster and regular diner at Daphne’s, also born in Marseille, over to meet her. Marcel was charming, and exchanged words with Tess about places in Marseille they both knew.

The government will nationalise the Northern Rock bank. Good. I don’t know enough about the details of the private bids which have been made for the bank, nor of the bank’s robustness in terms of assets and liabilities, to be absolutely sure that the government has wasted several months, and should have done this in the autumn; but that’s my guess. The Tories, of course, are trying to present this as final proof of the government’s economic incompetence. It’s nothing of the kind. There’s no comparison with 16 September 1992. The incompetence, as I’ve written before, is with the greedy rich men who ran Northern Rock, and who wanted to make even more money by relying on wholesale international borrowing to get the funds to lend for mortgages, rather than getting their income from savings and from steady existing mortgage payments, as Building Societies used to do.

Yesterday, Kosovo declared independence. Again, good. Serbia and Russia are howling, predictably. Some countries with minorities calling for their own independence have objected. But most of the EU countries, plus America, will recognise an independent Kosovo. Comparisons with other situations where provinces or minorities want to secede from an existing state are inappropriate, unless those provinces or minorities have recently experienced genocide, as the Kosovan Albanians have. Yes, there has been some dreadful abuse of the Serbian minority in Kosovo; but nothing compared to what Milosevic did in 1999 to the Albanian majority, and less than nothing compared to what he would have done if NATO hadn’t stopped him. We just have to hope that the new government will keep its promise to run a secular, democratic state, tolerant of minority rights. I think it will sincerely try to, with EU, UN and NATO help. The problem, I think, will come from the other side, with the Kosovan Serbs taking orders from Serbia not to co-operate, and using violence to foment inter-communal hatred. On the other hand, Serbia recently elected, thank God, a pro-European president; there must be a majority opinion in Serbia which wants to get on with the social-democratic life which the rest of us enjoy, join the EU, join the euro (which Kosovo already has done, de facto), and move beyond the disasters into which Milosevic led them. His grand, brutal dream of being the master of all Yugoslavia has shrunk, now he’s dead, to the reality that Serbia is merely Serbia: not Serbia-with-Montenegro and now not even Serbia-with-Kosovo.

The starkest possible contrast with the Eurostar experience I described last month: I’m travelling up England by train, at the speed of an 18th-century stage-coach. Such is the parlous state of our railways, and so desperate and overdue is the need to repair them on Sundays. I’m going to spend what will remain of the day, when I get there, with David, Lindsay and Tom James. David’s coming over to Stafford to pick me up. I shall have to phone him in a minute and try to estimate how late I’ll be. The alternative would have been to drive; not a viable alternative on a day when they’ve closed the M1 completely to demolish a bridge. So, the usual travelling misery, caused by a mixture of chronic under-investment in public transport over decades; the confusion in the division of responsibility as between public and private entities in the running of the railways; and, in the case of the roads, the simple problem of wealth. Too many of us have cars which we want to drive too often, too far. The infrastructure can’t cope. Meanwhile, the planet bleeds.

On Friday, I drove dad from Wootton to Tooting for a check-up on his aneurism operation. It took nearly three hours to drive the 60 miles there; about two and a quarter to drive back. 38 years ago, I used to do an almost identical journey — Wootton to Richmond, to visit Jenny — in an hour and a half. Where they’re widening the M1 to four lanes south of Luton is an apocalyptic scene of mud and metal, a great brown stain on Hertfordshire. I remember Forster’s fear in Howard’s End of the creep of the city and the machine into that county: ‘a red rust’.

I had a terrible day yesterday. I spent several hours speaking to courteous people in India, trying in vain to get our internet connection fixed. ‘Only connect.’ Failed. The sense of the waste of time, of a precious day of my life flushed down the toilet (Larkin’s wonderful phrase — ‘time torn off unused’) weighed more and more heavily on me, and brought down the gloom I have to try to stave off often in this phase of my life: the fear that, for all the assortment of achievements I can point to in my 35 years of adult life, it doesn’t add up to much. I’ve been a utility player: a bit of this, a bit of that. And the growing feeling that this is how it’s going to be. Everyone of my age who’s going to make a run has made it by now. I’m not one of them. It’s not about money, of course. It’s about making a mark of greater longevity than the length of your own working lifetime; causing a stir which goes beyond your immediate circle of friends and professional colleagues. I haven’t done that.

England is covered with water. The vile, charmless shelters about which I’ve written in the past — the houses and bungalows in their crowded thousands which accommodate the great mass of the population — scar the landscape and grieve the eye everywhere. They look worse than ever in a dull light and drizzle.

The train has taken a long deviation around the western edge of Birmingham. We slide past the feet of the stilts which carry the M6 and M5 as they intersect. Indescribable ugliness everywhere. Piles of rubbish. Meaningless graffiti. Two swans preen one another by a canal. There is blossom in the most unexpected places.

With mum and dad. We came up this morning, bringing the lunch. This afternoon we walked round the village while mum and dad rested. It’s a wintry Easter: freezing cold, with snow flurries and occasional sunny intervals. It could be Christmas. The over-committed buds and flowers are on hold; some are drying and shrivelling in the icy wind.

Today is the earliest Easter for many years. It will not fall as early as this again, I read, until 2160. Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox or, as will very occasionally happen, after the full moon at the spring equinox. So it could fall one day earlier than this, on 22 March. On Friday night, the night of the equinox, there was a beautiful full moon in the indigo sky, the clouds racing, obscuring and revealing it. It was the Council of Nicaea in 365 which decided when Easter should be celebrated. Why they decided to make it a moveable feast, following the moon, I don’t know. Christmas, after all, is a fixed feast. I’m sure the reason is known. Perhaps, just as the decision on Christmas was to piggy-back on the pagan festival of Yule, there was an existing spring festival, date governed by the moon, and the Christian fathers decided to piggy-back on that. Then, of course, there was the schism between Rome and Byzantium, causing Easter usually to be celebrated on different Sundays in the two spheres of influence. This year the Orthodox Easter isn’t until 27 April — five weeks away.

May Day and Ascension Day on the same day: extremely rare. I’ve just rung Rosa and she tells me that these feasts — one humanistic, one religious — haven’t coincided since 1913.

We’re off to Portugal this afternoon, to spend the long weekend with Glenda and Julian Walton. Julian is teaching in an international school in Lisbon. Glenda retired from Shropshire’s education service at Christmas, and is simply enjoying her new-found leisure in the douce climate down there. What fun.

My best recent news is that I’m putting my poems on a website — www.myproperlife.com. I’ve struck up a friendship with a wonderful man called Mark Leicester, who until recently worked in the web team at Teachers TV. I’ve always liked him, but we didn’t have much to do with each other until the week before Easter. When our internet access at home failed, I asked Mark whether he would mind coming to look at it. He came round on Maundy Thursday evening, even though this kind of maintenance work is well below his usual plane of operation; he’s a web designer and programmer, with advanced conceptual, even philosophical, ideas about what the web can do, and how this new medium is changing our sense of the potential of content. It’s too boring to describe our struggles over the Easter weekend to restore internet access to 77 Weavers Way; many hours were spent on the phone to India. Success was eventually achieved on Easter Monday at 10.00pm. In the course of our trials, we got to know each other, and I said that I had been thinking of putting my poems on the web. (Mike Raleigh has been encouraging me to do this for some time, and I was just coming round to the decision to take Mike’s advice when I met Mark.) Mark said he’d do it for me, and he has! The site looks wonderful already, even though it’s still being built, and all sorts of extra embellishments will be added before it goes live (at the moment it’s password-protected, but I haven’t been able to resist giving the password to a few friends, who’ve all been impressed).

There’s something about the existence of this website which has released me, poetically. I’m going to stop looking back, fiddling, wondering whether some other kind of configuration of the work might tempt an editor to write me an acceptance rather than a rejection letter. I’m going to put the stuff out there, and I can say that I have published it. I’ll tell friends and acquaintances about its existence, and we’ll see if some kind of audience builds. I’m going to give people permission to use the poems for their own purposes, non-commercially, as long as they attribute me. There will be an invitation to visitors to give some money to Sight Savers International if they want to show appreciation in a practical way. It’s terribly exciting.

Not much is different with mum and dad. Mary and Tess spent a week with them in April, while Helen and I were in France. There was an absurd emergency when the hospital rang up one evening to say that mum must go in immediately; the values which they’d just read in a sample of her blood (taken two weeks previously) meant that she was on the point of death. An ambulance arrived, which Mary followed to the hospital. Mum and Mary sat in there for several hours, only to be told that it was a false alarm; someone had muddled up mum’s blood readings with another person’s. Several more hours passed before an ambulance came to take mum home. Relying on satellite navigation, the driver and his mate (both French) managed to take mum to the wrong village. She heaved herself up from the bed and identified the village as Kempston Church End; they were outside the school where she’d been headmistress for all those years. She was able to direct them home by means of local human knowledge. Mary was just about to phone the hospital to report a lost ambulance when they arrived. We don’t know whether the person who really was at risk of imminent death did die because they weren’t got into hospital in time, or not.

I’ve just finished a translation of Booz Endormi by Victor Hugo. I’m very pleased with what I’ve done, and Peter Hetherington, David James, Mike Raleigh and Helen have all been highly complimentary. In an email David sent me last week, with his thanks for the translation, he included an entertaining detail which he remembered from a biography of Victor Hugo:

‘For some reason I treasure the thought, as reported in Graham Robb's biography, of Hugo in old age, building a small greenhouse on the roof of his Jersey home, in which, of a morning, he would shave naked and then expel over his head, through a kind of Thomas Crapper device, a large gush of rosewater. This was preparatory to his later stroll down to the port area, where he would visit various ladies of the night, or, in his case, afternoon.’

It’s caused me to want to go out and buy the biography this afternoon before we go to the airport.

Helen and I went to vote in the London mayoral elections this morning. It’ll be a close-run thing between Ken Livingstone and the Tory Boris Johnson. Nationally, Labour is in deep difficulties; Brown’s nightmare continues. The latest fiasco is over tax on poor people: not the poorest, but people on modest incomes, as the genteel phrase has it. In March 2007, in his final budget as chancellor, Brown abolished the 10p rate of income tax which he had himself introduced ten years previously; the abolition was not to take effect, however, until April 2008. I don’t know why he abolished the 10p rate, from his own point of view. If it had been a good progressive thing to introduce it in 1997, why was it no longer a good progressive thing in 2007? The headline-grabbing part of Brown’s tax changes in that budget was the reduction in the basic rate from 22p to 20p. Perhaps Brown thought, wrongly, that even the people who had been beneficiaries of the 10p rate would be net gainers as a result of the cut in the basic rate. Anyhow, I was on the train to Bristol on the March morning after Alastair Darling’s first budget as chancellor. I read every word in The Guardian’s budget supplement. I was very pleased to see what this supposedly boring chancellor, with his supposedly boring budget, has done to reduce the number of children living in poverty (real poverty — not modest incomes). I then looked at the table showing how different people, on different incomes and in different circumstances, would be affected by the tax changes legislated for a year ago, and now about to take effect. I could see at first glance that there was a blip around the £15,000 mark, where the changes would actually make people poorer. I thought, ‘Can that be right?’ and went on reading.

Our legislators — the people we pay to scrutinise our forthcoming laws — hadn’t noticed this anomaly in debating the budget last year. (Someone told me that Frank Field had noticed it then, had pointed it out, but had been ignored.) Anyhow, Frank Field — a man I admire deeply — has led a Labour rebellion this year on the point, which has caused the government to have to design a complex and expensive means of compensating the losers for their loss, as the price extracted to persuade the rebels not to vote against the Finance Bill. There were enough rebels, and Labour’s majority is small enough, for the government to have lost the vote. If a government loses a vote on a Finance Bill, it usually faces a vote of no confidence. That wouldn’t have meant the government falling, because the rebels would presumably have supported the government in the no-confidence vote. But it would have been a disaster in terms of the government’s standing with the electorate, which is already very bad. The Tories have, in any case, had a field day. It’s a bitter irony that the party which, when last in power, was in practice the enemy of poorer people, managing for example to double child poverty between 1979 and 1997, has been able to present itself as the champion of a group for which it has no real sympathy whatever.

I expect that Labour will do very badly in local elections around the country today. Boris Johnson may win in London. There is no sign of Brown being able to recover the authority he had until the shambles of last autumn’s election-that-wasn’t.

Anthony Minghella has died since I last wrote in this diary. It’s a dreadful loss of a wonderful man and a brilliant film director. He was still young (two and a half years younger than I). His film of Beckett’s short play Play is a masterpiece; that’s how I came to meet him. When I went into the cutting-room to view Play with him, I thought to myself, ‘Whatever you say, it had better not be stupid.’ I made three small suggestions to Anthony, all of which he adopted. I was terribly sad, and diminished, when I heard.

I have recently read a very good new biography of John Donne, by John Stubbs.

‘Who casts not up his Eie to the Sunne when it rises? but who takes off his Eie from a Comet when that breaks out? Who bends not his eare to any bell, which upon any occasion rings? but who can remove it from that bell, which is passing a peece of himselfe out of this world? No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were: any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; It tolls for thee.’

From Victor Hugo’s poem ‘Puisque je suis étrange au milieu de la ville…’: ‘…il est moins urgent / De punir les effets que de guérir les causes’. Nothing more needs to be said about the heartbreaking and apparently irresolvable conflicts disfiguring the face of the world.

I strolled down to St Pancras International (admired previously, I know) and took a humble train to Bedford. I shall stay tonight in Wootton, and tomorrow drive dad to Tooting, in his car, for a check-up on the stent in his aorta. Then back to Wootton, then the train again to London. I’ve done this four-way trip several times in the last few months. I find it much less tiring if I’m doing only two of the stints in the car.

The poetry website is nearly there. I shall launch it in the next few days with an electronic postcard to about 140 people, asking that they pass the postcard on to anyone they think might be interested. I must say, I’m very proud of the site. Mark has done a wonderful job. We shall see what the response will be.

You can listen to the poems. Peter Hetherington, Zawe Ashton (Paul’s daughter, a very good young actor) and I recorded the readings in the course of one day in the sound suite at Teachers TV. It was a great day. Of course, professional recording facilities make almost anything sound wonderful. That taken into consideration, there were some moments when the editor and the other listeners were moved by what they were hearing. As I like to say, ‘If it makes people cry, it must be literature.’

I decided to put some prose on to the site too: the autobiography as it stands at the moment and the first four Madame Granic stories. So it’s quite chunky now.

The long weekend in Portugal with Glenda and Julian at the beginning of May was delightful. Julian picked us up at the airport on Thursday evening, and drove us to their comfortable flat in the Lisbon suburb of Parede. We ate a delicious fish stew which Glenda had prepared, and talked until late. The next day Glenda, Helen and I took the train to Estoril and then walked on the boardwalk to Cascais. We wandered around the town, admiring the particular beauty of Portuguese domestic architecture (especially the use of ornamental tile work on the walls of the houses). About three, Julian joined us with the car, having done his morning’s teaching, and we drove to Cabo da Roca, the most westerly point of mainland Europe. It is an extraordinarily beautiful place, with vertiginous drops to the sea, which was flat calm that day. The promontory was covered with wild flowers, of which the most profuse was the hottentot fig, a purplish succulent invader from Africa.

That evening we dined in Parede, at a sea-food restaurant called Eduardo. The food was spectacularly simple and fresh: dose after dose of protein. The climax of the meal was crabs for four. The brown meat in the body of each great beast had been scooped out, mixed with egg and pepper, and put back. Superb. However, the legs and the claws were unbroken. Each of us was supplied with a wooden hammer and block. Most of the other diners in this packed Friday-night venue were eating the same thing. So the place sounded more like a carpenter’s workshop than an eatery. It would not have been the right place to make romantic or sexy proposals, nor to negotiate a delicate diplomatic agreement.

On the Saturday, we went to Cintra. I’d read about the place, but had no real idea of its eccentric beauty, sweeping up and down the steep wooded hills. We walked around the Moorish castle at the top of one of the hills, and looked across at the extraordinary fairy-tale Ludwig-of-Bavaria-style castle on the top of another hill, and gazed down at the lesser but still astonishing fantasy palaces below. We visited the luxuriant Monserrate gardens, created by the English millionaire Sir Francis Cook. His summer pavilion, at the top of the garden, is being renovated. There was a photograph of him and his family, taken on a hot afternoon about 120 years go. The clothes they wore! How lust must have weighed on the minds and bodies of the young men and women, looking away from the camera and at each other, under all that fabric. Old Francis, gazing straight at the camera, seemed content with his cigar.

That evening we crossed the magnificent 25 April bridge over the Tagus, and drove south-east for half an hour to the hilltop town of Palmela, where there is another castle and a former monastery, now in use as a pousada, one of Portugal’s luxury hotels. A wedding party had taken over the dining-room, so we dined in the cloisters, consuming whatever we wanted from a huge hot and cold buffet, while a viola-and-flute duet played classical snippets to us.

On the Sunday we drove into central Lisbon and walked around. It’s a wonderful city, rising and falling steeply, its houses clambering up and down over each other. We climbed all over the castle of St George, our third castle in two days, and admired the views of the city, the Tagus and its great lagoon inland from Lisbon, and the countryside to the south. We found one of those old-fashioned, solid, unfussy restaurants where you know everything is going to be right the moment you walk in. Dark wood panelling; stiffly starched tablecloths and napkins; serious waiters in equally stiffly starched white cotton jackets. We ate a superb meal, of which the highlight for me was lamphreys. I’d never eaten them before, and knew nothing about them, other than the factoid everybody knows, that King John died after eating a surfeit of them. They are a sea and fresh-water creature sui generis, not — as is often supposed — related to the eel. They live by sucking the blood of other fish. They reminded me slightly of crayfish, in that they can operate in both kinds of water, and that there’s something faintly disgusting about them: crayfish will eat anything; lamphreys are blood-suckers. Anyhow, they were delicious, served up in a thick, strong, black sauce.

On the Monday, our last day, Julian had to work. Glenda and Helen were in the mood for some shopping and a ladies’ lunch. I took the train to Lisbon again. The terminus in the city is also the river station for boats across the Tagus, so I walked straight from the train to the first departing boat, which was going to Seixal. It was a fifteen-minute crossing, with beautiful views in all directions. When we got to Seixal I could see that there once had been a railway station there, bringing people in from the countryside south of the river. The railway line was no more, and the station building abandoned, alas. There was a huge car park full of cars: daily commuters. I walked along an unprepossessing strip of new road, next to an enormous building site: hundreds of new flats. After five minutes I came to the old village of Seixal. It is quite beautiful, essentially unchanged by the centuries. It has three parallel streets, of which the first faces out over the water, which is either a tributary or an inlet of the Tagus. I wandered about in the quiet of a Monday morning, alone, enjoying being alone, and sat down outside a café and had a coffee and one of those exquisite cakes called bolos. Then I wandered about some more, and soon it was time for lunch, which I ate in the narrow central square, under a holm-oak which, I noticed, had been planted in 1907 by the arboreal friends of Seixal. It was bliss. The lunch cost almost nothing. Everyone was charming. It felt a million miles away from Lisbon, a great modern city bursting with pride and ambition, although I was only a short ride across the water. I sat there until about 2.30, took the boat back across the water, then the train to Parede. Glenda and Helen arrived from their lunch just after I did, and we packed and Julian took us to the airport. We were home about midnight.

Since the trip to Portugal, we’ve had the second long May weekend in Shropshire with Andrew and Annie Bannerman (deeply pleasurable, though pouring wet on the Sunday when we drove around beautiful Corvedale), and the following weekend I went over to Northern Ireland to see Peter Logue. On the Saturday, we drove over Tor Head on the north Antrim coast. The weather in Northern Ireland had been beautiful for a month, unlike that in southern England. On this day it was perfect. There is a place high up on the little lane which clings to the side of the hill where we stopped the car. Far below was the deep, calm blue sea. Only a few miles across the water was the Mull of Kintyre, with the mountains of Scotland in the distance behind it. Near the tip of the Mull were little islands. Further south was England and the hills of the Lake District. In the opposite direction were the Hebrides, with the jagged mountains of Skye showing in the haze. Around us were hawthorn, fuschia and gorse in flower. Birds sang. Nobody came and nobody went. We stood there for a quarter of an hour, the only witnesses, just then, of this scene of exalted and spectacular beauty.

My birthday was properly marked, as I like it to be. Helen took me out to the Connaught for dinner, which was superb in a straightforwardly English sort of way: leek and potato soup, lamb chops with spinach and mash, apple crumble. I broke the alcohol fast I’m currently undergoing: champagne, claret, sauternes. Helen gave me a lovely little limited-edition Miro print, and I had lots of cards.

Today I’m feeling great because www.myproperlife.com went live yesterday. Lots of people have written in response to the electronic postcard to say well done and how good the site looks. Of course, the only thing to do now is to write some more, but having done what I’ve done I can leave all those poems and that prose behind and let the world make of them what it will. There may be feminist friends who will be disappointed about the frank descriptions of male sexuality. There may be friends more left-wing than I who will find absurd my justification in the last chapter of the autobiography for still being a member of the Labour Party. There may be Christian friends who will be sorry to read that I’m an atheist. I don’t care. I’ve said in public what I want to say, and I feel better for it. I’m fulfilled.

Tomorrow we go to Cambridge for Clare Harrisson’s graduation. She got a 2:1 in history. The ceremony is at 10 o’clock at the Senate House, so we start early. I expect there will be some refreshment at Trinity afterwards, and then Helen and I will drive across to Suffolk for our annual weekend with Peter Adams. Rod Allen, Peter’s host at Letheringham Mill for the last 20 years or so, died last August, so it won’t be quite the same.

I think I’m going to New York on Teachers TV business for a fortnight in July, but the trip still isn’t finally confirmed.

We went to Cambridge, and then on to Suffolk. The graduation ceremony was splendid and very moving. Judith and I had the best seats in the Senate House, right next to the chair in which Martin Rees, the Master of Trinity, sat to confer the degrees. Clare, by pure coincidence, was the first of the 80 or so in her batch, so she got the full Latin paragraph both from the praelector and from the Master, the others having to be content with the abbreviated version. Of course we all thought of Mike, of how proud he would have been. It’s over five years since he was killed.

Then we stood about and chatted on the Senate House lawn before strolling by the back lane to Trinity, where lunch was served in Neville’s Court. It felt very pleasing to be there again, on a much warmer day than that of my own graduation 36 years ago.

About half past two we left Clare and Judith and drove across to Suffolk, for a longer-than-usual weekend with Peter. That evening we went to eat at the Fox and Goose in Fressingfield, a place new to us, though I was told later by Tim Miller that it had been a cut-above sort of pub/restaurant for decades: in the 60s it was run by a Belgian who was a passionate anti-smoker, before his time; if he caught a diner smoking in the dining-room, he would seize the cigarette from the person’s hand, walk to the door with it, open the door and throw it out, before turning to the offender and inviting him to follow it.

On the Friday afternoon we visited The Red House, where Britten and Pears lived from 1957, which is now owned by the Trust which carries their names. Very interesting: the house full of the paintings which Pears collected over the years.

We went to an Aldeburgh Festival concert on the Saturday afternoon: Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge and Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, performed by the young people of the Britten-Pears Orchestra. I’d never been in the Maltings Concert Hall at Snape before: a beautiful, plain interior, brown and restrained, the old brick and the new wood.

Peter and I went to church at Melton at eight o’clock on Sunday. Tim joined us. Afterwards he showed us the grand house above the village where he had been born and grown up: Foxboro Hall. We looked at it from the lane at the bottom of the park. His parents sold it about 30 years ago, when the children had long gone and they were old and rattling about in it and couldn’t afford to keep it up any longer.

I like Tim very much. We got to know him through Peter. He used to be churchwarden at St Anne’s, Soho, where a friend of Peter’s, Fred Stevens, used to be vicar. He’s gentry: he went to Eton; he was in the Guards. Then he became a documentary film-maker. Then for 15 years he was a probation officer, working with young offenders who had committed some of the worst crimes. Then went to the Royal College of Art as head of the film department. Now he’s retired, but he’s got a new occupation: screenplay writer. One of his former students, Asif Kapadia, has directed the films The Warrior and Far North. Tim and Asif write the screenplays together. They’re working on a sequel to The Warrior. Tim has an apartment in Albany, a house at Shingle Street, and a house in the Pyrenees which he shares with his cousin. He’s deeply in love with Suffolk, and knows an immense amount about its history. He’s rooted. We had drinks at Shingle Street before going to Orford. I love to stand on that beach, with the valerian and sea-cabbage in bloom, and look out at the great container ships making for Felixstowe.

We drove back to London on Sunday evening.

I’ve been here since Sunday with Andrew Bethell, and he’s flying back tonight. I’m staying another eight days to help Ron Thorpe, the director of education at the PBS television station Thirteen, and his colleague Margaret Honey produce a document which they will take to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, no less, asking for a large sum of money to establish Teachers TV in the USA. If Gates grants the money, I may be spending more time here.

It’s hot. It was unpleasantly humid and overcast for the first couple of days here, but now the air is clear and there’s a pleasant breeze mornings and evenings. The Empire State Building, three blocks from this hotel, is a great straight grey pencil marking, not scraping, the sky. Ron’s office at Thirteen looks out over the Pennsylvania Station sidings, then the Hudson, then the New Jersey shore. The walk from hotel to workplace takes an informative 15 minutes. I could happily envisage six months or a year here, helping to set TTVUSA going, getting to know the city properly.

I shall go down now to the laundromat to pick up shirts, socks and underwear, bring them back here, then go out again and find somewhere nice for dinner. I may go to the restaurant near the Museum of Modern Art where I ate lunch the day after we won the Emmy in 2004, when I tried the delicious gazpacho to make sure that American Airlines hadn’t rendered me allergic to tomatoes.

This is my last evening here. I’ve worked solidly every day since Andrew left, including Saturday and Sunday. I get up about 7.30, have a shower, leave the hotel about 8.15, and I’m at Thirteen, on W33rd Street between 9th and 10th Avenues, a quarter of an hour later.

It’s been relentlessly hot — in the 80s and 90s (they still have Fahrenheit here) — and I haven’t minded that. As I say to taxi drivers and anyone else who wants to complain about the weather, I’m from England, I spend most of my life being cold, I can take a little of this. I work in the great ugly brown air-conditioned building until six, then switch off the computer, walk back to the hotel, have a shower, and go out for the evening.

I haven’t read much — one slim early novel by John McGahern, called The Leave-Taking, which covers some of the same ground as his beautiful late (last?) book, simply called Memoir, which I read recently, given to me by Peter Logue. The Leave-Taking isn’t as good.

Peter Logue once met McGahern, who told him the following story. During Charlie Haughey’s time, there was a scandal — one of the many in Haughey’s corrupt administrations — in which the minister responsible for development was in the pocket of a rich developer, who wanted to turn a beautiful auld decency house on the banks of the Liffey into an exclusive hotel, with golf courses, swimming pools, fake 18th-century extensions, etcetera. McGahern, who lived nearby, led an effective, well-publicised campaign of opposition to the plan. So noticeable did the campaign become that the matter was discussed in cabinet. Haughey asked the minister for his comment on the situation. The cabinet note-taker had his pen poised as usual. The minister said, ‘Taoiseach, I’m very sorry about it, but that fucking writer cunt above has them all ris.’

Yesterday I was stopped and asked for money by a black man, aged about 35, who had been in the marines in Iraq and had been shot. He pulled up his shirt to show me the bullet holes. I gave him money. He was the kind a beggar who always moves me and to whom I always give. That is, he hadn’t passed over to the other side, to a hopeless state of intoxication and sub-humanity. He was still one of us, but he knew how desperate was his plight, how close he was to a place beyond help. It was only three dollars I gave him, pulled randomly out of a wallet containing hundreds, but he thanked me with tears in his eyes. I said I was from London, and he said he had a buddy in Gloucester. Did I know Gloucester? I said it had a beautiful cathedral. He said he hoped we would meet again some day, and jerked his finger heavenwards. We shook hands once, and as we parted he wanted to shake again, by which time I had transferred my bag to my right hand, so I offered him my left. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the right hand, the right hand.’ We shook properly, and he was gone.

I got back from NY on 19 July in the morning. The following Wednesday we went to France, stopping overnight at our hotel near Avranches and arriving at Kerfontaine on Thursday lunchtime. Five and a half weeks then slipped pleasantly by. We drove down to the Gers on 29 July, in order to celebrate Mike Raleigh’s 60th birthday the following day, which we did in fine style, a party of 10 in a beautiful large restored manoir. I took a walk alone on the afternoon of Mike’s birthday, in the great heat, through exquisite countryside, gently hilly, with fields of young sunflowers glowing everywhere, and vineyards. In the tiny bourg of the commune, there was a moving memorial to a battle fought between the Germans and the French resistance, aided by some Spanish republicans and, I’m glad to say, a unit of Special Operations Executive. The Germans won in the end, only by bringing up greatly superior firepower, and the village was totally destroyed. The houses there now don’t look new, to the casual glance; they must have been rebuilt soon after the war with traditional materials in the traditional style.

The day after Mike’s birthday we departed and drove up to the Charente, to stay three nights with Stephen and Theresa. I love being there, and they’ve made big progress on the house since our last visit. The kitchen is almost finished, and the ceilings of the bedrooms have plasterboard and paint, so the danger of an insect falling into the open mouth of the snoring sleeper has passed. Just as I was drying myself by the pool after my first swim, the phone rang. Harold Rosen had died that morning. I wasn’t completely surprised. I’d seen him for the last time the day before I went to New York. We had a good long talk. His physical infirmity was depressing to him. It seemed to me he was gazing at the probability of death, but refusing to accept it. There was no philosophical quiescence. He wasn’t going gently into that good night. That was his nature; and as was his nature, after the briefest of medical conversations, he said, ‘What’s new, John?’ and I told him about my work.

I spoke to Betty on the phone straight away. The next day, as I had expected, she rang and asked me to do the obituary for The Guardian. I rang The Guardian obituary desk. Yes, they would definitely run a piece. Could they have it by Sunday? It was Friday morning. I sat down in one of the spare bedrooms and wrote the piece on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, with the help of phone calls to Michael and Brian Rosen, Harold’s sons, for factual information and for guidance on the political side of Harold’s life: essentially, his membership of the Communist Party and his leaving of it. The educational part I could do unaided. Then I read the finished thing, still in handwriting, on the phone to Michael and Brian, listening together, and then to Betty. We both cried a lot as I was reading it to Betty. I said, ‘A man should no more cry at his own writing than he should laugh at his own jokes.’ All three of them liked what I had done, so on Saturday afternoon Stephen and I went to an internet café in Chalais and I hammered it in and sent it off. Such is the wondrous technological world now.

The obituary appeared on Monday 4 August, with a lovely picture of Harold which The Guardian had got from Betty. I didn’t actually see the newspaper until 10 days later. They’d fiddled with what I’d written, quite unnecessarily, and made it about 10% worse. (They did exactly the same with my obituary for Terry Furlong in 2002.) I was cross, as I had been with Terry’s piece, but at moments like that there’s no point in getting uppity, and many people have been complimentary about what they read. Here’s what I wrote (not quite what was printed).

The funeral was arranged for 13 August, and the family asked me to be the master of ceremonies, since it was to be a non-religious occasion. It was a proper and fitting ceremony, with about 200 people there.

Jumping back, 4 August was Helen’s 60th birthday. By this time we were back at Kerfontaine, and David, Lindsay and Tom James were in their usual gîte at Moëlan-sur-Mer. They came over on the day, and Lindsay, with a bit of sous-chef help from me, cooked a magnificent dinner. Jean and Annick came down for it too. It was a sublimely happy occasion. I gave Helen an emerald ring in white gold, which I knew she wanted; and she had many other presents, and scores of cards.

Yesterday I was due to meet our bank manager, who’s in Shrewsbury, where we still keep our accounts. I’ve never seen her. She doesn’t call herself a bank manager but a ‘relationship adviser’, and she’s replaced the excellent bank manager we used to have, who called himself a bank manager. I had no special business with her, but she wanted a meeting, and was prepared to come to London for it. At nine o’clock yesterday morning, the mobile rang: she was so sorry, she wouldn’t be able to make the meeting; the National Westminster Bank couldn’t afford to send its relationship advisers on train journeys at the moment.

On 1 September, my first day back at Teachers TV after the summer, Andrew Bethell told me that he could only afford to employ me for seven days in September. So I did five of those straight away, and then went back to France for most of the rest of the month.

On 10 September, I met Peter Adams at Stansted Airport and we flew to Dinard, where I had left the car. We drove to Rennes, and met Helen, who had just stepped off the TGV from Marseille, having had a wonderful 10 days there with Mary, Jacques and Tess. Peter had four days with us. On his last day (a Sunday), I took him back to the airport via Mont Saint Michel, which he had never seen. We climbed up to the top (we had to pay to get into the abbey itself) and arrived there in the midst of high mass. It’s a spectacular building, soaring and light, and the service in full swing, organ music, incense and all, made it exhilarating. We went up to the altar rail. Peter didn't take communion. He didn't think it right to, as an Anglican priest. He received a blessing. I did take communion, even though I'm an atheist. Afterwards, the view from the square outside the west doors, over the great bay at low tide, was breathtakingly lovely: reflections of clouds moving across the sheen of water on the mud, and the empty winding creeks showing where the tide would later enter.

After that, Helen and I had a peaceful two weeks together alone at Kerfontaine. The weather was the best of the summer: a succession of steady, golden days. On Monday 22nd we picked the apples. Rosa came down to help us. I have a useful new tool for apple-picking: a long extendible metal pole, to which is attached a short fitment with a cloth bag at its end. With a bit of practice, and as long as an apple is ripe, you can cause it to fall into the bag by holding the bag under the apple and banging the metal ring at the bag’s mouth against the stalk. You can get four or five apples like this before bringing the pole to earth. A lot of apples fell to the ground as the trees were disturbed, but the ground was so soft after all the rain earlier in the summer that they didn’t bruise. We gave most of them to Rosa; they’re a winter boon for her.

On the way back to London, we stayed in a delightful auberge, called the Auberge d’Inxent, an hour south of Calais. It is completely old-fashioned. We were shown to our room via an outside staircase where we had to push aside great yellow daisies to walk up. The village of Inxent is in the valley of the perfectly named River Course; the Course is a fresh stream, flowing fast over the chalk. Dinner was simple — a four-courser for 28 euros, with lots of regional specialities which I hadn’t heard of. The wine list was quite spectacular for such an unpretentious place. We had a half-bottle of white Rhône (Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe) but I couldn’t choose amongst the clarets, so I asked the owner to pick one for me for about 50 euros. He came back with a Saint-Estèphe which was ten years old and wonderful.

The next morning the sun was bursting through the mist as we threaded the lanes, past churches which might almost but not quite have been in Kent or Sussex, before rejoining the old RN1 (now demoted, because of the motorway, to the D901). We took a boat across the water, because the tunnel was still catching up on bookings after the recent fire, and were in London about six.

I have guaranteed work two days a week until further notice.

Meanwhile, the world has been convulsed by a financial crisis. As I write at the computer, I keep watching the behaviour of the stock markets on the BBC’s website. So much has happened in the last few days and weeks that it’s hard to know where to start, and how much detail to go into. Essentially, very greedy and stupid people running banks, encouraged by the light regulatory regimes which were put in place in the 1980s in America, Britain and elsewhere (less so in Continental Europe), lent enormous sums of money, irresponsibly, gambling that they would get their money back at a handsome profit. This irresponsibility was further encouraged by the fact that there always seemed to be another bank or financial institution which would buy a particular bank’s debts (called assets, in the Alice-through-the-Looking-Glass world of banking) from it. Now this never-never delusion has been revealed for the catastrophe that it was. In America, most spectacularly, but also in Britain and other countries, governments have had to step in to buy up or at least guarantee banks’ debts. In America, after a huge hiccup when the House of Representatives first voted down a measure which the leadership of both parties thought they had agreed, which caused the measure to be revised before finally being agreed in the House last Friday, the government has agreed to spend a sum which may turn out to be around a trillion dollars (they’re saying $700 billion at the moment, but I expect it’ll go up) buying up banks’ bad assets. Ordinary Americans, caught up in all this chaos either because many of them have lost their houses, unable to keep up payments on mortgages sold to them by smooth-tongued salespeople; or because banks suddenly won’t lend them any money, even if they’re credit-worthy and their small business needs immediate funds; or because they’re out of work now that the financial crisis, which has been going on in America for 18 months, has spilled over into the real economy, are angry at the grotesque behaviour of the super-rich on Wall Street. Barack Obama, I’m very glad to say, is benefiting from this anger, a month before the presidential election.

This morning in Britain, before the markets opened, the government made available around £500 billion to the banking system. Some of that money will buy shares in banks — part-nationalising them. Some will be used to guarantee that if banks lend to each other, they will be paid back. Some will be lent to banks in exchange for assets which the banks would like to get rid of. At around lunchtime in the UK, the Fed, the Bank of England and the ECB cut interest rates by half a percent. These actions have come about after days of wild fluctuations, mainly precipitous falls, on stock markets. Bank shares in particular have collapsed. The RBS Group, which owns NatWest, which has Helen’s and my money, is worth about a sixth of what it was worth at its high point earlier this year. Recently, the government had to nationalise the Bradford and Bingley’s bad debts, while getting Santander to take on its viable assets. It persuaded Lloyds to buy HBOS, although that deal hasn’t been concluded and isn’t certain; I think a lot depends on what happens to the share prices of the two banks after today’s events.

The people who have made me angry fall into two groups. In the first group are some bankers, who have gone on television to blame the government for the mess we’re in: a mess which is entirely of their own making. It’s true that the government should have acted more swiftly last year over Northern Rock, a bank run by the greediest and most stupid of bankers, and which had to be nationalised as a measure of last resort. But since then, Brown and Darling have done as well as anyone could have been expected to, considering the scale, speed and complexity of the crisis. On Monday night, Darling met the bosses of the big banks, in what was supposed to be a private meeting. Somehow, the fact that the meeting was taking place leaked out, as did the (true) rumour that the Treasury was planning this morning’s package. Bank shares collapsed yesterday. This is supposed to be the Chancellor’s fault, even though it’s either the bankers themselves, or the Governor of the Bank of England being too candid with the Conservatives, who then blabbed, who fanned the rumour.

The second group I hate are opinion journalists, like Simon Jenkins in today’s Guardian, who sneeringly say that the Chancellor’s performance has been hopeless. Jenkins and commentators like him would not have remained continent had they been confronted with such a crisis. Darling has kept his cool, maintained his tone, been himself — boring, some might say, but one doesn’t want an entertainer at a time like this — and done the right things.

The political ironies of recent months are sharp. The most right-wing, free-market government in American history (though perhaps Reagan’s government, which started the rot, ran it close) discovers that the state has a life-saving role to play in the country’s affairs. A Conservative opposition here, which until recently loudly preached the virtues of laissez-faire economics, whose members are the inheritors of Thatcher’s view that the state is bad, or at least not to be trusted, and that the private sector always knows best, now speaks about the need for stronger regulation and about the virtues of fairness. A Labour government which, unlike any previous Labour government, has been, in the words of Peter Mandelson (restored to the Cabinet last Friday, to everyone’s astonishment) ‘seriously relaxed about people getting filthy rich’ (I think I’ve got that right), is being attacked by the Conservative opposition for not being tough enough on the City! Cameron’s biggest backers include people who have got rich by pulling the most disreputable levers of the fruit machines of capitalism in the hedge funds. But Labour also has supporters amongst hedge-fund managers and short-sellers of vulnerable stocks; one was made a junior minister at the weekend.

The only thing we can hope for is that the scare which governments have had in recent days and weeks will make them impose sterner regulation on their financial sectors, in exchange for lifting them out of the sea at the point of drowning. Governments must require banks not to lend more than they’ve got; to lend responsibly, to those who, according to their best judgement, can afford to repay; to lend to people who make things and do things in the real material world, not to people who only want to borrow money to lubricate arcane financial instruments in the unreal world; and to stop paying themselves obscene amounts of money.

My father’s brother, my uncle Peter (I prefer to call him Peter, even though for years he has called himself Miles, or Miles Peter) died yesterday. He was 85 and had cancer. He was a serious painter; he painted single-mindedly and with passion all his life. He had been a student of David Bomberg. With all his devotion to his art, he was never famous. I remember him most affectionately from the 1970s; Mark and I lived in his house in Albert Street while he was in Spain. I visited him and his family at their huerta near Ronda in 1975 (twice) and 1976. During the two summers, I watched farmers threshing corn on a circular floor of cobbles, using a horse and a mule yoked together, the horse for spirit and the mule for stamina: a way of working which has gone for ever. Fiestas in white walled villages high up in the mountains went on all night; we drank and danced in the square for hours, until the dawn had fully come, and then bought sweet pastries for breakfast from stalls in the street and went home to sleep until noon. I swam in the stream across the field from the house every day. One day, Peter suggested that he and I go for a ride on horses. I had never ridden a horse before. We mounted and galloped, I following him, until we arrived at an abandoned house. It was midday, and burning hot. This had been the house, Peter told me, where Bomberg and his wife had lived. As I knew, Peter had come to Ronda, with his wife, to be with Bomberg. We stood for a while as Peter talked about his life in painting, about the importance of taking your art seriously, whether anybody else notices or not. Then we galloped home, dangerously, near-suicidally in my case, as my horse repeatedly swerved under the low branches of trees to try to knock me off. I flattened myself along its back and held on.

I wrote lots of poems when I was in Spain in those years. A very few of them have survived, often much changed, in the current collection.

Friday was Peter’s funeral. (I shall call him Miles from now on, because everyone there did, and that was the name on his coffin.) I went up on the train from Kings Cross to Northallerton. Some cars met the dozen or so of us who’d been on that train, and we were driven to the village of East Rounton, about 12 miles away. I met Mark there; he had flown up from Bristol to Newcastle and rented a car.

The little church was quite beautiful, and the service appropriate. About 80 people were there. The priest, who had known Miles well, described his intense, unorthodox spirituality perfectly. Three of his children gave tributes: Philip very movingly recounted memories of his father; Georgina read a short Lorca poem, first in her lovely translation, then in the original; Bob read some brief diary entries which his father had written in the last weeks of his life. The hymns were good, ending with ‘Jerusalem’, which was right for a passionate English mystic whose hero Blake had been. Then we followed the coffin outside and laid Miles to rest in the corner of the churchyard. The sun shone and sycamore leaves floated to the ground in and around the grave.

Afterwards there were refreshments in the village hall. On a stand in the room was one of Miles’s last paintings: a view of the North Yorkshire hills from exactly the spot where he knew he would be buried. After an hour of conversations, Georgina and Philip took Mark and me to the studio where Miles had worked until the end. On an easel was another view of the same hills, from the same spot; this time there was a purple mark in the lower right-hand corner of the painting, which was, we were told, Miles’s spirit crawling into its grave. We wouldn’t have known.

There was an excellent obituary in The Guardian last Wednesday. It described how Miles had struggled all his life to paint and draw in a way which acknowledged the physical world but did not simply represent it. His art was not abstract — it did not ignore nature — but nor was it a slave to nature. There was a story in the piece about a painting called ‘The Red Studio’, a reproduction of which took up about half the full page given to Miles, which I’ll quote. ‘… in the 1970s he found that his work had taken the long route through drawing to the discovery of light and colour. It is probably no coincidence that one of this new sequence of paintings is called “The Red Studio”, the very title Matisse used in 1911 for one of the most important breakthrough paintings of the age, in which colour gives the impression of both light and spatial depth. Richmond had moved to London and was working in a studio in Camden Town; in his telling, he painted non-stop for three days, during which he experienced a quasi-mystical experience when he seemed to travel through the sun; as he emerged, he heard a voice saying, “Now you are connected.”’

I would say there was no quasi- about the mystical experience. Mark and I lived in that studio for five years, from 1974 to 1979, when Miles was in Spain. ‘The Red Studio’ stood on an easel in the room. I looked at it every day, with admiration, but I didn’t know until now that the doing of it had been so significant an event in Miles’s artistic life.

Yesterday I went to Portsmouth to see my aunts Evelyn and Margaret and my cousin Ceri. Lovely lunch, cooked by Ceri, and then I walked on the down as usual. The weather was glorious. I lay on the grass and looked at the city, the harbours, the Isle of Wight. All the complex connections kept crowding in on me, overwhelming me: there (Tennyson Down, on the island) my parents courted, there (the Church of the Resurrection, just down the hill) they were married, there (in Fratton) I was born, there (in Solent Road, opposite my aunts) I first went to school, there (somewhere on the other side of the Havant Road, down a street of quiet bungalows) I accompanied my father to the little Plymouth Brethren chapel, and here where I was lying we walked home from the service, my hand in his, on summer Sunday evenings. To these well known connections I added another that Philip had told me on Friday: my father’s father’s father had come from Hartlepool to Portsmouth as a poor man, a labourer, and had found work in the dockyard. I had known that my father’s side of the family as well as my mother’s had been established in Portsmouth, and that it was a coincidence that my father, whose own father had moved to London with his wife, had come back to Portsmouth when he joined the Admiralty after university. But I hadn’t known how the Portsmouth connection on my father’s side had started. So down there in the docks, on the west shore of Portsea Island, starting at some date in the 1880s, alongside thousands of other men, a man with a northern accent had moored and unmoored warships. On Friday I had been not far from Hartlepool, in a church on whose walls the plaques commemorated Bells and Trevelyans, the lords of that part of the world, Miles’s first wife’s relations, who’d made their money as owners of factories and foundries in the coastal towns of the north-east. Philip told me that the labourer had been very proud of his son, who became an engineer in the Admiralty and did important and secret work designing ships’ engines (he got an MBE). (A generation later, my father also worked for the Admiralty as a scientific researcher, developing radar.) Philip said that our father’s mother’s family had thought nonetheless that our grandmother married beneath her. Her father, a Mr Winterbottom, owned a printing business, and was well off; his daughter had trained as a classical singer. I remember my great-aunt Margaret telling me that Mr Winterbottom — one of my great-grandfathers — had known the only great-grandfather I knew, the one I loved and who played draughts and cribbage with me. He had worked as a commissionaire in a bank after he and his family had moved to Portsmouth in (I think) 1925. Mr Winterbottom had his account at that bank. This slight connection between the two families came long before my father met my mother.

I walked down the hill and across the Havant Road, looking for the Plymouth Brethren chapel. I found it in South Road. A man was up a ladder fixing to the front wall a banner proclaiming a verse of scripture. His two little children, a boy and a girl, played in front of the building (now simply called South Road Church). I thought about going over to ask the man if the church was still Plymouth Brethren. I might tell him that I had attended it 50 years ago: information which would certainly lead to friendly enquiries about the state of my soul now. I went on.

Vantage Point

In October sunshine, high on the down, with a view of the city, the harbour, the sea, I sit and ponder the place where I started, which I cannot disown, whose birthmarks are printed in me like spots on these fallen sycamore leaves, like flukes in the bark of this whistling hawthorn which leans with the wind down the hill into the huge deep bowl of air below me. I am panoptic, exalted.

What have I retained of what I was given here, then? First, love; next, education: two gifts out of three. The third, which was faith, I’ve handed back for good.

The boy who walked with his father on this grass, bending his curious but believing brain to hard truths wrung from texts containing all heaven and earth in fine, clear print, is no more and never will be. Instead, here sits a man certain that we, and we only, can do good; that ‘to be born is best’; that our days supply infinite occasion for joy; and that the dead know nothing at all.

Listened to Anthony Sher’s excellent programme on Radio 4 about Isaac Rosenberg. Heart-breaking: the difference, amongst the great poets of that war, between being a Jew and a private soldier and a Christian and an officer. In one of his letters home to his mother, he cries out: ‘Mother, send me a pencil.’ In another, he writes that for the moment he’s able to write, ‘being lucky enough to bag an inch of candle’.

Junction of Berners Street and Oxford Street: look left on this clear dry afternoon to Centre Point, and beyond it to the calm azure sky. There to the left of the building, large and level with its upper floors, is the full moon, its mountains and seas sharply delineated. It hangs, a quiet new person in the room, waiting for our notice without calling for our attention. A miracle. Gravity holding us together and apart. Just below the smudged but gleaming disc, an aeroplane crosses the sky, disappears behind Centre Point, reappears, disappears.

On Saturday 1 November dad had a heart attack. Joyce Bavington, who goes in early mornings and late evenings to help mum and dad, arrived about ten that evening to find him lying on the couch in the front room downstairs. He said he felt weak. Joyce took his pulse and called NHS Direct. An hour later, dad was in hospital. I went up the next morning. The doctors said that the attack had been mild; nonetheless, some of the heart muscle was now dead. When heart muscle dies, it isn’t renewed. So the rest of dad’s heart muscle will have to take over the work of the dead part. I stayed in Wootton until the following Thursday, looking after mum and visiting dad twice a day. On Thursday my brother Peter came to take over from me. Dad left hospital on Friday. Mary arrived two days ago to take over from Peter. She will stay until the 23rd. Between us, we’ve been putting in place enhanced care arrangements for after that.

At the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival last weekend, we had very good readings from Dennis O’Driscoll, George Szirtes, Alan Brownjohn, Tiffany Atkinson and a Chinese poet called Yi Sha. Dennis O’Driscoll also delivered an excellent lecture about Seamus Heaney, on Heaney’s stance as a public and political figure, mainly with regard to the Troubles but also to other conflicts (he spoke very well about ‘Anything Can Happen’, Heaney’s wonderful translation of the Horace ode, which refers to the Twin Towers). Then last Monday we heard Heaney and O’Driscoll being interviewed by Mark Lawson in Wyndham’s Theatre. Stepping Stones, a fat book of O’Driscoll’s interviews with Heaney, has just been published. I bought it at Aldeburgh. Both men were excellent. An edited version of the conversation is on Front Row on Radio 4 this evening.

Ten days ago, Barack Obama was elected the next president of the United States. I sat up all night in Wootton and watched. It was a wonderful triumph. I felt as elated as I did on 1 and 2 May 1997. The better part of America won. Obama’s administration faces gigantic tasks: fix the collapsing global financial system; revive America’s dying economy; save the planet from environmental disaster; engage with the outside world instead of bullying it; in particular, get out of Iraq. At the moment it looks as if Obama wants to send more troops to Afghanistan, to properly finish off the Taliban and Al-Qaida. While I have nothing but hatred for those forces of barbarism, backwardness and cruelty, and while I reluctantly supported the original invasion in 2001, there’s every chance that an increased Western military force will get bogged down in Afghanistan for years, with many deaths on all sides, and will become Obama’s albatross. Meanwhile, Pakistan is looking increasingly shaky as a democracy. People with disgusting attitudes, willing to defend the selling of girls as property, or the execution of women who have been raped, have joined the government. There’s no doubt that Taliban and Al-Qaida fanatics are being trained in Pakistan. The whole area represents a huge problem for the next US government. The only thing I can say, weakly, is that the problem won’t be solved by force alone. It needs intensive diplomacy, including negotiations with some of the most unpleasant people in the world — the kind of people who shoot women who run girls’ schools.

Obama’s victory speech was one of the finest pieces of political rhetoric I have ever heard: up there with the best of JFK and Martin Luther King, but delivered in a style appropriate to modern mass communication, so that, at its heights, it was almost conversational, as if he were speaking to each listener one by one. ‘Our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared.’ Every so often in life, despite the inevitable long process of disappointment which a political idealist like me is bound to experience, comes a flaring up of hope, a sense of the possibility of how things could be if a few good, intelligent, imaginative men and women coincided as world leaders. Hope flared up in me again as I listened and watched this remarkable man, ten years younger than me, holding an audience in the palm of his hand at about 5.30 GMT on the morning of 5 November 2008.

Update on the financial crisis and the recession: there’s a lot of noise from the Tories and the right-wing press about burgeoning UK government debt. In fact, the UK’s debt is 50th in the CIA’s world rankings, according to the league table I’ve just looked at, at 43.6% of GDP, lower than (in ascending order) Switzerland, The Netherlands, Austria, Cyprus, the United States, Portugal, France, Canada, Germany, Norway, Hungary, Belgium, Greece, Italy and Japan, to list only other EU countries and non-EU first-world countries. It’s true that the debt is projected to increase significantly, perhaps towards 60% of GDP in 2013/14, but I imagine that these other countries’ debt will increase equivalently. So far as I can see, Alistair Darling’s proposals in yesterday’s pre-budget report (which is in fact a full-scale budget, and much more significant than many full budgets are) are sensible Keynesian action in a recession. The government’s prediction for the depth and length of this recession is that it will be shallower and shorter than the two recessions of the Tory years. We shall see. The difference between the situation today and those prevailing during the Tory recessions is that there is currently a global banking crisis of exceptional — possibly unique — proportions. The one fair criticism of Gordon Brown’s time as chancellor doesn’t relate to his management of the ‘normal’ economy; it relates to his failure to impose tighter regulation on the banks. But that would probably have required global agreement to reverse the light-touch regulation of the Thatcher/Reagan inheritance, at a time when other governments, notably in the US, would have laughed at him for suggesting it. He could, had he been endowed with second sight and phenomenal courage, have tightened control alone. Had he done that, in a globalised finance system, a lot of money would have left the UK.

I’ve just finished reading all of Milton’s English poems (except ‘Comus’, which I skipped after a couple of pages because it seemed too silly). Milton was born 400 years ago last Tuesday. Somehow I avoided him when I was young; I didn’t study him extensively either at school or at Cambridge. I may have been prejudiced against him by the information that Keats had given up writing ‘Hyperion’ because there were ‘too many Miltonic inversions in it’. The only poems I have certainly read before are the famous sonnets ‘When I consider how my light is spent’ and ‘Methought I saw my late espoused Saint’; both are utterly wonderful, though the syntax of the first four-and-a-bit lines of ‘When I consider…’ takes a lot of conning.

To utter heresy, I don't think ‘Paradise Lost’ is a great poem. It's a long poem. Milton was a great man. There are some passages of great poetry in ‘Paradise Lost’, notably — and this is also the glory of Dante — when he makes a comparison between something religious and high-flown, and a common, down-to-earth, human experience. Examples are the lines near the end of the last book, where Adam and Eve are being expelled from Eden:

‘…all in bright array
The Cherubim descended; on the ground
Gliding meteorous, as Ev’ning Mist
Ris’n from a river o’re the marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the Labourers heel
Homeward returning.’

Or, describing Satan’s secret entry into Eden in book 4:

‘Or as a Thief bent to unhoord the cash
Of some rich Burgher, whose substantial dores,
Cross-barrd and bolted fast, fear no assault,
In at the window climbes, or o’re the tiles:
So clomb this first grand Thief into Gods Fould:’

(And, just after this passage, I love the quirkiness — not Biblical — that Satan’s first manifestation in the Garden is as a cormorant sitting on top of the Tree of Life.)

Occasionally, Milton achieves simple, sublime lyrical beauty, as in the description in book 1 of Satan’s fall:

‘…from Morn
To Noon he fell, from Noon to dewy Eve,
A Summers day; and with the setting Sun
Dropt from the Zenith like a falling Star,
On Lemnos th' Ægean Ile:’

And there are grandeurs such as the description towards the end of book 2 of the abyss of Chaos which Satan contemplates before he launches into it, including the phrase ‘His dark materials’ now made famous by Philip Pullman.

But there are excessive longueurs, where the prolix iambic pentameters jog on just above the level of rhythmical prose; and stately but predictable and tedious conversations. I love Dr Johnson’s remark: ‘“Paradise Lost” is one of those books which the reader admires and lays down and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is…’

If I had to, I would exchange the whole of ‘Paradise Lost’ for the two great sonnets.

‘Lycidas’ is very beautiful, and a political poem, and the rhymes are enchanting. (The preface to the second edition of ‘Paradise Lost’, where Milton justifies his decision to have written the poem without rhyme, protests a bit too much, though it is very interesting. The thought of doing something on that scale, dictated orally in blindness, and rhyming it too, boggles the mind.) ‘Samson Agonistes’ is absurd in that it’s one of numerous examples of great poets trying to write plays, which turn out static (I know Milton didn’t intend this one to be performed). Wordsworth, Tennyson and Hardy are other culprits. But there are some memorable lines, my appreciation of them probably enhanced by a 21st-century sensibility. Dalila to Samson, during their row:

‘In argument with men a woman ever
Goes by the worse, whatever be her cause.’

And Samson to Dalila:

‘At distance I forgive thee, go with that;’

I can think of a few people to whom, esprit d’escalier, I would like to have quoted that line.

Here we are again: our second Christmas at Kerfontaine. Dad has been pretty well since his heart attack. It was Mary’s turn to be with mum and dad this Christmas, and she, Jacques and Tess arrived there on Sunday. So we have been liberated. This afternoon, as two years ago, I went into the wood and cut holly, which is now scruffily but pleasingly plaited above the fireplace. The garden and the wood are beautiful, in the spare, contained way of winter. In particular, Jean-Paul has done a great job with the strimmer in the wood. It's easy and pleasant to walk between the trees. The stream is full but not overflowing.

We crossed Dover-Calais yesterday lunchtime, and stopped last night at Le Manoir de l’Archerie, near Villedieu-les-Poêles. We ate a wonderful Norman country meal, with only two other diners in the room. We woke up the next morning to thick mist, and drove on down the old N175 (‘la Route de la Liberté’, with the special kilometre posts carrying the embossed hand holding the flaming torch of freedom, which I noticed the first time I drove down that road more than 30 years ago) to Avranches. The ghostly silhouettes of the rooftops and church spires of the town looked spectacular. Mont Saint Michel not to be seen. A quarter of an hour later, the mist suddenly cleared, and we were in blazing sunshine, which has lasted the rest of the day. Brittany looked splendid: well cared-for and trim, with winter corn beginning to show. We stopped for our Christmas food in the supermarket at Plouay, bought flowers for the house at Le Nay and two dozen flat oysters for tonight from my man by the church, who explained that he wouldn’t sing me another English sea shanty today, as he had in the summer, because he has ‘something like sciatica’ which is causing him a lot of pain. He prefers to be up, moving and working, despite the pain; lying in bed is worse. I’ve been buying oysters from him for 18 years.

As two years ago, I most definitely didn’t listen to the carol service from King’s College, Cambridge on the radio. Its very beauty always fills me with profound melancholy: an inheritance from childhood. Consequently, I don’t need cheering up on the evening of Christmas Eve, because I’m already cheerful. I shall go and open the oysters; the flat ones are much easier to deal with than the hollow.

A clear sky at sunset. The day started overcast. We rose about 10.30, Helen having discovered, as usual, a present to wake up to at the end of the bed, enclosed in one of her own stockings: La Perla perfume. We had a larger-than-usual, longer-than-usual breakfast: coffee, the pear juice we bought yesterday at the hotel, two boiled eggs each, toast, yoghurt. We took a hamper up to our neighbours. We left them preparing for lunch and drove down to the sea. The roads were deserted, as on Christmas Day 2006. We walked along the same stretch of shore as then. To our amazement, about half a mile out at sea, causing surf where no surf usually is, were what must have been either porpoises or dolphins, their black forms partially appearing briefly and tantalisingly before disappearing under the water before appearing again. Just as we watched, the sky cleared and the sun came out. On the walk back, this time along the water’s edge, oyster-catchers were running comically and fast on the wet sand and through the shallowest water, their legs moving at top speed like cartoon legs, their bills pecking the sand in sudden, jerky, irregular movements, but confident, sure that there, exactly there was a tiny tit-bit of food: nothing so large as an oyster.

Then we drove back and ate a plate of goat’s cheese and salad with a glass of Madame Laroche’s magnificent Savennières. We opened our presents. Helen gave me a biography of Milton, which I’d asked for, and four beautiful second-hand first editions of poetry: Tony Harrison’s V, Stephen Spender, Robert Lowell and R.S. Thomas. I gave her more cosmetics. She had named four brands she currently likes (Tom Ford, Estée Lauder, Dolce e Gabbana and a Japanese name I can’t remember). I got her one of each. Extravagant, but we have got £100,000 in the bank and we do own two properties outright, combined value about £500,000, and we have no dependents, so there’s no need to practise economy too diligently.

Then we went for a walk around the grounds, admiring everything in its pared-back winter state. But the viburnum was in full flower, its pinky-white florets offering a peppery scent when you put your nose right up to them in the cold air, the flowers standing out brightly from the dark pointed leaves. That bush is about 10 feet high, and it’s been standing there since we bought the place. One year I thought it was going to die, and lopped off several already dead branches, but it’s recovered completely.

Our Christmas meal tonight: smoked salmon, coquille St Jacques, guinea fowl with sprouts and roast potatoes, cheese, Christmas pudding. This morning, Helen also gave me small presents in a hand-made paper stocking, including — as every year — Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Wine Guide. Hugh tells me that the Brane-Cantenac 2002 which I’ve been keeping may now be drunk, so I’ve decanted it into the claret jug which Stephen gave me years ago. It smells sensational.

This fleeting privilege at freezing twilight:
bright Jupiter, and Venus, and the last new moon of the old year,
assembled where the vivid afterthought of the departed sun
is losing its prismatic contest with the night.

Harold Pinter died on Christmas Eve. I heard on Boxing Day. As when Anthony Minghella died earlier this year, the loss caused a deep, unsettling shift in me; I can do no better than return once more to Donne. It was the Beckett project which brought me into personal contact with both men. Anthony’s death was both a surprise and a shock, in that he was young and I had no idea he was ill. Everyone knew that Harold has undergone treatment for cancer of the oesophagus; the last-but-one time I met him was in the pavilion at Lord’s where the BBC was launching a season of films of some of his plays. He made a short speech saying that he had recovered well from the illness and the treatment, and that it was good to be alive. I saw him by chance one more time in the Festival Hall. We exchanged a few words. When you’ve had cancer, as I know from Albert’s experience, it doesn’t necessarily ever go away. The appreciation for Harold in Le Monde put it well when it said that his death wasn’t a surprise but it was a shock. He was a truly great playwright — I think, after Arthur Miller’s death, the greatest living playwright in English, and I’m not saying he was a lesser talent than Miller, just different — and it isn’t excessive to discuss his achievement in the same terms as Beckett’s and Brecht’s. I admire all his plays: the great early ones obviously, but also the terrible, shocking political statements in his later work. I must say I think he was a dreadful poet, and that it would have been better for him not to have published any of the poems I’ve seen in print. They’re formless rants, inchoate splutterings of rage against the wicked masters of the world, which for him principally meant the leaders of America and Britain. And there I do disagree with the emphasis of some of his polemics. Of course it’s right to condemn and protest against the misery which American military might, with British help, has visited on the world in recent decades. But to pass so briefly over the tyrannies which have caused the West, rightly or wrongly, to intervene in some regions of the world seems to me one-eyed. On the wrongness of the invasion of Iraq, I agree with Pinter completely. But in the case of ex-Yugoslavia, his efforts to defend Milosevic were preposterous. He said in 2001, ‘I believe [Milosevic’s] arrest and detention by the international criminal tribunal is unconstitutional, and goes against Yugoslav and international law. They have no right to try him.’ He thought Milosevic had been unfairly demonised. How can he have thought so? The political part of his Nobel acceptance speech was nine-tenths anti-America; it had one short paragraph acknowledging the tyrannies of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc before 1990. I don't believe that Pinter would have survived in those societies.

But to return to his greatness: it’s something to do with the way he ratchets language and human communication a few degrees from true (in the sense of realistically, ordinarily true) while retaining in his dramatic situations a masterful ability to portray the apparently ordinary, the apparently real. This produces a sense of the thinness of the ice on which humans skate as they continue to do business with each other; of the closeness of the silence which is behind the sounds and gestures we make to each other. More simply, as a Londoner (though not born and bred like him) I love his grip of the speech style of Londoners, especially working-class Londoners. And, as with Beckett, I love the comedy which bubbles up through his choices of language. ‘That’s not equivocal. That’s unequivocal.’ ‘Why don’t you just pop off?’ ‘She had no wish for full consummation. She was content with her particular predilection. Consuming the male member.’ ‘Nearby is an Indian restaurant of excellent standing, at which you would be the guest of my committee.’ ‘Have you been to Carrickmacross? / I’ve been to King’s Cross.’

For six days, from Christmas Eve until yesterday, the weather has been wonderful: freezing cold, with bright sunshine in the days, exquisite coloured twilights and profound black star-crowded nights. No moon until yesterday, and then the thinnest shaving of the new. No wind. We’ve had good long walks every day except today. Today I did leaf-clearing from the lawn, which I knew I should do while the leaves were dry and the ground hard. I worked well and felt good. Then I went for a meditative mooch down in the wood, admiring again Jean-Paul’s excellent work there. It’s deeply satisfying to be the owner of a well-husbanded and beautiful parcel of the earth.

Poom! The glass-panelled front door took the blow, and we saw feathers stuck to the glass outside, and opened the door. There lay a greenfinch on its back, its mouth gasping, its breast heaving. I picked it up. Contained in the palm of one hand, it was a living vessel of softness and warmth, desperate to fly, and not apparently injured. It stretched its wings once, twice; but no lift-off. I wondered whether to throw it aloft, but feared it might not be ready, might still be in shock, would fall straight to earth and be further damaged.

We put soaked bread and a saucer of tepid water on a dinner plate, and placed the bird on the plate next to them. It put its head on the bread, but seemed not to know it for food. It stretched its wings again; frustrating its instinct to fly was the fact that something somewhere was wrong. I took it up again, held it up, offered it up. A tiny drop of blood ran from its beak on to my palm. With all its might it desired to live. It shuddered in my hand. Its eyes were bright. Then it laid its head on my fingers and departed from this world.

On 22 January my aunt Evelyn died. Her daughter Ceri, my cousin, asked me to speak at her funeral, which was held yesterday. This is what I said.

An event to commemorate Harold Rosen’s life was held at the Institute yesterday. It was a great occasion: I should think 200 people were there, representing all the overlapping constituencies in which Harold had been so inspiring and influential. I was one of the speakers. I’ve put the speech, some of which was taken from the tribute I gave at his funeral, on to my website, at the end of chapter 3 of the autobiography.

I’m here for Mothering Sunday. I expect this will be my last. Mum is very frail. She stays in bed, but she’s still bright, and was pleased with my flowers. I brought such a big bunch that dad and I divided them into five vases, two in her bedroom.

On Friday I went to my aunt Aase’s funeral in Kent. I didn’t like her, and hadn’t seen her for many years. My brother Peter has been very good to her in recent times, living not far away as he does, and recognising a priestly responsibility for a member of the family, however peculiar and ungrateful. Aase was carried off quickly by cancer. She chose not to tell anyone she was ill, even when she was in hospital and near the end. I’m not sure how the news got out; when it did, Peter went to visit her. Anyway, on Friday I picked up my cousin James (who did like Aase) and his girlfriend Bernadette from Covent Garden very early, and we drove down to the crematorium near Sittingbourne. We arrived more than an hour before the coffin was due at ten o’clock, so we found a greasy spoon café and had the sort of unhealthy, delicious breakfast which should really be avoided by a middle-aged man with high cholesterol. Then we went back to the crematorium and met Peter. The hearse arrived. The four of us plus Aase’s gardener followed the coffin into the chapel and stood in the front row for ten minutes in silence. That was it. That was what she had wanted.

We drove back to Peter’s vicarage at St Nicholas-at-Wade and had coffee. We talked a lot about mental illness, because James suffers from bi-polar disorder, which I still prefer to call manic depression, a much more accurate and vivid description of the condition; and Peter works with mentally ill people. Then we walked to the village pub for lunch. Peter drove back to the crematorium to collect Aase’s ashes. In the afternoon, we all gathered at the farmhouse in the little beautiful valley south of Faversham where Bill and Aase had lived. We buried the ashes beneath a clump of flowering snowdrops, under a young oak tree, next to where Bill’s ashes had been buried a few years before.

On 6 April my father died. On 6 May my mother died. So the last few weeks have been extraordinary, both emotionally and practically.

We were in Shropshire on the weekend of 3 to 5 April, staying with David and Lindsay. On the Friday evening, we had been to dinner with Mike and Sue. Sue is coping bravely with secondary liver cancer, the first cancer having been found in the bowel. She’s having courses of chemotherapy, and the latest news I have is that the treatment has slowed and possibly even reversed the growth of the lesions, and that it may at some time be possible to operate to remove the infected part of the liver, while leaving enough of it in place for the organ to continue to work. If the operation happens, the doctors will afterwards attend to the original cancer in the bowel. But I haven’t spoken to Mike or Sue for about a fortnight, so there may be more up-to-date news.

Anyhow, as we were preparing to leave David and Lindsay on the Sunday afternoon, I had a phone message from my mother to say that dad had been taken into hospital at lunchtime. He had been at church in the morning (Palm Sunday) as usual. He had not felt well, and someone had walked across from church to the house with him after the service. He had gone upstairs, lain down on the bed next to mum, and lost consciousness. He had then regained consciousness and tried to get up, but had fallen over again and didn’t know anyone. Julie Kennedy, one of the carers, was there getting lunch, and mum phoned Joyce Bavington, their other carer, who came round straight away. They phoned the ambulance.

Dad was given a CT scan as soon as he arrived at A and E at Bedford Hospital. The scan revealed a major brain haemorrhage, too big to be operated on. The hospital sent the picture electronically to Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, who confirmed the diagnosis.

I arrived at the hospital at about 7.30 that evening. My brother Peter was already there. Dad was breathing steadily with the help of an oxygen mask, but his eyes were closed and it wasn’t possible to tell whether he was aware of us or of anything outside himself. Peter said that he had seemed to shed a tear when he had spoken to him and prayed with him. The nurse said that dad would not recover, although it was impossible to say whether he would live for hours or for days.

I went home and told mum the news. She took it very calmly. She wasn’t distraught. She didn’t weep. I then went back to the hospital. Peter returned to Wootton. At about eleven, Peter Ackroyd, the vicar at Wootton, came and prayed with dad. I stayed with dad until about quarter past one in the morning. Then I went to Wootton to sleep, asking the nurses to phone me immediately if dad died in the night.

Helen and I returned to the hospital at about eleven the next morning. The curtains were drawn around dad’s bed. We went through. Dad had died a few minutes before. The sister came; she was sorry; she had been about to phone us. Earlier that morning, the doctors had decided that there was no purpose in prolonging dad’s life artificially, so they had taken away the oxygen. It was the correct decision.

Helen and I stood with dad for about two hours, until a doctor came to confirm the death.

There then began the intense period of organisation and decision-taking that always follows a death. By the end of the day, we had arranged the date, time and place of the funeral (21 April at eleven o’clock at St Mary’s Church, Wootton, followed by a cremation at Bedford Crematorium), and told everybody in the immediate family. Mark and Gill, who were on holiday in Cornwall, drove up. Mary, who had been intending to come from France to Wootton on 25 April to look after mum so dad could have a break with Mark and Gill, brought her arrival forward to 18 April. Peter, Mark and I agreed to divide the time between then and 18 April between us, so mum would have someone with her all the time. Dad had been mum’s principal carer, although she also received paid care from Julie and Joyce, until the day he departed.

Over the next few days, I drafted about 30 letters giving news of dad’s death, some personal, some business, which mum signed. I was greatly helped by mum’s lap-top computer and the printer which Peter had connected to it. Peter and I went to Bedford to register the death, and to the funeral director in Kempston to agree details for the funeral. I planned the order of service. I put dad’s car into my name, so it could be used by any of us when we were at Wootton. On the Thursday morning, I think, Peter went back to Kent.

Mum was deeply grateful for all our efforts, but all the time her scleroderma was worsening. She just had the strength to heave herself from the bed on to the commode next to the bed and back again. She produced great quantities of liquid faeces at hourly intervals. She never troubled me during the night, but every morning early I emptied a pot near to overflowing. It was a matter of simply overcoming, going straight through, a revulsion at seeing and smelling your mother’s shit. Beckett should have written a play about it. There were a couple of times in the bathroom when I nearly retched, but after that I simply kept the windows open to clear the smell as quickly as possible, and made extravagant use of hot water and Dettol wipes, for which invention I thank the Lord (metaphorically speaking).

I went to church on Good Friday, to hear the moving tributes to dad made during the service, and because it was proper.

On Easter Eve in the afternoon, mum began to be more than usually ill. Besides the diarrhoea, she vomited, was dizzy, had a painful headache and difficulty in breathing. This last was because the swelling of her abdomen, brought about by gas produced by undigested food rotting in her gut, was pushing up against her lungs. Joyce came round. She had seen mum many times in distress, and as a retired nurse knew what to do to ease the pain a little. But this was worse than usual, and at about eight o’clock that evening I called an ambulance. While we were waiting for it to come, I helped mum on to the commode one last time. When she had finished, I tried to get her back into bed, but she was a dead weight in my arms as I held her under the armpits. I managed to lay her across the bed. She began praying to God to help her. God seemed to be otherwise engaged (Easter Eve is a busy time). I said, ‘Mum, for goodness’ sake don’t die now. Leave dad in peace for a few days. He’s just getting to know the place.’ She laughed as well as she was able to.

The ambulance came quickly, and with some difficulty we got mum downstairs and on board. The paramedics, who were excellent, put her straight on to oxygen and a drip, and off we went to A and E, six days after dad had arrived there. The doctors and nurses were quite brilliant. Essentially, mum had nearly died of dehydration, collapse of blood pressure and loss of essential minerals and blood sugar. Pumped up with emergency supplies of everything she had lost, she began to feel more comfortable, although there was nothing immediate anyone could do about her bleeding and pustulating sacral sore, the result of many years of lying in bed and constant attacks of diarrhoea.

To her and my great relief, she was taken to a room of her own in the acute assessment unit. I left her there at about midnight, and went back to Wootton for a late supper.

I went to church again on Easter Sunday morning. There were more generous and moving tributes to dad for all the work he had done for the church over 44 years, and prayers for mum.

Mum was in hospital for three weeks and four days. During that time, the surgeons twice considered whether any kind of operation on the gut or the bowel might be possible, but of course had such an operation been feasible it would have been done a long time previously. So the only hope was to deliberately starve mum for a while, to clean her out completely and thus stop the diarrhoea, in the hope that the gut and the bowel might then begin to work a little. Mum just had a saline and/or glucose drip, oxygen and sips of water. This regime of course weakened her. When she was given a little food, either through the mouth or through the tube into her stomach which she had had for several years, the diarrhoea and sometimes vomiting resumed. There was a fear that faeces might get into the lungs.

I returned to London on Thursday 16 April in the morning. Mark was with mum until the Friday afternoon. Mum knew that I would arrive with Mary on the Saturday afternoon.

On Friday 17 April, I was at home with Helen, Bronwyn and Stephen. We were having champagne before dinner when the phone rang. It was the sister from the acute assessment unit. Mum was ‘deteriorating’. I left immediately and drove up the motorway, planning what to do if mum died over the weekend. Maybe there would be just enough time, getting the formalities through and the order of service reprinted at top speed, to have a double funeral. If not, it might be possible to make the service both a formal funeral for dad and a thanksgiving for mum’s life, and then have mum’s funeral as a small family affair later.

When I reached the ward I knew immediately that mum wasn’t about to die in the next few hours. She looked awful, and was vomiting brown fluid into a bowl, but she still had some strength and all her wits, and was pleased to see me. I stayed until about midnight and then went to Wootton to sleep. The next morning I drove to Luton Airport and met Mary, Jacques, Tess and Sophie. I explained what had happened as we drove back to Wootton. Mary went to see mum that afternoon.

Mary and I shared the visiting on the Saturday and Sunday. On the Sunday evening I drove back to London, and went to work on the Monday.

Tuesday 21 April was the day of dad’s funeral. Helen and I left London at seven, and drove through mist on the motorway, arriving at Wootton at about half past eight. The mist cleared during the morning, and there followed a perfect spring day: cloudless, very warm by the afternoon, but with all the freshness of April.

The service was at 11. I stood at the church door from about 10.30 and greeted everyone. At 10.55 precisely the hearse arrived. Peter Ackroyd and I walked down the path and greeted the funeral attendants. The four pall-bearers took the coffin out of the hearse. The little group processed to the church: Peter, Steve the chief attendant, the pall-bearers with the coffin, me. As the coffin entered the church, Peter began to read the sentences: ‘“I am the resurrection and the life,” says the Lord…’ The coffin was placed on a trestle in front of the screen. I took my place at the end of the front row, next to Mark.

This is the order of service.

It was a magnificent service. I should think there were about 140 people there. Mark’s tribute was splendid: beautifully composed, quietly but confidently delivered, recounting the key events in dad’s personal, religious and working life lovingly and humorously. I had to struggle to get through my two readings (which I had privately chosen at least two years previously), but get through them I did, and I think the fact that I was visibly moved while reading moved the congregation.

Here are the readings, with my introductions.

After the service, the coffin was carried out to the hearse, which I followed as it drove at walking pace as far as the house. It paused there, and then drove on, with Mark and Peter following in Peter’s car to Bedford Crematorium.

There then followed a splendid lunch at the house, with most people eating, drinking and talking in the garden. I should think about 80 people came across from the service. Mary and Jacques had cooked a huge joint of beef and an equally impressive piece of gammon, which were served cold with salads and savoury tarts. I stood by the array of dishes telling people what was in them. I described one particularly delicious dish as ‘spinach from the garden, cheese and olives’. ‘Oh no,’ said the first five polite Wootton folk, ‘not olives for me, thanks, no.’ I noticed that the olives, which were black, hardly showed up at all against the dark green of the spinach, so I stopped mentioning them in my description. After that, everyone ate that tart, with no complaints. For pudding there was raspberry, strawberry and blackcurrant meringue; the fruit had come from dad’s fruit cage last summer, and had been in the freezer since. I provided red and white burgundy and apple juice. The sun shone.

Mark and Peter went to the hospital after the brief ceremony at the crematorium, to tell mum how it had all gone.

The remaining two weeks of mum’s life were an agony for her. It isn’t true that, in a rich country with access to the best medical knowledge and equipment and pain-reducing drugs, death is always somewhat bearable. Essentially, mum died of starvation, not through any fault of the doctors and nurses, but because her dreadful condition defied their best efforts.

There was one unsympathetic and brusque nurse among dozens of nurses who combined great skill with evident humanity. There was one foolish young doctor who, coming to examine mum for the first time, was so shocked by the quantity of diarrhoea she found under mum’s sheets that she first reached from some floor wipes on the side cupboard and would have applied one to mum’s anus had Mary, who was standing there, not prevented her, and who then scuttled away saying that cleaning up patients was nurses’ work, not doctors’, and was never seen again. But the severe criticisms of the NHS which I have as a result of the experience of watching my mother die relate to the capacity of the system, not to individual failings.

First, once the surgeons had finally decided that they could not operate, and the assessment of mother as a patient was at an end, she was moved to an ordinary, open ward, crammed into a bay with five other very sick women, even though it was well understood that she was going to die. Mother at least had a place by the window, so she could look out across the car park and see the trees in leaf, but the side of her bed was perhaps three feet from the side of the next bed, in which a severely demented but physically strong woman shouted, screamed and struggled day and night. To face death in the close proximity of that woman must have made the experience even worse than it had to be anyway.

Secondly, over the bank holiday weekend before mum died, doctors were invisible. I was told that there was one doctor on call for several full wards. For three days, none of us saw a doctor. It is not that a doctor could have brought about any change to the situation, but it would have been comforting to have had a medical conversation with a doctor during those days. Patients continue to be sick during public holidays.

When mum was first taken to the open ward, and I saw how little room she had, I asked the staff whether it was possible, as I think is the case in some NHS hospitals, for a person to pay to have a room of their own. Not in Bedford Hospital, I was told, and I respect the principle. I rang the nearest private hospital, at Biddenham. A bed there costs more than £500 a night, plus the cost of medicines and consultancy fees: around £4000 a week. The next day I told mum this, and said that if she wished I would try to arrange a move, and we would worry about arrangements for payment later. She didn’t want to spend that kind of money, which — depending on how long she remained at Biddenham — would have involved borrowing against the equity in the house.

Jacques, who visited mum several times, was shocked to see how poorly patients’ accommodation in a British hospital compares with that in France. In France, no hospital patient, however minor the reason for their stay, is in a room with more than one other patient; and many patients have rooms of their own. That was certainly the case with Albert during his cancer operation and recuperation, and when he went back to hospital to die after the cancer returned. It was also true for Rosa during both her knee operations. I know the two health systems are funded differently (in France, people are individually insured), but the blunt fact must be that France spends more on health, one way or another, than the UK does, and the difference shows at times of greatest need.

Mum was lucid until about 36 hours before she died. The last sensible thing she said to me was, ‘I’ve never felt this way before.’ Eventually her extreme weakness meant that she didn’t seem to see us even when her eyes were open, and she didn’t respond to my squeezing her hand. The nurses had to come every two hours or so to clean her up, and the cleansing of her sacral sore must have caused her terrible pain. When I returned to her side after these attentions, her face wore a fixed, staring grimace, as if she had just been assaulted or tortured, though of course the nurses were only doing what they had to do.

On the afternoon of 5 May, a doctor finally appeared, and Mary, Mark and I accompanied him to a room where we rapidly agreed to stop all attempts at further feeding, to stop the drips, to turn off the oxygen, and to give mum morphine. It was an easy decision. The morphine was injected straight into an artery in mum’s thigh, and a little box called a driver pumped the drug into her at regular intervals.

I phoned Peter Ackroyd that evening, and he came and talked to mum, read some passages from the Bible and prayed with her, as he had done for dad. Mark and I were with mum until about half past midnight, when I went home. Mark said he would stay for a couple of hours and then come home himself. I was back in Wootton about twenty minutes later, and the phone rang almost immediately. Mum had just died, at ten to one on Wednesday 6 May. I told Peter and Mary, and went back to the hospital. The sister had taken off mum’s rings, and put them in an envelope. Mark and I gathered the few things from around the bed, kissed mum on the forehead, and departed. When I got back to Wootton, I gave mum’s rings straight to Mary.

The next few days were a close but not identical copy of the days after dad’s death. Mum’s funeral in Wootton church was a sister event to dad’s. It was held on 14 May at 2.00. Here is the order of service.

The service was as fine as dad’s had been. Mark’s tribute was once again apt, humorous and beautifully delivered. Once again, I found myself almost but not quite overcome during my readings. Here they are, with my introductions.

After the service, Mark and I walked behind the hearse from the church gate to the house before letting the car go. This time, the cremation wasn’t until the following morning. There was tea and cake for guests. It was a quieter occasion than for mum, but equally convivial. That evening the family ate dinner together, which Gill had cooked. I provided champagne. The next morning, Peter, Mark and I went to the crematorium early, and saw mum off. Peter said some prayers. As the curtain closed around the coffin, the organist played ‘Somewhere, over the rainbow’: a quirkily a-religious and somehow cheering choice.

Back at the house, Mary supervised the division of mum’s jewellery amongst the women. We decided to sell the house as quickly as we could. Peter had been wondering whether to buy it himself, but had changed his mind: the right decision in my opinion. We agreed to take away immediately those few things which had either financial or emotional value. We drove Mary and family to the station; they took the train to Gatwick. Peter (my fellow executor) and I went to our parents’ solicitor in Ampthill. We applied for probate, and began the process of winding up the estate. Our parents’ financial affairs were not complicated.

Last Saturday, I shook hands with Paul Lowe, who lives next door to our parents’ house and is a property developer, and agreed to sell him the house for £230,000. I like Paul, and I think the deal will go through quickly. The total value of our parents’ estate after deductions will I think be about £250,000: £50,000 each.

I haven’t at any point since my parents died felt disabling grief. There have been times when I have been moved to tears, mainly by literature and music associated with memories of my parents; but literature and music can move me to tears at any time. I’m grateful that I’ve been able to deal with the experience as calmly as I have, and I don’t think I’m denying any deep-lying feeling. I have been fortunate to have both parents until the age of nearly 58. There was no unfinished business between us, apart from the unfinishable business of their religious faith and my lack of it, and they were immensely grateful for everything that we did for them in their last years. I took comfort from my leading role in the organisation of affairs after each death, and from the care I gave mother after dad died, both at home and when she went into hospital. I feel good, and pleased that now nothing is stopping me, for the rest of my life, from being myself completely.

Mum’s and dad’s ashes are currently sitting side by side under my writing desk here, in identical discreet black carrier bags. On 15 July, we shall scatter them on Tennyson Down on the Isle of Wight, as dad requested. Then we shall have dinner in the Highdown Inn (researched on the internet by Mary and, in a reassuring coincidence, warmly praised by a friend yesterday) and stay the night. That’ll be it.

Everything I’ve written in the diary this year has been about death, including the first entry about the death of a greenfinch. This can’t be healthy. Am I becoming maudlin as my default mood, I who always thought of myself as an essentially cheerful and positive person? I don’t think so, although I confess that some mornings when I look into the mirror I am struck by the likeness between my face now and the face I kissed and stroked in Bedford Hospital on 5 and 6 April. That is, I can fast-forward in my mind along the route that my face will take during my remaining years, if I live as long as my father, until the day I look very much like my father looked in his last hours.

Meanwhile, the world has been getting on with business. In May 1995, I wrote in revengeful joy of the Conservatives’ comprehensive defeat in local elections: a disaster for them which was the prelude to their near-annihilation in the general election two years later. Eight days ago, Labour suffered a similar catastrophe. They were routed in county- and unitary-council elections in England. They now control nothing in England outside the big cities, most of which were not voting. Their share of the total vote was 23%. It has never been as low as that in a nationwide local election. Of the 34 councils elected that day, 30 are now Conservative, one (Bristol) is Liberal Democrat, two (Cornwall and Cumbria) have the Conservatives as the largest party but without overall control, and one (Bedford) has the Liberal Democrats as the largest party but without overall control.

On the same day, the elections for the European Parliament were held. In these, Labour did even worse. It won 15.8% of the overall popular vote. In Wales, it was pushed into second place by the Tories for the first time since 1918. It suffered its lowest vote in Scotland since before the first world war. It finished in third place across the UK, after the United Kingdom Independence Party. Perhaps worst of all, the collapse of the Labour vote allowed the racist thugs of the British National Party to gain their first two European seats.

Labour’s humiliation has several causes. First, The Daily Telegraph has for weeks now been reporting on the abuses of the parliamentary allowances and expenses system which some MPs and ministers have been committing. It seems that a source in the fees office at Westminster sold the information to the paper for a large sum of money. The rest of the media has had to run with the story; it is a journalistic coup. Members of all the major parties have been exposed, but the Telegraph started on Labour MPs and ministers first. There is a mood in the country of righteous outrage at the venality, greed and arrogance of our representatives. Labour, as the incumbent government nationally, was punished at the elections more severely than the other parties, even though allowances and expenses at Westminster have nothing to do with local nor European issues, and Labour’s sins, though grievous, were not more grievous than those committed by other parties.

Secondly, the international financial crisis has hurt lots of people in a way that it hasn’t hurt me. Those who’ve lost jobs, seen businesses go bust, watched the interest on their savings shrink to almost nothing (actually, that has happened to us), or found it impossible to get a mortgage blame the government, even though it was Brown’s and Darling’s swift actions last autumn which stopped the crisis turning into the complete collapse of the financial system which might have meant that all the money in our bank accounts disappeared. There’s nothing fair in politics.

Thirdly, Labour has returned to the habit of fratricidal strife which in the joyful years immediately after 1997 I so naively hoped it might have shaken off for ever. On 30 November 2007 I wrote: ‘The government has gone from an absolutely dominating position in the three months since Brown became prime minister to a position where, if there were to be an election tomorrow, there would be a big Tory victory.’ This woeful state of affairs has persisted since. In the days before the elections, it became known that a group of Labour MPs was plotting to oust Brown immediately after the expected heavy defeat. Eight ministers, including three cabinet ministers, resigned in the run-up to and immediately after the elections; the more honest among them said frankly and publicly that Brown was leading the party to electoral disaster next year. There was a moment on Friday 5 June when Brown’s hold on the premiership looked shaky, but he conducted a hurried reshuffle that day with the help of Peter Mandelson, who’s playing a role rather like that which Heseltine played for Major after Major’s back-me-or-sack-me resignation of the party leadership in June 1995. The new cabinet was thus bound to be loyal to Brown (anyone who accepted a post only to resign it within days would look a fool), and the MPs’ revolt petered out over the weekend. So Brown is secure until the election next year; but the sight of Labour tearing itself apart before the elections, just as in the bad old days, did us more damage.

So I expect that the Conservatives will win the next general election, some time next year. At the least, I expect them to be the largest party. This despite the fact that there isn’t the active hunger for a change that there was in the years before 1997. The truth is that Labour, although one has to acknowledge that it will have had the longest period in government in the party’s history, has inflicted deep wounds on itself through the unceasing conflict between the Brownite and Blairite factions in the parliamentary party, and through the inability of some of its dominating personalities to subordinate their interests and egos to the interests of the party and therefore of the country: behaviour which seems inexplicable and arcane to most ordinary Labour supporters like me. If Labour in government had been able to do the simple things well, as I had hoped in the early years that it might, we would be looking forward to at least one more parliamentary term after this one. The Tories were in power for 18 years; Labour looks as if it will manage 13.

On 3 May 1997, I wrote: ‘There is the possibility that, for a generation to come, Britain could be governed by a progressive party (or coalition of parties, if the Liberals were invited into government at a future election where Labour won a smaller majority) which will realise the proper purpose of politics: to give organised reality to the best instincts of the human heart and the human reason.’

On 5 June 2009 at about half past ten in the morning, I was walking past the back of the Foreign Office and Downing Street just as Brown was conducting his reshuffle (though I didn’t know he was doing that until later in the day). I said to the person I was with that if I were Brown, I would call in Nick Clegg and Vince Cable. I would offer Clegg the Home Office and Cable the Exchequer, and one or two other cabinet jobs to Liberals. After further conversation, I would hold a press conference announcing the coalition, and making the following statement.

‘The date of the next general election will be 22 May 2010. That is a Saturday. We hope for a better turn-out on Saturdays than we have been getting on Thursdays. Additionally, anyone who wants a postal vote can have one. Parliament will have six weeks’ holiday this year. We’ll stop work on Friday 7 August and start again on Monday 21 September. The first three weeks of September will be enough time for the party conferences. During the autumn, the coalition government will bring in a bill to establish proportional representation as from that election (the form to be decided before we introduce the bill); to establish fixed-term five-year parliaments as from that date, dissolvable only by a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons; to reconstitute the House of Lords as an 80%-elected, 20%-appointed revising chamber with a fixed number of members, those first elections to occur at the same time as the Commons elections; and to prepare a written constitution for the UK.

There will be another bill going through Parliament at the same time, proposing the complete overhaul of the expenses and allowances system: notably, MPs who have constituencies outside London will be given a flat nightly rate for being in London, which they can spend on their accommodation however they like; and MPs will not be allowed to have continuous other jobs.

We shall abandon ID cards. We shall abandon the plan to record and keep on computer all phone calls, emails and other electronic communications made by people in the UK; we shall abandon the part-privatisation of the Post Office, since if we can afford to spend hundreds of billions saving the banks we can afford to keep a much-loved service in public ownership, even if it is losing money.

Thank you. I’m now going to get on with governing the country.’

Total fantasy, of course. That afternoon, Brown held a press conference to announce his reshuffle. Completely tribal, making the best of a diminishing pool of talent, heavily reliant on the House of Lords, acknowledging his debt to Mandelson by making him First Secretary of State (the title Major invented for Heseltine) and giving him other titles and a huge department. It won’t stop the rot.

Since I last wrote, we’ve been fast-moving. Two days after my birthday, we flew to Malta. Taxi to the ferry for Gozo. Short ride across the straits between the two islands. Our friend Juginder Lamba met us off the ferry, and drove us to the north-western tip of the island, where he and Lesley Lancaster have their house. It’s a gracious, spacious structure, built of the honey-coloured limestone which is everywhere on the island. Like all the traditional buildings there, the house feels Arab. The walls are thick. The rooms on two storeys surround a courtyard. We had four days of heat. I swam in the pool every day and in the sea once, at a place called St Blas, which you get to by descending a steep pathway. The sand is rust-coloured. The water was turquoise, and at a perfect temperature: welcoming but invigorating. I swam for a long time, as I love to; but these days I’m more careful about going out too far, after my frightening experience in Brittany a couple of years ago.

Gozo is little, and more sparsely populated than Malta. The most striking sights, architecturally, are the churches in every town and village. They’re huge, and in the baroque style of St Peter’s, Rome.

While I was there, I read a biography of Bunyan by Christopher Hill (out of print) which Helen had found for me second-hand on the internet, and Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim’s Progress in a combined volume, which Paul had given me for my birthday. My interest in Bunyan had been stirred by the famous extract from The Pilgrim’s Progress (Mr Valiant-for-Truth coming into his reward) which I read at dad’s funeral. I realised that I knew very little about Bunyan, despite the Bedfordshire connection. Hill’s book (as usual, immense learning lightly carried) presents Bunyan as a true political radical in his time, despite the dogmatic conservatism of his religious convictions. I found myself skip-reading both the Bunyan books; partly because the religious territory is so familiar to me (I know what’s coming), but also because there is much repetitiveness in both. The thing that saves them, and the thing, probably, which has made The Pilgrim’s Progress one of the most popular books ever written, is the wonderful blunt use of language, grounded in the familiar.

Nothing within Christianity could be further from Bunyan’s psychological self-torturings — essentially, the struggle for salvation of the individual soul — than the devout but communal and habitual Catholicism of the people of Gozo.

On our last morning on the island, Juginder and I walked on the high cliffs not far from their house, amid tiny walled fields where corn had already been cut. The Mediterranean was calm three hundred feet below us. Spectacular.

After Gozo, we were back in London for a couple of weeks, in the middle of which we had our annual weekend in Suffolk with Peter Adams: the usual, enduring pleasures. Then we took another short trip abroad, this time to Lisbon to stay with Glenda and Julian Walton. We were there last year, and had intended to repeat the trip at the beginning of this May, but postponed it because my mother was dying. As last year, we had lots of fun with Glenda and Julian — lovely meals, swimming from the town beach in the Lisbon suburb where they lived, a trip north to the beautiful little walled town of Óbidos. They’re leaving Lisbon this month, and going to Bangkok, where Julian has a job for a year teaching in an English-medium private school linked to Shrewsbury School, where he used to teach.

Back to England, and the following week Mary, Jacques, Mark, Helen and I went to the Isle of Wight to scatter dad’s and mum’s ashes on Tennyson Down. Dad had requested this of me for himself about two years before he died, so we did them both together. It was the most beautiful afternoon, with sunshine and a light breeze, the sea calm, the turf a giving pleasure to stride on. Despite it being July, there was hardly anyone about on this Wednesday afternoon, so we had the down to ourselves for the few minutes it took to scatter the contents of the two plastic urns. Dad’s ashes almost filled his container; mum’s barely half-filled hers, so skeletal had she become when she died. The act could not have been better done. We walked along to the Needles, then retraced our steps up to the Tennyson Monument, before returning to The Highdown Inn, where we were to stay the night. Mark, Helen and I drove down to Tennyson’s house, Farringford, which is now a hotel, where they kindly let us walk around the rooms, whose walls are covered with photographs and paintings of the poet, and illustrations of scenes in his poems. I was particularly struck by an amazingly sexy engraving of the Lady of Shalott; hair flying wildly up from her head, her body revealed to best effect through the drapes of her dress.

That evening, we drank champagne in the garden of the pub to mark the end of our parents’ lives, and ate well in the little dining room. The next morning, Mark biked off to Yarmouth (he had crossed from Lymington with his bike, having left the car there; he had noticed, at my request, the sand bar of ‘Crossing the Bar’) and the rest of us drove to Fishbourne. Crossed to Portsmouth and to Sainsbury’s on the Eastern Road to buy a picnic lunch to have with Margaret. While the others were in the shop, I simply dumped the two empty plastic urns in the appropriate recycling bin in the car park. I wasn’t sure why, sentimentally, I felt a bit guilty about doing so. What else was I going to do with them? And, after church attendance, loyalty to Sainsbury’s had been my parents’ steadiest observance.

Then we went to Margaret’s house and had lunch with her. She is 95 now, in fit form, and was glad at what we had done the previous day. She told me the story, which I knew, of how when Tennyson and his wife were unpacking their things on the day they moved into Farringford, with furniture parked on the lawn and everything in confusion, Prince Albert turned up unannounced, having driven over in a pony and trap from Osborne. A minimum of formality; they got him something to drink, and he went to pick cowslips, and left soon, because he could see they were busy. He was going to make cowslip wine for the queen. (Personally?) I said, ‘There are no cowslips there now, but there is a golf course and there was a helicopter parked on the lawn.’ She said, ‘My dear, you’ve said it all.’

Towards the end of the lunch, as Mary was saying something and Margaret was looking at her, Margaret suddenly asked Mary, ‘What’s that locket round your neck?’ Mary said that mum had given it to her, and that she thought granny (Margaret’s elder sister) had had it before her. ‘Yes,’ said Margaret, ‘it was a wedding present to our grandparents [probably married about 1870] and our mother had it after that. She was holding me in her arms one day when I was a baby, and I bit it. Take a look.’ Mary took off the locket and, sure enough, there were baby bite marks in it, made by Margaret in about 1915.

After lunch, we left Mary and Jacques, who were taking the train to Gatwick later, and drove back to London.

A week later, on Thursday 23 July, we took the last of our brief summer jaunts, this time by first-class rail to Penzance, for the wedding of a young teacher whom Helen has worked with at Churchill Gardens Primary School. We stayed at the Queen’s Hotel, where the wedding reception was to be held on the Saturday. The Queen’s is everything that is awful about seaside hotels in Britain. Arrangements of artificial flowers, dust-laden, adorn the staircase. Our room sported wallpaper of the kind that Oscar Wilde is supposed to have deplored in his famous last words. The perfectly good stout oak doors to all the rooms had been improved about 40 years ago by the addition of plywood fascias. Dinner on the first night was abominable to the point of laughter. A kind young obese man, our waiter, dicky-bowed, anxious to please, brought the menu. In case of doubt in these situations, it’s always best to go for the plainest offerings. Fish and chips and pies were available. ‘What kind of pies go with the fish and chips?’ I asked. He looked perplexed, then said, ‘Oh, peas, you know, the green things.’ Silly of me. Why should I expect the most expensive hotel in Penzance to know how to spell, let alone cook, peas?

The only good thing about the Queen’s, and it was wonderful, was the view from our bedroom window out across the bay, taking in St Michael’s Mount as you look down to the distant Lizard to the east, and round past Newlyn towards Mousehole to the west. On the Friday afternoon, while Helen went shopping, I sat at the open window and read the complete Dylan Thomas poems, which Stephen Eyers had given me for my birthday. Reading all the poems Thomas had published in his short life made me think that, usually, anthologisers and selectors of poetry get it right. The 20 or so poems which are famous are the best ones, by a distance. Scores of others are attention-seeking, flashy in their imagery, perverse in their obscurity: the bard giving himself room. But the 20 or so great ones are great. I found myself reading ‘Fern Hill’ out loud, over and over again. It’s a hard poem to read aloud well. Then Helen came back and I began to read it out loud to her, but I couldn’t finish it; I wept and wept. I knew why it was. Here was I on the south coast of England, the coast where, a couple of hundred miles to the east, I had started. As a child, the south coast of England and the Isle of Wight seemed to me a territory of romance. My parents had met there. They had been happy there, before the disappointments came. ‘Fern Hill’ remembers a place where the poet had been lyrically happy as a child; had enjoyed a secure joy now departed. My father, a young scientist working for the Admiralty, had traveled all along the south coast, by land and sea, testing the radar stations at Spithead, Portland Bill, the Lizard. He had had hope, a good job, a growing family, untroubled faith…

The wedding day was great. A good service in St Mary’s Church (high), presided over by a sympathetic and humorous priest, was followed by one of those afternoon-merges-into-evening drinking and eating sessions. The wedding breakfast was miles better than the Thursday-night dinner. Back to London the next morning.

And we came here last Wednesday.

We’ve been here a month now, apart from a six-day tour down south, first to see Stephen and Theresa at Barraud in the Charente as usual, and then to visit David, Lindsay and Tom, staying in a gîte with Lindsay’s brother and sister-in-law near Beaumont de Périgord in the Dordogne. Lots of fun in both places. My essential annual swim in the Dronne; more swimming in pools. When I’m at Barraud, I like to have a project. This year it was to free the prolific plum tree from the grip of the ivy choking it. The plums were ripe and delicious. I get moments of pure happiness doing something like that.

Here, friends and family have come and gone on short visits, and we are alone. It’s the steady good weather of late August. Until today, I haven’t written anything since the last diary entry. Today I did a fifth in a series of little poems commemorating, for good and ill, my parents’ lives. I’ve worked in the garden, especially with Jean our carpenter, who has made and installed some beautiful gates for the gaps in the hedge around the ex-potager. Now that the deer won’t get in to eat the flowers, I’ve taken the wire netting off the trunks of the young trees. After Jean had finished, I spent a day varnishing the gates while listening to the first day of the last Test between England and Australia. For the next three days, until last Sunday afternoon, I mainly just sat and listened. (Paul and Vikki were here overnight on Friday.) I can still get utterly absorbed in a big Test match. England won back the Ashes by two games to one over a five-game series, after the humiliation of losing five-nil in 2006-7. I’m 60/40 pleased when we win, and 60/40 sorry when we lose, but the result isn’t really important to me. It’s the contest, and the achievements along the way, which I enjoy. When it’s over, I always feel sad, and have to go for a walk.

Early in August, I spent three days reading my father’s journals, which we found in a cupboard in their house, not carefully hidden, after his funeral and before my mother died. They fill 12 school exercise books, numbered. The entries begin on 17 February 1986 and end on 18 June 2001. (Mary tells me that she found a thirteenth book at the house when she was there earlier this month, with intermittent entries continuing until recently. I shall read it and add it to the pile when I get back.) The writing is a terrible, heart-breaking confession of misery. Here is a man, aged 61 when he begins to write, an Anglican lay-reader, married to one of the churchwardens of the church they have already been attending for 21 years. They are senior figures there. He was made redundant from Oxford Instruments in Newport Pagnell six years previously, and is now retired; she, in the final years of her teaching career, is headmistress of Kempston Rural Primary School. Their five children are all grown up now; the youngest is 22.

The journal entries are usually addressed to God. Most of them start with ‘Father…’ Across 15 years, they confess, with little variation or progression, to the complete failure of my father’s marriage to my mother. A major reason for the failure is that, at 61, he is still sexually hungry. She has no interest in sex at all. He quotes her as saying, ‘Why did God have to make it such an animal business?’ After the birth of their last child in 1963, she sees no reason for sex, although she accepts, reluctantly and with some distaste, that the need is still implanted in my father.

Dad admits that the reason he married my mother was so that he could have sex without shame. The religion and the sex began to confuse with each other right at the beginning. When dad met mum, she was already an evangelical Christian, having been converted at the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union some time during the two years she was at Homerton. Dad was a sexually frustrated young man with vague religious leanings, who visited the local church in Drayton, Portsmouth, at the encouragement of his friend (and later best man) Ron Fischbacher, who was already a convinced believer (how evangelical I don’t know). Dad met mum at the church, and began to court her seriously. She told him (he quotes her): ‘If this is going to carry on, you must become a Christian.’ So he did. He became a Christian so he could marry my mother. He knelt down by his bed and said, ‘God, I’ve made a mess of my life so far. Please take it over.’ Pathetically, he makes the same appeal to God, in virtually the same words, repeatedly in the journals. He still sees his life, at any point between 36 and 51 years after that first prayer, as a mess he has made.

Mum’s firmness in insisting on dad becoming a Christian before giving herself to him is an early warning of the imbalance of power between them throughout their married life. Imbalance of power between married couples is, I would guess, much more often in favour of the man. In my parents’ case, mum dominated and dad submitted in all areas except theology. Her domination was reinforced by a ferocious temper, which on countless occasions through my childhood and youth led to scenes of anger and hurt within the family, most usually during Sunday lunchtimes. Dad confesses to his journal sometimes that he is seething with anger at the way she has just spoken to him. He is ashamed of the way that, during family rows in previous years, he allowed his children (notably me) to stand up to mum, to say harsh, true things to her about her behaviour which he didn’t have the courage to say. Most sadly, he often writes, after a bad encounter with her, that he feels like ‘a nasty, dirty little boy’: nasty and dirty partly because he wants sex and she only grants it to him as an act of resignation, partly because he senses that he hasn’t ever really grown up. He is still the boy in his first pair of long trousers going to see his mother in hospital on the night she died of cancer, and hearing a sympathetic stranger say of him as he left her bedside, ‘Poor little chap.’ The poor little chap, who had been badly bullied by his older brothers for being mother’s pet, had no mother throughout his teenage years. The desire for a mother morphed into the desire for a woman, a strong woman, and that’s what he got. Because of his religious belief, the idea that he might relieve his sexual feelings in mature manhood by any means other than penetrative sex in the missionary position with his wife was unacceptable, though he hints frequently at the temptation. Once he suggests that he has committed adultery. I hope he did, actually; and there was one occasion, a long time ago, when he went to America on business, and afterwards spoke to me admiringly about a woman he’d met at a conference, I think in Dallas, who ‘loved life’. This was such an unusual phrase for my father to use that it stuck with me. But probably, dad’s confession that he’d committed adultery was no more than a reference to the verse in the New Testament (Jesus or St Paul? I can’t remember) which says that ‘whoso looketh at a woman to lust hath already committed adultery with her in his heart’.

From having been behind mum in religious conviction when they met, dad went far ahead of her as a result of an experience which he dates and times precisely to 7pm on 7 July 1971. He was praying alone at home (this was in the first house they owned in Wootton, the one they had built in Keeley Lane), when he had the sensation of being filled with the Holy Spirit. He began to speak in tongues. (He writes towards the end of the journals that he spoke in tongues almost every day of his life thereafter.) He became, in theological jargon, a charismatic. This meant that the conventional forms of belief and worship, even those as dogmatic, prayer-filled and Bible-based as practised in a regular evangelical church such as St Mary’s, Wootton, became unsatisfying to him. He longed for the church to be renewed by the Holy Spirit. He sought out like-minded people in the area, based in churches of a variety of denominations, who wished to worship and pray in a Spirit-filled way.

In practical terms, this meant: praying extempore rather than using set written forms; the possibility of bursting into tongues at any moment, should the Spirit so lead; entering into mildly trance-like states of joy, often with hands raised above the head, when praising God; dancing in the Spirit; prophesying; healing the physically and mentally sick by the power of the Spirit; being willing and able from time to time to confront the devil and evil spirits which had entered into people and places, and to exorcise them by the power of Jesus and the Spirit.

My mother hated all this with a loathing. She was a conventional, repressed, loyal (though sometimes angry) servant of the Church of England. She believed that prayer and praise should be conducted in a restrained, generally formal way. Arms should never be raised above the waist. Faith-healing: highly suspicious. So after 7 July 1971, a further difference opened up between her and my father, exacerbating those to do with sex and power already evident: a cruel difference which they might never have expected. Both born-again Christians, how could they disagree so deeply about faith, and the practice of faith? But they did. Dad often laments to his journal, and to God, that ‘Daphne hates the way I pray’. He is referring to their daily, early-morning prayer sessions in the bedroom. She attacks him for this too.

So, in dad’s own words, it was a failed marriage. It would be impossible to publicly divorce or separate; the shame would be too great. In 1988, mother retired from teaching. Her younger sister Evelyn in Portsmouth was beginning to suffer severely from the multiple sclerosis which would eventually kill her three months before mother died. Mother frequently spent Mondays to Fridays with Evelyn and Margaret, going down on the train, leaving dad in Wootton. These separations were a blessed relief to him. He wished that the arrangement could informally become permanent, so that they would see each other only occasionally, without the need for any public announcement of their separation. He writes that he finds the atmosphere at Portsmouth stultifying anyway. But mother is back every weekend, to fulfil her responsibilities as churchwarden, and usually to criticise him over Sunday lunch for his shortcomings (not enough achieved in the house or garden while she’s been away, or the way he prayed or preached in church not to her liking).

As a lay-reader in the Church of England, dad was required to conduct services in the conventional manner, and asked by the vicar of Wootton to preach sometimes in the village church and in the daughter church at Stewartby. (He was also often invited to take services and preach in other churches around Bedfordshire.) The folk in Wootton and Stewartby are not naturally charismatic. Outbursts of religious emotion are embarrassing to them. The three vicars under whom dad served during the 39 years he was a licensed lay-reader expected him to ‘preach about God and preach about twenty minutes’, as the cliché goes. They all valued his loyalty and hard work, they admired the sincerity of his spirituality, but they found him unpredictable, worrying, hard to control. This was especially true of the first of the three, a conventional evangelical, in personality and in preaching devoid of any spark of inspiration, whose principal pleasure was his round of golf on Mondays. The second and third were more sympathetic, and much more interesting people, but not uncritical of dad. He was liable to preach too long, too spontaneously, and too confessionally in the sense that passages of religious disquisition and textual exegesis were frequently followed by true confessions about his life, the state of his soul, and the lives and souls of his wife and family. He reports that one Sunday lunchtime mum told him to ‘leave our family out of your sermons’. I am sympathetic to her about that.

(I need in fairness to record how wonderful Peter Ackroyd, the present vicar of Wootton and the third under whom dad served, was at the time of both my parents’ deaths.)

So, to add to his other unhappinesses, dad was an Anglican no longer really at home in the Anglican church, but unable or unwilling to leave it. The charismatic movement touched Anglicanism (and not just low-church Anglicanism), perhaps not as much as it did the non-conformist churches, but significantly here and there. Dad was attracted by activities at St Andrew’s, Chorleywood, not far away. There they had received the Toronto Blessing, an extreme form of visitation by the Holy Spirit, in which respectably dressed people fall down and writhe on the floor. Sicknesses were instantly healed. God was moving in our generation in Hertfordshire; why not in Bedfordshire? I think my mother accompanied dad to Chorleywood once. She was appalled. During another unhappy Sunday lunchtime, she said (and again I sympathise), ‘I don’t want to hear any more about St Andrew’s, Chorleywood.’ (I’ve just checked the internet; the obsessive could spend hours reading the violent polemics for and against the church and the activities and morals of some of its recent pastors.)

Weekly, dad asks God to show him what to say in his next sermon at Wootton, Stewartby or another village. Sometimes, on a Monday, the journal records thanks to God that some people seemed to appreciate what he had said. Mostly, there is sadness, self-criticism or hurt that mother or one of the vicars has criticised his preaching. Sometimes, in his darkest moments, he takes a walk to ‘the rejection tree’. This was the tree he went to (I think it’s on the lane to Bourne End) on the day many years ago (mid-60s) when he heard that his application to be ordained had been rejected: a rejection which hurt him profoundly, and as a result of which he became a lay-reader — the nearest to priesthood he would come.

The overall tone of the journals is one of despair and self-loathing. He has wasted his life. The fact that four of his five children have divorced, and the fifth has chosen to live with a woman without marrying her, must be blamed on the failure of his marriage and the bad example he and mother set. So must the fact that only one child, Mark, is the kind of Christian who for him counts as the real thing. Three of us are outside the faith completely, and Peter — an ordained Anglican priest — is merely ‘an ecclesiastic’. He worries about me working for such a godless organisation as Channel 4; how could I have made that choice? And, again and again: ‘Please Father, I’ve made a mess of my life. Please take it over for me, such of it as remains. In Jesus’ name. Amen.’

About the achievements of dad’s working life, notably the pioneering work he did on MRI between 1965 and 1980: nothing. About the beauty of the natural world, which he appreciated so much: a little. About poetry, which he loved and read frequently: nothing.

Next to sorrow, my strongest feeling on reading the journals was one of disappointment at narrowness. When you spoke to dad, you didn’t get a sense of bigotry and small-mindedness. He seemed a gentle, humorous, loving and grateful person. But in his writing, we discover someone who is unhappy if he’s away from his church (whatever pains he experienced within it) for even one Sunday. He didn’t enjoy the trips to the south of France which Mary arranged for them, or the trip to Brittany which I arranged for them, because ‘France is a godless place; there are more astrologers than priests’. It hurt him that he had to be at table with people who didn’t say grace at the beginning of meals. He and mum did take one holiday to Scotland, during which mum unfortunately experienced the first symptoms (then undiagnosed) of her illness. They seemed to have a moderately good time. The conservatism of the cooking in Scottish bed-and-breakfast places was a plus. (Dad was notoriously unadventurous about food and drink.) A significant blessing was granted them in Nairn when they overheard another couple saying grace before their meal. So they were able to have fellowship with them.

On more important matters, dad is fixedly opposed to the ordination of women, and almost obsessed with homosexuality, which poses for him a terrible threat to the church and society. He quotes someone (he doesn’t say who) with approval: ‘“Liberalism is the slow road to agnosticism; feminism is the short way to paganism.”’ It never seemed to occur to him, not once, that his form of belief, with its petty, self-referencing, self-mortifying outpourings to a silent and unresponsive God, might not be the only way of salvation, after all.

Nothing written for well over two months! Nothing to be done; no point in remorse or apology; just write some more.

I started back at work at Teachers TV on 1 September: earlier than usual for these recent years. Next year is going to be a year of change; Helen will retire, probably at the end of May, and so will I unless I get a ‘foreign posting’ to help set up a branch or version of Teachers TV in some other country, in which case Helen will come with me. I think that prospect unlikely. The most probable thing is that, early next June, we’ll begin a new lifestyle, spending half the year in France, half in London, and seeing something more of the world. We’ll be able to afford it, although we’ll have to live more simply than has been our habit for many years. For this reason, I didn’t mind starting back to work earlier than usual this autumn.

I’ve had plenty to do: in particular managing a project called Social Care TV, which was launched on 21 October. It’s a website which aims in a small way to do for people working in social care what Teachers TV does for teachers. There will soon be about 50 short films on the site, covering 16 topics, commissioned from four production companies. It’s been a long and at times frustrating business, trying to park the urgent, can-do culture of television production up against the slow, indecisive, risk-averse culture of the agency of the Department of Health called the Social Care Institute for Excellence. (SCIE is actually a registered charity, which is curious, given that it depends entirely on government funding and seems to be answerable to ministers.) Anyhow, now that the site exists, everyone seems to be very proud of it, and SCIE has just found money to fund the production of about 40 more films.

I’ve also completed a project funded by the British Council. Connecting Classrooms is a Council initiative linking good schools and head teachers in different countries. We’ve made eight programmes — three in Brazil, three in Mexico and two in England — which we’ve broadcast and put on our website, and which the Council can distribute around the world as it likes.

With Paul, I’m looking after the making of about 30 programmes for pupils. This is refreshingly reminiscent of what we used to do at Channel 4, though with smaller budgets.

Teachers TV continues to see international partnerships as a potential source of new revenue, although so far the money actually received from other countries has been insignificant. We’re still hoping that the Gates Foundation will fund the setting up of Teachers TV in America. The Thai government has voted the equivalent of £10 million a year for three years to have a Teachers TV there. The wildly eccentric Berlusconi government keeps makes noises about doing the same thing in Italy, but so far nothing practical has resulted. More seriously, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation would like to persuade the Australian government to fund an educational channel, which it would carry. It has seen Teachers TV, and admires it. So last week I was in Australia. I had a great week. I did seven presentations about Teachers TV, in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne, to executives at the ABC, to curriculum agencies, and to advisers and officials in the government. They seemed impressed. I was escorted round by Kim Dalton, the director of television at the ABC, whom I liked very much and who became a friend immediately. I also did a short presentation about our arts output to a conference, held in a studio at the ABC in Sydney, where 200 people were discussing how to forge mutually profitable links between traditional arts organisations and the electronic media.

And I enjoyed myself. On the Monday night, Kim hosted a dinner for about 16 of the contributors to the arts conference, at a restaurant called Marque in Surry Hills: a 12-course tasting menu, delicious. On the Tuesday night, I took a cab down to the Sydney Opera House, to be simply overwhelmed by the beauty of the scene there: the Opera House lit up, the harbour bridge, the dark waters of the harbour. I had dinner with two friends from England who by coincidence were in Sydney on holiday. On Wednesday night, by which time Kim and I were in Melbourne, he took me to dinner with his father, aged 90, in an Italian restaurant in the suburb of Carlton: lovely food, and wonderful conversation with a man in full possession of his faculties, a life-long socialist, still interested and analytical. He had been an organic chemist, and had worked in government scientific institutes in Australia and Britain, mainly on the development of polymers. Politically, he reminded me of Harold Rosen; in terms of his scientific interests, he reminded me of my father.

On Thursday I had my one day off. I just wandered around Melbourne in the warm spring sunshine, taking the place in. I bought Helen an opal necklace at a jewellers in Collins Street. I strolled by the Yarra. I lunched at another Italian restaurant, called Scusami, on the south side of the river. Splendid: a dozen oysters with two little pots of balsamic vinegar sorbet, risotto del giorno (I’ve forgotten what was in it, but it was lovely), half a bottle of Semillon from the Barossa Valley.

Two final presentations on Friday morning, then Kim and I flew back to Sydney. He drove us straight to the Opera House; he was going to a play in the theatre there, and I was going to Peter Grimes. I had a seat in the third row of the stalls. It’s a magnificent auditorium, and the production was superb. Stuart Skelton played Grimes as near-autistic, almost the village idiot of 200 years ago, rubbing his palms neurotically on his fisherman’s overalls. Of course he has a wonderful voice, but it was his acting which moved me the most. The wall of sound hitting the third row of the stalls from chorus and orchestra was electrifying.

Afterwards I dined again with the same two friends in the same restaurant as Tuesday. They had been to a Joni Mitchell tribute concert in another auditorium of the Opera House building.

On Saturday I walked out to the Sydney Cricket Ground, hoping that there might be a game on which I could watch for a couple of hours. There wasn’t, so I walked back to Surry Hills — a suburb just on the fringe of the city which I like very much and could imagine living in — and sat outside a café and had breakfast in the morning sunshine and felt good. Then I went back to the hotel and packed. Michael Ward, one of the directors of the ABC, whom I had met at a drinks party on Tuesday evening at the end of the arts conference, came and picked me up and took me out to Newington College, the school where his sons go, and we sat and watched his son Reuben playing cricket for the under 16s. A warm Saturday afternoon, playing fields with numerous games of cricket in progress, a sense of leisure at the end of the week: it reminded me of Dulwich College 1962-5. When the game was over, Michael drove me back to the hotel. I had a spare hour before I needed to go to the airport, so I walked back to Surry Hills a last time, and had a drink in a bar I had noticed and liked the look of earlier in the day. It was Hallowe’en, and it seemed odd, but not entirely disagreeable, to be served in the warmth of a spring evening by a cheerful young woman in a black corset with blood from a Dracula bite running down her neck.

Then the airport, then the long ride (14 hours) to Dubai, then a strange alienated four hours in the huge terminal there, then what seemed a short hop (only seven hours) to London. Business class these days means chairs which convert properly to flat beds, which is an immense mercy. And I was grateful for the Mercedes which whisked me home from the airport. So I haven’t felt too bad this week.

My parents’ house was finally sold to Paul Lowe, their next-door neighbour, on 9 October. The estate was wound up, and we five children received about £50,000 each, on 21 October. It could have happened much more quickly than that. I had decided to put the job into the hands of my parents’ solicitor in Ampthill, because he was local and he held the deeds to the house. It was a mistake. He turned out to be incompetent, so I sacked him in late August, he having allowed three months to be wasted by not communicating with the Probate Registry as he should have done. I turned the job over to Peter Stewart, who is Helen’s and my solicitor in Shrewsbury. He was brilliant, and all went well thereafter.

I’ve been reading French history lately: The Discovery of France by Graham Robb, highly entertaining, about the 18th and 19th centuries, whose thesis is that France as we understand it now, a centralised single state with a proud language and a strong sense of itself, hardly existed then; Occupation by Ian Ousby, about France 1940-1944; France since 1870 by Charles Sowerwine, a straight consecutive account which includes cultural developments and women’s history step by step with political events (and which disagrees with Graham Robb’s thesis); Paris after the Liberation by Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper (an easy read, because the political stuff is mixed in with bonbons about the doings of the elites); La Vie en Bleu – France and the French since 1900 by Rod Kedward, dense but excellent, which I’m halfway through; and finally Graham Robb’s biography of Balzac, which I’m also halfway through, and which is as good as his biography of Victor Hugo.

When I was in Melbourne, I bought a copy of Judith Wright’s Selected Poems, because I thought I really ought to read a major Australian poet while I was there. Magnificent, my kind of poetry: controlled, crafted, deeply felt, often entertaining, a not uncritical tribute to her country and its people, especially troubled and troubling about the despoliation of the land by those who have come there so recently.

This afternoon Helen and I are going down to Portsmouth to have tea with Margaret. Tomorrow I go to Peter Hetherington’s house in Bletsoe, Bedfordshire, where seven school friends from 40 years ago will gather for tea, then apéritifs, then go with Peter to The Plough at Bolnhurst for dinner, then back to Peter’s for digestifs, then stay the night in a bed-and-breakfast place in the village. We haven’t all met together for about 20 years. Who knows whether we shall ever all meet again? I hope it’ll be fun and relaxed, despite the great differences in character, political views and outlook on life which have emerged since we were schoolboys.

The schoolboys’ reunion was a success.

At the end of November, Helen and I gave ourselves a long weekend in Paris. Train from St Pancras, of course; two and a quarter hours later, arrive at the Gare du Nord. Taxi to our hotel in the Rue St Honoré. For four nights and three days, taste the reliable pleasures the great city offers: random walking; not too much culture; eating and drinking in the old familiar places.

On 11 December, Helen went into hospital for an operation on her right foot. She had had a bunion growing on the inside of the foot, at the broadest part near the big toe, for years. It was unsightly and uncomfortable, but the main problem was that it had already begun to deform the bones and tendons inside the foot, especially the main bone which runs down to the big toe. Unattended to, it would eventually cripple her. So it had to be removed. Such are the wonders of surgical science in rich countries these days that she went in at noon, was operated on that afternoon under a general anaesthetic, with a lot of local anaesthetic in the foot, and was available to be discharged at half past seven that evening.

We are nearly halfway through the recuperation period. For the first ten days Helen could only move on crutches, and spent all day on the sofa with her foot up. Last Tuesday, we went to the hospital (UCH, in its beautiful new building) for the bandages to be taken off. The wound had already healed remarkably. The surgeon explained what he (or rather his assistant, under his supervision) had done. As I understand it (and I always need doctors to explain something two or three times, but am shy after the first explanation), the distorted bone was deliberately broken where the distortion was. The distorted part was removed. Possibly with the help of a part of the bunion which was closest to the break (but are bunions made of bone? I don’t think so), the bone was made straight again, and two steel screws put in to secure it where the breaks had been made. The rest of the bunion was removed, and the wound sewn up with soluble stitches. I may have got some of this wrong. What is not in doubt is that we saw an X-ray of Helen’s foot, with the bone beautifully straight, and the two screws securing it. Amazing. Everyone at UCH, from surgeons to nurses to receptionists, was charming. It was the NHS at its wonderful best, making one proud to live in this country.

(And early on Christmas Eve Barack Obama got his health bill through the Senate: a great achievement. It still has to pass the House of Representatives, but most commentators think it will become law next year. Compromise as it is, it is the most significant piece of progressive legislation passed in any area of domestic social policy in the USA for many years, and probably the most important piece of health legislation ever achieved there. And done in the teeth of brutal opposition from vested interests in the medical profession and the drugs companies, and the protests of those many Americans whose minds are incomprehensible to me, who howled that the measure amounted to ‘Godless socialism’. 30 million Americans, who previously had no health insurance, will now have that security.)

Helen must wear a high protective shoe until 19 January. She can now walk without crutches, and is allowed to put weight on to the foot. She had her first bath this morning, with the foot lodged on the rim of the bath, out of the water.

I have been more than usually active in the kitchen. I hate washing and ironing, so the dry cleaner near my office, which also has a laundry service, has done brisk business with me lately. I don’t mind cleaning, but my standard of work as a cleaner, and my sense of when something really does need to be cleaned, can never meet Helen’s expectations: the one area of tension between us.

We haven’t gone to France this Christmas. Simpler to stay here. The only way Helen could have travelled would have been in the car through the tunnel. On 18 December, trains entering the tunnel from France broke down when snow which had accumulated on the tops of the trains in the extreme conditions then prevailing in northern France melted in the warmth of the tunnel and broke the electrics. Complete chaos, and great distress for thousands of people who had to be rescued from the tunnel and were then stranded in France. No deaths or injuries. But once the tunnel was open again, there was a huge backlog of travellers who had booked places (which we hadn’t, not knowing what the hospital’s advice would be last Tuesday), so here we are in London for Christmas and New Year. We went to Stephen and Theresa on Christmas Day, and stayed until after lunch yesterday. Great fun, lovely food and drink, and good walks.

Some time next year, Helen must have her left foot done, because she has a similar problem there.

At Copenhagen between 7 and 19 December, the countries of the world failed to agree legally binding international action to limit global warming. It seems that the villain of the piece in the last two days of the conference was China, exercising its muscle as the world’s pre-eminent superpower-to-be. Although willing to agree a statement of intention in the right direction, China would not agree to specific targets for cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions, nor to a system of verification by inspection of its power stations. It would not even allow the other countries to publish their own targets; if they had done so, it would have removed its name from the bland final communiqué. The idea of Obama, Brown, Sarkozy and Merkel being dictated to in this way by a Chinese representative who wasn’t even the Chinese leader, and who had to keep leaving the room to get instructions from his boss, is extraordinary and shows how global politics is changing. The Chinese behaviour reminded me of Amartya Sen’s thesis that famines don’t happen in democracies, because where there is a flow of information, and where leaders have some kind of respect for public opinion, ways are found of avoiding famines (unlike in China during The Great Leap Forward, when tens of millions of people starved to death). Chinese leaders need not worry what their people think about climate change; in any case (and perhaps in opposition to Sen’s thesis) I imagine that most Chinese who are benefiting materially from China’s growth rates in recent years are simply happy no longer to be poor. Who knows whether China’s leaders will have the wisdom in future years to recognise that prosperity achieved at the cost of wrecking the planet is a poor bargain? Of course, hanging over Copenhagen was the legacy of Bush’s disastrous policies: initially denying that climate change existed as a man-made phenomenon, and withdrawing from the Kyoto Treaty. Although a completely different person now leads America, that damage persists. China can argue that it’s hypocritical of America to make such large climate-related demands on it only a few years after denying that man-made climate change existed.

It may be that if China really behaves badly in the next few years, continuing to go for coal-driven growth regardless of the consequences, the other major powers will have to agree legally binding limits for as much of the world as will accept them, and then impose quotas or tariffs on Chinese imports to try to make China change its policy. That would be ugly and confrontational; I imagine that the climate-change deal-makers are already thinking about ways of bringing all the significant players back together for a more successful bargaining round soon. The fact that Copenhagen was a failure doesn’t mean the world is doomed. But the world will be a much more hostile place for great sections of humanity in a few years’ time if we have too many more failures. As I think I’ve written before, we just have to face the fact that the developing world can’t do what the rich world did to enrich itself. It seems unjust, but there it is. Such historical understanding requires great statesmanship on the part of the leaders of the developing world: understanding which wasn’t apparent in the Chinese position at Copenhagen.

In some recognition of its historic guilt, the rich world must give the developing world huge sums of money to help it develop without hurting the planet beyond repair. A modest success at Copenhagen was the agreement of the rich nations to begin to do this. The number of billions of pounds or dollars promised sounds impressive; it’s tiny by comparison with what the rich countries spent in autumn 2008 to rescue their banks.

After great struggle, I’ve completed a third longish translation from Victor Hugo: the first part of ‘L’Expiation’, his poem about Napoleon, which describes the retreat from Moscow.

Since my parents died, I’ve been receiving mail redirected from their address to ours. Most of it has been junk mail: firms offering my father Christmas claret with his name printed on the label, or suggesting to my mother that she might be able to claim compensation for accidents she has suffered which were not her fault. (Does death count as an accident that was not her fault?) I have also written to numerous religious organisations to which my parents subscribed, the most hopeful of which is engaged in the long task of converting France to evangelical Protestantism. The main headline on the front page of France Mission’s leaflet announced a baptism near Toulouse.

A few people haven’t heard of my parents’ deaths, and sent Christmas cards. These people aren’t in my mother’s address book; I wrote in May to everyone in the book who didn’t already know about the deaths. Because there are no senders’ addresses on the cards, I have no way of telling the people that their good wishes for Christmas and the New Year fell on deaf ears. I will quote in its entirety one accompanying letter from a person who was evidently at school with my mother.

‘I hope that your health problems are well under control and that life is quite tolerable for both of you. It is a good job that you have adequate care for your daily needs since the family are so dispersed.

In August Alice Hilton died: she was the last link with Staff at the ‘Northern Grammar’. She arrived in September 1946 to teach Geography when I was in L6th. In 1959 she joined Fareham Girls Grammar School where I was working and we had remained friends.

We’ve had quite a ‘smooth’ year with no crises on either the health or domestic fronts. Derek’s diabetes seems under control and he is busy in the garden — when the weather allows! Despite the oddities of rainfall and temperature which affected some of the vegetables, our big freezer is comfortably full again this year.

I had a very pleasant holiday in the Isle of Man in August, having found a firm offering taxi/coach/flight transport — eliminating umpteen rail changes from here. The Isle was SO CLEAN, litter and graffiti free and transport all ran to time.

Best wishes

Ruth

[Then there is a postscript, in different handwriting and written with a different pen, so presumably Derek’s.]

Lost £5m in the cash crisis. Apologies for the SIZE of the card — we like to support Naomi House’

There is something about this message which encapsulates an attitude to life which I am so glad to have eluded. The details are the give-aways: the inverted commas around ‘Northern Grammar’ and ‘smooth’ — let us not allow the informal to creep in without inverted commas to corral it; the sense that health and home are battlegrounds — ‘health and domestic fronts’; the British jollity of ‘when the weather allows!’ with its exclamation mark; the complacency in ‘our big freezer is comfortably full again this year’; most significant of all, the capital letters for ‘SO CLEAN’ in describing the Isle of Man. This woman is saying, ‘We have everything under control, and we are going to keep it that way. We will not allow life to spring any nasty surprises on us.’

But then, life did. There’s that astonishing postscript. I had these people summed up as retired teachers living in a bungalow or a semi-detached house with a garden. How did they come to have £5 million to lose? I didn’t think my parents knew any millionaires. The apology which follows ‘for the SIZE of the card’ made me laugh out loud. People who’ve just lost £5 million, you might think, would confine themselves to small cards, or perhaps not send any cards at all. This was a very big card. I can see from the back of the card that it’s sold in support of the best and most touching of causes: a children’s hospice. I have no wish to mock that. But why apologise?

I leap from the little to the large, this last day of the year. Some African countries, at the urging of their religious leaders, are passing or trying to pass legislation to criminalise homosexuality, or to impose even stricter punishments (including, in the case of Uganda, the death penalty) on homosexuals. Iran’s leaders are at an extreme of theocratic authoritarianism, which led them (I believe) to consider it right to pervert the outcome of the presidential election this year. America has millions of born-again Christian citizens who are sure their way of life is ‘God’s way’ (and who, as I wrote a few days ago, believe that a national health service amounts to ‘Godless socialism’). Outside the religious sphere, China’s behaviour so far, as the world’s next superpower, is not encouraging to people like me who hope that in a world no longer bi-polar, the great powers will be able to co-operate in ascendancy rather than compete for supremacy. Nor is Russia’s.

We have Obama: the great political plus of the year. He is that extraordinary rarity amongst national leaders: a true statesman, and — a further bonus — a great orator. Let us hope we have him until 2017. So much, too much, is expected of him. Because of him, American and British troops are withdrawing from Iraq. They should never have gone there, but it is good that they are leaving. It remains to be seen whether, once they’ve departed, Iraq can avoid a civil war which will show even more blatantly the murderous pointlessness of the invasion. Afghanistan and Pakistan remain desperate; good secular governance is nowhere in sight, and outrages committed by Islamist fundamentalists, in Afghanistan often linked to common criminality funded by the drugs trade, are everyday occurrences. These two countries are Obama’s big gamble; he has increased his country’s military commitment in Afghanistan (and, as a result, so has Gordon Brown, by a small amount) in the hope that Allied forces can speed up the process of preparing the Afghan government to assume normal power, the Taliban having either been defeated or, in the case of their more moderate members, co-opted into government and civil society. I fear that this is a remote hope.

A young Nigerian man tried to blow up an American aeroplane over Detroit on Christmas Day. He failed. He had been trained by al-Qaida in Yemen. The world, in this period, faces a severe threat from a tiny but determined group who would impose an Islamist theocracy on all of us, by violence if necessary (a project doomed to failure). While I feel the need to make the unremarkable statement that I am respectful of moderate Islam (and moderate Judaism, moderate Christianity, moderate Hinduism…), my real belief is that all religions are attempts to distract ourselves from recognising the terrible truth of our condition: we inhabit this world for a little space; then nothing.

Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’: ‘We must love one another or die.’

The struggle between enlightenment and certainty continues.

The weather has been freezing for several days, with snow and ice all over the country. London is nearly always less affected by snow than elsewhere, but this afternoon there was a moment when it fell outside the office window as snow should fall: in big, slow-moving, drifting flakes. But then it changed to smaller, wetter flakes, falling faster, and by the time I left for home it had stopped. There are fewer people and cars. Some people haven’t come back from their holidays; some haven’t been able to get into London from places where the snow is much thicker than here; some, who probably could have got in if they’d had to, have decided to ‘work from home’, which generally means stay in bed late, drink several coffees, read the paper more thoroughly than usual, and check emails every three hours. So the town is pleasant.

Helen is making a steady recovery from her foot operation. It’s a good time for her to be confined to the flat.

Today there has been another outburst of fratricidal strife in the parliamentary Labour Party. Two former Cabinet ministers, Geoff Hoon and Patricia Hewitt, sent an email or a text to every MP at about midday asking them to say whether they would support a secret ballot for the leadership. They’d been plotting this since the week between Christmas and New Year. Charles Clarke, that recidivist back-stabber, was also involved. The rebellion is fizzling out as I write (10.45 pm); no serving Cabinet minister will support it. But it’s another self-inflicted wound. I feel nothing but contempt for people who can’t see, a few months before the election, that to replace the leader now would be a disaster, whoever took over. The last chance to replace the leader, assuming (which I don’t) that that would have been the right thing to do in order to restore the government’s fortunes, was last summer, at the time of the dreadful local and European elections. It didn’t happen. That should have been the end of the matter until after the general election. Hoon, Hewitt and Clarke are doing this, I can only conclude, out of spite, to take revenge on perceived or actual wrongs done to them in the past, or because they can’t see beyond the Blairite/Brownite ideological cleavage which has weakened the government so sorely and unnecessarily since 1997. No-one who sincerely wants Labour to win in May, or least to limit the damage done to it, would have done what they did today. The anger of Labour back-benchers on the Channel 4 News tonight was bluntly expressed. The episode is a present to the Tories.

Six days ago, on 12 January, at about this time (9.53 in the evening GMT, 4.53 in the afternoon EST) an earthquake struck Haiti. The epicentre was a few miles to the west of Port-au-Prince. The magnitude was 7.0. It was a shallow earthquake — the movement of the crust descending only about six miles below the earth’s surface — which made it more destructive. It was the first major earthquake to hit Haiti since 1860.

The destruction has been unimaginable. No-one knows how many people have died, nor how many will yet die from sicknesses and untreated injuries. 200,000 is a current guess by those best informed. Three million people are homeless, out of a population of between nine and 10 million. It is true that the total death toll of the tsunami of 26 December 2004 was a little higher, at about 250,000; but those deaths were spread across several countries. These are all concentrated in one.

An enormous international relief effort is under way. It is hampered by the complete collapse of the infrastructure and machinery of government of what was already the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. In recent days, the excellent television and internet reporting of the catastrophe has tended to suggest that not enough is being done to co-ordinate the relief effectively. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been donated by governments, international agencies and individuals. There is no sense yet that generosity on this scale is getting to the people and places where it is most needed. I expect (but how would I know?) that the UN, the NGOs, the US and the other countries which have sent military and civilian personnel are doing the best they can. The UN, which already had a large peace-keeping force in the country under the terms of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti, was itself shattered by the loss of many of its staff, including the head of the mission, Hédi Annabi, when its headquarters building collapsed. There is a fear that unless food, water and medical help arrives in the next day or two in much larger quantity than at present, usual civil behaviour may break down completely in many places, with armed gangs terrorising the traumatised population. I am glad that large numbers of US and UN troops are or will soon be there to combat the threat.

Jon Snow was magnificent on the Channel 4 News tonight, his journalistic professionalism once or twice almost overwhelmed by his feelings as a man who has done so much for and with the poorer world over so many years. All I can do is receive news and give money.

I’m sure architects and engineers are working on this, but I was thinking last night that there must be a quick way of building good, cheap, earthquake- and hurricane-resistant houses. Drill a dozen or 20 holes in the ground at the perimeter of the eventual house. Fill the holes with reinforced concrete, but leave in the middle of each a core of some kind of rubberised material, which absorbs shaking, into which steel stanchions are placed which stick up above ground level. Then bring in, from anywhere in the world which will supply them, houses in pre-fabricated kit form, with steel loops attached to the underside of the floor which are hooked and bolted on to the tops of the stanchions. The floor of the house doesn’t actually touch the ground. You have four steps or a ramp up to the front door. Something like this must be the best solution to the problem of replacing the destroyed dwellings — a problem which will face Haiti and international aid donors for many years.

And Haiti must replant its forests. Deforestation is the principal reason why hurricanes in recent years have been so destructive (though even the damage and loss of life in the dreadful 2008 hurricane season was as nothing in comparison with this earthquake). There are no trees to hold the land together; hence landslides and floods. There are no trees because poor people cut them down for fuel or as a way of making money.

Haiti is at the bottom of a deep vicious spiral of brutal poverty, grotesque inequality, political corruption, incompetence and wickedness, and environmental self-harm. Two hundred years ago, it enraged the European colonial powers, and especially France, for which liberté, fraternité, égalité were brave ideals for the emancipation of white people, by becoming the first independent republic in the Caribbean. Colonial societies based on slavery surrounded it. Now, it is trammelled in a different kind of servitude from which there will be no release for many years, even if those with power act with exceptional speed in a spirit of exceptional enlightenment.

Here we are with spring in full cry. It has been the most beautiful season I can remember since… since the last time I wrote in ecstatic tones about the beauty of the world. We went to France at Easter, and everything was as lovely there as ever: primroses and cowslips in abundance, the first cuckoo call, skylarks hovering above the big open fields of green corn. The streams and rivers were in spate with the water from the snow and rain of the exceptionally long winter just past. In the last fortnight back here, the cherries, blackthorn, hawthorn, limes and now chestnuts and beeches have opened their flowers and leaves in procession. I find the sight of a cherry tree in flower, before it has put forth its leaves, one of the most extravagantly wonderful sights of all, because of the stark, minimalist contrast between wood and flower, with no diluting effect of leaf.

We have had plenty of opportunity to admire the English and Welsh countryside in the last fortnight, for a sad reason. Sue Goldie, Mike Raleigh’s wife, died of liver cancer on 11 April. I’ve just checked and I see that we visited Mike and Sue on the first weekend of April 2009, and that the disease had already been diagnosed then. So she struggled against it for more than a year, enduring one whole course of chemotherapy. That restrained the tumours for a while, but they came back and the doctors said that her liver wasn’t strong enough to withstand another course. We saw Sue for the last time on the first weekend of this March, when we stayed with her and Mike at the Little Stone House. On the Sunday, nine of us drank champagne and lunched at the Lake Vyrnwy Hotel, on a brilliant, still, blue, cold day. The lake, with its little Ludwig-of-Bavaria pumping station, the hills and the sky looked as spectacular as I’ve ever seen them. We kissed Sue in the car park before driving back to London. She lived for another five weeks. She died at home, quietly and without great pain. Mike says that the care she received from the health service throughout her illness, and from the Macmillan Nurses at the end, was excellent.

We went to be with Mike on the Wednesday after Sue died, and stayed until the Sunday. Then we returned for the funeral on 21 April (by coincidence, a year to the day after my father’s funeral). It was held at Shrewsbury Crematorium. More than 100 people were there. It was a moving and uplifting occasion. I had written a poem, which I read towards the end of the service.

Then we sang ‘Jerusalem’, and went out to Tina Turner’s ‘Simply the Best’, turned up loud.

There was a reception at The Mytton and Mermaid at Atcham. The next day, a smaller group of us, about 20 this time, lunched at Lake Vyrnwy again.

While Helen and I were in France, Lindsay rang to tell us that she has been diagnosed with lung cancer, five years after her supposedly successful recovery from bowel cancer. She has an operation next week to remove a small part of the infected lung for tests. Then she will know whether the doctors propose to remove a larger part of the lung later, or to give her chemotherapy. It seems, surprisingly, that if the new cancer turns out to be a secondary development from the original bowel cancer, the prognosis is better than if it’s a new kind, because they’ll know exactly how to treat it. We will support Lindsay, David and Tom, my godson, whatever happens.

Lung cancer is the biggest killer amongst the cancers; bowel cancer the second biggest. By coincidence, the papers yesterday reported a remarkable new diagnostic test and treatment for bowel cancer, which uses a tool called a Flexi-Scope — reassuringly plain name — to look for and if necessary remove polyps, the potential sites of cancer, in five minutes. It seems extraordinary. If it’s as good as it sounds, everyone should have the test by the time they get to my age.

We are a week away from the general election. Labour has been in power for 13 years, and it seems very unlikely, in fact impossible, that it will be given an overall majority in the House of Commons for another five.

I’ve written before about how we got into this mess. Since the events of January (Hoon, Hewitt and Clarke trying to unseat Brown), there have been two more spectacular own goals. In March, the selfsame Hoon and Hewitt, plus Stephen Byers, all three former Cabinet ministers, all standing down at the election, were entrapped by journalists pretending to be lobbyists into saying that they could and would use their powers of access to influence government policy once they left Parliament. Their fee: between £3000 and £5000 a day. They were secretly recorded saying this, and the dreadful, embarrassing footage was shown in a Dispatches programme on Channel 4. The three were suspended from the Labour Party, as was Margaret Moran, who’d done the same thing. The spectacle was so disgusting, so entirely the opposite of everything that Labour is supposed to stand for, that it will have done deep damage in the minds of wavering voters. I hate those four people.

The second own goal was scored yesterday. Gordon Brown was campaigning in Rochdale when he was approached by a 65-year-old woman, a lifelong Labour supporter, who asked him challenging questions about the national debt, pensions and immigration. She had gone out for a loaf and heard that Brown was down the road. It was a classic encounter between a good woman who doesn’t know very much and a good man who knows a lot: a friendly if robust exchange which ended with a handshake and smiles, despite the gulf between those two people. If the incident had ended there, the pictures shown would have, on balance, worked in Brown’s favour. He got back into his car and forgot to remove his radio microphone. (Question: why do politicians wear microphones on occasions like that? He didn’t need a microphone to have a conversation with a member of the public. Answer: because politicians like television viewers to see how normal and likeable they are on informal occasions.) In the car, the microphone transmitted his voice remarking to his aide that the encounter had been a disaster, ridiculous, asking who had put him with the woman — ‘Was it Sue?’ — as if to blame someone else for it, and then, worst of all, saying that his interlocutor had been ‘just a bigoted woman’.

Cruellest of ironies, the microphone belonged to Sky News. The Murdoch empire — the same people who tried to destroy Labour’s autumn conference by having The Sun announce its support for the Conservatives on the day of Brown’s speech there, the same people who stitched Brown up by arranging for the mother of a soldier killed in Afghanistan to record his telephone conversation with her when he rang to apologise for apparently having spelt her name wrong in a personal, hand-written letter of condolence he had written — couldn’t believe its luck. The letter-writing episode backfired on The Sun. Most people were impressed and surprised that the Prime Minister wrote letters of condolence himself, in his own hand, and understood that a man who sees with only one eye might not have the most beautiful handwriting.

There was no backfiring this time. The private conversation was replayed repeatedly on all the networks, notably Sky, and was soon being listened to on the internet in offices all over the country, including mine. Brown did an interview on BBC Radio 2 shortly after his remarks had become public property. The tape was replayed on air. Though it was a radio interview, someone was pointing a camera at him, so we later saw the sight of the Prime Minister putting his head in his hands in a gesture of despair.

Meanwhile, the woman — Gillian Duffy — was told what Brown had said about her. The Sky News journalists, like sharks with blood in the water, detained her, holding on to her arm to discourage her from walking away, squeezing every drop of damage out of her distress and sense of offence. Had the event changed her mind about Brown? Yes. Would she now be voting Labour, as she had done all her life? She would probably not vote. That afternoon, Brown changed his schedule and, extraordinarily, drove back to Mrs Duffy’s house and spent 40 minutes alone in there with her. To her credit, she has not so far revealed anything about what was said (although that may change with this Sunday’s papers). He came out with the broad official smile on his face, saying that he was ‘a penitent sinner’, that he had apologised fully, and — less persuasively — that he had misunderstood what Mrs Duffy had said in the original conversation.

The enduring trouble is that the suspicion has been confirmed in the minds of many people, including the crucial undecided voters, that Brown is one thing in public — humane, personable, fallible, approachable — but ruthless, calculating and domineering in private.

So much for own goals. In fact, the election campaign has been dominated by a development which dwarfs their significance. Perhaps I should have written about it first. We have had three live televised debates, each lasting 90 minutes, in which the leaders of the three main parties have answered questions from a studio audience. These events have suddenly made traditional electioneering methods — putting up posters, knocking on doors, even telephone canvassing — redundant, or at least much less influential than they used to be. The first debate, broadcast on 15 April on ITV, was watched by 10 million people. A week later, on Sky, the second debate attracted 4 million viewers. Last night the third pulled in eight million on the BBC. (Eight million is rather a disappointing figure, given the historic novelty of these occasions. There will be more actual viewers than that, it’s true; I watched the debate after midnight on the BBC’s i-Player. But I imagine the BBC was hoping for something closer to 15 million live viewers.) Nonetheless, all future election campaigns will be dominated by the performances of the party leaders on these three occasions under the most unforgiving of spotlights.

The fascinating, extraordinary thing has been that, given the full public exposure which no Liberal leader has had since Lloyd George, Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats suddenly looked to a lot of people like a potential party of government. Clegg performed very well in the first debate. He was more relaxed and fluent than the other two, and he made the case well that UK politics does not automatically and for ever have to be a duopoly. The opinion polls instantly registered scores that made a hung parliament likely. While the Conservatives have retained their lead in the polls throughout the campaign, the lead has diminished because of the Liberals’ surge.

Naturally, as soon as Clegg emerged as the principal threat to an overall Conservative majority, the right-wing newspapers turned their fire on him in the kind of character assassination which only they know how to perform: the combination of insinuation and downright lies which Brown has had to endure for years. But it doesn’t seem to have worked. The Liberal surge has held so far.

From my point of view, and given the quirkiness of our current electoral system, the best thing to hope for after next Thursday is a Lib/Lab coalition, or at least an agreement that the lesser party in terms of number of seats, which I still think will be the Liberals, will support a Labour government on crucial votes. I must say, in fairness, that if the Conservatives win the greatest number of seats although not an overall majority, they should be given a chance to form a government, but I can’t see them succeeding. In that case, a coalition or agreement between the Liberals and Labour would be able to change the electoral system before the following general election, which would have the highly satisfactory result of keeping the Conservatives out of power for a further lengthy period. I remember writing something like this in the full flood of joy after the 1997 election, imagining a time when Labour would need the Liberals to continue to govern. Of course, with a change in the voting system, it could be that the Liberals, not Labour, come to be the larger progressive party in terms of seats in the House of Commons.

Why does the possibility of a Conservative government so fill me with alarm? In a way, that’s a silly question to ask myself; I’m a lifelong socialist, that’s why. But analyse a bit, in just one area, the area where epic things have happened since Brown became Prime Minister: finance and economics. In the perspective of the last 30 years, here is what has happened in economic policy. Thatcher and Reagan and their financial advisers changed the world so that bankers could do what they liked. Blair and Brown inherited that world, and stayed with it because they were riding high. The Conservatives wished the government to go even further down the road of deregulation. When the crash happened, and with the Bush government still in place in the US, Brown and Darling made some heroically correct moves which persuaded others to work together to prevent the world’s financial system from collapsing completely, which saved millions of people like us from losing all the money in our bank accounts. The Conservatives were helpless and wrong in their analysis of the problem at that moment. However, they have managed to twist the argument since, so that they now offer themselves as the party of economic competence as the country confronts its large national debt and its need for a mixture of tax rises and spending cuts in the next few years. Brown and Darling will get no credit from the electorate next Thursday for what they did in the autumn of 2008. The Conservatives lurch incoherently from masochism (let’s have deep cuts now) to populism (let’s not raise National Insurance next year). They try to frighten voters by suggesting that, if a party or parties other than they form the next government, the financial markets — the people primarily responsible for the economic mess we’re in — will punish us. It seems that we must accept the right of the richest, stupidest and greediest people in society so go on being rich, stupid and greedy. I can’t wait for some kind of internationally agreed measure which takes serious money from these people in the form of taxes or levies and gives it back to the societies they have exploited. They’d still be rich. National debt could be paid back more quickly. Public services wouldn’t be hurt so badly. Only a progressive government will take this kind of action.

The Conservatives want to raise the inheritance tax threshold so that a group of already wealthy people won’t have to pay it. How emblematic. Macro-economically, as I’ve said, they’re incoherent, although of course they would expect and get an easier ride from their friends in the City than Labour or the Liberals would get.

May Day! And a beautiful day it has been. We came up here yesterday, to spend the long weekend with Adam and Hazel. Today Adam and I left Helen and Hazel in Holt, to shop, while we walked on the salt marshes at Morston. Skylarks sang high in the air; kestrels hovered; in the little pools left by the diminishing tide, shoals of tiny fish dashed. Beside the lanes between Holt and the coast, the coming flowers of the young cow parsley are still green buds. Shining patches of blackthorn flower are everywhere.

Gloomily studying the opinion polls, and facing the possibility of a small overall majority for the Tories on Friday, I realise that another of Labour’s failures in the election campaign is not to have trumpeted the numerous real achievements since 1997 which have made millions of people’s lives better. Put aside for a moment the errors — the Blairite/Brownite schism, Iraq, the decade in which Brown was happy to let the banks do what they liked, the 2007 election that never happened, the abolition of the 10p tax, the attempts to pull Brown down since he became Prime Minister, Labour’s full share of wickedness in the expenses scandal. Those are grievous errors, and if they hadn’t been committed Labour would I think be heading for a fourth term. But in the 13 years of Labour government, a number of wonderful things have happened. The NHS has gone from being a grossly under-funded organisation to being a world-class service, according to a report from the Kings Fund, the independent think-tank on health, published during the course of the campaign. The report went on to say, quite rightly, that the next step is to spend much more on preventive medicine and on health education, to stop people getting ill in the first place. The improvements in schools are immense, both in academic achievement and in quality of buildings and equipment. I say this while knowing, as an educator, that Labour ministers have made all kinds of stupid mistakes in detail — too much testing, getting obsessive about methods of teaching reading. In grand terms, nonetheless, the transformation has been remarkable. Then there’s the minimum wage, against the introduction of which the Tories fought tooth and nail; the tax credits for families on lower incomes; the significant though still incomplete progress in reducing the number of children living in poverty. I could go back to the lists I used to make to clear my mind when having arguments with friends who said that Labour was no different from the Tories. The trouble is, we haven’t heard much about these great steps forward. The television debates, ground-breaking as they were, didn’t give Brown the opportunity to speak about them, or perhaps he just didn’t make the opportunity by turning some of his answers in that direction. Elsewhere, I’ve heard almost nothing. I understand the difficulties, and they make me weary to report them, they’re so familiar: the difficulty of getting a positive message across when the newspapers are overwhelmingly and malignantly hostile; the huge sums of money — much of it provided by tax cheats like Lord Ashcroft — which the Tories can spend on negative poster campaigns, which Labour can’t match. Nonetheless, senior Labour politicians haven’t until yesterday spoken up about the things Labour has done as they should have, at least not when I’ve been paying attention, and I’ve been paying a lot of attention. Yesterday, at an event in Westminster Central Hall organised by Citizens UK, Brown recounted Labour’s achievements and values cogently and passionately. But, I fear, too late.

I read something in the paper last night which depressed me beyond measure, although the great majority of the population won’t notice it. The futures market in government bonds and foreign exchange will open at one o’clock in the morning on Friday, exceptionally. This will allow financial speculators to make money through the night, particularly if the prospect of a hung parliament causes the City to get jumpy about government debt. In other words, people who brought the country to its current financial difficulties will be allowed to profit from those difficulties seven hours earlier than usual.

Gordon Brown spoke again yesterday, at a rally in Manchester, admittedly to Labour Party faithful but addressing the whole country, using terms and taking a tone which should have been present from the start of the campaign: health, schools, Sure Start, minimum wage, tax credits for poorer people, Northern Ireland… he read out a list of 55 achievements. These reminders of the true purpose of politics should have been given much, much earlier. Elsewhere, Tony Blair popped up to say: ‘You look at the largest investment in public services since the second world war, the creation of whole new services like Sure Start, the minimum wage, progress on gay rights, changes on paternity leave, the right to join a union, even things that have been difficult that used to cause me problems in government like the Human Rights Act — that is a massive progressive agenda we have delivered.’ And he was eloquent about the vacuity of Cameron’s notion of a big society. ‘No one wants an over-heavy state, but there is an element of what the Conservatives are saying that almost suggests that government has no role to play, or that it is down to volunteering.’

It’s this simply expressed combination of celebration and analysis that we have been lacking. Cameron has been allowed to get away with the lie that our society is broken. It isn’t broken. The Tories nearly broke our society in the 18 years in which they doubled child poverty, engendered mass unemployment and glorified greed. Society in 2010 is profoundly imperfect, and there are forces at work that may be stronger than any government can counteract, but the effort which the Labour government has made, taken as a whole, has been to mend society, not to break it.

I’ve just read the excellent at-a-glance comparison of the three main parties’ manifestos on the BBC’s website. It shows how far the parties’ policies, as officially announced, are from the way they are presented in the newspapers, and indeed from the shorthand caricatures which politicians construct to promote their own policies and to attack their opponents’. It would be an instructive game to cut up the one-line accounts of the policies, throw them into a hat, pull them out one at a time at random, and ask players to say which of the parties (one, or more than one) had each policy. So: ‘Support party funding reform, including caps on individual donations’. Who proposes this measure? Why, the Conservatives, of course, the party bankrolled by Lord Ashcroft’s millions. (The proposal doesn’t specify the level of the cap.) Or: ‘Push for an international agreement to stop banks engaging in large-scale trading using their own money and a global levy on banks’ (not grammatical, but we get the drift)? Conservatives again, the party which has managed to persuade a large chunk of the electorate that the current level of UK government debt is all Labour’s fault. (I admit that the other two parties have similar but not identical proposals in both these areas.) Or — a different kind of difference between presentation and reality — what would we find if we checked the detail of the Conservatives’ promise to reward marriage through the tax system? First, we’d find that the tax break applies to civil partnerships as well as to marriage; secondly, that it’s an offer to let one partner transfer £750 of his or her personal allowance to the other partner so long as the higher-earning of the two partners is paying the basic rate of tax. So it’s a much more nuanced proposal, benefiting homosexual as well as heterosexual couples, and excluding the middle class and the wealthy. Rather progressive, you might say, if you had any time for a proposal which chooses to favour certain emotional and sexual choices through the tax system, and thereby to penalise others, which I don’t. Its value to the Conservatives is not in the detail, but in the headline: ‘Tories back marriage’.

There are policy areas where the parties’ announced intentions confuse my basic allegiance. The Tories wish to end mixed-sex wards and to increase the number of single rooms in hospitals. I can only applaud, having spent a good deal of time in hospitals in the last years of my parents’ lives. The Tories and, unsurprisingly, the Liberals wish to scrap ID cards and the national identity database. I agree. Labour limps on with its now voluntary ID card scheme for UK nationals, while insisting that every time someone applies for a new passport his or her details will go on to a national identity database. I can’t see why you need a national identity database as a separate thing; surely, if you have people’s passport details, you have a de facto database. Compulsory ID cards were an affront to civil liberties in the first place; the affront, it was argued, was a price worth paying in order to increase our security. The voluntary version is no use as a way of stopping terrorism (what terrorist who is a UK national is going to ask for an ID card, or rely on a legitimate passport when travelling?). The only reason for not scrapping the scheme completely is to save political face; Labour has lost the argument. Speaking of databases, Labour wants to keep for six years the DNA of criminal suspects arrested but not convicted. The Tories would destroy the DNA of every suspect found innocent in a court of law. I agree with the Tories’ policy, while recognising that the police and the courts might prefer Labour’s. But ask a random sample of voters which party is strongest on law and order, and most will tell you it’s the Conservatives.

These ruminations are a world away from the popular language and imagery of an election campaign. People make their voting choice either because newspapers, most of them owned by very rich people who want a Conservative government, influence that choice, while claiming not to; or because of tribal loyalties; or because they ‘just think it’s time for a change’; or on the basis of their preferred gladiatorial performance by one or other party leader on television. I don’t think that the cool study of the parties’ manifesto commitments comes into it that much.

It’s a beautiful, calm, warm afternoon, and the nation is voting. There was a queue at my polling station this morning; later, people arriving at the office who had already voted had queued at theirs. I hope for a high turnout. I fear that a Conservative government with a small overall majority will be elected. The combination of Labour’s mistakes, its failure until these last days to remind people of the good it has done, the global financial crisis, the ‘give the other lot a go’ mentality and — decisively — the lies bellowed into people’s ears by and on behalf of the Conservatives, will do its work. The Liberals’ surge won’t be quite enough to give them the king-making power which might have led before the next election to a change in the voting system and to other constitutional reforms. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think so.

It’s the first anniversary of my mother’s death.

Well, I was wrong. The Conservatives don’t have the small overall majority that I feared. They have easily the largest number of seats (306) and the largest share of the votes (36.1%). (They’ll win a 307th seat on 27 May in a safe constituency where the election was postponed because of the death of a candidate.) But 326 is the number they needed if they were to have an absolute overall majority. Labour has 258 seats, with 29% of the vote. The Liberals have 57 seats, with 23% of the vote. The other parties put together have 28 seats, with 12% of the vote.

The most surprising thing is the Liberals’ disappointing performance. Only a few days ago, I was writing about the Liberal surge, about the way that Nick Clegg’s performance in the TV debates had given the Liberals a popularity they hadn’t had since Lloyd George. In the event, they have five fewer seats than they had before. They can, legitimately, point to the iniquity of a voting system which gave them less than a tenth of the seats available when they had polled just under a quarter of the votes. But their vote share hardly increased either; it went up by about one percentage point, which is a paltry result after such optimistic predictions.

I don’t know how this happened; nor, I suspect, do expert psephologists. Perhaps more natural Liberal voters voted Labour tactically than the reverse; or perhaps the perversities of the current system meant that even had there been equal amounts of Lib/Lab tactical voting, the Liberals couldn’t have greatly benefited. One thing not in doubt is that the Liberals haemorrhaged support in the last days of the campaign. The combined findings of the final polls taken before 6 May gave them 27%. Four of those percentage points disappeared when people went into the voting booth.

There was little overall pattern to the results as they came in on Friday, apart from the generalisation that the south and midlands of England shifted significantly towards the Tories, while the north of England and Scotland didn’t. In Scotland, Labour actually increased its share of the vote, although the allocations of seats between the parties remained exactly as before. The Tories did a lot better in Wales than in 2005: eight seats instead of three.

Yesterday at 1.30 in the afternoon, Gordon Brown said that the Conservatives and the Liberals together should have the first chance to try to form a government. He also said that he would be willing to talk to any other party. He obviously meant that if Con/Lib talks failed, he might be able to put together a government with the Liberals, presumably relying on the support of some of the smaller parties. An hour later, David Cameron said that he would enter negotiations with the Liberals.

The Conservatives and Liberals are talking. There seems to be an expectation that the talks will succeed; that somehow the circle of the Liberals’ insistence on electoral reform and the Conservatives refusal of it will be squared. I can’t see it.

There have been contemptible calls for Brown to get out of Downing Street immediately, not just from the usual newspapers, but also from some Labour MPs. Brown is doing exactly the right thing, constitutionally and morally, by staying put until someone is in a position to form a new government. Alastair Darling is in Brussels with other European finance ministers, discussing how best to prop up Greece and other eurozone countries in financial difficulties. Everyone agrees that we’re lucky not to be in the euro at the moment, but I expect that some of our banks are owed loads of money by some of the more troubled eurozone countries. Anyhow, the point is that the business of government goes on.

Everywhere, people are saying that the measures that will have to be taken to reduce our deficit and restore the public finances to good order will be unbelievably awful; and that whoever takes these measures will risk extreme unpopularity. I don’t agree with either of those positions. Taxes will and should go up dramatically; but as long as that is done progressively (which one shouldn’t expect with a Conservative-led government) most people in this rich country can easily take the hit. The middle classes will just have to go out to dinner less often, and take cheaper holidays. And we’re in a strange, masochistic moment, where a Mr or Ms Whiplash (it’ll be Mr) Chancellor can do things ‘for the good of the country’ without the negative political consequences which would follow in normal times. My fear, with a Conservative-led financial regime, is that the tax cuts will be lighter, especially for the better-off, and the cuts to public services deeper than they should be; in personal terms, that George Osborne, not Vince Cable, will win the argument about how the balance is struck.

We came to Shropshire yesterday for Tom James’s confirmation. The Bishop of Shrewsbury conducted a cheerful ceremony in the chapel of Prestfelde School. Life is passing when bishops begin to look young; this one was born, he revealed, in 1961.

A week ago, Lindsay had the operation on her lung. The surgeon removed a little piece for a biopsy, which was done while Lindsay was still under the anaesthetic. With the information gained from the biopsy, the surgeon removed two lesions from one lung. Lindsay came home from hospital two days later. She cannot tolerate morphine, so is relying on other and less effective pain-killers. Neither can she tolerate hospital food, which was one reason for her early discharge. There she was at the confirmation. She is an extraordinary person.

Politics has been tumultuous since last I wrote. And I was wrong again about the outcome. The Conservatives and the Liberals talked and talked until Monday afternoon. They kept saying that the talks were going well, it was all very productive. But no product. Then, on Monday afternoon, Gordon Brown came out of number 10 and announced that the Liberals, while continuing to talk to the Tories, had indicated that they would also like to talk, officially, to Labour. (I think secret conversations had been going on over the weekend.) And Brown said that he was going to stand down as Labour leader; a new leader would be in place in time for the party conference. This bombshell immediately shifted the game on. The Conservatives, having until then refused the Liberals their cherished referendum on some kind of electoral reform, suddenly yielded. At that point, the thing that I thought so unlikely on Sunday became likely. Parallel sets of talks continued on Monday night and into Tuesday. A Lib/Lab coalition, with the support or acquiescence of some of the minor parties, was just a possibility in terms of votes in the Commons. But a Lib/Con coalition, if policy differences could be overcome or at least accommodated, would have an overall majority in the Commons of about 80: comfortable.

At some point on Tuesday the Lib/Lab talks stopped. The Lib/Con talks continued. By mid-afternoon, most people could sense what was going to happen. It was just a matter of the machinery. Late in the afternoon, Brown emerged again to say that he was going to Buckingham Palace, immediately, to resign as Prime Minister, and that he was also immediately standing down as Labour leader. He wished the new government well. He was proud of what Labour had achieved in its 13 years in government. He was proud to have been Prime Minister, but still prouder to be a husband and father. It was very moving. His wife stood beside him, and then the door of number 10 opened and out came their two little boys, and the family walked hand in hand down to the car to go to the palace.

An hour or so later, David Cameron entered Downing Street as Prime Minister.

The following morning, in another piece of choreography, Nick Clegg walked up Downing Street. Just as he got to the door of number 10, it was opened by the Prime Minister himself. Handshakes and waves and pats on the back; after you, no, after you. And in they went. In the next few hours, the full scale of what the Liberals had gained during the talks emerged. Nick Clegg is deputy Prime Minister. There are four more Liberals in a cabinet of, I think, 23: Vince Cable is the Business Secretary; David Laws is Chief Secretary to the Treasury; Chris Huhne is at Energy and Climate Change; Douglas Alexander is Scottish Secretary. There will be a further 15 Liberals in junior government posts.

That afternoon, Cameron and Clegg strolled out together to give a press conference in the garden behind number 10. The pair of them exuded relaxed bonhomie, but were also grandiloquent. This wasn’t just a new government; it was a new kind of government. Cameron generously described the government he was about to lead as ‘Liberal-Conservative’. Or was the written form ‘liberal Conservative’? Was he saying something to the right wing of his own party about the particular Conservative tradition he wished to inherit? He and Nick had considered some kind of ‘confidence and supply’ arrangement, whereby the Liberals, in exchange for some political concessions, would stand aside at votes to let the Tories get their business through, but had decided that they could do a whole lot better than that. They were going to govern for a full five years, and together bring the country out of its current financial difficulties. The journalists were fascinated. One of them reminded Cameron that he had once said, when asked what was his favourite political joke, ‘Nick Clegg.’ Clegg said, ‘Did you really say that?’ and pretended to storm off. Cameron cried, ‘Don’t go.’ He would be happy to eat his words. It was kiss-and-make-up time after a lovers’ tiff, in the Downing Street garden, in front of millions of people, with the birds singing. Then they strolled back inside.

Shortly afterwards, the text of the agreement between the two governing parties was published. It does seem to be evidence of a genuine conversation, with give and take on both sides. I’m afraid — though how would I know? — that my own party probably said to the Liberals on Monday and Tuesday, from a much weaker position than the Conservatives, ‘This is our manifesto. Do you want to sign up to it?’ And the Liberals said, ‘No thanks. We’ve had a better offer.’

There will be an acceleration in the reduction in the budget deficit, with an emphasis on cuts in public spending rather than tax rises. People earning less than £10,000 a year will be taken out of income tax. The proposal to increase the inheritance tax threshold to a million pounds has been dropped. The tax break for married couples will be postponed. There will be a serious look at the possibility of taxing financial transactions. A committee will be set up to see if banks can be broken up, so that high-street and casino operations are separated. Trident will be renewed, though the government will look for cost savings in the process. There will be five-year fixed-term parliaments. There will be an elected House of Lords. There will be a referendum on the alternative vote system for the House of Commons, with the parties free to argue for or against changing the current system during the campaign. ID cards and the national identity database will be scrapped. People found innocent after a criminal investigation or trial won’t have their DNA kept. There will be new nuclear power stations, but the Liberals will be allowed to abstain when the vote comes. There will be several unambiguously green measures on energy generation and conservation. Schools teaching poor children will get more money. The Tories will pursue their policy of letting people set up their own ‘free’ schools, outside local-authority control.

Seven pages like that. A remarkable hotch-potch of measures, some enlightened, libertarian and long overdue, some crazy (‘free’ schools, more nuclear power when safe green technologies are now available and viable). The key to the success or failure of this government will be the impact of the actual measures taken to reduce the budget deficit. If ordinary people in their millions seriously suffer, while bankers in the end are allowed to go on living their grotesque lives with no discernible inconvenience, the new-government gloss will come off quickly. A rejuvenated Labour opposition, led in all probability by David Miliband, will easily find its range, presenting itself as the only large progressive party in the UK, with the Liberals so tainted. But if the Liberal influence can see to it that the pain to come is inflicted with a sense of social justice, a coalition government which can point to major achievements in the areas of civil liberties and constitutional reform, areas which Labour so shamefully neglected or opposed, could well last the full five years, and get a second term.

Just as a matter of interest, here’s what I wrote in the diary on 12 June last year:

‘On 5 June 2009 [the day after the local and European elections in which Labour performed so catastrophically] at about half past ten in the morning, I was walking past the back of the Foreign Office and Downing Street just as Brown was conducting his reshuffle (though I didn’t know he was doing that until later in the day). I said to the person I was with that if I were Brown, I would call in Nick Clegg and Vince Cable. I would offer Clegg the Home Office and Cable the Exchequer, and one or two other cabinet jobs to Liberals. After further conversation, I would hold a press conference announcing the coalition, and making the following statement.

“The date of the next general election will be 22 May 2010. That is a Saturday. We hope for a better turn-out on Saturdays than we have been getting on Thursdays. Additionally, anyone who wants a postal vote can have one. Parliament will have six weeks’ holiday this year. We’ll stop work on Friday 7 August and start again on Monday 21 September. The first three weeks of September will be enough time for the party conferences. During the autumn, the coalition government will bring in a bill to establish proportional representation as from that election (the form to be decided before we introduce the bill); to establish fixed-term five-year parliaments as from that date, dissolvable only by a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons; to reconstitute the House of Lords as an 80%-elected, 20%-appointed revising chamber with a fixed number of members, those first elections to occur at the same time as the Commons elections; and to prepare a written constitution for the UK.

There will be another bill going through Parliament at the same time, proposing the complete overhaul of the expenses and allowances system: notably, MPs who have constituencies outside London will be given a flat nightly rate for being in London, which they can spend on their accommodation however they like; and MPs will not be allowed to have continuous other jobs.

We shall abandon ID cards. We shall abandon the plan to record and keep on computer all phone calls, emails and other electronic communications made by people in the UK; we shall abandon the part-privatisation of the Post Office, since if we can afford to spend hundreds of billions saving the banks we can afford to keep a much-loved service in public ownership, even if it is losing money.

Thank you. I’m now going to get on with governing the country.”

Total fantasy, of course. That afternoon, Brown held a press conference to announce his reshuffle. Completely tribal, making the best of a diminishing pool of talent, heavily reliant on the House of Lords, acknowledging his debt to Mandelson by making him First Secretary of State (the title Major invented for Heseltine) and giving him other titles and a huge department. It won’t stop the rot.’

Quite a lot of my fantasy looks like becoming reality — under the Conservatives.

We came here on 3 June. The weather is currently glorious, and has been so for over a week. This afternoon, it’s seriously hot outside. The place looks wonderful. Jean-Paul cut the grass last Thursday. We’ve bought lots of flowers, planted in pots or in the ground, and I’ve even started edible gardening in a miniscule way — four tomato plants and nine lettuces. It’s a kind of tribute to Albert. Maybe I shall be more ambitious next year.

At the end of May, Helen and I both sort-of retired. I say ‘sort-of’, because I think Helen will do a day or two a week in schools in London in the winter, and I’m available for foreign trips on behalf of Teachers TV if Andrew Bethell wants me to do that; also, I’ve done three days’ writing work for Mike Raleigh’s little educational consultancy firm, Owen Ltd (named after Robert Owen, who was born in Newtown, down the road from where Mike lives), and I’m happy to do more — £600 a day is good pay. Even if we continue to work a bit, our lives have changed completely. We intend to be here until the end of October, apart from a trip down to Italy at the end of August to stay in a villa near Pienza which Bronwyn and Stephen have hired, and in London from November to March, apart from a fortnight back here for Christmas and New Year. We’ll be back here again next spring. That’ll be the pattern.

At the moment, it still feels strange and delightful to get up every morning and then decide what to do. And the sense of this holiday stretching indefinitely into the future, to the end of our lives… Naturally, the constant voice in my head is saying, ‘Don’t fritter it. Use it. Apply seat of pants to seat of chair.’

In late May and early June, Mike Raleigh took a solitary journey to north-west Spain, driving the little sports car which he bought as a surprise for Sue last October. He stayed in Santiago de Compostela, León, Salamanca, Segovia and Bilbao, where Kate Myers joined him. They went on to San Sebastián, then crossed into France and walked for a day or two in the Pyrenees. Mike dropped Kate at Bergerac airport, and then stayed with two different couples in the Gers and the Vendée before arriving here for two nights. I think the trip was consoling for him, and he was glad to know that he could confront the melancholy that comes with being alone. Anyhow, we gave him a good time here; he enjoyed this bedroom where I’m writing, with its view down the garden, and the lovely terrasse where he could smoke (his only vice, and this is not the moment to nag him about it). In Galicia, he had discovered the 19th-century poet Rosalía de Castro (who wrote in Gallego). I hadn’t heard of her, but by the time he arrived two copies of her collected poems had been delivered by the excellent Amazon. His telling me about her caused me to tell him about Machado, and I ordered Campos de Castilla at the same time. Mike asked me to translate En abril, las aguas mil, which I’ve done.

That’s the only serious literary brainwork I’ve done this month. A delightful divertissement has been to edit and proof-read Paul Ashton’s splendid emerging Dictionary of Artists and Designers. There will eventually be some 500 entries in the dictionary, ranging over three millennia, the entire world, and all forms of art and design. The writing is authoritative in tone — expert to layperson — and the background research impeccable. None of the artists or designers exists or existed.

I’ve made good progress towards getting Becoming our own Experts on line. The wonderful Vanessa has found a firm that will do the electronic scanning (the book has about 450 pages) and send the scanned pages electronically to Mark Leicester in New Zealand for not much more than £100. Mark will then do the design. So www.becomingourownexperts.com should be on the internet soon. I’ll then need to alert a few people in the world of educational research to its existence.

George Osborne, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, presented his first budget last Tuesday.

VAT will go up to 20% from 17.5% next January. Capital gains tax for higher-rate taxpayers will rise from 18% to 28% immediately. Child benefit will be frozen for the next three years. There will be a two-year pay freeze for public-sector workers, but those earning less than £21,000 will be paid £250 extra each year for the next two years. From April next year, the basic state pension will rise in line with earnings, prices or by 2.5%, whichever is the greatest. The government will accelerate the increase in the state pension age to 66. The personal income-tax allowance will be increased by £1,000 from next April to £7,475. There will be welfare cuts worth £11bn by 2014/15: tax credits for families earning more than £40,000 will be reduced; housing benefit will be restricted to a maximum of £400 a week; from 2013, there will be a medical assessment for Disability Living Allowance for new and existing claimants. The child element of the child tax credit will be increased by £150 above inflation.

Corporation tax will be cut to 27% next year, and by a further 1% a year for the next three years to 24%. The small companies tax rate will be cut to 20%. From 2011, there will be a levy on UK banks and building societies, and on the UK operations of foreign banks. The levy is expected to raise more than £2bn a year. Smaller banks will not pay the levy.

The government will sell its shareholding in the air traffic control agency, the student loan book and, if it can, the Tote.

Taken together, these measures are projected to bring the budget deficit down to 1.1% of GDP by 2015/16 from 10.1% at the moment. The deficit is expected to be £149bn in 2010/11 (lower than Alastair Darling predicted in his budget in March) and £116bn in 2011/12.

Government spending will be £637bn in 2010/11, and is predicted to be £711bn in 2015/16. The UK economy is expected to grow by 1.2% in 2010, 2.3% in 2011 and 2.8% in 2012. Unemployment is expected to peak at 8.1% in 2010/11, and then to fall each year to 6.1% in 2015/16.

In macro-economic terms, the question is: is the overall deflationary effect of the budget measures on the economy, an effect which will be accelerated by public-spending cuts to be announced in the autumn, going to push us into a double-dip recession? Joseph Stiglitz, my favourite economist, thinks so. In an interview with The Independent, he says: ‘If you have a household that can't pay its debts, you tell it to cut back on spending to free up the cash to pay the debts. But in a national economy, if you cut back on your spending, then economic activity goes down, nobody invests, the amount of tax you take goes down, the amount you pay out in unemployment benefits goes up — and you don't have enough money to pay your debts… The lesson is not that you cut back spending, but that you redirect it. You cut out the war in Afghanistan. You cut a couple of hundred billion dollars of wasteful military expenditure. You cut out oil subsidies. There's a long list of things we can cut. But you increase spending in other areas, such as research and development, infrastructure, education… I haven't done the calculation for Britain, but, for the US, all you need is a return on government investment of 5 to 6 per cent and the long-term deficit debt is lowered.’ The article refers to an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies which suggests that the budget will cost the poor 2.5% of their income, while the rich will lose 1%. So it could be that the budget is both macro-economically wrong and socially unjust.

I’ve said my piece before about the hypocrisy in the Conservatives’ accusation that Labour is responsible for the size of the deficit now. If the Conservatives had been in power in the years when Gordon Brown was Chancellor, they would have been even more laissez-faire with the banks than he was. Brown and Darling pretty much saved the world’s financial system in the autumn of 2008; they get no credit for that. But the deficit does need to be brought down, and Labour lost the election; so it can be blamed for its size.

The main progressive measures in the package, which show the Liberal influence in the coalition, are the new arrangements for increasing the state pension each year, the increase in the personal allowance for income tax, and the increase in capital gains tax for higher-rate taxpayers. (This last was a blatant split-the-difference fudge. The just thing to do would have been to tax capital gains at the same rate as income, but Cameron and Osborne would have upset too many of their supporters.) The increase in VAT was expected and inevitable. The freezing of public-sector pay is harsh, but the £250 extra a year for lower-paid workers slightly takes the edge off the harshness. Just how harsh the freeze will be depends on inflation, of course; there may well be strikes in the public sector over the next two years.

It’s very unfair that private-sector workers won’t suffer any freeze on their wages, but governments of left and right have long given up trying to have any kind of incomes policy to cover the whole workforce. At least this government has kept Labour’s increase in the rate of tax on incomes over £150,000 at 50%. The key thing will be the details on the bank levy. If the levy really hits the banks, really makes them cough up money on a scale to make some kind of amends for their crimes up to 2008, there will be some public sense of justice being done.

I don’t know enough to have an opinion about benefit cuts. I believe that there are plenty of people who claim Incapacity Benefit falsely, for example; but there are more people who claim it legitimately, and whose already curtailed lives would be made unjustly worse by a cut in their benefit. It will all depend on how fair the assessments are.

In the week before the budget, Osborne announced a reform of banking regulation. The Bank of England gets much more power in the supervision of banks; the Financial Services Authority, which Gordon Brown created in 1997, has its power greatly reduced.

The one big political casualty in the coalition government since the election is David Laws, a Liberal who was for a few days Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and who would have had a major influence on government economic and financial policies. It emerged that he had been claiming for rent he was paying to his long-term partner, a man, when the rules say that MPs can’t claim for rent paid to spouses, including partners in gay relationships. Laws resigned. I’m not very sympathetic. Laws is gay: fine, of course. He didn’t want anyone, his family especially, to know about his sexuality: fine, of course, although such secrecy is difficult to maintain. He’s the MP for Yeovil, so he had a right to claim for accommodation in London: fine, of course. So why didn’t he rent accommodation from anyone with whom he wasn’t having a relationship, claim for that, leave some of his stuff there, use it as a kind of office, and then go and live with his partner? He could have given some of the money he was claiming to his partner on an informal basis. If Laws had been a person dependent on his MP’s salary, I could see the argument that it might be beyond his means to claim for accommodation he wasn’t living in; but he’s a millionaire, having made his fortune in the City before he went into politics.

The Saville Report into the events of 30 January 1972 in Derry (‘Bloody Sunday’) has at last been published. It is unequivocal in its condemnation of the actions of some of the British soldiers in firing on innocent, unarmed people who posed no threat to them, and of the orders given to the soldiers by some officers. The effect of the publication of the report on the Catholic community in Derry, and in Northern Ireland generally, has been dramatic. I think many of those people expected some kind of a fudge, or even a whitewash of the army’s actions. The frankness and explicitness of the report’s language was therefore unexpected and welcome. My friend Joe Mahon, who lives in Derry, confirmed what I had already seen from the live pictures of relatives of the dead speaking in public in the Guildhall there, that the report has given them the immense emotional relief that comes when justice is done and the truth told. David Cameron in the House of Commons was eloquent in his unreserved apology to the families of the bereaved, and in his full acceptance of the report’s findings. Harriet Harman for Labour was merely competent; she read what she needed to say from a paper. It was a moment when oratory was called for; Cameron had it, she didn’t.

Apart from its judgment on the soldiers’ actions on Bloody Sunday, the report condemns some of the soldiers for lying persistently to the enquiry. In my opinion, no soldier should be prosecuted for the killings, because of the extraordinary history of Northern Ireland since then. Republican and Loyalist murderers have in effect been forgiven their crimes in the effort to bring this dreadful chapter in the province’s history to a close. The soldiers should be treated similarly. However, I would vigorously prosecute those who lied to the enquiry in the cynical belief that the passage of time would make it impossible for their actions on that day to be accurately identified.

I’ve recently read, 20 years after I should have done, The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes’s wonderful book about the transportation of convicts from Britain and Ireland to Australia. It is an account of brutality so extreme that there are passages which are hard to read; but also of the relative liberality of some governors who had a notion of punishment as rehabilitation, and could see that the future of the colony depended on the efforts and skills of the rehabilitated. It is shocking to be reminded of the triviality of the crimes for which many convicts were transported, although Hughes rejects the romantic notion that Australia’s first white settlers were mainly heroic fighters for the freedoms which we now enjoy, who had been expelled from Britain and Ireland for political reasons; only a tiny minority were Tolpuddle Martyrs and their like. White settlement in Tasmania brought about the genocide of the entire Aboriginal population there; Hughes says that this is the only example of genocide in the full sense in the history of British imperialism. I don’t think that’s right. We committed genocide against the Carib and Arawak peoples of the Caribbean (no doubt with the help of other European nations). I don’t know enough in detail about the slaughters in Africa to say whether or not any of them counted as genocide. Hughes suggests, at any rate, that the dreadful actions in Tasmania gave other nations an example of the extermination of an entire people, which some of them later followed.

Then I read The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes, which brilliantly recounts the major scientific achievements of the late 18th- and early 19th-century in Britain, principally featuring Joseph Banks, the Herschels (brother and sister and, later, William Herschel’s son John) and Humphrey Davy. I didn’t know that Keats’s line in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ —

‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken’

— is a reference to William Herschel’s discovery of Uranus. It’s a beautiful book: a reminder that greatness generally is accompanied by obsessiveness, a driven determination to discover and do more and more, to go on, undistracted.

Now I’m reading Hazlitt. There are times when his relentless rhetoric, his piling of conceit upon conceit, tires me, but overall he deserves his reputation as one of the greatest prose writers in English. It is easy to praise the wonderful relaxed vigour of his style in the famous account of the boxing match at Hungerford, or in his tribute to Cavanagh, the fives player. I admire equally the profundity of the wisdom in his political writing. On the French Revolution: ‘— it was not the Revolution that produced the change in the face of society, but the change in the texture of society that produced the Revolution, and brought its outward appearance into a nearer correspondence with its inward sentiments.’ On violent revolutions in general: ‘That the people are rash in trusting to the promises of their friends, is true; they are more rash in believing their enemies. If they are led to expect too much in theory, they are satisfied with too little in reality. Their anger is sometimes fatal while it lasts, but it is not roused very soon, nor does it last very long. Of all dynasties, anarchy is the shortest lived. They are violent in their revenge, no doubt; but it is because justice has been long denied them, and they have to pay off a very long score at a very short notice.’

In mid-June I popped back to England on the plane, to join Andrew Bannerman in another performance of his Lyrical Ballads show, this time in support of the restoration fund for St Alkmund’s church in Shrewsbury. In Andrew’s prose commentary linking the poems, he quotes several times from Hazlitt’s lovely essay ‘My First Acquaintance with Poets’. I didn’t read the full essay until last night. When Hazlitt describes walking six miles with Coleridge from Wem back towards Shrewsbury after Coleridge had stayed the night with his family (where Coleridge received the letter from Tom Wedgwood offering him an annuity of £150 a year, which caused him instantly to abandon his plan to become the Unitarian minister in Shrewsbury — ‘Coleridge seemed to make up his mind to close with this proposal in the act of tying on one of his shoes’), I thought to myself, ‘Well, those two men would have walked through Harmer Hill, where David, Lindsay and Tom live.’ And sure enough, after a couple of pages describing the topics Coleridge had discoursed on during the walk, come the sentences: ‘If I had the quaint muse of Sir Philip Sidney to assist me, I would write a Sonnet to the Road between W—m and Shrewsbury, and immortalise every step of it by some fond enigmatical conceit. I would swear that the very milestones had ears, and that Harmer-hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet, as he passed!’ Wonderful! I wonder why Hazlitt felt the need to leave the ‘e’ out of ‘Wem’. It isn’t a swear word or the name of a person one wants to protect.

Michael Foot died earlier this year. I gave a tribute to his connection with our Lyrical Ballads show at the beginning of the second half of the performance last month:

‘Andrew and I first performed this evening’s programme in January 1998, the year of the 200th anniversary of the publication of Lyrical Ballads. A distinguished member of the audience that night was Michael Foot. Michael sat in the front row, and punctuated our performance with most audible and frequent grunts of approval. He had with him his dog Disraeli, who was of a great age, as was Michael. Disraeli too made his appreciation heard, in counterpoint with Michael’s, while moving his ancient hindquarters from side to side in a way which worried Andrew and me as readers, but didn’t in the event cause any embarrassing distraction. Michael was unconcerned; he simply wound the dog’s lead more and more tightly around his own leg.

For our second performance, a few months later in London, Michael kindly agreed to introduce us to the audience, and made a brilliant short improvised speech in which he linked the radical, dissenting tradition to which Coleridge and Wordsworth belonged, at least in their early lives, with events in our own day. Andrew and I were very honoured to have such a great man as one of our supporters, and we dedicate this evening’s performance to his memory.’

Since I last wrote, I’ve done another translation from Machado: ‘To a Dry Elm’. The circumstances in which Machado wrote the poem are very touching.  He met his future wife Leonor in 1907 in Soria, in Castille.  They married in 1909, when she was 15 and he was 34.  He was a schoolteacher.  In 1911, he was awarded a grant to study in Paris with Henri Bergson, and Leonor went with him.  In July of that year, she vomited blood and was diagnosed with tuberculosis.  They returned to Soria.  The poem is dated May 1912, and Leonor’s recovery is the miracle Machado hopes for at the end of the poem.  She died on 1 August of that year, and was buried close to the elm tree.

I’ve written three original poems. I finished ‘The Vernacular’, a little thing based on another Irish story which Peter Logue told me. I wrote ‘Prayer before Death’, in the manner of MacNeice’s ‘Prayer before Birth’. Something Peter Hetherington wrote to me in the course of his essential criticism of that poem caused me to re-read MacNeice’s ‘The sunlight on the garden’, and I tried to copy its form in a mildly erotic fantasy, spoken by a woman, called ‘Her Night Thoughts’, one line of which had been suggested to me by a woman friend. I couldn’t manage MacNeice’s rhymes linking the last syllable of the first line with the first of the second and the last of the third with the first of the fourth, as well as everything else, but the piece is skilful enough.

Stephen and Theresa came last Monday and stayed three nights, on the their way down to the Charente. We had the happiest and most relaxed time with them. On Friday we went up to Saint Brieuc and spent 24 hours with Jim and Jacqui Payne. We drove to the Pointe du Roselier and admired the magnificent bay, then visited an old brickworks which has been turned into an industrial museum. Yesterday morning we wandered in the market, and bought the most echt, warty, split, multi-coloured tomatoes I’ve ever seen. Delicious they were when we got home last night. At a stall selling crabs and lobsters, an old man bought two large spider crabs. The digits on the weighing machine had almost come to a stop at eleven euros. The woman took the crabs off the machine and said, ‘Onze euros.’ This didn’t satisfy the man. ‘Pesez-les encore,’ he said. When the digits had come to a complete stop, they read 10.99. He was happy to receive his extra centime in change. Later we found the only old-fashioned bar in the town, and sat outside in the sunshine. I had two glasses of delicious Corsican rosé. Then Jim kindly bought us lunch: a very good steack tartare in my case. We drove home through the deserted interior of Brittany on a Saturday in July. (The RN12 on its spectacular high bridge by-passing Saint Brieuc had been stationary with traffic.)

On Wednesday, David, Lindsay and Tom will come and stay for a fortnight. Lindsay has had unwelcome news about her lung cancer. The operation did not permanently remove all the lesions. They have reappeared (I’m not sure whether on one or both lungs) and the condition is incurable, although it can and will be restrained by chemotherapy. She is being admirably positive about the situation, determined to get on with life whatever happens and however long she has. As I’ve written before, we will support her, David and Tom emotionally and practically through the coming years.

I’m just about to finish a love poem for Helen, called ‘The Stalker’.

We are in southern Tuscany, in a converted farmhouse next to the road which runs between Pienza and San Quirico. Bronwyn and Stephen Mellor have rented three of the five apartments in the house for a fortnight, and we are their guests. Their daughter Alix and her boyfriend Jeremy arrived from Australia yesterday.

The country around here, as I know from our summers in the 1980s, is breathtakingly beautiful. The earth is between blonde and grey. At this time of year, the corn has long been harvested, and tractors with caterpillar tracks are pulling ploughs up and down the hilly fields. Big bunches of black grapes hang for a few weeks more along severe straight lines of vines. The views in all directions, at any time of day, are magnificent: Monte Amiata to the south, Montalcino on its high hill to the west, the undulating lands towards Siena northward, Pienza close by to the east. In the mornings the sunlight is lemon. At evening, the low sun creates dapples, dimples of shadow in the hollows of the fields. The days are hot but not unbearable, the nights cool.

After David, Lindsay and Tom left us on 10 August, our friend Deirdre Finan came to stay for a few days. Then we started southward on 21 August, and stayed three nights with Stephen and Theresa in the Charente; as pleasurable as ever. I like to do something physical on the property with Stephen when I’m there. This time we cleared the drain at the back of the house, cut back hedges, and rescued an oak from the clutches of ivy which had grown a trunk almost as thick as the oak’s. I missed my swim in the river this year, working too late on our last day, but enjoyed many swims in the pool, always nude. I become semi-feral at Barraud. Stephen and Theresa came with us as far as Ribérac on the morning of our departure. We had coffee in the Café des Colonnes, and said goodbye. Then Helen and I took two slow days to drive through the Dordogne, the Lot, the Aveyron, the Tarn and the Hérault: la France profonde at its loveliest and emptiest. We stayed the first night at the Hôtel Le Belle Rive below Najac, by the Aveyron river. From the opposite bank, a steep cliff covered in deciduous trees rises to the castle which dominates the high town. When night fell, the illuminated castle’s walls and towers seemed to float in the black. On the second night, after more quiet wandering down D roads over high plains, through thick forests, across rivers low amongst their rocks after this dry summer, we came down to Lozère, blazing hot, and stayed at the Hôtel de la Paix. The next day we had a short, fast drive on the motorway to Marseille, where we stayed a night with Mary and Jacques. We shall stay longer with them on the way back to Brittany.

We came into Italy on Friday last week, zooming round the sensational autostrada which follows the arc of the riviera. I first drove that road more than 30 years ago. It’s showing its age now, and must be very expensive to maintain. The succession of viaducts and tunnels, taken at speed and in close proximity to other flying metal objects, induces a dangerous exhilaration after three or four hours. We stayed at a hotel in Moneglia. The room was comfortable, but the restaurant looked dreary to me — too many tables laid out for pensione guests going through the eat/swim/laze/eat motions of their holiday, as last year, as next year — so, after a bit of research in the Michelin, I found a restaurant high up above the town, and phoned. No, he regretted, he was full — well, almost full. There was a little table outside, but the weather was bad. It might rain. I said I would come and recce the place, while Helen was washing her hair. I snaked up the mountainside, sometimes needing to stop and reverse in order to get round tight corners, and arrived. The table outside was on a little balcony of its own. I said yes, we’ll take it and bring pullovers. Manoeuvred back down to the hotel, picked up Helen, manoeuvred back up to the restaurant, and we sat down in the humid night, the cloud low above us on the mountain.

We were then presented with one of the most delicious and excessive meals I’ve ever eaten. All fish, no choice: langoustine tails in tempura with orange; a boiled white fish (name forgotten), warm, with potatoes and mayonnaise; tuna with tomatoes, onions and croutons; linguine in a lobster sauce; a whole sea bass, baked in salt; langoustines and dressed crab, hot (of which, when we had finished, we were offered a second helping, which we declined); hot crêpes containing ice cream; hot dark chocolate with bitter cherries and more ice cream. Two bottles of dry white wine: one good and local; one unfiltered, from near the Slovenian border, its name Slovenian not Italian, sensational. Sweet wine left on the table with the dolci. What about a digestivo? ‘No grazie, I must drive, downhill, and judge those bends.’ Coffee.

I cleared my head in the hotel swimming pool the next morning, and we eased on down to Pisa, where we met Bronwyn and Stephen, and came here.

On Wednesday the joint owner of this property, Claudio Barbi, took us to Montalcino to visit the vineyard of San Lorenzo, belonging to his friend Luciano Ciolfi. We drove up past the famous little town and kept climbing before turning right down a small road which soon becomes a strada bianca. Luciano’s farm is 500 metres above sea level. He’s quite young — I would say about 35 — and has revolutionised production since taking the place over from his parents. Previously, the vines produced table grapes. 11 years ago, Luciano planted the Sangiovese vines from which Rosso and Brunello di Montalcino are made. 2004 was his first vintage. We admired the disciplined rows of plants and the dark fruit hanging from each. Because there are maximum limits in Montalcino for volume of wine per hectare (80 quintals for Brunello and 90 for Rosso), there is much pruning of the less favoured bunches throughout the growing season. Luciano said that there would be more pruning later this month. September, he said, is the crucial month for quality: a good warm September, and there will be more and better Brunello; a mixed or poor September, and there will be less Brunello and more Rosso. He will know for sure in December how much of each he can make. At this altitude and on south-facing slopes, the vines get maximum sunshine and few parasites. From where we stood, we could see the mountains of Corsica.

We went into the shed housing the oak barrels and stainless-steel tanks. Luciano explained the process: from harvest in mid-October to tank, then to barrel (in his case for much longer than the regulation minimum time for Brunello and Rosso respectively), then back to tank, then by tube and pump to the bottling machine. Then a minimum of four months in bottle for the Brunello, which may be sold from 1 January of the fifth year after the harvest. We tasted the 2008 Rosso, the 2005 Brunello and (a surprise) a rare Brunello Riserva (2006 I think) still in barrel and not able to be sold until 2012. Luciano had provided bread, cheese and sausage. Over the bread he poured some of his own olive oil. Grappa, both white and yellow, is made from the skins and pips of his grapes. These days wine-makers are not allowed also to make grappa; the skins and pips go off to a distillery near Siena. But the spirit which comes back bears the name San Lorenzo, and we tried both kinds. All the drinks were superb. We bought a case of the Brunello, three bottles of the yellow grappa and one of the white. I might go back for a case of the Rosso. [I did.] We would have bought some oil, but it had all been sold. Claudio has since given us a can; he uses Luciano’s oil at home.

The visit was a wonderful experience.

As I wrote a couple of days ago, the enormous pale fields are being ploughed. Only tractors with caterpillar tracks can make progress on land that rises and falls so steeply. After the first ploughing, the earth lies in huge dry clods, tumbling over each other, such that it seems impossible that seeds could ever take root in it. But there will be harrowing later, and I guess that winter wheat will be planted before Christmas. The skill of the ploughman is impressive. Early this morning, he started on the hillside immediately next to our house southward. He ploughed all round the extreme edge, once. I suppose he was giving himself turning room for the ends of the furrows, but it also seemed to me, sentimentally, that he was cutting out his work like a tailor: ‘Right, this is the size of it.’ All day since then (it’s now half past four), the diesel engine has been growling away. The ploughman takes the field in sections, changing gear up and down depending on the gradient. The cracked stubbled land narrows as the stiff grey waves broaden. I’m sure there is knowledge informing the directions he takes — up and down, or back and across — perhaps to do with the way the water runs off earth turned this way or that, perhaps to economise on diesel. There are gradients too steep to plough upward even in first gear. Here he ploughs downhill, then climbs back to the top with the plough lifted. Such slow work must be dispiriting. The eventual effect is extraordinarily beautiful. Newly ploughed earth, even in a dry region like this, is of course darker for a few hours than that ploughed yesterday. There is still an enormous area to be done, in all directions, and the tractors are slower and the ploughs narrower than on easier land.

(Having stopped writing, and gone to view my ploughman’s progress, I see that, having done the smaller segment of the hillside up and down or back and across, he is taking the larger segment in diminishing concentric circles, so no need for turning space at the ends of furrows. Maybe my thought about the tailor sizing up his garment wasn’t completely sentimental.)

(Later still, Claudio tells me that circular ploughing on a hill is always done anti-clockwise, so that the ground is turned uphill, against the slope.)

The house has a swimming pool large enough for me to get up steam properly before turning round. I swim two or three times a day. Others find the water too cold, now the summer is ending. I make noises about being thrown into the English Channel at two, and told to get on with it. (Not completely true, of course.)

On Monday, the ploughman finished the job. After two days of circling, the remaining circle became too small to conveniently turn in, so he changed back to straight up and down, as with the earlier, smaller segment. The gentle contrast between three shades — the previous day’s ploughing, that day’s work, and the stubble still to be done — was lovely. He came up to see Claudio when he had finished. I congratulated him. He laughed and said it was easy work; in any case he had been ploughing since he was 14, and he was now 63, so he had got the hang of it.

I know more about the next stages of the work than I did. Once the rain has softened the ploughed earth, it will be harrowed, and then in November wheat will be sown, for bread. Frumento is the word Claudio used; I had trigo in my head, but that must be Spanish. [It is.] Froment is the grain from which the sweet French crêpes are made; and in the first chapter of the The Mayor of Casterbridge, before the shocking event of the sale of the wife for five guineas, the husband and she are drinking furmity, ‘a mixture of corn in the grain, milk, raisins, currants, and what not’, laced heavily with rum in his case, more lightly in hers.

There is one more enormous field to be turned, but that will be planted with broad beans, fave. To be prepared for beans, the ground only needs harrowing, not deep ploughing. The day after the ploughman finished, Claudio’s father, the owner of the farm and the farmhouse together with his wife and Claudio, began harrowing, and did half the field in a day. He is 82, and a few weeks ago had a heart operation and a pacemaker fitted. When I saw him first, ten days ago, moving slowly and leaning on a stick, I assumed that his working days were over. He drives here with his wife twice a day in a little Ford, but it is she who does all the routine work of emptying the dustbins, feeding the hens, watering the flowers and herbs. I was wrong; here he was, back on the tractor for the first time since the operation and, so his wife and Claudio said, happy. They had both warned him against overtaxing himself but, said Claudio, ‘He is a man who will do what he will do.’

On Saturday Helen, Alix, Jeremy and I drove up Monte Amiata. Above a certain altitude, you are in the cool of chestnut forests. Higher still, the chestnut gives way to beech. There is skiing in the winter, and we parked as close to the summit as we could get, by the closed-up hotels, and walked to the very top. The day was quite misty, but there was still a spectacular view to the east, across to Lake Trasimeno and the mountains of the Marches. We walked down and drove home in a complete silence deepened by our blocked ears. When we arrived back at the house, Helen fell on the gravel and sprained the ankle of the foot which was operated on last December. She hasn’t left the house since, but is slowly recovering. She has swum twice.

From Thursday to Sunday there was the annual cheese festival in Pienza. The climax was a cheese-rolling competition on Sunday afternoon in the cathedral piazza. Representatives of the six contrade of the town rolled pecorino cheeses across the cobbles towards a stick. Concentric circles around the stick carry different values: the closer to the stick, the more points. A great crowd watched. There were two referees to judge matters of doubt. The winner was loudly cheered. I had asked Claudio what the prize would be: ‘A year’s supply of pecorino?’ ‘The honour,’ he said.

That evening all of us except Helen ate in a restaurant still proud of the fact that some of the scenes in The English Patient had been filmed in the street outside. There were photographs of Anthony Minghella with the staff, and copies of an interview with him in which he praised the roast pork (excellent, according to Stephen and Jeremy; I had duck, also delicious). It reawakened my great sadness at Anthony’s death.

On Monday I took everyone except Helen to Siena, and came straight back. The four of them then spent the day there — the first time for all except Stephen — before Alix and Jeremy caught the train to Florence, again for their first visit. Stephen and Bronwyn caught the bus back. I shall go and pick up Alix and Jeremy at Siena station later this afternoon.

It’s Monday morning at the end of summer or beginning of autumn in Marseille. I’m in the Place Jean Jaurès, known as La Plaine. The weather is perfect — the easy shirt-sleeves temperature which leaves you in your own skin, lets you feel more alert than does the somnolence of high summer in the south. Marseille is an extraordinary place. It has immense charm and a relaxed friendliness which seduce me every time I come here. It’s also, in some respects, a mess. Rubbish lies around everywhere. There is barely a surface — be it park bench, metro station or doorway — not covered in graffiti. The pavements are so cluttered with cars that it’s difficult to know where to walk. Somehow this huge number of people, of all sorts, crammed together in this tight space, manages to get on together most of the time, indeed co-exist stylishly, as long as everyone keeps their good humour. Last night we ate on the little terrasse at the back of Mary’s and Jacques’s apartment. In the dozens of apartments around us were other families quietly eating dinner, on their terrasse if they have one, inside with the window open if not. It worked. But I should think — in fact I know from Mary — that Marseille can be a tiring place to live. And the part of me that feels and admires civic pride would like to do something radical to clean the place up, starting with the imposition of savage penalties for graffiti writers. What is it that causes people, with no other talent, to want to write obscenities and secret signatures on walls? To leave your mark; to urinate on your territory; to remind us optimists, us believers in the possibility of good government, of the dog beneath the skin?

Here we are in a gloomy little hotel on the bank of the Cher (not that you can see the river, hidden behind trees), having driven all the way from Marseille in about seven hours. The principal distinction of Bruère-Allichamps is that it is at the exact centre of France. In the village an old stone post surmounted by a tiny limp tricolore announces this geographical curiosity, as if it represented an achievement of some kind. Ten départments we have crossed today: Bouches du Rhône, Gard, Hérault, Aveyron, Lozère, Cantal, Haute-Loire, Puy de Dôme, Allier, Cher. The drive over the Massif Central was spectacularly lovely: France’s landscape at its grandest. The superbly engineered A75 autoroute whisks you through it, exposing grey mountain villages which must have been extreme in their remoteness before the road was built. The Viaduc de Millau is one of the modern wonders of the world. It’s the second time we’ve been over it — the first was on the way down to Mary’s wedding three years ago — and this time we stopped at the aire on the north side of the valley to look back and admire it.

Last night we went to a restaurant by one of the calanques of Marseille. Jacques drove. We descended the precipitous tiny winding road, with no barriers in case of error, amid a blazing sunset which for ten minutes turned the white rocks an intense pink. The water in the calanque was quite still. There was no wind, and no sound outside the clatter of the restaurant. With the sun gone, the light held for a few minutes on the vertical white cliffs hemming in the little square bay.

The meal was delicious: mainly fish. I had a sea-urchin flan in a sauce made of soft-shelled green crabs, followed by a marmite des pêcheurs. Others had grilled bass or bream. Very good white Cassis. The food was served in that friendly but direct, take-it-or-leave-it way characteristic of Marseille: they don’t do deference here.

The weather changed abruptly as we came off the massif about two hours ago. It’s cool and overcast now, with patches of mist hanging over the river.

Even as I was writing the last entry, I was experiencing unsettling premonitions about the hotel we had chosen to stay in. We had picked it out of the Michelin, as usual, because the description promised pleasant surroundings and had the little red icon of the Michelin man licking his lips, which means ‘good food at moderate prices’. When we arrived, the look of the place already disappointed us, and I almost suggested to Helen that we phone and make up a story about having broken down (they had my mobile phone number) and go elsewhere, but I was tired from the long drive and — more significant — Helen still had her sprained ankle and didn’t want to walk around. If only I had followed my instinct, and trusted the 40 years of experience I have of French hotels!

I can hardly bring myself to write in English about the experience of that evening and — worse — of the next morning, and fortunately I don’t have to, because it’s all recounted in a letter I wrote in French to the Guide Michelin, and sent off on Friday:

We shall see if I get any response from Michelin. Still angry and still wanting revenge, I posted shorter versions of the account, omitting references to the Michelin guide and the happy paragraph at the end, on two big French websites carrying people’s opinions about restaurants where they’ve eaten. I hope I do some damage. The business is almost but not quite out of my system. [I did get a detailed, courteous reply about a month later.]

But to complete a day in which, to stoop to a terrible cliché, I experienced a roller-coaster of emotions, I opened my emails on Thursday evening to read that I had won first prize in the open category of this year’s Stephen Spender Prize for Poetry in Translation, for my translation of the first section of Victor Hugo’s ‘L’Expiation’, which I called ‘The Retreat from Moscow’. So I was thrilled. The prize-giving ceremony is on 10 November in London, and I pocket £750.

Quick hop back to England for a Poetry Society trustees’ meeting. Exquisite coastline east of Brest — the rivers, estuaries and the domino-like dark shapes of oyster and mussel beds visible through the sapphire water; then Guernsey, where Victor Hugo wrote ‘L’Expiation’; before long, the western tip of the Isle of Wight, where my parents’ ashes lie, dust on the down; the Solent, and a big loop into Hampshire, county of my birth, turning back towards Southampton Airport over Winchester, with a beautiful view of the cathedral, of Saint Cross, where my mother was happy living as an evacuee with Mr and Mrs Mattingley, who were kind to her, and of the water meadows where she used to walk and gather buttercups.

(My mother’s first billet as an evacuee in Winchester was a disaster. The woman of the house had two daughters in their late teens or early twenties, and mum, as the most innocent of 13-year-olds, couldn’t understand why so many men clumped up the stairs during the evenings and nights and went into their bedrooms for half an hour or so. She must have described these strange carryings-on to her mother, who removed her instantly from this informal brothel. Apart from her hostess’s lack of common kindness, mum also suffered in that the principal food she was given was seed cake, in great lumps with no sugar [which was rationed, of course, but a kinder woman would have put a little in].)

Hopped back here yesterday, a day later than planned, because on Thursday the French air-traffic controllers had gone on strike, together with many other workers, over the government’s plans to raise the state retirement age. So I had an unscheduled day and night in Southampton.

I’m not especially sympathetic to the strikers’ cause. They live within a vision, which the leaders of the French left have promoted over the years, of endless progress: better pay and pensions, earlier retirement, shorter working hours, kinder conditions. The French left is always talking about les droits acquis; they never talk about les responsabilités acquises. The strikers are right to point to some of the disgraceful measures taken by Sarkozy’s government to benefit the already rich; only a socialist government would reverse those measures. But even if the tax system were strictly fair and progressive, the French state can’t go on paying pensions from age 60, as it has since Mitterrand’s first septannat, while people are living so much longer than ever before, unless the working population is prepared to be more heavily taxed, which no political party has been courageous or foolish enough to propose in its manifesto before an election. So the only alternative is to raise the age at which people receive their state pension. Under the draft law, people can receive at least a partial pension from age 62; if they’ve already worked their full quota of trimestres, as most workers who start work in their teens will have done, they’ll get the full pension then or earlier. People will in any case get a full pension, whether or not they’ve worked their full quota, at 67.

That seems reasonable to me, and it’s clear that unless something like this is done, France’s pension fund will be bankrupt in a few years. I do understand that French workers rely much more on the state pension than do British workers; for many of us with professional pensions, the state pension is a handy top-up rather than something we depend on. But the grand French tradition of descent into the streets whenever the government wants to do something one group or another doesn’t quite like is irritating to me; how the French love to think they’re different from and better than the rest of us! In the UK, the state pensionable age is going to increase, I think, to 66, with no early payments, and we won’t be descending into the streets to protest (although we may on other matters). I despise Sarkozy, but I hope the measure passes.

Today the Labour Party has elected its new leader: Ed Miliband. He beat his older brother David by the narrowest of margins. Under the alternative vote system used for the election, the candidate with least votes in each round of counting is excluded until one of the candidates receives more than 50% of the vote. David was ahead in every round until the last; in every round, including the last, he had the most first-preference votes of MPs and MEPs and of ordinary party members: two thirds of the electoral college. But Ed always led in the one third of the college given to the unions’ vote, and he took more second-preference votes from defeated candidates, and so was just ahead in the last round.

It was an impeccably democratic and comradely contest. One can debate the rights and wrongs of giving such weight to the union vote when it represents people who pay a levy to Labour through their union dues rather than being full individual members. On the one hand, I’d rather that everyone who wants to be a member of the Labour Party pay a full subscription, even if it were necessary to reduce the price so as to avoid the possible charge that some people can’t afford it; on the other hand, the trade unions are where Labour was born. I can’t criticise the alternative vote system, and I hope it will be introduced for the Westminster parliament in time for the next general election (it will if the referendum to be held next May produces a majority in favour of the change). But I think Labour has elected the wrong Miliband. Ed is a nice and very bright man; he did a good job at the Department for Energy and Climate Change; but I don’t think he has the stature, the natural eloquence, the quality of potential statesmanship that his brother has. I imagine the Tories are rather happy this afternoon. With a coalition government which will undergo severe strains of its own between now and 2015, it’s too early to make any predictions about such a remote date; but I just have a feeling that Labour will lose again then, that Ed will stand down, and that his brother, who will still only be 50 and will have had a good rest, will take over.

Andrew Bethell rang on Friday to say that the government is going to stop funding Teachers TV as from the end of April next year. The (once again renamed) Department for Education communicated this news by email: no warning, no invitation to a face-to-face meeting, no thanks for what has been achieved; just the usual brutal bad manners which has been the style of most of the civil servants there since the start. It was Labour’s bad decision to take Teachers TV off air from the end of August, even though two thirds of the viewing was still being done on television, so that now it’s just a website; it is the Tories’ even worse decision to abandon completely a service which is evidently appreciated by hundreds of thousands of educators. Andrew’s shocked, of course. He will see if the service can be maintained on some kind of commercial basis, by which individual schools and training institutions would pay an annual subscription; and perhaps some not-for-profit foundation might want to help.

Stopping the government funding is an act of pure vandalism, dressed up as a necessity under the current financial conditions. Teachers TV costs very little money (£10 million a year), and you would have thought that, even in the government’s own terms, even taking account of whatever ambitions they may have for improving the quality of teaching, it’s proved its worth.

Yesterday George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced the results of the comprehensive spending review 2010: what the UK will spend in the four years beginning in April 2011. For most government departments, and for many people in the UK, the news is harsh. About 490,000 public sector jobs are likely to be lost. On average, departmental budgets will be cut by 19% over four years.

The structural deficit — that is, the exceptional debt the government has taken on in the face of the financial crisis — is intended to be eliminated by 2015. People on various welfare and unemployment benefits face cuts of £7 billion in addition to those of £11 billion announced earlier. Funding for the police will be cut by 4% a year; this will mainly affect civilian support staff. The retirement age will rise from 65 to 66 by 2020. Rail fares will be allowed to rise by 3% above inflation every year. The English schools’ regular expenditure budget will be protected, but spending on new school buildings — one of Labour’s best achievements — will be cut by 60%. The NHS budget for England will rise every year until 2015, which is good, and there will be an extra £2 billion for social care, which I don’t think will be enough. The Department for International Development will receive extra funding year by year until the UK’s contribution to international development finally arrives at the UN target of 0.7% of GDP, which is excellent. I can’t but be ashamed that Labour didn’t get to the target during its 13 years. I remember that the 0.7% target had already been set when I used to go to bread-and-cheese War on Want lunches at Cambridge, 40 years ago! The levy on the banks, forcing them to make amends for the near-catastrophe into which they led us through their stupidity and greed, will be made permanent, which is a good thing in itself, but it remains to be seen whether the banks will use their lobbying power with the Tories and their clever accountancy to diminish what they actually pay, while continuing to reward their top staff with obscene salaries and bonuses for performing socially useless and sometimes destructive activities.

Life will be very difficult for local authorities, which face an annual cut in their budgets of 7.1% for four years. They’ve never had to make cuts on anything like this scale before, and the effect on the users of council services in poorer areas will be grim.

Naturally, the City and the bond markets think that all this, apart from the bank levy, is wonderful. If there were no history, if the UK’s economic story had started yesterday, I might say that these measures were necessary if unwelcome. But I continue to be outraged by the Tories’ hypocritical lying over the recent past, presenting themselves as the fiscally responsible party brought in to clean up the mess left by a spendthrift previous government, when they know in their hearts — at least, the more intelligent of them do — that the mess was caused by people who, on the whole, would support conservative rather than social democratic administrations around the world, and that if they, the British Conservatives, had been in power in the years leading up to the financial crisis, they would have been even more laissez-faire with the banks than Brown was. (I know I’ve written this before, but it still cries out in me to be said.)

It’s the most beautiful day here: bright warm sunshine, of the sort that, in autumn, I perceive as a gift, an act of grace, rather than a right; but a strong fresh wind, which is snatching the leaves from trees and whirling them horizontally across the air. There are horse- and sweet-chestnut trees within sight; and, with the French windows open, the thump of both kinds of chestnut on the ground is frequent.

We’ve been back in London since 31 October. From the writing point of view, it was a good productive five months away, at least by my standards. 20 new pieces: 13 originals and seven translations or imitations. Some are very short, I admit; but there are also more substantial poems there, notably ‘Prayer before Death’, ‘Mission Sundays’ and ‘Evening Visitor’ among the originals, and the two Machados plus Montale’s ‘The Eel’ amongst the translations. They’re all up on the website. I’m afraid I’ve been breaking my rule about not revisiting anything after I’ve sent it to Mark in New Zealand; in particular, ‘Evening Visitor’, about a conversation between my father’s ghost and me, has been changed at least twice. I sent Mark what I know is the final version this morning, to paste over the version currently on the site. As I wrote to him, I don’t know whether my hesitations have to do with the emotional closeness I still feel to my father; I don’t think so. They have been more to do with form. I wrote the first version — about 80 lines — in not much more than half an hour: a dangerously high speed for me (maybe for anybody). Formally, the poem is free-ish, but there is some iambic rhythm and some rhyme. It affected Helen very much when I showed it to her, and Mark said that he and his wife had been moved by it when I unwisely sent it to him only a day or so later. A month after that, in London, I looked at it on the site and there were some lines that just seemed to me lazy and aimless, not poetry at all. So I tightened it up: more rhymes, more regularly rhythmical lines.

Last Thursday evening, Peter and Monica Hetherington came down from Bedford and the four of us went to the theatre, but to two different plays: Peter and I to Krapp’s Last Tape, performed by Michael Gambon and directed by Michael Colgan (and I shall write to Michael C shortly telling him how wonderful it was); Helen and Monica to Passion by Stephen Sondheim. (Helen had double-booked us at the theatre that night; the accident worked out very well, because Monica loves Sondheim and of course Peter reveres Beckett as much as I.) Anyway, while Peter and I were having a drink after the very short Krapp, I gave him the two versions of ‘Evening Visitor’ and asked him to compare them and tell me where the better efforts lay. He came back to me on Saturday with his usual marvellous, detailed judgement: on the whole, though not entirely, he thought my first thoughts had been best. So the thing went about two thirds of the way back to the first version. It’s done now, and I’m pleased with it. It’s harder to know when a looser poem is finished than when a tighter poem is. I’ve done two tight funny poems recently, one called ‘One in a Bed’, about Helen’s snoring, and one called ‘Vacheries’, a conversation between two cows. They’re clever and neat (‘neat’ an accidental pun with regard to the second), and I knew as soon as they were done that they were finished.

I’ve just finished reading Ian Hamilton’s biography of Robert Lowell. I’ll say a bit more about it in a minute, but the relevance here is Lowell’s wonderful distinction between ‘raw’ and ‘cooked’ poetry. When he proposed those metaphors, I think he was thinking of himself as the chief cook of American poetry, and Ginsberg as the chief purveyor of raw American poetic food. I’ve always been suspicious of raw, even though some of my poems are free-ish (I don’t think any, apart perhaps from the prose poem ‘Funeral Oration, by the Deceased’, is untouched by some attempt at prosody). But it’s a matter of how much rope you allow yourself. When I write free-ish, I always have a bad conscience; a voice in my head is saying, ‘This is a bit too easy, too slack. It’s not poetry yet.’ And then I think: Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, D.H. Lawrence’s unrhyming poems, Walt Whitman…

To go back to this summer’s output: the thing I’m most pleased about is that, having had a run at writing — lots of days when nothing happened other than that we got up, never early, and I started writing around ten and carried on until about seven in the evening, with a half-hour break for a cold lunch — I’ve proved to myself that I can do it, I can be moderately productive. Most important of all, ideas do come. I’ve always said to myself, and to anyone else who asked, that with poetry (it’s probably true of all kinds of imaginative writing), getting the idea in the first place is the hardest thing. The more I write, the more the ideas come, and when a good idea comes, I can usually do something with it.

I have to report, however, that getting down to writing has been almost impossible in the three weeks since we’ve been back in England. Life is suddenly choc-a-bloc with pleasant and worthwhile distractions. The diary (not this diary, alas) has something in it almost every day. A lot of it is social, because I’m a sociable person, and some of it is good works (the Poetry Society and the Canon Collins Trust), but the great octopus work-for-money also still has a tentacle or two around my neck, which is probably just as well, since neither Helen nor I have the feeling that we’re spending less now that our income is smaller.

So I’ve now got on to the plane to Bangkok for Teachers TV, partly to give a ridiculously short talk (20 minutes) to a UNESCO/Intel conference for ministers of education in the Asia-Pacific region, and partly to spend two days talking to Pico, the firm which runs Teachers TV in Thailand. In December, I’m going to San Francisco with Andrew Bethell for a week. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding a pilot Teachers TV in America; they’ve called it Teaching Channel. Unfortunately, according to Andrew, some rather major errors have been made right at the start, especially in key appointments. Two people have left their posts after short stays. When Andrew was in America a couple of weeks ago (he’s on the advisory board for all the Gates Foundation’s educational projects), he was asked to step in for a few months to right the ship. He said he’d do it as long as he could have me helping him. Agreed. So for this one week before Christmas, and for six weeks between Christmas and Easter, we shall be in the US, mainly in San Francisco at the NewSchools Venture Fund (no idea why there’s no space between ‘New’ and ‘Schools’), the organisation to which Gates has awarded the contract to run Teaching Channel. We'll be preparing for the launch of the pilot, I think in June 2011; it will be broadcast on some of the PBS stations and published on a website, and we hope it will lead to a full service later. Nice work if you can get it, and well paid. I said I was available for this kind of thing, so I’m not complaining. The PBS station which we hope will begin the broadcasts and offer them to other stations across America will be Thirteen in New York. In July 2008, Andrew and I spent time there (I wrote about it in book five of this diary). We worked with Ron Thorpe, the director of education at Thirteen, helping him to prepare a bid to the Gates Foundation, when it seemed possible that Gates might give Thirteen the job of running Teachers TV USA. That hasn’t happened, and there’s been some anger and confusion about it. But I hope that Thirteen will make several series for us, as well as carry the broadcasts, and that Ron can be involved in some way, as he deserves to, having had the idea for Teachers TV USA in the first place, and having worked hard to get it seriously considered by Gates.

I received my prize for ‘The Retreat from Moscow’ on 10 November. A jolly evening at Notre Dame University, just off Trafalgar Square: about 150 people there, including Bronwyn and Stephen Mellor, Stephen Eyers and Theresa Cato, Martina Thomson, Peter Hetherington, Paul Ashton and Helen. There were prizes in the under-14, under-18 and open categories. The prize-winners read their translations before receiving their cheques. I was on last, and I gave the reading the full theatrical works. Afterwards there were drinks, and Peter and I spent a quarter of an hour talking to Lizzie Spender, one of Stephen’s two children, and to her husband Barry Humphries. Natasha Spender, Stephen’s widow and Lizzie’s mother, had died only two weeks previously at the age of 91, so there was sadness in the occasion, since Natasha had been the founding spirit of the Stephen Spender Trust. Then all of our group except Peter, who had to get back to Bedfordshire, went to dinner at The Century. I was very happy.

I owe at least a chunk of the prize to Peter, because my first effort at translation was in blank verse. I sent it to him, and he said, in effect, ‘This is fine, but why haven’t you made it rhyme, like you did with “The Lions” and “Boaz Asleep”?’ I didn’t think I could do it until he provoked me. It turned out that I could. I’m pretty sure that the blank verse version wouldn’t have won anything.

I can’t like Robert Lowell as he appears in Ian Davidson’s biography. All right, he was mad, and that condition deserves sympathy. He was also a bully, domineering and selfish. His decision to use Elizabeth Hardwick’s private correspondence with him when their marriage was ending as matter for his collections For Lizzie and Harriet and Dolphin was contemptible, as many people said at the time. Adrienne Rich had it right: ‘There’s a kind of aggrandized and merciless masculinity at work in these books… what does one say about a poet who, having left his wife and daughter for another marriage, then titles a book with their names, and goes on to appropriate his ex-wife’s letters written under the stress and pain of desertion, into a book of poems nominally addressed to the new wife?’ After quoting from the last of the poems in Dolphin, in which Lowell seems to be half-apologising for, half-justifying what he has done, Rich writes: ‘I have to say that I think this is bullshit eloquence, a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book…’ I agree with that.

And yet he was a great poet, for what he did in Life Studies, For the Union Dead and Near the Ocean. I can’t sustain enthusiasm for the endless, endless 14-liners in History, though some of course are very good. I’m grateful for his choice of the term ‘imitations’ to describe and entitle his collection of loose English versions of poems originally written in Latin, Greek, Italian, German, French and Russian. It has helped me to be clear about when I’m doing a translation and when an imitation. But I find Lowell’s introduction to Imitations, ending with ‘I have been almost as free as the authors themselves in finding ways to make [the originals] ring right for me’, suspiciously close to an attempt to justify his not trying hard enough to get as close as possible to the original while remaining sure that the imitation is itself a poem. At any rate, I know that my translations (not imitations) of Montale’s ‘The Eel’ and the first section of Hugo’s ‘L’Expiation’ are better than his efforts.

I detect in myself a sort of no-nonsense lack of patience with those very male, very drunk, frequently mad American poets who regarded themselves somehow as a generation of doomed geniuses: Lowell, Berryman, Roethke, Jarrell, Schwartz. What had they got to complain about, really? They didn’t come from materially deprived backgrounds, although in some cases their childhoods were psychologically damaged. They just fucked up their immensely brilliant brains with drink and drugs, and then wrote about it. Along the way, they hurt and inconvenienced the people who loved, admired and cared for them. This is very unfair and only a little true, but I still want to say it.

We’re just about to land at Bangkok. Flooded rice fields still abound amid the urbanisation. I can see some major new highways. Maybe the traffic won’t be quite as bad as it was when I was last here, 25 years ago.

The UNESCO conference has finished, and Teachers TV has caused a stir. My presentation went very well yesterday, although it’s not hard to be better than most of the rest when they simply read out the words written on over-complex PowerPoint slides which look like pages taken from economics textbooks, causing the receiving brain to decide after a minute or two to take a nap until it’s time to join in polite applause at the end. Martina Roth from Intel was excellent yesterday morning, saying everything that needed to be said about the role of ICT in advancing a knowledge-based economy; and although I wasn’t there this morning, Mario Franco from the Portuguese government evidently made an inspiring contribution about a scheme which gives every child a cheap unbreakable computer with access to all sorts of appropriate content. I’m pretty sure we shall collaborate with him in some way.

At this afternoon’s wind-up session, where government ministers and officials said what they wanted to do as a result of the conference, Teachers TV was mentioned numerous times. Eventually, the chairman asked me to make a statement to the gathering about how we could help in the future, which I did. I expect that more Teachers TVs will be springing up in the region.

I spent Wednesday at Pico, and this morning I sat in the hotel talking to Thai Teachers TV’s head of marketing. The channel looks great, on air and on line: a tremendous achievement to get it going, and to have had such an impact in the few months since launch. This afternoon I introduced Pornchai and Viriya, the people who run the channel, to the deputy minister for education in Laos, a lovely, laughing man who had been very complimentary about my presentation. Pico has the concession to extend Teachers TV to several countries in south-east Asia, including Laos, and I think they’ll do some business together, especially as Thai Teachers TV’s satellite footprint covers the whole of Laos as well.

Having been uncomplimentary about the presentational skills of many of the speakers at the conference, I need also to say that a visit to this region is the most salutary of experiences for the complacent Westerner. The countries represented here, containing — with India and China amongst them — 60% of the world’s population, are moving fast towards the future, and education and technology are at the heart of that change. There is enormous energy and ingenuity. If I live another 30 years, as I would like to, Europe and North America will be nothing more than two centres of economic activity within a network of equals. Indeed, the US could be in a state of decline unless it addresses the extreme inequalities in every kind of wealth, especially knowledge wealth, amongst its people. One statistic stuck out for me from Martina Roth’s presentation: if the US had performed as well as Finland in the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment studies of the effectiveness of publicly-funded school systems (where Finland is the top performer) since those studies began, it would now have a GDP one trillion dollars a year greater than it has. Of course I know that GDP per head of population isn’t the only way, shouldn’t be the only way, of measuring a country’s greatness or value, and I understand the potential environmental downside of growth (which is beginning to be addressed, unevenly and slowly); but America’s problem is that its political system finds it almost impossible to encourage or even allow any moves towards the equalisation of wealth. Witness the lunacy of the opposition to Obama’s epoch-making reform of the health-care system; witness the ambition of the Republicans, now that they have control of the House and that the Democrats’ majority in the Senate is wafer-thin, to undo everything Obama has done (they won’t be able to, I don’t think, so long as he’s there, but nor will he be able to make any more forward progress unless he wins again in 2012 and Congress swings a bit back towards the Democrats). I guess Teaching Channel is a little tiny effort to address the problem of the inequality of teacher quality in America’s public schools, which the PISA studies continually report as chronic.

Last night, I didn’t feel like sitting down to dinner with my fellow conference-goers at six o’clock, straight after the last session. I never eat that early. (The lunch served had been absolutely delicious, as it was today: a buffet of every kind of exquisite Thai, Indian and Chinese food, plus roast meats for unadventurous Westerners.) So after a shower I walked out of the hotel and wandered along Wireless Road in the heat of the evening. I had no plans. Then I thought: eat at the Oriental, as Helen and I did 25 years ago. The taxi took a good 40 minutes to get there in the traffic. There was a perfect quiet table out on the terrace, just as we had had in 1985. The ferryboats criss-crossed the river; the disco boats passed and re-passed as they had then, playing the same pop tunes for the benefit of similar groups of gyrating lubricated Westerners. The only physical difference was that on the other side of the river there are now three high towers, of which one is the Peninsular Hotel, one looked like apartments and one isn’t quite finished. (Pornchai told me this afternoon that that side of the river is now a ‘green area’: no more big buildings allowed. These must have got their construction permits before the law was passed.)

Anyway, it was great to be there. I sat in the warmth and quiet and was happy. The service was as impeccably courteous and friendly, without being over-attentive, as before. I ate spring rolls, king prawns with rice, chilled sago with raspberry sauce. Two Singha beers. The waning moon hung above us. I confess that when I’ve been in the tropics before, which isn’t that often, I’ve never noticed that the moon wanes horizontally from the top, not from the side, as on my familiar latitude. I suppose it’s to do with the tilt of the earth, but it’s shameful that here am I, in my sixtieth year, almost certainly more than two thirds of the way through, and I still have to write ‘I suppose…’ I must, I will find out, so I know.

After the meal I walked back to the hotel, retracing the taxi driver’s route. It took me an hour. A walk of that length, in that heat and humidity, is an expenditure of effort and sweat that most people, Thai or Western, would dismiss as mad. But unless you take a walk in a place like Bangkok, you’re just another rich person in a rich person’s bubble of aeroplanes, taxis and air-conditioned hotels. I found, as I had in 1985, the crush and sociability of the street life exhilarating. On every pavement are mobile kitchens, the stoves powered by bottled gas, where the cook fries or grills the food that people eat at the plastic tables adjacent. There are stalls everywhere selling fruit, vegetables, clothes, hardware. The little shops are just beginning to close at eleven o’clock at night. Meanwhile the traffic sometimes roars, sometimes drags along: lorries, buses, taxis, tuk-tuks and motor scooters fill every inch of road space, with a surprising absence of hooting, much patience and a high degree of skill. People living the very simplest lives are still at work. Young men unload bricks from a lorry, teetering down a plank while carrying two rough frames, one on each shoulder, into which the bricks have been stacked. In the gloom a gang is sorting rubbish, opening black plastic bags and separating glass from polystyrene from other plastic from cardboard from paper. Better-paid young men, wearing uniforms issued by the construction firm for which they work, are only now leaving the job: an almost finished skyscraper, I should think of about 50 storeys. A train rattles past on the new (since I was last here) elevated railway, a mighty achievement in concrete which overshadows the six-lane highway beside which I make my way. Amid the noise and the close proximity of brutal machine power, young women walk in ones and twos, going about their business confidently and without fear, as is right, and I find myself thinking that, whatever sexual exploitation exists in some sections of this society — and Thailand still has a reputation as the preferred destination for sex tourists — the position of most women is enormously preferable to that which prevails in some Muslim countries in Asia and the Middle East. (Of course I know that there is a significant Muslim minority in this predominantly Buddhist country.) Then I find myself reflecting that grotesque misogyny, the attempt to justify the oppression of women by appeal to religious dogma, has been a feature, at various times and to various extents, of some tendencies within all three monotheistic religions, Islam, Judaism and Christianity, whatever more enlightened tendencies also exist there.

As the walk continues the buildings become smarter. This is the embassy quarter: Australian, French, German, Dutch, American. The American ambassador’s residence, just along the road from the US embassy, looks to me, as I peer through the perimeter security wall, to be a traditional Thai house, of which there are very few left in Bangkok: wooden vernacular, with a sloping polychrome tiled roof and a surrounding veranda, set in an enormous green garden. Wireless Road, where Thailand’s radio station may once have been, is anything but wire-less. Wires loop in great black bunches from lamp-post to telegraph pole to lamp-post. And now here I am back at the hotel, drenched in sweat. I make straight for the bar: one more frosted Singha beer before bed.

Andrew’s and my first week with Teaching Channel begins tomorrow. There will be plenty to do, diplomatically unmaking mistakes that have been made, putting in place all the working systems that a TV channel and website need, and — most important — finding good people to make the programmes.

Helen and I had three days in Norfolk until last Tuesday, staying with Adam and Hazel. There has been heavy snow in Britain recently, and Norfolk was covered. On Monday we drove towards the coast, looking for an Iron Age fort. We took a fortunate wrong turning, and came upon a strange, beautiful, ruined church tower, rising alone from a white field. We stopped and crunched across the untouched, foot-deep snow. There was no sign by the tower, no information, no safety barrier preventing me from ascending the hazardous spiral staircase inside it; it just stood there with only its surroundings for context, a remnant, I would guess 600 years old, the flints in its masonry glinting in the sunlight, the blue sky framed in the open space of its Gothic west window.

Half an hour later we found the fort, near the village of Warham. By contrast with the mute tower, sufficient unto itself, an English Heritage information panel at the entrance to this field told us everything. The great earthworks are two thousand years old. There is a circular double ramp enclosing a deep ditch, except on the south side, where the immense labour of 1800 years before was undone 200 years ago in order to straighten the River Stiffkey, I suppose to meet agricultural needs. Previously, the fort followed the natural curve of the river. It encloses an area of, I guess, three acres. Within, the people of this settlement lived their lives; no-one could have made a greater effort to be safe from invasion. The huge silent place was as wonderful as the tower had been, clothed in the intense brilliance of thick snow.

We drove back to London on Tuesday. The day was again clear, after a night of (for England) extreme cold. I have never seen hoar frost so thick on the trees. It was especially lovely on the already white leafless birches. For two hours, until we neared London and the temperature rose, the scene was of entrancing beauty. I kept saying to myself, ‘You are witnessing a rarity. You might not see this too many more times.’

On Tuesday evening I had a jolly evening at the Century Club with some friends from Teachers TV. On Wednesday I went round to Paul’s to watch Arsenal play a European game; as ever on these occasions, he and Vicki provided a delicious Indian take-away. On Thursday, with Andrew, I talked to the deputy minister for education in Thailand and his senior official, who’d come over to see how we do Teachers TV in England. (Unnecessary, really; I could have seen them in Bangkok two weeks ago.) Pornchai was there too, and our real task was to tell the minister what a great job Pornchai and his colleagues at Pico are doing, while gently suggesting that, grateful as Pico is for the Thai government’s funding, it would be better if the government didn’t interfere so much.

While these civilised discussions were proceeding, there were riots in the streets of London. I don’t think I’ve written before about the coalition government’s decision to allow universities to dramatically increase their fees, and to replace Labour’s system of student loans with a calculation, for each student, of what they have racked up in fees and maintenance during their time at university, a sum which must be paid back, in whole or in part, once a graduate’s salary reaches a certain level.

When you read the fine print of the measures (which were passed in the Commons on Thursday by a small majority), you have to admit that, marginally, they are more progressive than was the student loans scheme. But they still attach a potentially huge debt — £30,000 and more — to an individual graduate, and there is no doubt that such a level of debt will discourage students from poorer backgrounds from going to university, as the student loans scheme has. But that was not the cause of the riots. In April and May, the Liberals campaigned on a pledge that they would abolish tuition fees. Many students, tired of authoritarian old New Labour, thought that the Liberals might offer a new kind of progressive politics, and voted for them. How surprised were they to discover that they had voted for the junior partner in a Conservative-led government, and that the excellent Vince Cable, whose understanding of the financial crisis in 2008 had been so impressive, was now in charge of the department which had designed the new system! They felt betrayed, and the feeling generated organised public dissent of the sort which UK students haven’t shown since I was a student.

During the autumn there have been several days of protest, with big marches. These have been impressive demonstrations, marred by the activities of small groups of hooligans, often not students at all, who have committed acts of violence, turning the demonstrations into violent confrontations between police and students. No-one has been killed.

Whether the protests will subside now that the measures will become law I don’t know. Amid the mess, I feel anger at my own party. If the Labour government had done the right thing when it came to power and introduced a graduate tax, paid only after graduation and when a person has achieved a certain minimum salary, none of this rage would have been necessary.  Then, the 35-year-old merchant banker earning £500,000 a year would have paid, say, 1%; and the 35-year-old primary-school teacher earning £30,000 a year would also have paid 1%. Crucially, no person would have taken on individual debt, so there wouldn’t have been the evident disincentive which there now is to the children of poorer families.  But Labour didn’t do it because the Treasury, under Gordon Brown, didn’t want to stump up the money for a few years until the tax started coming through.  Two years ago, Darling and Brown necessarily spent sums hundreds of times greater than the hypothetical cost of pump-priming the graduate tax, baling out the banks.



One of the wickedest of the coalition’s educational measures is closely related to the fees issue: the extraordinary decision to savagely reduce government support for humanities courses in the universities, while maintaining it for courses in science, engineering, maths and other areas of ‘hard’ knowledge. This means that the great majority of the cost of humanities courses will have to be borne, eventually, by the student as he or she repays debt incurred. The government is saying, ‘Be a scientist, be an engineer, and we’ll help you financially; be a historian or a student of literature, and we’ll hurt you financially.’ This is cultural barbarism, based on the benighted idea that a country’s GDP is all that matters, and on the mistaken belief that people with humanities degrees don’t contribute to a country’s wealth. What about those of us who teach children to read?

A second piece of wickedness is the abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance, a Labour measure which gave 16- to 18-year-olds from poorer families a bit of money to encourage them to stay on in education. Gone, abolished. There’s going to be a thing called a pupil premium, which will give schools extra money for every child from a poorer background they take on. Good, in itself. But where’s the coherence between introducing the pupil premium and abolishing the EMA?

The week in America passed in a blur of activity. By the time I arrived at Heathrow from New York on the morning of 18 December and, three hours later, Andrew arrived from San Francisco, we had done most of the things necessary to get Teaching Channel started. We had chosen six independent production companies (I chose a seventh the following week). Our eighth and principal supplier will be Thirteen, as we had hoped, who will make three series for us. Thirteen will also broadcast the programmes (I have get used to writing ‘programs’ over there.) We had chosen a company to build the website. A start had been made on writing various documents, notably the contract which will go out to producers early next month. Overall, progress was rapid. The group of people who constitute the central team all seem good to me; in particular, I like Erin Crysdale, a lovely, energetic person who’ll in effect be my deputy for the next few months. It’s just that the team had been led, up to the point where Andrew took over, by someone who didn’t know what she was doing. Whose fault it was that she was appointed in the first place, I don’t know; water under the bridge. Apparently, about a million dollars has floated by, wasted in the water.

I think I’ll be back in the US for ten days in the second half of January. I have the grandiose title of Interim Vice-President — Production.

I had flown from San Francisco to New York on the Thursday of that week for a meeting the following day at Thirteen with Stephen Segaller, the director of programs there, which produced the successful results just mentioned. I stayed at the Paramount, and ate a good dinner that Thursday evening at Benoit’s on West 55th Street, which I always enjoy, and associate with my recovery from tomato-juice poisoning six years ago. Friday was a beautiful day, cold and clear. I walked across to Thirteen. After the meeting with Stephen, which Ron Thorpe joined, I had half an hour with Ron, eating some of the party food he had arranged for the company party later that afternoon, before stepping out on to the street, imagining that I would simply hail a cab to take me to JFK. No yellow cab wanted to go there on that Friday afternoon a week before Christmas. I guess they all thought they’d spend too much time in traffic and it wouldn’t be worth their while. Just as I was beginning to think I might miss the plane, and was cursing a city which, for all its wealth, doesn’t have an express train connection from the city centre to the airport, along came a big black saloon car whose driver offered to take me there for $145 plus tolls. That seemed to me a lot of money, but to miss the plane would have been even more expensive. The young Pakistani driver — in America ten years, and now a US citizen — got me there in good time, doing all sorts of complicated back doubles through parts of Queen’s that the tourist never sees.

I felt asleep over Newfoundland and woke up over Wales. Large parts of the UK, I knew, were covered with snow. The plane landed on time at eight o’clock. While I was eating breakfast in the arrivals lounge, waiting for Andrew (and I should own up to the reason why I had to wait for him — I had stupidly forgotten that my London door keys were in a bag I had deliberately left in San Francisco), it began to snow heavily outside. Five inches fell in an hour. After breakfast, to pass the time, I walked around Terminal 5, admiring the construction. In the departures lounge, about five thousand people were being told that all flights until five o’clock that afternoon had been cancelled, and that they should leave the building immediately. No other information was offered. Back in the serenity of the arrivals lounge, someone came in to say that police with machine guns were calming the atmosphere upstairs in departures. (Subsequently, British Airports Authority apologised for its mishandling of events that day.)

Andrew’s plane was I think the last to land before the airport was closed to arriving as well as departing planes. He said it skidded a bit on the runway. The Heathrow Express and the tube worked well, and we parted company at Kings Cross. The snow was thick on the walk up to the flat. Helen had gone up to Shropshire with Mike Raleigh two days previously, for our usual pre-Christmas weekend with David and Lindsay and other friends. My solo drive there that afternoon and evening took me seven and a half hours instead of the usual three and a half. A lorry had jack-knifed at the top of a hill just north of Newport Pagnell. We were stationary for three hours, giving me plenty of time to think about John Bunyan’s posting in the town with the parliamentary army during the Civil War, and about my father’s years at Newport Instruments there, doing his life’s most important work. Once we moved, it was exhilarating to drive on the familiar old M1, suddenly strange, a hard wide piste of white, no road-markings to be seen, between trees loaded with snow and hoar-frost. I had the heater full on and the windows wide open. Near Rugby the snow stopped, and there were no further interruptions until I was nearly at Shrewsbury, when fog descended so thickly that I had to crawl the last few miles. The dinner party was nearly over when I got to Harmer Hill, but they’d saved some food for me.

There was another jolly meal the next day, with Mike and Andrew and Annie Bannerman. On the Monday, Helen and I went to Shrewsbury to buy her Christmas presents, and then on to lunch with Juginder Lamba and Lesley Lancaster. The little unsalted lanes, in the freezing cold, were enchanting to drive along; it was like invading a Breughel in a four-by-four. We lunched in a pub in Ruyton XI Towns. Arriving back at David and Lindsay’s, we were surprised to find no one in, though the key was under the mat. Tom soon phoned to say that David had been taken ill on his way to work in Birmingham that morning; he was pissing blood. He’d got himself back to Shrewsbury station, where Lindsay and Tom had met him and taken him to hospital. Lindsay and Tom soon arrived at the house; Lindsay and I then returned to the hospital with an overnight bag, to find David in the treatment room of Accident and Emergency, with a catheter fitted. The liquid in the bag was bright red, and every time David passed water the pain was intense. As so often in NHS hospitals, the hardest thing was to extract information from the staff, but in the end we got David some pain-killers, and discovered that he would be taken to a ward overnight in order to have X-rays the next morning. When an Irish staff nurse called Colette arrived, things improved immediately. Up we went to the ward, to a bay which mercifully had only four beds, of which only one other was occupied (though the other two, so David said the next day, were filled during the night, causing him to sleep even less than he might have done anyway). We left him.

By the next morning, David’s urine was running clear. He had numerous X-rays (the results of which aren’t yet known); then they removed the catheter and told him he could go home. I went to collect him. He was exhausted and went straight to bed, where he stayed until the following morning, Wednesday.

We had intended to come to France on the Tuesday, through the Channel Tunnel. When David was taken ill, we were prepared to stay at Harmer Hill as long as necessary. Meanwhile, heavy snow had closed the tunnel. When David got up on Wednesday, he said he felt fine urically, though pissing was still irregular and unpredictable. He’d damaged his back getting off the hospital bed; he does have a weak back, but also an excellent chiropractor, with whom he made an appointment for the next day. We rang Brittany Ferries, who said they had a boat crossing from Plymouth to Roscoff that night, and that the roads down to Plymouth were clear. We decided to take the boat. We would have been very welcome to stay at Harmer Hill — in fact, I know David, Lindsay and Tom would have liked it — but the house would have been very crowded over Christmas, with David’s parents and Lindsay’s mother, brother and sister-in-law also staying, so with the emergency apparently past it seemed right to go.

We drove to Plymouth with no trouble. Brittany Ferries’ brand-new boat, the Armorique, shamefully does not have a proper restaurant, so the principal pleasure of using that firm to cross the channel was taken away. We made the best of it in the huge, shiny self-service canteen, with football matches being compulsorily screened at every eye-line. The cabin was fine; we arrived at Roscoff on time the following morning, to be told that the boat couldn’t dock because of strong winds. I went out on deck once; the gale was almost powerful enough to knock me over. We stood off Roscoff all day, finally docking at about four in the afternoon. We drove straight to Plouay and stocked up for Christmas.

The light is failing on the last afternoon of the year. It’s been the kind of day which New Year’s Eves seem often to be: grey, still and enclosed. I’ve just been for a mooch round the garden. In the fountain was the fourth salamander that I’ve ‘rescued’ this week. I put the word in scare quotes because I don’t know whether or not I’m doing the right thing to take salamanders off the vertical wall around the fountain where they always stand, and transfer them to the boggy ground on the other side of the path. I’m certainly not doing them any harm; if I walk away for a few minutes and then come back, they have nearly always burrowed under the mud. I’m guessing that, having been born in the water of the fountain, but being amphibians, they are happy to breathe air for a while, but that they could get tired after many hours clinging to a vertical surface, fall back into the water, and eventually exhaust themselves. Certainly, I’ve had to scoop drowned frogs out of the water quite often. Anyhow, photographic researches on the internet tell me that the yellow-and-black salamander which flourishes at Kerfontaine is the fire salamander (salamandra salamandra). (Now I notice that the French term is salamandre terrestre ou commune, so perhaps this is the commonest kind.) I love these creatures. I’ve learnt how to handle them; I don’t try to catch them in the fishing net which is there for frogs, living and dead, and drowned mice. I simply pick them up. They move very slowly; no sudden jumps. Their paws are almost human: the front paws have three fingers and a little stump of a thumb; the back paws four fingers and the thumb-stump. They await their fate patiently, perhaps expecting imminent death. Camouflaged they are not; their yellow patches, contrasting violently with their black bodies, are the most striking feature of their beauty. Further reading tells me that they are long-lived; one lived for more than 50 years in a natural history museum in Germany. Their colouring would be sufficient justification for their name; additionally, the ancient myth that salamanders are born of fire probably arose from the fact that they like to live in dead wood. When people took the wood into their houses to burn, the salamander naturally did its best to escape from the flame.

I’ve enjoyed a quiet week, after my recent rushing around. Christmas here is assuming its own traditions: on Christmas Eve in the afternoon I gathered holly to plait above the fireplace; that evening we ate oysters, foie gras, pork with prunes, Christmas pudding (the last supplied by Lindsay); on Christmas Day we got up late, took a hamper of food, wine and crackers up to Jean and Annick, drove down to the sea near Fort Bloqué and walked for a couple of hours before coming back for champagne and presents, followed by smoked salmon, more foie gras, duck with orange, more Christmas pudding. On Saint Stephen’s Day, which was bright and freezing cold, we took a long circular country walk, passing through the hamlet of Saint Etienne where, on the west wall of the chapel (late 16th- to early 17th-century), there is a bas-relief, much weathered now, of the stoning of Stephen. That evening we went to eat at L’Art Gourmand, the little restaurant we like at Pont Scorff. Tonight, we’re going back there for a grande bouffe, breaking our 20-year tradition (for we’ve nearly always — not last year — been here at New Year, though only recently at Christmas) of eating the Saint Sylvestre meal at home. Don’t arrive before nine, warned Agnès.

The Saint Sylvestre meal at Pont Scorff was lovely: delicious food, and not too much fuss. At midnight, everyone raised the glass of champagne we’d just been given, wished each other ‘Bonne année, bonne santé!’ and that was that.

New Year’s Day was beautiful: still, bright and — for the turn of the year — extraordinarily mild. We did the same walk we had done on Saint Stephen’s Day, but in the opposite direction.

I was saddened today to see that Pete Postlethwaite has died of cancer at the age of 64. He was a wonderful actor, on film, television and the stage; I’ll never forget his funny and poignant performance as the brass-band leader in Brassed Off. No age, 64: five years older than me. Don’t waste time. Get on with things. End of New Year resolution.

Birds seen this afternoon during my walk around the grounds: jays, numerous; a thrush with a patch of maroon on the right of his breast; a green woodpecker; an innocent, peace-loving heron being harassed and chased away by a mob of crows; two male robins who, against all the folklore I’ve been told, seemed to be coexisting quite happily within a few feet of each other on the lawn; blackbirds; wrens; a bullfinch. The place is clean and cut back; Jean-Paul has done a great job with the débroussailleuse in the wood. The buds of the early camellias are already bulging; the edges of the packed petals of the white one, which flowers first of all, can be seen pressing against their green casings.

I’ve been reading more Hazlitt since Christmas; Helen gave me a beautiful two-volume first edition of Table Talk, the first volume published in 1821, the second a year later. As I think I wrote last summer, there are times when Hazlitt’s relentless rhetoric, his determination to lay it on thick, to hammer the nail another dozen times after he’s already driven it home, can tire. But then, what wisdom he has, plainly but beautifully uttered! The essay ‘On Familiar Style’ is a description of and a set of instructions for good plain prose writing which I salute with enthusiasm and can only hope, humbly, to try to practise in my own prose. The essay ‘On Corporate Bodies’ says everything that needs to be said about the wickedness of the banks in the years leading up to 2008, for instance, though it was written about 200 years previously. And then there are the familiar and easier classics like ‘The Indian Jugglers’ and ‘Whether Actors Ought to Sit in the Boxes?’ You get the feeling that Hazlitt was something of an obsessive in his hatreds: he can’t get the Edinburgh Review out of his system. Injustice offended him so deeply that he had to attack its perpetrators time and time again. There is a deep sadness in ‘On the Disadvantages of Intellectual Superiority’, born of his realisation of the impossibility of expecting the mass of the common people to do otherwise than think as they are told to think; he might have been writing about the readership of The Sun or the Daily Mail in the UK, or about those in America who watch Fox News every night for their dose of ignorant, self-righteous opinionation and prejudice. That sadness is contradicted by his occasional and, I think, excessive optimism about the ‘the People’. He ends ‘On Corporate Bodies’ hopefully thus: ‘In short, the only class of persons to whom the above courtly charge of sinister and corrupt motives [he’s been charging corporate bodies, notably in the City, with such motives throughout the essay] is not applicable, is that body of individuals, which usually goes by the name of the People!’ If only it were so. The German people voting for Hitler, the Italian people voting for Berlusconi, teach otherwise.

I flew over yesterday for the second of these Teaching Channel visits. This time, after three days in New York, I’ll be in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix and San Francisco again, before returning to London in 11 days’ time. I’ll be meeting all the production companies in their place of work.

Getting into America at JFK Airport always requires patience. I queued for a full hour yesterday. When I finally arrived at the desk, the officer was charming and full of jokes. It was as if we were having a beer in a bar. I couldn’t help but respond to the bonhomie, but I was thinking, as I glanced back at the snaking line of about 500 people waiting, that perhaps less chat and more action would be welcomed. It was freezing cold outside the terminal building, with snow piled up beside the road. About 200 people were queueing for taxis. This second wait was just short of an hour. A cheerful Ghanaian then brought me here at illegal speed. I have since discovered that there is a way of getting to JFK from Manhattan by train: Penn Station to the Jamaica hub, and then the Airtrain to the airport. I shall try that on Wednesday.

On 8 January, a deranged man shot in the head and critically injured a US congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords, who was holding an open-air constituency meeting outside a supermarket in Tucson, Arizona. The man killed six people and wounded 13 others at the same time. Giffords seems to be making a remarkable recovery in hospital (90% of people shot in the head die), although it is too early to say whether or not she has suffered permanent brain damage. It would be amazing if she hasn’t; the bullet entered her head at the back and came out at the front.

Giffords is a Democrat in a largely Republican state. She supported Obama’s health-care reform. Before the mid-term elections last year, she was one of a number of Democrats whose names appeared, on the unspeakable Sarah Palin’s website, in the cross-hairs of a gun-sight icon. At the time, Giffords spoke prophetically about the danger of conducting political debate thus. After the shooting, the local sheriff lamented the atmosphere of hatred into which polarised American politics has descended. His testimony was eloquent; one should never make assumptions about a person’s politics on the basis of appearance, but when a stout Arizona law-enforcer begs for civility and respect instead of threatened violence in politics, it strikes a chord across the country in a way that a liberal Democrat from California or New York could not.

Republicans and conservatives outside the Republican Party have of course denied that there is any connection between the actions of a crazed young man and the tone of recent conservative polemic. But they know that there may be, and they know that many people think there is. Evidence gathered from the man’s history and from his rambling anti-government threats on the internet confirm that there is.

The good that has come out of this (though I doubt whether it will last) is that the extremists within and beyond the Republican Party have been given pause. Before, the lynch mob felt that the spirit of the times was with them. It was all right for presenters on Fox News night after night to plant in white Americans’ minds the thought that Obama hates white people. It was all right for activists in the Tea Party, grotesquely claiming an association with the heroes of 1773, to talk about ‘Second Amendment solutions’, meaning their right if necessary to take up arms against the federal government. Immediately after the shooting, Republicans of all sorts, including the most feral, were loud in their condemnation, and sick-making in their recourse to the usual clichés about keeping Ms Giffords in their prayers. They are, for the moment, rattled.

Barack Obama has been magnificent in the crisis. He is a statesman and an orator, as his words and actions have once again shown. He declines in public to make the connection between the individual act and its political context which I and thousands of others have made, though the temptation to do so must be strong. He behaves as a president should behave at a time like this; he unifies. I so hope that he will gain political benefit, though he would not have wished it to come this way. It’s probably too much to hope that at least part of middle America will realise that they have for once elected a president worthy of the office, and that he stands head and shoulders above any Republican competitor currently in sight. It’s extraordinary, in this extraordinary country, that the possibility of Sarah Palin getting the Republican nomination for president in 2012 still exists. I don’t think it’ll happen, but it’s a damning comment on the state of political discourse here that some people think that a person as stupid and dangerous as her could ever represent this country at the highest level.

Helen and I are in America until mid-May. We flew to New York three weeks ago, stayed there for three nights, and came to San Francisco on 9 March. We’re settled in a delightful apartment in this quiet, well-heeled, slightly alternative district, where it’s easier to buy gluten-free food than food with gluten in it. The apartment has a private deck out the back, which it will be a pleasure to use once the weather improves. The locals keep saying the cold, wet, windy weather we’ve had this month is highly unusual.

I agreed with Andrew Bethell that it would be more satisfactory for me to be here full-time, with Helen, than to keep flying back and forth across the Atlantic without her. At the moment I’m being paid three days a week for doing a five- or six-days-a-week job, but it’s a good daily rate and I’m enjoying myself. The arrangement lasts until the end of May. I shall soon know whether I’ll be asked to return for a further period (in which case I shall want to be paid a full-time wage) or not. I shall be happy either way. If I come back, I shall be very well paid and I’ll have the chance to see Teaching Channel properly develop into the service to American teachers we want it to be. If I don’t, we shall have our usual pleasant summer in France and Italy, and I can resume the poetry writing which I’ve entirely deserted since Teaching Channel began to absorb my attention.

We return to England on 12 May because on the evening of Saturday 14 May we’re holding an event in the church in the Inner Temple to mark the 10th anniversary of the Ros Moger and Terry Furlong Scholarships which a group of us organise under the auspices of the Canon Collins Trust. We’ve helped more than 50 students from southern Africa to pursue higher education in South African universities. I’ve edited a booklet of testimonies by some of the students. It looks great (beautifully designed by a woman called Aine Cassidy, whom I haven’t yet met physically but who was recommended by Matthew Rudd — who did design work for me when I was at Channel 4 — just as I was leaving for America) and contains moving accounts of what small amounts of money, in our terms, can do to transform lives in that part of the world.

Two weeks after that, we shall be back at Rodellosso, where we were last summer. We decided then, impulsively, to book the place for three weeks, including the date of my 60th birthday, and maintaining that arrangement was the only condition I set when I agreed to come to America. It will be wonderful to see that same landscape at the green beginning of summer.

Most of the time I’m in Europe, I’ll continue to work, by phone, Skype and email, but I will have a proper holiday around the time of my birthday. That’ll give my deputy, Erin Crysdale, a good chance to hold the reins for a while. After Italy, we either return here or go to Kerfontaine.

Recently I’ve read a splendid biography of Flaubert, by Frederick Brown, which caused me then to reread Madame Bovary. It’s a magnificent and profoundly pessimistic book. It was interesting to read in the biography how even those who were sympathetic to it, who knew that Flaubert was a great writer and supported him at the time of the obscenity trial, nonetheless wished that the book might have contained some pointers to the morally good; might have had a character or two in it whom one could admire, and of whom one could say, ‘That’s how we should be.’ But of course the strength of the piece, in our modern terms, is precisely that it refuses to do that. (Actually, there are two characters in the book whom one can unequivocally admire, though they are minor: Emma’s good-hearted father and the boy Justin, who helplessly adores Emma sexually in her last desperate days, who is helplessly present when she eats rat poison, and who weeps by her grave at the very end, until the grave-digger who also grows potatoes in the graveyard surprises him and wrongly assumes that he has been stealing his potatoes.)

Writing the word ‘unequivocally’ reminds me that we went to see a production of Pinter’s The Homecoming on Thursday. (That’s not equivocal. That’s unequivocal.) It was easily the worst production I’ve seen, but it didn’t matter. As with Shakespeare, so long as the actors say the lines audibly, I’m satisfied. The greatness does its work. There were obviously lots of people in the audience who’d never seen the play, didn’t know what happens in it, and the sudden intakes of breath, the sighs of disbelief at what was being said and shown, the shrill, nervous bursts of laughter, were testament to the play’s unsettling power half a century after it was written.

I haven’t written anything during recent months about the extraordinary sequence of events in the Arab world. In Tunisia, there was a rebellion against the oppressive rule of the dictator there. The rebellion was led, not by Islamist fundamentalists, but by people simply demanding the same freedoms that we enjoy in the West, and aware of those freedoms because of the new technologies which have in recent years connected previously dispersed parts of the world, and have given oppressed peoples living under dictatorships easy ways of communicating with each other. The dictator fell.

Then the mood spread to Egypt, where Mubarak was a tougher nut to crack. Much blood was spilt when thugs employed by Mubarak tried to put down the rebellion, but in the end he departed. The army is ruling the country until September, when the people are promised the first free elections they have known. Those who made the revolution fear that the elections will bring success to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and to the rump of Mubarak’s puppet political party, rather than to the forces of secular openness and freedom that they represent. My hero in Egypt is Mohamed ElBaradei, who was for 12 years Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency and who justly, together with the IAEA, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. He has said that he will run in the Egyptian presidential elections, but I have no idea what are his chances of success. He is exactly the kind of wise, open-minded, internationalist leader that Egypt needs. To be sure of his qualities one need look no further than the fact that the Bush administration did everything it could to prevent him from gaining a third four-year term in charge of the IAEA in 2005. John Bolton, one of the vilest of the underlings in that administration, was given the job of trying to discredit ElBaradei. His efforts failed.

The spirit of rebellion then spread to Yemen, to Bahrain, to Algeria, to Syria, to Libya… In Bahrain, forces loyal to the royal family which controls that little island, which represents the Sunni minority and has kept the Shia majority in subjection for decades, brutally suppressed an uprising calling for the same democratic rights as were being demanded elsewhere in the Arab world. This was embarrassing for America, which stations its Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. Indeed, the whole chain of events in these Arab countries has exposed the hypocrisy of the West, which has happily sold arms to oppressive governments in the region, speaking publicly of the need for security there while congratulating itself privately on the profits its arms manufacturers have been making, only to discover that the arms were being used to put down the very democratic values the West claims to treasure.

And then, Libya. Same story to begin with: the people had had enough of Gaddafi’s brutal and quixotic 41-year reign. They rebelled. Different response from the regime: whereas in Tunisia and Egypt the dictators left, having killed some people but not changed the overall outcome, Gaddafi made it clear that he was willing to destroy his own people in whatever numbers necessary in order to maintain his hold on power. He began to use aeroplanes and tanks to attack the rebels, and looked certain eventually to impose a temporary bloody peace at the cost of thousands of deaths and full-scale destruction of towns and cities, especially Benghazi, which had proclaimed its rejection of his regime early on, and had declared itself the cradle of a potential new government. Gaddafi’s rhetoric is similar to that used by another monstrous African leader, Robert Mugabe: he presents himself as a valiant opponent of colonialism. The West only wants us for our oil, he says. Being a maverick Muslim, he is also able to declare that challenges to his power come from ‘Crusaders’ (us, the West) and Islamist fundamentalists.

Anyhow, the United Nations has done something which I applaud and which will, I hope, restore its reputation as the only international agency with the right to authorise violence in order to prevent greater violence. That reputation was disastrously damaged by Bush and Blair when they went to war in Iraq in 2003 without a UN mandate and against the advice of the wisest voices at the time (including ElBaradei, who described the invasion of Iraq as ‘a glaring example of how, in many cases, the use of force exacerbates the problem rather than [solves] it’). This time, after long debate, the Security Council passed a unanimous resolution (Russia and China abstaining rather than voting against) authorising the use of force to prevent Gaddafi attacking his own citizens. The resolution came just in time; Gaddafi’s tanks were close to Benghazi. Suddenly, the game changed. Gaddafi’s counter-revolution was stopped in its tracks. As I write, it looks as if his regime will come to an end, either by military defeat or by a palace coup to drive him from power, leading to some kind of arrangement with the provisional government established by the rebels.

The micro-history of revolutions is extraordinary. A young man called Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on 17 December 2010. I simply quote from Wikipedia: ‘Twenty-six year old Mohamed Bouazizi had been the sole income earner in his extended family of eight. He operated a purportedly unlicensed vegetable cart for seven years in Sidi Bouzid 190 miles (300 km) south of Tunis. On 17 December 2010 a policewoman confiscated his cart and produce. Bouazizi, who had such an event happen to him before, tried to pay the 10-dinar fine (a day's wages, equivalent to 7USD). In response the policewoman slapped him, spat in his face, and insulted his deceased father. A humiliated Bouazizi then went to the provincial headquarters in an attempt to complain to local municipality officials. He was refused an audience. Without alerting his family, at 11:30 am and within an hour of the initial confrontation, Bouazizi returned to the headquarters, doused himself with a flammable liquid and set himself on fire. Public outrage quickly grew over the incident, leading to protests. This immolation and the subsequent heavy-handed response by the police to peaceful marchers caused riots the next day in Sidi Bouzid that went largely unnoticed, although social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube featured images of police dispersing youths who attacked shop windows and damaged cars. Bouazizi was subsequently transferred to a hospital near Tunis. In an attempt to quell the unrest President Zine el Abidine Ben Ali visited Bouazizi in hospital on 28 December 2010. Bouazizi died on 4 January 2011.’

And look what has happened as a result.

A week has passed. Last Monday the weather changed; it has been warm and sunny since. This morning we ate breakfast out on the deck (as they call it in America — terrasse as I would call it at Kerfontaine). Spring is fully here, and for a European it’s spring on speed. Flowers are in bloom that I would expect to see in June and July in England or Brittany.

Yesterday we took a long walk, up and down the hills along Castro Street, left on Oak Street until we got to the park called the Panhandle, which leads to Golden Gate Park, then all the way along Golden Gate Park (stopping for an hour in the De Young Museum) to the Pacific Ocean. The great booming breakers were urged on by a strong wind off the sea which blew sand in our eyes.

Golden Gate Park is a magnificent example of what a park should be in a great city. The site, on sand dunes, was chosen in 1870. After trial and error, the designers discovered a variety of European grass that would take root in the sand and stabilise it. Tree planting soon followed, so now there are magnificent mature trees of many varieties, deciduous and coniferous, and countless kinds of wild flowers, I imagine at their best at this season. There are special attractions for which you pay, like the De Young, the California Academy of Sciences, the Japanese Tea Garden, the San Francisco Botanical Garden. Were I a native of the city or were I here for a long time, I would come to love this park as much as I love Regents Park.

We took the N tram all the way back from Ocean Beach into the city, then changed to the J to get home, sitting together pleasantly tired and quiet.

Work is going well. The programmes (‘programs’ in American) are coming in now, and tomorrow we make the website available to an invited audience, for user testing.

Last week I didn’t get round to writing about the other immense event which has shaken the world in recent weeks. On 11 March, an earthquake under the sea off the north-east coast of Japan triggered a tsunami which by current estimates killed 27,000 people. This is a small number by comparison with the death toll in last year’s earthquake in Haiti or that in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, but still represents a terrible catastrophe. And there has been a consequent disaster which didn’t occur in either of the other two cases: a nuclear power station was badly damaged and has been leaking radiation into the earth, the air and the sea. No-one knows to what extent more people’s lives have been or will be cut short by radiation poisoning. For the moment, the debate about the wisdom of using nuclear fission to generate electricity has entered another doubtful phase, as it did after the disaster at Chernobyl and the near-disaster at Three Mile Island. In particular, people are asking why the authorities allow nuclear power stations to be built in earthquake zones.

There is universal admiration for the calm, mutually supportive way that the Japanese people are enduring the agony. I read yesterday that Tokyo, which is 400 kilometres south of the devastated area but which is greatly affected by the shortage of electricity caused by the damage to the power station, is in a state of self-denial; people consider it inappropriate to enjoy themselves in public, or to consume too freely, while their compatriots are suffering so terribly up north. And of course, in a country which has known nuclear annihilation and then the effects of radiation poisoning for many decades after 1945, the fear of what is in the wind must be ever-present.

In Libya, much blood has been spilled this week as the civil war continues. Gaddafi’s better equipped forces have retaliated against the rebels, who have enthusiasm and moral right on their side, but who are struggling to get organised and who need better weapons. The coalition forces, empowered by the UN resolution to protect Libyan civilians, aren’t sure to what extent they should use that resolution to proactively attack Gaddafi, with the risk of causing civilian casualties. I’m sure the West is doing some things in secret to help the rebels. What France, the UK and the US want more than anything else is for Gaddafi’s closest associates to recognise that the game is up and to betray him. His foreign minister managed to get out of the country to Tunisia this week, and then defected to Britain. That was a big propaganda coup, but there hasn’t been another since.

Meanwhile, in other Arab states where the people’s desire for the same rights and freedoms that we enjoy in the West has expressed itself in protest, the dictators have resorted to familiar and contemptible arguments to justify their repression. As convenient, they announce that the protests are promoted by sinister foreign elements (which might include Shias if you’re a Sunni autocrat, or Sunnis if you’re a Shia autocrat), by Al-Qaida, by ‘Crusaders’, by the West’s greed for oil, by European powers nostalgic for their former colonial dominance. There’s a little bit of truth in some of these accusations in some cases, but overwhelmingly they miss the point, which the autocrats can’t or don’t want to see: their people know the kind of world they’re living in, because of the unstoppable spread of communications technology, and they want their human rights.

Assad in Syria is one of the nastiest of the Arab leaders; either that or he lacks power himself — former eye doctor turned head of state when his father died — and is a puppet of brutes around him. He’s been promising the Syrians reform for the ten years he’s been president, but it hasn’t come. His speech on television this week was like one of Mubarak’s speeches early in the Egyptian crisis: ‘I’m not giving an inch’. I fear that, if the protest movement in Syria continues to gain courage and strength, there will be another blood bath, and another dilemma for the UN and the world’s big powers.

Two unspeakable ‘Christian pastors’ in Florida, who staged a mock trial of the Koran and then burnt a copy of the book, are responsible for numerous deaths in Afghanistan, including those of several UN workers. Predictably, the Taliban took up the provocation intended by the pastors, and have committed murders in revenge. And today the Taliban have slaughtered Sufi Muslims in Pakistan.

The barbarity is endless, and of two kinds: secular barbarity, as in Syria, where the regime’s desire is simply to retain power; and religious barbarity, as in Florida, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the Ivory Coast, a struggle for dominance is in its final stages, with the forces of President-elect Ouattara, who won the country’s election last year, about to overcome those of the tragically foolish President Gbagbo, who has refused to accept his defeat. Thousands of people have died in the conflict which has followed Ouattara’s eventual and understandable decision to take his legitimate power by violent means. Gbagbo won’t last much longer.

All in all, not a good week for the brotherhood of man.

We’re staying in the same house as in August and September of last year. At that time, months before I knew that I was going to be working in America, Helen proposed the idea that we should return for a three-week holiday, with friends coming and going, to include my 60th birthday, which is next Thursday.

It’s the first time I’ve been in Tuscany at this season. The place is, if anything, even more enchantingly beautiful than it is at any other season. The fields are green with wheat, barley, oats and rye; wild flowers abound at the roadsides; as the long light evenings draw to an end, the sun sets next to the silhouette of Montalcino on its hilltop.

As I probably wrote last year, we are exactly equidistant from San Quirico and Pienza: 4.5 kilometres in each case. To compare them properly, I turn to Yeats: ‘Both beautiful, one a gazelle.’ The gazelle is Pienza, above us to the east, named — or renamed — after Pope Pius II, a native of the place, who gave much money to re-establish it as a civitas, a place where the virtues of urban living could be practised and developed, where men and women could come to realise that life can be more than grubbing from the soil. In short, unlike Mrs Thatcher, Pius II believed that there is such a thing as society. This morning we stood outside the Bar Casello, between the Via d’Amore and the Via del Bacio (and couples do stand under the street sign to kiss), on a stone pathway, leaning on a balustrade and gazing southward across the immense scoop of the green and blonde valley towards Radicofani and Monte Amiata.

Being a gazelle, Pienza is besieged with tourists, even so early in the season. It has too many shops containing things that a sensible person can do without. If I had to make a choice, my heart would belong to the sister who doesn’t quite achieve gazelle status, but who is lovely enough to satisfy the longings of any reasonable homme moyen sensuel. San Quirico, below us to the west, stands quietly within its walls, outside which little vegetable gardens are thriving almost visibly, given the combination of rain and heat that we’ve had. A church and a chapel, each about a thousand years old, mark the two ends of the town, linked by a straight street about half a mile in length. Halfway up the street is the Piazza della Libertà, where a very good cappuccino can be had at the Bar Centrale. Last night we dined handsomely at the Osteria del Cardinale. I eat as much tripe as I can get when I’m here; it’s almost impossible to find in restaurants in England, now we’ve all become so bourgeois — and how strange that that word has come to mean what it does, when it started out simply meaning people who lived in bourgs, borghi, like San Quirico and Pienza. Anyhow, my tripe, covered with a spicy tomato sauce, was delicious. ‘Eat like a peasant, drink like a nobleman’: I did, on a Brunello di Montalcino Riserva 2004. Afterwards we wandered in the town, which was celebrating the Festa di Barbarossa, commemorating a meeting there between the Emperor of Germany, he of the red beard, and representatives of the pope of the day, at which the two great powers tried to reach an accord. I haven’t studied hard enough to know whether or not an accord was in fact reached; nor, I think, had the young men who entertained the crowd in the quartiere next to the chapel with dazzling performances of 50s American pop numbers — Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis and the like — causing wild outbreaks of rocking and rolling on the uneven ancient stone slabs.

During our first week here, we rented all five apartments in the house, and the friends who joined us then — Mike Raleigh, Kate Myers and David, Lindsay and Tom James — gave me a wonderful and appropriate early birthday present: a 1766 two-volume first edition of Smollett’s Travels through France and Italy. I’m halfway through the second volume, which is about Italy. He’s a bad-tempered so-and-so, and occasionally tedious, but often wonderfully informative about the details of daily life in France and Italy 250 years ago. For example: ‘With all their pride, however, the nobles of Florence are humble enough to enter into partnership with shopkeepers, and even to sell wine by retail. It is an undoubted fact, that in every palace or great house in this city, there is a little window fronting the street, provided with an iron-knocker, and over it hangs an empty flask, by way of sign-post. Thither you send your servant to buy a bottle of wine. He knocks at the little wicket, which is opened immediately by a domestic, who supplies him with what he wants, and receives the money like the waiter of any other cabaret. It is pretty extraordinary, that it should not be deemed a disparagement in a nobleman to sell half a pound of figs, or a palm of ribbon or tape, or to take money for a flask of sour wine; and yet be counted infamous to match his daughter in the family of a person who has distinguished himself in any one of the learned professions.’

Smollett’s way from Florence to Rome passed, as it had to, along the Via Cassia, right next to where we are staying. His carriage broke an axle-tree just south of Buonconvento, which is 15 kilometres north of San Quirico; our Land Rover, at about the same place, developed serious trouble in its cooling system, and is currently being attended to in a garage in San Quirico. I think Smollett paid less for the repair than I shall, even allowing for inflation; but I am of opinion (to use that lovely 18th-century phrase) quite opposite to his, on the character of Italian people on whom the traveller is obliged to depend. Smollett says (not for the first time in the book): ‘I repeat it again; of all the people I ever knew, the Italians are the most villainously rapacious.’ My mechanic Valerio gave me the use of a little rental car for almost no money, and supplied me with two bottles of wine because the next day was the Festa della Repubblica. It remains to be seen how efficient he will be in repairing the Land Rover; but he’s made a good start in terms of customer relations.

After a week more of this idyll, we shall drive to Marseille (in a fully repaired car, I trust), stay three nights with Mary, leave the car there for her to drive it in convoy with Jacques to Kerfontaine in July. They are going to re-paint the outside of the house. We shall take the train to Paris on 21 June, stay a night there, then fly back to America. My contract has been extended to the end of August, although I’ve negotiated to spend the second half of that month working by internet and phone from Brittany. Despite my previous determination to ask for a full week’s pay for a full week’s work, I’ve accepted a continuation of the three-days-a-week compromise I’ve had up to now, because the daily rate is good, and I’m enjoying myself over there. After the end of August, I don’t know. I shall be quite content if that’s the end of the matter; there will be a permanent, American chief executive in place by then, and he or she may or may not want me. If he or she does, and if I like him or her, I’ll go back one more time, until the end of the year. But that’ll be it. I’m a European, not an American. They tend to eat dinner too early, for one thing. But I’m pleased with what we’ve achieved at Teaching Channel so far. The trouble is, there’s too little content; we won’t turn the heads of millions of American teachers with 35 hours of commissioned programmes, whatever the quality. Funding decisions are, as the Americans say, above my pay-grade. On the other hand, as the Americans also say, in life you have to see the doughnut, not the hole.

Today I am 60. I feel melancholy. It’s nothing to do with the passage of time, reflections on my mortality, anything like that. I think I have a little of Leopardi’s sadness in ‘Il sabato nel villaggio’:

‘Questo di sette [that is, Saturday] è il più gradito giorno,
pien di speme e di goia:
diman tristezza e noia
recheran l’ore, ed al travalgio usato
ciascuno in suo pensier farà ritorno.’

It’s not that I’m thinking about work tomorrow. I won’t be working until Monday, and in any case the prospect of work doesn’t sadden me. It’s the sense that once a looked-for day arrives, it doesn’t carry the charm which it promised in anticipation. I experienced this feeling every Christmas Day when I was a child. It will pass.

Leaving our apartment in Noe Valley, I walked up the steep — and then precipitously steep — slope through quiet streets of pretty, wooden houses, each painted differently in a pleasing mix of colours, then crossed a bridge over a highway, then climbed further through a more modern estate of apartments and houses, not so attractive, until I came up to Twin Peaks, high above the city. From either one of this pair of hills is the most wonderful view: to the east, San Francisco and its bay, looking across to Berkeley and Oakland, with the traffic on the Bay Bridge twinkling in the twilight; to the north, the Golden Gate Bridge and the hills of Marin County; to the south, the Saint Bruno mountain; to the west, the Pacific. Watching the sun descend into the sea on a clear evening, bracing yourself against the high wind which nearly always blows up there, then turning slowly around 360 degrees and taking everything in — the planes taking off and landing at SFO and Oakland Airports, the stars appearing one by one in the darkening sky, a new moon getting up behind the Berkeley Hills — has been one of the great, panoptic experiences of my life. I’ve done this about five times since I’ve been here.

Much has happened in the ten weeks since my birthday. We flew back to New York on 22 June, and spent five days there. Then on to San Francisco for what turned out to be my last stint at Teaching Channel. A new chief executive, Alan Arkatov, took up his post on 1 July. We met and talked a few days later. I told him that I would stay on beyond 31 August, if he wanted me to, on two conditions: that I remained the second-in-command of the organisation, and that the daily rate I had been receiving for my fictional three days’ work per week should be paid to me for the five days a week I was actually working.

I returned to New York on 11 July. Arriving back in San Francisco on 15 July, I spoke on the phone to Alan. He was very complimentary about what I’d done for Teaching Channel so far, but he said didn’t need a second-in-command at the moment, and he didn’t like the idea of my being in France, while still working, in the latter half of August. We didn’t get on to money. So I suggested that I should finish, definitively, on 11 August, the day before we had booked flights to return to Europe once more, and that Erin Crysdale, who had been my deputy since December, should take over my post on 12 August. Alan thought about the idea, phoned Erin twice, and on the second occasion offered her the job. She accepted.

My strongest feeling after the phone call with Alan was that of relief. As soon as we met, I knew that we were very different characters, and I wasn’t sure that I would retain the freedom of action in my role that I had had with Andrew. By the time I left, Alan had — I think and hope — come to realise that Teaching Channel would prosper only if it regarded the continuation of the kind of work I had started as its central task: to use the art and craft of high-quality narrative television to show American teachers engaging and sometimes inspiring examples of their collleagues at work. He has a number of other ideas for promoting and extending the service, some good, some in my opinion distractions from the central task. He was very gracious in his thanks to me when I left. His principal task is to secure regular funding, from the Gates Foundation or whomever, which would among other things enable Erin to commission in larger quantity than I was able to. $5 million a year would be an adequate commissioning budget. We shall see.

The other Teaching Channel colleagues were sad to see me go. We had a party on a boat belonging to Mark Cattell, a close friend of Erin’s — and now a good friend of mine — on my last evening. The boat is moored at Sausalito, and we chugged around the bay near there, drinking champagne and eating sushi. There was a beautiful sunset and an almost full moon.

The chance to work in America has been wonderful. It may well not happen again. I’ve made some friends who will, I think, be friends for life, however often or however rarely we see each other in future.

The next day Helen and I packed and took a taxi to the airport in mid-afternoon for the overnight flight to Heathrow. I slept well on the plane after dinner, so didn’t feel too bad as we changed planes and flew to Charles de Gaulle on Saturday afternoon. I’d hired a car, and we drove down empty motorways to Kerfontaine, arriving about eleven. David, Lindsay and Tom were here to greet us. They had been staying for a fortnight already. Mike Raleigh and Kate Myers had joined them for a few days and had already departed.

Mary, Jacques, Tess, Sophie and Jacques’ mother Lucille had been here earlier. Jacques painted the outside of the house. It shines like a wedding cake now. The guests following had done a great job weeding and replanting the overgrown borders: tedious work to me, for which I’m very grateful. David, Lindsay and Tom left the following Wednesday, and I spent then three days mowing lawns and clipping bushes. The place looks fine now, although the big hedges will need cutting soon. I’ll do that with Jean-Paul. So, je cultive mon jardin (with a little help from my friends).

In the world outside, the major current event is the endgame of the conflict in Libya, about which I first wrote in March. There has been a full-scale civil war, which Gaddafi is just about to lose. Many thousands have died. The rebels, whose administration is called the National Transitional Council, have had increasingly decisive help from the NATO bombardments of Gaddafi positions and facilities which the UN authorised. It’s becoming clear that outside countries, notably the UK and France, have provided secret support to the rebels in terms of training and equipment, and in the co-ordination of the final advance on Tripoli. Gaddafi loyalists are resisting strenuously, but not for much longer. The whereabouts of Gaddafi himself are unknown at the moment.

Meanwhile, the brutal suppression of resistance in Syria continues. Again, thousands are dead. Unlike in Libya, it will be impossible to get UN backing for any kind of military intervention there unless — God forbid — the suppression were to get dramatically worse, and possibly not even then. Russia and China would veto it. So the West is left with lesser weapons such as a ban on the purchase of Syria’s oil, freezing of some of its assets abroad, and visa restrictions. I just hope that events in Libya, which has been the toughest liberation struggle yet in north Africa, will embolden Syrian people to believe that what has happened in Tunisia and Egypt, and will shortly happen in Libya, really could happen in their country. But the violence will be dreadful. The Assad regime is just as vicious, in a more calculating, less crazy way, as the Gaddafi regime has been.

World capitalism has been experiencing one of its periodic fits of unreason, made worse by palpable political failings on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, there was an almost complete breakdown of communication in Congress, which was only resolved a few hours before a deadline — midnight on 2/3 August — which would have meant that, theoretically, America would have defaulted on its enormous government debt. The problem was that the legal debt ceiling needed to be raised, to deal with the immediate danger of default, as part of a longer-term plan to bring the budget deficit down. The budget deficit had been brought about, first, by the ruinous cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; secondly by the Obama administration’s evident need to borrow money after the 2008 crisis, to avoid the possibility of a complete collapse of America’s financial and industrial system.

The mid-term elections last November brought into Congress extremists in the Republican party not prepared to countenance tax rises of any kind as a contribution to lowering the budget deficit. This despite the fact the some of the tax cuts and tax breaks introduced by the Bush administration defy justification by any reasonable criterion. It cannot be right that the billionaire bosses of hedge funds pay a lower effective rate of tax than the humblest secretaries working in their organisations. It cannot be right that oil companies get generous tax breaks when they continue to post multi-billion-dollar profits every quarter. All the Democrats in Congress, the whole Obama administration, and quite a few of the more moderate Republicans understand that. But the zealots don’t, or won’t. America has needed to borrow so much because of the wars and the disastrous results of laissez-faire attitudes to financial institutions introduced in the Reagan and Thatcher period; that is, because of essentially Republican attitudes and actions (though I admit that it was under Clinton that the Republican-dominated congress took the fateful decision to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, a decision which theoretically he could have vetoed). America had a budget surplus when Clinton left office. It’s extremist Republicans who have refused to apply sensible remedies, involving a mixture of tax rises and spending cuts, to a problem their own ideology and party has created.

In the end, at the last minute, a compromise was reached, but a far less satisfactory compromise, attending less radically to the problem, than could have been reached if Washington were anything other than a dysfunctional site of governance at the moment.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the problems of countries in the eurozone with large public debts, principally Greece, but also Portugal, Ireland and then more worryingly Italy and Spain, have meant that the governments of all the eurozone countries, plus the European Central Bank, the European Commission and the International Monetary Fund, have been struggling to protect Europe’s weaker brethren, and have faced the possibility that some countries might need to leave the euro and re-establish their own currencies, and the outside possibility that the euro itself might collapse.

It’s here that one sees the wickedness of the power of unbridled private money. There are legitimate criticisms to be made about bad or incompetent politicians and political systems. The previous government in Greece lied about the public finances; Papandreou has had to clear up the mess. The previous government in Ireland allowed an unsustainable property boom to develop, based on borrowed money. Berlusconi (whom the Italian electorate will, I think, finally reject at the next elections) has brought the whole government machine in Italy into disrepute as a result of the evident corruption and illegality of so many of his actions. It’s true that in too many countries of southern Europe it’s too easy not to pay tax. But so powerful are the centres of private money in the world, and so easy is it for money holders to enrich themselves even further by taking advantage of the weaknesses and problems of states, that the heads of government in Europe find themselves in constant crisis mode to outwit the activities of people in front of computer screens who gamble on the movement of debt and debt interest with no regard at all to the damage in the real world which their casino games cause.

It is possible, I’m sure, to redress the balance of advantage in the lending and borrowing of money towards states and away from private finance, even within the system of international capitalism which is here to stay. But it requires international consensus, and since 2008 such consensus has been so hard to achieve, decisions in the right direction so feeble, that unless there’s another scare on the scale of 2008 or worse, I fear that states will continue to be the mongoose and private money the snake.

Earlier this month, there were riots in London and other English cities of a kind and on a scale that has not happened in my lifetime. The riots of the 70s and 80s were essentially race riots, to put it crudely; black and brown people, especially young men, expressed their rage at the abuse and harassment they had over many years received from the police. It is true that this month’s riots were sparked by the shooting dead of a 29-year-old man of colour in Tottenham. He was in a minicab; he had a loaded gun with him; he was confronted by armed policemen who shot first. The remaining details have not yet been published. The following day there was a peaceful demonstration to protest at his killing. Then, quite unexpectedly, anarchy took over. People with no connection to the dead man, people of various ethnic backgrounds including many whites, young women as well as young men, began to loot, break and burn property all over London, and later in Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol and other cities. The violence continued night after night. The police were initially overwhelmed. The Prime Minister and the Mayor of London rushed backed from their holidays. Parliament was recalled for the second time this summer recess (the first was because of the News of the World scandal, which I haven’t written about yet). After five nights, and with greatly increased police presence at all the trouble spots, the violence ceased.

The most dreadful individual incident occurred in Birmingham. Three young men, Asian Muslims, who were standing defending their property, were run down and killed by a man in a car. I haven’t read whether the driver was a racist, or drunk, or simply lost control of the vehicle. The father of one of the men made a heroic and successful appeal for calm in a context where there could have been full-scale intercommunal fighting and more deaths.

Some of the magistrates’ courts stayed open all night, and through the following weekend, to deal with those arrested, whose number I think was more than two thousand. Many of the hearings were adjourned so that trials could take place at higher courts, where harsher sentences could be imposed. It’s clear from the sentences already passed that there’s an element of exemplary justice in the punishments, which I approve of.

Of course, the riots provoked a spate of agonised or enraged sociological questions and suggested answers about why they happened. Within an inevitably complex set of reasons, this is what I think.

There has been for a generation now now an underclass in British society created by the upheavals of the Thatcher government. These people aren't necessarily poor in the sense that the unemployed were poor in the 1930s; they have some material goods that the poor of the 30s couldn’t have dreamed of, notably the hand-held electronic devices which the rioters used to communicate information about where to gather next to loot and burn. But they have no sense of a stake in the society, no pride, however rarely spoken or thought, in being citizens. Quite often, their parents have been completely ineffective as models of right behaviour and attitude. They’re out for themselves, because they reason that no-one else will care for them or value them. Of this hopeless group of people, only a small minority will actually commit crimes, but that minority made up the majority of those who went out into the streets on those nights. I admit that, among the rioters, there were some who weren’t poor at all, in any sense: young people from middle-class families about to go to university; people with paying jobs and cars who succumbed to greed in the madness of the moment. The press made much of these cases. But, from what I’ve read, most of the criminal acts were committed by people of the kind I’ve described: almost entirely young (30 and under), mainly but not entirely male, of many ethnicities, outside the social consensus in which the comfortable majority of British people live.

What examples are these footloose people, living in a less deferential, less hierarchical society than two generations ago, a society with less fear built into its structures: what examples from public life are these people offered in our instant-communication world? The bankers of 2008, still obscenely rich and apparently beyond sanction for their acts of greed and stupidity which often came close to criminality, and should in some cases have been pursued through the courts; the members of parliament who routinely robbed those who had elected them through their abuse of the expenses system; journalists who hacked the phones of the murdered and the bereaved, and were paid well for doing so; footballers and their hangers-on who, normally quite legally as a result of the absurdities of the market for their talent, live lives of Babylonian luxury whose details are constantly offered to the underclass through the internet, gossip magazines and trash TV. And the footloose say, ‘I’ll have some of that if the chance presents itself.’

I must say that I don’t know what we can do about this. Labour, despite sincere efforts, made only the smallest dent on the inequalities it inherited in 1997, of which the most grievous was that twice as many children in Britain were poor in that year as had been poor in 1979. It had Sure Start, the minimum wage, the tax credits for low-income families, and other measures. But it committed its own dreadful errors too, with its excessive courting of and admiration for the wealthy and powerful. I’ve written before about the hypocrisy of Cameron’s ‘broken society’ mantra; it was his political forebears, not Blair and Brown, whatever their shortcomings, who almost broke British society. I really think that the only solutions are the old, practical, prosaic ones: more apprenticeships, a good variety of training schemes leading to worthwhile work in trades and professions, job creation in areas of greatest unemployment, a balancing of the rewards of work against benefits to make work the more attractive option, where it exists.

Meanwhile, more young people than ever want to go to university, and are qualified by their A-level results to do so. Conservative ministers, in power, congratulate these young people and their teachers; they don’t say on radio and television, as they did in opposition, that results are better only because exams are easier.

Cameron and — to a lesser extent — the Home Secretary, Theresa May, made contemptible statements at the height of the crisis criticising the police, and suggesting that it was only when they intervened that the problems of inadequate police numbers were solved. Their desire to get political credit out of the affair disgusted me. Certainly, the police were overwhelmed at the beginning; the riots were sudden, unpredictable and, because of the use of hand-held communications gadgets, unprecedented in the speed at which they spread. But it was a police decision to rapidly increase the numbers on the streets of London on, I think, the third and fourth nights; nothing to do with Cameron coming back from Tuscany to chair a meeting. As one of the police chiefs said, pointedly (I paraphrase), ‘We’ve had to take some unfair criticism from people who weren’t there.’ Everyone knew who he meant.

Not for the first time, my short flight from Brest to Southampton is delayed, so what better way to fill the time than to write the diary? Actually, I’ve just been finishing the first English poem I’ve written since leaving Teaching Channel and re-applying the brain to the old art. It’s called ‘Internal Eclogue at 60’. The first voice is bucolic and full of philosophic melancholy about mortality, driven by Ecclesiastes chapter 9 verse 5, which I’ve paraphrased as ‘The living know that they have to die / and the dead know nothing at all’. The second voice brusquely tells the first to stop whingeing, be grateful that he’s had such a lovely life so far, and just get on with it. I’m pleased with the piece. The first part could almost stand by itself, but only almost; it drifts too close to a world-weariness which has been a theme for thousands of poets for thousands of years. Just when you think that’s all there is, the metre changes (from dactyls to iambic fourteeners) along with the bucket of cold water from the new voice.

I say ‘the first English poem’, because I’ve also written my second French poem (the first being the short tribute to Albert which is on his grave). This is a version (closer to an imitation than a translation) of last year’s comic poem ‘Vacheries’. I did it because on 4 September I went to the Fête de Saint Guénaël, as I always like to when I’m at Kerfontaine on the first Sunday in September. Annick had given a copy of the English poem to Dominique Gragnic, the farmer at Saint Guénaël who’s a good friend and the main organiser of the fête, and whose cows had given me the idea for the poem in the first place. Dominique asked me to read out the poem, in English followed by a rough prose French translation, as part of the entertainment after lunch (squeezed between a display of wood-chopping by lumberjacks from Finistère and an illustrated talk by an enthusiast for traditional Breton games). A crowd of about 300 listened, smiled very slightly at what I thought were quite good jokes, and applauded politely. I determined to do a proper French version, complete with rhythm and rhyme. Annick helped me, as she always does when I try anything difficult in French.

The Libyan revolution is almost complete. The head of the National Transitional Council made a good speech today, promising a democracy within ‘moderate Islam’, and appealing to his supporters not to take individual revenge on Gaddafi loyalists. There have been some revenge killings, but on a small scale by comparison with Gaddafi’s atrocities. Many of Gaddafi’s close allies have fled to Niger. Some of his family are in Algeria. No-one knows where he is. His whereabouts matter less than the establishment of a new government in Libya, and a final end to the war. I hope that he will be captured at some point and sent to the International Criminal Court, where his trial will go on for years. Of course it would be cheaper and more straightforward if someone would kill him (I remember feeling the same way about Milosevic), but that would make him a martyr in his supporters’ eyes, and the important job that the ICC does is to continually remind potential and actual tyrants that they are not beyond the law.

Yesterday’s delayed 40-minute flight to Southampton was notable for its ending. After crossing the Isle of Wight and the Solent, the plane travelled inland, did its usual 180-degree turn and approached the airport via Winchester, giving me a beautiful view of the town and the cathedral. There were rain clouds about and the ride was bumpy. We skimmed over the perimeter fence. I always sit up straight in my seat just before the moment of impact on landing; I have a — probably wrong — idea that in the event of a crash I might sustain less damage in that position. The plane hit the ground with one violent bump, and then another. I looked out of the window to see that we were heading for the sky again. The air hostess announced that the captain had ‘discontinued the landing, and that there was no cause for alarm’. We did another circuit of the Solent, and the captain came on in reassuring tones: the wind had changed at the last moment; it might have been difficult to bring the plane to a halt; the safest thing was to take off again. Everyone was calm. There were a few British jokes about learner drivers. The second landing, after exactly the same approach, was successful. There was light applause. But I noticed four fire engines in attendance as we taxied.

I’m briefly in London on Poetry Society business. There has been full-scale war in the organisation in recent months. The war’s causes are too tedious too recount in detail, even to myself. The main facts are that, early this year, the chair of trustees took some actions, I think sincerely intended for the director’s benefit, without — according to the director — having consulted her. (He insisted he did consult her.) The director resigned, citing wrong treatment by the trustees. There was a fear that she might sue the trustees for constructive dismissal. The trustees took their own legal advice. The chair, only in post since last November, resigned. The dispute became public knowledge, and eventually led to the holding of an extraordinary general meeting, at which the members of the Society by a large majority declared that they had no confidence in the trustees. The trustees decided to resign as a body. The annual general meeting of the Society, usually held in November, was brought forward to tonight. The director resumed her post, as announced by an email from the acting chair of trustees, which included an apology from the trustees. A new board will be voted in tonight (in marked contrast to the usual situation, where it is difficult to find enough people to serve as trustees, there are more than 30 nominations for about a dozen places) and then, as the next item of business on the agenda, we shall resign.

While all the blood was being spilt, I was in America. I tried, completely unsuccessfully, by phone calls and emails, to bring the director and the then chair of trustees to an understanding before their positions became irreconcilable.

I’m sorry that I won’t be a trustee of the Society any more. I think I did a bit of good in the educational area. I can’t help reflecting that I was on the panel which appointed the director, so I take some responsibility for that; then, when the director told me that she couldn’t work with a previous chair of trustees, I had a hand in getting a new chair appointed at last year’s AGM. He was the person she said she wanted. The Society then made a successful bid to the Arts Council for a three-year funding award, to everyone’s great satisfaction, before the trouble broke out, causing the Arts Council to say that its promised funding couldn’t be guaranteed unless the Society got its governance in order.

Part of the difficulty has been that poets and people interested in poetry are too well educated and too self-important. At the height of the dispute, around 40 emails a day were clogging up my inbox. People weighed in from all sides with prolix, exquisitely turned expressions of rage, contempt and self-importance. Well known poets, with honorary positions on the Society’s notepaper, announced their resignations, evidently without knowledge of the prosaic reasons which had brought about the dispute. It has all been a bloody and unnecessary mess, causing me to recall my old law of inverse proportionality: the nobler the cause which brings a group of people together, the more vicious can be the actual behaviour of those people towards each other.

London is exquisite today: the welcoming, breezy, invigorating air of early autumn. The rowans carry great bunches of full ripe berries.

I haven’t written about my reading recently. In America, I went on from Madame Bovary to three of Balzac’s novels: Cousine Bette, Père Goriot and Eugénie Grandet. I hadn’t read any Balzac until now, although I read Graham Robb’s biography of Balzac last year. I have the feeling that three Balzacs are enough. I get the idea: a savage, cynical account of the pettiness, insincerity and self-interestedness of most French people, at least of the upper class and the ‘respectable’ bourgeoisie. You have to imagine how some of the scenes would have played to the contemporary audience: for example, the encounter at the beginning of Cousine Bette between the vile man (forgotten his name for the moment) and the respectable wife, where he straightforwardly proposes adultery, and then the pathetic turning of the tables later in the novel where she goes to him to offer her honour, by which time he is no longer interested. The novels are easy to read, and offer wonderfully detailed portraits of Paris and (in Eugénie Grandet) provincial France in the first half of the 19th century, but somehow they didn’t deeply engage me, I think because the author’s unchanging attitude to the characters he had created seemed to me to be represented by a sneer.

Being in America, I thought I should read some Faulkner, and here the rewards were great. I started, by lucky chance, with something easy by Faulkner standards: The Unvanquished. Then I opened Absalom, Absalom! I stuck with it, steadily, night after night, skipping nothing, making my eyes take in the unrelieved pages of solid narrative print even when there were long sections I couldn’t understand. When I got to the end, I started at the beginning again straight away. I don’t think I’ve ever done that with a book before. This time, it yielded itself. The last 50 pages felt like an exaltation second time round. I had taken it in; I had got it — the whole extraordinary portrait of the South, with its unspeakable racism accepted as normal life, the codes of behaviour which bound people and which one can only reach now by an extreme effort of imagination, the brutality. It is an epic masterpiece by the highest standards of world literature. Then I went on to the easier but equally astonishing As I Lay Dying. I love the line where the husband, once his wife has breathed her last, says, ‘The Lord’s will be done. Now I can get them teeth.’ When the carpenter son narrowly escapes drowning in the flooded river, the main thing the family is concerned about is retrieving his tools. They put cement on his broken leg, without greasing it first. Characteristically, the climax of the action — to bury the decomposing corpse in the graveyard of the town where the mother was born — is thrown away in a subordinate clause. By then, we are more concerned about the fate of the pregnant teenage daughter who wants to have her baby aborted, and her encounter with the corrupt chemist. The husband gets his false teeth in the end. It looks as if he may have found another woman too, the same day as (or is it the day after?) he’s buried his wife.

Now I’m in the middle of the long short stories in Go Down, Moses. Faulkner is a great writer. I’m sorry it has taken me so long to get to him.

Since we’ve been in France, I’ve read the biography of De Gaulle which Stephen Eyers gave me for a recent birthday or Christmas. Very good. The General was an impossible, unreasonable, vain, stiff, deeply honourable, great and courageous man. And the night before last, I finished Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men, a wonderful account of those astonishing talents of the second half of the eighteenth century, who saw everything as interesting and were constantly inventing, and who helped to make the Midlands the cradle of the industrial revolution.

The annual general meeting of the Poetry Society passed off without violence. About 150 people were present in St Giles in the Fields church. The meeting lasted nearly three hours. Unnecessarily long speeches were made by a few self-appointed consitutionalists. The acting chair of the outgoing board of trustees handled the gathering very well. It could have descended into chaos with someone less firm and clear in the chair (metaphorical chair — she stood throughout). The former finance manager of the Society explained the financial position clearly. 12 new trustees were elected, the counting of the votes being scrutinised by a high-court judge. And that was it. It may be that other members of the outgoing board were present in the crowd, but I didn’t see any. There was no need at all for me to have been at the meeting, but in some sort of virtuous way I had thought I ought to be, having been absent throughout the most difficult months of the dispute.

I flew back to Brest two days later. A smooth landing this time. Since then, we’ve had Peter Adams to stay for five days; on the last of those, my brother Mark and his wife Gill arrived in their newly acquired 20-year-old mobile home. I must confess that I’m not a fan of mobile homes; they seem to me to manifest a right-little-tight-little individualism, a desire to stay in a comforting, familiar bubble while travelling through Here Be Strangers Land. They’re everywhere now; they infest Europe. On the weekend of the big bicycle race in Plouay at the end of August, about 200 of them — huge, vulgar things with names suggestive of daring and adventure (the opposite of the characteristics of the people inside them) — are parked by the finish line.

But I love my brother and his wife, and they love their mobile home, so that’s that.

Earlier this month, I helped my brother Andrew and his wife Beryl buy a 10-year-old Mercedes Sprinter van, French-registered and therefore left-hand-drive, so that they could drive it to Bulgaria, where they’ve just bought a hectare and a half of land in a village, with two houses on it, one 300 years old and one 50 years old, for the equivalent of £12,000. Admittedly, the houses need some work. The encounter with bureaucracy on both sides of the channel was instructive. The vehicle couldn’t be insured in France, because Andrew doesn’t live here. It couldn’t be insured in the UK, because it’s French-registered. Having told the truth about Andrew’s residence (currently a tent in Wales) to two insurance companies in Plouay, I decided that the only way to enable him to drive the van legally was to lie about his residence, saying that he lives here with us. This I did at a third insurance company, which agreed to insure him. Arranging for the van to have a new carte grise (the French equivalent of the logbook) entailed two trips to the sous-préfecture in Lorient and the payment of more than 200 euros. Then the registration plates had to be changed; I hadn’t realised, in all the years I’ve been driving in France, that until two years ago registration plates stayed with the driver whenever he or she changed vehicles. In 2009, France went over to the system we’ve always had in the UK. So vehicles registered before then are issued with a new, permanent nombre d’immatriculation the first time they change hands after 2009. This all required further negotiation and expense. I think Andrew’s going to leave the van in Bulgaria, and re-register it there, so its identity will change once again.

Andrew’s great skill in carpentry has turned the van into another mobile home, in the sense that there’s now an upper and a lower storey in the back, the upper storey perhaps 18 inches below the roof, allowing for comfortable sleeping for two but not a great deal of other activity. Somehow, I feel more sympathetic to this hand-made mobile home than I do to ready-made ones. And of course, 38 years ago, Martyn Coles, Pamela Dix and I set off from London on a supposedly round-the-world tour in a Ford Transit van with a mattress in the back wide enough for three. We cooked on a Calor-gas stove. So enough high-mindedness about mobile homes.

I’ve done two more poems. ‘The Squirrels and the Nut Trees’ is about the entertaining raids on our walnut and hazelnut trees which the red squirrels have been making this month. ‘An Argument of Fowls’ was suggested by a sight we saw last Friday, at about eight o’clock in the evening, just before going into Brice’s restaurant in Lorient. There’s a building site nearby (I think it’s for the redevelopment of a school). On the arm of the huge yellow crane dominating the site were perched thousands of starlings. Against the background of the clear sky at dusk, each bird was perfectly, individually visible. Their collective noise was loud and raucous over the traffic. I wondered whether they would roost there. After we had eaten the first course in the restaurant, I went out again, to see them descending in great dark clouds to the planes and sycamores below. And then I remembered how I had enjoyed learning the collective noun for starlings — a murmuration — when I was at primary school. So I had a poem. I’m sure I’ve written this before, but I’ll say it again: the hardest thing, for me, is to get a worthwhile idea in the first place. Once I’ve got that, I can usually make a presentable poem. I think ‘An Argument of Fowls’ is one of the best I’ve written.

The Libyan revolution is still not complete; two pro-Gaddafi towns are holding out. But they will eventually fall, and then the huge task of rebuilding the shattered country will begin. A major challenge for the new government will be to hold together the various factions and tribes which have overthrown Gaddafi. I’m not optimistic that this will be achieved without strife. But at least the new government has the support of almost all the major countries of the world, and of the UN.

Today, the German parliament voted to approve the rescue plan for Greece which the eurozone’s leaders agreed in July. 10 of the 17 countries in the eurozone have now agreed to the plan. Expert opinions of all kinds about what will happen to Greece, and to Europe, can be found in the newspapers, on radio and television, on the internet. Here is a selection.

Greece will default, leave the euro, reintroduce the drachma, and heavily devalue. Greece’s default will bring down several banks. Portugal, Italy and Spain will find it increasingly difficult to meet their commitments to creditors, and may have the leave the euro too. The euro will collapse. The euro will be reinvented as the currency for the richer, more disciplined countries of northern Europe. None of this will happen. The eurozone leaders, with great difficulty, will save Greece, which is rapidly putting its economic house in order amid savage self-flagellation, and will ride out the waves of strikes and other popular protests. The European Financial Stability Fund will be quadrupled in size, to about 1.6 trillion euros, which will be more than enough to calm the markets.

I’ve read articles which say all of these things. I don’t suppose that even national leaders and their close officials know exactly what will happen. If I had to bet, I would bet on the most boring scenario: that the euro will be saved, and that the countries in the eurozone which have been most fiscally irresponsible will be brought into line for the time being. The question then will be: will it be politically possible to extend and permanently maintain fiscal similarity, which is the natural corollary of monetary union, in all the eurozone countries?

I have to admit to a growing sense of euroscepticism in recent months: not a position usually held by a socialist. For a long time, I’ve taken the rather exalted view that, after two terrible wars, the European Union has been the instrument — clumsy, expensive but necessary — to guarantee peace and prosperity on the continent. I’m not so sure now. I can see, easily, the need for legally binding international treaties on matters which cross national boundaries, such as the protection and repair of the environment and the fight against transnational criminals. I can see the desirability of reciprocal arrangements on health care for foreign travellers and foreign residents (such as we now are for about half the year). Despite the eurozone’s current difficulties, I can quite see the advantages of a single currency for a group of countries whose economies and fiscal arrangements are similar. And I can easily agree to the idea of free trade between as many countries as consent to it. But I find myself asking whether these important examples of international collaboration require the great lumbering machine of the EU. Couldn’t agreements be concluded bi- or multilaterally? Do we need a European Commission, a European Council of Ministers and a European Parliament? I read the serious newspapers most days, and I do my best to remain politically informed, but I can’t name a single thing that the European Parliament has done which has had a beneficial effect on my country, my family or me. (Was there some agreement on maximum charges for mobile phone calls made abroad?) Of course, the stories about the corruption and luxury lifestyles of some of those on the European payroll are meat and drink to the right-wing papers in the UK, and those excesses should be curbed; but we had our own Westminster scandal two years ago, and no-one is suggesting closing down the Westminster parliament. That’s not the main point. The main point is: do we need all that machinery in order that countries on the same continent should come to agreements on matters which mutually affect them?

When the EU invented the post of President of the European Council, I assumed that this would see the end of the six-monthly rotation of that presidency by the head of state or government of one of the EU countries. But no; Herman Van Rompuy is President of the European Council, at least until the end of May 2012, and possibly for another 30 months beyond that. Simultaneously, the six-monthly rotation continues. Currently, Poland holds the Presidency of the Council of the European Union. How could I have been so foolish as to confuse the Presidency of the Council of the European Union with the President of the European Council? Every dog in the street knows the difference.

Nonetheless, countries are still queuing up to join. If you’ve been through an intercommunal war in the Balkans, or the upheavals associated with the end of Communism in eastern Europe, the EU must look like a safe haven, and membership must seem the certificate of arrival in the haven, whatever I think.

We’ve been back in London for 10 days. Last weekend we went to Aldeburgh for the poetry festival. The usual mixed bag: Roger McGough was the best for me; he performed his witty, touching lyrics like a man who knows how to work an audience. Too many poets choose the wrong poems for performance — poems which are too dense to be appreciated properly on one hearing. And too many poets don’t know how to perform anyway. Heather Loxton, as ever, had booked a lovely house, right by the sea, for the eight of us. We lunched at The Lighhouse on the Saturday. Afterwards, Stephen and I took our annual walk to Thorpeness, on the shingle by the waves going, on the easier higher hard path coming back. On the Sunday afternoon, Helen and I drove on to Norfolk, and spent three nights with Adam and Hazel, belatedly celebrating Adam’s 70th birthday, which had occurred on 3 October. We took them out for a posh dinner at Morston Hall. We twice visited Sheringham Park, which I really enjoyed. We climbed up the gazebo (a modern construction, which I suppose replaced an earlier tower) for a view above the tops of the oaks to the nearby coast. Humphrey Repton laid out the park. I learnt that it was he who invented the phrase ‘landscape gardener’.

European affairs lurch on. Today, Greece has a new prime minister. He is Lucas Papademos, who used to be a vice-president of the European Central Bank. I’ve greatly admired George Papandreou’s efforts to clean up the mess left by the previous New Democracy government, which had simply lied to Greece, Europe and the world about the state of the country’s finances. It may be that Papandreou’s policies were excessively deflationary, but the situation he inherited was dire. However, he completely astonished his European allies, and notably France and Germany, by announcing that he would put the latest agreement forged between him, the EU, the European Central Bank and the IMF to a referendum. Apparently, none of his own cabinet colleagues knew that he was going to do this. There was no coherence to such a proposal; none of the previous bitter medicine he was asking the Greek people to swallow had been prefaced by an invitation to them to say whether they wanted to swallow it or not. It’s not clear to me whether the announcement was politically calculating (I can’t see how it would have been from his point of view) or just the desperate act of an exhausted man who wanted to commit political suicide. Or perhaps he was too tired to think straight. Anyhow, it has led to his downfall. Papademos is a non-party technocrat who will attempt to put together a coalition government.

Something to celebrate: the end of Berlusconi. He resigned today, having brought his country close to ruin through corruption and incompetence. If ever a man gave politics a bad name, if ever an already rich and powerful person, once he had added political to his existing media power, used the new levers at his disposal to benefit himself and to hurt his country, it was he. There are plenty of other leaders across the world who have done and are doing the same thing, I know. But Italy is particularly close to home; and the sorrow is, Italians voted for him time and again, like trusting children. I remember writing that the thing that finally caused me to abandon my faith in Blair — a faith I stuck with for pragmatic reasons long after most of my friends had abandoned him — was his decision to take his family summer holiday with the Berlusconis, at Silvio’s expense.

User of under-age prostitutes; evader of tax; creator — via the links between the governance of Italy and the control of opinion he exercised through his media empire — of the closest thing to a monopoly of thought which has recently existed in western Europe; racist (‘I like President Obama’s suntan.’); disastrous failure as Italy’s chief minister: farewell. Or rather, fare ill. People came out to shout abuse at him as he left office; he was apparently shocked. He should have been grateful that they didn’t string him up, as their forebears did a previous leader in whom they had unwisely put their trust.

An academic economist and former European Commissioner, Mario Monti, has been invited by the President of Italy, Giorgio Napolitano, to form a new government. One can hear the sighs of relief from a thousand miles away. A person of great intelligence and fierce honesty is going to govern Italy, for a change. Interestingly, as a younger man Monti studied at Yale University under James Tobin, the Nobel Prize-winning economist now most famous for his proposal of a financial transactions tax, an idea which in recent years has been nicknamed after him, and which every major economy should introduce as soon as possible. Which of our leaders will have the courage to do so, and to face down the inevitable howls of protest from the bankers, remains to be seen. Certainly no-one in the current UK government.

So, within two days, Athens and Rome, two cities which were experimenting with advanced systems of government when the rest of us Europeans hadn’t progressed beyond local tribal warfare, have realised the limitations of the very representative democracy which they taught us.

It’s a beautiful, almost spring-like day here in London in late November. The weather since we returned from France has been abnormally mild.

Last weekend we spent with David, Lindsay and Tom in Shropshire. Delightful. Climbing up the gazebo in Norfolk two weekends previously had made me wonder, not for the first time, about the etymology of that word. (I suppose the first time I wondered was when I came across it in Yeats’s poem about Lissadell and the two girls in silk kimonos.) I thought, ‘Surely it can’t be the case that someone just took the word ‘gaze’ — what you do when you get to the top of a gazebo — and added the inflection for the first person singular of the future tense of a second conjugation Latin verb?’ Then, when I was in Shrewsbury with David on Saturday, I bought an almost new copy of Chambers Dictionary of Etymology. The entry for ‘gazebo’ says: ‘1752, supposedly derived from gaze, on the pattern of Latin future tenses in ‑bo, such as videbo I shall see, placebo I shall please; but the earliest quotation of gazebo calls it a Chinese Tower, suggesting an altered form of an Oriental word.’ Amazing!

We’ve been to the theatre twice. First we saw a splendid production of Juno and the Paycock at the National, brought over from the Abbey in Dublin (speaking of Yeats). Sinead Cusack was Juno. There was a moment of splendid confusion towards the end of the second act, reminding one that things can go seriously wrong even in the most distinguished theatres. The door at the back of the tenement room, giving on to the staircase, was closed. Mrs Tancred, whose son has been killed in the Civil War and is about to be buried, is supposed to knock on the door, be admitted, be supported emotionally by the women already in the room, and utter the heart-rending speech which includes the cry: ‘Blessed Virgin, where were you when me darlin’ son was riddled with bullets? Sacred Heart o’ Jesus, take away our hearts o’ stone, and give us hearts o’ flesh! Take away this murdherin’ hate, an’ give us Thine own eternal love!’ Mrs Tancred knocked, Juno went to the door and turned the handle, but it didn’t open. She tried again. It was stuck. The actors improvised as best they could, one by one trying the door. Eventually Ciaran Hinds, who played Captain Jack Boyle, gave up the pretence and said ‘Has anyone got a key?’, which brought gales of laughter from the audience. A technician came on stage and frankly apologised for the problem with the door. The curtain closed and the house lights came on. We chattered cheerfully for five minutes. The house lights went down again, the curtain opened and the play resumed at a point a few seconds before the knock. But of course when the knock came again and Juno went to the door and it opened easily, there was more laughter and a tremendous cheer from the audience, giving the actor playing Mrs Tancred, Bernadette McKenna, an almost impossible task with her speech. She did well but it was a bit wooden. I expect it was better the next night.

Last Tuesday we saw The Comedy of Errors, also at the National. It was, I think, the first preview, and there were actors on the stage who weren’t sure of their lines. But the set is spectacular, and the two Antipholus’s, the two Dromios (each wearing Arsenal replica shirts) and Adriana and her sister, played as Essex girls, were all very good.

I was quite ill with the flu during our last week in France. I didn’t want to do anything except sleep and eat, and then sleep, read and eat. It was strange how strong my appetite was, even though I couldn’t taste anything. I stumbled out of bed to the kitchen, wolfed a large plate of food, and stumbled back. When I got to the reading stage, I read Nicholas Murray’s biography of Matthew Arnold, which has caused me to read and re-read much of Arnold’s poetry and some of his prose since. I have added him to my list of heroes, because he combined a long career in the service of state education with an imaginative life; he believed in the importance of state education as a civilising and unifying force in society, which was part of his belief in an active state, at a time when most opinion was for a minimal state, and let the market do the rest (plus ça change…); he was a modern European when most of his educated contemporaries were, in their heads, in ancient Greece or Rome, otherwise not venturing beyond Calais; and he was a determined Liberal when that was as progressive as you could be within the spectrum of realistic politics. Unlike almost all the people he dined and corresponded with, he actually knew and saw every working day the condition of the poor, through visiting and inspecting elementary schools. One morning he was at a school, I think in Bethnal Green; that evening he was placed opposite Disraeli at the dinner table of his friend Lady Rothschild at Mentmore. He had some views which you just have to say were wrong, such as that Shakespeare isn’t improved by being staged or, worse, that the sooner the Welsh language dies out, the better; and there’s an unfortunate remark in an early letter complaining about the inability of women to teach — a piece of stupidity I hope he regretted later, for he was loved and respected by the teachers and head teachers of the schools he visited, many (most?) of whom must have been women.

I’ve always reluctantly agreed with Arnold’s theory of the remnant: that in each of the three classes of society (in his terms, barbarians [upper class], philistines [middle class] and populace) the majority is a lump; they just do what their upbringing and socialisation has taught them to do. But within each class there is a minority which is self-aware, which understands that the world doesn’t have to be as it is; it could be a better place. I suppose a Marxist would say that Arnold’s idealising was just wind, and didn’t actually change anything. Who can say whether that’s true or not with regard to Arnold’s criticism? But his work in the schools did make a difference; he was courageous in his opposition to payment by results and excessive testing, and was an eloquent supporter of the kind of humanistic, exploratory, broadly-based curriculum which we know works. And, of course, he has left us a small number of very beautiful poems (as well as quite a few which seem impossibly mannered and remote now). My affection for ‘The Scholar Gipsy’ and admiration for ‘Dover Beach’ are enhanced by the memory of my father’s love of them, and his ability to quote extensively from them. ‘Sohrab and Rustum’ and ‘Balder Dead’ are fine, exotic narrative pieces. One criticism I have of them is that they often try to do something which Homer does splendidly and Dante does with genius: employ what Seamus Heaney brilliantly calls ‘head-clearing similes’ — the comparison between an epic or awe-inspiring sight or event in the mythical or supernatural world of the poem and a happening in common everyday life. In Arnold, these nearly always seem forced. They never do in Dante.

When Arnold met Disraeli, the latter (I’m not sure whether he was Prime Minister or leader of the opposition at the time), in explaining why he didn’t write novels any more, said something like, ‘I am one of those fellows who can only do one thing at a time’ — a remark with which I am in sympathy, since I didn’t write a single poem during the nine months I was working for Teaching Channel. But I’m moderately pleased with the output this autumn. Since the four poems, three English and one French, about which I’ve written earlier, I’ve done six more, of which the best are a tribute to Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking’, called ‘After “After Apple-Picking”’, written in the same manner as the original; and ‘“The Leaving It”’, which speculates on my own death in a rueful, part-comic way, using good irregularly occurring rhymes. And I’m pleased with two comic efforts: a tribute to Sir Joseph Bazalgette, the master-engineer of London’s sewage system; and a complete remaking of the ‘poem’ I wrote in about 1984, just after Betjeman died, playing on the fact that he had said ‘fuck’ on television (admittedly, he was quoting Larkin’s ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’, but still) and then, later in the same valedictory series, regretting that he hadn’t had enough sex in his life. My first effort rather wasted a good idea; it was a sort of prose-poem which just about limps into verse at the end. The new version is quatrains in iambic tetrameters rhyming ABAB, a form which Betjeman used a lot, and it’s much better.

Peter Hetherington didn’t much like the first version of ‘The Squirrels and the Nut Trees’. He thought it prosaic, and he didn’t approve of the self-referential beginning (‘The squirrel in my other squirrel poem…’). So I remade that too yesterday. It’s shorter, not self-referential, and much more poetic (four triplets, iambic pentameters, half-rhymes across the three lines of each triplet; although I know that such technicalities don’t in themselves make anything poetic). I hope he likes it better.

Since the last time I wrote about the Arab revolutions, Gaddafi has been found and killed. Most members of his family have been killed or captured, or have fled into exile. The new government has made a good start, with a cabinet of ministers representing a range of the factions which overthrew the Gaddafi regime, and no place for extreme Islamists. Tunisia has held its first elections. David, Lindsay and Tom were in Tunisia for their usual autumn holiday on the day the elections took place. They said how proud were the people they spoke to about what had happened since they were there last year. In Egypt, just as I write, there is much confusion. A huge popular movement, whose point of focus is Tahrir Square, wants the military to stand down immediately, and the postponement of parliamentary elections, due to start on Monday, which the protestors believe will be rigged by the soldiers. One prime minister resigned earlier this week, to be replaced by another who is no more acceptable to the protestors. Terrible brutality has been committed against them either by the military itself or by the riot police who are supposed to take their orders from the military — brutality not on the scale committed by the Mubarak regime in its dying days, but still terrible. At least 40 people have died; hundreds more have been injured; the torturing of detainees continues. Meanwhile, there are plenty of Egyptians who do want the elections to go ahead, and seem to think that the military is sincere in its statement that it is only an interim force until presidential elections are held next year (at a date brought forward also in response to the Tahrir Square protests). It would be wrong to say that the revolution has descended into chaos, but it’s certainly true that the army has mistaken the mood of a large section of the people. It should have moved much more quickly in the democratic direction, as happened in Tunisia. In Syria, where the repression has been worse than anywhere else in the region, the forces of opposition are organising, and there is a real chance of a civil war here too, unless Assad stands down — an unlikely prospect — as the Turkish prime minister and the King of Jordan have publicly advised him too. The Turkish prime minister compared Assad to Hitler and Gaddafi: a remarkable change of tune from a man who was recently an ally of the Assad regime. That regime is the most evil, the most brutal, the most implacable of all the tyrannies that have been or are being overthrown at the moment.

There will be a big strike here in the UK next Wednesday, bringing together several million public-service workers whose pensions will be cut, pension contributions increased, and working lives made compulsorily longer as part of the government’s programme of debt reduction. The government has offered some concessions as the likely size of the strike has become clear, but not enough to persuade unions to call it off. Essentially, the unions don’t see why they should pay the price for the greed and stupidity of the banks and the financial markets whose actions have brought us to this pass. Nor do I. Nothing more clearly illustrates for me the gulf which exists between most people in this country and those who make the government’s economic and fiscal policy than George Osborne’s refusal to contemplate a Tobin tax — a tiny tax on all financial transactions, perhaps at the rate of one two-hundredth of their value — which would bring ten of billions of pounds into the exchequer every year. Other European countries are seriously discussing how to make it work. Osborne says it would be a blow to the heart of the City. John Major is wheeled out to agree with him. Meanwhile, the folk in the City are beginning to lick their lips at the prospect of another massive New Year bonus, as the unemployment figure rises to a height not seen since the last time the Conservatives were in power. Of course it would be best if the whole world were to agree to a financial transaction tax at the same time, but that’s not going to happen. Occasionally, a country has to be courageous enough to do something because it’s the right thing to do, and let the others come along later. The notion that the City would close down, or lose its pre-eminence in the financial world, because of a tiny tax on share and foreign-exchange dealings, and on the exotica of casino banking which almost broke the world’s financial system three years ago, is nonsense. I remember, when Labour brought in the minimum wage, how many millionaires in Parliament and in the City there were saying that we could never afford such a luxury…

Skimming back through the diary entries this year, I notice that I promised myself that I would write something about the News of the World affair, and that I haven’t done that. A public inquiry chaired by Lord Justice Leveson is currently being held into disgusting practices which senior figures in the Murdoch newspaper empire condoned and even encouraged, and into similar misbehaviour, but on a lesser scale, within other newspaper groups. Essentially, journalists at the News of the World, whether on the staff or freelancers, routinely invaded the lives of private citizens and were well paid for doing so because the stories such invasions generated, whether true or false, sold more newspapers. They hacked into people’s phones, stalked them as they walked down the street, camped outside their houses, used deceitful means of gaining private information. To some extent these practices, deplorable and — in the case of the phone-hacking — illegal as they were, were tolerated by the public when the victims were celebrities. There was a vague feeling that footballers, actors and pop stars were complicit with the journalists and photographers in perpetuating the cult of celebrity. That all changed when it became known that a teenager called Milly Dowler, who had been sexually assaulted and murdered, had had her phone hacked into after her death. At about the same time, the claims by senior people at News International, the part of Murdoch’s empire which runs its UK newspapers, that phone-hacking had been the anomalous work of the odd ‘rogue reporter’, were shown not to be true. The public mood changed. The Murdochs — Rupert and his son James — then did an extraordinary thing: they announced that they would close the News of the World after its edition of Sunday 10 July. The reason publicly given — deep regret at the discovery of these deplorable practices — was nothing to do with the truth. The truth was that at this time, Murdoch was hoping to buy all the shares in BSkyB, the UK’s main satellite broadcaster, which he didn’t already own. Murdoch’s newspapers, especially The Sun, have bought him influence over governments Conservative and Labour which I don’t think any newspaper tycoon has ever had in this country. Not Northcliffe, not Beaverbrook. But by Murdoch’s standards they don’t make huge amounts of money. Their value has been the political influence they give him. The money-maker in the UK has been and is BSkyB. So the Murdochs closed the News of the World in the hope that this gesture would persuade the government to continue to look kindly on their bid for 100% control of BSkyB. There had been a deeply embarrassing incident just before Christmas last year when poor innocent Vince Cable had been tricked into telling journalists posing as citizens in his constituency that he had ‘declared war on Murdoch’, when it was his decision whether or not to refer the bid to the competition authorities. It looked as if Cable might have to resign; he kept his job, just, but the right to make the decision was taken away from him. Murdoch must have chortled at Cable’s embarrassment. However, now the boot was on the other foot. Parliament was asked to work an extra day in order to ‘debate public confidence in the media’. This meant: should we allow the Murdoch bid to go ahead? Remarkably, MPs agreed, I think unanimously, that it shouldn’t. In fact, Murdoch bowed to the inevitable a few hours before the Commons voted, and withdrew the bid. I hope Cable chortled in his turn. I also hoped at the time that the government would go further and declare that Murdoch was not a proper person to run a television service, which it has the right to do. That would have meant that Murdoch would have had to sell his share in BSkyB completely. This hasn’t happened, although it might still, as more and more revelations about News International’s practices are made to the Leveson Inquiry. The most affecting testimony this week came from the parents of Madeleine McCann, the little girl who was snatched from her bed while they were having dinner on holiday in Portugal. These were not celebrities; at least, not until they were forced to be. Their treatment by the press, and the lies about them they were obliged to read, are dreadful.

I’ve said that Labour in government was as culpable in sucking up to Murdoch as the Conservatives had been previously and have been since — until this summer. A significant difference between the two parties in their relationship with Murdoch, however, lies in the fact that the current Prime Minister actually hired a former editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, to be his director of communications. It’s extraordinary that a person so mired in the filthiest tactics of tabloid journalism should have been regarded as an appropriate person to act as spokesperson for the highest office in the land. Every toff needs his thug, I suppose. Cameron had to sack Coulson, of course, but it did him only passing political damage.

The Press Complaints Commission, the means by which the press supposedly regulates itself, has failed completely. It should be replaced by a body with statutory powers.

I remember writing in September 2010 about the Labour Party’s wrong judgment in electing Ed Miliband as leader rather than his elder brother David. It was the the union vote which caused Ed to squeak past David by the tiniest of margins. Here we are, four days before the biggest and most morally justified strike held in this country for decades, and what have the unions got for their support for a clever, likeable man who simply doesn’t have the qualities necessary to lead his party and to make a future Prime Minister? The most tongue-tied, facing-both-ways, faint-hearted responses to the legitimate question: ‘Do you support this strike?’. The Conservatives must be so much enjoying Miliband junior’s complete failure to lay a finger on their leader.

I’ve just been for a walk along the canal through the midst of the enormous building site behind Kings Cross. Huge works are being accomplished there. I walked back along the road and crossed the new pedestrian bridge across the canal to a huge, refurbished warehouse which is the new home of Central Saint Martin’s School of Arts and Design. It’s a magnificent achievement, a splicing of the old building in front with a new structure behind. They’ve enclosed what was once an open space and created a great atrium for displays. Outside, in all directions, hundreds of workers and scores of machines were busy. It was an encouraging sight on a dry evening with a new moon in the sky. Unfortunately, energy and investment like that are the exception, not the rule, across the country as a whole. I wait to see whether the government has any significant proposals to address the problem of the mass unemployment which its excessively deflationary policies have brought about in the short time it has been in power. The Chancellor makes his Autumn Statement tomorrow.

The Chancellor’s Autumn Statement and the report from the Office of Budget Responsibility contain great quantities of bad news. Rises in public-sector pay will be capped at 1% for two further years from 2013. The growth forecast for 2011 is revised down from 1.7%, as predicted last March, to 0.9%. The forecast for 2012 is revised down from 2.5% to 0.7%. The possibility of another actual recession cannot be discounted. The prediction as to the number of public servants who will lose their jobs rises from 400,000 to 710,000. Government borrowing over the next five years will be £111 billion higher than predicted last March, although the cost of servicing the debt is lower than predicted because of the low yields on gilts (a small piece of good news). The Office for Budget Responsibility predicts that the structural deficit for 2014/5 will be 2.8% of GDP; only eight months ago, it predicted that the structural debt for that year would be 1%! The couple and lone-parent elements of the working tax credit will not be uprated with inflation in 2012–13, so many poorer working people will see an actual fall in the value of their income. A previously promised increase in the child element of the working tax credit of £110 above inflation will now not take place. The Treasury admits that the overall effect of the changes in working tax credit mean that an extra 100,000 children are likely to be classified, by the government’s own measure, as living in poverty.

The levy on banks will be increased, which is a blessing in itself, but by a paltry amount, meaning that the levy will continue to yield only about £2.5 billion a year. The Chancellor explicitly ruled out a financial transaction tax, which would yield tens of billions a year; he said that it would be a tax on pensioners, not on banks, presumably employing the argument that share dealings often involve huge amounts of money invested in pension funds. Such an argument carries exquisite hypocrisy (a Tobin tax might be set at half of 1% of the value of each transaction) as the government prepares to damage the pensions of public-sector workers by making them pay more, work longer and eventually get less than at present.

The proposals to do something about youth employment, welcome in themselves, have simply revived, under other names, the efforts Labour was making when it left office, efforts which the new government immediately cancelled. So the effect is that time has been wasted doing nothing. The Chancellor hopes that pension and insurance funds can be tapped for serious sums of money (tens of billions) to invest in infrastructure projects. There is no guarantee that this will happen. I suppose the government would underwrite the risk. The idea is remarkably similar to Labour’s private finance initiative. Meanwhile, the government’s proposal to spend an additional £5 billion of its own on infrastructure projects is pathetically unambitious.

I can see that, in a world held in thrall to the financial markets, confidence in a government’s fiscal rectitude is essential. It just offends me that obvious major sources of new income — the Tobin Tax, taxing capital gains at the same rate as income, and serious efforts to combat tax avoidance and evasion by companies and wealthy individuals — are ignored. The poor and the moderately well off will pay the price, for the next few years at least, of the government’s policies. As unemployment rises to levels not seen since Thatcher’s time, their suffering will intensify. And the pain won’t even be justified in the government’s own terms: its income will diminish further as poverty and unemployment bring diminished income from tax and increased outgoings in benefits.

Yesterday, millions of Egyptians voted for the first time in their lives in something approximating to free elections. As ever when this happens after the overthrow of tyranny, most memorably in South Africa in 1994, the sight is deeply moving. There is a long and complicated process to be gone through, with three stages, before a parliament will be formed. The Muslim Brotherhood is likely to do well; perhaps it will be the largest party. If it does in the end wield a decisive influence on the composition of the parliament, the question will be: will it respect the values of openness and toleration of difference which are the best features of Western democracies, or will it attempt to impose a benighted theocracy based on Sharia law, as the Taliban, I fear, will attempt to do again in Afghanistan once the West has pulled out?

Today was held the largest and most morally justified strike the UK has seen for at least 30 years. Local government workers, civil servants, teachers and NHS workers walked out to protest at government proposals to damage their pensions by making them work longer, pay more into their schemes, and get less pension at the end. The government justifies this robbery by saying that we’re living longer and that, in any case, we have to tighten our belts in order to get the state’s finances back in order. Of course the unions recognise that we’re living longer; in at least two of the four sectors which went on strike today, recent negotiations (that is, in the last three or four years) with the employers were successfully concluded, taking account of this welcome fact. The government’s proposals are not a belated attempt to rescue a situation which had become fiscally unsustainable because of the improvidence of the previous government; they are simply a raid on the living standards of public-service workers. The government also says that public-service pensions are ‘beyond the dreams’ of most workers in the private sector. The average annual pension in the NHS is £5,000 a year; and that average includes the high pensions that top doctors and surgeons get. If private-sector pensions are worse than that, the answer is to do something about those pensions, not to hurt public-service pensions in a kind of race to the bottom. Major sources of funding are available to the exchequer, as I wrote yesterday; there is no chance that the government will take advantage of them, because they would slightly inconvenience the rich and the comfortably off. The Camden street cleaner and dinner lady will, if the government gets its way, pay for the follies of the bankers.

I accept that the government made some concessions to the unions once it saw that the strike was going to be big and had widespread support. They are welcome but inadequate. I hope the unions will continue to take action, including more strike action in 2012 if necessary, to annul or at least seriously amend the government’s proposals, which it has said it will impose in any case.

In Brussels in the early hours of yesterday morning, David Cameron employed the UK’s veto to prevent the European Union amending the Lisbon Treaty so as to impose much greater fiscal discipline on the 17 EU countries which use the euro and on any of the other 10 countries in the EU which wished voluntarily to accept that discipline; the amendments would also have brought about a greater degree of supervision and regulation of the financial affairs of all 27 member states, including those not in the euro-plus-volunteers group.

The eurosceptics in the Conservative party are of course triumphant, as is the right-wing press. The Liberal Democrats are enraged and embarrassed; it is a mark of their helplessness as the junior member of the governing coalition that they, the most straightforwardly pro-European party in parliament, have to swallow this. Labour says that Cameron has made a historic error; that our influence in Europe will be irrevocably diminished henceforth.

I find myself in a peculiar position, especially after the eurosceptic thoughts I allowed myself a few weeks ago. I am not going to join the chorus of know-alls who say that Cameron’s decision marks the end of our significant role as a European power. I can see that, if you have the only internationally traded currency in Europe which is not the euro, you don’t want that currency supervised and regulated anywhere other than London. To that extent, I think that Cameron did the right thing. I guess (but who can say?) that Gordon Brown would have done the same. On the other hand, I’m pretty sure that Cameron did the right thing for very mixed motives. He asked the other Europeans, notably France and Germany, for something which he knew they would not give him — a treaty change imposing disciplines on 27 countries, but with a complete opt-out from those disciplines for one country. Knowing that he was making an unacceptable demand, he also knew that when the demand was refused and he employed the veto, he would be cheered in many quarters as a conquering hero when he returned home, as he has been today and as he will be again in the House of Commons on Monday.

Sarkozy and Merkel got exactly what they wanted: fiscal discipline for the euro group plus non-euro volunteers (who might be all the other countries but the UK) without the tedium of dragging a large, unwilling member through the legalities which will now follow. I read this morning that Cameron, having used the veto and having heard that the other Europeans were going to construct an agreement outside the Lisbon Treaty, petulantly said that the euro-plus-volunteers group wouldn’t be able to use the institutions of the EU to police the agreement, because the agreement wouldn’t strictly be a piece of EU law. ‘I’m taking my ball home; not only that, but I’m forbidding you to play football in this playground, even if you get another ball.’ Merkel apparently said something like, ‘We’re going to do it anyway,’ which shut him up.

The irony here, and the reason why my position is peculiar, is that the UK does need exactly the kind of control over its financial sector which the treaty change would have brought about and which the euro-plus-volunteers agreement will bring about; it’s just that we need to do it ourselves.

Today, a French court found former president Jacques Chirac guilty of embezzling public funds when he was mayor of Paris, and gave him a two-year suspended prison sentence on corruption charges. Very good. The old man won’t go to jail, but a point has been made; no-one, even a former head of state, is above the law. Chirac wasn’t in court to hear the verdict; he’s discovered recently that there’s something wrong with his memory, and standing trial can be so stressful for a character as sensitive as his. I imagine that, starting tomorrow, he’ll make a remarkable recovery, though he won’t publicise this welcome and unexpected change too widely.

We’ve been here for a week. Before that, we made our usual pre-Christmas visit to Shropshire. We were there for longer than in previous years: Helen for eight days, I for four. One joy of quasi-retirement is that there’s no need to race down dark motorways on winter Sunday evenings along with everybody else. We saw all our Shropshire friends.

Stephen and Theresa joined us on Christmas Eve, and left yesterday morning. It’s the first time we’ve had company here at Christmas. It was a wonderful merry time. I know how much our guests appreciated it, after the hard year they’ve had. Theresa’s mother died in February, Stephen’s in October.

As Theresa was leaving, she described these quiet days between Christmas and New Year as 'unspoken for'.  I thought that was beautifully put.

In Brittany of old, this week was a favourite for weddings.  For the rural working class, it was the year's only holiday; contracts with farmers were annual, finishing on Christmas Eve.  A new contract began on the day after New Year's Day.  So there was time even for a three-day celebration, which some weddings were. Talking of farm labourers, Stephen, who was born and brought up in Bournemouth and who's eight years older than I am, remembers an old man in rural Dorset telling him in about 1950, 'Farmer's paying I for not working.' He was referring to the paid holidays which the Labour government brought in after the war, 10 years after Léon Blum's Popular Front government introduced them here. A point on which the Breton labourers insisted in their contracts was that they shouldn't be fed salmon (that's wild salmon of course, straight out of the river) more than twice a week.  They wanted meat, and didn't see why 'farmer' should get away with providing food too often which it hadn't cost him anything to produce.

At the end of a year which has seen astonishing changes in other Arab countries, the plight of the Syrian people remains heart-breaking. Assad’s forces have killed at least 5,000 civilians, the great majority of whom were unarmed. Mass imprisonment and torture remain a routine weapon of repression by the forces of the state. The Arab League has sent a delegation to inspect the situation. This is a welcome development in itself; I can’t remember a previous occasion on which a pan-Arab body showed any particular concern for human rights in an Arab country. But I don’t have any great hopes for the effect which the inspection will have. I expect that the delegation will mildly chide the regime, offer the pious hope that it will behave better in future, and go away. During the last four days, according to the BBC’s website, about 120 protestors have been killed. I expect that many more deaths are occurring as I write, since Friday has become the traditional day of principal protest in the Arab countries whose people have been demanding the rights and freedoms which we so complacently enjoy in the West. I can see no future for the country other than a civil war, as happened in Libya. The Syrian opposition is divided. It can only win a civil war, and overthrow the Assad regime, if it unites behind the best organised military force in the opposition, which I think is the Free Syrian Army. And it will probably need the help of the outside world, through the UN if possible, as the Libyan opposition did. That will be much harder to get than was the case in Libya, since Russia still obstinately refuses unequivocally to condemn the Syrian government, and would probably veto any kind of intervention, rather than abstain in the vote, as it and China did over Libya.

It isn’t very long — certainly less than two years — since I sat in a Syrian restaurant in London, in my capacity as International Development Executive (an absurd title which I made up myself) at Teachers TV, in the company of the Syrian Minister of Education, the head of the British Council, various people from the Syrian Embassy and from United Kingdom Trade and Industry. The minister spoke little English; he had brought along his daughter, an extraordinarily beautiful young woman who was studying for a PhD at Edinburgh University and who of course spoke perfect English, as translator. We discussed the possibility that Syria might set up a pan-Arab equivalent of Teachers TV. The minister told me that President Assad’s wife has a great passion for education. (During my time as International Development Executive at Teachers TV, all the Arab countries which with I had contact had autocratic leaders with trophy wives who were a) gorgeous to look at and b) had a passion for education. Often, the wives were given a few billion dollars to go away and set up an educational foundation of some kind. This arrangement got the wives off their husbands’ hands and gave them something appropriately female to do once they’d had children. I never heard of a leader’s wife who had a passion for economics or for the geology of oil exploration.) The head of the British Council made an elegant, optimistic speech saying that though political differences might divide our countries, surely we could find common ground on the cultural front. How misplaced such optimism seems now! At the end of the evening, there were the usual enthusiastic exchanges of business cards and eyeball-to-eyeball promises that we were going to do something great together. During the following weeks, I wrote repeatedly to the minister’s office, the British Council, the Syrian Embassy and UKTI, trying to push forward our good intentions in practical ways. There were two or three half-hearted replies; then further communication ceased. Mind you, that was par for the course after these privileged international get-togethers; practical outcomes were exceptional.

Once we had stopped talking business, the minister’s daughter told me how she missed the shady gardens of Damascus where she could drink cool drinks on summer evenings. She spoke so lyrically that I became for a moment another of those educated European men for whom the Orient has exercised such a fascination over the centuries, with sexual desire lurking not far below the surface of cultural curiosity.

Outside, the light is failing on this drizzly, grey last day of the year. As Albert used to say at about this time (I’ve probably written this before), ‘That’s enough work for one year. If people haven’t done enough by now, it’s too late to make up for it.’

We’re going to the same restaurant in Pont Scorff that we went to last year.

The Saint Sylvestre meal at Pont-Scorff on New Year’s Eve was as delightful and delicious as it had been the previous year. Once again, champagne was poured at ten minutes to midnight. At midnight this year, for some reason, all the diners stood up and walked around the restaurant for kissing and handshaking, which was very enjoyable. I tried to work out mathematically how many kisses were exchanged: 24 diners plus Agnès and Marc, the owners; 13 women in the company; two kisses per embrace exchanged woman to woman and man to woman (handshakes of course between the men); therefore, how many kisses? I gave up after a minute or two of mental effort. The problem reminded me of those practical applications of maths to supposedly real-life situations which we used to do in primary school: ‘A bath is being filled at the rate of three gallons a minute. Unfortunately, Johnny has been careless and hasn’t fitted the plug properly. Water is escaping at the rate of three-quarters of a gallon a minute. When full to the top, the bath holds 30 gallons. Johnny is watching his favourite programme on TV. If he doesn’t come back in time, how long will it be before the bath overflows?’ I didn’t enjoy problems (that’s what they were called). I could do them, but they were laborious. I much preferred the pure abstraction of numbers, algebra and geometry.

Reading last year’s Occurrences before sending them to Mark Leicester so he could post them on my website, I thought they were rather heavy. The balance between political thinking-out-loud and observations about things that had happened to me and not to anyone else seemed too much tilted towards the former. I shall try to redress that balance this year.

The weather since we’ve been here has been extraordinarily mild. Everyone says it’s bizarre, not right. The plants will get going far too soon, then there will be a cold spell with sharp frosts which will kill the blossom, then there will be no fruit… Anyhow, working in the garden these last few days has been a pleasure. Yesterday Helen and I did a massive leaf-clearing job. Usually, most of the leaves fall before Jean-Paul cuts the grass for the last time in the autumn, so he picks them up with his machine. This autumn, most of the trees still had their leaves by the time he had to cut the grass (before the ground became too soft). They then fell during the course of one night in December when there was a violent storm. So we spent several hours making dozens of little piles and then barrowing these to huge heaps at the edge of the wood. Today, for a change of activity, we cleared out the shed and I drove the detritus to the déchetterie — always a satisfying task.

Becoming Our Own Experts, the collection of studies of classroom language which a group of us at Vauxhall Manor School made during the 1970s, and which we published ourselves, is about to go online as www.becomingourownexperts.org. The book has been out of print for many years. Mark Leicester, the designer of www.myproperlife.com, is also designing this website, with his wife Nicola. I’m sure it’ll look great. I can summarise best the reasons for giving the book an electronic afterlife by quoting the preface I’ve written to the online edition.

‘Becoming Our Own Experts was first published as a fat printed book with a red cover in 1982. It is the bringing-together of papers written between 1974 and 1979 by a group of teachers, self-styled the Talk Workshop Group, at Vauxhall Manor School, an 11-18 girls’ comprehensive school whose buildings were on two sites in Vauxhall and Kennington, south London. The papers constituted an example of teachers researching the interactions of language and learning in their own classrooms, a process sometimes known as “action research”.

The book was published in an edition of 4,000, with the help of a generous no-interest loan from the Schools Council (a long-dead organisation, superseded by more bureaucratic and more centrally controlled agencies known by sets of initials which have changed — and continue to change — with bewildering frequency). The edition sold out within two years. The publication caused considerable interest and enjoyed a little fame in the worlds of teacher education and educational research for some years, in that it showed that classroom practitioners could reflect productively on their teaching, and teach better as a result. If a group of people in one school could do this, why could not a group in any school?

The educational world in the UK, and notably in England, is unrecognisable from that which prevailed in the 1970s. Essentially, teacher autonomy has been overtaken by government control, a process which has brought some benefits and done much harm. There is no doubt that, overall, standards of student achievement in schools have improved significantly in the last 30 years. Most of this improvement has come about independently of government action, as a result of the continuing efforts of teachers, and of those who advise and support them, to understand better how to teach effectively. However, we should also acknowledge that, though government initiatives in education, beginning with the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1979, have been a mixed blessing, there has been a considerable amount of blessing in the mix. While brilliant and inspirational teaching always existed in the system, there were also large areas of complacent and poor practice. The government argument, to put it in its most generous light, was that if it were possible to understand how good teachers worked, if it were possible to agree on a broad, balanced, relevant and interesting curriculum in all school subjects, the complacent and the poor could perhaps be brought up to the level of the good and the brilliant, and everyone’s loss of autonomy would be a price worth paying.

There were — and are — struggles between governments and educators as to what “good teachers” and “a broad, balanced, relevant and interesting curriculum” actually look like; the educators, we are glad to say, have prevailed more often in these struggles, in terms of what actually happens in classrooms, than governments of either colour since 1979 would care to admit. There is the official story and the unofficial story: the latter always closer to the truth.

The harm done in the undermining of teacher autonomy has been seen in an excessively atomistic approach to curriculum design (in other words, the prescription as to what should be taught), most notoriously in the early versions of the National Curriculum, and by an excessively mechanistic approach to assessment: both the assessment of student progress by teachers and the assessment of teacher performance by senior colleagues and outsiders. Essentially, teachers were and are not trusted to make professional judgments to the extent that members of comparable professions were and are so trusted. The balance which should be struck between the autonomy of a proud profession and a recognition of the fact that teachers spend taxpayers’ money and should be answerable as such has shifted too much in the latter direction, driven often — under the Labour government of 1997 to 2010 as much as under the Conservative government of 1979 to 1997 and the Conservative-led coalition presently in power — by reactionary ideology which politicians and their advisers have imposed or attempted to impose, in ignorance of how learning happens most effectively. The result has been a loss of morale, an undervaluing of the use of the imagination in teaching, a draining-away of the essential pleasure, more days than not, that the calling should bring with it.

Despite the fact that the educational past is as much “another country”, where we “did things differently” as any other kind of past, there remains an interest in “action research” and in the concept of the “reflexive practitioner”. The arrival of the internet has given those members of the Talk Workshop Group who are still alive and still in touch with each other the opportunity to republish Becoming Our Own Experts electronically. Although much of the content of the book is of its time and place, the spirit of enquiry which it represents, the notion of the teacher as an autonomous self-critical professional, not simply a deliverer to learners of educational content pre-formulated elsewhere, is independent of time and place, we believe. Hence www.becomingourownexperts.org.’

It’s a beautiful day. There’s no wind. The sun shines steadily from across the valley. At lunchtime we could have sat outside, though that would have meant getting furniture out of the shed, so we didn’t. This morning we took the short circular walk up the road, turned right, through Saint Guénaël, home through the wood. The birds sang as if spring had come. We passed one fruit tree which already sported dark pink flowers. I didn’t know what kind it was. Now, thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can report that it was a quince. (Google ‘fruit blossoms’, click on ‘Images’, study the postage-stamp-sized pictures, click on the one I recognised from this morning and, hey presto!: ‘There are two distinctive types of quince tree: the one that bears large fruit and the ornamental one that is more of a shrub and has beautiful dark pink blossoms in spring. Quince is one of the first fruit trees to bloom in the year. The Chinese consider quince blossom as a symbol of good fortune. So you may see the blossoms used in celebration bouquets for Chinese New Year.’ And the internet tells me that Chinese New Year 2012 falls on 23 January. So everything makes sense.)

There is a further reason for my pleasure in this discovery. My father loved quinces, and he had a quince tree in his garden. After he and mother died, and just before the house was sold, I asked the woman who had looked after the garden during my parents’ last years to take a cutting for me. I brought it to France. Rosa looked after it for two years. Now it is planted in the garden here, and I must just go up to see if it has any flowers yet. (It doesn’t, but it looks healthy.) I’m very much hoping that eventually it will yield quinces and I’ll cook and eat them and think of my dad. I also like the fact that marmalade was originally a preserve made from quinces, not oranges. The Portuguese for quince is marmelo.

We returned to London in mid-January. Reading the biography of Matthew Arnold when I was ill last October led me on to reading some of his essays, including that ‘On Translating Homer’. Arnold has four things to say in admiration of Homer. They are: that Homer is rapid; that he is plain and direct in his syntax and words; that he is equally plain and direct in his matter and ideas; and that he is noble. These compliments are just, but Arnold repeats them too frequently, like a teacher or preacher doubting his hearer’s powers of recall. All of Homer’s previous translators are, in one way or another, unsatisfactory to Arnold; but the offender for whom he reserves his cruellest scorn had the misfortune still to be alive. The essay ridicules Francis Newman’s Iliad and Odyssey. (Francis Newman was the brother of John Henry Newman.) Reading the extracts from Newman’s translations which Arnold quotes, I can’t help but agree with him. Newman went for a kind of ballad metre, but without rhyme:

‘Great Hector of the motley helm then spake to her responsive…’

‘O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief-working vixen…’

Newman protests a bit too much against the use of rhyme, like Milton in the preface to Paradise Lost. Apparently, he started out intending that each second and fourth line should end on a stressed syllable, as in a conventional ballad, but then, having doubled up pairs of lines into long lines, as in the examples above, found that the last syllable of each long line (the equivalent of two lines in the normal setting-out of a ballad) contained ‘an unpleasant void until he gave a double ending to the verse’, as in ‘resPONS…ive’ and ‘VIX…en’. Arnold sarcastically quotes ‘a recent American writer’ who says that this rhythm ‘has a disadvantage in being like the rhythm of the American national air Yankee Doodle’.

Arnold offers a few samples of the way he thought Homer should be translated. His preference is for hexameters. ‘Applied to Homer, this metre affords to the translator the immense support of keeping him more nearly than any other metre to Homer’s movement…’ After all, the original poems are in hexameters. (The mnemonic I use to remind myself of Homer’s metre is ‘DOWN by a DEEP DARK HOLE sat an OLD TOAD MUNCHing a CORN STALK’; I forget where I read it. I know there are allowed variations in the use of dactyls and spondees.) So Arnold proposes, for example:

‘So shone forth, in front of Troy, by the bed of Xanthus,
Between that and the ships, the Trojans’ numerous fires.’

One might suppose that there wasn’t much left of poor Newman by the time Arnold had finished with him. But the offended scholar writes an angry ‘Reply to Matthew Arnold’, equally long and even more learned, in its turn pouring scorn on Arnold’s hexameters. Then Arnold writes a response to the response called ‘Last Words on Translating Homer’.

Anyhow, all this hyper-educated bile has caused me to read The Iliad and The Odyssey in Robert Fitzgerald’s wonderful modern translations. These use loose iambic pentameter, the default metre of English poetry, and I don’t think anyone could do much better for the English reader. Like countless readers before me, I became engrossed in and then entranced by the stories, and amazed by the mixture of exalted epic sentiment and down-to-earth detail which they contain. Achilles tosses and turns on his bed as he grieves for Patroclus; he tries various positions, but he can’t get comfortable. About 2,800 years before I built sandcastles on the beach, one of the analogies somewhere in The Iliad is with boys doing just that. When Penelope says:

‘…many and many a dream is mere confusion,
a cobweb of no consequence at all.’

— I think of most of my own dreams, how they seem to lack any significance. Why should I last night have dreamed that I was making love to the wife of a good friend of mine, a woman I have known for 30 years and always liked and admired as a person, but for whom, in my conscious mind, I can honestly say that I have never entertained the faintest sensation of desire, and about whom I haven’t thought for months?

The scene where the old nurse recognises Odysseus by the scar on his leg while bathing him when he is still disguised as a beggar is electrifying. Odysseus had forgotten about the scar. I love the fact that none of the heroes is perfect: Achilles and Agamemnon of course not — their faults, leading to such disasters, are huge; but even Odysseus, who has neither thoughtless arrogance on Agamemnon’s scale, nor offended pride on Achilles’ scale, makes mistakes. His wrong judgment undoubtedly led to some of his men being eaten alive by Polyphemus. They’d begged him to get going out of the cave with a few cheeses before the giant returned in the evening:

‘Why not
take those cheeses, get them stowed, come back,
throw open all the pens, and make a run for it?
We’ll drive the kids and lambs aboard. We say
put out again on good salt water!’

But Odysseus wouldn’t:

‘Ah,
how sound that was! Yet I refused. I wished
to see the caveman, what he had to offer —
no pretty sight, it turned out, for my friends.’

Later, when they’re tangling with Circe, the faithful second-in-command Eurylochus is right to challenge what he sees as Odysseus’ foolhardiness, reminding the sailors:

‘Remember those the Kyklops held, remember
shipmates who made that visit with Odysseus!
The daring man! They died for his foolishness!’

Odysseus is so angry at this insubordination that he thinks of killing Eurylochus, but is dissuaded by the other men. In Polyphemus’ cave he was pig-headed. Now he is a thin-skinned rank-puller, like a few unimpressive people I have known in my working life.

The scene in book 23 of The Odyssey, after the slaughter, where Odysseus and Penelope sit opposite one another in the great hall of their home, not speaking, is profoundly moving:

‘There
leaning against a pillar, sat the man
and never lifted up his eyes, but only waited
for what his wife would say when she had seen him.
And she, for a long time, sat deathly still
in wonderment — for sometimes as she gazed
she found him — yes, clearly — like her husband,
but sometimes blood and rags were all she saw.’

I’ve had my reader’s head in Homer and my writer’s (translator’s) head in Petrarch. I can’t remember what train of thought it was that made me realise that I knew virtually nothing about one of the fathers of European lyric verse. He was Italian; he was in love with Laura; he invented the Petrarchan sonnet, which is different from the Shakespearean sonnet: that was about it. The internet brought me to Love Songs of Petrarch, translated by William Dudley Foulke and published in 1915. The translations — a selection from Petrarch’s oeuvre — are archaic and mannered, which is a relief when you’re trying to be neither. They don’t tempt you away from your own thoughts. But each has a helpful introduction, and there is an excellent long biographical essay, for which I was very grateful. Then I bought the Harvard edition of the complete Rime sparse, edited by Robert Durling. His translations are in prose, so again there was no interference.

Petrarch first saw Laura on 6 April 1327. Foulke says that on this day, ‘a day which according to mediaeval tradition was the anniversary of the Crucifixion of our Lord (and which fell in that year, not on Good Friday, but on Monday of Holy Week)… Petrarch first saw Laura, in the church of Santa Clara at Avignon. He at once became enamoured of her beauty, but she gave no sign of responding to his passion.’ Durling confirms that ‘April 6, 1327 was not Good Friday; it was the historical anniversary of the Crucifixion, as its date was calculated in Petrarch’s day.’ (The information that in 1327 the anniversary of the crucifixion wasn’t celebrated on Good Friday surprises and perplexes me; I haven’t gone further into how this came about in the practice of the church.)

Petrarch’s passion for Laura lasted for the remaining 21 years of her life (she died on 6 April 1348, on the same day and at the same hour that he had first seen her, so he leads us to believe; my father also died on 6 April, at about that hour, though according to the Gregorian not the Julian calendar) and for 10 years after her death. Of the 366 poems included in his Rime sparse, I would guess (I haven’t counted) that about 300 are addressed to or are about Laura. His love for her seems to me to have been a real, visceral feeling for these 31 years; different from Dante’s love for Beatrice, which has more of a quality of beatification about it, as her name is intended to suggest. The love was never consummated sexually. Laura either was married when he first saw her, or soon became so; and he was in minor holy orders (a decision he’d taken for reasons of career, the Pope residing in Avignon, rather than of vocation). His officially celibate state, and his obsession with Laura, didn’t stop him fathering two children by another, unnamed woman. He became a successful public poet, author and diplomat, moving frequently between France (his father, a lawyer, had moved to Avignon from Arezzo when Petrarch was a boy), Italy, Germany and the Low Countries, ambassador to dukes, emperors and popes. He had a house in the Vaucluse, at the source of the river Sorgue, which was the retreat to which he returned from his travels.

Petrarch is credited with being one of the scholars who laid the foundations of the renaissance, by rediscovering the works of classical authors and reintroducing them to contemporary readers.

With all his success, literary and political, Petrarch remained under Laura’s spell. Although he often uses familiar conceits to describe his state (fires being drenched by tears, the lover being shot by the loved one’s dart or being entangled in her snares like a limed bird), and although his poems are full of the classical allusions that he assumed his readers would understand, I don’t get any sense that the expression of his feelings is merely conventional. He’s hot, to use a vulgarism. He’s truly wretched. He really does think that he’s wasted his life on a hopeless cause. He frequently attempts the religious sublimation of his feelings, but he always comes back to statements of sexual desire and frustration.

I’ve done 11 translations so far (a number which suddenly sounds terribly puny), choosing poems where the metaphors or the argument seemed most concrete or original: not just elegant moping. Many have said it, and I may have written it before, but it always amazes me how approachable is the Italian poetic vocabulary of 700 years ago. I work with a modern Italian-English dictionary, a grammar and a book of verbs with their conjugations; I’ve never failed to find a word of Petrarch’s in the dictionary, though sometimes the spelling has changed.

I may do another batch later. For the moment, I’m in danger of only being able to think in iambics with full rhymes. I have completely failed so far to imitate the Italian metre with its eleven syllables. I keep saying to myself that I must try, but I fall back into iambic pentameter or hexameter, like a cyclist getting his wheel stuck in a tramline. So I’ve translated the first stanza of the third rima, which commemorates the event of 6 April 1327, and whose original is:

‘Era il giorno ch’al sol si scoloraro
per la pietà del suo factore i rai,

quando i’ fui preso, et non me ne guardai,

ché i be’ vostr’occhi, donna, mi legaro.’


— as:

‘It was the day the sun’s rays hid their light
for pity of their maker’s agony.
Lady, your lovely eyes caught hold of me
and I had no defence; they bound me tight.’

Peter Hetherington, who knows Italian well, apart from being simply the best critic any poet or translator could hope to have, has helped me immensely, saving me from several elementary errors in translation, and guiding me towards the balance between dignity and informality of diction which is, I think, the hallmark of a good translation.

The online edition of Becoming Our Own Experts went live on 15 February. It’s been a lot of work and a long time coming; the idea of doing it came to me in the autumn of 2008, before Mark and Nicola Leicester went back to New Zealand. I’m very pleased with it now it’s here, and I’m doing my best to publicise it to people who should be interested.

To start with a statement of helplessness: in Syria, at this moment, acts of barbarism are taking place, unchecked, which compare in nature with the worst human cruelties we have seen in the world in recent decades. In scale, the wickedness doesn’t match Rwanda or Cambodia, but it certainly matches disintegrating Yugoslavia in the ’90s, and it exceeds the worst we’ve seen since the people of several Arab countries began calling for normal human rights and freedoms fifteen months ago. The outside world does little but wail. The UN is helpless, because Russia and China won’t support any kind of military intervention. A conservative estimate of Syrian civilians killed by their own government would be 7,500. Countless have been maimed, imprisoned, tortured. We read reports of boys aged 12 having their throats cut by soldiers. We see pictures, secretly filmed, of injured men being tortured in hospitals where they are supposedly being treated. After the rebel fighters withdrew from the Baba Amr district of Homs last Friday, hopelessly outgunned by the regime’s forces, the government refused to allow the Red Cross or the Red Crescent access to the area to provide humanitarian aid, saying that the area was too dangerous to enter. The truth was that they wanted a free hand and no prying eyes while they carried out atrocities of revengeful slaughter.

And here I am in a quandary (not that it matters to anyone else — least of all to those who are suffering). I steadfastly opposed the invasion of Iraq, on the grounds that the UN came nowhere near to authorising it. I supported the invasion of Afghanistan, on the same grounds: anyone reading the resolutions passed by the Security Council at the time can see that there was, if not in explicit detail, at least in overwhelming spirit, a consensus that al-Qaeda and the Taliban should not go unpunished. For the same reasons, I supported the UN-approved NATO intervention in Libya. How can I support military action against Assad’s disgusting regime when I would not support military action against Saddam Hussein’s equally disgusting regime? I have the purest contempt for Russia’s position on Syria; it tries to pretend that equal blame for the violence can be assigned to the regime and to those challenging it, while supplying the regime with the arms it’s using to slaughter Syrian people. (Putin won a flawed election on Sunday, as everyone knew he would. Unless the Russian people rise up in the same way that some Arab peoples have — unlikely — he will be president for at least six years, and possibly for twelve.)

I can’t see my way out of this quandary. I find myself thinking that we should covertly supply arms to the rebels to give them a chance to win a civil war, since moral right is so clearly on their side. That would increase the bloodshed, but at least there would be a chance of a just outcome. I say ‘a chance’, because I’m not aware of anyone in the Syrian opposition with the stature to lead Syria in the direction it needs to go, towards a tolerant secular democracy within a largely Islamic but not Islamist country. Of course, the Assad regime has been secular in the sense that it hasn’t been theocratic. So was Saddam’s regime. Unfortunately, you can have secular butchers as well as religious butchers.

Meanwhile, we are edging dangerously close to a war in Iran. Neutral, specialist observers remain convinced that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon, despite its insistence that it is only interested in civil nuclear power. Israel, which has nuclear weapons but won’t say so, is making belligerent noises about a pre-emptive strike on Iran, in ‘self-defence’. America is calling for restraint, for giving diplomacy more time to work, which is the right policy. Unfortunately, Obama cannot ignore the Zionist lobby in an election year. He is saying that if diplomacy fails and the Iranian government continues to ignore warnings, America will intervene militarily to destroy Iran’s nuclear capability. (I suppose US intelligence, aided by the official investigations of the International Atomic Energy Authority, knows where the significant nuclear installations are.)

The only bright spot in this dark picture is that there is in Iran, unlike in Syria, a coherent opposition to the regime of President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Khamenei. Iran has had since 1979 a theoretically valid democratic system; apart, that is, from the major fact that ultimate power in the country doesn’t lie with the president but with the supreme leader, who is an Islamist cleric, which means that the country is a theocracy. When Ahmadinejad fraudulently won the 2009 presidential election, Khamenei described his victory as ‘a divine assessment’. Mousavi, who probably did win the election, and who would, if he were president, attempt to guide the country away from the disastrous course it is currently taking, is under house arrest. But as president he would still have to work within a theocratic system, unless there were another revolution giving ultimate power to elected politicians rather than priests.

There’s an essential divide between the West and most of the East over the meaning of democracy. Governments in Russia, China, Iran, most of the ‘…stan’ countries which were part of the Soviet Union, and those Arab countries which haven’t had popular revolutions, or which have suppressed revolts before they’ve become revolutions, simply don’t believe that individual civil rights and freedoms, or fairly fought elections, are that important. What is important to them is stability, economic development and their own ascendancy, and they will sponsor whatever corruption or repression is necessary to maintain them. Ironically, one manifestation of economic development is technology. The computers and smart phones designed in the West but manufactured in China, contributing to that country’s vast sovereign wealth (some of which it’s investing in Africa, Latin America and now, with Europe’s economic difficulties, even here) are the tools by which the people of the East see things in the West which they want to have: not just material things (though they certainly and understandably want those), but intangible things like freedom of speech and dignity of citizenship.

The last paragraph could easily have been written by a British Conservative or an American Republican. The thing I need to add, which most Conservatives or Republicans probably wouldn’t, is that the West doesn’t stand on moral high ground over these difficult matters. We have nuclear weapons, and we’re not going to give them up, notwithstanding Obama’s heroic efforts to reduce the size of the arsenals. In all probability, the UK government will spend about £25 billion replacing Trident after 2015, whoever wins the election in that year. It’s not easy, therefore, to say to developing countries that they can’t have these things, as if they are children and we’re grown-ups, even though no rational government in a developing country would waste precious resources on them. The disastrous decision to invade Iraq means that the West has recently broken international law. Russia’s contemptible refusal to act against the Assad regime is in part a reaction to America’s long refusal seriously to challenge Israel’s illegal expropriation of Palestinian land and its oppression of the Palestinian people.

To come back to a word in the first sentence today: helplessness. There’s nothing I can do but watch, and perhaps give some money to humanitarian organisations which may be able to bring succour to the Syrian innocents. I’m an appalled spectator.

In an hour’s time, I’m going to Oxford to hear Geoffrey Hill give one of his lectures as Oxford Professor of Poetry. His topic is ‘Poetry, Policing and Public Order’: alliterative, certainly. Until yesterday, I’d never read a word he’d written, even though I’d known for years that he is a major figure in English poetry, and that some people think he’s the best living poet born in England. Yesterday I read Hill’s Selected Poems, A Treatise of Civil Power and Clavics, which were the three books of his I found in Foyle’s on Saturday. In the first of these, I could mostly understand the selections from For the Unfallen, King Log, Mercian Hymns, Tenebrae and Canaan, and I pretty much got The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy, which appears complete. I am unashamed to say that in order to understand his references I consulted the internet, usually Wikipedia, about 50 times (and it never failed me); and a Latin dictionary about 10 times. I kept going through the selections from The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech! and The Orchards of Syon, but here my patience, or perhaps stamina, began to fail. A voice in me was asking, ‘Why are you wasting your time on this cleverness?’ and quoting the old saw about how most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people. One of the eulogistic blurb writers on the back of the book is A.N. Wilson. We know what kind of position he represents: a regretful elitism. He’s the man who writes, in the last book of his I read (and the last, in the other sense, that I will read), that clever children shouldn’t be educated with stupid children. In the introduction to his social history of Britain under the present queen, which was as far as I got before giving the book away to Oxfam, he tells us that the British gained their empire mainly out of a genuine desire to help the native peoples there. So Wilson’s admiration of Hill didn’t help me to an impartial judgment of Hill’s poetry. I fall back on the thought, which has often occurred to me when reading poetry that has inspired me, moved me, made me wish that I could ever write a fraction as well as that, that the great don’t need the protection of obscurity or advanced and specialised learning. Homer, Virgil, Dante, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Tennyson, Hardy, Heaney: they can sometimes be difficult, they don’t always surrender immediately, but it’s not an assault course. They’re not deliberately placing obstacles in the way of the common reader. And in speaking of those that I also consider great, but with reservation (Auden, Lowell, for instance), the reservation is always to do with their over-production of assault-course verse. I think I’ve written before that anthologisers nearly always get it right: they sort out the 10% of simple (not necessarily easy) greatness from the 90% of learned, skilful obscurity. Eliot may be a unique case in this respect. I do think The Waste Land is often culpably obscure. On the other hand, it was such an epoch-making poem that one forgives it. It started something big and different.

There were a few more guiding lights in the poems selected from Scenes from Comus and Without Title. Then I read A Treatise of Civil Power. Most but not all of these poems are referential: you have to at least know what the book he’s read is about, or who are the people whom Holbein painted, or what Handel’s music sounds like, or who Gillian Rose was (a philosopher who died young, whom perhaps Hill knew). There wasn’t anything unconquerable here. Then I came to Clavics, and soon gave up. He’s sporting with the reader. It’s close to learned gibberish. I found myself unkindly thinking, ‘It’s the drugs,’ having read during one of my frequent visits to the worldwide web that, after long periods of mental illness in earlier life (and, consequently, sparse output) he’s now taking pills which have made him happier and more productive. Productive in quantative terms, yes.

When Hill is good, it’s because he writes directly about nature, landscape, his memories or his Christian faith. Heroes we can recognise (poet-martyrs, or the German officers who were executed after the plot to assassinate Hitler) are good topics too. The toughness of his language and his steady eye are admirable. Early on, he uses rhyme and conventional forms, and there is music in his words. The music is heard more rarely as time goes on. There is hardly any in the late work. You’re left grinding through arcane ideas. He’s also self-conscious. He talks about himself and about his antagonistic relationship with his critics, as if that matters. It doesn’t, or shouldn’t. He definitely isn’t ‘the greatest living poet in the English language’ (Nicholas Lezard’s opinion on the back of one book), nor is his poetry ‘the major achievement of late-twentieth-century verse’ (William Logan’s on the back of another). Heaney is incomparably greater, because — with all his skill and learning — he never turns his back on the common reader.

It was an enjoyable evening. Hill’s lecture had nothing to do with either policing or public order. It was an hour of learned rambling on poetry and power. Human landmarks that we passed during the hour included Bishop Grosseteste, John Wycliffe, Langland, Petrarch, Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, Thomas Wyatt, John Donne, Breughel (the Elder, I think), Byron, Wordsworth (not principally as a poet, but as the author of the Tract on the Convention of Cintra), A.V. Dicey and Coleridge (briefly). I’d never heard of Dicey before. In 1915 he was a Fellow of All Souls. ‘The events of the European War suggested [to him] an edition (1915) of Wordsworth's Tract on the Convention of Cintra (1809) and a volume on The Statesmanship of Wordsworth (1917), designed to emphasize the intensity of the poet’s effort to persuade his countrymen to continue the struggle for “a peace grounded on the destruction of despotism”.’ (This is from R. S. Rait’s entry on Dicey in the Dictionary of National Biography.)

Hill’s learning didn’t add up to much, in the end. All we had was the assertion, supported by no evidence, that we are heading for a cultural/societal disaster because too much poetry is ‘accessible’ (he pronounced the word with extreme distaste). Only ‘difficulty’ will save us, and Hill doesn’t expect difficulty’s posse to arrive in time or in sufficient numbers. Curiously, he named the date by which he expected this Armageddon to have arrived (2032), as if he were a Jehovah’s Witness. Actually, he looked and sounded like Jehovah’s witness (small ‘w’) or possibly Jehovah himself: a bald 80-year-old crown, silver hair on either side of the head, and a flowing white beard. He pronounced his words slowly, oratorically, boomingly, sometimes with unexpected pauses in mid-sentence while we waited. I was grateful for this manner of delivery; it was the only way one could, just, hold on to the haphazard changes of direction in the ramble.

There were two occasions on which I found all respect for the man falling away. The first was when he alluded to comprehensive education (of which he naturally disapproved) and gave, as an example of it, A. S. Neill and Summerhill! Pure ignorance. The second was when he told us with some complacency that he doesn’t go online. I thought, ‘Do you really imagine that any sensible person, without access to the internet, would go to the trouble of tracking down the multiplicity of references, without which much of your work is incomprehensible, using only printed sources? And do you really think that only through applying ourselves to poetry as obscure as yours may we save ourselves culturally? You’re deluding yourself.’

Afterwards, David Bradshaw, David James and I walked through ancient lanes to The King’s Arms for beer, and then to a good restaurant in the High Street for dinner. The train brought me back to Paddington not long after midnight.

The last month has been interrupted by two unwelcome events, one minor, one major. The minor event is that I was attacked by a virus which laid me low for more than a fortnight. I had no energy, I was feverish and my chest was bunged up with a great quantity of viscous yellow-grey mucus. I could do nothing except read, usually in a horizontal position. Eventually I went to the doctor, probably just as the virus was fading, and she gave me a puffer such as asthmatics use. It worked; my chest cleared within three days. I’m fine now.

The major event is that, in the midst of my small illness, my brother Peter had a serious stroke. He was in Nottingham, staying with his friend Susan. On the morning of Friday 23 March he took a bath. He says now that that he can remember feeling unwell before he stepped into the tub. After some time, Susan began to wonder why he was spending so long in the bathroom, went upstairs and opened the door to find him lying unconscious, with the water about to overflow onto the floor, and with his nostrils just above the water level. She pulled the plug and called the emergency services. (She’s profoundly deaf, so she used her text phone, which she says gets the attention of those services more quickly than does 999.) They came immediately. Peter was in hospital within an hour. There’s no doubt that Susan saved his life. She might easily have gone to work that morning, or been out of the house for some other reason, in which case he would have died, probably from the stroke itself, possibly from drowning.

The stroke was in an artery of the right brain. A recent MRI scan shows that the clot is still there. Peter can speak, and can read, eat and drink using his right hand (he is right-handed), but he has no movement at all down his left side, and he can’t see out of his left eye. His recovery, if he makes a full recovery, will be long and slow. He might move at some point back to a hospital in Canterbury, where he lives.

As I understand the medical information we’ve been given by the excellent doctors and nurses, the area of the brain around the blocked artery, into which the thwarted blood has flowed, is now dead and will never work again. However, the brain will be trying to construct new synaptic connections to take the place of the abandoned ones. I don’t know whether that is happening already, or whether it can’t start until the blood is flowing through that artery again. Such are the limits of my medical knowledge. I must ask some more questions.

So far, I’ve been up to Nottingham six times, and I’m going again tomorrow. We think we’ll still go to France as planned next Thursday, and be based there until the autumn. But now I shall be flying back about once a month to visit Peter. His children George and Stephanie have been wonderful in this crisis, as has Susan, but it’s a heavy load for them to carry.

My illness plus the train journeys have given me time to read The Aeneid (in Robert Fitzgerald’s magnificent translation, as with Homer earlier this year). I studied book VI for A-Level, as have thousands of other schoolchildren, and enjoyed it. But I’ve never read the whole work until now, and so I didn’t know that the whole point of Virgil’s epic is to invent for the Roman elite of his day, and in particular for the emperor, a noble ancestry. Rome was the new Troy, and Aeneas was a hero to rival Odysseus. The account of the sack of Troy (book II) is one of the most splendid and dreadful accounts of warfare I’ve read in poetry. It rivals anything in The Iliad, for me, I think because, written 800 years later, it seems a more human, less formulaic description. It’s strange to realise, having now read both Homeric poems and The Aeneid, that the most famous event of the Trojan War in present-day popular knowledge — the stratagem of the wooden horse — isn’t mentioned at all in The Iliad and only in passing in The Odyssey. Virgil provided the story in full. The fact that it is mentioned, however briefly, in The Odyssey is evidence that the wooden horse was part of the myth of the sack of Troy 800 years previously. Scholars will know, but I don’t, whether more complete versions of the episode existed in the great gap of time between Homer and Virgil, or whether he provided all those details himself.

Then I read Roy Jenkins’s biography of Gladstone. Very good. What an astonishing man Gladstone was. He had titanic amounts of energy and stamina, despite being frequently ill. He read voluminously and variously throughout his life, his consumption of books not at all reduced by the responsibilities of office. He was at least as interested in religious and ecclesiastical matters as he was in politics. During his fourth and final premiership, for example, as he struggled unsuccessfully to bring Home Rule to Ireland, he wrote a long article about improvements in the standard of church music he had witnessed in his lifetime.

In his first speech to parliament at the age of, I think, 23, he opposed the emancipation of West Indian slaves. As a young man he wrote a book insisting that all holders of public office in the United Kingdom should be communicant Anglicans. This was the same person who, in maturity and old age, was the great hero of the poor, a star orator capable of drawing crowds in the thousands and tens of thousands, far more popular than Queen Victoria, who was jealous of him for that. We can easily see now that if he had carried Home Rule for Ireland, the tragedies of the twentieth century in that country might have been avoided. He was a far greater figure than Disraeli, who emerges from Jenkins’s book — admittedly perhaps not the most friendly of sources — not as the father of compassionate one-nation Toryism, but as an unscrupulous manoeuvrer, willing to break Peel over the Corn Laws before adopting Peel’s policy once he had broken him, willing to oppose by every means Gladstone’s attempt to extend the suffrage by 400,000, only then to extend it by a million when he got office himself. Jenkins also accuses Disraeli of poisoning the queen’s mind, in a constitutionally improper way, against his chief opponent, not that the queen’s rather limited mind needed much encouragement to accept the poison.

Gladstone was, famously, a visitor of prostitutes for altruistic purposes who, Jenkins says, nonetheless derived a sexual thrill from the visits. He was indifferent to the danger to his reputation which these nocturnal adventures might cause. But he obtained a whip so he could flagellate himself afterwards. He cut down trees by the hundred on his estate at Hawarden, for exercise (and perhaps to work off excess sexual energy?). One of his most absurd exploits was to chase around Europe in pursuit of a woman who had left her husband and children and gone off with another man. He was hoping to catch up with her and persuade her of the error of her ways. She stayed one step ahead of him.

The final, just reputation of this great man, who was not a democrat in any modern sense of the word, who believed in a landed aristocracy, who enjoyed appointing bishops and archbishops, who was not enormously enthusiastic about the Forster Education Act — one of the most significant of the laws passed under any of his premierships — is that he nonetheless represented in himself progress, as in progressive, as in a tide which flowed in a direction which has benefited the majority of British people since. As I’ve said already, if he hadn’t been betrayed by the stupidity of men in parliament who couldn’t see the inevitable in Ireland as clearly as he came to see it, the majority of Irish people might have benefited too, and might have been saved the hatred and bloodshed awaiting them in the next century.

I visited Peter yesterday. There’s no great change in his condition. He’s been moved to a private room, which must be a relief. ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’ applies more to NHS hospital wards than to anywhere else. He said that the physiotherapists detected some slight twitching in his left side in response to their stimuli, but he’s not aware of any movement yet. Side-effects of the stroke include constipation, a problem compounded by the difficulty of actually performing a bowel movement when half of you isn’t working, and a tendency to violent attacks of hiccups. His recovery will be long and slow, and a big challenge will be to keep him from becoming depressed.

The blossom everywhere has been wonderful these last few weeks. Down the road from our flat, by the railway bridge taking the St Pancras tracks over Camley Street, there’s an area of waste ground, abandoned, overgrown and littered with rubbish. Out of it rise two beautiful big cherry trees, which are covered just now with white flowers (‘Wearing white for Eastertide’). Some men, working I think for the railways, have been doing a great job clearing the area, throwing the rubbish into a lorry and putting the undergrowth through a shredder. The cherry trees look even better on the cleared ground, though there was always something poetic and paradoxical about such beauty emerging from ordure and chaos.

We arrived here on Friday. The place looks wonderful, if a little shaggy. I shall need to get the lawnmower out as soon as we have a dry afternoon. The primroses, mainly yellow but some mauve, are in full flower. So are the violets and a few aconites. And daisies and dandelions, of course. Strangely, there are green, fresh daffodil leaves, but no flowers. I thought perhaps we had missed the flowers, though I was puzzled that I could see no dead ones. Then Rosa said when I visited her last night that she had had the same thing: leaves but no flowers. She didn’t know why either.

On Thursday night we stayed for the second time at a little hotel near Mont Saint Michel. (The first was on the way back to London in mid-January.) We were introduced to the place by the daughter of the couple who run it. She was working as a waitress at Benoit, a restaurant in New York that we frequented when we were there last year. Her name is Annaëlle Lefort, and she told us that her parents, Annie and Thierry Lefort, run the Auberge du Terroir at Servon. The place is a delight. It’s in a tiny village, which nonetheless has a large church and a huge walled and turreted manoir. There are about eight rooms, and the restaurant has more the atmosphere of a family dining room. Beautiful traditional cooking. Because of the connection with Annaëlle, our stock was so high on Thursday that a whole bottle of champagne was offert. We knew in January that Annaëlle was going to leave Benoit and attend a wine school for a few weeks. She is now the sommelière in a new, posh restaurant in New York, and very pleased with life.

I visited Peter on Wednesday. He’s out of bed during the day now, in a wheelchair. I pushed him around the hospital grounds for 20 minutes, which he enjoyed. He can see out of his left eye again. He has some sensation in his left foot, but no movement on that side yet. His children think that he should move soon to the hospital at Canterbury, so he can be in contact with friends there. Everyone emphasises the importance of physiotherapy in what will be a long and slow recovery. Seamus Heaney, in the third and last of his wonderful sequence of short poems about his stroke, mentions physiotherapy, in an unlikely but successful comparison of himself with the charioteer at Delphi:

‘The charioteer at Delphi holds his own,
His six horses and chariot gone,
His left hand lopped

From a wrist protruding like an open spout,
Bronze reins astream in his right, his gaze ahead
Empty as the space where the team should be,

His eyes-front, straight-backed posture like my own
Doing physio in the corridor…’

‘holds his own’ is a sort of play on words. It has the ordinary meaning of ‘keeps control, stands his ground’, but it also clearly means ‘holds his own hand’, in contrast with Heaney’s helpless hand as described in the second poem:

‘…that I could not feel you lift
And lag in yours throughout that journey
When it lay flop-heavy as a bellpull…’

But there’s a bit of a mystery, a peculiarity, in that the charioteer’s left hand is ‘lopped / From a wrist protruding like an open spout’. I have in front of me an image of the Delphi charioteer. His arm is missing from the bicep, not the wrist. I’m pretty sure, in fact I’m certain, that there’s only one Delphi charioteer. Wikipedia tells me that the bronze statue was erected at Delphi in 474 B.C. and found there in 1896. It was made in sections. Three sections were discovered and reassembled. The fourth, the left arm, is lost. Even imagining the statue complete, would the left hand have been holding the right, to give it extra strength and resistance as it gripped the ‘Bronze reins’?

After reading about Gladstone, I went on to Matthew Hollis’s biography of Edward Thomas’s last years, Now All Roads Lead to France. Very good, although a bit too clever early on in the way it jumps about chronologically. But that’s a quibble. I was grateful to learn so much about a poet I’ve always revered; in particular, to know about Thomas’s friendship with Robert Frost. I knew that Frost had been in England, and that they’d been friends, and I’d read Frost’s beautiful tribute To E.T. (with, incidentally, its prophetic line ‘The foe thrust back unsafe beyond the Rhine’). But I didn’t know that it was Frost who showed Thomas how to be a poet; that Frost’s theory of ‘the sound of sense’ — a Wordsworth-like determination to take ordinary human speech and control it only lightly in the discipline of verse — enabled Thomas to realise that the poetic prose he’d been putting into so many books, often turned out grudgingly to make a living for himself and his family, could be adapted and heightened, but not by very much, to become the equivalent of the poetry for which Frost is most famous. (I also didn’t know that Frost’s first two collections, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston, were first published in London.)

So I’ve re-read Thomas’s poems, 144 of them, all composed, amazingly, between November 1914 and January 1917. I reckon about half of them work perfectly, and a large proportion of those are truly great. To say what I don’t like will help me to say why I like what I do. Over-obvious rhymes, lyrics with very short lines, and adjectives following nouns in archaic poetic fashion: these I don’t like. But when he lets his plain voice speak the findings of his acute observing eye, almost but of course not quite as if he were just talking to you in his house or in a pub, he is quite wonderful. The famous ones, yes: ‘Adlestrop’, ‘As the team’s head brass’, ‘Rain’. But also extraordinary powerful philosophical and angry pieces like ‘February Afternoon’ (Petrarchan sonnet, more or less):

‘Men heard this roar of parleying starlings, saw,
A thousand years ago even as now,
Black rooks with white gulls following the plough
So that the first are last until a caw
Commands that last are first again, — a law
Which was of old when one, like me, dreamed how
A thousand years might dust lie on his brow
Yet thus would birds do between hedge and shaw.

Time swims before me, making as a day
A thousand years, while the broad ploughland oak
Roars mill-like and men strike and bear the stroke
Of war as ever, audacious or resigned,
And God still sits aloft in the array
That we have wrought him, stone-deaf and stone-blind.’

I didn’t know, but now I do, that ‘shaw’ is ‘Archaic or dialect — a small wood; thicket; copse’. I might be particularly fond of this poem because of my own poem about starlings, and because of the contempt in the last two lines for any idea of a benevolent God.

I’ve written before that poets deserve to be called great if they have written 30 or 40 great poems, even if, like Auden or Lowell, they have also produced much larger quantities of merely skilful verse. By this minimum criterion, Thomas is without doubt a very great poet indeed.

God is sitting aloft, stone-deaf and stone-blind, at the moment as the Assad regime continues to slaughter its own people in Syria, as Sudan and South Sudan edge closer to all-out war over oil and territory, as Israel threatens Iran and vice-versa, as the Taliban look ever likelier to resume their barbarous governance of Afghanistan once the West has withdrawn, covering our failure and our retreat with brave words, as we will.

It’s two months since the last entry, and here we are at my 61st birthday, in the same wonderful place where we were last year. I remember writing exactly a year ago that I was melancholy; it was something to do with the weight of anticipation of such a significant date, and then the anti-climax of its arrival. A foolish and ungrateful thought, considering how many people had been kind and generous in marking the occasion. Today I feel uncomplicatedly cheerful.

Eight of us have been here for a week: Mike Raleigh, Kate Myers, Peter and Merle Traves, Bronwyn and Stephen Mellor, Helen, me. Mike, Kate, Peter and Merle left this morning. The remaining four of us will stay another week. Last night I was taken out to the same restaurant — La Porta at Montichiello — where I was treated last year. Last year the weather was bad and we sat inside; last night the weather was perfect and we sat on the terrace and gazed at the magical landscape as evening fell. The food was excellent. The holiday here has been and will be the usual mixture of pleasures: eating, drinking, swimming, reading, visiting ancient towns of exquisite beauty, admiring the countryside, in my case improving my Italian.

I’ve stopped making apologies to myself for the enormous gaps of time between one entry and another in this record. I do have a sort of excuse for the latest silence. I’ve been doing something which I promised myself I would do when I got to 60. I began then to feel a regret that my writings on English teaching and language in education of many years ago had been scattered to the four winds. After I joined Channel 4, I wrote very little educational stuff. But from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s I produced quite a body of articles in magazines and journals, chapters in books and notes for talks, as well as The Resources of Classroom Language and (with others) Becoming our own Experts. During that time, I was too casual about keeping copies of the shorter pieces I’d done. I think it was a kind of vanity. I was saying to myself, ‘I can toss these things off without too much trouble; I hope people find them useful; there will be more.’ It was an affectation. Anyhow, with the help of various friends I’ve reassembled quite a lot of what I wrote, and it’s going to become a third website, to go with My Proper Life and Becoming our own Experts. Once again, Mark and Nicola Leicester are building it. As soon as we arrived at Kerfontaine I started on the editing and revising of the pieces. I’ve grouped them into sections. All but two of the sections are finished and have gone to New Zealand. The work took all my time until I came down here. I’ll do the last two sections when we get back to Kerfontaine at the beginning of July.

I say ‘I came down here’ because Helen spent two weeks in Marseille without me, on the understanding that Mary and family would speak English as little as possible, so that Helen could approfondir son français. (The partial immersion has had a positive effect.) I dropped Helen at Nantes station on 24 May. She took the train south. That evening, I flew from Nantes to Gatwick, and went to visit Peter. He had moved to the Kent and Canterbury Hospital, as we hoped he would. He was already beginning to make progress, and has made more since. I spoke to him yesterday, on his birthday. He can walk a few steps now, with physiotherapists standing beside him. Last evening, he was moved from the stroke unit of the hospital to a neurological rehabilitation ward. The doctors are acting on the assumption that he will make a full recovery, though there’s no guarantee of it, and the process will be long: maybe as long as a year.

While I was in England I visited Martina Thomson twice. She’s coping bravely with her myeloma, helped by an operation she agreed to, by which a surgeon put little bits of cement into her spine to strengthen it. The weather in England was freakishly hot during the five days I was there. On the second occasion, we walked down from her house to Daphne Restaurant and sat outside in what felt like a tropical night, eating our favourite dishes and drinking retsina. The next day I flew back to France and got a lot done on the educational pieces during the following six days, being alone and able to live like a barbarian. Jean and Annick kindly invited me to dinner on four successive nights. I drove to Agen on 5 June and met Bronwyn and Stephen, who had just had a week with other friends in a house between Toulouse and the Pyrenees. On 6 June three of us arrived at Marseille, where we stayed two nights. Then we four came on down here, via one night at an excellent agriturismo called Podere Conti, near Pontremoli. When we leave here next Saturday, we shall drop Bronwyn and Stephen at Pisa airport, and give ourselves three more nights there. We’ll visit La Spezia for the first time. Then Marseille again for three nights; then we’ll return to Kerfontaine, taking Tess with us. On 12 July, I’ll fly to England again, with Tess, because by then Mary and Jacques will be in London. Mary owns a house in Camberwell. The woman who has rented it for years has left, and they are going to do some repairs and redecoration before finding another tenant. I’ll visit Peter again. When I return to Kerfontaine, I hope to stay put for a while after all this charging about. David, Lindsay and Tom will come for a fortnight; later in August Juginder Lamba and Lesley Lancaster will come for a few days; and there may be other friends there in September and October.

I haven’t done much poetry recently, because of the other writing, but I did do a translation of the last 60 or so lines of book II of The Aeneid, which I admired so much when I read it earlier this year. The Greeks have entered and are destroying Troy. Aeneas, having realised that the Trojan cause is hopeless, has led a little party of his family and servants through the night to a rendezvous point outside the walls, from which they will go into exile. When they get there, Aeneas discovers to his horror that his wife Creüsa is not with them. She must have been separated from the others in the confusion. He goes back alone to try to find her. He witnesses the continuing destruction in the city, including that of his own house. Abandoning all caution, he cries Creüsa’s namely repeatedly as he goes about the streets. Her ghost appears to him; she must have been killed, although she makes no mention of the manner of her death. There is a touching scene in which she tells him that he will see her no more, but that he will, after many wanderings, come to Italy, achieve royal fame and marry a new wife. As she fades from his sight, he tries three times to put his arms around her neck; three times her wraith eludes him. The passage ends with Aeneas returning to the rendezvous point, to find a large crowd gathered, all determined to follow him into exile. I’ve translated the very last lines as:

‘Above Mount Ida’s highest ridges rose the morning star.
It brought the day. Greeks had blockaded and now held the gates.
No hope of help remained. I bowed to the inevitable,
took my father up, and headed for the mountains.’

I’ve entered this, together with the Machado translation ‘To a Dry Elm’ and one of my Petrarch sonnets, for the Stephen Spender Prize. I’ve also put four of my own poems in for the Bridport Poetry Prize.

It was a pleasure to be in France at the time of the presidential election, to see Sarkozy ousted and Hollande installed. Victories for the left are rare enough these days. But there was little of the joy unconfined which I remember from Mitterrand’s election 31 years ago. These are much tougher and more pragmatic times. Europe, and the eurozone in particular, are in deep difficulties, essentially because of the unsustainable debts taken on by some governments, and the unwise lending indulged in by some banks. Tomorrow, Greece has a general election for the second time in a few weeks. The election there last month failed to produce a party or coalition of parties which could command a majority in parliament. It saw the rise of a radical left party which wants to tear up the terms of the bailouts which first Pasok and then the New Democracy/Pasok coalition had painfully negotiated with the IMF, the EU and the European Central Bank. (Another of the parties which did well in last month’s elections is a neo-Nazi party whose symbol is very similar to the swastika.) The radical left party will attract good support again tomorrow, though whether enough to form a government I doubt. I have a feeling that New Democracy and Pasok will be forced into another unwilling coalition, and that Greece’s agony will continue for years yet, with perhaps some renegotiation of the bailout terms, but not much. I might be wrong. Greece might leave the euro, return to the drachma in a new form, and simply default on large chunks of its debt. Its problem if it defaulted is that, unlike other countries which have defaulted on debt, it simply would not have in its coffers the money, borrowed or otherwise, to pay its teachers and police and doctors and pensioners. So it would become a kind of failed state. Meanwhile, numerous European banks have lent huge sums to Greece, and they might themselves be in trouble if Greece defaulted.

Separately, the ECB lent about a hundred billion euros to Spain a week ago, to try to shore up Spain’s disastrous banks, which had so foolishly lent vast amounts of money to property developers which have gone bust. Conditions are very difficult here in Italy too, although I suspect that Mario Monti’s government of unelected technocrats is doing the right and necessary things. There was an instructive chart in yesterday’s Corriere della Sera, showing the deficits, as percentages of GDP, of each of the countries in the eurozone for 2012, with predictions for 2013, and the countries’ accumulated overall debt ditto. Greece has a deficit in 2012 of 7.3%, predicted to rise to 8.4% next year. It has an accumulated debt of 160.6% of GDP this year, predicted to rise to 168% next year! I can’t see how it can escape from the vicious spiral that it’s in, other than by some extraordinary act of debt forgiveness, coupled with the willingness of lenders to then lend again at reasonable rates. I don’t think that’s going to happen. Italy has bitten the bullet courageously; its deficit is 2.0% this year, dropping to 1.1% next, but its accumulated debt is still 123.5% of GDP, dropping only to 121.8% next year. The other countries with accumulated debt of more than 100% of GDP are Belgium (just), Ireland and Portugal.

All this trouble, we have to remember, was triggered in America in 2007 and 2008. There, a deeply indebted Republican government reaped the whirlwind of the laissez-faire attitudes to financial institutions which were among the most toxic inheritances of the Reagan/Thatcher years. Because the developed world’s financial system is so interconnected globally, the problem spread to the UK and to continental Europe. On the continent, governments which had been happy to borrow money to fund the well-being of their citizens suddenly found that the nice friendly lenders they had been relying on had become the equivalent of drug dealers exercising power over addicted clients. It was right-wing governments in Italy, Greece and France which ran up huge state debts, in Greece’s case concealing the truth about its indebtedness. It’s true that Zapatero’s socialist government in Spain allowed its banks to become dangerously exposed, and it shouldn’t have done that. But the Spanish government’s own debt is ‘only’ 80.9% of GDP, admittedly predicted to rise to 87.0% next year. As I’ve written before, Gordon Brown’s failure as Chancellor of the Exchequer was in not controlling more severely the UK’s financial institutions. He didn’t borrow irresponsibly; government debt during his time in that office was well within bounds. It was 40.9% of GDP in 2000, according to a chart I’ve just seen in an article by Niall Ferguson on the BBC’s website. It was only when the crisis hit, by which time Brown was Prime Minister, that the UK was obliged to borrow massively in order to save the banks. The debt is currently 88.4%, and the chart predicts that it fall only to 86.8% by 2017, despite the current government’s austere economic policies.

What are the lessons? Governments shouldn’t run up excessive debt. They should get together to limit the thrall in which they are held by private financial institutions with no interest in the welfare of the societies in which they operate, but only in enriching themselves. Multilateral, publicly owned lenders should lend at reasonable rates to countries and regions for necessary investment in infrastructure. Citizens should be made to pay their taxes in the countries, notably Greece and Italy, where tax evasion has been a national sport. Companies should be stopped from engaging in the legal but fraudulent activity of earning money in one country while being headquartered in another country with a much lighter tax regime. Wealthy individuals who legally avoid or illegally evade the tax which they should pay, and which their less wealthy compatriots are obliged to pay, should relentlessly be pursued by the authorities, and laws should be changed to make that kind of behaviour much more difficult to sustain. International pressure should be applied by the powerful economies in order to close down tax havens. Capital gains should be taxed at the same rate as income. There should be a financial transaction tax; and I’m glad to see that Hollande and Merkel seem to be edging towards it. I hope they stuff it down Cameron’s throat once it begins to bring serious money into their exchequers; he continues to insist that it’s a bad idea.

The second round of the French parliamentary elections is held tomorrow. I think the Socialists should win a working majority, with the help of the Greens and some other small parties. Hollande wasn’t helped this week when his current partner, Valérie Trierweiler, tweeted her support for the opponent of Ségolène Royal, the president’s former partner and mother of his children, in the constituency — La Rochelle — into which she has been parachuted with the intention that she will be elected its MP and then become the speaker of the Assembly. I’m sympathetic to Olivier Falorni, a Socialist who was expelled from the party after he refused to step aside to let Royal stand, and who is standing as an independent. It looks as if he will win. It was the wrong thing to parachute Royal in. But Trierweiler should have kept her trap shut. Naturally, the UMP is delighted at this unexpected distraction from its own difficulties, notably to do with the ambiguity of its position with regard to the Front National. I fear there’s going to be more trouble and embarrassment down this line.

Away from these soap-opera antics, Egypt is also holding elections this weekend: the second round of the presidential contest, between the candidate of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the man who was Mubarak’s last Prime Minister. For a lot of people, this isn’t a cheerful or meaningful choice. They don’t want someone tainted by his association with the old regime, and they don’t want Islamist fundamentalism either. This week, Egypt’s Supreme Court — judges appointed by Mubarak — declared unconstitutional the parliamentary elections which the Muslim Brotherhood won last year. So there will have to be fresh elections. And there is still the fear that the army may in the end resume power, despite the soldiers’ declared intention to hand it over as soon as all the country’s democratic institutions are established.

In Syria, the UN’s ineffective peace mission has just been suspended. The slaughter of Syria’s citizens by its government continues. The great powers seem powerless. I think there will be a civil war.

I’m being taken out for a second birthday dinner tonight.

It’s another blazing hot day. Helen and I have just been into Pienza for some food shopping and then a cappuccino and sweet pastry in our favourite café there. On the lawn next to the house as we returned was a beautiful bird which I’ve never seen in England but which is quite common here — a hoopoe (upupa in Italian; stress on the first syllable). It has black and white bars on its body, a long, thin beak and, most strikingly, an almost equally long, thin crest ascending from the back of its head.

Last night we ate in the arcaded cool of the Osteria del Cardinale in San Quirico. It was a lovely, relaxed, quiet meal, accompanied by a delicious (and expensive) local red wine called Quiricus.

Three sets of elections yesterday: mixed results. In France, the outcome is straightforwardly good. The Socialists look as if they will win between 313 and 315 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly. This gives them an absolute majority. They can govern without the help of the Greens (not that the Greens’ participation would have been a bad thing) and without the help of the Front de Gauche, who would have made life difficult over the necessary cuts to reduce France’s large national debt. So I think that there will be a mixture of national investment for growth, and economies elsewhere. Hollande has said (I quote from the BBC’s website) that ‘his first priorities for the new parliament include postponing a balanced budget until 2017, raising income taxes and hiring 60,000 new teachers’. The Socialists now have the Presidency, the Senate and the National Assembly: a position unique since the establishment of the Fifth Republic. Madame Trierweiler’s idiotic tweeting doesn’t seem to have done much damage nationally, although — as expected — Madame Royal lost in La Rochelle. I think that would have happened anyway. It’s always a mistake for the top leadership of a party to try to impose a candidate when a local constituency already has one whom they like. In slightly different circumstances, Tony Blair discovered to his cost that he couldn’t impose his choice of mayor on London, nor his choice of First Minister on Wales.

In the Morbihan, our own département, five of the six constituencies, including that in which we live, went to the Socialists. The long-serving Jacques Le Nay, mayor of Plouay and UMP deputy, lost. People on the whole speak well of him, but his prospects looked bleak when Plouay, a conservative little town, voted for Hollande against Sarkozy by a margin of 11 votes in the second round of the presidential elections. It would have been 12 votes had Annick’s mother, aged about 90, not fallen down the stairs that morning, and felt not well enough to go out and vote.

In Greece, it looks as if some kind of stability will return, since New Democracy, the centre-right pro-bailout party, won the largest number of seats — 129 — in a parliament of 300. The radical left party, which would have torn up the bailout agreement, won 71 seats, and will lead the opposition. Pasok won 33 seats. By a peculiarity of Greek constitutional law, the party winning the largest number of seats is then given a further 50, to be occupied presumably by candidates waiting on a list. (Nice work if you can get it.) This will give New Democracy and Pasok 212 seats out of 300. All around the world, leaders are breathing a sigh of relief, although Greece’s future will still be hard for many years. I expect there may be some slight easing of the obligations on Greece in the bailout agreements, though no major rewrite. Perhaps the payback periods will be lengthened. The thing that sticks in my craw is that it was New Democracy that got Greece into its mess in the first place, by running up huge debts and lying to its creditors and to the international authorities about its indebtedness. It was Pasok under Papandreou which did its best to make the country face up to reality, until Papadreou’s folly in proposing a referendum on the bailout terms, a proposal which had to be abandoned and which led to his political demise. Now, of course, New Democracy is boasting that it will save the country. As we know, there is no justice in politics. The cliché that the first casualty in any war is the truth applies equally to politics, where — to generalise — electorates have short memories and low levels of intelligence.

The worst news is in Egypt. The result of the presidential election won’t be announced until Thursday, although the candidate of the Muslim Brotherhood is already claiming victory. But that isn’t the bad news. The bad news is that the army made an announcement last night which looks to me to be close to a military coup. As I wrote two days ago, last year’s parliamentary elections were last week declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court — a collection of judges appointed by Mubarak. Now the army says that new parliamentary elections cannot be held until a new constitution is drawn up. It will itself appoint the people to write the new constitution. The announcement removes from the future president any authority over the army, and gives the latter law-making powers and control over the budget.

Mohamed ElBaradei, my hero in Egypt, has (again according to the BBC’s website) described last night’s document as a ‘grave setback for democracy and revolution’. Other significant voices, including candidates in the first round of the presidential elections, have said similar things. The Muslim Brotherhood has said that the declaration is null and void. Soldiers have been stationed around the parliament, with orders not to let the supposedly unconstitutionally elected MPs enter. I cannot see but that there will be mass protests against this, with further bloodshed. The army has promised to ‘hand over power’ to the incoming president by 30 June, but it now seems as if all along the soldiers have been plotting that the power they intend to hand over will be ceremonial only.

Midsummer’s day. As a child in England, the arrival of this date used to depress me, because I knew that the days would now shorten, and it seemed that summer had not yet begun. The summer holidays were still a month away, and if it had been a wet June, which it often had, what prospect was there of anything better as the days declined? Years later, someone offered me the comforting (and correct) analogy that 21 June is to the year what midday is to the day: the next three months until the equinox would be like the afternoon until six o’clock.

Anyhow, today in central Italy deserves the name ‘midsummer’s day’, with all the associations of languor and heat. I think we are at the peak of a heat wave brought by a giant anticyclone centred on north Africa, which has been with us since last weekend (today is Thursday). The temperature outside must be approaching 40 degrees, although there’s a pleasant breeze coming through the open window as I sit here and type in my underpants. We have two more days of this idyll. Last night, we ate for the third time at the Osteria del Cardinale. I consumed two beautiful summer dishes, both cold: panzanella and a carpaccio of cured, finely sliced beef. White wine from San Gimignano; red from Montepulciano. Drove home in the exquisite soft night, and sat up reading (not a book, but the BBC’s website to catch up on the news) with a grappa until late. I swim at least three times a day; the morning immersion is the sweetest, since it instantly washes away any slight headache which might remain from the night’s enjoyments.

My dear friend Paul Halley, who lives in Canada and whom I’ve known since Cambridge in 1970 — he’s a year younger than I — came on Monday with his wife Meg and his son Nick. He’d written to me about a month ago, wondering if we could meet while they were in London. He mentioned that they were going on to Italy. I said I wouldn’t be in London when they were there, but why didn’t we meet here? So they drove up from Rome, arrived in time for lunch and stayed until the following morning. Two of the apartments here were empty during this second week of our stay, and Claudio kindly let me rent them just for the night.

Paul was born in Romford, Essex. His parents emigrated to Canada when he was little, and he was raised in Ottawa. He is a wonderful musician. He was the organ scholar at Trinity. Since then, among other jobs, he’s been organist of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. He works now at King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. He trains and conducts choirs, and composes. He and Meg run a music publishing business. (I’m pretty sure I’ve written some of this in a previous diary.) Although Paul and I have seen each other perhaps only five times in the last 40 years, we’re very close.

The important thing is that he is going to compose an opera, or perhaps an oratorio, about the life of Roger II, the 12th-century Norman King of Sicily, and he wants me to write the libretto. I’ve never done anything like this before, but I don’t think Auden had either until he got the invitation from Stravinsky to write the libretto for The Rake’s Progress, so I’m determined not to be frightened. The first thing I need to do is read John Julius Norwich’s book The Kingdom in the Sun. Here’s the description of the book on the Amazon website:

‘There were two Norman Conquests. John Julius Norwich is writing about the “other” one, the conquest of Sicily. When on Christmas Day 1130, Roger de Hauteville had himself crowned first King of Sicily, the island entered a golden age. Norman and Italian, Greek and Arab, Lombard, Englishman and Jew all contributed to a culture that was as brilliant as it was cosmopolitan; to an intellectual climate that attracted the artists and scholars of three continents; and to an atmosphere of racial and religious toleration unparalleled in Europe. Sixty-four years later to the day, the sun set on the Sicilian Kingdom; but its glory lives on in such dazzling monuments as the Palatine Chapel in Palermo or the cathedrals of Monreale and Cefalù.’

It’s easy to see why Paul is excited about the topic. If, more than 800 years ago, it was possible, at least for a while, for Islam, Christianity and Judaism to co-exist in one place to the mutual benefit of all, why does it seem to be so difficult in so many places today? The thought certainly challenges a simple, optimistic view of human progress over the centuries.

I shall get on with the job as soon as I’ve finished the last two sections of the website I was writing about the other day.

This evening we’re picking up Alessandra, Claudio’s business partner, in Montalcino at six, and driving to Follonica on the west coast, where Claudio and his wife have a house (I think inherited from her family). We’re being taken out to a fish restaurant by the sea.

Here we are back chez Mary et Jacques after a wonderful two and a half weeks in Italy. The meal in the fish restaurant was sensational. We said goodbye to Claudio and Alessandra on Saturday amid protestations of enduring friendship. Bronwyn received bad news from Australia just as we were leaving: her brother-in-law John had had a stroke. There have been many difficulties to do with the disposal of Bronwyn’s father’s businesses after his death, caused by the vindictiveness of two of Bronwyn’s brothers, especially towards John, of whose competence and success in managing the father’s businesses they have obviously been jealous. I think perhaps they also harbour a long-term resentment that the father didn’t trust them to take senior positions in his businesses many years ago, but did trust his son-in-law to do so. Naturally, Bronwyn and her sister Barbara, John’s wife, feel that the stress inflicted on John may have been a contributing factor in the attack. Anyhow, Bronwyn is back in Australia already, supporting her sister. They have an ailing mother, now suffering increasing dementia, to care for as well. Meanwhile, Stephen’s mother, who’s in Bury St Edmunds, is beginning to fade too, as she has a right to at the age of, I think, 97. So their life is complicated at the moment by mothers coming to the end of their lives on opposite sides of the world, as well as by the unlooked-for and exhausting intra-family anger in Australia.

After I dropped Bronwyn and Stephen at Pisa airport on Saturday afternoon, Helen and I had three quiet days at Podere Conti, which is likely to become a regular stopping-off point in our Italian trips from now on. The drive up here yesterday was that dream-like experience of beauty and speed which the autostrada/autoroute along the Italian and then French Riviera offers. Then the empty Esterel, and the huge grey bulk of Mont Sainte-Victoire under a steely blue sky, the sun implacably burning through the windows in the roof of the car, beating down the efforts of the air-conditioning, turned up full, to keep us cool.

Last night we ate on the terrasse: gazpacho, monkfish and rice, peaches and ice cream. Jacques’ mother Lucille came, bringing a bottle of champagne to celebrate my recent birthday. She is an indefatigable talker, and always interesting. She tends to talk exclusively to me when I’m here. After keeping up my end of the conversation for three hours at the table, following the seven-hour drive, I was tired. I slept well till nine this morning. Mary has gone to London today, by herself, to begin to make arrangements for the re-letting of her house. She’ll be back on Tuesday. By that time, we’ll be at Kerfontaine with Tess.

Two days after I last wrote, Helen, Tess and I drove back to Brittany, via an overnight stop at Agen. We had a delightful 12 days together here. Tess was charming company. Then she and I flew to England, where Mary and Jacques already were, beginning the redecoration and repair of Mary’s house in Camberwell. I stayed four nights in England, including one in Canterbury, visiting Peter, who continues to make slow progress: some movement in his left side; he can put weight on his left leg; he can manoeuvre himself from bed to wheelchair and from wheelchair to passenger seat in a car, which means that he can get out of the hospital for trips home or to the shops. Stephanie and I took him out twice. On the second occasion we went to a pub in a village five miles outside Canterbury. Just as Peter, with our help, was at the point of no return in performing the difficult transfer from car into wheelchair in the pub car park, the sky opened on us — perhaps the heaviest shower of rain of this sodden summer — so that by the time we got into the pub we were all drenched. It was one of those moments that make you realise how tough life’s most mundane actions life are for anyone with a physical disability.

Five days after my return here, David, Lindsay and Tom arrived. They left yesterday. They enjoyed themselves. Lindsay cooked a wonderful meal for us on Saturday, Helen’s birthday. She is coping bravely with her lung cancer, having endured (I think) six phases of chemotherapy, and being about to face further radiotherapy. She has no idea how long she has to live. She wanted to discuss with me readings and hymns at her funeral service, which I did apparently willingly but with some private reluctance, partly because I felt that I was to some extent usurping David’s place in that task, and partly because, to quote one of Albert’s favourite remarks, ‘Il ne faut pas danser plus vite que la musique.’ I hope Lindsay lives for another 30 years; who knows? Anyhow, we had a good literary session over coffee and croissants outside a café in Lorient in the morning sunshine while David and Tom were playing golf. I mentioned what we had done to David the next day. He wasn’t offended, but I don’t think there will be any more planning of ceremonies until the moment requires it.

Now we are alone until the 23rd of this month, when Juginder Lamba and Lesley Lancaster will come for five days. Juginder will be able to revisit four of the five sculptures we have bought from him over the years. They’re flying to and from Brest. I shall return to England with them on the 28th for another visit to Peter in Canterbury.

Mary and Jacques have had a very difficult time repairing the house in Camberwell, with a succession of tradesmen who’ve been either boorish or incompetent or a combination of the two. Most recently, carpet layers managed to puncture a central heating pipe, so Mary is staying on for an extra five days (Jacques and Tess return to Marseille today) to hire a plumber to fix that. When at last the place is ready, she’ll let it again.

Paul Ashton’s beautiful memoir of his childhood and youth, A Puritan at Les Baux, arrived recently. I helped with the editing and proof-reading. In my opinion it’s as good as Gosse’s Father and Son, as I told Paul, both books being concerned principally with their authors’ spiritual struggles within and then beyond their religious upbringings in the Plymouth Brethren.

From small concerns to great ones: the civil war in Syria continues, with many defections from the Assad regime to the rebels, the latest and the most significant being that of the Prime Minister, Riad Hijab, whose spokesman issued a statement that Mr Hijab had ‘defected from the terrorist, murderous regime and [is] joining the holy revolution’. The rebels control large parts of Aleppo, Syria’s second city. There is a constant stream of refugees into Turkey. I cannot see the Assad regime surviving, despite Russia’s continuing failure to condemn it and Iran’s active support for it. It will be overthrown, after more bloodshed and atrocity, but the outlook for the future governance of the country is confused, to say the least, with rival groups, some secular and some jihadist, claiming legitimacy and declaring themselves governments in exile.

Two months since I last wrote. What have I been doing in the meantime?

Juginder and Lesley came, and enjoyed themselves. As I said I would in the last entry, I flew back with them and spent four nights in England, including two days visiting Peter in Canterbury. He continues to improve, slowly. The other day he told me on the phone that he can walk a dozen steps now, with a stick but otherwise unaided. He’s going to sell the house that he bought only (I think) three years ago, which is as inappropriate as a dwelling could be for a disabled person, being on four floors with steep staircases. When he’s sold it, he’ll buy something more suitable. Naturally, we all hope, especially after his recent news, that he still may make a full recovery, but the chances of that are lessening.

My brother Mark celebrated his 60th birthday on 16 September. (It was mother’s birthday too; she would have been 85.) He had a big party at his house near Taunton. We didn’t go across, but I sent him six bottles of champagne, and a few days later he and Gill came here in their camping car. I remember writing in less than complimentary terms about camping cars when they arrived last year. This year they have a new one, the old one (which they only had for about a year) having rusted badly. They had it welded together again, sold it and bought the new one. I always quietly wonder how many nights in a nice little hotel you could have for the thousands, perhaps ten of thousands, of pounds it costs to buy one of these great, ugly, lumbering things and maintain it. Chacun à son goût, up to a point. They stayed the night, preferring to sleep in the camping car than in the house, and went on south the next morning. I think they must be back in England by now.

To continue with the round-up of my siblings: Andrew and Bez are still in Bulgaria, repairing the houses they bought there last year. Next month they go to New Zealand, where Bez has a daughter. As well as the van I helped them to buy in Nantes a year ago, they have one parked in New Zealand, which they plan to drive around both islands before finally selling. They’ll be back in Europe next May.

After many difficulties, Mary has repaired her house in Camberwell and rented it to some Italian students whom she likes.

The thought strikes me that the five of us own, between us and together with our spouses, ten houses: two for me, three for Mark (the one he lives in and two others in Taunton), one for Peter, two for Andrew and two for Mary. I don’t know why I should find that worth mentioning; perhaps a sentimental reflection on the relative simplicity of the lives of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents in the matter of property.

I’ve done a translation of Montale’s long poem Mediterraneo: a wonderful meditation, in nine parts, begun in 1924, on his relationship with that sea, filled also with the uncertainty and pessimism of a humane intellect in Italy as fascism gathers strength.

The website of my educational writings, about which I wrote earlier in the year, is now nearly ready. Its title will be Writings on Language and Learning 1975 — 1995, and its URL will be http://www.languageandlearning.net, which I was pleased and surprised to find hadn’t been taken by someone else. I wondered whether anyone would be affronted by the fact that the three significant words in the URL are the same as the title of James Britton’s great book, but decided to take that risk. I finished the content in July, and now I’ve done the corrections to all the sections, and I’m waiting for Mark and Nicola Leicester in New Zealand to assemble it into one piece, which I’ll check one last time. Then it’ll go live. I’ll tell everyone I still know in the world of English teaching and language education, and we’ll see if anyone finds any of it useful. It will mean, at least, that I don’t feel that all that work is lost.

The main task occupying me these last weeks, however, has been the Roger II libretto. I’m pretty sure it’ll be an oratorio, not an opera. I read two John Julius Norwich books: The Normans in the South and the one I mentioned in June, The Kingdom in the Sun. Then I read Pierre Aubé’s Roger II de Sicile. During the last fifteen years of Roger’s life, his friend the scholar Abu Abdullah Mohammed al-Idrisi compiled, at Roger’s instruction and with his continuing interest, a work of geography the English translation of whose title is The Avocation of a Man Desirous of a Full Knowledge of the Different Countries of the World, commonly known as The Book of Roger. Norwich describes it as ‘the greatest geographical work of the Middle Ages’. It divided the known world into seven ‘climates’, going from central Africa up to Norway, each climate further divided into ten sections, going from west (the Atlantic or ‘the Ocean of Darkness’) to east (China). The book was accompanied by maps. The information on the maps was also engraved, as Norwich says, onto ‘…a huge planisphere of purest silver, weighing no less than four hundred and fifty Roman pounds, on which was engraved “the configuration of the seven climates with that of the regions, countries, sea-coasts, both near and distant, gulfs, seas and watercourses; the location of deserts and of cultivated lands, and their respective distances by normal routes in miles or other known measures; and the designation of ports.” One would give much for this magnificent object to have been preserved; alas, it was to be destroyed during the riots of the following reign, within a few years of its completion.’

The Book of Roger was written in Arabic. Al-Idrisi was of course a Muslim, and each section of the book begins and finishes with praise to God, who would I’m sure have been Allah in the original. There’s no English translation, but a French one was done between 1835 and 1840, and a new edition of the translation, irritatingly and incomprehensibly only including the sections of the book covering the western sections of the seven climates, was published in 1990. I’ve read that.

Tariq Ali has written a novel, A Sultan in Palermo, which is a fictionalised account of al-Idrisi’s work for and relationship with Roger. It arrived in the post today. I’m going to read it straight away.

Anyhow, I’ve made a start on the libretto. It has been difficult and sometimes dispiriting work, because I’ve been blundering around, unsure how to proceed, never having attempted anything like this before, often putting stuff down that I wasn’t thrilled about because I couldn’t think of anything better. I’ve sent Paul Halley two drafts — hardly drafts, more bits of rough scaffolding — and he wrote back today encouragingly. He also made the suggestion that we might in the end be writing ‘a play with a great deal of music — incidental and central’, which could be a liberating thought. In other words, a musical or Singspiel.

It has rained for weeks, it seems, almost without let-up. This morning Jean-Paul and his new apprentice Nicholas and I went down to the stream to cut and remove several trees which have in recent years fallen into the water. We worked for an hour or so: Jean-Paul, in high waders, on chainsaws, large and small, me stumbling behind him pulling the cut logs and branches to the shore, Nicholas dragging them onto the sodden ground. Then it poured so hard we had to give up, not because we were wet — we were soaked already — but because Jean-Paul was worried about water getting into the chainsaws.

It didn’t take me long to read Tariq Ali’s novel. It’s quite the worst piece of fictional writing I’ve read in years: absurd plot, threadbare prose, heated up from time to time with embarrassingly bad sex scenes. He should stick to what he’s good at. At least there’s nothing in the book that I might have wanted to draw on, so no need to think about approaching his publisher.

We returned to London at the end of October. I sat up all night last week watching the American presidential election results. (I did the same thing four years ago, looking at the little TV downstairs in my parents’ house. Mum was asleep upstairs; dad was in hospital.) As four years ago, I was first nervous, then gradually more confident, then exhilarated, then deeply moved by Obama’s eloquence. This time, many people thought that the result would be very close, because the Republican Romney had narrowed the gap on Obama after the latter’s poor performance in the first televised debate. But in the end Obama won convincingly. The victory speech he made was about 25 minutes long and, so far as I could see, delivered without a note. I kept looking for a discreet glass autocue, but I don’t think there was one. His powers of oratory are remarkable and rare.

The election campaign itself was the most expensive in history (each candidate spent about a billion dollars), and vicious. At its heart was the essential division between what is, for me, the better part of America and what is the worse. Romney’s speeches and other statements should have been an insult to the intelligence of the American voter. He had nothing to offer but appeals to patriotism and an economically illiterate determination to reduce taxes. Obama said that of course America is a great nation and will remain so, but that it must accept that other great powers are rising in the world; the future is multi-polar. And he insisted that tax rises on the rich must be part of the solution to America’s budget crisis. It was reason against demagoguery. The terrifying thing is that so many Americans swallow the demagoguery.

I do think, having watched a few presidential election campaigns now, that the electoral college system is mad. Because, unless pigs fly, Texas will always have more Republican than Democrat voters and California will be the other way round, and the same clear imbalance of preferences is evident in the great majority of states, the candidates are really only interested in the ‘swing states’. There are only about eight of those, which distorts the whole process. This time most of the attention was focused on Ohio, which Obama eventually won. Florida, the site of the dubious electoral practice 12 years ago which probably robbed Al Gore of the presidency, once again needed several days before it could make up its mind who had won the state (Obama had). I don’t understand why, in order to elect their national president, Americans don’t simply award the presidency to the candidate who gets the most votes. I can’t see a single argument against it, and I can see the overwhelming arguments for it: voters everywhere, whatever their persuasion, would feel that their vote had counted; and the candidates would have to appeal to voters in all the states, not just the swing states.

It was a delight to see the joyful multi-racial crowd at Obama’s victory rally. It gave me equal pleasure to see a doleful room full of rich white people in Boston digesting the bitter news they were watching on Fox News, the most flagrantly partisan of the Republican cheerleaders in the US media. There was a remarkable and hilarious moment when Karl Rove, the devil incarnate in terms of hatred of Obama, who has spent the last four years doing everything he can to destroy him, and who has solicited millions of dollars in contributions to the Romney campaign from rich people and organisations on the promise that Fox could deliver a Romney win, disagreed live on air with the exit-poll prediction on Ohio which the channel’s own researchers had announced. There was Rove saying, ‘This can’t be true,’ as a graphic on Fox’s screen said ‘Obama Re-elected’ (because Ohio, apart from being a crucial swing state, happened to be the result that tipped Obama over the 270 electoral college votes he needed to win). There was then the excruciating sight (lovingly replayed on YouTube many thousands of times) of Fox’s anchor woman walking carefully off the studio set in her high-heeled shoes, worried about falling over in front of millions, and making her way down the corridor to the back office where the statisticians were housed, to ask the chief statisticians if they were sure they had got their sums right. They were.

Obama had a huge majority amongst Hispanic voters. One of the commentators on the BBC’s coverage I was watching remarked that 50,000 young Hispanic Americans turn 18 every month. That’s 600,000 new potential Hispanic voters a year. Sensible Republicans (I try to imagine such a species) will attempt now to make their party more appealing to a wider cross-section of the population. Naturally, I hope that they fail, that their extremist colleagues prevail, and that Hillary Clinton runs in 2016 and is elected.

The Republicans retained control of the House of Representatives. The Democrat majority in the Senate increased slightly, but not up to the 60 out of 100 they would have needed to make their majority there filibuster-proof. So Obama now has to return to the weary battle with the Republicans over the budget. There are still plenty of Tea-Party extremists who won’t countenance any form of tax rise as part of a balanced programme whose eventual purpose must be to reduce America’s grotesque national debt while not choking off economic recovery.

My website of educational writings finally went live last week, and on Sunday I wrote to all the people who I thought might be interested, telling them of its existence. I’m pleased with it. It looks good; it’s easy to navigate; and there is sensible matter in it. Mark and Nicola Leicester have done a wonderful job in building the site. Whether it will make any difference in the bleak educational world out there I don’t know. I decided to do it, as I’ve said before, partly because I didn’t like the feeling that all that writing I had done all those years ago was simply lost, partly out of pure rage at what education ministers in the present government have been saying and doing, and partly in the hope that some readers may take encouragement from it.

The efforts on the King Roger libretto which I described last month as ‘bits of rough scaffolding’ did finally combine into a first full draft. I sent that to Paul just before we left France. Once he’d read it, we discussed it on the phone. As a result of that conversation I’ve done a second full draft, which I sent to him yesterday. I expect there’s still a lot to do on it, but we’re getting closer to something he can begin to set to music.

It’s been a mixed experience. There have been times when I’ve really despaired, accusing myself of wasting my own and Paul’s time as a result of an impulsive, vain offer to attempt something beyond my abilities. Then, as the individual scenes have accumulated and an overall shape has emerged, I’ve had the contrary feeling: maybe I’m not so bad after all. There are some pretty terrible libretti around, some of them accompanied by sublime music; perhaps mine might hold up OK in that company. I can write reasonable prose dialogue, and verse in a variety of forms. The structure is sound: I’ve made al-Idrisi the narrator of the piece, which holds it together. It’s in two acts, of about equal length. The first act goes from Roger’s beginnings to his coronation on Christmas Day 1130. The second goes from there until his death, the penultimate scene being the completion of The Book of Roger. I hope, whatever Paul thinks of this draft, that we are beyond the risk of abandonment. Something will emerge in finished form.

No prizes for poetry this year, neither for translations nor for originals.

One could be forgiven for despairing of the wider world. The number of deaths in Syria is now reckoned to be around 40,000. The Assad regime continues to use its full military might to kill its own people. The act which shocked me most last week was the bombing of a hospital. 40 were killed, including surgeons and other specialists who had, heroically, been working there during these dreadful months. There is now, at least, some kind of unity in the opposition. Earlier this month, the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces was brought into being, led by a moderate imam called Moaz al-Khatib. France, courageously, has recognised the coalition as the legitimate government-in-waiting for Syria. I think the UK would like to do the same thing, but is being more cautious. Reports seem to suggest that opposition forces are gaining more and more ground in Syria; but Assad still holds Damascus and Aleppo, and wields weapons which the opposition can’t match. Russia and China are guilty of criminal stupidity in continuing to suggest that this is somehow a conflict in which the two sides share equal blame. Russia in particular still lives in the Cold-War past. Syria was its proxy then; it sold Syria arms, and continues to do so. Russia and China block any effective action from the UN. Iran actively supports the Assad regime for its own benighted reasons: through Syria flow arms to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which keeps up pressure on Israel.

Then, Israel/Palestine. The latest outbreak of violence between Israel and Gaza has seen 158 Palestinians and six Israelis dead. There is now a fragile ceasefire. The familiar, hopeless arguments are trotted out. Israel has a right to defend itself when rockets are fired into its territory. Israel’s responses to these attacks are grossly disproportionate. The tunnels linking Gaza to Israel are used to smuggle arms. The Israelis treat Gaza as an open-air prison containing 1.7 million people. There will be no settlement until the Palestinian government on the West Bank and that in Gaza can settle their differences. Israel continues relentlessly and illegally to extend its territory on the West Bank.

I think the UN will this week, against the wishes of the US, the UK and Israel, agree to recognise Palestine as a ‘non-member observer’ state, however unimpressive that status may sound. Quite right, but I remain unconvinced of the long-term validity of a state consisting of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem, even if the Palestinian Authority and Hamas could come to an accord. Realists will say that it’s the only way forward. For me, the only long-term solution is one secular state, with guarantees of religious freedom for Jews, Muslims and Christians, encompassing all the territories currently occupied by the Israelis and Palestinians. (The Golan Heights, with Syria in such a mess, would be a particular problem.) This is dreaming, I know; although, as John Lennon said, ‘I’m not the only one.’

Then, Egypt. Earlier this year, it was the army which looked likely to threaten the gains of last year’s revolution by taking to itself extraordinary powers. Last week, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, the narrow victor in June’s presidential election, also took such powers to himself. He was feeling confident, having received much praise for his role in bringing about the Israel/Palestine ceasefire. He issued a decree saying that no authority could revoke his decisions. He is now trying to temper the force of that decree, but it has already provoked widespread protest. Morsi pleads that he is only taking these powers for a short time, until democracy is fully established. One has heard that kind of pleading before. On the other hand, it is true that many of the judges, whose powers Morsi would like to reduce, are Mubarak-era stooges who have no great commitment to democracy either. Secularists fear that the commission appointed to draw up a new constitution for Egypt — a body which Morsi wants to protect — will propose an Islamist constitution for the country, based on Sharia law.

The only voice in Egypt which I unreservedly respect, even revere, is that of Mohamed ElBaradei. He has said that he will not engage in dialogue until the president rescinds the measure.

Then, the Congo. The sufferings of the people of that huge country in the last 15 years dwarf those of any other country in the world, but they don’t get written about much. Five million were killed in warfare between 1997 and 2003. How we mourn, and rightly, the thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands killed in the Middle East, in Iraq, in Afghanistan; but five million… Last week, a rebel army walked into the large city of Goma, near the Rwandan border, and took it over. The UN force there did nothing. The official Congolese army disappeared. I think I just about have a grip, in the most general way, on the tragic complexities which have brutalised the country since the Belgians, the worst brutes of all, left: grotesque corruption within the government in Kinshasa; intense greed over the exploitation of the country’s mineral wealth; Rwanda’s determination not to let the butchers of 1994 regroup in the east of the Congo, causing it to support Tutsis who have in their turn committed atrocities in the region — an action which it continues fervently to deny.

The rebel army says it may advance westward, to challenge Joseph Kabila’s government. Another possibility is the de facto division of the country into east and west, allowing the rebels to establish a new ‘state’ in the east, to exploit the mineral wealth, leaving the west to its own devices. Whatever happens, innocent people in their millions will suffer. The outside world seems powerless to help.

From vast tragedy to minute comedy: the exterior woodwork of this block of flats is being painted, which it badly needs. Because much of the painting was done when we were still in France, none of our windows would open, the new paint having dried over the cracks between the windows and the frames. A lovely man called Carl, from Wrexham, climbed up a ladder last week and ‘eased’ the windows, as the saying is. He had to move the ladder five times to do it. I invited him in for a cup of tea afterwards. There then followed a paradigm case of class-denominated manners. I foolishly served him a cup of lapsang souchong. Carl was direct: ‘What is this? It tastes of burnt wood.’ Apologising, I returned to the kitchen and found a different jar of tea bags. The resulting brew turned out to be Earl Grey. ‘No better,’ said Carl. ‘This tastes of washing-up liquid.’ Desperately, I searched the cupboard. Thank God; there was an unopened box of Sainsbury’s tea bags. Unfortunately they were both free trade and organic, but they were at least, and very clearly, ‘Indian’. Carl said, on first sip, that this was ‘proper tea’, and showed a more than passing interest in its other virtues as described on the box. When I told this story to Helen that evening, she said, ‘At least you didn’t give him goat’s milk. That would have put the tin lid on it.’ (We’ve recently taken to buying goat’s milk as well as cow’s milk, because she finds the former easier to digest.)

There hasn’t been a single ray of sunshine today. Solid cloud, and damp. It’s the sort of day when you’re glad when it gets dark. Wallace Stevens: ‘It was evening all the afternoon.’

Yesterday I went down to Brighton (Hove, to be precise) to see my friend Mick Robertson. One day in the summer, he collapsed when he was at the gym, and was taken to hospital. He was suffering from tachycardia, a sudden extreme speeding up of the heart rate. He could easily have died, but was saved by the wonderful actions of the National Health Service. He looks fine now, but he has a little electronic machine under his skin, near the top of his rib-cage on the left-hand side, which monitors his heart rate and which, amazingly, will tell the local hospital if something is going wrong, even before he knows it himself.

He and his wife Emma have parted, amicably. They sold their large house and have bought two flats in the town. Mick’s is at the top of an elegant old house overlooking Sussex County Cricket Ground, which suits him perfectly. He can’t actually see most of the play, but he can see part of the grass and has a clear view of the scoreboard. He’s a member at Sussex, so he can pop in whenever he likes. We walked round and went into the pavilion, where there was a sale of books about cricket. One of the stalls had a good collection of Wisdens, including a 1927 edition. I knew that Beckett had played first-class cricket for Dublin University at about that time, against Northamptonshire. Sure enough, there was a report of the match, played on 7 and 8 July, won easily by Northants by an innings and quite a lot of runs. ‘S.V. Beckett’ (which must be a mistake; he was Samuel Barclay Beckett) opened the batting, but only scored 4 and 1. He also seems to have opened the bowling, since his name comes second in the list of bowlers. He took no wickets, and conceded 47 runs. But he did take two catches. This Wisden, hardback and in pretty good condition, would have cost £130; I put it back. Wikipedia tells me that Beckett played twice for Dublin University against Northants. A few words tapped into Google, and I have the report of the 1925 game between the two sides. Beckett did better on this earlier occasion: batting at number 8, he scored 18 in the first innings and 12 in the second. He took no wickets, but his bowling was economical: eight overs for 17 runs. Once again, Northants won easily, this time by an innings and 56 runs. A few more Google taps, and here is Wisden’s obituary of Beckett:

‘Samuel Barclay Beckett, who died in Paris on December 22, 1989, aged 83, had two first-class games for Dublin University against Northamptonshire in 1925 and 1926, scoring 35 runs in his four innings and conceding 64 runs without taking a wicket. A left-hand opening batsman, possessing what he himself called a gritty defense [interesting spelling of that word], and a useful left-arm medium-pace bowler, he had enjoyed a distinguished all-round sporting as well as academic record at Portora Royal School, near Enniskillen, and maintained his interest in games while at Trinity College, Dublin. Indeed, Beckett, whose novels and plays established him as one of the important literary figures of the twentieth century, bringing him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, never lost his affection for and interest in cricket.’

Only one factual inconsistency remains: the obituary says clearly that Beckett’s two first-class games were played in 1925 and 1926, but when some more Google tapping brings up the Dublin University versus Northamptonshire game for 1926, Beckett isn’t in the side. When I add together his 1925 figures and my memory of his figures for the 1927 game (which I can’t find on the internet), they come to the right totals.

Thus can one idle away an hour of one’s life on the internet.

We went to Emma’s flat to collect their daughter Dillon, who’s nearly nine and unofficially one of my godchildren, and drove up to Devil’s Dyke on the top of the downs. It was a beautiful, very cold day, with perfect views across the Sussex Weald to the North Downs, to Butser Hill near Portsmouth, and even to the Isle of Wight. Kiteboarders took off from the slope which falls steeply away to the north, and sailed back and forth in the great space of air. We played ball (Dillon catches very well, much to her father’s approval) and went to eat in the pub. Then back to Mick’s flat for tea; he drove me to the station; I was home about eight.

Last Thursday Lord Justice Leveson issued his report on the press, which the government commissioned last year in the light of the scandals about the hacking of telephones and other abusive invasions of privacy by journalists on the News of the World and other newspapers. In the run-up to publication of the report, the usual suspects (the Murdoch press, the Mail, Telegraph and Express groups) had been screaming about the importance of press freedom, by which they really meant the freedom to carry on behaving exactly as they chose. Leveson made a subtle proposal: tougher, independent (not state-controlled) self-regulation of the press. Paragraph 5 of the Executive Summary: ‘I should make it clear at the outset that I consider that what is needed is a genuinely independent and effective system of self-regulation.’ But he added to this proposal a further one which, as he says in paragraph 70 of the Executive Summary, ‘leads to what some will see as the most controversial part of my recommendations…. there should be legislation to underpin the independent self-regulatory system and facilitate its recognition in legal processes.’ Paragraph 72: ‘What would the legislation achieve? Three things. First, it would enshrine, for the first time, a legal duty of the government to protect the freedom of the press. Second, it would provide an independent process to recognise the new self-regulatory body and reassure the public that the basic requirements of independence were met and continue to be met; in the report, I recommend that this is done by Ofcom. Third, by recognising the new body it would validate its standards code and the arbitral system sufficient to justify the benefits in law that would flow to those who subscribed…’ As Leveson predicted, the proposal for legal underpinning has caused controversy. I don’t know whether he privately expected the controversy to be as passionate as it has been. Probably he did.

I watched the debate on the report in the Commons on Thursday afternoon, which began with a statement by the Prime Minister. Cameron made it clear that he didn’t favour any form of statutory underpinning of the regulation of the press. Ed Miliband took the opposite view: Parliament should implement Leveson’s proposals in full. For the hour or so that I watched, there was a thoughtful exchange of views from both sides of the House. Later, Nick Clegg made a statement disagreeing with Cameron, and effectively allying the Liberals — part of the governing coalition — with the Labour opposition. Since then, there has been anger and a sense of betrayal on the part of those who believe, as I do, that some sections of the press have so flagrantly and so often abused the freedom they enjoy that some kind of legally reinforced mechanism needs to be introduced to challenge and punish the abuses. This is nothing to do with the right to freedom of speech; nor is it anything to do with the political purposes of the owners of our newspapers, grievous as is the imbalance towards right-wing positions in that respect.

Most of our papers will always, so far as I can see, do anything they can to discredit the Labour Party and especially Labour governments, and everything they can to support the Conservative Party and especially Conservative governments. I know The Sun has swung both ways since 1997; even when it was supporting Labour, the overall imbalance was there, with the Mail, the Express, The Times and the Telegraph lined up on the other side; currently, with The Sun back in the Tory camp, the imbalance is extreme. This is the perverted reality with which we live. Leveson had nothing to say on overall political bias specifically, though he did have some proposals about competition law as applied to the press. The hypocrisy of the cries for the maintenance of the ancient right of free speech, of which a free press is supposedly the most potent symbol, from the mouths of those in the press who regularly commit abuses with a sense of impunity: this is the heart of the offence. The abuses represent the evil which Leveson sets out to challenge.

The other absurdity in the argument of the ‘save free speech and a free press’ campaigners is the attempt, in a world of many media, to treat the printed press as a special case. There is no reason why the printing of written text on paper with ink (or, recently, its distribution in facsimile versions to people’s computers) should be treated any differently from other sections of the media. Radio and television are far more stringently regulated than is the press; they have to be impartial in their reporting of political news. Imagine if such a requirement were imposed on the newspapers! Of course, Murdoch would like to bring about the opposite situation, such as prevails in the US, where radio and television can be as partisan as the most partisan newspaper. In the UK, such a disastrous idea isn’t currently being suggested by any legislator (though I’m sure it’s in the minds of some on the right of the Tory party).

Anyhow, we shall see. I’ve signed an on-line petition, organised by the ‘Hacked Off’ campaign, calling for Leveson’s report to be implemented in full. It has more than 100,000 signatures, and it has only been going since Friday. If Cameron doesn’t change his mind, I think Labour will bring forward a motion calling for full implementation, which almost all his side will support, which all the Liberals are likely to support, although they’re in the government, and which quite a few Tories may also support, since 42 of them signed a letter arguing for a model of regulation very close to that which Leveson proposed. If the votes are whipped, which I imagine they would be, I don’t expect that all of the sympathetic Tories would have the courage of their convictions. Still, there could be a defeat for the government, although the motion would only be advisory, since it would have come from the opposition. It would put Miliband in a strong position to say if he wished to that he would push the Leveson proposals through if Labour were to win in 2015, though of course the price he would pay for that would be even greater vilification in the right-wing newspapers than he will get in any case. On his side is the fact that most of the public agree with him and with Leveson that parts of the press have put themselves outside the law by their behaviour, and that only some kind of legally supported new system will frighten them enough to change their ways.

Last week the Chancellor delivered his Autumn Statement. There were one or two good things in it, such as the continued rise in the level at which people begin to pay income tax, and more tax relief on investment by small businesses. Corporation tax will be reduced to 21% of profits from April 2014; I guess that’s good, if we can afford it, in that it encourages people to do business here. Rich people will see the amount they can put annually into a pension pot, thus diminishing their tax liability, reduced to £40,000. But at the heart of the proposals was a dreadful measure: people of working age on benefits will in most cases see those benefits increase annually by only 1% for three years, when inflation is likely to be 2% or more. So the link between prices and benefits has been broken. The Chancellor knows that this proposal will play well with large sections of the electorate, who are happy to believe what the right-wing press tells them, that people on benefits are mainly idle scroungers. In fact, 60% of people on benefits work, and do humble jobs without which the country would grind to a halt. Of the remaining 40%, a large number (I don’t know how many) are in genuine need, because they’re physically or mentally ill or disabled — like my brother with his stroke — or they’ve been put out of work through no fault of their own, and are actively trying to find work.

The Chancellor will save about £3.7 billion as a result of these changes. He justifies the measure by saying that working people have seen a real-terms reduction in their wages since the financial crisis began; therefore it’s only fair that benefits claimants should share the pain. There would be some force to his argument if bread or potatoes or housing or electricity were paid in a currency called percentages, rather than in actual money. It isn’t. Those receiving the lowest income are obliged to pay the same amount for many things as those who are comfortably off. In some cases — payment for fuel, for example, where there are cheaper deals for people with bank accounts who can pay by direct debit — the poor actually pay more for the same product or service.

Benefit fraud is a crime whose perpetrators should be pursued and if necessary prosecuted. A household of a given size should not be better off on benefits than it would be if one of its adult members were working full-time on the minimum wage. Agreed, of course. But benefit fraud, though contemptible, is a minor drain on the Treasury’s funds compared with illegal tax evasion and legal but immoral tax avoidance practised by wealthy individuals and international companies. There’s been widespread outrage recently as the tax-avoiding activities of Google, Amazon and Starbucks in particular have been exposed by a House of Commons Select Committee. If that theft could be stopped, the Chancellor wouldn’t need to punish the poorest people in our society as he tries to rectify a dire economic situation brought about by the richest (I’m thinking about the people who used to run the banks, for instance). To stop it will require international as well as national action. I quite accept that Labour did nothing about it when it had the chance to.

‘The Living Wage’ is an idea whose popularity is growing. For London it’s set annually by the Greater London Authority, and for the rest of the UK by the Centre for Research in Social Policy at Loughborough University. It’s a calculation, taking a whole lot of factors into account, of the minimum hourly wage that a household, with one person working full time, needs in order to live decently. It’s currently £8.55p per hour in London, and £7.45p per hour outside. It seems that the Prime Minister and Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, are in favour of it. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, is actively in favour of it. Labour and the Liberals are, of course. If everyone who works received at least the living wage, there would be less to pay out on benefits. It’s one of those simple ideas which seems to please everybody but the most exploitative employers. It would have been good to hear something about it in the Autumn Statement: perhaps the Government using its enormous power as an employer and as a client of contractors to upgrade people currently on the statutory minimum wage to the living wage. Nothing. Meanwhile, come next April, those earning more than £150,000 a year will pay less tax.

I generally only read opinion articles in newspapers written by people who actually know what they’re writing about, rather than by hacks who have to have an opinion about something because it’s time for their weekly column. But I did read Deborah Orr’s piece in Saturday’s Guardian, as I was travelling down to Canterbury to see my brother. She writes: ‘The Conservatives have had awesome success in promulgating the nonsensical idea that the crash was caused by Labour incompetence and overspending, when it was really caused by Labour’s failure to tackle the neo-liberalism introduced by the previous Tory administration. Genius. Not only do the Conservatives fail to take responsibility for the results of the banking deregulation that their party “masterminded”, they also look as though they are the poor sods picking up the pieces after a socialist failure. That’s such good insurance, too. They can carry on saying, for a while yet, that the problem they inherited was huge. And they’re right. It was huge, because it had been stoked up since the Big Bang 26 years ago.’ That is a brilliant analysis of the position, although I’m not sure that Big Bang itself, which I think was an organisational response to new technology, was the problem in itself. Other laws deregulating banking certainly were.

My sister flew over last week to spend some time with Peter, so she was there when I arrived in Canterbury. In the course of a few hours, we found a brand-new flat for him, £30,000 cheaper than the price he is likely to get for the sale of his house, and ideal in other ways: it’s within the walls, it overlooks the River Stour, there’s a little pedestrian bridge which will take him straight into the centre of the town, and — most important — it’s physically convenient for a wheelchair user. Peter put down the reservation fee of £1,000. Mary and I returned to London pleased with our afternoon’s work.

The other day we went to see The Dark Earth and the Light Sky at the Almeida. It’s a play by Nick Dear (who wrote the screenplay of the Cinderella I commissioned at Channel 4, and whose agent gave me and the producers such trouble). It’s about Edward and Helen Thomas, and Edward Thomas’s life-changing friendship with Robert Frost. It goes over the same ground as the Matthew Hollis biography which I read in April, although it also contains scenes set after Edward Thomas’s death. I thought the play was good if not outstanding; for me, it was more a series of scenes than a piece with an overall sweep. But there were some poignant moments: the complete mutual incomprehension between Thomas and his father; the occasion when Thomas and Frost meet an angry gamekeeper with a gun, to whose violent threats Thomas responds in a way which later obsessed him as proving that he was a coward, and Frost responds with manly defiance; and the actor’s recitation of Thomas’s poem ‘I have come to the borders of sleep’ at the end. The thing which moved me most, however, was nothing to do with the play, but to do with a detail of the costume the actor was wearing. He had on a tie exactly like one of my father’s ties: it had a green-brown weave, with — and this was the detail — little reddish fronds of wool attached to and protruding down from the V-cut at the bottom. One of my earliest memories is that bit of decoration on one of my father’s ties (perhaps on more than one; it was probably a fashion). I was briefly overcome by a feeling of regret that, when I had taken all my father’s ties to the Oxfam shop, I hadn’t kept that one, or one like that if there were more than one, to remember him by, and to wear from time to time.

As we left the theatre, I saw that Helen’s response to the play had been altogether more profound than mine. She wept as we walked along Upper Street to the car. As we drove home and talked more over supper, it became clear, absurd as this will sound, that she saw in the relationship between Edward and Helen Thomas an intenser version of our relationship. The difference in intensity would be a hundred-fold, in every respect. Thomas was a full-scale depressive; I am occasionally moody. Thomas frequently said cruel, hurtful things to his wife; I am never intentionally cruel, but sometimes I say angry things in exasperation at some difference between us. Thomas was a great poet; I am an insignificant one. But Helen (my Helen — I don’t know whether the coincidence that she and Edward Thomas’s wife share a first name strengthened her feeling that there was a comparison to be made) said that, like Edward Thomas, I often withdraw from her company, psychologically. I’m still there in the room; I’m still making conversation and being polite, congratulating her, for instance, on having prepared a delicious dinner; but my true thoughts are elsewhere, and she’s left waiting for me to come back, when the mood takes me, into full psychological communion with her. She said that this had been a feature of our relationship from the beginning. I was shocked by the frankness and strength of feeling in her words, but can’t deny that her perception is accurate, although I would want to say that my withdrawals occur more rarely than Helen suggested that evening. Whether there’s anything to be done about it, so late in the day, I don’t know.

We’re just back from our usual pre-Christmas weekend in Shropshire with friends. We stayed with David and Lindsay, as ever, but this year, I’m pleased to say, Lindsay didn’t have to do any cooking for big parties. We went to Glenda and Julian on the Saturday and to Pete and Merle on the Sunday. Lovely food and drink, and much fun.

This morning I was on my way to the solicitor in Shrewsbury who will handle the sale of Peter’s house and the purchase of his flat (the same firm as handled the sale of Margaret’s and our parents’ houses), when his daughter Stephanie rang to say that his previously ‘firm buyers’ had pulled out. This is something of a blow, but we’ve decided to keep going with the potential purchase of the flat, in the hope that a new buyer for the house will appear soon. The worst that could happen, if no buyer appears by the time Peter has to exchange contracts on the flat, is that he would lose most of the reservation fee. If he abandons the flat now, he’ll be no further forward when someone does eventually offer to buy the house, and I think he would lose most of the reservation fee anyway. But the next few weeks will now be more uncertain than I hoped that they would be.

On the way back from Canterbury. Peter has signed various solicitor’s forms which I shall post to Shrewsbury tonight. He also walked the length of the ground floor of his house, with the help of a stick with a kind of claw foot to give stability. This is more progress, but I think he’s right to press ahead with getting into a flat; there’s no certainty, alas, that he will make a complete recovery. After his walk, he was tired and needed the wheelchair.

Tonight we’re eating at Daphne’s with Mark and Nicola Leicester, who are over from New Zealand for a few weeks.

We arrived yesterday. As usual, we drove down over two days, stopping at the Auberge du Terroir at Servon, where Thierry and Annie Lefort, who have now become our good friends, were glad to welcome us. We ate a delicious if not strikingly healthy meal: foie gras, coquilles Saint Jacques with tiny pieces of carrot and celeriac in a butter sauce, cheese and (in my case) crème brûlée. The champagne is so superb there that we start by drinking a glass each and end up keeping the bottle. It didn’t last the whole way through the scallops, so we had a glass of white Bergerac to finish them off, and then one of Lirac with the cheese. I’d never heard of Lirac before; it’s a Rhône wine, not as heavy as, say, Châteauneuf du Pape, but full of flavour. The main grape is grenache noir, blended with lesser amounts of mourvèdre and syrah. I shall get to know Lirac better.

The weather is wet, warm and windy. The stream at the bottom of the wood has massively overflowed its banks. I’ve never seen so much water there. This afternoon I climbed into the fountain and saved five salamanders and three frogs, all trying and failing to climb the vertical walls. Not for the first time, I’ve put branches into the water, their upper ends leaning against the lower wall at the front, in the hope that the animals might have the sense to use them as a means of escape.

I’ve been shopping twice today. Now we have everything we need for Christmas. Stephen and Theresa will come on Christmas Eve, as they did last year, but this time by train.

Last night I joined les amis de Saint Guénaël for the annual pre-Christmas nocturnal walk. About 30 of us gathered at the chapel at 7.30 and set off in the drizzle for a circular perambulation, lit by torches, lasting about an hour. It was straightforward on the country roads, but once we took to tracks and pathways it become trickier, for the land is heaving with water with nowhere to go. At one place in particular, we all linked hands to get down a sleep slope which had become a minor waterfall. But there were no mishaps, and vin chaud was waiting for us in a steaming cauldron when we got back to the chapel.

Christmas has come and gone. Stephen and Theresa arrived as planned, and left this morning. We enjoyed ourselves. Rain continues to tip out of grey skies, with only brief intermissions. The first of these was on the afternoon of Christmas Day, when we walked by the sea at Fort Bloqué, as on previous Christmas Days. The waves were huge, after days of wind, and the sun shone through light rain, producing a brilliant rainbow. I’ve written before about the extraordinary sight, when the wind is from off the sea, of the foam being flicked off the tops of the waves as they crash, landing on the sand beyond the furthest extent of the waves, and forming a kind of ethereal bedroll of airy nothingness which you can walk through and which closes up behind you as you pass. The second period of relief from rain was yesterday afternoon, when Stephen and I went for a long circular walk in the late afternoon, starting and finishing at the house. It was a great relief to feel a drying wind on the face. We returned in the dark, with a beautiful if watery full moon in the sky. Rain resumed today.

We now have a proper wood store, built by Yves Le Vouedec. Albert’s stock of wood lasted us from 2003 until this spring. The slowly diminishing pile was covered by a plastic sheet. When we finally exhausted the stock, I decided we needed a solider shelter. The new construction looks very fine. Our neighbours say there are worse bus shelters. I tried and failed to get Yves to build it before we took a new delivery of wood in October. All the French craftsmen I’ve ever dealt with have been brilliant workers, when they arrive; it’s getting them to arrive which is the difficulty. Because of the delay, the wood when delivered had temporarily to be stored, like Albert’s wood, under plastic sheets. Because this year has broken all records for rain, most of the logs are damp, despite having been covered, so getting the fire to light and then blaze has been trickier than usual. Yesterday morning Stephen and I pulled off the sheets and transferred the wood to the wood store: a satisfying task. I hope, when there is a change in the weather and we get some dry if cold air, that the now properly covered winter fuel, off the ground, on pallets which stand on a concrete base (made before Yves arrived, by Christian and Bernard Grandvalet, who built the extension to this house), should burn more easily.

I had an email from Paul Halley two days ago, in which he promised that he would read the latest draft of my King Roger libretto in the next few days. He’s had it for more than a month now. I know how busy he’s been, conducting concerts and services in the run-up to Christmas, but I’ve found it frustrating waiting for a response from him. I can’t seem to settle to anything else in a creative way until I get this done. I don’t mind how much there is still to do; I just want to get on with it. I wrote back this morning saying that I’d really like to work on the libretto in the quiet of the first week of January, and that I’d value a long conversation before that.

More and more, as I write this diary, I’m aware of the immense gap between the insignificance of my concerns and the hugeness of the events which convulse the world. In Syria, Assad is almost certainly finished, but won’t go. About 44,000 people are dead, countless mutilated, hundred of thousands displaced from their homes. Russia continues, stubbornly and stupidly, to insist that the two sides ‘negotiate’. It won’t accept that responsibility for evil actions lies overwhelmingly with the Assad regime, not with the rebels, although at last it seems to accept that Assad’s days are numbered.

In Egypt, Morsi has got his way: in a referendum held in two stages on 15 and 22 December, a new Islamist constitution was approved by a large majority (63.8%) of the 32.9% of the electorate who voted. The non-Islamist people of Egypt (secularists, liberals, Christians and moderate, non-Islamist Muslims) feel betrayed. Parliamentary elections must be held within two months. It’s hard to predict what will happen now. I guess much will depend on how the new constitution is actually enacted; whether it will realise the worst fears of Morsi’s opponents, ushering in the kind of socially backward authoritarianism, particularly with regard to the rights of women, which prevails in some parts of the Muslim world, or whether something better, more tolerant, plural and pragmatic, will ensue.

‘Socially backward authoritarianism, particularly with regard to the rights of women’, has recently been seen in its most disgusting form in Pakistan, where women who were administering anti-polio vaccinations as part of a UN-funded campaign to rid that country of the disease, where it is still endemic, were murdered by members of the Taliban.

Mario Monti, the wise technocrat who has been Prime Minister of Italy since Berlusconi was evicted last year, resigned on 21 December, having successfully piloted Italy’s 2013 budget through parliament, but having otherwise lost the support of Berlusconi’s so-called People of Freedom party. He will stay on as Prime Minister in a caretaker capacity. There will be elections on 24 February. It looks as if the centre-left Democratic Party will have the largest number of seats in parliament as a result of the elections. Berlusconi, amazingly, will be standing again as leader of his party. Reason would suggest that his presence, after all the scandals which surround him and all the damage he has done, will hurt the People of Freedom; but reason — at least, political reason — doesn’t necessarily prevail in Italy. Monti has made a deliberately vague announcement saying that he would not ally himself to any party, but would be available to any eventual government as its adviser or possibly its leader. If the winners of the election have any sense, they’ll take up his offer in some way.

America is heading towards a ‘fiscal cliff’, a legal and financial sheer drop, brought into being in August of last year, when the political brinksmanship which then brought the country to the precipice of bankruptcy caused a law to be passed which was supposed to bang politicians’ heads together for very fear before midnight on 31 December 2012. It hasn’t worked, because the Republicans are still in thrall to those of their number who won’t contemplate tax rises of any kind, even on the super-rich. So if America goes over the cliff there will be enforced spending cuts and enforced expiry of Bush-era tax cuts, which will hurt the less well-off more than the rich, and which some think will send America back into recession. Obama meets congressional leaders today. Perhaps he can work a last-minute miracle, which would mean finding a way for Republicans to accept economic good sense without losing face. At the moment I doubt it.

The year is ending, familiarly, in rain. It’s extraordinary to think that 10 months ago there was a drought in large parts of England and France, and that there were big publicity campaigns urging people to conserve water. Since the spring, the rain has hardly stopped. A caprice of nature, or an effect of global warming? Amazingly, primrose leaves are already poking through the grass.

This morning I emptied the gutters of fallen leaves: a surprisingly pleasant annual task as long as it’s not too cold, which it isn’t with this constant cloud cover. The only tricky part is the gutter at the side of the house by the lane. Because the land descends there, I have to jam a large stone under the lower foot of the ladder to make it level. Climbing the ladder is then precarious, but in the last 22 years the stone has never slipped and I’ve never fallen off.

Yesterday and on Saturday I wrote a comic poem called ‘Chorus of the Guardian Cats of Montmartre Cemetery’. Keith Fulton gave me the idea. He and Lou Pepe had visited the cemetery. They’d taken photographs of the graves of some of the famous people interred there and of the many cats which inhabit the place. Keith sent me the photographs, and suggested that particular cats were the guardians of the spirits of particular people. Could I write something along those lines? What I’ve done isn’t exactly what he asked for: instead of speeches by individual cats, it’s a chorus by all the cats together, addressed to visitors, claiming that the cats can see the spirits of the dead when they emerge at night to practise the activity for which they were celebrated in life. It’s a light thing, but quite skilful, and I’ll put it on the poetry website.

America is still teetering on the edge of its fiscal cliff. There is more slaughter in Syria and in Iraq. Mario Monti has said that he will lead a grouping of centrist parties into the February elections in Italy. Good. If the Democratic Party wins the most seats, and goes into coalition with Monti’s centrists, Italy will have the chance of a decent elected government for a change.

I think that the emergency actions which Europe’s leaders have taken during this year will slowly solve the eurozone and sovereign debt crises, at the expense of a much more stringent set of arrangements which fiscally bind together the countries of the eurozone. Those countries are becoming more and more one country, effectively, at least in economic and financial terms. The UK continues to play the would-be outsider in Europe, while remaining inside. I’m not sure how long we can go on having our cake and eating it in this way. There are increasingly strident voices at home calling for a referendum on our continued membership of the EU. If one were held now, my guess is that there would be a small majority in favour of leaving.

I’ve expressed my own eurosceptic thoughts here before. The EU doesn’t help itself in PR terms with a parliament which shuttles between two cities, with top leaders with virtually identical titles, with 200 people at the headquarters in Brussels who (according to David Cameron) earn more than he does, with the grotesquery of the common agricultural policy (admittedly due to descend to about 32% of the EU’s expenditure in 2013, but still overwhelmingly benefitting the richest landowners, and still hurting farmers in poor countries through the EU’s export subsidies). I would only subsidise farmers for the environmentally friendly stewardship of their land, and let the market do the rest, although all governments should hold stocks of food against emergency shortages. If the removal of production subsidies meant that more land became wild, so be it. We could do with more wilderness.

I know that the UK’s contribution to the EU budget is trivial in terms of our annual government expenditure. Different sources on the internet variously tell me that, with our rebate, we make a net contribution of a little under four billion or a little under five billion euros to the budget: nothing by comparison with the money we spent to bail out our own banks. But even sums as small as that, in national terms, sound like a lot of money to most people, especially when the information they receive on the topic is distorted by the messengers in the eurosceptic press. The overriding question is: if we left the EU, would we still have access to the single market, as Norway and Switzerland do in their different ways? A large proportion of our prosperity depends on that access. If the answer is no, we should definitely stay in, whatever the irritations. If the answer is yes, there’s a good argument for leaving. If we want to give money to poorer countries in the EU, as we do collectively at the moment through its regional support programme, we can do so independently. If we want to conclude agreements on, for example, international criminality or the transnational care of the planet — two areas in which of course we must act collectively with other nations or groups of nations — we can do so.

It’s becoming clear that several of our Europe ‘partners’, to use the familiar, optimistic term, including the most powerful ones, are getting tired of us. They want more integration, more co-ordinated action. They’re quite happy for Europe to move in the direction of becoming one country, while of course insisting on the cultural individuality of its nations and regions. They don’t see why the UK should constantly be asking for special treatment. They think we’re acting like a spoilt child. Perhaps, to use an adult metaphor, the UK and the rest of the EU are heading for an amicable divorce (apart, that is, from Scotland, should it vote for independence in 2014, which will want to join the EU as an independent country as soon as possible).

Tonight, as for the last two years, we will eat the Saint Sylvestre meal at L’Art Gourmand in Pont-Scorff. As I’ve written before, apart from the enjoyment of the meal, I like the lack of fuss there: just simple good wishes at midnight, with a glass of champagne.

The New Year’s meal at L’Art Gourmand was just as last year and the year before, gastronomically. More kissing and ‘Meilleurs voeux, bonne année, bonne santé surtout’ at midnight. This year, in addition, there were singers at each of the other tables, who spiritedly gave us a mixture of folk songs, French and Breton, and Edith Piaf numbers. One old lady in particular had a beautiful voice and, very touchingly, concluded her second offering, a love song whose last line is a direct statement of passion by a young woman to her young man, by turning away from the room which until then she had been addressing, and looking straight into the eyes of her old husband across the table. Tears were shed. Then everyone glanced meaningfully at the only table which had not yet made a contribution, so I got up and did my ‘Scarborough Fair’ party piece, beginning as usual with a prose translation into French. It went down very well; it always does. I made a vow to Helen immediately afterwards that I will learn three or four French songs for occasions like this. Otherwise word will get around that I’m that Englishman who always sings the same song.

With its now customary 11th-hour, 59th-minute timing, the US congress avoided America’s fiscal cliff by passing a law which went through the House of Representatives at 11pm on 1 January, and was signed by the President the next day. The Republicans finally blinked, and agreed some tax increases, notably for individuals earning over $400,000 a year ($450,000 for couples), together with increases in capital gains tax and estate tax, and the phasing-out of certain tax deductions and credits. Good; Obama is strengthened by that development, although the Washington decision-making machine must look completely absurd to most American citizens, as it does to me. The reverse side of what was supposed to have been a ‘grand bargain’ was further delayed, however; no decisions were taken about spending cuts, and there will be more horse-trading over those during the next two months. Meanwhile, America continues to owe more than $16 trillion to its creditors: about 105% of its annual GDP. 40% of US government spending is on borrowed money. Unsustainable.

The lives of Edward and Helen Thomas continue to touch me. I’ve just finished reading Helen Thomas’s pair of books, As it Was and World without End. They’re beautifully written, by someone who wasn’t a natural writer. There is intense sincerity in them, and through them we understand Edward Thomas as a man more acutely than through anything else I’ve read about him. Helen Thomas emerges as a rather extraordinary person: in one sense a proto-feminist, and very advanced, particularly in sexual manners, for her day; in other respects a typical adoring wife, always ready to defer to and forgive her difficult and sometimes psychologically cruel husband because she believed in his gift, and to do all the housework (though he was a good gardener). The last chapter of the second book, which describes their final parting, just after Christmas 1916, both of them knowing that there was a strong likelihood that he would never come back, is deeply moving.

Last June, I asked Helen to give me some Dostoevsky novels for my birthday. I had never read any of his work; I’m getting to an age when I feel I must read the greatest novels before I die, and since reading novels takes up so much time (which is the reason why I prefer poems) I will only bother with the greatest. Helen gave me Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov. I read Crime and Punishment straight away. (I’m not sure why I didn’t write about it at the time.) There’s no point in saying that it’s a magnificent masterpiece; people have been saying that since it was written. The thing which struck me most forcibly (again, I’m sure that thousands of critics have remarked on it) is how modern a sensibility it demonstrates. Dickens was a great novelist, of course; but no one could say that Dickens was especially penetrating or complex psychologically. You always know whether Dickens’ characters are good or bad, to be admired or despised, to be pitied, laughed at or laughed with. This is certainly true of Dombey and Son, the most recent Dickens novel I’ve read: massive, massively enjoyable, and at its heart deeply sentimental. (Of course I should meanwhile acknowledge the importance of much of Dickens’ writing as eloquent protest against social evils.) But in Crime and Punishment there is an analysis of hidden motivations, an understanding of the destructive and erratic workings of guilt, as evidenced in Raskolnikov’s mind, which is far ahead of its time. You feel you’re reading the work of a writer of the mid-20th century, not of 1866. At the same time, there is the easier pleasure (which there is in Dickens too) of following the twists and turns of a good story. I wasn’t completely convinced by the epilogue, in which Raskolnikov, having confessed his crime and been sent to Siberia, begins to be morally redeemed under the loving influence of Sonya, the former prostitute (although it must have taken courage for Dostoevsky to present a prostitute — admittedly a previously innocent girl forced into that trade in order to support her family — as an unreservedly virtuous character). (The courage reminds me of the full title of Hardy’s great novel: Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented.) Overall, I was utterly absorbed by and silent in admiration of Dostoevsky’s genius.

During the autumn, full of expectation, I tried to read The Idiot. I gave up after about 250 pages. I can’t believe that such a famous book is not very good. Perhaps I’m missing something. Perhaps the translation isn’t the best. Whatever the case, once I’d grasped the idea that Myshkin is a naïf wandering through the duplicities and insincerities of St Petersburg society, I couldn’t get more deeply involved. These people and their stupid lives bored me. At some point, I shall have to force myself further on, perhaps with another translation.

After that disappointment, and the resentment I felt at having given several evenings of my life to a task which I had then abandoned, I turned last week to The Brothers Karamazov. I am utterly entranced. The book has all the narrative excitement of Crime and Punishment, but is more complex because there are three main characters, not one. It’s extraordinarily daring, with its formidable long passages of theological argument for and against the existence of God rubbing shoulders with brilliant social comedy and thrilling crime fiction. I’ve got to the point where Dmitri Karamazov is being interrogated after his presumed murder of his father. The foolish, cheerful, suicidal confidence with which, chapter after chapter, he condemns himself out of his own mouth is quite wonderfully presented. I’m gobbling the pages, while telling myself to eat more slowly.

We’re back in London and I’ve finished The Brothers Karamazov. Extraordinary, and wonderful. That Smerdyakov is the murderer, not Dmitri Karamazov, came as a complete surprise to me; but I’ve never been able to identify the villain, even in elementary whodunnits. Thereafter, we view the other characters’ actions and (in the case of the prosecuting and defence lawyers at the trial) their speeches through the perspective of our superior knowledge. So we wait to see whether Ivan Karamazov, the only character who knows the truth, will tell all. He does, but in such a crazed way that no one believes him: having said that Smerdyakov killed Karamazov senior, he adds that he, Ivan, gave instructions for the murder, and a few lines later describes himself as ‘simply a murderer’. This is dismissed as raving. Then Dmitri is destroyed by Katerina Ivanovna’s revelation of his apparently self-incriminating letter. After that, nothing that the eminent defence lawyer from Petersburg can say is likely to shift the jury’s mind.

Passionate intensity rages throughout the book: in Dmitri’s and his father’s destructive rivalry in courting Grushenka; in the turbulence of Dmitri’s and Ivan’s feelings towards Katerina, and in the two men’s awareness of each other’s ardour; in the violent lurches in Katerina’s attitude to both brothers; in the complicated hatred between Katerina and Grushenka, culminating in their unintended meeting in the hospital in the penultimate chapter, which Katerina assumes, wrongly, has been stage-managed by Dmitri or Alexei. I found myself a puzzled spectator of these emotional charges, rather than someone who could imagine having felt anything similar myself.

Dostoevsky seems to want to take leave of his reader on a downbeat. He leaves things hanging. Will Dmitri really be able to escape on the way to Siberia? And why make the very last chapter an account of the funeral of the little boy Ilyushechka, which though touching seems beside the main point? Just as I was less than convinced by Raskolnikov’s potential for moral and spiritual salvation in Siberia, so I found the preachy tone of Alexei’s homilies to the group of boys grieving for Ilyushechka somehow too pat after the complexities and ironies which had held me for 760 pages. But overall, the book is a masterly commentary on human nature, panoramic but also precise; mainly concerned with human failings, though sometimes aware of human virtues too.

It’s snowing. The flakes are small and fall quite fast, so the sight isn’t as lovely as when big, fluffy flakes drift in the air before reaching the ground, but the effect on the ground is equally impressive. It’s now two o’clock in the afternoon, and if it carries on all day like this, we shall have a thick carpet, by London standards. I can hear children outside shouting with pleasure as they play.

We went over to Stephen and Theresa last night, and ate a delicious curried goat which Theresa had prepared. I had one difficult moment, when I unwittingly ate a Scotch-bonnet pepper whole. I think it should have been removed from the sauce before the dish was served. I’d never heard of this charmingly named but ferociously hot vegetable before. (I’ve since discovered that ‘Scotch bonnet’ is a name for a wasps’ nest.) I was obliged to leave the table and walk around the room for a few minutes, such was the fire in my mouth; somehow, movement distracted my attention from the pain. At last I doused the flames with glass after glass of tap water. This morning, sitting on the toilet, the following couplet occurred to me:

‘Of last night’s gastronomic joys no memory’s distincter
Than traces of Scotch-bonnet pepper passing by the sphincter.’

We’ve had my niece Tess here for ten days. She departed on Tuesday. She is the most delightful companion. We took her to Kew Gardens, where the crocuses were spectacular; to the Victoria and Albert; to see Mamma Mia (this an experience I willingly missed, being happy to meet Helen and Tess afterwards and go for a pizza); to Charles Darwin’s house at Downe, which was a wonderful experience — it was our first time and we shall go again; to the Manet exhibition at the Royal Academy. This last trip was just Tess and I. Afterwards we crossed the road to Fortnum and Mason and lunched there before buying some absurd follies in the cosmetics department.

The visit to Down House reminded me of the bicycle rides I took around south-east London and its environs when I was a boy. On one occasion, I got out as far as Downe and passed the house, then I think a private residence, and saw the plaque on the garden wall saying that Darwin had lived there. It must have been a very cold day and I wasn’t wearing gloves. When I got back to Farnaby Road, Shortlands, I put my hands straight into a bowl of hot water. The change of temperature was too rapid, and my father to the end of his life remembered running into the kitchen on hearing my profuse weeping. He said that I said, through my tears, that there was nothing wrong; I was just warming up my hands. The poem I wrote when my father was 80, called ‘Bicycles’, is about my protectiveness towards him wobbling along the Bedfordshire lanes as BMWs and Range Rovers screeched past him. How trusting my parents were in 1962 to let me cycle anywhere I liked in the vicinity of Bromley, as long as I didn’t go on main roads, by which they meant A roads. How I got out to Downe without going on an A road I can’t remember.

One of the things I love about Kew Gardens is that every plant is labelled. There’s never that unsatisfactory half-intention to look something up in a book later, which of course you don’t get round to. I was particularly pleased to know the name of a tree three of which I see every year at this season in Regents Park. They have small yellow flowers emerging straight from the wood. No leaves yet. The specimen at Kew told me that it’s a Cornelian cherry.

A week ago we went to Shropshire to stay the weekend with David, Lindsay and Tom. Lindsay is very sick now. She starts more radiotherapy on Monday, which is intended to help her breathing; then more chemotherapy. She is immensely courageous and at the same time very sad. There is nothing more to be said other than that life can be brutal and unfair. She is in her late 50s, with a child of 14 and a husband who love her. I took Tom to school on the Saturday and Monday mornings. He’s at Shrewsbury School. On the Saturday afternoon I went with Tess to pick him up after his game of fives. Darwin of course was born in Shrewsbury and went to the school, where he said they didn’t teach him anything of any value. I showed Tess the beautiful newish statue of the young genius. Then I explained that, although Tom was a day boy, most of the pupils at the school were boarders. Tess, as a rational French citizen (aged 13) was shocked that the English moneyed classes should so neglect their offspring. ‘Doesn’t it cause psychological problems for them later?’ she asked. I said that in all likelihood it did. Nonetheless, she was impressed by the luxurious facilities.

Helen gave me Building Jerusalem by Tristram Hunt as one of my Christmas presents. It’s an excellent account of the growth of the Victorian city in Britain, and of the efforts of civic leaders to impose some kind of order, dignity and even beauty on their chaos and squalor. There is a long chapter about Joseph Chamberlain and Birmingham. One thing struck me forcibly. When Chamberlain began to run Birmingham, there were two private companies supplying gas to the city. He municipalised them. Henceforth the profits made from the supply and sale of gas to the citizens of Birmingham would be spent on improvements to the city, and would allow for a reduction in the rates. He then did the same thing with the previously private water company. It’s a terribly simple idea: let the supply of life’s absolute essentials (to which today we would add electricity) promote the common good and militate against common evils. 140 years later, we’ve arrived at a point where life’s absolute essentials are once again provided for the profit of private companies (now global giants invested in by individuals and organisations all over the world who want a little steadiness in their share portfolios). British Gas is happy this week; profits are up because it’s been a cold winter. Centrica, the company which owns British Gas (which also supplies electricity — a state of affairs that my grandmother found incomprehensible when she heard about it just before she died), has recently said that it will not invest in the building and running of new nuclear power stations; the commitment would be too risky without firmer guarantees from the government. So the government is considering guaranteeing prices for the supply of electricity for up to 40 years to any energy company willing to build and run a nuclear power station or two. This is madness. As so often with madness, you forget that it’s mad when it’s all around you. The present rant is not principally against greedy capitalists running the energy companies to please their shareholders and meanwhile paying themselves huge sums of money; though it is that too. It’s principally a cry of despair that the political class, starting of course with Thatcher, have dug us into this hole. The supply of gas, electricity and water are services which could and should be run by representatives of the public, for the public good. And they were, at least from the Attlee government on, until Thatcher got hold of them. If we went back to Chamberlain’s simple idea, but at the national rather than the municipal level, the huge decisions about and huge investments in our need for energy and water could be made rationally, by competent people in charge of the situation, rather than helplessly by public servants, many of them no doubt able and well-meaning, but who are merely hostages to private powers.

I’ve also recently read a new biography of Joyce, by Gordon Bowker, confirming my previous opinion that Joyce was an impossible, egocentric, unpleasant genius, living out his life at the expense — in every sense, notably financial — of those who loved, admired and believed in him; this despite the compassion one feels for the man’s blindness, his frequent illness and the suffering he experienced at his daughter’s madness. It’s often said that you have to be a monster to be a great writer; he certainly was both. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners and Ulysses are great books which also utterly changed readers’ and writers’ ideas about how writing could be done. Finnegan’s Wake disappears entirely up its own backside, and insults the ordinary intelligent reader.

I’ve just finished the English translation of a beautiful short novel by Leonardo Sciascia called The Council of Egypt. Peter and Merle Traves gave it me for Christmas. It’s set in Sicily, and concerns a priest in the late 18th century in Palermo who, using his small knowledge of Arabic, deceives the city’s high society and the church and even the court of the King of Naples into believing that he has found and translated into the vernacular two priceless Arabic codices which throw light on Sicily’s Islamic and Norman past. He’s a complete conman. Meanwhile, a young radical lawyer, inspired by the French revolution, plans a similar uprising in Palermo. The plot is discovered and the lawyer is tortured and executed. The priest and the lawyer are presented as opposite types: a doomed commitment to principle versus conscienceless venality. One can see through the excellent translation what a master stylist Sciascia is. I’d never heard of him before. I’m going to get some more of his books.

Talking of Italy, the country finds itself this week in deep difficulties politically. The elections last Sunday and Monday produced, as expected, a working majority for Bersani’s Democratic Party in the Chamber of Deputies, but no working majority for anyone in the Senate. An Italian government needs working majorities in both places in order to operate. Berlusconi’s party, to my despair and incomprehension, did much better than it seemed a few weeks ago that it would. Mario Monti’s centrists were punished for the painful efforts Monti has made to reform the state, challenge corruption and force more Italians pay their taxes. His paltry 18 Senate seats together with Bersani’s 117 (Berlusconi got the same number) still leave the left and the centre 23 seats short of a working majority in the Senate. Meanwhile, the comedian Beppe Grillo’s Five-Star Movement, not so much a party as an organised howl of protest, astonished everyone by winning a quarter of the votes. The Movement now has 109 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 54 in the Senate. The trouble is that although Grillo has correctly castigated the incompetence and corruption of the political class, he doesn’t seem to want to dirty his hands by joining in the cleaning-up job. So, stalemate at the moment. Italy has been in political deadlock so many times since the war that one is tempted to believe that they’ll muddle through somehow. The difference now is the euro. If the third-largest economy in the euro returns to anything like the regime of mismanagement which prevailed before Monti took over, with its debts rising again towards unsustainable levels, banks in other countries, which have foolishly lent vast sums to Italy, will again be in difficulties just as the euro crisis seemed past the worst. Meanwhile, now the election is over Berlusconi himself is back in court, facing charges of tax fraud, bribery and sexual misconduct. It just astonishes me that the Italians have given him a political lifeline rather than, at least metaphorically, hanging him from a lamp-post. What is it in the soul of that country, whose people I love so much and who have enriched the world with their genius in so many ways over so many centuries, which makes them liable so often to make truly catastrophic judgments about their leaders?

It’s a beautiful morning. I’ve just been across the car park to dump the rubbish, and it seemed to me that:

‘It is the first mild day of March:
Each minute sweeter than before…’

Andrew Bannerman and I used to perform that poem of Wordsworth’s in our Lyrical Ballads show. Despite its charm, one can’t help inwardly snorting at:

‘My sister! ('tis a wish of mine)
Now that our morning meal is done,
Make haste, your morning task resign;
Come forth and feel the sun.’

If he’d helped Dorothy with her ‘morning task’ in the first place, they could have got out a bit more quickly.

I shall feel the sun again in an hour or so when I go over to see Len Brown in Ealing for a little multi-media experimentation: three of my poems — one on clouds, one about refugees leaving their city and one about a river — are to be accompanied by his photographs on those topics and by music.

I’ve done two more Madame Granic stories, thanks to the encouragement of Monica Hetherington. I stayed the night with her and Peter on 24 January. I’d been to the funeral of Katie Shephard, my school friend John Shephard’s mother, at Boughton near Northampton. The next morning Monica said she’d read the first four stories on my website, and enjoyed them. I realised how stupid it was that I hadn’t written any since… I don’t know when I wrote the last one; it must be four years ago. Anyway, now there are six, and I’m going to keep on doing them until there’s a proper collection. I don’t know whether they’re any good, really. They’re certainly not innovative in any structural sense. They’re just gently humorous. A bit middle-brow, possibly. Anyhow, I’m not ashamed of them, and they are carefully made.

Katie Shephard (Kath as I tended to call her) was born in May 1913 and died in the early hours of New Year’s Day 2013. She was a gracious hostess to our group of teenagers at Bedford Modern School in the 1960s. We often used to go to John’s house, 136 Spring Road, Kempston. Although Kath was certainly a Christian believer — she attended the Church of the Transfiguration in Kempston — there was none of the theological dogmatism which still governed the atmosphere in our house at the time. Kath and her husband Bill seemed untroubled about the destination of their or anyone else’s soul. A relaxed optimism reigned. There was a crate of Double Diamond beer in the kitchen, and within reason we could help ourselves. If we turned up unexpectedly before a meal, Kath would say, ‘I’ll just put on a few extra vegetables.’ I think my poor mum experienced feelings of jealousy that I had found a home from home which was in some ways more to my taste than my own home. In fact she told me that once. Kath, though she didn’t realise it, was one of the first adults, along with some of the teachers at school, notably of course Peter Hetherington, who showed me that goodness is possible outside the narrow confines of a particular set of Christian doctrines.

I haven’t written anything this year about my brother Peter. After long delays, we’re hoping that he will shortly sell his house. He has buyers who it seems (I keep hedging; such is the way with property sales) are about to exchange contracts with him. The bad weather in January and February has helped him in the sense that it has delayed the completion of the new flat, so the builders haven’t been demanding money for the purchase before he’s got money from the sale. I hope we’ll be moving him out of the house soon. There may be an interim before the flat is finished. If there is, he’ll stay somewhere locally for a short time.

Towards the end of last year, I wrote at some length about the Leveson Report on press regulation. The political manoeuvres within government and parliament since then have been exquisitely complex, but they were resolved in the early hours of Monday morning. That rarest of things in British politics, cross-party agreement, will bring into force a new regime which, I’m delighted to say, infuriates the people who own and run our most disgraceful newspapers. There will be a Royal Charter laying down the new arrangements for the independent (that is, not state-controlled) regulation of the press. There will be a clause in an otherwise unrelated government bill saying that henceforth all Royal Charters will be subject to whatever conditions about their amendment or continuation are contained in each particular Charter. This Royal Charter contains a condition that it may not be changed without the consent of a two-thirds majority in each of the Houses of Parliament. Delicate footwork of this kind was necessary so that the Prime Minister could say that there will no statutory underpinning of the press. Actually there will be, but it’s the lightest of touches. The important thing is what’s in the Royal Charter. The newspaper industry loses its right of veto over the membership of the new regulator which will replace the Press Complaints Commission, although it will choose one member to sit on the appointments panel for the new regulator. So we’ll no longer have a situation where the most irresponsible newspapers are forgiven their crimes because the only court of appeal is one heavily influenced by their own editors. It won’t be compulsory for newspapers to accept the authority of the new regulator, but those that don’t will be subject to exemplary damages — in other words large fines over and above payments to an aggrieved party and legal costs, which will act as a deterrent — if they are found guilty of a breach of the new code of conduct for the press. Those that do accept the authority of the new regulator will be subject to smaller punishments. The new code will be written by a committee consisting of one third newspaper editors, one third journalists and one third laypeople. (I fear there may be some room there for the press to wriggle out of its responsibilities; it will depend on who the editors and journalists are.) The new regulator will have the power to ‘direct the nature, extent and placement of apologies’. In other words, if The Sun has told a lie on the front page in 36-point bold type, it will have to publish a retraction and apology on the front page in 36-point bold type. Not only individuals, as at present, but groups of people who’ve been abused will be able to go the regulator.

The Hacked Off campaign, which I support, is happy with the outcome. That’s the most important thing so far as I am concerned. The responsible national newspapers — The Guardian, Financial Times and The Independent — are content with the outcome and will work within it. It’s been fascinating but also nauseating to see the other newspaper groups — Murdoch, the Mail group, the Express group, the Telegraph group — reaching for constitutional arguments going back to the 17th century and claiming that our very rights as freeborn Englishmen are under threat from this mildest and most reasonable of measures. Apparently the bare-breasted girl on page three of The Sun on Monday increased her allure to the voyeur by quoting Thomas Jefferson. By coincidence, on the same day, The Sun paid damages to a Labour MP who’d had her phone stolen. Somehow the phone got from the hands of the thief into The Sun’s office. Thereafter The Sun had access to the MP’s private texts and emails.

There’s nothing whatever in the measures to discourage or stop responsible investigative reporting. The Telegraph’s revelations in 2009 about MPs’ and Lords’ expenses, for instance, could be made with equal impunity under the new regime. So the deal made in Ed Miliband’s office at three o’clock on Monday morning, with all three major parties plus Hacked Off present, and which was presented to parliament later that day, does I think deserve the accolade ‘historic’. We’ll see how it works next time one of the usual suspects among the disgraceful newspapers does something immoral, illegal and contemptible, which undoubtedly will happen.

Nine days ago I went to the Prince Charles cinema in Leicester Square for a screening of four of the films of John Krish. His daughter Rachel is a friend of mine; we worked together at Channel 4 and Teachers TV. I didn’t know until she invited me that her father had been a distinguished documentary film maker in the 1950s and 1960s. All four black-and-white films, beautifully restored by the British Film Institute, are gems: one about the last week of the London trams, one about a day at the seaside for abused children from the slums of Birmingham, one about a brand-new secondary modern school, and one about an old man without much money, a widower living in a council flat somewhere in London, spending his Sunday alone. The films were tenderly observed, humorous and sad. The commentaries were more sententious than would be approved of these days. John Krish answered questions afterwards. He said he had been in the tradition of ‘made’ or, as he put it, ‘confected’ documentaries, rather than the ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentaries which have been more in fashion in recent years. ‘You interfere with truth in order to get to truth,’ he said, or words to that effect.

Last Thursday I got up early and went to Heathrow to meet two of the scholars we have supported (in one case) or are supporting (in the other case) via the Ros Moger/Terry Furlong Scholarships we offer through the Canon Collins Trust. Juliet Perumal was one of our first scholars; we supported her for three years from 2001 while she was doing her PhD on aspects of gender in education. Kgadi Mathabathe is one of our current scholars; we began to support her this year in doing her PhD in science education methods in secondary schools. They’re both delightful people. Juliet is now at the University of Johannesburg, Kgadi at the University of Pretoria. We arranged for them to meet academics at King’s College, London and the Institute of Education who are working in their areas of interest. They had a tour of the Houses of Parliament in the company of Bob Hughes (Lord Hughes of Woodside, a long-time supporter of the Trust) and visited a girls’ school in Hackney. On Saturday there was a small meeting at the Canon Collins office. Present were some of the Trust’s staff, all the members of the Ros Moger/Terry Furlong organising group, and six other people. Sandy Balfour, the Chief Executive of the Trust, I, Kgadi and Juliet spoke, in that order. The women’s presentations were beautifully fluent, informative and extraordinarily moving. That evening we took our guests to the theatre (The Winslow Boy at The Old Vic), and on Sunday afternoon I drove them back to the airport.

This is what I said in my talk:

In one sense, the meeting was a failure. It had taken up a large amount of my and other people’s time since before Christmas. We had written twice to our 100+ contributors, and followed up with phone calls and emails. Of the six outsiders who came, two had nothing to do with our publicity at all, but were South African friends of Juliet’s who live in London. I shouldn’t think the event will produce any increase in contributions, and it has cost us about £2,500 to fly Juliet and Kgadi over and to look after them here. And yet the occasion was one of the most inspiring I’ve attended or been responsible for. It certainly re-affirmed the value of what we’ve been doing awarding these scholarships for the last 12 years, and made us all determined to continue, which we can do, at least for a few years more, with the healthy bank balance we have.

We went to The Winslow Boy that evening because Sue Davidson, a member of our group, was able to get special tickets through her friend Deborah Findlay, who was in the play. I wasn’t sure whether Terence Rattigan’s terribly English piece about a pre-First-World-War question of honour in an upper-middle-class family would appeal to our visitors; but they loved it, and so did I. Rattigan was famously out of fashion for many years, being regarded as socially limited in his subject matter and technically constrained by the limits of the ‘well-made play’. But this production showed what an excellent comic writer he was: a virtue that balanced the tendency to speechifying in the text. And the play’s concerns, including defiance of the establishment and the emergence of women’s rights (as personified by the hero’s daughter, who is a suffragette), forcibly struck contemporary chords. As for ‘well-made’ as a term of disapprobation: I like well made. I try to make my poems well.

I’ve just been watching the Chancellor’s budget statement, Ed Miliband’s reply, some of the immediate reaction from the BBC’s political and economic commentators, and interviews with Danny Alexander, the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, and Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor.

Macro-economically, the budget paints an unrelievedly grim picture; micro-economically, there are some good features.

The official estimate for economic growth in 2013 has been reduced in the space of three months from 1.2% to 0.6%, and the prospect of significant future growth recedes further and further into the distance. Reduction of the annual deficit and the accumulating national debt as a proportion of GDP is also postponed. Government borrowing remains high. Whether or not it’s higher or lower than it was this time last year is a judgment based on all sorts of technical factors. But because the heavy-duty wealth-creating machine — the productive economy — has stalled, the Chancellor is reduced to tinkering, while hoping for some good news to turn up before the next election.

Some of the tinkerings are good. It’s good that the level at which people begin to pay income tax will rise to £10,000 from April 2014. It’s good that Corporation Tax will come down to 20% from April 2015. There are two interesting measures to stimulate the housing market and encourage house building: people buying new properties will be eligible for a loan from the government, interest-free for five years, for up to 20% of the value of the property; and there will be government guarantees for new mortgages taken out on the purchase of any property (subject to the usual credit checks) which should encourage lenders to lend with more confidence. Employers will see a reduction in their National Insurance contributions. The tax-avoidance havens closest to the UK — Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man — have entered into some kind of agreement with the Treasury which will bring in more money, and there are promises of tougher action against tax avoidance and tax evasion generally.

Previously announced measures will benefit some groups. The new, simplified, flat-rate state pension, to be introduced a year earlier now, from April 2016, will I think have more winners than losers. There’s going to be significant help with childcare: parents will receive up to £1,200 per year per child towards the cost of childcare, but not until autumn 2015 (why so long to wait?).

It’s unreservedly good that we will as a country at last begin to spend 0.7% of GDP annually on international development during this parliament.

Under these pieces of good news, which are a kind of cheerful descant trilling away at the top of the musical stave, sound the gloomy fundamental bass notes: real incomes falling every year for millions of working people on low or moderate incomes and for those of working age, working or not, who depend partially or wholly on benefits; very high unemployment; a collapse in the public sector which is not being compensated for by growth in the private sector; an increasingly divided society. Whatever the actual facts about the amount of government income forgone by the reduction in the top rate of tax from 50% to 45%, which will occur in two weeks’ time, the symbolism is stark: the rich get richer. Some of the rich owe their wealth to entrepreneurial brilliance, creativity and hard work. Creativity and a capacity for hard work are also characteristics of most school teachers and nurses. Others of the rich owe their wealth to self-seeking ruthlessness, to working in industries where serious money is plentiful and easy to get, or to activities which border or enter on the criminal. There is no argument for giving the rich more, and I hope that the political damage to the Conservatives when that measure comes into force will be significant.

Peter Hetherington came down to London this morning. I met him at St Pancras, we walked back here for coffee and lunch, then took a cab to a sound suite near Baker Street and recorded the poems and translations I’ve done in the past year. It went very well. Peter’s readings of my translations of Montale’s ‘Mediterraneo’ and of the passage at the end of book 2 of The Aeneid, about the sack of Troy and Aeneas’s desperate search for his wife, were magnificent. Len Brown recommended this recording studio, Air Edel, and he turned up just before the end of the session, having been filming. As I mentioned earlier this month, I’ve recently written three poems at Len’s commission, something I don’t usually do, because he, apart from being a superb film maker, is a superb stills photographer, and he suggested that we might try putting my words together with sequences of his photographs, and adding music and effects. We had a go at one combination, ‘Clouds’, in his house on 6 March. It was pretty good. I think he’s going to finish this multi-media compilation using the better-quality reading of the poem which I’ve just done. He wanted a poem called ‘Streets’. He has beautiful photographs, going back 40 years, of largely empty streets all over the world. I ended up writing a piece which doesn’t help him; it’s called ‘Out of City’, and it’s about refugees fleeing. ‘Sometimes a poem’s not a poet’s choice.’ I shall try writing one about empty streets soon. And I did one called ‘The River’, which in my mind was a French river, say the Rhône, described from source to mouth. He thinks he can do something with that.

We’ve just been to see Trelawney of the Wells at the Donmar. Earlier this year, we saw another Pinero play, The Magistrate, at the National. The Magistrate is a hilarious farce from start to finish; Trelawney is both funny and touching. Both plays excellent and brilliantly performed. What with these and The Winslow Boy, we’ve enjoyed old-fashioned examples of the dramatist’s craft at its most accomplished.

I’m in the middle of a seventh Madame Granic story. I’m going to keep up the strike rate, now I’ve restarted the series, until I’ve got a book-length collection. The stories are probably the only things I’ve ever written which might have some commercial value.

Easter Monday. On Good Friday, I thought I’d re-read Donne’s great poem ‘Good-Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’, but I’d forgotten the year of composition. Exactly 400 years ago! So on Friday, Saturday and Easter Sunday morning I wrote a tribute poem, ‘Good Friday 2013. Driving Westward’. It’s in exactly the same form as the original — iambic pentameters, rhyming couplets — and exactly the same length — 42 lines. A learned article by A.B. Chambers, published in 1961 in English Literary History, a Johns Hopkins University journal, which I found on the internet, helped with some of the difficulties in Donne’s poem, and suggested some of the argument in mine. I’m pleased with my effort. It also makes a nice balance with the other Donne tribute poem I did, about ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’: profane versus sacred, confidently lascivious versus humbly reverential. Supposedly, I’m driving through Warwickshire on Good Friday, just as Donne, in all probability, was riding through that county on that day (29 March 2013 by the Gregorian calendar; 2 April 1613 by the Julian). In fact I’ve been here in Camden Town all weekend, but I’m not bothered.

Looking back over the entries during the last month, I notice Wordsworthian musings about mild weather on 5 March. The following day, when I went down to Len Brown’s house in Ealing, we sat in the back garden and watched bees buzzing around the blossom. Since then, the weather has gone into reverse. It was the coldest March on record. Day after day, the temperature hovers a little above zero, and registers minus at night. Every tree and plant is stalled. There isn’t much sun; mainly slow-moving cloud. We went for a walk in Regents Park yesterday afternoon. I’ve never seen the place looking so pinched. There were a few shivering daffodils, it’s true. The only virtue of the prolonged chill is that such flowers and blossom as have opened have remained open; there’s no heat to hurry their cycle through. The beautiful big mimosa in Barker Drive has been bright yellow for about six weeks now. Same with the Cornelian cherries in the park.

There have been snowstorms, with real blizzards and big drifts, in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the Midlands and the north of England. Sheep farmers have had a terrible time, losing thousands of ewes and lambs. And, according to the weather forecasters, spring is not ‘just around the corner’. These conditions, they say, might well continue for most of April.

St George’s Day, Shakespeare’s birthday and the day of his death, and Wordsworth’s birthday; and the most beautiful, warm day it is. I’ve been over to Stoke Newington to have lunch with Paul Ashton and to talk about his latest book, a lovely fiction called The Flight into Egypt, which imagines what happened to Jesus in the gap of time between the slaughter of the innocents and the day he appears in the temple at Jerusalem at the age of 12 and amazes the scholars by his learning and intelligence. The book’s cleverness is that the fiction is not simply realistic. Animals recognise Jesus’ greatness when he is still a tiny baby. The baby ‘talks’ to the animals through the head of his half-brother James, who’s 12 years old and who narrates the story, although in Jesus’ human form he doesn’t know he’s doing it. The Egyptian gods realise that a formidable challenge to their power has come into their land. Some of them, in their jealousy and fear, try to destroy the holy family. There are narrow escapes from pursuing Roman soldiers. It’s very good: part adventure story, part magic realism, with some comedy to lighten it and a certain amount of theology to weigh it down. I’m going to do the editing and proof-reading job I do on all Paul’s books. This is his fourth.

Two days after I last wrote, I was walking from the Borough, where I’d been to check on the Mellors’ flat, to The Young Vic in Waterloo, where I would meet Helen. We were going to see a short piece called My Perfect Mind, starring Edward Petherbridge, about the stroke that Petherbridge suffered in New Zealand as he was on the point of fulfilling his lifelong ambition to play King Lear. In Union Street the phone rang. It was David James. Lindsay, after a terrible night between Tuesday 2 and Wednesday 3 April, had been taken into hospital and was obviously near the end. I said I’d tell Helen and that we’d probably drive up the next day. Helen was very upset when I told her in the foyer of the theatre, but we went to the play anyway.

The next morning at nine o’clock I rang David’s mobile. He’d spent all night in the ward next to Lindsay. She was coming to the end of her life. I said we would leave during the morning and arrive in Shrewsbury in the early afternoon. I’d ring from the edge of the town to see whether it would be appropriate to come straight to the hospital. At about ten o’clock I was on the way to the High Street to get cash from the bank and sandwiches for the trip when David rang to say that Lindsay had just died. I stood in Barker Drive by the little park and tried to say the things which David would want to hear then. He said that he would be going home shortly. We agreed that we’d meet at Harmer Hill. When we arrived, at about half past two, David and Tom were there, with David’s parents Ron and Yvonne and Barbara Bradshaw, who with her husband David Bradshaw is one of David James’s oldest friends, and who had ministered to Lindsay wonderfully during her last days.

The two weeks and two days between that day and last Saturday, when we arrived back in London, were of course extraordinary. I have recently dealt with my parents’ deaths and funerals, and with my great aunt Margaret’s; my parents were in their eighties and Margaret 96. It’s a different matter to be involved with the death of a woman of 57, with a husband of the same age, a child of 14, and a mother still alive.

Helen and I did all the things that close friends should do, and which we would hope others would do for us. I think my job was the easier: to advise, organise and, when necessary, console. Helen did the harder job of looking after Tom during the hours when David and I were out visiting the registrar, or the funeral director, or the bank, or the solicitor, or the hospital (this last in order that David could say thank you); or when we were in his study with the door closed, writing letters and emails and deciding on the order of service for the funeral.

Every evening we ate a proper three-course meal, with wine and the candles lit, as Lindsay would have wanted. I went to see Lindsay’s mother Beryl in her bungalow in Oswestry several times. I admire her intelligence, courage and stoicism very much.

The funeral was held on 18 April in the church at Rhydycroesau where David and Lindsay were married in 1994. The service was conducted by David Crowhurst, who had married them. 19 years ago he was vicar of Oswestry and rector of Rhydycroesau. He’s now retired, and he and his wife live at Dorrington. His words and actions, when we went to see him at his house, when he visited us at Harmer Hill, and when he officiated on the day, were exactly what one would hope for in a pastor.

18 April was a beautiful day: perfect springtime after a long spell of cold weather. Sheep and lambs bleated in the fields. The church, which I should think seats about 100, was packed to the doors. People stood at the back and occupied the staircase up to the organ loft. There were three familiar hymns: ‘O God, our help in ages past’, ‘Guide me, O thou great redeemer’ and ‘For all the saints, who from their labours rest’. David Bradshaw read Peter Levi’s poem ‘The break of day and the falling of night’. Christine Davies read 1 Peter chapter 1, verses 3 to 9. David had written a tribute to Lindsay, which I read on his behalf. Here it is.

David Crowhurst preached a good and affectionate short sermon, and there were prayers, the commendation and a blessing. Helen and I followed the coffin and the family out of the church. Outside, there were about 50 people standing. Someone told me later that when the hymns started, most of those people, having neither the order of service nor a hymn book, sang the hymns from memory in the open air.

The ladies of the congregation at Rhydycroesau laid on a terrific tea in the village hall. A small group of us — David, Tom, Helen and I, Beryl, Lindsay’s brother Martin and his wife Brenda — followed the hearse in our two cars to the crematorium in Shrewsbury. David Crowhurst was already there, having driven in his own car a bit faster than the hearse. There was a short final ceremony, and we left. The funeral director did his job beautifully. He told me how sad he was personally: he had been at school with Lindsay in Oswestry. Then we drove back to Rhydycroesau for the remains of the tea and to greet those few guests who remained; we’d been away two hours. On our way back to Harmer Hill, once the last guest had departed, David Bradshaw, David and Tom, Helen and I stopped at The Talbot in Ruyton XI Towns. Tom didn’t want his father to drink even a half of bitter (he wasn’t driving); he said that alcohol will kill you. I knew why he said it. Nonetheless, David had two halves.

The following night, the family (including David’s parents), David Bradshaw, Mike Raleigh, Kate Myers, Helen and I met at a very good restaurant in Oswestry called The Walls. We had a lovely secluded square table and ate an excellent meal in Lindsay’s memory. I’ve just looked back at my entry for 7 August last year, remembering how Lindsay had begun planning her funeral service with me then. I didn’t write at the time that she also started to make suggestions for a post-funeral meal, including venue (the Lake Vyrnwy Hotel) and menu. At this point I drew the line, telling her that she really mustn’t extend her formidable powers of organisation too far beyond her departure. I think the venue we chose was better than the Lake Vyrnwy Hotel would have been: it’s in the town of her birth, and is very close to where her mother lives. She would have approved of the food; although not as sophisticated as that which she regularly produced, it was fresh, hearty and wholesome, accompanied by a crisp Pouilly-Fumé and a well-made claret.

Helen and I, together with David and Barbara Bradshaw and Martin and Brenda Richards, are Tom’s guardians until he’s 21 should — God forbid — his father die before then. I’m also an executor of David’s new will, although I hope never to have to undertake that duty, since I’m four years older than he. David and Tom are coming to Rodellosso with us at the end of May, and to Kerfontaine in the summer.

Margaret Thatcher died on 8 April. Her funeral service, in St Paul’s Cathedral, took place the day before Lindsay’s. I’m glad that my preoccupation with the aftermath of the death of a private citizen meant that I didn’t pay much attention to the public noise which Lady Thatcher’s death caused. She divided the nation in death as she had in life. Disgracefully, the taxpayer made a contribution of several million pounds to the cost of her funeral. I would think it equally disgraceful if the taxpayer contributed to the cost of the funeral of a politician I admired. With typical cunning, the government did not officially term the event a state funeral, although that is what it was in all but name. Churchill 50 years ago had a full state funeral, which was appropriate because of his leadership of the country during the war. I think Gladstone (not an uncontroversial figure, though certainly a great statesman) had a state funeral, so there is a precedent. One thing is certain: there won’t be another state funeral for a politician in my lifetime.

Since I last wrote about my brother Peter, he has found a buyer for his house, and the builders of his new flat have finished it, two months later than they said they would. So two days after returning from Shropshire, I went down to Canterbury to organise the last stages of the move. Money was squirted around in such a way that Peter will enter the flat with no mortgage. Mary and I have between us lent him £12,000 until June, when he will take early retirement from the NHS and the Church of England, and pay us back out of his lump sums. The actual move took place on Friday; it went very smoothly, helped by two excellent young men who have a little local removal company. I was back home by four o’clock, having left Peter with his children, who had everything under control.

Saturday was Stephen Eyers’ 70th birthday. He organised a magnificent lunch party for 20 people in Dorich House, a 1936 art deco dwelling built for the sculptor Dora Gordine by her husband Richard Hare. Hare was 12 years younger than Gordine, and died of a heart attack in 1966. Gordine stayed on in the house until her death in 1991, when she must have been 95 or 96. Many of her sculptures are still there. The house now belongs to the University of Kingston, where Stephen works, and is available for hire for parties.

We arrived at Stephen’s house at 10, and gave him his presents: a linocut called ‘Plunge’, done by our friend Martin Davidson, and three black-and-white photos of Stephen and me which Helen took on one of our Italy trips in the late 70s, and which she’d had reprinted and specially framed. We went in a taxi to Dorich House. The 20 of us first had a guided tour, then champagne and canapés, then a four-course meal with lots of wine. I read a poem I’d written the evening before:

Stephen then made a speech ambulando, moving around the table and referring to the effect that each of those present had had on his life. He said he would do it with no more by way of notes than his preacher father used to have when delivering his sermons: three words or phrases written one above another on a piece of paper. He managed this, despite being burdened by drink as his father had never been in the Conditional Immortality Mission Hall, Boscombe.

After the lunch, a few of us went back to the house in a taxi for yet more drinks. At about nine o’clock, I felt an overwhelming desire for a curry, and went down the road with Heather Loxton to an excellent Sri Lankan place, returning half an hour later with a large takeaway. This soaked up some of the alcohol, and tasted delicious. Helen and I left at midnight. It was stupid to drive; I would have been miles over the limit if stopped, but I was ultra-careful and got home undetected.

On Sunday we were unusually quiet.

Here we are again staying with Mary and Jacques, after another week at Rodellosso in Tuscany. This is the fourth time we’ve been there. It has become a regular feature of our year. We’re going back there again at the end of this month. The reason for this odd and rather inefficient perambulation is that the only week David, Tom and Lindsay, had she lived, could have come was Tom’s half-term week, which was last week. I was very pleased that David decided that he and Tom would come despite their loss. Mike Raleigh and Kate Myers, Peter and Merle Traves and our friend Deirdre Finan came too; we took all five apartments. Stephen and Bronwyn Mellor also wanted to come, but weren’t arriving from Australia until later. Happily, the week they can make, 29 June to 6 July, coincides with the end of Tess’s school year, so Mary, Jacques and Tess are joining us, and we shall have three apartments. Tomorrow we head back towards Brittany, arriving on Wednesday evening. We’ll be there for two and a half weeks before returning south.

Rodellosso was as beautiful as ever, and we tasted the usual pleasures. Because the weather was unseasonably cold and wet, we travelled more and looked at more art and architecture than we might otherwise have done. We visited or revisited Siena, Cortona and Arezzo, and frequented the little local towns of Pienza, San Quirico d’Orcia and Montalcino. Culturally, the highlight for me was the Fra Angelico ‘Annunciation’ in the Museo Diocesano in Cortona, which I last saw some time in the late 1980s. This time there was no one in the museum apart from our group: an extraordinary privilege to see such a masterwork in peace and quiet, with no distraction.

Last year, Bronwyn made me aware of Iris Origo, a wealthy Irish-American woman, born in 1902, brought up in conditions of great privilege in Italy, who married an Italian marchese, Antonio Origo. In 1923, just before they were married, they bought an estate of 3,500 acres, La Foce, which is very near to where we stay at Rodellosso. I had already read Iris’s excellent book The Merchant of Prato, without realising who she was. Bronwyn had read her War in the Val d’Orcia, which I then read in its Italian translation. It’s a remarkable account, written secretly as a diary in 1943 and 1944, of resistance to the German invasion after Mussolini’s downfall and Italy’s change of sides. The Origos, as enlightened, wealthy landowners, had revolutionised farming methods and the treatment of their tenant farmers in the years before the war. They built a school and a hospital, and when the war came they took in refugee children from bombed cities in the north of Italy. The climax of the book comes when they find themselves, in June 1944, right at the centre of the most savage fighting between the advancing Allies and the retreating and revengeful Germans. There’s an extraordinary passage in which, having decided that it’s too dangerous to remain at La Foce, they and their assistants walk, leading or carrying the refugee children and their own two children through the heart of the bombing and shelling, with dead men and animals on all sides, to the safety of a friend’s house and underground cellars at Montepulciano.

We visited La Foce last Wednesday and had a tour of the gardens in the rain. What can be done with money: astonishing formal beauty, created by the architect Cecil Pinsent, who had also improved and extended the house. I’m now reading Iris Origo’s autobiography, and will have more to say when I’ve finished it.

Going back a bit: we arrived at Kerfontaine on 4 May. During the first week there, I did a lot of work in the garden. On 13 May, Peter and Monica Hetherington came and stayed for eight days. It was great to be able to show them the beauties of the area, and — as often happens when a host makes a special effort for guests — we found two magnificent new walks: the Côte Sauvage on the west of the Quiberon peninsula, and the coastal walk west from Doëlan. The rainy spring meant that there were wild flowers of all kinds in profusion. The same has been true throughout France and in Italy.

Today is the first properly hot day of the Marseille summer. Helen and I walked down to the Vieux Port, and admired from the outside the grands projets still in the process of completion to mark the city’s status as European City of Culture 2013, especially the Musée des civilisations d’Europe et de la Méditerranée, which is due to open on Friday. I expect we’ll visit when we’re next here. Then we wandered up through the rapidly gentrifying Le Panier, had an Orangina and an iced tea behind the Hôtel de Ville, and came home on the métro.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned before that I’ve written a pamphlet for the United Kingdom Literacy Association called Teaching Reading: How To. It’s an abridged, revised and updated version of an item in the ‘Teaching of Reading’ section of www.languageandlearning.net. The item itself was a turning into prose of notes for talks I used to give about the early teaching of reading. When I was putting the website together last year, I was angry about a number of the government’s stupidities and zealotries with regard to English, notably its fixation on synthetic phonics as the only way to teach children to read, and its policy of bribing and bullying primary schools to adopt only that approach. My friends Eve Bearne and David Reedy, who are both senior people in ULKA, agreed to publish the pamphlet. It came out last month, and I’m pleased with it. I would be astonished if it made any difference to government policy, but I hope it might encourage a few teachers and teacher-trainers to resist the government’s diktat.

Two weeks ago I had an email from Simon Gibbons, the Chair of the National Association for the Teaching of English, to say that the NATE trustees have decided to give me an award for ‘Lifetime service to English education, in acknowledgement of your work both as a teacher and writer and as one involved with educational programming’. I must say, I’m terribly pleased. They want to present me with the award at the NATE conference dinner on Saturday 29 June, in Stratford-upon-Avon. So, having arrived again at Rodellosso the previous day, I shall get up before dawn on the Saturday, drive to Pisa, fly to Paris and on to Birmingham, get myself to Stratford, receive the award and make a speech, stay the night, and do the journey in reverse on the Sunday.

The award causes me to feel that the idiosyncratic accumulation of writings and activities which has made up not so much a career as a succession of enjoyable experiences has been noticed in some quarters and has perhaps made a difference here and there; which gives me satisfaction. I’m not an academic and I’m not an intellectual, in the narrower senses of those words. But I think I have had a talent for taking good educational ideas, often brought into being by people who have been proper academics and intellectuals, and making them more readily available to teachers. And, as the Duke of Kent says in King Lear, ‘To be acknowledged… is to be o’erpaid.’ Never were truer words put into the mouth of such a bad man.

There will be a delay in my finishing Iris Origo’s autobiography, because I have unwisely used it for its physical rather than its intellectual weight. When we’re in Marseille, Mary and Jacques kindly let us park the car — a rather prominent British-registered Land Rover Freelander, and perhaps vulnerable to break-ins if left on the street — in their little lock-up garage. The car just squeezes in. When backing out, it’s necessary to put something on the radio aerial so that it doesn’t buckle backwards and break on the underside of the opened garage door. The book did the job, and then of course I forgot that it was there as we drove off. What are the chances of an English-speaking person finding it in a gutter and enjoying it? Slim, but not non-existent. My foolishness reminds me of an even greater piece of absent-mindedness committed just before Christmas last year. Martina Thomson has done a book of translations of the German poems of Paula Ludwig. It’s very good; she had been showing me them as they accumulated, and I had made one or two suggestions about details. Martina knew Paula Ludwig. She came to their house in Berlin when Martina was a child. Ludwig could also paint, and in the book of translations there is a reproduction of a painting she did of Martina as a little girl, with — I think — her brother. Anyhow, Martina gave me a touchingly inscribed copy of the book. One early evening about ten days before Christmas, I wrote the Christmas cards, about 80 of them, and then decided to go to the pub to read the whole book at my leisure. On the way to the pub I posted the cards and, alas, the book, which I had dropped into a shopping bag with them. I simply grabbed the whole stack and stuffed them in two or three goes into the box, forgetting about the slim volume amongst them. I felt guilty and foolish, but knew immediately that I wasn’t going to hang about and throw myself on the mercy of the Post Office employee who next came to empty the box. I had also bought a few copies of the book, so it wasn’t necessary to confess my folly to Martina. The tossing away of the two books, I console myself, may be a little like those actes gratuits that the surrealists used to perform. Perhaps their discovery has had unintended, unenvisaged consequences in the world. Probably not.

I shall wait until we get back to Pienza at the end of the month before buying another copy of the Origo autobiography. I know that I could have one more quickly through Amazon. But I’ve stopped using Amazon because of its disgusting tax-avoidance practices. If Google, Amazon, Apple, Starbucks and the others could be made to pay proper corporation tax in each country where they make their profits, rather than using cross-border jiggery-pokery to reduce their tax liability, the nation states involved, including the UK, wouldn’t be in quite such deep fiscal crisis.

A few weeks ago, I read William Dalrymple’s Return of a King. It’s the first of his books I’ve read. It’s quite excellent. It tells the tragic story of Britain’s first entanglement in Afghanistan, in 1839. Because of our paranoid fear that Russia would invade Afghanistan and then threaten British control of India, we foolishly invaded the country in order to re-establish on its throne Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. The Shah was the wrong horse to back. For two years, with breathtaking complacency and incompetence, we sat in Afghanistan, until we had made ourselves unpopular enough to provoke a rebellion from a coalition of Afghans opposed to us and to the Shah. We retreated towards India through the Afghan winter, and were slaughtered on the way. This humiliation provoked a new invasion with the sole purpose of retribution. In the course of this second invasion, we committed acts which would now be described as war crimes. Then we retreated again. Our own barbarism was matched by the sadistic savagery of the Afghans who resisted our interference in their affairs.

The relevance of the debacle to the current situation in Afghanistan is obvious, though the parallels, for me, are not exact. It would be hypocritical of me not to acknowledge that I reluctantly supported the American-led invasion of the country in 2001, to overthrow the Taliban who were governing the country with a barbarity towards their own people equivalent to that demonstrated in the acts committed against invaders by their forefathers, which Dalrymple describes; and, it must be admitted, to take revenge for the attacks of 11 September. The case was different, for me, from Iraq in 2003, crucially because the United Nations supported the invasion of Afghanistan and not that of Iraq. I have written all this before. We have now left Iraq, and next year we will finally leave Afghanistan. Despite the optimistic propaganda offered by American and British politicians and generals, I have no great confidence that the Taliban will not simply resume their barbarous governance of the country once we leave. If that is the case, will anything worthwhile have been achieved to compensate for the death, destruction and expense? I wish I knew. I wonder if even those at the heights of power know, PR messages aside, what is actually likely to happen.

Meanwhile, in Syria, the carnage continues. A few months ago, I wrongly wrote that Assad was finished. I fear I was just repeating an opinion I had read in a newspaper. The Assad regime has recently regained some of the territory and towns it had lost to the rebels. Russia continues to supply it with arms, and fighters from Hezbollah have come from Lebanon to help. Iran also backs Assad. The West wrings its hands, regrets the almost certain use of chemical weapons by the regime, and refrains from helping the rebels to anything like the extent that Russia supports the regime. The problem, apart from the West’s reluctance to get involved in a new war involving a Muslim country, is that some very unpleasant Islamist jihadists are now fighting with the rebels. Their vision of victory would be the establishment of an Islamist theocracy with Sharia law; in other words, a Syria governed in the way that the Taliban used to govern Afghanistan. So, it seems to me, the civil war in Syria comes down to a classic fight between various strands of Shia and various strands of Sunni Islam. At least 80,000 people have been killed in the conflict so far, and millions displaced either within Syria or in neighbouring countries. I can’t help acknowledging, as I think I have before, the unpleasant private thought I have that there is something within Islam, at this stage in its history, akin to the wars of religion of past centuries within Christianity, and akin to the respect in which Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, was once the excuse for a desire to dominate and plunder the world. Catholics and Protestants used to slaughter each other (and recently still did, to an extent relatively tiny historically, but still tragic, in Northern Ireland). Spain and France and England invaded and conquered the rest of the world, justifying their action by a sincere or assumed certainty that their religion would one day be proclaimed the only global truth. Now, in the age of the internet, it’s the turn of a small number of Muslims to commit a similar dreadful error.

Eight years before the British blundered into Afghanistan, Charles Darwin set sail from Devonport on board the Beagle. I’ve just finished The Voyage of the Beagle, and I’m about to start on The Origin of Species. My first, and accumulating, response to the young Darwin’s great book was sheer wonderment at how much he already knew when he undertook the voyage. In order to understand what he was looking at as he travelled the world, in zoology, botany, geology and marine studies, he had already ingested and mastered a vast amount of the then existing scholarship. The detailed vocabulary of all these disciplines was at his fingertips. He knew who had written anything of importance about each of them. So it is that, even though the book was written for the general reader, and even though I read it with pleasure and no great effort, there were many passages, terminology and references which I didn’t understand, and simply had to take on trust. Then, as I’m sure many readers must have observed in the last 150 years, it’s very exciting to read passages where, simply through Darwin’s accurate observation and clear explanation of phenomena, we can see his curious mind at work, chipping away (metaphorically not physically, although he did plenty of physical chipping with his geological hammer) the irrelevant or obviously wrong hypotheses about why something it as it is, homing in on the great theory which has made him one of humanity’s few awesome and enduring mighty geniuses. What were those fossilised seashells doing thousands of feet up in the Andes? Why — and here he is honest enough to admit that he nearly missed this crucial fact, and someone else pointed it out to him — is it the case not simply that the Galapagos finches are unique to the Galapagos Islands as a group, but that different varieties of finch are unique to individual islands within the group? Why have atoll and barrier coral reefs been formed as they are, and why have fringing coral reefs been formed by a different geological process?

In between these eventually epoch-making questions, there is the entertaining travel journal of a spirited and energetic young man. His social attitudes are interesting, viewed from a distance of 180 years. He is a naturally kind and compassionate person. He has what we would today call empathy. He respects all sorts and conditions of men, and hates cruelty. His cri de coeur against slavery, towards the end of the book, is very moving. On the other hand, he is of his time in being quite happy to use the term ‘savages’ when referring to what I suppose today we would call ‘indigenous peoples’. He is quite clear, in general, that the European nations are ‘civilized’, ‘advanced’, and have been responsible for bringing enlightenment to the dark places of the world. On the other hand again, he assigns blame, correctly, to British imperialism when he is aware of evils which the British have committed. Of Tasmania, he writes: ‘All the aborigines have been removed to an island in Bass’s Straits, so that Van Diemen’s Land enjoys the great advantage of being free from a native population.’ I read this sentence two or three times before realising that its second half is intended ironically. He goes on: ‘This most cruel step seems to have been quite unavoidable, as the only means of stopping a fearful succession of robberies, burnings, and murders, committed by the blacks; and which sooner or later would have ended in their utter destruction. I fear there is no doubt, that this train of evil and its consequences, originated in the infamous conduct of some of our countrymen. Thirty years is a short period, in which to have banished the last aboriginal from his native land, — and that island nearly as large as Ireland.’ There is a fuller account of the extermination of the native people of Tasmania in Robert Hughes’ wonderful The Fatal Shore.

One can tell that Darwin is uneasy about Captain FitzRoy’s efforts to ‘civilize’ the three inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego, whom he had brought back to England on a previous voyage, and was now returning to their native land in the company of a missionary. I laughed more than once at Darwin’s not very high opinion of the missionary’s qualities. As the main party are to go off on a surveying side-trip, ‘Matthews, with his usual quiet fortitude (remarkable in a man apparently possessing little energy of character), determined to stay with the Fuegians, who evinced no alarm for themselves; and so we left them to pass their first awful night.’ Poor old Matthews doesn’t stay the course, however. When the party gets back from the surveying trip, ‘Matthews gave so bad an account of the conduct of the Fuegians, that Captain Fitz Roy determined to take him back to the Beagle; and ultimately he was left at New Zealand, where his brother was a missionary.’ Admittedly, the evangelist’s treatment had been alarming: ‘Another party showed by signs that they wished to strip him naked and pluck all the hairs out of his face and body.’ This is a people, after all, who in time of famine kill and eat their old women: ‘when pressed in winter by hunger, they kill and devour their old women before they kill their dogs: the boy, being asked by Mr. Low why they did this, answered, “Doggies catch otters, old women no.” This boy described the manner in which they are killed by being held over smoke and thus choked: he imitated their screams as a joke, and described the parts of their bodies which are considered best to eat. Horrid as such a death by the hands of their friends and relatives must be, the fears of the old women, when hunger begins to press, are more painful to think of; we were told that they then often run away into the mountains, but that they are pursued by the men and brought back to the slaughter-house at their own fire-sides!’

I think perhaps that it’s easy for someone like me, who believes broadly that the European invasions of other parts of the world were wicked acts, accompanied by brutality on an industrial scale, leading to centuries of exploitation and impoverishment of the invaded peoples whose effects are still with us, to romanticise the cultures of those peoples. Yes, we had no business going there as conquerors, we should only have gone there as traders; but of barbarity and backwardness in those cultures there was plenty.

Darwin ends his book with a paean of praise to British imperialism worthy of the most tub-thumping John Bull: ‘To hoist the British flag, seems to draw with it as a certain consequence, wealth, prosperity, and civilization.’ Perhaps he sincerely meant this. He had seen, for example, a happy and prosperous Christian settlement in the little part of New Zealand which he visited, which contrasted sharply with the filth and squalor in which the indigenous New Zealanders he had seen lived. But the simplicity of the statement just quoted is at odds with the more nuanced opinions he expresses in the course of the book. It occurs only six pages after his anti-slavery appeal. (Admittedly, the British slave trade had been abolished by the time he wrote; but not many years previously.) Did he feel the need to strike a ringing consensual note, to reassure himself and his readers, even as the full, terrifying implications of some of the things he had observed were dawning on him? We know that he was capable of diplomatic reserve, in that he has nothing but praise and gratitude to offer Captain FitzRoy in the book and its introduction, even though there were difficulties in their relationship, not simply brought on by their being confined together in cramped living quarters for nearly five years, but also as a consequence of FitzRoy’s unstable mental state, and his intolerance of Darwin’s questioning of the, to him, unquestionable and fixed truths of the creation.

Darwin the conscientious naturalist kills and examines specimens of creatures of all kinds, as long as they’re not too big. These he sends back to England from various parts of the world, as we gather from his acknowledgement to ‘the Reverend Professor Henslow’, his teacher at Cambridge, at the end of the preface. Darwin the country gentleman also frequently goes on shooting expeditions just for the pleasure, even though, quite often, ‘we had very poor sport’.

The weather is terrible, and seems likely to remain so. Last Friday, there was a deluge of rain in the morning, but that was nothing compared to the hailstorm which hit us at about six o’clock in the afternoon. I have never in my life seen hail like it. (Admittedly, I’ve never lived in the Pyrenees or other parts of the south of France, where destructive hail is regular.) The hailstones were not, to quote the cliché, the size of golf balls. They were about half the size of golf balls, not round but jagged and irregular in shape. They descended in violence for at least twenty minutes, bringing with them thousands of green leaves ripped from trees, destroying many of the flowers we had planted out in pots, and causing a river to flow down the path to our front door. I was, not for the first time, filled with admiration for the men who built this house 90 years ago. Although in a steep valley, it is constructed on a little plinth, generally unnoticed, which means that a torrent of water approaching the house takes a smart left turn a metre from the door, then a smart right turn, and flows down the side of the house away into the lawn. The hailstones meanwhile heaped up in unexpected places, obedient to invisible and, to me, mysterious forces. One heap was a full metre high. Some of it was still there 24 hours later.

Rosa, who lives in a modern house in Plouay, was not so lucky as we were. I phoned her as soon as the storm eased. Her garage under the house was flooded. I went round and helped her sweep the water out. Luckily, no mud had got in with the water, so actually the floor was cleaner when we had finished than it had been before. But poor Rosa, who tends her little vegetable garden with minute care from March onwards, saw it largely destroyed in half an hour; and all the developing apples and plums on her trees lay amid the leaves on the ground. She was philosophical. ‘No one was injured or drowned,’ she said. ‘C’est l’essentiel.’ The next day I went round again to help her sweep up the fallen mass of green matter and flowers. Yesterday she came here for the afternoon, and on the way home we stopped at Point Vert so she could buy some more lettuce seed. She is a strange mixture: she has a natural talent for gardening; things grow under her hands as easily as they used to under Albert’s. But she is obsessive about weeds, and buys the most ferocious, non-ecological produits in an unavailing attempt to kill them. We went to the cemetery early yesterday afternoon, taking a detour between her house and ours, as we often do when she visits, before coming here for a tour of the grounds and tea. Albert’s grave is certainly the best kept in the place. There are some tiny, innocent little green weeds peeping through the gravel around the tomb. (Nothing at all on the monument itself, of course.) These are removed, and then each place where their offence was committed is sprayed with the poison. At her house, her success in growing herbs of all kinds has meant that chives and parsley have seeded themselves where they should not, in cracks between the house and the patio, and on the low walls of the raised flower beds. She has attacked these interlopers with neat bleach, with white vinegar, with dreadful obscure chemicals in plastic bottles sporting skull-and-crossbones warnings. Still they return. I say, ‘Rosa, let them be. They do no harm. Look at these beautiful mauve flowers on the chives.’ No use.

Having got back from Rosa’s on the day after the storm, I addressed the mess here. Upturning one of the plastic buckets which I park near the shed, I found a quietly meditating toad. This of course brought immediately to mind the couplet in the witches’ spell in Macbeth:

‘Toad that under cold bucket
Thirty days and nights hath stuck it…’

There is academic dispute about the authorship of these lines, with some scholars unable to grant the possibility that the master could have written such tosh. Beaumont, or Fletcher, or (an eccentric opinion this) even the Earl of Richmond have their champions amongst those who ‘cough in ink’. So far as I am concerned, if a timeless genius, author of the greatest dramatic verse ever achieved, chose occasionally, by way of variety, to turn out some demotic jogging doggerel, he had every right to do so.

I finished The Origin of Species on Saturday. It’s hard to know quite what to say about a work now so iconic, so monumental in the modern consciousness. I’ll just say the things which surprised or touched me particularly as I read.

I thought it extraordinary that Darwin keeps apologising for the brevity of the book (which is 392 pages long in my edition); for the fact that he hasn’t been able to enter into details as fully he would have liked. So far as he’s concerned, the work is only an abstract of a future, more substantial effort. Some abstract! I imagine he was concerned, as a scholar, about criticism from the academy on the grounds of lack of evidence to support his theory. He keeps appealing to the reader to trust him. ‘I have the evidence,’ he says. ‘I am a man of honour, but I haven’t the space.’ As we know, he was pressed into print by the arrival, in the post on 18 June 1858, of Wallace’s paper. He must then have written in a hurry.

I loved the homeliness of much of the book: the genuine respect he had for the cattle breeders, horticulturalists and pigeon fanciers whose selections of better-favoured specimens of animals and plants gave him the idea for nature’s analogous selection of better-favoured variations. I loved the simplicity of many of his experiments (although he apologised for his inability to bring forward as much evidence as he would have liked, there is in fact plenty there). He takes a breakfast cup full of mud from a pond. As it dries, hundreds of different plants grow from it. He counts and identifies them all. He dries seeds, and puts them in salt water. They survive for much longer than he would have expected, and germinate afterwards. So he knows that seeds could easily have floated hundreds of miles across an ocean, thus transporting plants from one continent to another. The conclusions he comes to about the crossing of varieties and species, about the fertilisation of sexed plants, are based on tests in his garden which I, even I, could carry out (though I never will).

It was a relief and a liberation to read that the system of classification of organic beings (variety, species, genus, family, class…) is nothing more than scientists’ best efforts to group things. In fact, difference is on a continuum; it’s not a series of separated packets. Species are simply well marked varieties. Where you draw the line and say, ‘This is a species, not a variety; this is a genus, not a species,’ is a matter of judgment. Academic authorities differ.

Then, the determination to explain: the ‘Author’s Introduction’ at the beginning of the book; the summary at the end of nearly every chapter; the summary of summaries which is the last chapter, culminating in that glorious, stately, beautiful final paragraph. He is saying, ‘I will have you understand this. I am, ever so politely, rubbing your nose in it. Argue with me if you dare; but don’t pretend that you haven’t quite grasped what I’m saying.’ Of course, we know what happened at the British Association meeting in 1860, and the cause célèbre thereafter: the rage and derision of the Pharisees, the cartoons in Punch, the filtering down to the man on the Clapham omnibus of a tabloid but perhaps not wholly inaccurate version of the great controversy Darwin had unleashed. We can see that he was afraid of what might happen. He is flinching at the anticipated, not the given, blow. But with the fear, the courage. ‘This is the truth of which I am fully persuaded. I must speak it.’

It was very exciting for a person interested in language to read Darwin’s occasional analogies between natural and linguistic science. The genealogical descent of species and varieties may be compared to the descent and divergence of languages and dialects. There is a point at which we can all agree that French is a language, not a dialect. But there are plenty of communities using a form of speech which some linguists might say is a language, some merely a dialect. Then, and wonderfully for me given my recent preoccupation with early reading, towards the end of chapter 13, in discussing rudimentary organs, such as nipples in male mammals, or the stump of a tail in tailless breeds, Darwin writes: ‘Rudimentary organs may be compared with the letters in a word, still retained in the spelling, but become useless in the pronunciation, but which serve as a clue in seeking for its derivation.’ Put that in your bloody synthetic-phonics pipe and smoke it, Mr Gove! Actually, I think that most Conservatives are a good example of how evolution, by its very nature, leaves less-favoured varieties behind, having selected more-favoured. The trouble is, it’s taking a geological length of time for the less-favoured variety in this case to die out. But one shouldn’t joke, given the perverted purposes to which Darwinism was put in the 20th century.

What does Darwin not say? He doesn’t say anything about the very earliest origins of life. He has no opinion about the beginning of the universe, or about how the first single-celled creatures came into being. He doesn’t know. There’s a lot that he doesn’t know. The book was published nearly a century before the discovery of DNA. He seems to hedge his bets about whether all organic beings originated from several or from one species. And although he is increasingly aggressive as the book goes on about the impossibility, the absurdity of the idea that all species were separately and independently created and are immutable, The Origin of Species is not an explicitly atheistical work. He mentions God, or ‘the Creator’, a few times. People who believe in God could, and still can, hold to the idea that God simply set the ball rolling, and natural selection with variation did the rest.

I think of the coincidences connecting the great man’s life and mine. I’ve written about my bicycle ride past Down House when I was 11. Meanwhile, on Sundays, I was going to church and listening to stuff directly contradicting the wisdom written down, only a few miles away, 150 years previously. (And my poor old dad, good scientist as he was, was still clinging onto ‘intelligent design’ when he died, like the people — I think including Gosse’s dad — who suggested that the fossils had been left on earth by God to test our faith.) Many years later, when we went to live in Shrewsbury, we lodged in a house 400 yards from the house where Darwin was born. In 2009, the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth, Andrew Bannerman wrote and, with a group of young people, performed a beautiful quartet of scenes, at four open-air venues in the town, commemorating significant events in the young Darwin’s life there. While I was watching the scene being performed one Saturday in front of the old Shrewsbury School, which is now the town library, a group of noisy football fans, supporters of the away team due to play Shrewsbury Town that afternoon, came up the street from the station, singing their songs and chanting their chants. Andrew, dressed in early nineteenth-century costume with mutton-chop whiskers, ran across and — I heard him — said, ‘Welcome to our town. Could you just go a little more quietly? We’re performing a play across the road.’ The boys obliged immediately.

A certain intruder interrupted my reading on Friday, as I was sitting outside during a rare interval of sunshine. The intrusion provoked a little poem, which I finished yesterday (my birthday), and which is here (and already on the website).

Helen took me out to dinner last night at L’Art Gourmand. We were the only people there. It felt like having our own chambre privée. The food was delicious, and the Pernand-Vergelesses we had with it exquisite. I’ve had cards, phone messages and texts a-plenty.

The longest day of the year, and still the weather continues awful. So far, there has been virtually no summer. It’s more like a mild winter with long days.

Since finishing The Origin of Species, I’ve read two related books. The first, Evolution’s Captain by Peter Nichols, is a biography of Captain (later Rear-Admiral) FitzRoy. It’s rather racily written, a bit like historical fiction, which it isn’t. I was grateful to have lots of details filled in concerning events about which I had been vague when I read the Darwin. During FitzRoy’s first Beagle voyage, he took the four Fuegians as hostages when his whale boat had been stolen, in the vain hope that the thieves would return the boat in exchange for the captives. After the Fuegians' trip to England, during which Fitzroy attempted to 'civilise' them by introducing them to society, they returned on the second Beagle voyage, the one with Darwin on board. There was an unsuccessful attempt to re-implant them, with an English missionary, in their homeland in order that they should spread Christianity among their people. The Beagle voyages made extraordinary demands on and carried great dangers for captain and crew. The charts FitzRoy made of the southern coasts of South America were so absolutely accurate that they were in use by the Admiralty until well into the 20th century. FitzRoy’s later career was dogged by disappointments. Especially shameful was his failure as governor of New Zealand, but his work as first director of the Meteorological Office was important and pioneering. Throughout his life, FitzRoy was troubled by a gnawing sense that he had unwittingly been responsible for allowing the godless errors of Darwin’s ideas into the world. His mental state was increasingly unstable and he finally committed suicide. He had been kindness itself to Darwin during their voyage, and most of the time they had enjoyed a warm and relaxed friendship; but from very early on there were moments of inchoate rage, the first when Darwin challenged him on the matter of slavery. The saddest image I retain from the book is of FitzRoy, at the end of the famous and raucous British Association debate in 1860, standing at the back of the room, trying to make himself heard in order to denounce Darwin’s theory, waving his Bible in the air; and no one paying attention.

Then I read the story of another acquaintance of Darwin’s, also a scientist, also a Christian fundamentalist who suffered because he could not bear to accept the truth of a theory whose implications he clearly understood; also a man who married and then lost his first wife, and later married again. In Fitzroy’s case, the suggestion is that the first wife increased the religious dogmatism in him; in the case of Philip Henry Gosse, the dogmatism was there in full measure when he met Emily Bowes, his equal in evangelical piety, at the Brethren meeting in Hackney. Ann Thwaite’s biography of Gosse père, Glimpses of the Wonderful, is excellent. FitzRoy, master surveyor of coasts, whose later achievements in early meteorology have deserved the fame he has had since 2002, with one of the UK’s shipping forecast areas named after him, is however principally remembered as the man who sailed Darwin round the world, who was mentally unbalanced and who killed himself. Gosse was a truly distinguished zoologist, author of many books, Fellow of the Royal Society, ‘the David Attenborough of his time’, as Nichols writes in the FitzRoy book, where we meet Gosse briefly. He is however principally remembered, first, as the author of the absurd Omphalos, the book which attempted to square the circle or cut the knot of the evident incompatibility of the recent findings of science with the creation story as told in Genesis; secondly, as the terrifying father in Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son.

Ann Thwaite of course agrees that the Omphalos theory is absurd. In the book, Gosse asserts that the life of all organic beings is cyclical. God’s creation was an irruption into the cycle. It was necessary, at the moment of creation, to put all the marks onto a created being that would have been there if creation hadn’t happened; so, notably, a navel, an omphalos, onto Adam. This explains the existence of fossilised remains of creatures from the time before the creation. Gosse invented the word ‘prochronic’ to describe the pre-creation period. One can see the crazy logic of the idea, applied to beings which were still going concerns, as it were, at the moment of creation. Neither Thwaite nor Nichols tells us (and perhaps Gosse doesn’t attempt this, and I doubt that I shall ever read the book) how he explained the existence of fossils of creatures which were already extinct before the creation. Perhaps they were a kind of background colour.

Anyhow, the book, which Gosse hoped would satisfy both scientists and Christians, generally pleased neither, although there were a few good reviews, probably written by people anxious to be respectful to the reputation of an already eminent and popular figure. The scientists (many of whom also regarded themselves as Christians) immediately saw that the theory was preposterous. The Christians (some of whom were also scientists) wondered how Gosse could have had the effrontery to tell us what had been in the mind of God at the moment of creation, and — even worse — to suggest that God had been happy to play a kind of confidence trick on mankind. They said, rightly from their point of view, that the creation is a mystery requiring faith, not a puzzle calling for a solution.

I realise that I was wrong, in the previous entry, to say that Gosse had suggested that God put fossils on earth to test our faith. I think that’s too glib an interpretation of what he proposed. The fossils would and did test the faith of believers; but in Omphalos, from what I can make out, they are there as part of the bigger plan Gosse invented in his desperate attempt to make faith and facts fit.

The main effort of revision in Glimpses of the Wonderful concerns the portrayal of Gosse the father famously given by Edmund Gosse the son in Father and Son. I have admired the latter book since I first read it 40 years ago. It’s very entertaining, and the account of the struggle of wills and ideas brought about by the forcing of dogmatic evangelical Christianity into the mind of a growing boy reminded me pleasurably of the milder version of that experience to which I had been subjected myself. But Thwaite convincingly tells us that Father and Son is not a true portrait, despite Edmund Gosse’s insistence that it was. There’s no question that the father was a religious zealot, who believed that the world was a fallen place, and that humanity’s only hope of escaping perdition was through the saving blood of Jesus Christ. He also hoped and expected that the Second Coming would occur in his lifetime, and that he would be one of the saints who would escape death, and be taken up in the Rapture to meet Jesus in the air. But he was also, according to Thwaite, a much more loving and lovable man than his son describes. She doesn’t believe that Edmund Gosse’s childhood was as joyless, bleak and frightened as he suggests. And she points to specific stories in Father and Son whose details, emphasis or timing are clearly at variance with other, more reliable, less dramatic accounts of the events in question. In short, she believes that Edmund didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story; or perhaps that he had a bad or careless memory. I see that she has previously written his biography too. Perhaps I shall read that.

We’ve been staying here for two nights. We met Bronwyn and Stephen in a hotel in Genoa on Wednesday. They’d flown there on Monday. Today we drive down to Rodellosso for our second stay this summer. Mary, Jacques and Tess arrive there tomorrow, by which time I shall, all being well, be in Stratford-upon-Avon receiving my little medal from NATE.

I’m only going to do one thing in this entry, which is to try to describe a passion flower. I do this because, when I’ve looked closely at passion flowers before (I remember doing so for the first time at Letheringham in Suffolk), I must confess that the astonishing, detailed, I might say over-the-top rococo complexity they display tested my faith in Darwin’s theory of natural selection with variation. What succession of chance variations, produced over millennia, could have been selected to produce such a prodigy? And is it the case that the beautiful but bizarre structure I now see before me is perfectly equipped for the job it does? I suppose it must be.

At the top of the stem of the flower, there are three purple spikes. (I realise how completely lacking is my botanical terminology.) These are attached to a little green bulb which is at the centre of another arrangement of spikes, this time five in number. These are green, seen from above, and bright yellow, seen from below — that is, from the eventual stalk. These two groups of spikes have the overall appearance of a double set of potentially counter-cyclical helicopter blades; but the helicopter is at rest. Following the stem further down, we come to a receiving circlet of mauve fronds, on a pale green background, which is the innermost of three concentric expressions in mauve or purple. Moving outwards, the next — the middle circlet — is of tiny dots. The outermost circlet is of long lashes, or spears, of dark purple colouring at the nearest point to the middle of the flower (where each spear sports its own dark dot or bobble, slightly bigger than the dots in the middle circlet), followed by a period of white at the middle point of each spear, followed by a longer period of paler mauve extending to the end of the spear. All of this exotic equipment is contained, and was formerly enclosed, by a triple layer of pale green outer petals. The outermost layer of this final group numbers three; the middle and innermost number five each. The whole extraordinary arrangement stands on one simple green stem, which was surprisingly tough to tear from the plant when I did so yesterday at the end of an alley in Pontremoli.

The quick trip back to England on 29 June went well, though there was a long delay in taking off from Pisa, which meant that I missed my connection to Birmingham at Charles de Gaulle and had to wait five hours for the next one. Having left Rodellosso at half past five in the morning, I landed at Birmingham at seven o’clock in the evening, took a taxi to Stratford, rushed to my room in the Holiday Inn, changed and appeared in the banqueting hall just as dinner was starting. After dinner, two awards were made: one to Keith Davidson, who I know has given long and valuable service to NATE, especially in the area of exam reform, and one to me. The speech which the Chair of NATE, Simon Gibbons, made in my honour was, I must say, touching and gratifying. Here’s what I said in reply:

The speech went down well, and there was generous applause. I didn’t get anything tangible beyond a certificate granting me life membership of the Association, but I meant what I said in the last paragraph. (I know I quoted Edmund’s remark a few entries ago.) After being photographed and saying hello to various people, I drank a most welcome pint of English ale with a friend, and went to bed. The following morning I consumed a delicious full English breakfast on the terrace outside the Dirty Duck, and felt good. The flights back to Paris and then Pisa were on time. I had a front row window seat on the second plane, and enjoyed a magnificent clear view of the Alps. To the west there were clouds, pierced only and spectacularly by the top of the Matterhorn. I drove back to Rodellosso through the gathering dusk, arriving just before eleven.

The following day, all that week’s occupants of Rodellosso’s five apartments — Helen, me, Mary, Jacques, Tess, Stephen, Bronwyn, three Belgians and two Italians — drove to Siena for the eve-of-palio prova (rehearsal for the morrow’s race) followed by dinner in the streets of the Val di Montone contrada, of which Claudio, our host at Rodellosso, is an important member. We met him near the Porta Romana, where he had arranged privileged parking places for us. We went first to the contrada’s headquarters for aperitivi. Then we walked behind the horse, jockey and the leading signori of Val di Montone through packed streets to the Piazza del Campo. About halfway there, people began to sing the anthem of the contrada in solemn unison. There were 40,000 people in the piazza, according to Claudio’s estimate. The event itself, I secretly thought, was a damp squib. You could see that the riders were conserving their energies and tactics for the real thing. Our own jockey simply cantered round, making no attempt to race. The most impressive display of horsemanship preceded the prova. Eight (or was it ten?) cavalrymen on sleek thoroughbreds, in full ceremonial dress, trotted around the square once, then galloped round a second time, now with swords drawn and pointing forward.

The dinner, however, was another matter. Two thousand of us sat down at numbered places to an excellent five-course meal served by gloved and uniformed volunteers. Wine appeared without stint. Coffee and digestivi were provided afterwards at the headquarters. We drove home at about one o’clock. There was a brief moment of alarm after Buonconvento when the waiting carabinieri flashed at us to stop. I was probably over the limit. When they saw the British number plate, they waved us on.

Val di Montone didn't win the following day (we watched on television), but Claudio wasn't too upset.  They won last August for the first time for 22 years, and he said that one shouldn't be greedy.  Waxing lyrical, he compared the palio to life: ‘Nel palio come nella vita, bisogna la fortuna e [he emphasised the “e”] la bravura.’

The rest of the week passed pleasurably, amid great heat. I bought another copy of Iris Origo’s autobiography, and finished reading it. She writes very well, in a beautiful restrained style. But there’s a great deal that she doesn’t say. Her feelings about the fascist period in Italy are complex. We visited La Foce a second time, and I heard from the guide that her husband had been, in the early days, an enthusiastic fascist, of the benevolent kind, if such a thing is possible. He wore the black shirt, and saw fascism as a practical means of addressing the poverty and agricultural backwardness of the region of which he and his wife had bought such a large portion. But by the end of the war, at great risk to their own lives, given the savagery of the German occupation after Mussolini’s fall, the Origos were secretly sheltering resistance fighters and Allied soldiers trying to find their way back to their lines. Antonio Origo played a significant local role in the period of immediate reconstruction after the German retreat. I would have appreciated a franker account of the Origos’ shift from support for Italian fascism through disillusionment to eventual opposition. I suppose it is very difficult for people to admit that they were wrong to place their faith in an authoritarian political creed which is later utterly discredited. At the other end of the political spectrum, many communist intellectuals have had the same difficulty.

We left Rodellosso on Saturday 6 July, spent one more night at Podere Conti, and then three in Marseille, for the first two of which Bronwyn and Stephen were still with us. On the Monday, we visited the magnificent Musée des civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée. There was an excellent exhibition about European colonialism in North Africa and the Middle East. On the Tuesday, Bronwyn and Stephen took the train to Avignon to stay with friends there.

On the Wednesday and Thursday we drove from Marseille to Brittany, largely eschewing autoroutes. It was enchanting. We stopped at Pézenas, near Montpellier, a beautiful and ancient town whose pride and wealth owes much to its association with Molière, who is everywhere. Not only restaurants and cafés and the principal hotel, but garages and dry cleaners and every kind of shop bear his name. Pézenas was one of the places where Molière’s travelling troupe stayed and performed during the period when he was ‘forced to tour’. Another curiosity of the place has an English connection. Lord Clive, on his way back from governing India, stopped there. I suppose his ship must have docked at Sète or Saint Gilles. He had with him his Indian cook, who invented, so the marketing information goes, a particular kind of sweetmeat while his lordship was in residence. ‘Sweetmeat’ is exact. The petits pâtés of Pézenas look like mini Melton Mowbray pork pies (the latter, I remember, are an important element of English culture according to T.S. Eliot in Notes Towards a Definition of Culture). Like mince pies in Victorian times, they contain actual meat (lamb in this case, I think, not beef), sweetened with sugar and spices. It’s an unfamiliar taste, sweet and savoury at the same time rather than one thing or the other, but three or four of them, hot, go down well with a chilled rosé en apéritif. I noticed as we entered Pézenas that it is twinned with Market Drayton, Shropshire, evidently because of the Clive connection, the man being a Salopian and having a village in the county named after him. I was talking on the phone about this to a Shropshire friend the other day, and she told me that Market Drayton also specialises in these delicacies. I didn’t know this, despite my long association with the county. I shall go and try them this winter.

That afternoon we drove along the southern edge of the Cévennes, where hay was being made and the sunflower fields were just beginning to open their faces this late, late season. We stopped for a night at our hotel in Agen, and ate a lovely dinner at Le Margoton, where we were glad of air-conditioning because of the great heat, but took our coffee and digestifs on the terrace afterwards in the Tennessee Williams night. The next day we made our way up through western France: Bergerac, Ribérac, Jarnac, Cognac (and many smaller ‘–acs’ in between), across towards La Rochelle, over the mysterious marshes of the Vendée, then the great bridge spanning the mighty estuary of the Loire at Saint Nazaire, and home. It was an exhilarating and dream-like journey.
 
Since then, we’ve had two Ashes Tests. The first was very exciting. England eventually won by 14 runs. I sat riveted on the last morning, and was only a little disappointed (but then I’m a romantic) that the final Australian wicket fell as a result of a decision made with the aid of cameras and computers, England successfully reviewing the not-out decision of the umpire. I was hoping that the Australians would get as close as they did at Egbaston eight years ago. I know I wrote about that amazing match, to which I was listening here, while cutting the hedge with hand shears so I wouldn’t miss anything, as Flintoff picked up and consoled Brett Lee, having dismissed him and thus won the match by two runs: one of the great moments of sport. England won this season’s second Test easily; in fact, they crushed Australia, who are not competitive at the moment. I hope they improve during the third Test; I like a contest.

The eve of Bastille Day saw an impressive gathering in Cléguer to celebrate the Fête de la République. About a thousand people turned up to play Breton games, eat, drink, bounce (in the case of the children) and sing. At a previous gathering, on the evening of the ferocious hailstorm in June (the storm having passed), there was a barbecue for the inhabitants of Saint Guénaël, held in a barn near the chapel. After dinner I sang ‘The Foggy Foggy Dew’, with prose French translation. This caused me to be nominated as Saint Guénaël’s official singer at the all-Cléguer event on 13 July. I took this honour seriously, promising that I would learn a French song (an intention I have had since the New Year dinner at L’Art Gourmand). I asked Graham Caldbeck’s advice. He suggested a number of French folk songs, all of which Britten had set to music. He very helpfully directed me to the website of Hyperion, the classical music label, where one can read all the words and hear extracts from the songs as recorded. I chose ‘Quand j’étais chez mon père’. Here are the words:

Old French, of course, and I don’t know which dialect, but it’s interesting to see the most frequent difference between this and modern standard French: the substitution of ‘i’ for ‘e’, for example in ‘troupiaux’, ‘chapiau’, ‘biaux’, ‘hamiau’.

I learnt the song on the afternoon of the performance, and we made our way to the evening event, expecting that I would compete in a friendly joust with other singers of traditional French or Breton songs. Somehow, I had got the wrong end of the stick. It was karaoke! The electronic music boomed out of the enormous speakers, it was come-all-ye, rather than a competition between nominated champions of the various hamlets, so that about 40 people sang during the course of the evening. Most of the songs chosen, and performed with the aid of background pop videos, were in English. The four-person jury (all hairdressers, for some reason) did something I didn’t understand until Helen, who keeps in closer touch than I do with mass culture (not hard), explained later that it was an imitation of the behaviour of the jury in a popular television talent contest. When the singer begins, the members of the jury deliberately turn their backs on him or her, almost as an act of rudeness, like anti-Thatcher demonstrators at the lady’s funeral. If however they are seduced by what they hear, they one by one turn around to face the singer.

The ironies multiply. The only foreigner present on the stage that evening is the only person to sing a traditional French song (though ‘La Vie en Rose’ got two airings, one by a woman who really did sound like Piaf). The foreigner has learnt that ancient song a few hours earlier with the essential help of the internet. ‘Quand j’étais chez mon père’ was definitely not in the karaoke catalogue helpfully provided for potential performers. So, when I was called up, I required the mighty machine to be silenced and its flickering images to be stilled. It had been very difficult, during the 30 or so performances which preceded mine, to hold the tune in my head in competition with Frank Sinatra doing it his way and Bobby Vee asking a certain person whether she would be his girl. I kept humming it to Helen in the gaps. But I gave it my best shot, a cappella, and it came out all right. There was good and amused applause: ‘Quelque chose de different,’ said the DJ approvingly. I didn’t notice which way the jury was facing by the end. I couldn’t have eaten earlier, so anxious was I not to fail when the moment came. Only hot dogs were left by the time I’d finished, but they were very good with a bottle of rosé from the bar, by then under the stars, which were indifferent but hadn’t turned their backs. After that there were fireworks, spectacularly good for such a little place, and then it was midnight and we came home and ate some more.

There was a period of intense heat after we got back from Italy. I sat up late, night after night, under the good outside light above the front door, perfectly comfortable in a light short-sleeved shirt, reading or writing. When I was writing with the computer on my knee, insects did to the screen what Hardy’s visitors did to his ‘new penn’d line’ in ‘An August Midnight’, except of course that electronic lettering can’t be ‘besmeared’. Now it is cooler and stormy. David and Tom arrived eleven days ago and stayed until two days ago. They’ve gone to stay with other friends in the Dordogne, and will be back for a week from 7 August.

All of our summer guests have come and gone. It’s enjoyable but tiring running a small hotel plus local tour guide service. Since I last wrote, we’ve had Glenda and Julian Walton, David and Tom James for the second time, my niece Tess, my sister Mary and brother-in-law Jacques, and finally Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe, our friends from Los Angeles. I’ve visited the Côte Sauvage on numerous occasions, and swum very enjoyably there twice; I’ve done the coastal walk west from Doëlan once; I’ve shown groups round the three chapels, Saint Fiacre, Sainte Barbe and Kernascléden, concluding the afternoon’s study of ecclesiastical architecture with a drink at the Auberge de Pont-Calleck. We’ve been up every morning putting out a buffet breakfast; I’ve shopped most days for great meals in the evening, which Helen has splendidly prepared with some sous-chef help from me. The dishwasher and the washing machine have been going non-stop. Now we are calm, and the calm is welcome.

On 31 July, we drove up to the Côtes d’Armor, where Jacques’ sister and brother-in-law have a house on the Ile Grande, which despite its name is small: one can walk around it in two hours, which I did with Helen and Mary, swathed in a mystical sea fret through which the sun occasionally broke, only to be veiled again. The house is right on the beach, and opposite a very little island which claims to contain the grave of King Arthur, as several places in Brittany and the south-west of England do. I swam in the warm, gently sloping bay between the house and Arthur’s island, thinking about the description of his death in Morte d’Arthur.

I think it’s one of the most beautiful and haunting pieces of prose in English.

Mary had kindly invited Peter over for ten days, and was looking after him with great delicacy and care. He enjoyed himself. We stayed for two nights, before returning here with Tess.

The third Ashes Test ended in a draw. I think Australia would have won it if rain hadn’t intervened on the last day. So England retained the Ashes, more with a whimper than a bang. They then went on to win the fourth Test, and so the series, thanks to a devastating spell of bowling from Stuart Broad on the final day, just as it looked as if Australia might reach the total they needed in the fourth innings. All four games have been wonderful and, apart from the second, not as one-sided as England’s 3-0 tally so far might suggest. The fifth Test starts tomorrow at The Oval.

Today is a perfect day of late-summer warmth and tranquillity. I feel reposed. Yesterday I wrote a little poem about something that had happened the night before.

The last Ashes Test, at the Oval, ended in a draw. It was one of those games which demonstrates the intense peculiarity of cricket. The England selectors, accountably, abandoned their hitherto successful policy of playing three top-class attacking seam bowlers, one top-class spinner and six specialist batsmen. They replaced the injured Bresnan with an untried all-rounder, Woakes, and the out-of-form Bairstow, who had batted at number six, with an untried leg spinner, Kerrigan. Australia won the toss, chose to bat and accumulated nearly 500 runs, in the process disdaining the bowling of Woakes and demolishing that of Kerrigan. Much scornful criticism of the selectors. England began to bat towards the end of the second day. During the third day they crawled along, clearly interested only in not losing the match. By close of play, they were still about 40 runs behind the total required to avoid the follow-on. The fourth day was entirely lost to rain. It seemed that the match could only end in the tamest of draws. But on the fifth morning, England suddenly accelerated, avoided the follow-on easily, and were all out for 115 less than Australia’s score. Australia then went in and threw the bat, declaring for the second time in the match at 111 for 6, giving themselves, but also England, a chance to win. England went in and, thanks principally to a characteristic display of aggressive brilliance from Pieterson and a steadier but still confident performance by Trott, were very close to reaching the target, with plenty of wickets to spare, when bad light stopped play and the game was a draw, but not a tame draw. There was much scornful criticism of the International Cricket Council’s rule that once light levels fall below a certain point, the umpires must stop the game, regardless of the circumstances. Most people with an opinion, including me, would prefer to go back to the old system, whereby when the light was bad, the umpires ‘offered it’ to the batsmen, who were more disadvantaged and in greater physical danger than the fielding side. If the batsmen were prepared to carry on in bad light, so be it. These days the umpires’ decision to ‘offer the light’ would be more consistent than it used to be, because they’re equipped with light meters. Anyhow, it was a very exciting last day, and overall the series has been as absorbing as any Ashes series of recent years, though less heroic than that of 2005. Battle is rejoined in Brisbane in November.

So I could be doing something useful while the game was on, I cut all the hedges rather than paying Jean-Paul for the service. The result is a bit scruffier than it would be with the professional touch, but no one will notice except me.

I’ve just finished reading Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore, all 628 pages of it. It’s a magnificent account of that city from the dawn of its history to the present day. For the first two thirds or so, the writing is informative but not elegant, because there’s so much to cram in that there’s a sense of haste, and events are set down sometimes without explanation, leaving the reader puzzled. It must have been an absolutely formidable task to decide how much detail to include. As we move into the modern period, the writing is more relaxed, and causes and effects are discussed more fully. Overall, the work is an account of savagery, of the atrocity which flows from religious bigotry and hatred of the Other, although occasionally we see the three religions, and their sub-variants, and the many peoples who have inhabited Jerusalem, living together with reasonable mutual tolerance. I don’t need to be convinced of the proposition that fanatical religious certainty combined with political oppression brings disaster. Over the period the book covers, representatives of Christianity, Islam and Judaism have at various times been both persecutors and persecuted. I was grateful to learn in detail about the emergence of Zionism, the British Mandate in Palestine and the bloody events leading up to the establishment of the state of Israel. The author, whose forbears play significant roles in the story, is obviously the kind of broad-minded, liberal, perhaps secular Jewish person who knows that the problem of Israel/Palestine will only be solved when the parties learn to live with and respect the Other, and are prepared to face down their own extremist wings in order to do so. At the same time, I think he does underplay the scale of the catastrophe which the Palestinians faced when Israel was created. Palestinian violence towards Israel, in this account, seems less understandable historically (it’s never justifiable, of course) than I have believed it to be up to now. The Palestinians are presented as the only ones who wouldn’t countenance any compromise leading to a solution. Arafat comes across as little more than a terrorist. On the other hand, the author is clear that settlement-building in the occupied territories is a grievous misjudgment and a provocation, while believing that a two-state solution is yet achievable. He knows far more about the topic than I do, but I still think that that the only ultimate solution is that of one state: Israel proper, the West Bank, all of Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip under a strictly secular government in which representatives all three religions and all ethnic groups participate, with guarantees of freedom of religion for all as long as that freedom doesn’t involve the oppression of the religious persuasion of the Other. A pipe dream, those on the ground will say, but it’s a pipe dream which for many years David Ben-Gurion himself believed could become a reality. I accept that even a partial two-state solution, involving the West Bank and Israel but not the implacable Hamas in Gaza, would be a step forward.

It seems certain that the Assad government in Syria used chemical weapons last week to kill hundreds of its own people. The government denies it, of course, accusing the armed opposition of being the perpetrators. America has sent ships carrying Cruise missiles to the eastern Mediterranean. I’ve just heard on the radio that the UK parliament is being recalled on Thursday to hear what action our government proposes to take in response to an action which, if proved, the West has repeatedly said it will not tolerate. It seems clear that the US, the UK, France and Germany have already decided to do something, which will probably be to attack Syrian government installations from the sea. Russia, which has supported and armed Assad’s iniquitous regime, of course nobly says that to intervene militarily, without the UN Security Council support which it and China will always prevent, would be a breach of international law.

Here we are again, as we were 10 years ago with Iraq. Then, I was absolutely opposed to the invasion, because we were going in without the agreement of the UN Security Council. I think that events in Iraq in the decade since the invasion have proved me and countless other people right. Iraq is in a worse state now, with many ten of thousands more people killed, than it would have been if we had not invaded but had continued to work for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in other ways. Saddam gassed his people too. So I can’t consistently be in favour of attacking Syria now, even though the intervention, at least at first, is likely to be limited to air attacks from ships. On the other hand, I don’t subscribe to the position that atrocity committed in a country is only the business of the people of that country. Meanwhile, I have to accept that, amongst the Syrian opposition, there are some very nasty people indeed, who are fighting not for the rights and freedoms that I enjoy, but to establish a barbaric theocracy based on a perversion of Islam.

The Montefiore book and the book about the first Afghan war which I read earlier this year have given me some understanding of the distance in understanding between many of the countries where Islam is the predominant or the state religion, including most of the Arab countries, and Western notions of democracy and human rights. I also understand better the load of responsibility which Western imperialism bears for some of the ills which still afflict countries from North Africa to Pakistan. But it’s now a long time since the colonial powers left. Our blunders, duplicities and crimes have done their damage and left their mark, but they don’t explain everything about the wounds which Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan continue to inflict upon themselves, nor about the nature of the autocracies in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, suffocating dissent and denying basic liberties as they do. We are in a period of bewilderingly complex, seemingly endless tragedy in that part of the world.

It’s another beautiful, quiet, gentle late-summer afternoon in my untroubled and irrelevant little paradise here.

Seamus Heaney has died. He was a great poet; in my opinion easily the greatest British or Irish poet to have written since the Second World War. For 40 years he has been my hero, the guiding light of my own poor attempts to write poetry. When I saw the news on the BBC website this morning, I wasn’t deeply shocked or distressed, because I had been preparing myself for it, in the manner of a relative or friend who knows that a loved one is likely to die. That may seem a strange thing to write about a person whom I only met once, about 35 years ago, when David Thomson introduced him to me at the Roundhouse in Camden Town. But he was for me, as he was for thousands of other admirers, the ideal of what a poet should be: accessible without being easy, a master in the employment of form in verse, an acute and loving recorder of the characteristics of the country, people and culture from which he sprang. His stance on the Troubles was hard to maintain, but the right one: an essential sympathy with the sufferings of his own folk, the Catholic minority in the Six Counties, and a steadfast refusal to support violence as a response to those sufferings. I loved also his love for Dante, Horace and Virgil. Of all the poems whose mastery I have wondered at, none exceeds in my admiration ‘Anything Can Happen’ in District and Circle, where he turns a version of a Horace ode into a comment on the wider meaning of the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Whenever I sit down to write, here or in London, at least two collections of his are always on my table, as talismans. In moments of despair at my own limitations, I pick one up and read something at random, to encourage myself. I know how sad Martina Thomson will be. She and David knew Seamus and Marie Heaney well, and Seamus and Marie visited Martina in London last autumn.

One of the good things about writing a diary, as long as you don’t doctor it retrospectively to try to make yourself wiser than you are, is that it can show you how wrong you can be. Only three days ago I was assuming that military action against Syria had already been decided on, and that the recall of the UK parliament was a formality to give a veneer of democratic accountability to a done deal. Wrong. I think now that Cameron made, from his own point of view, at least two miscalculations. He might have imagined that Miliband would support him, as the Tories supported Blair in the fateful decision to invade Iraq. He might have imagined that dissent on his own side would be limited. Neither was the case. The government motion which was debated in parliament yesterday was in any case considerably weakened in force from that which had originally been envisaged; it only endorsed the principle of possible military action, once the UN inspectors currently in Damascus investigating the chemical attack had reported back to the Secretary-General, and it promised another debate and vote in parliament before any actual military action. Miliband tabled a Labour amendment, very similar in content to the government motion, but expressed in slightly stronger terms, which predictably was defeated. The surprise was that the government motion was also then defeated, by 13 votes, with 30 Conservatives and nine Liberal Democrats voting against. Cameron immediately stood up and said he respected the will of parliament. So I think that, unless Assad does something even worse than what he has already done (like making a habit of gassing his own people) there will be no overt UK involvement in military action.

I’ve thought a lot in the last three days about the dilemma which the politicians face. Of course unanimity at the Security Council is desirable. It isn’t going to be achieved. The holding and use of chemical weapons has been illegal since 1925 under the Geneva Protocol. The Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993 augments that measure. It outlaws the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. 189 of the 196 countries in the world have signed and ratified the convention. One of the five countries which have neither signed nor ratified is Syria.

Then there is the UN’s 2005 ‘responsibility to protect’ initiative. This gives the international community the right to intervene in a country which is failing to protect its own citizens from genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. But the authority to intervene militarily, the last resort, rests solely with the Security Council and the General Assembly. So we’re back to the impasse at the Security Council. Yesterday, the BBC published the legal opinions of several international lawyers and human rights experts. One of them, Geoffrey Robertson, whom I’ve always respected, writes:

‘There has never been any need for a Security Council resolution approving action to stop, punish or deter a crime against humanity. Before the UN or League of Nations were established there were well-recognised situations where action was taken against piracy, against slavery. More recently, we have action taken by NATO to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. That did not require a UN resolution, which Russia would have blocked. If Russia wants to prevent military action against Syria, for a crime against humanity of using chemical weapons to mass murder its own people, then it must bring a motion of condemnation in the Security Council, as it tried to do with Kosovo. It failed, getting only three votes, so NATO action in that case is regarded as legitimate. So was the NATO use of force to create safe havens in Iraq in the 1990s.’

Admittedly there are other views in that article which differ from Robertson’s, but he is not alone in his opinion that there are circumstances in which force may legitimately be used without Security Council agreement.

Difficult, difficult to know what position to take. It’s no consolation to those suffering in Syria, but the House of Commons was at its best yesterday, at least so far as argument is concerned, with serious and careful speeches made both for and against intervention. But I’m ashamed of my own party’s tactics. There was no substantive difference between the government motion and the Labour amendment. If Labour had wanted to refuse military action in any event, that would have been a straightforward and honourable difference. But it didn’t. The difference turned on the emphasis of words, and it’s impossible to escape the conclusion that Labour acted as it did simply in order to expose Cameron’s weakness in the face of opposition from his own side. I hate numerous things that Cameron’s government is doing, but this wasn’t an issue which should have been decided by a contest within UK party politics.

I think I’m bending towards support for military intervention if all else fails. The situation is different from that in Iraq in 2003. Saddam’s chemical weapons had been used 15 years previously, not a week previously. The invasion wasn’t a punishment for what Saddam did in 1988; it was a punishment for his supposed (but non-existent) role in the 11 September attacks. The weapons inspection team wasn’t given the chance to complete its job. The sanctions were having their effect. This was all known at the time, so I’m not relying on what we discovered later about the falsity of the reports of his having weapons of mass destruction.

Military intervention in Syria, I imagine, would not touch the chemical weapons dumps, assuming we know where they are, for fear of simply spreading the poison, but it would say to the Assad regime that it can’t use an illegal weapon against its own people without unpleasant consequences. If we do nothing, we’re saying to Assad that if he wants to use chemical weapons, we’ll protest for a while but ultimately we’ll stand aside.

Last Sunday was the Fête de Saint Guénaël. For the first time, Helen and I were involved as volunteers. I may have written last autumn that we were given our official polo shirts, with ‘Les Amis de Saint Guénaël’ inscribed on the back, at the October meeting where the accounts of the 2012 event were presented. On Saturday I and about 20 others peeled 250 kilograms of potatoes. My job on Sunday, together with my friends Philippe and Pierre-Yves, was to sell bottles of wine and water to the 600 visitors eating lunch. Helen had the harder job: she was one of a dozen people doing the washing up. It was a beautiful, clear, hot day (as it has been for a week, and is today).

After lunch, spectators were treated to an exhibition of foolish team games, rather like Jeux Sans Frontières of yesteryear. For one of the games, ‘newly weds’ had to undergo various trials, including bicycling across the rough grass of the field, the ‘bride’ sitting on the handlebars or the crossbar while the ‘groom’ wobbled. The couples then dressed up in full wedding costume before walking along a slippery plank over a shallow pool which had been created in the middle of the meadow, the ‘groom’ gallantly carrying the ‘bride’ in his arms. This last ordeal was the highlight of the afternoon, since many of the couples fell into the pool, and had to be rescued by two lifeguards wearing old-fashioned one-piece men’s swimming costumes and flippers, though the water was no more than two feet deep. Another parody of the sacrament of marriage was offered all day long by two beefy men dressed as brides, who, in an inaccurate reference to le marriage pour tous which has recently entered in law in France (inaccurate of course because there is no chance of the Roman Catholic church offering marriage to same-sex couples any time soon, so it will remain an exclusively civil ceremony for the foreseeable future), were ‘united’ by a ‘priest’ just after midday (the actors having respectfully waited until the real priest in the chapel had completed the real mass, which was attended by about a hundred people, and included a baptism), and then queened about (I hope I may use the term) all day, offering kisses and tantalising glimpses of garters just above the knee.

We have recently got to know a couple who like us are incomers to Brittany, in their case from Paris. Five years ago they bought a house near Saint Guénaël. Gérard is a painter and photographer, Gertrude a designer and bookbinder. Gérard has done a very good copy of Gauguin’s ‘Le Christ Jaune’, which he formally gave to the chapel at the end of the mass and which the priest dedicated and blessed. Gérard told me, in one those stories whose irony is replicated whenever great works of art aren’t recognised at the time of their making, that Gauguin offered the piece to the rector of Pont-Aven when he’d finished it. This was in 1889. The rector refused it, saying that the work was too crude and too yellow. It’s now in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York State, and beyond price. I mentioned this to Jocelyne Gragnic, one of the leading members of the Saint Guénaël community. She’s married to Dominique, and they run one of the three farms in the hamlet. She paints too, and she said she didn’t like the Gauguin either. Some of her work is annually on display at the fête: the structure which we English would call the portaloo is embellished by her murals. They show a certain naïf crudity not unlike Gauguin’s.

During the evening, sausages were served, either hot-dog style or wrapped in crêpes. The bar had been open uninterruptedly since before noon. There was karaoke, as on 13 July. After my puzzling experience then, I kept a low profile and didn’t offer to sing.

The following morning, I arrived at the field at about half past nine and helped to clear up. The benches were stacked, the trestle tables flattened and stacked. Philippe and I deposited hundreds of empty bottles in cardboard boxes and took them to the nearest bottle bank in his van with trailer and my Land Rover. I watched while tractors with the double-spike attachment on the front, normally used for skewering bails of hay or straw, lifted the stacks of benches and tables onto long trailers and towed them away to barns for storage until next year. Another tractor towing a water cistern arrived at the pool and pumped the water out of the pool and into the cistern. A digger then turned up and shovelled the banks of earth back into the hole. By lunchtime the only structures standing were the marquee in which 600 people had been entertained the previous day, and the canvas lean-to in which the cooking had been done. About 60 of us sat down to lunch. After lunch, Anne the treasurer gave her initial financial report: the takings had been 13,000 and a few hundred euros. There will be several thousand euros to subtract by way of costs (purchase of the food and drink, hire of the marquee, public-address system and bouncy castle for the children), but the event will still have shown a handsome profit, all of which goes to the maintenance of the chapel. And it had been, everybody agreed, a great day. It’s quite remarkable that the inhabitants of a settlement containing perhaps fifteen houses, admittedly with the help of a few outliers like us, can achieve such a formidable feat of organisation.

Seamus Heaney’s funeral took place on Monday at a church in Dublin. His son Michael spoke most movingly. He ended his tribute by telling the congregation that his father’s last communicative act, a few minutes before he died, was to send Marie a text: Noli timere (‘Do not fear’). What an extraordinary way to end a great life! Paul Muldoon also spoke, in his droll way. His best joke concerned the electronic device which Seamus had fitted after his stroke, and of which he liked to say, ‘Blessed are the pacemakers.’ Seamus was buried later that day in St Mary’s churchyard, Bellaghy, Derry, his home town. I’ve just read the piece in The Irish Times about the ceremony. I see that two of the people I knew from Channel 4 days, Neil Martin and John Kelly, were present. Neil, who’s a wonderful musician, played a lament on the cello together with the uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn.

President Obama has said that the United States will attack Syria in order to damage Assad’s military capability, and to punish him for the chemical weapons attack of 21 August. Though the president has the authority to do this without congressional approval, he will seek a vote of support in Congress next week, and it looks certain that he will get it, since the Republican leaders also support military action. President Hollande similarly will seek the approval of the National Assembly. This is an interesting development: three leaders (two presidents and a prime minister), all with the authority to declare war without the approval of their legislatures, have nonetheless decided to seek that approval, unsuccessfully in the case of our prime minister, in all probability successfully in the case of the presidents. Today, for the first time, President Putin hinted that he might support a UN Security Council resolution if he were absolutely convinced that the Syrian government had been responsible for the 21 August attack. He’s never said that before. If Putin were to be convinced (or, nearer the truth, if he were prepared to admit in public what he must know in private to be the case), that would change the game. I can’t imagine he would join in any attack on Syria, having steadily armed the Syrian government for so many years, but he might put severe pressure on Assad to leave. If that happened, there might be the possibility of a political solution of some kind. This is all speculation. Obama will be in Russia tomorrow, at the annual G20 conference. He is bound to talk to Putin about Syria. I can’t help thinking (probably wishfully) that Putin’s slight change of position in advance of meeting Obama might have been made in order to allow another, more significant change of position to seem less sudden and contradictory.

I’ve just re-read Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. I read it for the first time only two or three years ago but, looking back through the diary, I don’t seem to have written about it then, which surprises me, given what an impression it made. To read a big book twice within a short period of time seems a great indulgence, given the quantity of big books I’ve never read and the shortness of time left to me, but I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said that it is better to read one book six times (as long as it is good) than six books once. He exaggerated as usual. Helen had been looking for something new to read, and I suggested Tristram Shandy, but I could see after a few days that she wasn’t going to persevere with it, so — telling myself that a series of long factual books had ben hard pounding these last few months, and I deserved a reader’s holiday — I picked it up and allowed myself a few nights of pleasure. It’s the most extraordinary achievement. Very funny, rather bawdy, and quite out of its time in the way that the author, in the guise of the narrator, plays with his reader.

He allows himself outrageously long digressions and stories within stories which have nothing to do with the main plot and the central characters, who are Tristram, his father and mother, his uncle Toby, his uncle’s man Trim, Parson Yorick, Doctor Slop and the widow Wadman.

The author/narrator addresses his imagined reader(s) as a different person or people at different times, sometimes ‘madam’, sometimes ‘sir’, sometimes plural. He inveighs against or appeals to critics as part of the onward rush of his rhetoric. The roll call of learned sources he adduces, mostly authentic, sometimes invented, is immensely long. I will admit that I skip-read some pages where I could see that Sterne was simply enjoying himself, and nothing new would be added to the action. Surely the book must be the most original novel, structurally, of the eighteenth century, and I wasn’t surprised to see from the introduction that Joyce much admired it. It seems to me that it isn’t finished; it certainly comes to a very abrupt conclusion. The first eight volumes were published serially, in pairs, and were hugely popular. The ninth and last is the only singleton. Perhaps Sterne, knowing how ill he was, felt he had to bring down the curtain while he still had strength.

I would have loved one more chapter, to see whether Toby does marry the widow, and what occurred on their wedding night in the matter of his wound in the groin. Of all the moments in the book which made me laugh out loud, none was more delightful than the widow’s coy question to Toby: whereabouts had he received the wound in his groin? Toby, innocent as ever, sends Trim off to find the map of the siege of Namur in the attic of his house. Trim knows perfectly well that the widow’s question was attempting to identify a place on Toby’s body, not on the continent of Europe, but he does his master’s bidding. The double-entendre reminded me of a joke that my good friend and colleague at Channel 4, Stuart Cosgrove, used to make. He was perhaps the most peripatetic of the C4 commissioning team, charging around Britain and Ireland promoting and commissioning production outside London. His base was and is in Glasgow. He suffers from a skin complaint. He went into a Glasgow chemist with a doctor’s prescription for a cream to ease the itching. The chemist asked him where he would be applying the cream. Stuart, who had a plane to catch, replied, ‘In Birmingham.’

I’ve had, for me, a moderately productive few days on the poetry. As Polonius might have said, I’ve done comical, pastoral and tragical. The comical was suggested by the episode in Tristram Shandy where, to complete the narrator’s early misfortunes, he loses his foreskin at the age of five when a sash window falls on it as he is pissing out of the window, the chambermaid having failed to put a pot in the chamber. This delight at another’s fictional wounding was combined with something I came across on the internet: a group of preposterous American Christians have got together to protest about the loss of their foreskins when they were new-born babies. What right, they clamour, had doctors or our parents to have us circumcised when there was no need? A perfect example, it seems to me, of rich, lucky people having nothing better to do than complain about something that doesn’t matter very much. They’d be better off doing something practical, like giving money to campaigns against female genital mutilation in poor countries (and in backward communities in rich countries). To these two sources I added some autobiographical thoughts, speaking as a circumcised man.

The next poem is only pastoral in a rather broad sense, since it concerns game birds, not sheep. It describes the endearing habit which flocks of partridges (coveys, to use the precise collective noun) have of running along the road in front of the car while disdaining to use their power of flight until all ground-based possibility of escape from danger has been exhausted.

The tragical poem is eight lines about the crushing of the Arab spring by theocratic authoritarianism or secular military force.

On this last topic, there has been a significant development in the Syrian situation. Russia has said that it will support a UN resolution requiring the Assad regime to give up its chemical weapons. The Assad regime has now admitted that it has these weapons and has said that it would join the Chemical Weapons Convention prohibiting their use. There have been straws in the wind about this in recent days. The first was Putin’s hint which I mentioned in the last entry. The second was John Kerry’s remark that Assad could avoid an American attack if he gave up his chemical weapons ‘within a week’. That is an impossibly ambitious timetable, of course, but it seemed to show that negotiations were going on behind the scenes. Now it emerges that at the G20 Obama and Putin discussed the idea of Assad abandoning his chemical weapons, in return for America staying its hand.

If this were to happen, it would be an good outcome for all the parties to the dispute, except for the Syrian people who have suffered and died under Assad, including, most notoriously, those who were gassed on 21 August. Russia could claim that its insistence on purely diplomatic means of resolving the crisis had been vindicated. America could claim that its credible threat of force had forced Russia and Assad to see reason. (Obama last night gave a characteristically eloquent address, whose text I’ve just read, to the American people.) Assad avoids attack. The UK’s vote against military action seems in hindsight to have showed foresight. President Hollande looks good too; he would have supported military action, despite the inconclusive and unimpressive debate in the National Assembly last week, and now perhaps he doesn’t have to back his words with deeds. We shall see. Even if a UN resolution is passed, there will be lengthy complexities and disputes to do with the organisation and verification of the removal of the weapons. And the civil war in Syria, with more than 100,000 dead now, is no nearer a conclusion. But the possibility of Russia, and perhaps China too, being for once on the same side as the US, the UK and France in the Security Council, is a cause for some small cheer.

A week ago, I sent Mike Raleigh a few of my recent poems. Yesterday he wrote back encouragingly, but with this comment on the owl poem which was in the diary entry of 20 August:

‘One technical point, derived from country living, upon the owl calls. If too-whit too-woo is what you heard, it was almost certainly a tawny (big round head, sentinel eyes, greyish or reddish-brownish depending on the season and the light).  However, if you heard both too-whit and too-woo, you heard a female (too-whit) answered by a male (too-woo).  But then poetry was never an exact science.’

Of course he’s right, as the internet has rapidly confirmed. So I’ve changed the poem, and now it’s much better:

I went to London on 12 September for three days, to attend the 50th-birthday party of the National Association for the Teaching of English. I thought I ought to be there, after the little gong they gave me in June. I also hoped to see Martina Thomson. I had spoken to her on the phone about a week previously. She said she was ‘going downhill’ with her myeloma, but was looking forward to my visit. When I got to Camden Town, I phoned and left a voice message. The next morning I phoned again; message box full. I went round. No one there. I wrote a postcard (in fact two postcards, pictures of Fra Angelico’s Annunication in Cortona, which I had promised to take to her) and pushed them through the letterbox, leaving my phone numbers (which she had anyway) and fearing the worst. The strange thing, I realised, was that I didn’t have contact details for any of Martina’s three sons, nor for any of her other friends. Normally there’s a network of some kind. I attended the birthday party, and did some tidying up in the flat. Just before I left Kerfontaine, I had received an email from Stephen Eyers with the good news that his daughter Chloe had had her first baby, a boy, two weeks late. Stephen had become a grandfather for the first time. On Saturday afternoon I went to University College Hospital and saw little Arthur. In fact I picked him up, attached to wires by all four limbs as he was, after various complications during and after the birth. Then I went down to Stephen and Theresa in Raynes Park, and spent the evening and night there. We celebrated the birth with very good champagne (Nicolas Feuillatte 2005) and Stephen took me out for a splendid meal. On the Sunday morning he drove me to Southampton airport, where I met Helen’s brother Adam and sister-in-law Hazel, and we flew back to Brest.

Adam and Hazel stayed with us for a week. During the week I phoned Martina’s number several times; message box always full. The next Sunday morning I drove Adam and Hazel back to Brest airport for their return to England. That afternoon, someone answered the telephone at Martina’s. It was Tim, one of the sons. She was dying in UCH. That evening I went to Lorient station to meet Paul Ashton, who was coming to stay for a few days. The next day, eight days ago, was the most glorious blazing late-summer day. Not a cloud in the sky. The three of us went to the Côte Sauvage, where we marvelled at the beauty of the waves and the cliffs, and wandered along the soft sand as the tide came in. When we got back, there was a phone message from Tim that Martina had died that morning. I rang and spoke to Luke, another of the sons. He gave me an email address, so I was able to write something to the three of them. I shan’t go to the funeral, even if I’m told when it is, but I said in the email that I would help in any practical way the sons wanted when I’m back in London. I somehow don’t expect to hear from them. I hope to be proved wrong.

Martina was one of the most remarkable people I've met in my life, and my friendship with her, both before and after David died, has been a blessed gift to me.  She was a poet, a potter, an engraver, an art therapist, a translator of poetry and prose from the German, an actor in her younger years.  I wrote on 30 August that she and David had been good friends with Seamus and Marie Heaney.  She used to show me the letters and postcards which Seamus sent her from time to time: writings for one person only, done with all the care and point of his poems for many.  She was born in the late 1920s or early 1930s (she was always evasive about her age), in Vienna, and moved to Berlin when she was little.  She was walking home from her piano lesson when Kristallnacht happened.  She asked someone (I think a relative) what was happening. The reply was, ‘Du arme kind.’ She had a Jewish father and a Gentile mother.  The family got out, by different routes, to London. I am so grateful for the day in 1974 when I went into the Edinburgh Castle and got into conversation with David, a conversation that led to a friendship lasting 14 years with him, and nearly 40 with Martina. Only three months ago, she went by herself to Italy, to Trani and Bari, and sent me a book about Frederick the Second. She had tremendous courage in the face of an illness which she knew would kill her. And one last, fascinating thing about her: while being married to David, she maintained a close and possibly romantic friendship with C.L.R. James, whom she had got to know because he had been a lodger in her mother’s house. The relationship was so close that she was present at James’s funeral in Trinidad. (I should say that David knew about Martina’s attachment to ‘Mr James’, as she always called him. I think he had one or two attachments of his own during their long and happy marriage.)

So I had been in UCH, holding a two-day-old baby in my arms, while Martina was dying in the same hospital. I blame myself a little. I should have been bright enough to guess that our local hospital would be where she was. The Winter’s Tale: ‘Thou met’st with things dying, I with things new-born.’ Except that I didn’t meet her; not then.

That rarest of things, an international agreement, does seem to be holding on the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons. A UN resolution requiring Syria to identify them and give them up for destruction was passed. The inspectors from the organisation in Holland charged with ridding the world of chemical weapons have arrived in Syria. We shall see how closely the Syrian government adheres in reality to the timetable which it has in principle accepted. Meanwhile, the civil war there continues, with increasingly murderous divisions within the ranks of the opposition, between the secular forces which the West is trying to support and the djihadists who simply want to replace Assad with an Islamic autocracy and sharia law. This plays perfectly into Assad’s and Russia’s hands, of course. All over the Muslim world, from Nigeria to Pakistan, barbarities continue. Just over two weeks ago, Somali terrorists killed many people in a shopping mall in Nairobi. The same weekend, Christians were murdered while worshipping in a church in Peshawar. This last weekend, more people were killed in the same city. At about the same time, students in an agricultural college in Nigeria were slaughtered. There are regular atrocities in Iraq and in Afghanistan. In the latter case, it seems to me more and more likely that there will be a violent internal struggle, and possibly civil war, when the UK and America leave at the end of next year.

The perpetrators of almost all of these unspeakable acts are people who believe that at the end of their campaign of terror an Islamist caliphate will be established, which will be a mighty power in the world. All forms of dissent from their version of Islamic teaching will be suppressed. These people are deluded, but the West really doesn’t know what to do about them, and local governments, often corrupt, are ill equipped to deal with the crises as they occur. Obama’s policy of attacking terrorist hideouts on the Afghani-Pakistani border using drones doesn’t seem to be working, and of course the drones sometimes kill innocent civilians. Last week Paul said that the only thing that will solve the problem is dollars, not arms. In other words, if you can give the common people of these countries prosperity, or at least a route towards prosperity, they’ll abandon their support for fundamentalist organisations, and even turn against the organisations’ leaders (who are often not poor themselves; Bin Laden was rich). I’d like to think that this is true; it’s certainly part of the truth. In any case, it’s the long view. In the short term, there is blood and misery.

There is a tiny ray of hope coming from Iran, where the newly elected president has been making conciliatory gestures towards America. He and Obama have exchanged letters and had a telephone call. He insists that Iran has no ambition to have a nuclear weapon. His predecessors have said the same thing, but the Iranian president says this time that the problem of Iran’s nuclear ambitions (‘problem’ so far as the West and Israel are concerned, he says) will be solved quickly. Perhaps there could be a peaceful outcome, with Iran getting all the help it needs to build nuclear power stations (just as Germany, for example, is getting rid of hers) in exchange for a verifiable commitment not to develop a weapon. One can hope. Unfortunately, Israel also has nuclear weapons which it will not even admit that it has.

America has arrived at another budget crisis brought on by Republican spite and stupidity. Today is the first day of its new fiscal year. A budget for the year has not been passed, because the Republicans wanted to attach to it a postponement of the implementation of Obama’s health care law. Rightly, the Democrats in Congress and Obama himself have refused to countenance such an absurd and self-serving proposal. So parts of the American state machine will be closed down until there is a resolution of the crisis. And a further crisis looms on 17 October, when America will reach its borrowing limit. I don’t know why the borrowing limit needs to keep going up and up; at some point America must borrow less. I guess there are two factors: the wars, and the borrowing necessary to bring the country through the post-2008 financial emergency, which it is now doing with some success.

It looks as if the vile Berlusconi may have over-reached himself. He has been convicted of one of the many crimes of which he is accused, and the conviction has been upheld on appeal. The long and (from the Italian state’s point of view) windingly inefficient road by which convicted criminals can postpone their punishment has come to a stop. A Senate committee will decide later this week whether to expel Berlusconi from the Senate. As a distraction from this looming humiliation, Berlusconi tried to bring down the coalition government the other day by ordering his party’s five ministers to leave the coalition cabinet, purportedly over the imposition of a sales tax which the Democratic Party wishes to introduce, and which I’m sure is essential in helping to bring down Italy’s huge budget deficit. Now some of Berlusconi’s previously loyal lieutenants have said that they will back the government in a confidence vote tomorrow, thus keeping the coalition in existence. If that happens, I think it will be the end of Berlusconi, finally, and not before time. Stabbed in the front, not the back, by his own henchmen. Good. The only thing I’m sorry about is that the bastard is apparently too old to go to jail. He will serve his sentence under house arrest. Some house. But there are several other court cases pending. I wish every humiliation heaped on him. No one since Mussolini has brought such shame on Italy.

This morning, I helped Rosa fill in some forms on which she applied for extra assistance towards her medical costs. (The French national health service isn’t like the British NHS; people are individually insured. Rosa is insured through the organisation, le mutuel, to which Albert paid dues when he was working.) The forms were fiendishly complicated, and the volume of accompanying documentation required was formidable. I think the French state may be suffering from a sclerosis brought on by the excessive complexity of its administrative systems.

It’s been raining hard today, but now the clouds have parted and the sun casts shadows. Most of the flowers in their pots look as healthy as they did in July.

A week ago we took the train from Lorient to Paris, and had three days here. The usual pleasures: walking, museums, parks, eating and drinking. We stayed and are again staying in Jean’s and Annick’s little flat in Montmartre. On Thursday we went down to Marseille, and have spent the weekend celebrating Mary’s 50th birthday. The occasion was properly marked. About 40 people crowded into a little Syrian restaurant on Saturday night. Mary was presented with a very expensive camera, which she had said she wanted and to which most of us contributed. Jacques gave her a beautiful diamond ring, which was a complete surprise to her. I composed and read a little vers d’occasion, in the two languages:

The evening was enlivened at one point by an energetic belly dancer, much slimmer and sexier than belly dancers usually are, at least in my limited experience. I remember seeing a few in Istanbul 40 years ago. This performance was a surprise gift from the management. The young woman always performs in that restaurant on Saturday nights.

Jacques’ daughter Sara came from Cannes for the weekend, with her little daughter Ainhoa, aged two and a half, who is a delight. She can count up to twelve in four languages: French, Spanish, English and Russian. I told Sara she should exhibit her enfant miraculeuse on La Croisette. Ainhoa is also charmingly philosophical. She had lost her ball while she and her mother were out shopping. We went back to the place where they had been. It wasn’t there. ‘Tant pis; c’est la vie,’ she said with a resigned sigh as she sat on my shoulders. I bought her a new ball. At lunch one day, Mary produced a splendid array of cheeses. ‘Mon fromage préféré est fromage râpé,’ she said, to general amusement.

Helen and I went for a long walk yesterday afternoon, in the lovely autumn sunshine of the south. Yesterday evening we went to Jacques’ sister and brother-in-law, and had plenty of very good champagne and a delicious curry. This morning we took the train back here. Helen’s having a sleep, and I’ve come for a wander. I’ve never been into this cemetery before, and particularly wanted to, because of the poem I’ve written about its cats and some of its famous occupants, inspired by and dedicated to Keith Fulton and Lou Pepe.

I’ve just (I think — I always have to say that) finished a poem called ‘Unauthorised Absence’, about the fact that my great-grandfather, who was born in 1870, the year of the Forster Education Act, rarely gained a ‘perfect attendance, perfect punctuality’ certificate at the end of the school year, because his mother always allowed him a holiday on his birthday. It’s given me a lot of trouble, but with some critical help from Paul Ashton over the weekend I think I’ve got it right.

There’s still impasse in America over the budget and over the need to raise the debt ceiling. Obama is holding firm. He knows that most Americans rightly blame the Republicans. I imagine that they’re trying to find a way of yielding which at the same time gives them some non-essential concession as a face-saver. I hope they’re severely punished in the mid-term elections next year, and that Obama then has an easier time for his last two years, and can get a few more things done that need doing.

Hundreds of people have recently been drowned in the Mediterranean, trying to get into Europe via Lampedusa, Malta or Sicily. They’re poor people from various African countries, and more recently from Syria, fleeing penury or persecution or both. Wicked traffickers (the French word, I read, is passeurs) charge huge sums to transport them from Libya or Tunisia in dangerous, overcrowded boats. It’s a calamity to which the European authorities offer no adequate response. As with the problem of Islamist terrorism, about which I wrote the other day, the eventual answer is greater prosperity and political freedom in the countries from which the migrants come. But that’s a long way off, and in the case of some countries it’s a pipe dream. The little island of Lampedusa has been absolutely admirable in its compassionate reception of these desperate people, and in fulfilling the gruesome responsibility of dealing with the drowned.

I don’t say that migrants of all kinds should be allowed to stay in Europe without check; there’s no chance of that politically anyway. But there needs to be a proper Europe-wide policy of reception and sorting of the migrants in humane conditions, surveillance of the sea between north Africa and the closest European coasts, and agreements where possible with the governments of the countries from which the people have come and from which they have embarked (not possible, I know, in Somalia and other failed or failing states; Libya seems in danger of collapse too) to outlaw trafficking and punish the traffickers. The richer countries in the north of the continent, which is where the migrants often want to go, should contribute generously. I fear this is more pipe-dreaming.

We’re on the way back to Kerfontaine. The day is misty and overcast. Last night we ate in a new restaurant: Le Bistrot de Paris, in Rue de Lille, near the Musée d’Orsay. It was splendid. I’m sure we shall return. But I think that for the next few weeks I should impose a period of restraint on myself. That’s an unusual resolution for me to make, I know. I just feel like giving my liver a rest and losing a bit of weight.

France is in a malaise. There is a growling, out-of-sorts discontent with the government. Hollande is profoundly unpopular, even though the economic policies his government is pursuing are exactly those needed to get the country out of its difficulties with deficit and debt, and to reduce the frightening level of unemployment. Le Monde told me the other day that the amount of money the state is losing as a result of illegal tax evasion and legal but immoral tax avoidance is between 60 and 80 billion euros a year. The combined amount that the countries of the EU are losing is estimated at 2,000 billion euros: an unimaginably vast sum of money. I’ve written before, speaking of the UK or France, that if these losses could be stanched, the government’s whole budgetary policy would be different. France currently pays out about 47 billion euros a year in interest on its debt; the same amount that it spends on its schools. It’s easy to see what a difference would be made by the recouping of even half of what it’s losing as a result of the actions of dishonest wealthy individuals and clever tax-avoiding businesses.

I think that part of the problem is that Hollande, personally, doesn’t impress. He doesn’t seem to have stature, even for those who, like me, are on his side. He hasn’t addressed the French in terms which would force them to face realities, to recognise that progress towards greater and greater prosperity isn’t automatic and guaranteed, but that France is still and always will be a great country if certain painful adjustments are made. He’s muddling through. And there’s this gnawing fear that the Front National is waiting to make big gains in the municipal and European elections next year: intellectuals of the left and even the moderate right fret about another period of Poujadism, and the permanent insertion of a racist party in the elected institutions of the state. The brutal fact is that large numbers of otherwise perfectly nice, even admirable French people are racist. Rosa is.

Paris is full of beggars and down-and-outs. I don’t remember ever seeing so many.

We’re back at home now, on a beautiful warm autumn afternoon, with chestnuts of both kinds on the ground and the apples urgently requiring to be picked, which I’ll do tomorrow. As I drove into Plouay an hour ago to do some shopping, the row of cider apple trees on the left as you go into the town looked like trees that Gauguin might have painted; the colour of their fruit is almost too intense to be true. One or two of the trees had already been stripped, and a huge heap of apples lay on a sheet on the ground, waiting to be taken to the press.

There are two bits of good international news. The first is that it looks as if the US Congress has done a deal which will re-open the federal government and avoid a default on the country’s debt tomorrow. And, most important, the deal does not damage Obama’s health care law. Some Republicans in the House will vote with the Democrats. They will be vilified by the lunatics in the Tea Party. I hope that this debacle may have shown a few Americans what crazy and destructive ideologues the Tea Party people are.

The second bit of good news is that the talks in Geneva between Iran and the US, UK, France, Germany, Russia and China seem to be edging towards some kind of agreement on Iran’s nuclear capabilities. There are lots of details to be sorted out, but there has never been such a relatively cordial atmosphere in discussions on this previously poisonous topic. Obama started the process of détente as soon as he came to power. Since the moderate president, Hassan Rouhani, was elected in August to replace the crazy Ahmadinejad, progress has been rapid. (I know I’ve just described as crazy both a group of right-wing Americans who would like, among other schemes, to bomb Iran ‘into the stone age’, in their charming phrase, and a man who believes that America is ‘the great Satan’. Stet.)

The US Congress has indeed passed a law, at the last minute as so often recently, which will re-open the federal government and deal with the debt ceiling, at least until early next year. Obama’s health care law is unaffected. It’s a great triumph for him, and a humiliation for the Republicans. The New York Times got it right: ‘The Republican Party slunk away on Wednesday from its failed, ruinous strategy to get its way through the use of havoc.’ But the American people are sick of seeing their legislators govern only by crisis. There needs to be a bi-partisan way of bringing America’s enormous debt under control.

I’ve been out in the garden picking apples, either off the trees or off the ground. There’s a profusion, but not on the scale of the glut of two years ago which provoked my poem of hommage to Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple-Picking’. The hail of 7 June has meant that almost every apple has at least one dry scar where it was hit by a hailstone. Fortunately, the scars don’t seem inclined to rot. I was accompanied in one tree by a beautiful little goldcrest, who didn’t seem frightened of me. Wikipedia tells me that Linnaeus gave the name Regulus regulus to this bird — ‘Little king little king’ — in reference to the legend of the king of the birds. I had thought that the wren was the bird referred to in the legend. The article has this to say on the subject:

‘Aristotle (384 BC — 322 BC) and Pliny (23 AD — 79) both wrote about the legend of a contest amongst the birds to see who should be their king, the title to be awarded to the one that could fly highest. Initially, it looked as though the eagle would win easily, but as he began to tire, a small bird which had hidden under the eagle’s tail feathers emerged to fly even higher and claimed the title. Following from this legend, in much European folklore the wren has been described as the “king of the birds” or as a flame bearer. [The French for wren is roitelet.] However, these terms were also applied to the regulus species, the fiery crowns of the goldcrest and firecrest making them more likely to be the original bearers of the titles; and, because of the legend’s reference to the “smallest of birds” becoming king, the title [I think the writer of the article must mean the first title] was probably transferred to the equally tiny wren. The confusion was probably compounded by the similarity and consequent interchangeability of the Greek words for the wren (βασιλεύς basileus, “king”) and the crests [goldcrest and firecrest] (βασιλισκος basiliskos, “kinglet”). In English, the association between the goldcrest and the Eurasian wren may have been reinforced by the kinglet's old name of “gold-crested wren”.’

At Channel 4, we commissioned a nice little five-part series for primary schools, each of whose programmes contained animation of a legend or other story about a creature and live-action scientific filming of that creature. The wren was one of those.

Another lovely mild autumn day. I took most of the apples I’d picked round to Rosa last evening. She’s always grateful for them, and wants more. Meanwhile, Helen has made chutney and two crumbles.

We’ve been back in London since Friday. Today is the most beautiful bright chilly autumn day, the air invigorating and head-clearing.

In the last two weeks at Kerfontaine, I read three books. The first was The World without Us by Alan Weisman. It’s a scientific fantasy about what would happen to the world if humans suddenly left it. The author has an impressive grasp of numerous branches of science, which means that the fantasy is factually based: animals would proliferate in this way, materials would decay in this way, nuclear power stations would explode in this way. The book left me more depressed than hopeful, confirming my natural pessimism about our future.  I think we probably are too stupid to restrain the malign implications of our own cleverness and greed.  We probably aren’t going to slow population growth or greenhouse-gas emissions or the disposal of plastics in the environment, or find a way of rendering nuclear waste harmless, until it’s too late for most of humanity to experience anything other than a desperate struggle for survival, instead of the kind of life which privileged people like us enjoy now.

Then I read The Great Shame by Thomas Keneally. It’s one of the finest works of non-fiction I’ve ever read. It’s a history of Ireland in the middle years of the nineteenth century, and of the migrations of Irish people to Australia and America. Some of those people were humble peasants escaping poverty and starvation, or who were transported to Australia for minor crimes or acts of defiance against brutal landlords. Others — the leaders of ‘Young Ireland’ and, later, the Fenians — were politically conscious rebels, reformers or revolutionaries who were arrested, tried, found guilty and sentenced to transportation. (Many of them were actually sentenced to death, but had their sentences commuted.) Apart from the clarity and ease of Keneally’s style, I am in awe of the amount of research which must have gone into the collection, marshalling and selection of information before he can have put fingers to keyboard. I admire too the restrained indignation of an Australian of Irish origins at the oppression of Ireland by Britain, an oppression most sharply evident in the grotesquely exploitative system of land ownership, which led to the rebellions and failed attempts at revolution he so calmly describes.  In particular, I found the two accounts of breakouts by Irish prisoners from Fremantle jail absolutely riveting; it was like reading a thriller, which I generally don’t. I think this book and Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore between them have given me a pretty good picture of the history of transportation to Australia and the early European invasion of the continent more generally. It was extraordinary also to read of the achievements of some of the Young Irelanders and Fenians in America, once they had been released or had escaped from Australia. Most but not all of these achievements, usually in politics or law or journalism, were admirable; on the debit side, John Mitchel supported the Confederate cause in the Civil War and championed the continuance of African slavery.

There is something heroic but also sadly comic in the repeated failure of ‘risings’ in Ireland in these years. Plans went awry for embarrassing and ridiculous reasons; on one occasion orders were left and discovered in a toilet. The British government planted spies in the rebels’ inner councils. And in North America, there were absurd attempts by Fenians to invade Canada from the USA, with the idea that the Canadians would be delighted to be liberated from the British yoke, and that the impetus gained there would lead on to the liberation of Ireland.

As I remember writing when I had read the biography of Gladstone, the failure of the UK parliament to do what Gladstone worked for, and give Home Rule to Ireland, a failure for which rebellious members of his own Liberal Party were responsible when Home Rule was debated and defeated in the House of Commons, led to the tragedies of the next century, beginning with the 1916 rising, about which there was nothing comic.

The Great Shame is a very great book.

I then read David Copperfield. I’ve got to the age of 62 without having read much Dickens: I think only The Pickwick Papers, Hard Times and Dombey and Son (which I read last year). For many years, he just wasn’t my kind of writer. There were too many words; you have to give up such a large slab of your life in reading him. But I must gobble him up now. It’s shameful for an Englishman who considers himself literate not to have read all of Dickens. In getting through the 870 pages of David Copperfield, I can’t remember when I last had such a conflicting set of responses to a book. There are passages of comic genius, notably to do with Mr Micawber and his family. There are passages which made me weep: in particular, the account of Mr Barkis’s death, when it was the poetry of the idea of a person dying on the Suffolk coast ‘going out with the tide’ which undid me. There are passages where one admires Dickens’s unflinching portrayal of brutality: for example, the wife- or woman-beating tinker David meets when walking to Dover. But the plot depends on a succession of impossible coincidences and convenient deaths, so much so that, at a certain point, one stops even thinking of it as a realistic novel (despite the social realism of much of the book’s description and concerns). It’s more like a picaresque jeu d’esprit in the manner of Don Quixote. Then there is the appalling mawkish sentimentality, the nauseating Christian piety, the fact that all the characters announce themselves at entrance as good or bad, kind or cruel, honest or devious, and never deviate. The dialogue is often stilted and predictable. But still, I read the book from beginning to end with pleasure, and I found the autobiographical sections — the humiliated child labourer, the parliamentary reporter, the articled apprentice lawyer in Doctors’ Commons, the famous young writer — very interesting. It’s easy to see why Dickens was as phenomenally popular as he was; he doesn’t do psychological subtlety like Dostoevsky does (I know I’ve written that before). He uses the lush primary colours of simple emotions and sensational events.

I’ve done a poem called ‘Legacy’, the idea for which I owe entirely to The World without Us — the poem speculates for 40 lines on the future of the earth minus humans. I’ve entered this and the owl poem for the National Poetry Competition. Earlier this year, I put ‘Good Friday. Driving Westward.’ in for the Bridport Prize. I don’t suppose they’ll get anywhere, but people keep telling me to put my poems about more, so I’m doing as I’m told.

Since last writing, I’ve been out of London three times. The first occasion was on the 6th and 7th of this month, when Stephen Eyers and I went down to the Isle of Portland in Dorset. He has bought a barn there. I’m not sure really what he proposes to do with it, apart from storing some of the hundreds of books he has in his and Theresa’s house in New Malden, but that’s his business. He inherited some money when his mother died two years ago, and decided that he wants to own a piece of property, however modest, in the country of his heart; he was born in Bournemouth and his ancestors come from Dorset. The task facing us on those two days was to remove ivy from the outside rear wall. It had grown up to the height of the roof, and was pushing under the slates, so allowing water into the barn. As we drove down through Surrey and Hampshire, Stephen said that he thought the job would take about an hour; after that we could do a little sightseeing around Portland.

When we arrived, and looked at the ivy, I knew that we would need more than an hour to get it down. We had brought tools and overalls, and Stephen had hired a ladder and a skip. But I have never seen — and certainly never dealt with — a parasitic plant on that scale. The diameter of each of its two trunks was perhaps half a metre. A thick overlapping lattice of growth covered and clung to the wall. I’m not the most confident person high up on a ladder, especially when there’s a stiff wind blowing off the English Channel, but we set to, and by nightfall on the first afternoon we had cleared perhaps a quarter of the total. Then we drove to the hotel close to Portland Bill where Stephen had booked a room. I was interested to see that the building had once been the Admiralty Underwater Weapons Establishment, and had been constructed in the late 1940s. My father worked for the Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment on Portsdown Hill above Portsmouth, built at about the same time and looking very similar. The two buildings are obviously a pair, and made (of course) out of Portland stone. I remember my father saying that he used to come to Portland, and to other prominent points on the south coast of England where the navy had facilities, to test the radar on which he was working as a young man. So I think it very likely that he stayed here. I also remember my parents talking about the Portland Spy Ring when I was nine or ten. The secrets sold to the Russians came from people working in this same building.

Our room was perfectly clean and very comfortable. Stephen then took me to dinner at a beautiful little fish restaurant just back across the bridge which connects Portland to the mainland. I had oysters and sea bass and we drank a very good Sancerre. I slept soundly back at the hotel, having been up early that morning and done a great deal more physical labour than I am used to. The wind which had been blowing all day was pounding at the windows, but had dropped by the morning.

We were back on the job at 8.30. We worked solidly until mid-afternoon, by which time we recognised that we had no chance of getting all the ivy down that day. We had done just over half of it, I would say, when Stephen rang the builder who was coming to repair the roof and make it watertight once we had finished, and asked him to quote a price for getting rid of the rest of the plant before attending to the roof. A sensible decision. We drove back to London. I was home by nine o’clock.

It’s strange that I, a southerner, born in Portsmouth, who has visited Dorset many times, should never have seen Portland before, except from aeroplanes flying between Southampton and Brest. It’s impressive, indeed awesome, to see this great lump of limestone rearing up as you come around Weymouth and cross the bridge. The notorious prison, The Verne, is built into the rock. I’d never really thought about the place until I read The Great Shame a month ago. Several of the Irish revolutionaries were kept there, in solitary confinement, for long periods before they were transported.

The next day Helen and I went to Aldeburgh for the poetry festival, as for so many years now. It was nice to be there with our friends, and I’m always grateful to Heather Loxton for organising the rental of the house by the sea, but the poetry itself isn’t as good as it used to be. The one exception was Ian Macmillan, whose late-night hour on the Saturday was wonderfully entertaining. The performances, as I probably wrote a year ago, have moved from Aldeburgh to Snape, so although the physical surroundings are more comfortable and the acoustics better, you don’t get that sense of being in one place for the whole weekend, and the pleasure of walking everywhere. I’m not sure that we shall go again.

Last Thursday we went to Shropshire to stay with David and Tom. It was David’s birthday that day; it would have been Lindsay’s two days previously. Father and son are coping pretty well with their bereavement, I think. We drove back yesterday.

I’ve read two more Dickens novels: Oliver Twist and Great Expectations. Pip in Great Expectations is the one example so far, in my admittedly still limited reading of Dickens, of a character drawn with real psychological subtlety. Pip becomes a snob when he comes into money; as a result, he avoids Joe (and Joe is in an agony of awkwardness when he visits him in London); he is initially appalled to discover that his benefactor is a convict, and not Miss Havisham; and he bitterly regrets these failings at the book’s conclusion. He has learnt something. Meanwhile, the plots of both books depend once again on absurdly unlikely coincidences, something which obviously hasn’t mattered at all to most of Dickens’s readers over the years, and I suppose shouldn’t matter to me. The books are melodramas. They contain some marvellous pieces of atmospheric description: Pip and the convict in the churchyard, Fagin in the condemned cell, Miss Havisham on fire. One can’t deny the ardour and sincerity of Dickens’s criticism of the treatment of poor children in Oliver Twist. One can’t deny the casual anti-Semitism by which Fagin is constantly referred to as ‘the Jew’, and presented to us as physically repulsive. I shall keep on gobbling up Dickens this winter; I think Our Mutual Friend next.

There has been a dreadful typhoon in the Philippines, perhaps the strongest ever recorded in that typhoon-vulnerable part of the world. It caused a surge of water which killed many people living near the sea, and destroyed much property and infrastructure. A big international aid and rescue effort is in full swing now, but it will take years to replace and restore that which has been broken and lost. These events will continue and increase in frequency, I fear, until the world’s leaders agree on unpopular measures forcing humanity to stop abusing the planet. It’s a cruel irony that we, the rich, have done the damage; they, the poor, are paying the price. It will take an unspeakable catastrophe hitting a rich country or two to bring about the change that is needed. Even then, it will be many years before the benefits will be felt.

The situation in Syria is awful. There is now a full-scale civil war in which the original aims of the opposition have been forgotten as two evils confront each other: the vile brutality of the Assad regime versus the murderous theocratic zealotry of the djihadists. Neither of these forces offers a vision of the future remotely connected to the hopes of the Arab spring. Indeed, the whole region — Syria, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon — seems convulsed by schismatic hatred between Shia and Sunni.

The rest of the year has run away with me, as it always does. We’ve been here, as usual now, since four days before Christmas, and we shall stay until 5 January. Earlier this month, we went to Norfolk, to Adam and Hazel (where we heard of Nelson Mandela’s death), and also back to Shropshire for the traditional pre-Christmas weekend, this year alas without Lindsay. Peter and Merle Traves hosted a merry evening nonetheless. At Mike Raleigh’s suggestion, I said a few words at the beginning of the meal in memory of the woman who had for so many years been ‘the founder of the feast’. The next day, a Saturday, David, Tom and Mike went to France for a week’s skiing, so we moved to Glenda and Julian for the weekend, for more pleasure. On the Saturday afternoon, at my request, Julian and I climbed the Lawley. It’s something I like to do at least once a year. On this occasion, the wind was so strong out of the south-west that we were nearly blown over, and had to make the final ascent on our hands and knees.

We’ve seen other friends for lunches and dinners and drinks: the usual thing.

Stephen and Theresa came for Christmas, and stayed for four nights. We went for walks on each of the three days. On Christmas Eve we ate John Dory; on Christmas Day goose, roast; on Saint Stephen’s Day goose, curried. On the day after that Stephen and Theresa took us out to our little restaurant at Pont-Scorff, where we shall go again tonight for the Saint Sylvestre dinner, as last year and the year before that.

The weather has been mild and very wet. Just before Christmas, there were violent storms here and in the south of England, causing widespread flooding and depriving many homes of electricity, including on Christmas Day. We were hardly affected. One tree fell down in the wood. But only a few kilometres away, at Quimperlé, at the confluence of the rivers Ellé and Laïta, disruption to people’s lives has been severe. There is only one road through the town, which crosses the bridge directly over the confluence. It was engulfed.

These inconveniences, however, are as nothing by comparison with the woes being suffered elsewhere in the world. Syria remains an appalling disaster, with no apparent end in sight. Well over 100,000 are dead, and many more mutilated. There are millions of refugees, either in neighbouring countries or internally displaced. As I’ve written before, perhaps too often, the principal conflict is now between Assad and the djihadists: equally unsavoury opposites. No reasonable person would want to be governed by either. The ‘international community’ (ridiculous phrase) seems helpless. Do we simply resign ourselves to the thought that the human condition is very often one of tragedy, and that this is normal?

In Iraq, ten years after the invasion, there is still regular violence, and al-Qaida seems securely entrenched. A similar situation prevails in Pakistan. Meanwhile, in Africa, several states are convulsed by civil strife, caused by tribal and/or religious divisions mixed with secular power struggles. This is true in South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Mali (though the situation there is quieter since the French military intervention of last January) and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Libya, Egypt and Tunisia remain deeply unhappy places, in which the exhilaration of the Arab spring has given way to profound divisions about what kinds of societies those countries should be. It seems impossible to establish there the kind of governance which significant proportions of those countries’ citizens actually want: respectful of religious belief, including that of minorities, while maintaining a secular parliamentary and legal system. The trouble in Egypt has been that, when the people were given the chance to vote, they voted by a small majority for an Islamist party. That party, despite its initial promises to respect diversity of thought and action, did the opposite: it moved unmistakably in the direction of Islamist theocracy and sharia law. So it was thrown out. It can claim, with some justification, that it was and is the only democratically elected government of Egypt since the fall of Mubarak, and that its overthrow was a dictatorial coup. But it was a coup which millions of Egyptians, and I would have been one if I were Egyptian, were glad to see happen.

The significance of Nelson Mandela’s life and the greatness of his humanity were properly acknowledged the world over. Barack Obama made the only good speech at the memorial service for Mandela, held in a football stadium in Soweto. Apart from paying proper tribute to the greatness of the man’s courage, wisdom and capacity for forgiveness, Obama chided other national leaders who seem not to have even a hundredth part of Mandela’s qualities, though few if any of them have suffered as Mandela did. And that does seem to be the problem. Statesman- or stateswoman-like leadership is extraordinarily rare. For every great unifying leader like Obama, there is a divisive thug like Putin. The world’s nations are too often led by men — usually men — whose true purpose in leadership is self-aggrandisement and self-enrichment, whatever propaganda they give out.

Recently, I read Andrew Rawnsley’s The End of the Party, about New Labour from the election victory of 2001 to the defeat of 2010. It’s a very long book, which I consumed addictively in two and a half days, so I must have enjoyed it. But by the end it had depressed me profoundly. I’m sure that Rawnsley knows what he’s writing about; I very much doubt that he made stuff up. The book revealed to me how naïve, how child-like had been my belief (in the early Labour years) and then my diminishing hope (in the years which the book covers) that the leaders of the party I was and am a member of were somehow better than they turn out to be.  The portrait Rawnsley paints is one of fratricidal warfare conducted between people with grotesquely distended egos, apparently unaware that they were squandering the once-in-a-lifetime advantage which the electorate had given them. Brown emerges, from the 2001 victory onwards, as fixated on one thing only: the leadership. He and his acolytes, notably Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, spent most of their energies undermining Blair’s authority. Meanwhile, Blair’s over-confidence in his own judgment, combined with his desperate desire to be Bush’s closest friend, a desire justified by the delusion that he was exercising a restraining influence on American foreign policy, led the UK into the catastrophe in Iraq. Rawnsley pays tribute to Blair’s positive achievements, notably his historic contribution to bringing about peace in Northern Ireland, but rightly says that Iraq, and all the duplicities that led up to it, have permanently stained the record of his premiership. That wrong decision is the thing he will be remembered for.

When Brown finally got the job for which he had been longing and plotting for so many years, he didn’t enjoy it and, with one huge exception, made a mess of it. The huge exception of course was his and Darling’s magnificent handling of the financial crisis of autumn 2008. Unfairly, the UK electorate didn’t particularly thank him for what he did then. That right decision, in its own way as significant for good as was Blair’s decision on Iraq significant for ill, was forgotten amid the daily evidence that Brown didn’t know, after the sorry farce of the election that never was in autumn 2007, how to look like a Prime Minister at ease in the post. ‘Enjoy the office,’ Macmillan is supposed to have said or written to Wilson. Brown gave the impression of hating it; and some of his personal behaviour while in Number 10 was that of a man having lost all sense, if he had ever had some sense, of how to treat other people and get the best out of them.

Even without returning to my own diary entries from 1 May 1997 onwards, written from the point of view of an optimistic but powerless supporter, I know that if I were to compare my outsider’s thoughts about events with Andrew Rawnsley’s inside knowledge of those events, the gap between my piety and his reality, my simplicity and his complexity, would be immense. I can’t now get beyond the thought that the best that people like me can do is to support the least bad political party capable of getting power. As Raymond Aron said, speaking of grander and more fateful choices than those with which British party politics are usually concerned, ‘The choice is not between good and evil. It is between the preferable and the detestable.’

I’ve done a bit of winter gardening while we’ve been here: pruning, weeding, leaf-clearing. There is a satisfaction in seeing the place pared back and trim.

I’m not as ashamed as I might be that this is the first entry for 2014. The reason is that I’ve been, until the last few days, solidly engaged in an educational project sponsored by Mike Raleigh and his colleague Peter Dougill. Both are former English teachers, former local authority advisers, former HMIs, and they now run a little consultancy called Owen Education (named after Robert Owen, described by Wikipedia as ‘a Welsh social reformer and one of the founders of utopian socialism and the cooperative movement’), who was born and died down the road from where Mike lives.

I’ve done a few bits and pieces of editorial work for Mike and Peter in recent years. In late November of last year, they asked me to do something bigger: to be the main writer of a series of booklets on the teaching of English, language and literacy to children and young people from age 3 to age 19. It’s an attempt to remind teachers and educational policy-makers of some of the best that has been thought and written on this topic in the last 50 years. The political purpose is straightforward. Recent governments, and especially the current government, have required in law approaches to the teaching of English, language and literacy which are simply wrong, and will prove unworkable. They have done so because of the political appeal of a retrospective populism which says that educational standards were much higher many years ago, when traditional methods were practised, especially in the teaching of early reading, spelling and grammar. The claim is demonstrably false, but truth is not a high priority in the minds and motivations of most politicians; certainly not in the case of our current Secretary of State and the advisers around him.

So we’re trying to state the truth about how children and young people come to have a confident control of English, and how teachers can best help them to do that. There will, I think, be 11 booklets in all, and they may be combined eventually into a book. I shan’t write all the booklets; probably seven of them. I’ve already produced the essential contents of five. So a large amount of the heavy work is done, and this is what has been keeping me busy since early December. We haven’t yet decided who’s going to publish us, but we’re pretty sure that the booklets will be electronically published before they’re printed.

Today has been the most beautiful day: warm and spring-like. I walked down to the Institute of Education, where — thanks to the good offices of my friend John Hardcastle, who works there — I’m a Visiting Research Associate. This gives me access to the Institute’s library, which I should think is the best educational library in the country, and quite possibly in the world. It certainly has all the books I’ve needed for research purposes. Then I walked across to John Lewis to pick up a print of a picture by Daumier which we saw at an exhibition of his work in the Royal Academy recently, and came home on the bus.

Yesterday I escorted our friend and neighbour John Bentil to University College Hospital, where he had an artificial lens inserted in his right eye, which was virtually blind. It was all done within four hours, without — according to John — any pain at all. This morning, when I took off the dressing which covered the eye, he said he could already see more clearly. Wonderful. He needs to put a drop into the eye six times a day for two weeks, and twice a day for a further week. I’ve been doing it for him today. When the NHS works well, it’s the most superb system. I took John for a pre-assessment about a month ago. Expensive machinery gave the nurses the exact specifications of the lens which he would need, which was then individually made for him. This morning he had a phone call from a nurse to ask whether everything was all right. We shall go back for a check-up on 31 March. He will then have the left eye done, which is not as bad as the right, but still needs fixing.

‘Praise they that will Times past; I joy to see
Myself now live; this age best pleaseth me.’ — Herrick

It’s a great age to live in as long as you’re in a rich country with a socialised healthcare service. Thank goodness we do.

Two weeks ago, we flew down to Marseille for a long weekend, to help Jacques celebrate his 60th birthday. It was a happy occasion. Mary had taken him and Tess to Rome for a few days, including his actual birthday. This was a family party on the following Sunday, held in the flat belonging to Jacques’ sister and brother-in-law. 30 people there. Mary had cooked everything: delicious. I wrote and performed a little poem, to go with the one I did for Mary’s 50th last October.

I’m reading Postwar by Tony Judt, an epic account of Europe since 1945. The scale and complexity of the changes which our continent has experienced in my lifetime and in the few years before it are immense, and Judt’s achievement in marshalling all this information is deeply impressive. The hypocrisies and acts of realpolitik by which, suddenly, a country which you have just necessarily destroyed (Germany) is helped to become a functioning state again, so Nazis recently out of uniform, some quite senior, are employed to help in the reconstruction. The appalling brutality of the Stalinist takeover of the East. The illusion in the West during what the French call les trente glorieuses that things can only go on getting better and better. The rude awakening from that daydream. The only thing I have against Judt’s writing (and this applies too to several other big histories I’ve read recently) is that he allows himself occasional moments of social commentary on topics he obviously knows nothing about. It’s natural that I’m going to object to the sweeping, unsupported statement that the introduction of comprehensive education in Britain has been a disastrous mistake which has inhibited rather than advanced social mobility. On other topics too, where my feelings are less committed and my knowledge less sure, he briefly indulges in saloon-bar opinionation. But these are trifling failings; overall, the book is a tour de force of scholarship and clear writing.

I’m on the way back from a meeting in Exeter with Angela Goddard, who’s going to write the ninth booklet in our series of eleven, on English as taught to 16- to 19-year-olds. Angela was a colleague on the Language in the National Curriculum Project all those years ago. She’s a main authority on A-level, particularly A-level English Language, and I think she’ll do a good job. At any rate, I like her very much. The reason for yet another long pause in writing the diary is the same as in March: these booklets, and the management of the project as a whole, are proving demanding. We’re hoping that the United Kingdom Literacy Association, which published my pamphlet on early reading last year, will do them. We had a meeting with UKLA three weeks ago. Eve Bearne and David Reedy, both good friends of mine and past presidents of the Association, are taking our proposal through various committees. We intend now to publish all eleven booklets in one go early next year, and maybe combine the series in a single book thereafter, to be published commercially.

What else have I done recently? In early April, we went to Shropshire to be with David and Tom James on the anniversary of Lindsay’s death. From there, we went across to Norfolk for a few days with Adam and Hazel. On Good Friday, Tess came by herself from Marseille and stayed with us for a week. She was a delight. We heard a concert at the Wigmore Hall, we visited Eltham Palace, Tate Modern (for the Matisse cut-outs exhibition), the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and Cambridge. This last was on a day when Helen was working, so it was just Tess and I. I took her all round Trinity, and managed to wangle a lunch with the students in hall. The food was as bad as ever, but the experience worth it. Then the Fitzwilliam Museum and Kettle’s Yard. The particular reason for all this gallery-visiting was that Tess was doing a project on self-portraits for her brevet. She had to study five. She had already chosen a Frida Kahlo, a Van Gogh and (interesting choice) Baudelaire’s poem ‘L’Albatros’ — a self-piteous portrait of poets as a kind. She needed two more. We settled on a Lowry in the NPG and a Christopher Wood in Kettle’s Yard. I was delighted to go back to Kettle’s Yard, from where I had borrowed works of art more than 40 years ago. I had known nothing about Christopher Wood. He was born in 1901 and killed himself in 1930 by jumping in front of a train at Salisbury station, not far from where I am at this moment. Prodigiously talented and deeply troubled. I remembered that I had seen his name and noted its Englishness on a portrait of Max Jacob in Quimper. Sure enough, he spent much of the 1920s in Paris and visited Brittany (I can’t remember how often) because of the Gauguin connection. The self-portrait is of him on a roof terrace in Paris with other roofs in the background. He’s large, apparently confident, staring at us almost insolently, and wearing a striking red-and-white patterned sweater. His painting equipment is to one side. Tess was very struck by the work, and so was I.

The next day, Helen took Tess to see a musical called Urinetown. I didn’t go because I disapproved of the choice, made without consulting me. Agreeing that they should go but that I wouldn’t was a sort of score draw. I met them afterwards and we went to see Gabriel Genest, who played a beautiful Bach partita for us. I wanted Tess to hear top-quality playing from someone we know and therefore she now knows. On her last day, she and Helen went shopping. She had arrived with a large but half-empty case. When it was fully packed the following morning, it was hard even for me to lift. £40 excess weight charge at Heathrow.

I’ve begun editing Paul Ashton’s latest book. This one is based on a true story told to him when he worked at the BBC, about a young man, physically ill-favoured, who’s 25 and a virgin and desperate. He goes to a brothel and falls in love with the young prostitute whom they assign to him. Meanwhile, he’s taken on as a part-time worker at the establishment. The book concludes brutally and shockingly, but along the way there’s much humour and tenderness, and the goings-on in the brothel, which is expensive and where entertainments of the most extravagant kind, mixing artistry with gratification, are regularly laid on, allow Paul full rein to his talent for baroque detail. Paul’s done six books now, all different, and I’ve been his editor on all but the first.

After Judt’s Postwar, I read Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers, about the causes of the First World War. Magnificent, and this time I had not even trifling reservations. The book explains both the specific actions and inactions which brought about the catastrophe, but also — and perhaps more importantly — manages to communicate something of the culture of that time, the assumptions and the manners by which the political elites dealt with each other. I knew nothing really about Serbia before I read the book. I didn’t even know that it had come into being as a state as a result of the Congress of Berlin. What struck me, in reading about the murder of the king and queen in 1903 and the uneasy relationship thereafter between the official government of the country and the militaristic shadow structure existing alongside it and threatening sometimes to supplant it, was how similar that was to the situation in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1990s and Ukraine now. One moves by uneasy stages from something close to democracy to out-of-control banditry. The Serbs’ obsession with ‘Greater Serbia’ was there at the beginning and at the end of the last century, a racial mania whose many victims notably included Albanians. At both periods, Russia’s support for its Slav ‘little brothers’ was a major contributor to the disaster. Without underestimating the threatening nature of German militarism, and fully accepting that the eventual invasion of Belgium was a casus belli, one can’t come away from the book with the idea, ingrained in traditional British thinking, that Germany was the only or even the principal culprit. Austria-Hungary had a right to be outraged when it became clear that Serbia was deeply involved in the Sarajevo assassination. Russia was uncritical in its support for Serbia. Russia mobilised first. In its determination to avenge the humiliation of 1870, France tied itself too closely to Russia. Everyone was a threat to everyone else. The catastrophe was avoidable in a way that the Second World War, alas, wasn’t.

We went to Kerfontaine for our summer season on 23 May. The previous weekend, we had been once again with David and Tom in Shropshire. As I have probably written before, Lindsay was a wonderful and ambitious gardener. When she knew she was dying, she commissioned an overhaul of their garden, which has resulted in the creation of magnificent flower borders and a large pond with an overhanging wooden deck, ideal for coffee or aperitifs. Alas, she didn’t live to see her project finished, but finished it was, and on 17 May about 60 people came to a lunch party to celebrate the completion. David made a very good and moving speech.

We were at Kerfontaine for a month, enjoying beautiful early summer weather. There was quite a lot to do in our garden: nothing in the Lindsay league, of course; mainly fighting back the encroachment of wilderness. I had to buy a new lawn mower, the other having given up the ghost last year. And there was more work on the language booklets. Helen gave me a wonderful day on my birthday. We went to our favourite little restaurant at Pont-Scorff in the evening.

On 16 May, on our way up to Shropshire, we had lunched with Peter and Monica Hetherington. Two days later, Peter sent me some translations of a recently found poem by Sappho, which Ken Pearce, who was for a year my Latin teacher at Bedford Modern, had seen in the TLS and sent to him. Peter wondered whether I might care to attempt a translation myself. I knew that I wouldn’t do exactly that, since six poets had already made the attempt, with varying degrees of success. But the suggestion prompted the thought that I might try translations of some other Sappho poems. So the day before leaving England I bought the Loeb edition. It gave me exactly what I wanted: a conscientious literal prose translation of each fragment, done by a scholar with no pretension to poetry. Of course I have no Greek at all. I can’t even do what Milton’s daughters did: pronounce the words without understanding them.

I use the word ‘fragment’ instead of ‘poem’ because that’s what the Loeb scholar calls them, and it’s easy to see why. It seems likely that Sappho was prolific, producing numerous books each containing many lyrics. They are lost. We depend on quotations from Sappho by later writers, Greek and Roman, and on remnants of papyrus and parchment — often partial and badly damaged — which have somehow survived to the modern day. I think that only the very first fragment out of more than 200 is more or less a complete poem. It didn’t take long to read the 200+; many of the fragments are only a few words long. I settled on 13 to translate, choosing those where enough remains to descry an argument, and where there is something original or striking in the thought. I’ve done the 13 at Kerfontaine and in our travels since. They’re versions (‘imitations’, in Lowell’s terms) rather than disciplined renderings of the originals. They often go off on frolics of their own. I’m pleased with them. I haven’t sent them to Mark yet to go on the website. Ken Pearce has kindly agreed to look at them, both to comment on them as poems, and also to check whether the Greek originals make sense. I pulled these off the internet and amended them when they differed from the Loeb version, like a monkey playing with Scrabble tiles. In one case I preferred the internet version to the Loeb, when I was pretty sure that a scholar had come across a fuller version of that fragment since the Loeb was published.

Most but not all of the fragments are about love. Sappho of course has become one of the patron saints of the lesbian community, and it is true that many of her poems are explicitly about love between women. (It is charming to read some of the nineteenth-century translations of her work on the internet, where scholars, who must have understood the difference between male and female personal pronouns in Greek, persist in translations where the loved one whom Sappho addresses is male.) But Sappho was also married, and had a daughter whom she adored. Later commentators, including Ovid in the 15th of his Letters of the Heroines (in which he takes on the voices of women pining for their absent male lovers or unrequiting loved ones or husbands) suggests that she died of love for Phaon. I can’t improve on the brief description of Phaon in Wikipedia:

‘Phaon in Greek mythology was a boatman of Mitylene in Lesbos. He was old and ugly when Aphrodite came to his boat. She put on the guise of a crone. Phaon ferried her over to Asia Minor and accepted no payment for doing so. In return, she gave him a box of ointment. When he rubbed it on himself, he became young and beautiful. Many were captivated by his beauty.

According to mythology, Sappho fell in love with him. He lay with her but soon grew to resent her and devalue her. Sappho was so distraught with his rejection that she threw herself into the sea under the superstition that she would be either cured of her love, or drowned. She was drowned. Aelian says that Phaon was killed by a man whom he was cuckolding.’

So Sappho, who was undoubtedly a historical figure, is muddled up with mythology. Maybe the story about Phaon is homophobic: a case of later writers wanting to punish her posthumously for having loved women. Horace described her as ‘manly Sappho’. Anyhow, she was born around 620 BCE and died around 570. She came of noble family in Mytilene on Lesbos. At some point in her youth the family fell into disfavour with the ruler of the island, and was exiled to Sicily. The political situation improved later, and Sappho returned to Lesbos, where she established a singing school for young women. They sang her poems, accompanying themselves always on the lyre. Sappho invented the plectrum, and a stanza form subsequently named after her (three lines of 11 syllables each and one of five), imitated by Horace and Catullus and, unsuccessfully, by some modern writers.

Of the few Sappho fragments which are not about love, the most interesting are those in which she chides one of her brothers, Charaxus, who seems to have disgraced the family by wandering around the Mediterranean and consorting with an expensive Egyptian prostitute. Having thrown all his money at her, he resorted to piracy to recoup funds. I’ve translated one fragment in which Sappho appeals to the Nereids (sea goddesses) and to Cypris (another name for Aphrodite) not to be too hard on the boy, despite his misdoings. The voice in the poem reminds me of that of parents or — when the parents didn’t speak English — of older siblings at exclusion meetings during my years as a school governor. Their child or younger sibling had behaved so badly that he or she had had to be removed from the school, usually temporarily but occasionally permanently. The sorrowing family members couldn’t seem to recognise their relative in the undoubtedly truthful and often quite restrained account of wrongdoing which the head teacher read out to them. ‘I can’t understand it. He/She isn’t a bad child really. It won’t happen again.’

On 24 June we set off for our now annual trip to Italy. We are, I must confess, becoming creatures of habit. Perhaps we always were. A night at the Château des Jacobins in Agen, with dinner at Le Margoton; two nights with Mary and Jacques in Marseille; a night at Podere Conti; and then Rodellosso, via Pisa airport, where we picked up Paul Ashton. Other guests in that first week were Mike Raleigh and Kate Myers, and Peter and Merle Traves. The fifth apartment was occupied by the Belgian couple André and Caterina, with whom we’ve coincided often during the five years we’ve been going to Rodellosso, and who have become good friends.

After a week of familiar pleasures with these friends, others came to stay: Peter and Monica Hetherington, Mary, Jacques and Tess, and Adam and Hazel. These people hadn’t met, either for many years or not at all, but everyone got on very well. On the Tuesday I took Peter and Monica to Siena. Monica hadn’t been before, and Peter only once. During the week, Peter and Adam went off on long rides together on the mountain bikes provided. Peter has tremendous boyish energy for a man of 83. Perhaps he overdoes it a little in order to show that ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower / Drives my green age’. He speaks good Italian, having studied for a year at the University of Perugia when he gave up teaching at Bedford Modern.

During the first week I gave Italian lessons; during the second, swimming lessons. Helen is sometimes a bit resentful that I seem to enjoy my role as tour guide and events organiser so much that I forget I’m supposed also to be on holiday with her. On the last Saturday, after everyone had gone, we drove to Siena together and had lunch in an exquisite restaurant that Claudio, our host at Rodellosso, had recommended: Le Logge, near San Martino. It will become our restaurant of choice in the city from now on. I should also say that Claudio and Alessandra, his business partner, laid on a wonderful evening for us on the Thursday of the second week, with a cornucopia of Tuscan dishes accompanied by Claudio’s family’s wines. We shall be back next year, in the week of the July palio (in which Claudio’s contrada will be running, as it will in this year’s August palio), so we can expect the same hospitality on the eve of the event as we received last year. Creatures of habit, as I say.

Then back via Podere Conti, Marseille, and four lovely days with Stephen and Theresa in the Charente. I helped Stephen in the garden. We went to eat in Ribérac one evening, hoping for a quiet outdoor dinner in the great heat. A free concert in the square (four thrash punk bands, one after the other) meant that the four of us had to lip-read from soup to nuts. There was neither soup nor nuts, but the food was good. The following morning we went back for the weekly market, which is enormous and which we enjoy very much. Then home to Kerfontaine last Saturday.

On Monday we went across to Plouhinec, next to Audierne, for lunch with Huw and Jo, friends of Mike and Sue when Sue was alive, and now of Mike and Kate, and our friends too, who were staying with Arthur and Suzanne, friends of theirs. Jo, Suzanne and Sue had been colleagues at Holland Park. Arthur Sculley is American and has had a very senior career in banking. He was at J.P. Morgan for a long time, latterly as CEO of its private bank. He’s now doing research into the entrepreneurs of Asian Turkey and northern Iraq, for the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He’s a charming, softly spoken man with a knowledge of international affairs got from the seniority of the positions he’s held and the company he’s kept. I learnt more about Turkey, the Kurds, the current tragedy in Israel/Palestine and the situation in Iran in the course of an hour of two with him than in weeks of reading the newspapers. A lot of what he said confirmed what I thought to be true; it was gratifying to hear it from him. For example: the split in Iran between the right-wing theocrats, who still hold ultimate power, and the recently elected government led by Hassan Rouhani and his excellent foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who are trying — to put the matter briefly — to bring Iran back into the world. They have had some success, with help of John Kerry and Catherine Ashton, in moving slowly towards a resolution of the crisis over Iran’s supposed intention to build a nuclear weapon.

After lunch we went swimming in the bay of Audierne. A delight, though a bit more invigorating than the swimming pools of Tuscany and the Charente. Then back for tea, and Helen and I drove home in the quiet early evening.

On Wednesday I flew from Rennes to Southampton. Train to Waterloo. Over to Paul’s for the evening: two delicious pints of English bitter in the uncharacteristic heat, and a very good Kerala curry. Yesterday I had a meeting at the RAC with Mike and Peter from Owen Education and Eve and David from UKLA. UKLA will definitely publish the 11 booklets, probably next March. Print and electronic publication will be simultaneous. We agreed a timetable for delivery of the manuscripts. Owen and UKLA agreed a split of costs. I feel a bit relieved. It’s a weakness of mine that, when I have a large undertaking on hand, I can’t ever put it out of my mind, even when there are other things I have to do which distract me from it. It hangs about at the back of all my thoughts. So it has been with this project all year. Somehow, we’ve invited lots of people to come and stay with us at Kerfontaine in August and September, which means I won’t be able to get on as fast as I would like (apart from the fact that my writing room is the guest bedroom). Having a reasonable steady schedule through to the end of the year, by which time the writing and editing should be complete, is reassuring: two booklets (already virtually complete) to be delivered by late August; then two more a month later; and so on. The principal uncertainty is with the booklets to be written by others. How good will they be? How much editing and diplomacy will be required?

Tomorrow I go to Taunton to stay the night with Mark and Gill. In the evening Mark and I will be in Wells Cathedral, listening to The Dream of Gerontius, conducted by Graham Caldbeck. I said I would come over for the performance anyway, and yesterday’s meeting turned up conveniently. Then back to Brittany from Southampton early on Sunday morning.

If I start on an account of the great events in the world at the moment, I know I shall be traversing ground which, alas, I have traversed many times before. Israel/Palestine is dreadful. In June, three Israeli boys were kidnapped and killed on the West Bank, probably by a rogue extremist group which regards even Hamas as being too cosy with Israel. The Israeli response was predictably and understandably robust. Meanwhile, Hamas has been firing rockets into Israel from Gaza, causing terror and a few deaths. So Israel has launched a huge and totally disproportionate counter-offensive, causing the deaths of many hundreds of Palestinians. Fatah and the Palestinian Authority seem helpless, caught between the two adversaries, trusted by neither. The usual calls from the international community for a ceasefire. I see no end to the bloodshed. Netanyahu’s policies are very largely supported by the Israeli public. They see no problem with their continuing theft of Palestinian lands on the West Bank. They see no problem with their blockade of Gaza, which makes intolerable the lives of the people there, even when they aren’t at immediate risk of being killed. Gaza is I think the most overcrowded bit of territory in the world. Recent big migrations to Israel, notably from Russia and other countries of the ex-Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, have tipped the balance of public opinion away from those Israelis who advanced the reasoned argument that Israeli must find a way of living at peace with its neighbours, towards the position that the only way for Israel to be at peace is to exclude its neighbours, to drive them away, to Jordan, to Egypt, anywhere. Netanyahu is a prisoner of that position. I still think that a one-state solution, not a two-state solution, is the only way out of the agony. It’s nowhere in sight.

Meanwhile, and not very far away, appalling things are going on in Iraq and Syria. A group of Sunni djihadists calling itself the Islamic State now controls large swathes of eastern Syria and western Iraq, and has declared the existence of a new Islamic caliphate. It’s saying that the boundaries drawn up during the First World War by the European imperial powers — Britain and France — are an aberration of history; which they are. The caliphate aims to expand its boundaries so as to create a huge Islamic theocracy in the Near and Middle East and North Africa, run according to its own most brutal interpretation of Islamic law, and dedicated to the destruction of Shia Islam as well as Christianity, Judaism and any other religion. Christians have had to flee. Many of them have gone to Kurdish northern Iraq.

Consequently, the West’s focus of concern in the region has shifted from the brutality of the Assad regime to the brutality of the Islamic State. Assad must be feeling complacent. He can say that all along he has been fighting terrorists. The legitimate opposition to Assad — that which the West has so notably failed to support — is crushed between two barbarisms, one secular, one theocratic.

Not very far way again, in eastern Ukraine, Russia continues to arm and support groups of thugs who have proclaimed their ‘independence’ from Kiev. It’s exactly the same technique as it used in its unilateral takeover of the Crimea from Ukraine earlier in the year (which the rest of the world seems to have accepted as a fait accompli): foment discord in a region which you want to own; claim to have nothing to do with that discord; secretly arm the separatists; play the statesman coming in to offer diplomacy; end up with more territory. A dreadful event occurred last week, however, consequent on giving terrifying weapons to people who don’t know how to use them. A surface-to-air missile shot down a civilian aircraft on its way from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, killing all 298 people on board. There’s no doubt that Ukrainian separatists fired the missile. There’s no doubt that it was supplied by Russia. It’s very probable that the missile was fired by accident. The separatists deny it. Russia denies it. No one else believes them.

This action is so far away from the norms of any civilised state or individual that we don’t know what to do. The European Union is 28 countries which find it difficult to agree to do anything. Some minor sanctions. Several of the EU countries are so dependent on Russia for gas, or are so far into potentially lucrative trade deals with Russia, that we’re afraid of hurting ourselves in the process. The US understandably doesn’t want to start another war just as it’s disentangling itself from Afghanistan and so soon after it has left Iraq (in a state of chaos). Russia exploits this weakness (Iraq has chopped away the moral high ground from the West), and continues to act as if we’re still in a world where power equals physical territory and the domination of immediate neighbours. Its own population, apart from certain elites who know better but who speak out at their own risk, is completely in thrall to a propaganda machine which assures them that the Kiev government is fascist, and that the EU and US are only interested in thwarting Russia’s legitimate assertion of its rights as a great power.

I could go on. An Algerian plane, en route from Burkina Faso to Algiers, came down yesterday in Mali, in the desert near the border with Burkina Faso, killing everybody on board. Bad weather was probably the cause.

Enough for one day.

The Dream of Gerontius concert was magnificent. Wells Cathedral was packed. Mark and I crossed the Somerset levels, which had been covered in water during the winter, first in the beautiful early evening, later in the soft night. I was up at half past five the next morning, and drove in a hired car to Southampton Airport for a 9.30 flight back to Rennes.

Since then we’ve had Deirdre Finan to stay, and then Glenda and Julian Walton. Much pleasure in both cases. On the eve of Helen’s birthday, between the two visits, our neighbours Jean and Annick took us out to a seriously expensive restaurant in Pont-Scorff (not the little one we usually go to) to celebrate her birthday, as they were about to be overwhelmed with grandchildren the next day. We were the only people there that Sunday evening. The food was experimental and spectacular. The woman who served us, the wife of the chef, announced each course in a paragraph of incantation, accompanied by a curious little dance — three steps forward, three steps back — as if the putting of food into our mouths were a religious rite to be approached with due solemnity. Which, in French restaurants at that level, it is.

The next day I took Helen out and bought her a ring. It’s silver, with a stout little opal set in the clasp. Unfussy, which we both like. I had already bought her a silver bangle the previous week. That afternoon Glenda and Julian arrived, and in the evening I took the whole party out to Le Vivier at Lomener. We had a good table overlooking the water, and celebrated both Helen’s 66th birthday and Julian’s recent 70th birthday in style. The food was delicious, if a little less experimental than on the previous evening.

After Glenda and Julian left, I had a final editorial read of Paul Ashton’s book about Joe in the brothel. That took me three days. Since then, I’ve been back on the English curriculum project. Mike Raleigh sent some of my draft booklets to an HMI who wrote back rather depressingly that he didn’t think teachers had time for this kind of thing any more — that is, attempts to lay out a sound theoretical foundation for the job of teaching — but just wanted quick tips to get them through the week and to do what the government requires of them. I must say, I was depressed, and for a while wished I had never embarked on the project in the first place. But of course it was I who had made it clear to Mike that I was up for whatever work he might have which would earn me a few shillings, and the few shillings will, over the year from November 2013 to October 2014, amount to £12,000. So I must be grateful and stay the course. Mike and his colleague Peter Dougill agreed that ‘hot tips for teachers’ is not what we’re doing, so I’m sticking to the timetable which we agreed with UKLA in London in July. The one significant change which we’ve agreed to make as a result of the HMI’s remarks is to introduce the series with an executive summary as booklet 1, which will contain the essence of what’s in the other 10 booklets. Instead of waiting until booklet 11 to propose our alternative version of the National Curriculum for English, we’ll put it at the end of booklet 1, entire, and in parts at the ends of the booklets dealing with each particular aspect of the curriculum. So since Tuesday I’ve been revising the booklet on the spoken language — now booklet 2 — accordingly, which has meant inventing an alternative set of National Curriculum ‘orders’ for talk. I sent it off to Mike and Peter yesterday, and I’m having a rest day today. I shall embark on a revision of the grammar booklet tomorrow.

We’ve also sent various of my drafts out to some very well informed people, including Margaret Clark, Myra Barrs, Barbara Bleiman and Henrietta Dombey. I haven’t heard from Henrietta yet. Margaret Clark’s comments were crisp and can quite easily be accommodated. Myra and Barbara have much more thoroughgoing criticisms of the two writing booklets — Writing 3 to 7 and Writing 7 to 16 respectively — and I know they’re right. It just means that I will have to do a lot more reading and then revision before those booklets will be presentable. I said to Helen the other day that I must shake off the resentment I feel about how long all this is taking, resign myself to the fact that it’s a major piece of work which will, by the time it’s finished, have consumed the lion’s share of more than a year of my life, and get my head down and just do it. If I never write anything educational again, at least I will have said something solid and significant, which I hope some people may find useful and — who knows? — might in the future have some sort of influence, perhaps on teacher-training or even — a forlorn hope, I fear — on government policy. In the end, though, I’m writing these booklets partly because my good friends are paying me to do so, and the money’s very handy, and mainly because I want to feel that I’ve said my piece on matters which have been important to me since the day I starting teaching.

My good friend Peter Logue was formerly the education officer for Channel 4 Schools in Northern Ireland. Joe Mahon, who runs Westway Films in Derry and who made several excellent schools programmes for me at Channel 4 (he also does the readings of my poems which require an Irish accent), told me on 3 August that Peter had been taken very ill, and was in a coma in hospital in Antrim. Later he emerged from the coma, and when I rang the hospital he had been transferred from the intensive care unit to an ordinary ward. I wrote to him. I shall try his home phone number soon.

The fifth Test between England and India is about to start. I’m going to sit on the deck and have a listen. It’s a beautifully quiet, cool morning, and a holiday in the Catholic countries, of course. It now occurs to me that it’s 10 years to the day since Albert died.

Peter Logue, I’m relieved to say, is back at home. I’ve rung him twice since I wrote last month. He has had a continuing variety of medical ailments, including diabetes and gout, but his voice on the phone sounds like the man I know. I shall go and visit him from London when we’re back there.

We’re going to be back there earlier than we had planned: on 6 October. I wrote enough last time about my feelings about this educational project. I shall feel much more at ease, and confident that I can get the booklets done within the timescale we’ve agreed with UKLA, if I’m in London and close to the Institute of Education library for most of the autumn. We have a meeting with the designer of the booklets on 8 October. Those on talk and grammar are finished and with the designer now. Yesterday, I completed (I hope) revisions on the Reading 3 to 7 booklet, thanks largely to Henrietta Dombey’s comments, and sent the thing back to Henrietta, who’s replied this morning that she’s going to look at it over the weekend. I sent it at the same time to Mike Raleigh and Peter Dougill. I do hope they don’t want much more done to it. Then we’ll have three booklets in the can; only seven to go! That’s why I’m having a day off today. The next in the queue is Writing 3 to 7, on which I have Myra Barrs’ detailed comments, and some books I’ve bought at her suggestion, which I must read before embarking on the revision.

Today Scotland votes in its referendum to decide whether it wishes to become an independent country. There’s been a long and passionate campaign there, and the turnout today will be the highest ever in any kind of national ballot in Scotland. The result will be very close. Most of the polls have indicated a slight advantage to the ‘No’ position, but one went the other way, and all the recent polls have had a margin of error which spills across the 50% mark.

I’m divided in my feelings. As a member of the Labour Party, I should be against independence for Scotland, because in that event there would be many fewer Labour MPs in the House of Commons from 2016 (when Scotland would become independent in the event of ‘Yes’ winning today), making it much more difficult for Labour ever to gain an absolute majority there again. At the moment there are 49 Scottish Labour MPs at Westminster. If Labour were to become, by a small margin, the largest UK party at the general election next May, the subsequent loss of their Scottish MPs once Scotland became independent in 2016 would undo any working majority a Labour-led coalition had. In which case, presumably, there would be a vote of no confidence and another general election in the diminished UK. All crystal ball gazing, I know. If on the other hand the Conservatives were to continue to govern from next May, alone or in coalition, the UK (with or without Scotland) will have another referendum in 2017, on whether to leave the EU or not, and my feeling is that, in that case, we could easily sleepwalk out of the EU. Meanwhile, an independent Scotland would be trying to join the EU, and possibly facing a veto to its membership from Spain (worried about Catalunya) and maybe even — but I don’t think so — from the diminished UK, out of spite, assuming that we hadn’t already left the EU ourselves. If Scotland votes today to stay in the UK, but in 2017 the UK votes to leave the EU, I think the Scots will want to visit the independence question again, because they’re desperate to stay in the EU. Speculation. One of the uncertainties will be resolved early tomorrow morning.

I said that my feelings were divided, because there’s an irresponsible part of me that would like to see what happens if Scotland says ‘Yes’ today. The economic and strategic questions are major. Alex Salmond, the Scottish First Minister, wants to stay with the pound sterling, in a currency union. It’s not clear whether or not London will let him. If London doesn’t, will Scotland pay its share of the interest on the national debt, or refuse to on the grounds that London has taken its monetary ball home? There are UK nuclear submarines in the water in Scotland. Will they be moved, at enormous expense, to Milford Haven or Plymouth or Portsmouth? At what point will Scotland demand 100% of the revenues from oil in what it will regard then as its waters? Then there are much smaller but still intriguing issues, such as BBC Scotland becoming the Scottish Broadcasting Corporation, the issuing of Scottish passports to people born on or after the day of independence, and the silly question of what the remaining UK calls itself. At the moment, it may be fortunate alphabetically that G as in Great Britain comes before N as in Northern Ireland. In a diminished UK, N as in Northern Ireland comes before W as in Wales. Will the Welsh object to being pushed into last place alphabetically, elbowed out of the way by a province that has given the UK so much trouble?

If the vote is ‘No’ today, there may well be a call from Wales and Northern Ireland for exactly the same extra level of further devolved powers as have been promised to Scotland in recent weeks, by an increasingly panicked Westminster. So the three smaller parts of the UK would be treated the same. But what about poor old England then? Why shouldn’t England have devolved powers? What about an English parliament, to even up this historic asymmetry? Enough, enough.

Some Tories are muttering that Cameron would have to resign if the vote is ‘Yes’. I can’t see that. If the vote is ‘Yes’, the Conservatives can bid farewell to Scotland (which has one Conservative MP at Westminster) with a crocodile tear in their eyes, and much insincere talk of a precious 307-year union broken, while looking forward to being much more likely to be the dominant governing party in the diminished UK in the future. And if the vote is ‘No’, Cameron can say that he has saved the union for the rest of our lifetimes.

I read on the BBC’s website that the Chinese are taking a close interest in the Scottish referendum, but that they can’t understand why such a small country would want to become even smaller. I suppose one could say ‘Tibet’ in reply (on the principle, not the scale of the thing).

We’ve had two more sets of visitors since I last wrote: Martyn Coles and Pamela Dix in late August, and Bronwyn and Stephen Mellor earlier this month. Bronwyn’s mother died in July in Perth, after a lengthy period of dementia. The complicated and unpleasant financial affairs that Bronwyn and Stephen, with Bronwyn’s sister Barbara, have had to deal with arising from the disposal of Bronwyn’s father’s considerable estate (he died about four years ago) and the division of the proceeds amongst the inheritors in the family, are coming to an end. And Barbara’s brother John suffered a severe stroke two years ago. So Bronwyn and Stephen have been through a trying time, and were glad to just relax with us. They did however help me to cut all the hedges, thus greatly lightening the burden of that annual task.

As I write, a red squirrel is running back and forth between the walnut tree and the wood. It’s stripping the tree of such fruit as it has this year: not much. A delight to see.

I’ve had Ken Pearce’s comments on my Sappho versions. They’re charming, and in handwriting. I’m going to take the trouble to copy them out here.

I was so pleased and gratified to get this from Ken. I’ve written to him, of course, and I hope that we can meet this winter. I haven’t seen him for more than 40 years. He seems sure that Sappho died in Sicily. I haven’t been able to find that certainty either in the Loeb edition or on the internet. It doesn’t matter. He says that writing was only invented 150 years or so before Sappho’s time. I’ve read authorities which contradict that, even if we confine the thought to Greek scripts, but again it doesn’t matter.

I’ve just finished another Dickens — Bleak House. The same combination of responses as before: admiration amounting to awe for the occasional nobility of his prose (notably the famous first chapter); intense enjoyment of his comic talent; the pleasurable sensation of being drawn into a plot of great complexity and mysteriousness; toleration of the ridiculousness of the coincidences, piled on top of one another, without which the plot would fail; and profound irritation at his cloying sentimentality, religious or otherwise, especially with regard to the characters of his heroines (who are so good, so unselfish, so unassuming, so usefully busy, so skilled at talking kindly to the poor, and so certain to end up with the right man). Dickens has always been praised as social critic, and perhaps his magnificent rhetoric against the ills of 19th-century England did have an effect on social reality (I don’t know; scholars must have studied this). But in the books themselves, the only solution to the misery and degradation of the poor is the occasional intervention of kind rich people. I shall keep on making up for lost time with Dickens: maybe Martin Chuzzlewit next.

In early June, my neighbour Jean and I went to the mairie in Cléguer to report that the road running down from Jean’s to our house was in a deplorable state. Jean said that it hadn’t been repaired in the 40 years he had been there. The lady behind the desk wrote a few words in a book and said, ‘C’est noté.’ We didn’t have high expectations of swift action. But we were wrong! On Monday, we were awoken by a JCB in the lane, scraping away the loose and broken surface material. The deep holes in the carriageway were filled up with small white stones which a lorry had brought. Then, yesterday afternoon, along came a tarring machine which completed the job in half an hour. So now, in perhaps the most remote corner of Cléguer’s road system, we have the newest tarmacadam. I shall go into the mairie soon to say thank you.

Andrew and Annie Bannerman are coming to stay on Saturday, for five days; then Anne Seeley for a few more days. Then we have a little time to ourselves; then back to London.

Well, all that speculation about Scottish independence was idle. The Scots voted yesterday by 55% to 45% to stay in the UK. It was a larger margin of success for the ‘No’ campaign than polls in the last few weeks have predicted; so the polls were wrong again, as they have been frequently in the run-ups to recent elections in the UK. There must be a lot of people who either deliberately mislead the pollsters, or who say they’re undecided when in fact they’re not.

Everybody in Westminster is highly delighted. David Cameron’s position has been greatly strengthened, at least for a little while. There will now be a rapid move towards giving Scotland greater powers over tax, spending and welfare. Cameron also promised in his statement in Downing Street this morning that Wales, Northern Ireland and England would be given more control of their own affairs:

‘In Wales there are proposals to give the Welsh Government and Assembly more powers and I want Wales to be at the heart of the debate on how to make the United Kingdom work for all our nations. In Northern Ireland, we must work to ensure that the devolved institutions function effectively. Millions of voices of England must also be heard. The question of English votes for English laws, the so-called West Lothian question, requires a decisive answer so just as Scotland will vote separately in the Scottish Parliament on their issues on tax, spending and welfare, so too England as well as Wales and Northern Ireland should be able to vote on these issues. And all this must take place in tandem with and at the same pace as the settlement for Scotland.’

This amounts to a significant constitutional shake-up in the affairs of the UK, promised within a short timescale. We shall see.

Meanwhile, beyond the peaceful politics of the UK (nobody was killed during the Scottish referendum campaign, after all), graver matters are at hand. The Ukraine has signed the association agreement with the EU the abandonment of which last year, under pressure from Putin, has provoked the current crisis. I read opinions within Ukraine which say, ‘Let us join the EU and NATO as soon as possible. Let us join the world. If those two eastern regions want to become part of Russia, let them do so. We’d be better off without them.’ The Ukraine parliament this week gave self-rule to parts of Donetsk and Luhansk (why only parts?); and a cease-fire between the Ukrainian army and the Russian-armed separatists is holding. The ideal outcome would be that legitimate referenda in Donetsk and Luhansk were held on whether those regions would join Russia or stay with Ukraine; but I doubt if they could be conducted without bloodshed. About 3,000 people have already died in Ukraine in the 10 months since the crisis began. I think the number of people killed in Northern Ireland over the 25-year period of the troubles was about the same.

There is no doubt that Putin has aggressive intentions towards numerous bits of the former USSR and the Eastern bloc. He is a fool. His mind is operating on 19th-century power politics lines. It may, alas, be necessary to return to a version of the confrontation of the Cold War, except that the Iron Curtain will have moved east.

Events in Iraq and Syria are unspeakable. Islamic State continues to terrorise and murder people in large numbers in the name of its perverted idea of Sunni Islamist purity. Thousands of young Muslims from countries around the world, including from the European democracies, have gone to join the Islamists. There is at least now a prime minister in Iraq who seems to have the intention of forming a more inclusive government, which the West is happier to support. A coalition of Western powers, inevitably led by the US, is supporting the Iraqi government and army, the Kurdish forces and the legitimate Syrian opposition to Assad in fighting against Islamic State. This week Obama gained support from Congress for his proposals to spend much more money in the effort, and to increase air strikes against Islamic State.

Putin’s continuing and uncritical support for Assad is another of his crimes. The death toll in Syria is over 200,000.

In Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Nigeria and Senegal, ebola has now killed more than 2,600 people, and the disease is spreading. Western countries, including the US and France, are sending teams of health workers supported by soldiers to try to isolate and treat affected people. At the moment there is no vaccine against the disease or other cure for it. In Guinea, a team of health workers and journalists intending to raise awareness of the disease has been killed by ignorant villagers who imagined in some way that the team’s presence was bringing the disease, not trying to prevent it.

Thousands of refugees from North Africa and the Middle East, desperate to get into Europe via Malta or Italy on boats launched from the North African coast, especially from Libya, have drowned during the course of this year. In the latest tragedy, the evil people trafficking the refugees deliberately sank the boat they were in when the refugees refused to move to another boat which they considered dangerous. I’m tempted to use Conrad’s phrase ‘the heart of darkness’, except that I know how drenched that is with assumptions of European moral superiority. We have had plenty of examples of the heart of darkness on our own continent.

It’s a beautiful quiet morning here. I think I’m going to take a few days off from the educational writing. I’m reasonably on schedule.

I’m unexpectedly returning to France, nine days after leaving it, for the saddest of reasons. Rosa Penhouët died during the night between Sunday and Monday. Gilles, her son-in-law, phoned me on Monday morning to tell me. Rosa’s friend Marie-Pol knocked on her door on Monday morning, perhaps intending to go shopping with her, got no reply, saw that the shutters were still drawn, had a key, went in, and found Rosa dead in bed. I haven’t heard any medical opinion about the cause of death. I suppose a heart attack is the most likely. When we said goodbye to Rosa eleven days ago, she was in good humour and facing the future with her usual practicality and confidence. She had logs in for the winter. The chimney sweep had come. The outside walls of her house were being repainted. I had bought her a new pair of slippers. We had coffee with her on the Saturday morning, and as we left she embraced us warmly and said, ‘Nous avons passé de bons moments ensemble cet été.’ As indeed we had.

Because we returned to London earlier than we have in recent years, I wasn’t able to help Rosa with the annual hygiene-fest at Albert’s grave just before Toussaint. I may have written about this before. Rosa was so preoccupied with keeping the grave clean that great amounts of probably environmentally disastrous produit were applied annually to the tomb and surrounding gravel. The faintest lines of dirt in the corners of the marble were scrubbed with an old toothbrush. Almost invisible weeds and wild flowers, venturing a few millimetres above the gravel, were pulled up and the places sprayed with weed killer. This rite Rosa planned to perform with her daughter during the last days of October. She and I went to have a look at the grave a fortnight ago. ‘Je serai là-bas bientôt,’ she said with a melancholy pleasure. I told her not to be silly. I said she had a good few years yet. She was right and I was wrong. She was 80 and people do die at 80. She took all sorts of pills for all sorts of complaints. Maybe the combination over so many years weakened her. Her actions, especially the great expense — for her — of having the outside of the house repainted, showed that she had no intention of dying yet, despite what she said to me in Cléguer cemetery, where we shall leave her tomorrow, after a mass in the church at Plouay.

I was a good friend to her, I know. In the immediate years after Albert’s death I went to see her every couple of days when we were at Kerfontaine, and phoned her twice a week from London. More recently I saw her at least once a week when we were at Kerfontaine and phoned perhaps once a fortnight from London. I helped her negotiate the obstacle race of the French social security system so that she received extra help with her medical needs. (This year’s grant of 550 euros will be no good to her.) She had other good friends in the neighbourhood. She often said that, though the circumstances of her and Albert’s removal from their house at Kerlébert were brutal, she was much better off where she was, in the town, with a shop nearby. Her death is the close of a chapter in our lives which has lasted 24 years, since the day Albert came down to Kerfontaine and agreed to look after our garden.

I like to keep in touch with three widows. For a long time the three were Betty Rosen, Martina Thomson and Rosa Penhouët. When Martina died a year ago I replaced her with Beryl Richards, Lindsay’s mother. Now I must find another replacement.

I’m going to stay two nights with our neighbours Jean and Annick, rather than opening up our own house again.

We enjoyed having the Bannermans and then Anne Seeley to stay with us. The weather in September was steadily glorious. Andrew and I swam three times in the sea, which welcomed us at a temperature which the Atlantic does not normally achieve at these latitudes.

Back in London, I’ve got on with the educational project. Three booklets are now firmly under the wire and with the designer, with whom we had a good meeting a week ago. I’m revising the fourth, Writing 3 to 7, at the moment.

The main events in the world are as they were. Ebola, which has now killed more than 4,000 people in West Africa, is developing into one of the worst medical scourges the world has recently seen. There will be many more thousands of deaths before the outbreak comes under control. There is no cure at the moment, though various drugs are being tried and intensive work is under way on the development of a vaccine. But the relativisms are strange. It is quite right that the rich countries should do everything they can to help. At the moment, the USA and the UK are in the lead. Meanwhile, I saw a poster on the tube yesterday telling me that 200,000 children a year drown in Africa and Asia, many of them doing something as simple as going to get water from a river or a lake. If that’s true, or even half true, it amounts to a loss of life and of potential wealth on a scale which compares with even the worst of epidemics or with most contemporary wars. It’s a reminder that the most important development work should be to provide the simplest things, including safe access to clean water.

Islamic State continues to march through large swathes of Iraq and Syria. The Western air strikes are slowing but not halting the progress of this evil force. The Iraqi Kurds are fighting courageously on the ground, aided (so I read in today’s paper) by forces from Iran. It’s impossible to say what the outcome will be. Assad is using the cover granted him by the rise of Islamic State to continue to fight his own brutal war against the legitimate opposition in his country. We haven’t heard anything yet about the achievements of Iraq’s new leader, who is supposed to be forming a more inclusive government in the country than Maliki achieved (or, as many people say, intended). Maliki is blamed for driving many Sunnis into the arms of Islamic State. Turkey is playing a dishonest double game. It refuses to allow its Kurds across the border into Syria to fight against the djihadists. It has even begun to attack its own Kurds (it says they attacked first), despite the recent understanding which was supposed to have been achieved between the Turkish government and the leaders of the PKK. It hates Assad, understandably, but seems somewhat relaxed about an equally vile potential autocracy on its border. Islamic State has funded its activities very largely through the sale of cheap oil, principally to Turkey. The situation is as complicated and unsatisfactory as it could be; and the West’s influence on events is small. In fact, the lesson of recent years seems to be that, though there is much that the West can do by way of good, in terms of aid to poor countries riven by disputes many of which have religious fundamentalism at their roots, there isn’t much that it can do by way of military action to support the more civilised forces in those countries. And the dreadful truth is that our invasion of Iraq in 2003 has been in part responsible for the rise of religious despotism in the region. The djihadists moved into Iraq during the chaos we created in the aftermath of the invasion.

In the UK, we have our own comparatively tiny problem in the shape of UKIP. The anti-immigration party won its first Westminster seat last week, in Clacton, where a popular Conservative MP, Douglas Carswell, had resigned from the party, gone over to UKIP, and triggered a by-election. He won handsomely. On the same day, a previously safe Labour seat near Manchester, where a by-election was needed because of the death of the sitting MP, was retained by Labour by a few hundred votes. UKIP came second. There will be another by-election next month in Rochester and Strood (Rochester quite genteel; Strood definitely not) because the sitting Tory MP copied Carswell’s move. UKIP thinks it can win that seat too, though if it does it won’t do so as decisively. The other parties, especially the Conservatives, are seriously frightened.

UKIP has only one message that matters: there are too many immigrants in the country, most of them are coming from the EU, and most of those are coming from the poorer countries of Eastern Europe. So let us leave the EU, it says, and make it far harder for immigrants from anywhere to get into the UK. It’s a policy which appeals to perhaps millions of less well educated voters in poorer areas who have been having a hard time since the crash of 2008. It’s obvious to them that much of what is wrong with the country is the fault of immigrants. Economic arguments to the effect that immigration is a net supplier of great wealth to the country; that young taxpayers doing humbler jobs are needed provide the state with an income to support our ageing population: these don’t work. And I can see that if it is true, as I read, that cities like Southampton have had a 9% increase in population in a small number of years, but not a 9% increase in the number of school places or doctors, and if it is true that the arrivants have been willing to undercut the pay of established unskilled and semi-skilled workers, there will be resentment. There used to be resentment and worse in the 19th century in English and Scottish cities at the effect of even cheaper Irish labour on workers’ wages, already barely sufficient to stave off penury. Romanians and Bulgarians are the new Irish, though the actual levels of deprivation, whether of arrivants or established workers, are not those of the century before last.

I do think that an Australian-style points system for immigration from outside the EU is required. You say how many people you need to do certain jobs, and you let them and their immediate families — that is, spouse and children — in for a fixed but generous period of time, say five years, with the possibility of their applying for British citizenship after that time. I don’t think that’s uncivilised or inhumane. Indeed, I thought that the Labour government had that policy aim before 2010. But it didn’t achieve it. The UK government could bring in such a measure whenever it chose. But immigration from the EU is another matter. I’ve no idea how much success any future UK government would have in persuading the other 27 members of the EU to change one of the Union’s most basic principles: the free movement of labour. And in any case, I’m one of those people who actually likes and welcomes the diversity of accents, languages, cultures and experiences which the free movement of labour has brought to our country. The answer to our current problem is not to blame the immigrants, but to increase the minimum wage significantly for everyone, so that poverty wages become a thing of the past, to take decisive action against the wicked people who employ workers illegally at rates below the minimum wage, and to make sure that, when there are sudden increases in population as a result of immigration, the social, health and education services respond. Easier said than done, I know. I would pay for at least some of the cost of all this by levying capital gains tax at the same rate as income, and levying National Insurance at its current range of percentages on the whole of a person’s income, rather than reducing it to 2% on earnings above £815 a week (in 2015/2016), which is a tax break for the better-off which I’ve never been able to understand.

But I am in the minority. At the moment, the mood in the country is summed up by men and women interviewed on television news programmes in the streets of these by-election constituencies, who have strong opinions and weak information, who feel abandoned by the traditional political parties, and for whom UKIP offers straightforward certainties. It’s not impossible that we might drift out of the EU in the next few years as a result.

Rosa’s funeral took place yesterday morning in the church at Plouay, in the presence of about 70 people. As a ceremony, it was mournful. The form of words was standard, off-the-peg. Concerning Rosa herself, there was nothing more than a statement of the meanest facts of her life: date and place of birth, place of residence during childhood and youth, profession (seamstress) before marriage, date of marriage to Albert, place of residence (Kerlébert) during almost all of their married life, death of her elder daughter at the age of 16 (a tragedy still whispered about locally), removal to Plouay ten years ago, death of Albert almost immediately after that, Rosa’s own death. Nothing about her as a person at all.

Miserable modern Catholic hymns were sung without accompaniment, the singing led courageously by a man I recognised as having been the butcher at the little supermarket in the middle of town when that shop had a fresh meat counter. We had a friendly word afterwards. The priest conducting the service did the best he could with what he had. He was a black African; the only person of colour in the place. He read the liturgy and choreographed the upstandings and downsittings with dignity and at the proper pace.

Rosa, as I may have written before, had views on immigration exactly like those of the UKIP voters I wrote about two days ago. She was perfectly receptive to the lies of the Front National here, though whether she actually voted for them I don’t know. Last year, during our successful campaign to get her extra state help for her medical needs, she asked a person on the phone — enraged as she was by being sent from pillar post by different branches of the French bureaucracy, and exhausted by listening to recorded music for 20 minutes — ‘You give all these immigrants everything they want whenever they ask; can’t you give a Frenchwoman something for a change?’ About a month ago, she told me a story which she said her daughter Gisellaine had told her, which Gisellaine had said her friend in Chinon had told her. The friend of the daughter had been waiting in a queue in a chemist in Chinon. In front of her were some immigrants, I think Roma according to the account. Supposedly, the Roma were given all the medicines they needed without paying. Then one of the group said he wanted tanning cream. The chemist said he could have tanning cream, but must pay for it. The immigrant said no, he knew he had the right to have tanning cream free. The chemist consulted his book of rules, agreed that the immigrant was right, and gave him the tanning cream free. ‘Voilà,’ said Rosa, ‘that’s why we’re so in debt in France.’ The last time she came to Kerfontaine, a few days before we said goodbye to her, she asked me why immigrants were so keen to get into the UK; why there are so many of them at Calais. I said I thought the popularity of the UK for migrants was something to do with English, a language with which many of them have greater familiarity than they do with other European languages, partly to do with the perception that there are more unskilled and semi-skilled jobs available in the UK than elsewhere, and partly to do with the fact that some social benefits in the UK, notably visits to doctors and hospitals, are funded out of general taxation and don’t require the system of registration and payment followed by reimbursement which operates in France.

Rosa was of course the kindest and most courteous of people, and would have been so to any person she met, whatever their colour and origin, as long as they were kind and courteous towards her. So I imagine that she would have been content that an immigrant, robed in a beautiful purple chasuble, sent her off to heaven, and furthermore that, given his skin colour, he wouldn’t have been asking for tanning cream, paid for or not, at the chemist.

After the service in Plouay, about 20 of us gathered at the cemetery at Cléguer. The Penhouët family tomb had been opened. Rosa’s coffin was lowered into it, and we looked down into the hole. It was lined with cement. One coffin, that of Rosa’s daughter, had been draped with a black plastic sheet, I imagine temporarily so as not to upset the family, especially Gisellaine, since it must have decayed considerably since the early 1970s when her sister died. There was the little container carrying Albert’s ashes, with his name and dates on the lid. Rosa’s coffin lay next to her daughter’s. That was that; there was no more ceremony. We dispersed.

At both places, I was most touched, not by anything that was said or sung or done publicly, but by the fact that friends of Rosa who were also friends of mine were there and were affectionate towards me and grateful that I had come.

Jean kindly drove me around. We went home for lunch. That afternoon, at about five, I went to Rosa’s house. Gisellaine, Gilles, their daughter Maïna and a faithful friend of Rosa’s, Pierrette, were there drinking coffee. There had been no larger gathering. The tears of a few hours previously were all wiped away, and the conversation turned on any subject other than that of the departed woman. I tried to re-turn it in that direction once or twice. My intervention was politely responded to, before this year’s fruit harvest, the habits of local wild animals, or the relative advantages of wooden as against traditionally built houses (this last because a school friend of Gisellaine’s, who lived in such a wooden house, turned up) reclaimed the full energies of the conversationalists. I left after an hour. It seemed as if the page had already been turned on Rosa’s life.

In recent years, a ‘book’ of these diary entries has been coterminous with a calendar year. During the first days of January, I have usually proofread the previous year’s entries and sent them off to my friend Mark Leicester to be uploaded to the website. This January was different, because the series of booklets on English teaching, finally called English, Language and Literacy 3 to 19: Principles and Proposals, has consumed every ounce of my energy all winter. (We still use imperial measures in such phrases.) I like the story of Disraeli who, when prime minister, was sitting next to a lady at a posh dinner party. ‘Oh Mr Disraeli,’ she said, ‘I did so enjoy those novels you wrote when you were younger. May we hope for more?’ ‘I fear not, madam,’ he replied. ‘I am one of those fellows who can only do one thing at a time.’ I am certainly one of those fellows who can only do one thing at a time.

The project is nearly complete. Nine of the 10 booklets (10 now, not 11) are finished and with the designer. Six of them will be printed and published by the end of next month. The remaining four, including the one not quite finished, will be published at the beginning of September. The routine of writing for eight or 10 hours in the little room in the flat is at an end. I’m now working on easier jobs: organising the three launches of the series in Brighton, London and York in the first week of June, and preparing other kinds of publicity. So gaps have appeared in my days, but I can’t quite settle to anything else, because my mind is still preoccupied. It’ll be better when the launches and the initial publicity are done.

One of the ways I’ve filled the gaps in my days recently is by canvassing for Labour. The general election is in nine days’ time. Keir Starmer is our candidate; he’s replaced Frank Dobson, who has stood down after 36 years. (Frank will be 75 this year.) Keir was for five years the Director of Public Prosecutions, so he’s held a big national job. I’ve met him three times now, once with just the two of us there, and I like him very much. He’s not grand; he is very able; and I think he really does believe in the things which unite, or should unite, Labour activists, politicians and voters. He will be elected in this safe seat. I hope, whatever happens on 7 May, that he’s promoted pretty quickly to the front bench on one side of the House or the other.

I can be confident about the next MP for Holborn and St Pancras. I can’t be confident at all about the result nationally. The only thing which seems certain is that neither major party is going to get an overall majority, so there will probably be another coalition of some kind, or perhaps even a minority government kept going by smaller parties, vote by vote. The significant new presence at Westminster looks likely to be the Scottish National Party. I wrote quite a bit about the Scottish referendum last September. Since then, the SNP has experienced an enormous increase in its support, to the point where all the polls predict that it will win the majority of the Scottish seats. Some polls have even predicted a clean sweep. I don’t think that will happen, but I would be surprised if the SNP ends up with fewer than 45 out of the 59 seats. There are three reasons for this.

The first reason is that it was a fateful error for Labour to enter the pro-unionist referendum campaign with the Tories. Thousands of Scots who had voted Labour all their lives, out of habitual loyalty, suddenly asked themselves what the party they had thought of as theirs was doing marching under the same banner as the deadly enemy. The result was like a sudden separation or divorce after a long but routine marriage. They deserted the party in droves. Labour should have run a pro-unionist campaign under its own banner.

The second reason is that at seven o’clock on the morrow of the referendum, a couple of hours only after the victory of the ‘No’ campaign had been announced, David Cameron came out of 10 Downing Street and made a speech (some of which I quoted in the diary entry the next day) not simply welcoming the result, and promising to see what could be done to give Scotland still greater autonomy within the union. He immediately linked the result to the need, as he saw it, to give English MPs the sole right to vote on laws which affect only England, because of the hoary old West Lothian question. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the West Lothian question, this immediate hijacking of the Scottish people’s relief or dejection enraged millions of them, ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ voters alike. It made nationalists more nationalistic still; it made many unionists feel they’d been betrayed. ‘We voted to keep Scotland in the UK,’ they thought or said. ‘Now he’s got us in the bag, he’s appealing to English nationalism and English voters, which is all he really cares about.’ I’m sure Cameron knew what he was doing. He wanted to damage the Labour Party, and he’s done it. If the proportion of seats won by the parties in Scotland in 2010 were even approximately repeated in 2015, Labour would have something very close to an overall majority, and could certainly govern with the Liberals. The Tories would be a distant second. As it is, Labour and the Tories are neck and neck.

The first two reasons for the SNP’s rise are negative. The third is positive. Nicola Sturgeon, the new leader of the party, has emerged as a political star. Across the UK, not just in Scotland, people like her. She’s tough, human, humorous, quick on her feet, ordinary as well as clever. As a result, she’s been dubbed ‘the most dangerous woman’ in Britain, because one possible outcome of the election is a Labour government looking to her for support of some kind, although Ed Miliband has ruled out a formal coalition. The front-page headline in The Mail on Sunday two days ago claimed that Theresa May, the home secretary, believes that the prospect of the SNP in government at Westminster represents the worst constitutional threat to the country since the abdication crisis: a truly bizarre comparison.

The Tories and the right-wing press have gambled that Miliband is a weak leader and will be exposed as such. In fact, Miliband has emerged better than expected from the two televised debates so far, and there are lots of not particularly political people who instinctively dislike poisonous personal attacks of the sort that some Tories and the right-wing press make their speciality. Michael Fallon, a particularly unpleasant person who is currently the defence secretary, who has a tendency to the absurd in his choice of words (he once remarked that schools shouldn’t have ‘local authority bureaucrats walking all over them in their suede shoes’), said that because Miliband the younger had ‘stabbed his brother in the back’ in the leadership election, he couldn’t be trusted with Britain’s nuclear deterrent. This was a preposterous claim, which embarrassed many Conservatives, and did Ed only good. I still think that Labour made a huge mistake in not choosing Miliband the elder in 2010, but that is history.

I have a policy for a devolved settlement in a United Kingdom. There should be four parliaments in the UK, as in a sense there are now. Very large and equal powers should be devolved to the four parliaments: justice and policing, education, health, transport, broadcasting and culture, support for business, local government, environmental protection in the local sense. (Some of these of course already are devolved, in an uneven way.) Governments in the four parts of the UK would set their own budgets and raise their own taxes to pay for these things. There should be one set of elected representatives for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, not the two that exist in those places at the moment. From time to time, the representatives in the four parliaments would meet in the House of Commons (where there’s just enough room) or indeed in one of the other parliament buildings, to debate and decide on UK-wide concerns: defence, foreign policy, relations with the EU, the environment (in the global sense) and climate change, migration in and out of the UK, financial regulation. The UK government would set budgets and raise taxes to pay for these things. So taxation would be like it is in the USA, with a federal tax and a state tax. You’d need two levels of cabinet; the UK cabinet would be a great deal smaller than it is now. The UK prime minister could also be the first minister of one of the four parliaments, or not. The Bank of England would continue to decide interest rates.

I would abolish the House of Lords completely. (The English parliament could perhaps move in there.) At the moment, apart from the grotesquery that there is still a small group of hereditary peers on the red benches, the main function of the House of Lords is to slow everything down. I would make much more use of paid expert committees advising the parliaments, so that former parliamentarians and distinguished people from outside parliamentary politics could make a contribution to law-making.

At the moment, the union is a lopsided mess. There’s a simplicity in my proposal which means that it’s not going to happen in my lifetime.

Today is the sixth anniversary of my mother’s death.

It’s pouring with rain. Tomorrow is the general election. Let it rain today, but let the sun shine tomorrow, so people aren’t discouraged from coming out and voting (and so that my life is pleasanter, sitting outside polling stations taking numbers, and climbing the stairs of council blocks asking whether people have gone to vote yet). I’ve just checked on the BBC website, and it looks as if my wish will be granted.

I’ve done about eight canvassing sessions and delivered a few hundred eve-of-poll leaflets to prospective Labour voters. As always when I do this, I’m reminded that the key, central, underlying question in our politics should be: how can we reduce inequalities? I meet people whom, in my comfortable normal life, I don’t usually meet. Mostly, they’re not people who are desperate (though there are a few of those), but people who are just about hanging on to a sense of the adequacy of existence. Life offers few pleasures. Routine, ill-paid work consumes most of their energies. Their immediate physical environment is dispiriting. If their incomes were reduced further, for example by the reduction of the tax credits which supplement the minimum wage they earn, they would join those who are already desperate. There is an urgent need for a straightforward and significant increase in these people’s incomes, so that life isn’t a constant worry about making ends meet, so that there is headroom both in the sense of a bit of financial surplus in the family budget and in the sense of room for the head to enjoy leisure and a greater diversity of experience.

Only Labour, with all its faults, has a chance of creating the economic circumstances which might make such a desirable ambition an actual reality. As could have been predicted, the right-wing newspapers are making every effort, telling every lie, manufacturing and distributing every poison, to try to stop Labour gaining power tomorrow. The Sun today has huge headlines warning people of the danger of a Labour government in thrall to the SNP. That’s the English edition of The Sun. The Scottish edition tells people to vote SNP. This is lying at its most absurd: warning of an impending catastrophe in one part of the UK; promoting the supposed cause of the catastrophe in another. It’s a complete and unapologetic contradiction with one purpose only: to damage Labour.

We shall see. I’m hoping, but I’m not optimistic, that Labour will get a few more seats than the Tories. If we do, it should be possible for Miliband to form a stable government, because Labour has more friends and non-enemies (that is, parties which wouldn’t vote down a Labour Queen’s Speech) than do the Tories. The situation isn’t hopeless even if the Tories do get a few more seats than Labour. They need more seats of their own in order to have a programme for a stable government, because only the Liberals, UKIP and the DUP would support them or abstain from voting them down. The Liberals have said that they won’t join any form of agreement, however loose, which involved UKIP. So it’s the Liberals or UKIP, not and UKIP, in such a scenario. Labour has the Liberals (who will climb into bed with either big party), the SNP, Plaid Cymru, the Green or Greens, the SDLP and one or two independents: a bigger group. Of these, the SNP is by far the most important and most problematic potential partner. It is likely to be the third-biggest political party in the UK after tomorrow. Miliband will have to come to some kind of informal agreement with the SNP if he is to govern. Without them, unless there is a delightful surprise tomorrow, it will be very hard to get to the number he needs. During the television debate with the other ‘challenger’ parties, Miliband said, ‘No coalition, no deal’ in response to an offer of collaboration from Nicola Sturgeon. In usual English, that seems to rule out any form of cooperative agreement, however informal. Maybe he’ll find a way out of the impasse he seems to have created. I wish he had said something like, ‘Until the election, my job is to put forward the Labour Party’s plans for government as effectively as I can. If the UK’s voters decide on 7 May that they want more than one party to govern for another five years, it’s the politicians’ job to try to satisfy their request. We will take part in that effort if we have to. But until 8 May, I’ll do the job I have on hand now.’

One more big lie which the Tories have been telling since the 2010 election campaign and ever since: that the ‘financial mess’ they inherited, as they put it, is all due to Labour’s fiscal irresponsibility. I’ve written about this before, I know, but it continues to enrage me. I’ve just looked up the figures. At the end of the 1997/8 financial year, after 11 months of Labour government, net public-sector debt was £352 billion, or 51.7% of GDP (source: Bank of England Quarterly Bulletin, November 1998). At the end of the 2007/8 financial year, after 10 years and 11 months of Labour government, net public-sector debt was £620.1 billion, or 43.3% of GDP (source: Office for National Statistics Statistical Bulletin, Government Deficit and Debt Under the Maastricht Treaty, September 2012). So just before the financial crisis, which was brought about entirely by the greed and stupidity of the very rich people running the banks and other financial institutions, Labour had in its 10 years of power achieved a significant reduction in government debt as a proportion of GDP. Meanwhile, it had built new schools and hospitals, and given education and the health service more money to spend than they had ever had before. That’s a legacy to be proud of, not to be ashamed of. Alas, I haven’t heard senior Labour people quoting these figures anywhere. Of course the debt as a proportion of GDP then shot up (£1,312.1 billion, or 85.8% of GDP, in 2011/12). It had to, otherwise many of us would have seen the modest savings in our bank accounts disappear ‘into air, into thin air’. Labour’s failing wasn’t to do with overspending; it was to do with letting the banks do more or less as they pleased. But the crisis happened on Labour’s watch. That’s the trouble. Paul Krugman, one of the economists I most admire, recently wrote that it was fortunate for Obama and the Democrats that the crisis occurred on the Republicans’ watch. If it had occurred a year later, the Republicans would have been echoing the Conservatives’ lies on the other side of the Atlantic.

My birthday, and an exquisite, calm, bright day here in Brittany.

To begin with politics: I was wrong again! The Conservatives won the election with a small overall majority of 12. If I was wrong, so were all the opinion polls and all the professional political commentators. The lesson to be learned, and never to be forgotten for the rest of my lifetime, is: don’t trust opinion polls, at least in the UK. Conservative voters lie when they’re asked who they will vote for; they’re politely called ‘shy Tories’. The exit poll on the day, which interviewed 22,000 voters as they came out of the polling stations, got it right; it predicted, as the polls closed at ten o’clock, that the Conservatives would be the largest party.

I sat up, as usual, until seven o’clock in the morning, then went to bed for three hours, got up again and watched more television until tea time. We went to see the musical Gypsy that night — booked long ago — starring the wonderful Imelda Staunton. It’s strange when in one part of your head you are utterly desolate, and in another you are persuaded to laugh amid the desolation. The bad feeling persisted until the Sunday night. I was reminded of its opposite: the exhilaration over the long weekend after 1 May 1997. How far away that now seems.

In brief, here are the reasons for the defeat, most or all of which I’ve identified before. First, we chose the wrong leader in 2010; it should have been David Miliband. It’s a cruel irony that it was only the unions which swung it for Ed. They thought he would be more left-wing than his brother; that they would get better treatment from him. They were wrong; Ed courageously changed the voting system for future leaders, eliminating the tripartite electoral college, and in other ways loosening Labour’s dependence on union block votes dictated by their leaders. When it came to 7 May this year, many of the people who actually decide elections in this country decided that Ed doesn’t have the gravitas, the authority, the hard-to-define-but-easy-to-recognise quality of a potential prime minister. So the unions have made a significant contribution to giving the country a further five years of Conservative government. Thanks.

Secondly, Scotland. It was a complete SNP landslide; they won 56 of the 59 seats there. Labour, the Tories and the Liberals hung on to one seat each. Some of the swings were phenomenal, unprecedented. Labour went from being the majority party in Scotland to almost nothing.

Thirdly, if 7 May was bad for Labour, it was a disaster for the Liberals. They lost all but eight seats across the UK: the price they paid for going into coalition with the Tories. So no chance whatever of Labour being able to form a Lib-Lab coalition.

Fourthly, the UKIP vote hurt Labour as much as it did the Tories. In many places, UKIP voters reduced the Labour count by enough to prevent Labour taking Tory-held seats; in some places the effect was sufficient to allow a Tory win.

Fifthly, the months of poisonous, calculated lying by the right-wing press had their usual effect. There’s always a nauseating, hypocritical moment just after elections won by the Tories, when that part of the press for a day or two pays half-hearted tribute to the qualities of the gallant loser, while privately gleefully congratulating itself on another job well done.

Those are the reasons. There was small local consolation in that we increased Keir Starmer’s majority in Holborn and St Pancras from the 10,000 he had inherited from Frank Dobson to 17,000. And in London as a whole, there was a swing to Labour. But great swathes of the rest of England went the other way.

Ed Miliband resigned as leader on 8 May. Labour must now choose a new leader (and deputy leader, since Harriet Harman will stand down as deputy leader in September, having done — as in 2010 — a stint of a few months as acting leader). There is no leadership candidate who fills me with absolute confidence. I think I shall vote for Andy Burnham. In three or four years’ time, with Cameron standing down as he said he will, and if Labour still trails in the polls, there may even be another leadership election. In the meantime, Miliband the elder should come back and get himself a safe seat, just as Boris Johnson, mayor of London until next year and a Tory leadership contender, has just done.

Change of subject: the first six booklets in the series English, Language and Literacy 3 to 19: Principles and Proposals were successfully launched in Brighton, London and York on 2, 3 and 4 June. We gave away more than 100 copies of Summary, the first booklet in the series, and sold 114 copies of the others, including some advance sales of the four booklets to be published in September. I feel very pleased. There’s still work to do in proofreading PDFs of the September booklets, but the intellectual work is now complete (English 16 to 19, the tenth and last in the series, was finished last week). There will be one more launch, at the United Kingdom Literacy Association’s conference in Nottingham on 12 July, but Mike Raleigh and Peter Dougill will do that one. I’ve written to Cambridge University Press, at the suggestion of Ron Carter, enclosing the six booklets and asking whether they would be interested in publishing a combined volume containing all ten. They’re thinking about it. If they say no, we’ll try one or two of the other big commercial publishers.

Here is the speech I gave at the three launches.

A couple of people have said that the speech made them feel that I should have been an MP myself. Nice for the ego, but it’s too late for that, I fear.

We crossed the channel on 7 June and arrived here the following day. I spent a good part of the next few days asleep. Since then, I’ve had the glorious feeling which comes at the end of a big project: delight in new-found leisure, and no immediate urge to do anything else in particular. The pleasure of just being here in early summer is enough. Actually, I’ve done quite a lot of physical labour. I’ve helped Jean our neighbour shift a heap of topsoil from one side of his house to the garden on the other side, where it was needed to cover clay exposed where a digger had dug a trench to take sewage and drainage pipes to a new septic tank at the far end of the garden, and then filled the trench in. Topsoil now covers the whole area, and we’ve rolled, seeded and watered it, so new grass should come soon. And I’ve weeded the flowerbeds here, put compost around all the plants and doped them heavily with fertiliser to accelerate their flowering. Jean-Paul had cut the grass before we arrived. So now Kerfontaine looks wonderful, in its slightly shaggy way.

Intended writing projects when I get round to them: some new poems (I have three ideas); more translations; more Madame Granic stories; and I’m going to write to Paul Halley to ask whether I’m ever likely to get any music from him to go with my King Roger libretto, which has been waiting for tunes for two and a half years. In the autumn and winter, when I’m back in London, I’m going — at Betty Rosen’s request — to edit a selection of Harold Rosen’s writings. We haven’t finally decided on the mode of publication yet; possibly a website, possibly designed and built by Mark Leicester.

On 26 February, I was writing as usual in the little room at 77 Weavers way, when I heard raised voices from John Bentil’s flat next door. I went across. John had collapsed. Fortunately, the cleaner, who only came for half a day once a fortnight, was there when it happened, and had dialled 999. The paramedic was telling the cleaner to pump John’s chest. For the next quarter of an hour, I ran up and down stairs admitting more and more emergency medical people. In the end there were eight or nine in the flat, being instructed by a doctor. It was an impressive exhibition of strenuous, skilled collaborative effort. They tried everything: electric shocks, adrenalin injections, oxygen, a machine to pump the chest. In vain. After about 40 minutes, the doctor looked at me and I looked at her, and we agreed that they should stop. John had died of a heart attack, his heart probably weakened over many years by his asthma.

The medical team left. After a few minutes, two police constables arrived. Half an hour after that, a sergeant turned up, and was swiftly satisfied that there were no suspicious circumstances. I sat with the constables for several hours, until the emergency undertaker arrived; two burly men took John away in a black plastic bag, bumping down the stairs on a trolley.

During my time with the constables, I showed them letters from John’s daughter, written 15 years ago from an address in Kent. I told them that the daughter was John’s only child. I knew this because about five years ago, I had asked John whether he had any children. He had said, ‘I have a daughter, but we don’t get on.’ I didn’t enquire further. About three years ago, I had offered to help John sort out his chaotic paperwork. His desk was covered by a huge heap of correspondence, mostly bills he had paid. Seeing the letters in a drawer of the desk, I recognised that they were personal, but read enough of the first pages of two or three of them to realise that the daughter was expressing regret that her father did not wish to pursue a relationship with her. That was all I knew then. I understood a little more when the police were with me and I read the letters all the way through. I also found a typed letter from two other people in Kent, which made it clear that they were John’s daughter’s adoptive parents.

I suggested to the policemen that their colleagues in Kent visit the daughter’s house, and tell her the news if she was still there. They agreed, and took away various of John’s documents (expired passport, expired driving licence, the folders into which I had organised such of John’s papers as were worth keeping). These would go to the coroner.

The next morning, the daughter rang. The Kent police had found her, told her, and given her our phone number. I liked her immediately. The morning after that, a Saturday, she arrived with her elder son. I shall call her June. She is the most honest, honourable, decent and charming person.

She told me the full story. John (as I knew) had arrived from newly independent Ghana in 1959 or 1960. He and his brother, who died soon afterwards, had rapidly become disillusioned with Nkrumah’s governance of the country. They feared that Ghana was heading towards a one-party dictatorship. They were in physical danger, as young, eloquent spokesmen for the opposition to Nkrumah. This was one of the reasons why John came to England.

John worked in London schools and in the Post Office while studying for the Bar. (I knew several of the schools, including Tulse Hill — which is no longer there — and some of the people he had worked with.) In 1962, at the age of 29, he had a brief liaison with a woman of 21. Result: a baby girl born in the harsh winter of 1963. The relationship didn’t last. Why, June doesn’t know. Was it that John didn’t wish his brilliant potential career as a barrister to be compromised by this inconvenience? At any rate, June’s mother didn’t keep the baby. Initially, she was fostered. June doesn’t know at what point her mother’s parents found out that their daughter was pregnant. They visited the foster home, and were appalled: a scene of Dickensian squalor. (I told this story last night to Jean and Annick, who came to dinner; they said ‘Zolaesque’.) The grandparents took the baby away, and later adopted her. So maternal grandparents (the writers of the typed letter) became legal parents.

John knew where his daughter had gone. He sent money to the new parents, and asked whether he could see his daughter from time to time. He was refused. This must have hurt him deeply, and was perhaps the reason for his later wrong behaviour. In the typed letter, the parents/grandparents wrote simply that John had broken their daughter’s heart, and that they had wanted to give the baby a completely new start in life.

The new parents then did one good and one strange thing. Once the little girl was old enough to understand, they told her that she was adopted. Her skin colour was not that of most Kentish maids. That was the good thing. The strange thing was that they told her that her mother was her elder sister. The mother had by this time met another man, married and moved away, but June saw her ‘sister’ from time to time. One day, when she was about 12 years old, she opened a drawer in the house, read some papers, and discovered the truth about her mother. There must have been a scene at that point. However, she didn’t then find out who her father was.

She grew up, became a nurse, married and had children. The marriage didn’t last. The husband, who was abusive, eventually left her for another man. Thereafter, she brought up the children alone, on a nurse’s salary.

Meanwhile, John was called to the Bar (in England and in Ghana, although he never revisited the country of his birth). He didn’t practise, but he taught civil, criminal and environmental law in universities in England and Australia. He had a sabbatical year while in Melbourne, during which he went to the USA and to Japan, studying aspects of those countries’ legal systems. During his career, he wrote more than 200 articles for legal journals. He returned to London at the end of his time in Australia, first renting a flat in Russell Square, then buying 79 Weavers Way in 1997.

At some point in the 1990s, I think (but I’m not sure) in the early years of the Labour government, the law in England was changed so that adopted children henceforth had the legal right to try to discover who their biological parents were. June, a woman by now in her mid-30s, took advantage of the new law. She contacted the Fostering Agency, who gave her John’s name and intended profession. She contacted the Bar Council, and asked whether they had an address for a John Kodwo Bentil. They did: 79 Weavers Way, London NW1 0XG. She wrote to John.

On an August day in the year 2000, when Helen and I were either here or visiting Stephen and Theresa in the Charente (there’s no diary entry between May and September of that year, I’m sorry to say), June brought her children to London to visit her father, their grandfather. They went to the zoo. John bought the children Toblerones. The children played in the little park in Barker Drive, round the corner from the flat. It was a happy enough meeting, but alas, either then or a few days later, John made it clear to June that he didn’t wish to pursue an adult relationship with her. He gave her some money. Her several letters in the weeks following were dignified, heartfelt attempts to get him to change his mind. They were unsuccessful. That was the full story behind John’s one statement to me that he and his daughter didn’t get on.

I liked John very much, and did a lot for him, but his rejection of June was a terrible failing. Obviously, it wasn’t her fault if his male pride has been hurt 37 years previously.

Once June had told us the story, we went next door and looked at the shabby flat, with its hundreds of legal and other books on shelves and a few cheap prints on its walls. She told us that on that day in 2000, John had said to her, as they looked at the books, ‘One day you’ll have to deal with all this.’ In our part of London, these flats now sell for at least £400,000, even in an unloved state. John owned it outright.

June’s birth mother had died before the meeting. The adoptive parents died in the early years of this century.

In 2014, I helped John to reclaim money he had left in Australia in a bank account and an investment trust. He had no idea how to do this, and it was a bit complicated to achieve, because Australian law says that if money lies untouched for a number of years, it is automatically transferred to the government. I had to apply to the government to get it back, but I managed this, and in the summer of last year, John’s UK bank account benefited to the tune of about £8000. I happened to be in London at the time for a few days, because of a meeting to do with the booklets. He had me in to drink a bottle of champagne and to eat some crisps and Twiglets. He thrust an envelope into my hand, insisting that I take it and not object. It was a cheque for £1000. My researches into his financial affairs had revealed that he had the best part of £200,000 in various bank accounts in the UK. So his total estate was worth at least £600,000, and probably more.

I told June that I was sure that she would inherit John’s estate. I was wrong. She rang me on the Monday, in some distress, having been told by (I think) a probate officer in the Treasury Solicitor’s office, who had received John’s papers, that she could expect to inherit nothing, unless a will were found naming her as the beneficiary, since she had been adopted, and under English law an adopted child forgoes any right to the estate of biological parents unless there are instructions to the contrary.

I consulted our solicitor, who kindly gave me a detailed opinion gratis, saying the same thing. I even enquired of her as to whether, as the person who had done the most for John during the last years of his life, I might have a claim as a beneficiary; if the claim were successful I would give the money to June. No. Unless a will could be found, the estate would go to any blood relatives (perhaps cousins, nephews or nieces in Ghana) who could be found. But the Treasury Solicitor would not be making any effort in that direction. It would simply post the details of John’s unclaimed estate on its website for three weeks. If no blood relative were found, the estate would eventually go to the Treasury.

Since then, two firms have emerged, calling themselves, with slight variations between the two, forensic genealogists. These people look at the details of unclaimed estates on the Treasury Solicitor’s website. One of them is pursuing the case on June’s behalf, saying that there may possibly be a way round the law, given the strength of June’s moral claim. I don’t know whether or not this firm is also trying to contact Ghana. They work on a no-win, no-fee basis. If they can find and prove a beneficiary, they take about 15% of the estate. I have my doubts. I think it’s overwhelmingly likely that the government will collect the money.

It may seem surprising that John, a barrister, did not know this piece of English law. The law is a wide area, and he probably simply wrongly assumed that, if he never got round to making a will, June would inherit by default. I am quite sure that he did say to June what she said he said on that day 15 years ago, and that it was his intention that she should inherit.

I notice that I wrote in spring 2014 about helping John to get one of his eyes fixed at UCH. He had been almost totally blind there. In the autumn, I arranged for him get the other eye done. It had been only slightly better than the first. In a few months last year, he went from a position of extreme partial sightedness to almost perfect vision. We visited Boots in the high street in January, where he was measured for his first ever (ever!) pair of spectacles. He had managed all these years with a magnifying glass.

I remember wondering then whether I should ask John if he had made a will, but didn’t do so for fear that he might think that I was interested in his wealth. I wish now that I had been bolder, because the ensuing conversation might have prompted him to make a will, giving legal force to his intentions for June. Whatever the law says on the matter, June has the moral right to inherit, and if ever a person deserved a stroke of good fortune in life, she does.

John’s funeral at Golders Green on 17 March was attended by June and her children, Helen and me, and the celebrant, if that’s the right word, who was a civil servant. If there’s no obvious person, religious or otherwise, to preside at a funeral, the civil service provides one. This man, also called John, did the job very well with the little information he had. I gave a tribute. Here it is.

You can’t do better than John Donne at a funeral. I read this wonderful, famous piece at my mother’s funeral too.

Helen’s taking me to Le Vivier for dinner tonight.

The dinner was exquisite, as was the whole day. Yesterday was equally bright, beautiful and warm. I did something which, now I’m 64 and the subject of the Beatles’ witty, melancholy lyrics, I need to be careful about: I cleaned out my shed, and took a lot of accumulated clutter to the dump. Don’t become shed man. I know for certain that there’s no chance that I will ever have jars of screws of graduating sizes, nor sets of spanners ditto hanging in rows on plywood panels. Helen has just come in and said, ‘Thank God.’

Another sublime blue day, and I’ve written a poem! A small one only, nothing much to boast about, but it is the first poem since the Sappho translations of last summer, and so a great relief.

Here we are again; our sixth year in southern Tuscany. Somebody said to me the other day, not in criticism but in banter, ‘You’re always doing the same thing.’ It’s true. I don’t think I’m particularly adventurous, in the sense of having a restless desire constantly to go ‘tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new’. I like coming back to the same places and the same people and getting to know them better.

We left Kerfontaine eight days ago. Our first night (as ever) was in Agen, at the Château des Jacobins with Stéphane and his grandmother. It was 21 June, la fête de la musique, and there was music in every street. Then two nights in Marseille, with Mary and Jacques. My brother Andy was there with Beryl, on their way back to Bulgaria, where they now live in the northern hemisphere summer. They were in New Zealand from last October until this May. Jacques’ mother died last year, and he and his sisters have sold her flat. There was an enormous sideboard in there, which no one wanted and which even Emmaüs, the charity, had declined to take away. It had a huge piece of fake marble on its top. Andy very skilfully cut it with a diamond-edged power saw, so that about two thirds of the original could be transported to Mary’s flat, to sit neatly atop the stone bench on their terrasse. I was sorry that the piece of furniture couldn’t stay together. It wasn’t valuable — reproduction — but well made of solid wood, if you like that ornate sub-Louis XV style. I hope, but doubt, that one of the employees of the Marseille recycling department saw the opportunity to keep it in one piece.

Then into Italy, and a night at Podere Conti with Cornelia. It was the most beautiful evening, warm but not hot, with low humidity after a violent thunderstorm the night before. Cornelia is very pleased with her new chef, and I must say the food was the best we’ve had there. I received the PDF of the seventh booklet in my series when we arrived, and it was the perfect place to concentrate on proofreading, so I did a bit before dinner, and got up at six the next morning and did most of the rest before we had to leave.

Then to Siena, where we had arranged to give ourselves two nights of luxury in the Hotel Grand Continental, the smartest hotel in town. We drove first to Claudio’s house on the edge of the city, and parked. It was about three o’clock, and he and his wife Lucia, assuming correctly that we’d eaten something for lunch (an egg roll only — they would have been appalled), provided an exquisite array of sweetmeats from a Siena pasticceria called Un Peccato di Gola. Then Claudio drove us into the city, and helped us carry bags to the hotel. We had a lovely room, not large but perfectly comfortable, with a wonderful view to the west. Swallows and swifts flew and screamed in their hundreds over the rooftops below us. That night we ate at Le Logge, the restaurant Claudio had recommended and we had tried last year. Beautiful food. Then coffee and grappa in the Piazza del Campo. It is quite something to sit, in the cool of the late evening, in one of the most miraculous human-made spaces in the world, with the growing moon overhead.

The next morning we went to the Museo del Duomo and to the Pinacoteca Nazionale. I hadn’t been into the latter for many years, and was mightily impressed by some of the Sienese masters of which I had known nothing before: Bartolo di Fredi, Sano di Pietro, the Maestro di Tressa, Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Lovely simple lunch at Osteria Dino. Then back to the hotel for a sleep, in Helen’s case, and the last of the proofreading in mine.

That evening we went out with Claudio and Lucia to a restaurant he had recommended. We weren’t as impressed with it as we had expected, but of course said how lovely it all was. I tried my best to pay; impossible. Then to the Piazza del Campo for coffee and grappa. The tufo had been laid that morning for this week’s palio. Impossible to pay there either. Whenever I try, Claudio says that the owners are his friends, and that it would be shameful in their eyes if he didn’t pay. This can’t be true.

The next morning we visited the Palazzo Publico; again, something I hadn’t done for many years. I think the works of art in there, especially the Simone Martini Maestà and his wonderful painting of the Sienese soldier on horseback traversing an apparently desert landscape between embryonic towns (picket fences, not yet walls), with military encampments threatening, are as good as anything in Siena or indeed in Italy. And the Ambrogio Lorenzetti portrayals of good and bad government are wonderful. I especially like the idealised countryside outside Siena, with the peasants happily going about their business, one encouraging his pig forward by prodding it with a stick.

Claudio met us at 1.30 outside the cathedral, and drove us to his house. ‘It’ll only be a small lunch,’ he said. ‘Lucia had to work this morning.’ (So did he.) I should like to know what he means by a large lunch. We had cold salumi of various kinds to start with. Then superb spaghetti with pesto, freshly made by Lucia in the blender with basil from their terrace. Two helpings. Then porchetta with ratatouille. Cheese. More dolci from Un Peccato di Gola. All this accompanied by very good spumante, Luciano’s rosso di Montalcino, Luciano’s brunello di Montalcino, a moscatello, a peach digestivo, grappa or brandy with the coffee. At four o’clock we drove here, to find that Mary, Jacques, Tess and Jacques’ grand-daughter Ainhoa had already arrived. We had planned to go straight out to my favourite restaurant in San Quirico, the Cardinale, but I was relieved at the decision to postpone that pleasure until the next day. We went shopping, and Mary and Jacques cooked a delicious rabbit stew, which somehow Helen and I found room for.

Yesterday the food intake returned to something like normal. We did go to the Cardinale in the evening, where we were greeted like the good friends we now are. I had the anchovies followed by the cinta sausages. Lovely. For dinner tonight, Helen and I have cooked a chicken casserole. Mary, Jacques and Ainhoa have just returned from Monte Amiata, not having found mushrooms, in contrast to last year, when they came back with a basketful.

I always seem to be apologising to myself for the long gaps in this journal. I feel like the weary schoolmaster who, in response to a pupil’s latest failure to produce his homework, asks, ‘What’s your excuse this time?’ This time the excuse refers to a self-inflicted wound. A few days after our return from Italy (about which more later) I was writing on my computer after midnight. I had had a moderate quantity of wine with dinner. To the right of the computer was a small glass of grappa. I knocked it — about an inch of liquid — straight onto the keyboard. I rushed for the kitchen roll, frantically mopped the keyboard, but the damage was done. As I began to type again, bizarre things happened. The letter b came out as 50 square brackets. I don’t remember such a feeling of panic, giving way to despair, since the occasion all those years ago when I left my notebook on the train at the Gare du Nord. Hoping that the thing might right itself once the liquid in the works had dried, I went to bed, but not to sleep for a long time.

The following morning the computer was completely dead. It wouldn’t even start. I tried warming it with Helen’s hair dryer, thinking that the hot air might dry out the works. No good.

I considered the situation as calmly as I could, and realised that it wasn’t a complete disaster. Everything to do with English, Language and Literacy 3 to 19 already existed on other people’s computers. All my poems were already on my website. The only things which I might permanently have lost were an unfinished Madame Granic story and the eleventh book of my journal (that is, this one). I rang Ian Wilkinson, my man in Maidstone who looks after the computer. I sent the poor thing over to him. He ordered a piece of equipment from China which he hoped would recover the data on the hard drive. It didn’t work. He then sent the hard drive to a specialist in data recovery in Portsmouth. Ten days ago I went to London. I landed at Southampton as usual; train to Waterloo; train from Victoria to Maidstone. Ian had bought me a new computer, and put all the necessary software on it. I now have a facility whereby every time I want to keep a document beyond all risk of loss, I put it ‘on the cloud’. This phrase has been around for a few years now. I had some idea that it might involve sending data up to a satellite. No; in my case, the Apple ‘cloud’, according to Ian and his young assistant, is probably an air-conditioned windowless box somewhere in Ireland. Anyway, I came back from my brief trip to London with a new computer. Then, on Monday, I heard that the specialist had recovered all the data safe and sound. I was only interested in the text files and, wonder of wonders, they arrived here that day, onto the new computer, and all I had to do was to transfer the ones I wanted from Dropbox to my documents or desktop. And send them to the cloud, of course. Done. The bill arrived today: £1700. An expensive glass of grappa. I’ll see if I can get anything back from the French house insurance.

I’ve just been to the insurance office. Sorry, no.

This unhappy affair is in itself no excuse for my writing nothing in the journal for nearly three months. But somehow, the worry of it got to me. I felt I couldn’t go on until I knew was the extent of the damage was.

To resume where I left off: we had, as always, a deeply pleasurable fortnight at Rodellosso. Mary, Jacques, Tess and Ainhoa were with us for the first week. For the second, we had booked the whole place, and were joined by Andrew and Annie Bannerman, Glenda and Julian Walton, and Bronwyn and Stephen Mellor. The first two couples hadn’t met Bronwyn and Stephen before. Everyone got on terrifically well. It was very hot, but the pool was cooling, and we went to the familiar restaurants and found one new one, at Montefollonico, on the last night. We sat outside in the soft air, and ate beautiful food, for which Bronwyn and Stephen generously paid, since that day was their wedding anniversary.

We returned via Marseille (two nights) and then stopped with Stephen Eyers and Theresa Cato for four nights in the Charente. I performed my usual role, helping Stephen with the various physical jobs which always need doing there. Swam several times a day in their little pool, nude this time, so secluded is the place. We got back here on Saturday 18 July. Shortly after that, Mary, Jacques and Tess arrived, and Mary and Jacques painted the outside of the house, which needed doing. It was a mixture of work and play for them; we had a lot of fun, and they cooked some splendid meals, brilliant cooks as they are. Mary’s eldest child Sophie came for a few days with her fiancé Julien. He is charming, and they seem very happy. He works for Air France, guiding planes in at Marseille airport. They plan to get married next June, and we all agreed to do the catering for them at the event, thus avoiding the ruinous prices which the Marseille traiteurs were proposing to charge.

We were alone on Helen’s birthday. I bought her a silver necklace with a pretty dark blue stone (name forgotten) from a jeweller in Pont-Scorff. She wanted to take another look at his work, so we went there in the early afternoon. He had some loose stones, including two beautiful opals, so I asked whether he could put those into silver earrings for us. He did this during the afternoon, so Helen had the silver earrings with opal drops in time for us to go out to dinner at Le Vivier in the evening.

Later in the summer, David and Tom James came, and then Deirdre Finan, and then my brother Mark and his wife Gill, on their way down the west coast of France and into Spain and Portugal in their beloved camper van. I may have ‘gone off on one’ (Helen’s phrase when I start ranting) about camper vans before. Chacun à son goût. I rang Mark yesterday, which was his birthday and would have been our mother’s. He and Gill had just lunched in a very good restaurant in Santiago de Compostella, before visiting the cathedral.

Today I hear that the last four booklets in English, Language and Literacy 3 to 19 were delivered to the Leicester headquarters of the United Kingdom Literacy Association. The thing is done, except that now we have to mount a publicity operation to see that the series gets noticed. A couple of weeks ago, I had a highly complimentary rejection from CUP of the idea of their publishing all 10 booklets as a combined volume. They were mightily impressed with the booklets and the whole idea of the series, but are also just publishing some classroom resources which follow the new National Curriculum for English closely, and it might seem contradictory to then publish something so critical of the government orders. I don’t think there’s any contradiction, myself, in supplying teachers with material which they need as things stand, while also asserting that things could be different, be better. There we are. We shall now try Routledge.

Last Saturday, Labour announced the result of the election for its new leader. Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing back bencher who had only got onto the ballot paper because some other MPs ‘lent’ him their vote in the interest of having a wider debate within the party, won crushingly in the first round, taking 59.5% of the vote. Most of the rest of the parliamentary party is dazed. Very few MPs voted for him. His success was due to the new voting system which Ed Miliband had introduced. This gives one person one vote, with three categories of voter: full members, like Helen and me; trade unionists who become affiliated supporters, paying about half what full members pay; and ‘registered supporters’, who have paid a one-off fee £3 and declared that they support the aims of the party and are not members of parties opposed to Labour.

Once the possibility of voting as a registered supporter became widely understood, there were malicious campaigns in some of the right-wing newspapers encouraging their readers to pay £3 and vote for Corbyn, in order to consign Labour to oblivion. There may have been a bit of that, but Corbyn won nearly 50% of the votes of the full members in the first round, so would have won easily even if the registered supporters (about 85% of whom voted for him, admittedly) had not existed. It’s very likely, I think, that the majority of the large number of people who have joined the party since the election have done so in order to vote for Corbyn. Apparently, more than 15,000 people joined in the 24 hours after his victory was announced.

Corbyn is a profoundly principled and decent man. I agree with most of his policies. The only one is disagree with, with regret, is his policy on defence. He wants to scrap Trident and leave NATO. I have always thought that for the UK to have an independent nuclear deterrent, while also being a member of NATO, is pure vanity. We’re harking back to our former great-power status. If you’re in a club, and you pay your dues to the club, why duplicate your expenditure by, as it were, also setting up your own club, with only you in it, and with an expensive membership fee? I remember reading a C.P. Snow novel years ago — it may have been Corridors of Power — in which some dissident Tories in the 1950s try to stop the government wasting the nation’s money on our own bomb, when the Tory government is already spending plenty as part of NATO. The effort failed, of course.

However, to leave NATO completely, when there are dangerous people about like Putin and Netanyahu and — despite the landmark agreement with Iran, achieved in July, one of Obama’s greatest achievements — a possible hawkish future leadership of Iran, ditto Pakistan, ditto North Korea, would be foolish. Of course there should be strenuous, permanent efforts to achieve significant multilateral cuts in nuclear arsenals.

Anyway, Corbyn’s arrival means that it’s not going to be business as usual in UK politics for a while. There is a very big difference between the two parties now, at least at the top level. Corbyn: renationalise the railways; tax the rich harder, and seriously crack down on tax avoidance and evasion; bring academies and free schools back under local-authority control; abolish the internal market in the NHS (which has already happened in Wales). I think he will come down on the side of staying in the EU when the referendum comes along in 2017, which must be a private relief to Cameron, who I imagine was banking on Labour’s support in his struggle against his own Eurosceptic right wing.

The next general election is a long way away. I think it highly doubtful that Corbyn will still be leader then, because at the moment he lacks the support of most of his parliamentary colleagues. And, wish it though I might, I don’t think the UK electorate would vote to put him in Downing Street. Maybe I’m wrong. I’ve been wrong often enough in political predictions recently. Maybe a 21st-century version of the spirit of 1945 will sweep him to power. Certainly, if opinion polls a year out from the election were to show Labour with a commanding lead, a lot of those MPs who have been openly critical of him in the last few days would suddenly find that they’d changed their minds. It would be wonderful: the British people rediscover a taste for social justice, decide that there is such a thing as society, and that they want to be part of it. The behaviour of the right-wing press can only be imagined. But I have deep doubts that the dream could become a reality, which is why I voted for Andy Burnham, who came a distant second, but who — I’m glad to say — agreed to serve in Corbyn’s shadow cabinet as shadow home secretary, unlike some of his former shadow-cabinet colleagues who went off sulking to the back benches.

The dominating issue in European politics at the moment, however, is not the little revolution in the British Labour Party, but the arrival of refugees in their hundreds of thousands, fleeing war and persecution in Syria, Libya, Eritrea, Afghanistan and many other places. It’s the largest sudden movement of people to and within Europe since the end of the Second World War. Europe, I’m afraid, has signally failed to rise to the challenge which the influx represents. The only people who have shown real statespersonship are Angela Merkel and the leaders of Italy and Greece. Merkel has said that Germany could take 800,000 arrivants, and welcome. Her vice-chancellor later said that the country could accommodate 500,000 a year for the foreseeable future. It’s true that Germany’s economy is booming, that its population is ageing and in need of young blood, and that there is a grand coalition in the country uniting the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats. It’s also true that Germany has ferocious neo-Nazi groups, who regularly burn the temporary accommodation provided for the migrants. Merkel has faced these down with great courage. She has proposed the most reasonable joint response to the crisis: every EU country should take a number of migrants in proportion to its population, its GDP, the levels of its debt and deficit. Unfortunately, most of the other EU countries, the UK included, are too timid and too scared of their own right-wing media to do the decent thing. It’s true that the UK has spent serious money supporting organisations and governments near Syria, in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, in their huge task of accommodating people in refugee camps, and we should be proud of that. But it’s significant that we’re prepared to spend such money as long as these people don’t come too near us. In terms of accepting people within our own borders, Cameron has made the puniest symbolic offer: we’ll take 20,000 over five years (five years!) from the refugee camps in the bordering countries. France has done a bit better than the UK in accepting people there, but nothing on the scale that a country of its size and standing should. Hungary, meanwhile, is building a fence along its border with Serbia, to keep the migrants out. Croatia is ‘moving migrants on’.

Italy and Greece have heroically borne the burden of being the first countries of arrival for most of the migrants. Greece has dealt with an endless stream of arrivals on Kos and Lesbos, only a few kilometres from the Turkish coast, while Athens has been locked in crisis negotiations over its debt. Thousands of migrants have drowned in the Mediterranean this year. It is a full-scale tragedy, and Europe has failed to live up to our much-vaunted humanitarian ideals. The EU has a population of more than 500 million. The numbers arriving, large as they may seem in the raw, are tiny in proportion to 500 million. We are a rich continent. And as has frequently been pointed out, many of the migrants are the most resourceful of the citizens of their ravaged countries: people with skills and energy which they would have wished to use at home, but from which Europe could benefit.

In the middle of writing this, an email brings me the newsletter from Claude Moraes, London’s MEP. He is Chair of the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs Committee. He writes:

‘Action by the European Union's Member States has been chaotic and painfully slow, hampered by a small minority of EU countries including Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The UK continues to opt out from the vast majority of common EU measures which could assist with the crisis and has decided to adopt its own approach which I have commented on widely in the media as being inadequate and not assisting in cooperative solutions to help the crisis in the EU and on its borders...

My key criticism of the UK government's response is not that the UK has given little in development aid to the affected areas. In fact, the UK’s latest £600m contribution places it as one of the highest international donors to the region. The criticism is that since 2011 the UK has accepted up to 5,000 asylum applicants but resettled only 216 Syrian refugees under the Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme. It is the same scheme that the UK has announced will be extended to 20,000 over a five-year period. The refugees will not come from anywhere within the EU or on the borders of the EU. The UK will also opt out of all the key cooperation measures to deal with the crisis already existing in the EU and on its borders.’

Quite.

The last four booklets in my English teaching series arrived on Saturday. They look good. I’ve spent a bit of time this week on publicity to sympathetic organisations and individuals. What I don’t want is for all this effort merely to result in a few friends and comrades having something to cheer them up, with no real effect on teachers more widely.

As for government policy, as I said in my speech at the launches in June, the Conservatives will take no notice of anything in the booklets, should they ever get to read them. If they did become aware of what’s in them, they might even pull a trick to which they resort regularly, which is to slip a word to mates at the Mail or the Telegraph, so that people like me can be publicly derided as trendies selling the nation's children short.  It's something that's happened to me before; in 1991, before I started writing this diary, my poor mum was reading her Telegraph, with coffee and digestive biscuit at 11 in the morning as usual, and was astonished to see her eldest son presented there as the devil incarnate.  She never bought the paper (or any paper) again.  

Now that there’s a new set of Labour shadow ministers for education, we’ll send them copies, but nothing will happen as a result for at least five years, since opposition is impotence. My realistic desire is that lots of teachers and teacher-trainers and advisers of teachers should know that there is an alternative to the benighted legislation which had just been imposed on them. (As we say in the preface to the booklets, and as I said in my speech, it’s a huge irony that academies and free schools, now in the majority in the secondary sector, don’t have to follow the National Curriculum at all. Why go to all the trouble of designing a common legal entitlement to the curriculum, and then say that large numbers of schools can opt out from it? I know the answer, of course; schools of which central government approves, because they are no longer part of local authorities, can be allowed greater autonomy, while the scruff, the ones which still belong in local authorities, must be closely controlled like a platoon under orders.)

It’s been a joy and a relief to get back to a bit of literary writing. I’ve just completed (I think) two new Madame Granic stories, in which our heroine becomes romantically involved with the man whom she met because he had a right to a share of the inheritance which the three old ladies wished to confer on Madame Granic, he being the natural son of one of them. When I’ve finished writing of that kind, poetry or prose, or even when I’ve just had a good writing day and left the desk with the work still in progress, I get a feeling of justification, a certainty that this is really what I should be doing, which is all the happiness I ask for. I know that I’ve spent quite a few days in recent weeks in a state of dissatisfaction because the educational writing was finished but I hadn’t got the impetus — or perhaps just hadn’t forced myself — to turn to the other kind. Now I have, and I must make sure the flow continues.

A pleasant little task last week was to translate a short museum guide into English. At Pont-Scorff there’s a small art gallery called Espace Pierre de Grauw, which houses the work of that artist, mainly sculptures. He is a Dutchman who’s been living in France since his youth. As an artist, he’s self-taught. He’s also a monk, though a disobedient one, since he left his order to get married. (The order had him back later, with limited rights.) He will be 94 in December. I think his work is magnificent: sculptures in wood (sometimes using old railway sleepers), bronze and plaster, nearly all on religious themes. We’ve been to the gallery several times now. We took Glenda and Julian there a couple of weeks ago. I spoke for some time to Chantal, the woman who looks after the gallery. At the end of our visit, trailing her coat no doubt, she said that she was looking for someone who could do an English translation of the guide. It’s only two sides of A4, the French is straightforward, and I’m familiar with all the Biblical stories to which the sculptures relate, so I’ve done the job. There was a ceremony on Sunday in the gallery, to inaugurate a new room on the second floor. We went, and met Pierre de Grauw and his wife Georgine. He has had a stroke, so can’t speak well, but is fully mentally active behind that disability, and wrote a charming dedication to me in the flyleaf of a big book about his work, which was my payment.

I haven’t worked out yet how Pont-Scorff came to agree, not just to house the gallery in the building which was once the mairie and the school, but to display de Grauw’s work in the open air in numerous places around the village. He has spent his career in France in the suburbs of Paris, at Bagneux and more recently in Sèvres. I expect I shall find out.

There has been some limited progress on the refugee crisis. Yesterday, EU leaders agreed to give an extra billion euros to the UN refugee agency and the World Food programme, to help them support refugees in the countries neighbouring Syria. There will be more direct help to Lebanon, Jordan and particularly Turkey, which have accommodated migrants on a scale which dwarfs anything Europe has achieved. There will be assistance for the Balkan countries through which migrants are travelling in their attempt to reach northern Europe. And help for Italy and Greece, which take almost all the migrants arriving via the Mediterranean. On Tuesday, EU ministers backed mandatory quotas to divide up 120,000 refugees among members. But the vote was passed only by majority and was fiercely opposed by Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary. Slovakia has launched a legal challenge to the decision. There has been vicious name-calling between several European countries. Serbia, for instance, has just said that Croatia’s newly introduced border restrictions were ‘comparable only to those of the World War Two fascist regime’.

This is dangerous and deeply depressing. A tragic view of history would claim that nothing is learned. Serbia, which has been responsible for much more recent dreadful atrocities than those committed against its citizens by the fascist regime in Croatia during World War Two, shows the dog not far beneath its skin. The former Soviet satellites have large proportions of racists in their populations, and their leaders show every sign of being concerned to appease those prejudices. Any idea that 70 years of internationalist solidarity under communism was anything more than an empty slogan has been discredited many times since 1991.

We can’t, it seems, get anything right. Of course the underlying problem is the war in Syria and, to lesser extents, repression in Eritrea, chaos in Libya, violence in Iraq and Afghanistan. Russia, against all common sense and decency, continues to back Assad. The West will not tolerate a future vision for Syria without Assad’s departure. So there we sit, while Islamic State and the Assad regime compete with each other in levels of barbarity. But meanwhile, Europe — the cradle of democracy, the birthplace of the concept of human rights — is limping ungraciously towards the most grudging of collective responses to the problem. There should be reception points in Greece, Italy, Malta and anywhere else where migrants arrive. They should be paid for out of EU funds. At these points, officials should process the migrants, sorting out the refugees and asylum seekers from the economic migrants. Meanwhile, the migrants should be humanely accommodated, again out EU funds. Once the bona fide refugees and asylum seekers have been identified, they should be sent to EU countries according to those countries’ populations and GDPs (as is happening on too small a scale with the 120,00 agreed on Tuesday). The economic migrants, depending on their qualifications and skills, should be offered work in countries which need labour, as many do with their ageing populations. If they refuse work, or if they can’t be accommodated, they should be flown back to their country of origin or to any other countries willing to accept them. Something like that is the obviously right response to the crisis. Europe is nowhere near it. Merkel is head and shoulders above the other leaders in her attempts to move EU policy in the right direction.

Just when I thought I had finished with the English-teaching series, another job came along. Various organisations representing English teachers in England (the National Association for the Teaching of English, the National Association of Advisers in English, the English and Media Centre, the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, as well as the United Kingdom Literacy Association, the joint publisher of the series) have expressed an interest in trying to agree a common position on curriculum and assessment in the light of the various errors committed by the government, and have thought that the series might be a starting point. So would I do a summary which they could consider? I’ve just spent a week on it. It’s largely been a cut-and-paste job from text which is already there, but it has also involved some new research, since the government’s plans, particularly about testing up to the age of 11, have moved on since I wrote about them in the spring. I’ve sent the thing to a few people; it’ll go to the wider group of organisations once the smaller group has commented. There will be a meeting on 6 November to discuss my effort. I hope they like what I’ve done. I’m not going to get into accommodating little revisions and preferences in the attempt to find a form of words which satisfies everyone. I’ll listen to initial suggestions, but after that people can take it or leave it.

Nearly two weeks ago, in the early hours on Monday 28 September, there was a total eclipse of the moon. I got up at around four o’clock, by which time the earth had already covered the moon. There was a full sky of bright stars. ‘Blood moon’ is the phrase that’s used, but the colour on the moon’s silhouette was between red and black, a dull splodge, with some lightness around the edges. I read in the paper that the lightness is caused by the sun’s rays passing through the earth’s atmosphere on their way to the moon. For a while, it was difficult to see what was going on. But once the earth began to move away from the direct line between sun and moon, and the full moon to reappear gleaming white, the edge of the earth’s shadow was clear and sharp as it slowly revealed more and more of the moon. It was spectacular: a small section of the curved line which is the surface of our round planet, black as pitch, yielding to the light. It took about an hour to expose the moon fully. Of course I thought about Hardy’s poem, and of my own poem ‘Eclipses’, written a few years ago after a similar event. I watched until the last little obstruction had been nibbled away, and climbed back into bed freezing cold. Helen remarked that my scrotum wasn’t so much like a shrivelled walnut as a shrivelled hazelnut.

I’ve just finished reading Alessandro Manzoni’s The Betrothed, in Bruce Penman’s translation. David James and Helen have been reading big novels together recently: War and Peace, The Brother Karamazov and Bleak House. I asked whether I might join in, and suggested The Betrothed; I knew that it is the iconic Italian novel, but I hadn’t read it. It deserves its reputation. The rattling good story about the young lovers is wonderfully interspersed with historical information about the states of Milan and Venice in the early seventeenth century, and with religious passages which reflect Manzoni’s own Catholic faith. The descriptions of the bread riots in Milan, and in particular the plague, are magnificent. I’ve never read anything which more accurately and poignantly tells of the terror and hysteria brought by the plague, the callousness in the face of suffering and death which it inevitably caused, but also the heroism of some people in the midst of it. Also, the book is often funny and ironical. I think we three are going to continue reading big European novels which we haven’t got round to. The next will be Buddenbrooks.

Driving back from Pont-Scorff this morning after Helen’s weekly trip to the hairdresser, we passed a magnificent crop of cider apples in the hamlet of Pilornec. There were five or six heaps, of different varieties, and behind were more apples in sacks, waiting to be unloaded. Last week I had to drive up to Bubry quite early in the morning. It was a beautiful day, unlike today, and in a field a man was picking up the apples under the trees. There were already twenty or thirty sacks leaning against each other. It’s great to see small-scale cider-making still going on. We’ve had a pretty good apple crop this year: not as good as the year when I wrote ‘After After Apple-Picking’, but still more than enough for our needs. We give away as many as we can. This is the first autumn since Rosa died, and I’ve immediately become lazy. I don’t climb up ladders and pick the apples. I wait until they fall down. If they get bruised, we stew them, bake them, put them into a crumble or make chutney. We had an absolute glut of peaches, which are more of a problem because they don’t keep. We did as much as we could with stewing and chutney and giving them away, but a lot were wasted. Rosa and her friends used to come and harvest apples, peaches, chestnuts, medlars: all we had. I liked that.

Ten days ago we decided to go somewhere we’d never been before. We ended up at the estuary of the Étel, where it meets the sea. The sun shone, and we had the beach almost to ourselves. We walked for a couple of hours and then found a little restaurant which looked as if it hadn’t changed for 50 years. I didn’t think that places like that existed any more. The bar was in a different building from the restaurant itself, and between were a few outdoor tables. It was still warm enough to eat outside, as long as you sat in the sun, which Helen insisted on doing. I was overcome by nostalgia for meals I’d eaten in places like this forty and more years ago. We had mussels in a green sauce, chips and white wine. Delicious. The cook told me the name of the spice in French — curcuma — and although the English was somewhere at the back of my mind, I couldn’t bring it forward. The cook’s wife, who was serving, disappeared into the bar and came back a minute later with the English word: turmeric. ‘Thank you, Google,’ she said in English, which gave my nostalgia a bit of a jolt.

Later we walked by the river, then crossed the bridge in the car and drove round to the town of Étel, where we walked again. The sun shone warmly all day, and I said to Helen as we drove home that it had been the day of the season. I wrote a little love poem later in the week, called ‘Tracks’.

I’ve had modest success with poems recently. As well as ‘Tracks’, there’s ‘Wind-blown Acanthus’, about the time that Richard Beckley, nearly blind, identified with his hands alone that style of decoration around the door of the chapel of Notre Dame de Vérité at Caudan; ‘Drummer’, which started as an attempt to connect Hardy’s ‘Drummer Hodge’ with the dreadful murder of Drummer Lee Rigby, but in the end is simply about the latter, though he isn’t named; ‘Learning to Whistle’, about my seeing a boy in Regent’s Park practising whistling, exactly as I had done at his age; and ‘Sunny Morning in the Park’, about a slightly spiritual, Stanley Spencer-ish experience in St Martin’s Gardens in Camden Town, when ordinary surroundings and people were momentarily suffused with light and became ‘rich and strange’. This last poem has given me a great deal of trouble since I first wrote it in June (and put it in the diary entry for 19 June, entitled ‘Saturday Morning in the Park’). Peter Hetherington thought it too wordy, and has tirelessly helped me to revise it. We’ve agreed today that it’s finished.

These are all short meditations. I did something longer and different this week. I read Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days in the Loeb edition, looking for something to translate. I couldn’t find anything in Theogony, which is mainly a genealogy of the gods from the creation of the world down to Hesiod’s day. But in Works and Days there’s the short, brutal fable of the hawk and the nightingale. Hesiod used it to make his point that humans, whatever our failings, are superior to animals. We don’t eat each other, on the whole, and we do have some sense and system of justice, however imperfect. The hawk captures the nightingale, terrorises her and says that he might eat her, he might not; whatever he decides, there’s no point in the weak defying the strong. They’ll always lose.

I translated this in ballad form, and then thought that the moral (not quite the right word) of this fable contrasts interestingly with that in the fable of the eagle and the wren, in which the birds decide that they would like to have a king. To determine who should be crowned, they organise a competition to see who can fly the highest. The eagle thinks he has won, but then the wren, who has secretly been riding on his back, pops up and flies even higher. I first came upon this story when we made a series at Channel 4 in Irish. Each programme combined an Irish fable or legend about an animal, done in animation, with scientific filming about the beast. One of the programmes featured the wren. So there’s a version of the story in Irish folklore. But now I find that, at least according to Plutarch, it was one of Aesop’s fables too; it’s one of those ancient stories, like Cinderella, which has several — perhaps many — versions around the world.

I did ‘The Eagle and the Wren’ as a partner to ‘The Hawk and the Nightingale’ and linked them under the overall title ‘Two Views of Power’. I’m pleased with them.

On Tuesday, I sent off the text of the document to be considered by the English associations, about which I wrote in the last entry, to the wider group of people who will be at the meeting on 6 November. It’s a substantial thing, at 38,000 words, robust in its criticisms of the government’s follies to do with curriculum and assessment in English, but also constructive; every criticism is matched by a realistic alternative proposal. We shall see how it’s received.

Lindsay James’s mother, Beryl Richards, died on Monday night in Shrewsbury Hospice. She was a wonderful person, full of wisdom and good humour, an interested and interesting conversationalist, who bore with great courage the terrible blow of Lindsay’s death. The funeral will be at Rhydycroesau, where she was churchwarden and organist for many years, where David and Lindsay were married, where Tom was baptised, and where Lindsay’s funeral was held. If the date is after we get back to London a week tomorrow, I’ll go.

I used to tell Helen that I needed three widows to keep an eye on. The three used to be Martina Thomson, Betty Rosen and Rosa Penhouët. When Martina died, Beryl became the third. When Rosa died, I was down to two. Now Beryl has gone, I only have Betty. A year ago, when I came back here for Rosa’s funeral, I told our neighbour Annick about the three widows. She said, ‘Not me yet, thank you.’ Jean is in excellent health. We’re taking them out tonight to the restaurant in Pont-Scorff, to thank them for all they do for us.

Last night, Jean and Annick told us good stories from their childhood and youth, to do with the cinema in their respective towns. Annick remembered going to the cinema in Plouay in the 50s and early 60s, when nearly everyone went. The film of the week was shown on Saturday afternoon, again on Saturday evening and again on Sunday evening. The Sunday evening crowd tended to come in from the country. I suppose there were buses to take them back and forth. The films were either American or Italian, and they weren’t all pulp movies. Annick remembers seeing Bicycle Thieves and other classics of Italian neo-realism. The best part of her account concerned the priest. He presided over these showings (the cinema was close to the presbytery), which might be regarded as a sign of liberalism; he didn’t condemn the cinema from the pulpit as a work of the devil. However, he was the self-appointed censor. He must have watched the films in private in advance, because whenever a scene came along which he considered trop hot (Annick’s exact phrase), he would tell the projectionist to stop the projector and fast-forward until the danger was past. There were groans and boos from the bolder members of the audience, and resigned shaking of heads from the others.

I expect the priest sometimes became aroused during his private previews.

Roujan, Jean’s town in the south of France, is smaller than Plouay. 60 years ago, when Jean was thirteen years old, it was a village. It shared the same copy of each weekly film with two other villages. So the showings were staggered. Reel one of the film began to roll in village A two hours before the same piece of celluloid began to roll in village B, which was two hours before its third roll in village C. I didn’t ask, but I suppose that the villages took it in turns to come first, second and third. As soon as reel one had finished in village A, it was rewound and driven in a car or on a motorbike to village B, where it was eagerly awaited. The car or motorbike returned to village A to await reel two, which by then was playing. And so on. The arrangement needed more than one transporter, since the same car or motor bike couldn’t be carrying reel two, for example, from village A to village B at the same time as carrying reel one from village B to village C.

The audiences bore the inevitable delays with patience. Additionally, in Plouay and in Roujan, there were the familiar hazards of the period, with films breaking and projectors overheating. Often the celluloid had to be quickly and temporarily scotché. (The word is a good example of a number of linguistic phenomena: a borrowing from one language by another; a proper noun, a brand name in this case, becoming a common word, like ‘hoover’ or ‘biro’; and a noun being turned into a verb and given a standard past-participle ending.)

And then, as all over the world, television arrived and the weekly trip to the cinema declined in popularity. It was no longer an event drawing a community together for entertainment. Which reminds me of a story which Annick told me years ago. There was a priest in the nearby village of Calan. He was noted for parsimony (not that priests’ stipends were generous). Some time in the 70s, he put an advertisement in the parish magazine: ‘Father So-and-so finds himself in need of a television set, and would gladly accept such a gift from any kind and generous member of the congregation. Preferably, the gift should be in colour.’

Helen and I told Jean and Annick about our contrasting experiences of the cinema during our childhood and youth. Helen went with her family at least once a week, and sometimes more often. There was a choice of five picture houses up and down the Edgware Road. I managed to see four cinema films by the time I was eighteen, because my parents did think that the cinema was, on the whole, the work of the devil. The four were: the classic pre-war Disney animation Fantasia, on a trip organised by my primary school in Bromley; a patriotic biopic about Winston Churchill, also in Bromley; Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, in Bedford, with my first girlfriend, when — as I like to say — we had to leave after the ninth commandment to get the last bus home; and Far from the Madding Crowd, also in Bedford, at a matinee performance which I saw with Peter Hetherington when we took an afternoon off from rehearsing for Murder in the Cathedral. I remember that there were two women in the row in front of us. Irritatingly, one kept informing the other about the upcoming plot. When Sergeant Troy came on, the less well-informed woman said, ‘I don’t like the look of him.’ Her better-informed friend, for the benefit of several rows around her, replied, ‘Don’t worry. He dies in the end.’

When I got to Cambridge I made up for lost time by seeing every single film that came on at the Arts Cinema, gobbling up the entire nouvelle vague as well as all the Italian masters: Antonioni, Fellini, Pasolini. There were usually five different films a week: Monday to Wednesday, Wednesday late night, Thursday to Saturday, Saturday late night, Sunday.

Yesterday, coming out of the supermarket in Pont-Scorff, I met a group of people suffering from cerebral palsy who were selling raffle tickets for a charity supporting people with their disability. I talked for a few minutes to one of the group, a man in a wheelchair. He had that characteristic loud, wrenched, groaning manner of speaking. After a while he said, ‘Vous avez un petit accent. Vous venez d’où?’ I told him, and we laughed. It was like one of those disability advertisements which try to trick your expectations.

It’s Beryl’s funeral tomorrow. I shall stay with David for two nights.

We got back to London on Friday evening after our usual two-day trip, with the stop at the Auberge du Terroir for delicious, cholesterol-packed food and deep sleep aided by Calvados. Having unloaded, we went straight to Daphne’s to remind ourselves of the delights of Greek cuisine.

There is thick mist outside as we rush through Buckinghamshire. Yesterday and today began mistily in London. We drove across to see Bronwyn and Stephen in Southwark at about 10.30. The dome of St Paul’s glistened magically as the yellow light of the sun forced its way through the white. There followed the most beautiful warm sunny day: according to the Met Office it was the warmest November day ever recorded in England and Wales. We went for a walk in Regent’s Park in the afternoon. It was about as different as could be imagined from the description of November in that not very good poem about the month, the one with all the ‘Noes’ in it. Admittedly, it was only the first day of November. Later in the afternoon I drove up to see Helen’s brother Nick in Edgware, taking apples, brandy and the special French soap that Christine likes. On the way back the traffic was so bad in the Finchley Road that I turned left and climbed up to Hampstead. At the top, the mist was as thick and mysterious as it is now (we’re at Coventry).

There was a nice letter from Keir Starmer, our MP, waiting for me on Friday. He said he liked the 10 booklets on English teaching, and asked for another set to give to Fiona Millar. He also said that he would try to have a word with Lucy Powell, the shadow education secretary. I sent the booklets this morning, telling Keir about the recent development with the various English-teaching associations and the meeting on Friday. Then I read in the paper that Nicky Morgan, the education secretary, is going to make a speech tomorrow about assessment in primary schools, with the possibility that there may be yet more external testing at Key Stage 1. The plan for summer 2016 at the moment is for externally set, internally marked tests for seven-year-olds in reading and in grammar, punctuation and spelling. We shall see; the picture keeps changing.

After posting Keir’s package, I went up to Betty Rosen in Muswell Hill (more mist) to talk about compiling a selection of Harold Rosen’s writings, educational, political, autobiographical, poetical and personal. We’re going to ask Tony Burgess, Jane Miller, Simon Wrigley, John Hardcastle and Michael Rosen to form a little steering group. I’ve already asked Mark Leicester in New Zealand if he would be interested in building a website carrying the selection; he said he would. I think we’d have some printed copies as well. I’d like to get the majority of the work done before we go to Australia in mid-February for Alix Mellor’s wedding. That may be ambitious, but dealing with the writing of a master will be more a matter of choosing what to put in and of grouping the material than of detailed editing. At any rate, I expect that the whole thing will be finished and published by the time we leave for France next May. After the job I’ve just done, this will be an easier pleasure.

I’m now on the local train from Birmingham New Street to Shrewsbury. It moves barely faster than a stagecoach. It will take more than an hour to do the short trip, stopping — as my aunt Margaret used to say — at every five-barred gate (I exaggerate). But at least the carriages are new and clean. The afternoon is now perfectly clear. It’s a quarter past four, and will be dark in an hour. It’s always a bit of a shock changing from the French summer time to Greenwich Mean Time within a week; night suddenly takes over.

The wider world continues grievous. The very conservative, neo-Islamist President Erdogan of Turkey yesterday won the re-run of parliamentary elections he had ordered. He hadn’t liked the result he got in June, which had meant that his party was obliged to share power with others, so he asked the people think again. Obligingly, they did. Before long, he will arrange to change the constitution so as to give him the powers of an executive president, as in the USA or Russia. The reality will be much more like the latter, with the press muzzled, independent critics silenced, all opposition cowed, the senseless, murderous war with the Kurds renewed. I expect that Islamist subjugation of women will follow. It seems strange that until recently Turkey was seriously applying to become a full member of the EU. I can’t see that happening now.

Syria is awful, unspeakable. More than 250,000 people are now dead; more than a million are injured; many millions have fled the country. Because Russia and Iran refuse to contemplate a Syria without Assad, and the West and the Sunni Gulf states refuse to contemplate a Syria with Assad, the international response to the war there is incoherent. Russia says it is bombing Islamic State, but it’s pretty clear that it’s happy to bomb what we would call the legitimate opposition to Assad as well. People go out shopping and are blown to pieces in the market when one of Assad’s barrel bombs lands. The West and the Gulf states give some but not enough military support to the legitimate opposition. Meanwhile, Islamic State continues to perform the most appalling atrocities across the parts of Iraq and Syria it controls. The outside parties to this conflict — USA, UK, France, the EU, Russia, Iran, the Gulf states — met in Vienna on Friday. The inside parties, those actually fighting, were absent.

The people on this little train, tired after a day’s work and thinking about their evenings (and often discussing them it on their phones, for the benefit of the rest of us) have no control over and not much interest in these faraway miseries. I don’t blame them.

A woman of Jamaican origin (I can be that precise because of her audible phone conversation) is telling us about certain emotional and domestic difficulties she is going through. As a person used to hearing the accents and speech styles of Londoners of Caribbean origin, it’s a change to hear Caribbean vowel sounds inflected, full on, by those of the Black Country. The mixture sounds Barbadian, Devonian. But I know she’s Jamaican. ‘I’m going to Kingston in the spring to see my aunty.’ Also: ‘It was a great Hallowe’en party but I don’t think she [a third party] should have appeared nude at the end. It got the men a bit, erm, you know, worked up.’

And the year has nearly gone! The weeks since the last entry have been filled with the familiar mixture of great events — mainly but not exclusively tragic — and my own small doings.

The great events first. On the evening of Friday 13 November, Islamist terrorists killed 130 people in Paris. Most were slaughtered while attending a rock concert. Others were killed while sitting in cafés and restaurants. The death toll could have been even higher; it emerged that three suicide bombers had tried to get into the Stade de France, where France was playing a friendly football match against Germany, but had failed and so blew themselves up outside. The grief and outrage were immense. Hollande, who is not popular, even among most Socialist supporters, rose to the occasion and spoke and acted like a statesman. A state of emergency was declared. Armed police and soldiers appeared on the streets of all major cities. The man generally thought to have masterminded the attacks was later traced to a flat in northern Paris and killed. The French government, which has been part of the coalition of forces fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, said that it would not be deterred from its purpose.

At the beginning of the year, on 7 January, France had been similarly traumatised when Islamist terrorists killed 17 people: journalists who worked for the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, and shoppers at a Jewish supermarket. There was an outpouring of grief and national solidarity then, which I shared, although I have always thought that a part of French secular opinion, of which Charlie Hebdo is a symbol, is immature and provocative. It parades its right to freedom of speech and thought, its right to shock and offend whatever the target, as a proud badge of France’s laïcité. I’m all in favour of laïcité, and I wish we had a clearer division in the UK between church and state, but if you deliberately set out to outrage every symbol, every precious article of faith cherished by members of a religious and ethnic group the great majority of whom are not terrorists, it is likely that you will give ideological cover for the tiny minority who are. It’s true that Charlie Hebdo also satirises Judaism and Christianity; but Islam has been its main target. An unfortunate side effect is that these highly educated, secular, left-leaning intellectuals, ‘children of ’68’, inadvertently arouse the same prejudices against French citizens who are Muslims as do the hateful messages of the Front National. ‘Je suis Charlie’ became an international motto for a few days. I saw it scrawled on dustbins in Camden Town. J’étais Charlie myself, but not 100%.

On 29 August 2013, David Cameron tried to get a motion through the House of Commons authorising air strikes against Assad of Syria, who had recently used chemical weapons against his own people. The motion was defeated. After the Paris atrocity last month, the French government made it clear that it would be grateful if the UK would extend its attacks on Islamic State from Iraq (where they had been taking place since the autumn of last year, after a vote in the Commons which drew little attention) to Syria. Cameron was desperate not to repeat his 2013 defeat. There was full-scale division within Labour’s ranks, since Jeremy Corbyn is against armed intervention in foreign conflicts in almost all circumstances, and a large minority of the party, including several members of his shadow cabinet, thought that we should extend the fight against IS to Syria. In the end the vote was won comfortably, thanks in part to a magnificent speech by Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, courteously opposing his leader and combining the finest oratory with compelling argument. I absolutely agree with him (though many of my friends don’t, and nor does Helen) for the following reasons. First, the coalition is succeeding in slowing down and reversing IS’s advance. It isn’t true to say that armed intervention does no good. Secondly, IS doesn’t recognise the border between Syria and Iraq anyway; it regards it as an imperial invention, put in place after the First World War (which it is). Thirdly, the level of barbaric brutality which IS practises, mixing sadism and religious bigotry in equal measure, is unspeakable. Fourthly, how would we feel if those attacks had occurred in London, and we had appealed to the French for help, and the French had refused it? Fifthly, finally and most important, the UN Security Council voted unanimously after the Paris attacks in favour of whatever measures are necessary to defeat IS. This last reason was the clincher for me. The absence of a UN authorisation was the reason I was so utterly opposed to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and why this is different.

Islamist fundamentalism, now a malign force throughout large parts of Africa and Asia (we should never forget, as we mourn 130 French dead, that many thousands of people in Africa are slaughtered every year in its name) is perhaps the principal challenge to enlightened human values now. But secular barbarism, as personified by Assad, comes a close second.

More optimistically: for a fortnight in December, in Paris once again (though actually in a large building on its northern edge) all the countries of the world came together and agreed to face up to the threat of planetary disaster if we do nothing to reduce — and fast — our emissions of greenhouse gases. The final resolution promised to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Centigrade, and if possible to get close to 1.5. All sorts of promises were made by which rich countries will help poorer countries to continue to develop without recourse to the carbon-generating technologies which have made the rich countries rich, and which have created the problem in the first place. It was a magnificent and moving sight: the whole world agreeing something so important that it dwarfs everything else. Now comes the hard part: sticking to the promises.

When we heard news of the Paris attacks, we were in Shrewsbury, staying with Glenda and Julian. It was David’s 60th birthday the next day. There was a lovely party in the Drapers' Hall, with about 30 people attending. David made a good speech. His close friend David Bradshaw, who’s very ill with cancer and couldn’t attend, had at my suggestion written an entertaining and touching reply, which his wife Barbara delivered.

I stayed up in Shropshire for the following week, moving across to David’s house on the Tuesday, because it was Merle Traves’s turn to celebrate her 60th birthday the next Saturday. Helen came back to London on the train. On the Thursday, I helped Ron and Yvonne James, David’s parents, to sort out their new flat in Shrewsbury, into which they had moved only the day before. They had far too much stuff, having downsized from a house in the Shropshire countryside. Some of it went to friends, including us. But most of my day was spent going backwards and forwards to the Severn Hospice charity shop. The next day we had a flat-warming, with champagne, and Ron and Yvonne took David, Tom, Julian, Mike Raleigh, Kate Myers and me out to The Armoury for dinner.

The gathering of English associations on 6 November liked what I had written, but suggested — and they were right — that a single 38,000-word document was too long to expect people to plough through. So I went away and chopped it up into six bits, which will appear as PDFs on the websites of most of the associations. The only disappointment was that the English and Media Centre, whose directors couldn’t stay for the afternoon meeting to which Mike Raleigh, Peter Dougill and I were invited, told us later that they didn’t want to be associated with the initiative. I can’t really understand why; there was no detailed explanation, no specific things they disagreed with. The email I got from one of the directors merely said, along with the usual compliments, that the Centre didn’t associate itself with things which it hadn’t itself produced. Which I thought was a bit parochial.

I’m well into the Harold Rosen work. There was a meeting of the steering group on 8 December. I had by then read or re-read most of Harold’s oeuvre, and I suggested a way of grouping the work, which the meeting approved. I’ve been using the Prontaprint shop in Camden High Street to scan writing from books, journals and off-prints, turning the scans into Word documents which I can manipulate, which makes the process much faster. In some way which I haven’t yet decided, I’m going to mingle Harold’s poems and autobiographical stories with his educational writing. The steering group agreed that the compilation should initially be a website, with the possibility of printed publication later. Mark Leicester has confirmed that he will design and build the site. I’m going to get as much as I can done in the long, dark month of January, with few distractions and not much drinking. And Betty Rosen has kindly said that she’ll pay me something.

Talking of drinking, we’ve had a merry and peaceful Christmas here, with Stephen and Theresa joining us for five days. The weather has been bizarrely and worryingly mild, with mimosa, camellia and even azalea in flower, and primrose leaves well out. On Christmas Day, as we drove down to the sea for our usual walk, we passed, not exactly a host, but certainly a posse, of golden daffodils. Tonight, again as usual, to Pont-Scorff for Saint Sylvestre. I promised myself this morning that I would learn a new French song to entertain the company, but I’ve spent so much time writing this that they’ll have to put up with the two I’ve given them before.

We’ve been in Perth for six days now, staying with Bronwyn and Stephen Mellor and preparing for Alix’s wedding tomorrow. Alix is our unofficial goddaughter. We flew straight here, stopping for a couple of hours only in the dream-like anomie of Dubai airport. The weather is beautiful: hot and dry, but with cooling breezes off the land or sea. This wealthy, stylish suburb has something of utopia about it. The architecture is either vernacular or modernist-tasteful, the Norfolk Island pines and eucalyptuses are inhabited by parrots of vivid colours or by crows which are somehow sleeker, more coupé than their Northern cousins, and the wide grass verges, planted with the thick, succulent buffalo grass which grows best here, are neatly trimmed. The feet sink into them.

We returned to London from Kerfontaine on 4 January. As I promised myself at the end of last year, I did get my head down and produce the compilation of Harold Rosen’s writings. It’s about 230,000 words, I think; 500 pages of A4 at Cambria 12-point. The Prontaprint shop in Camden High Street was terrific, and I’ve made good friends with Raj who runs it. 90% of Harold’s printed writings were turned into Word documents which I could then manipulate. 10% I had to bash in myself, because they were in old typescript or were photocopies where the black wasn’t intense enough to be detected by the scanner. I grouped the educational writings into three: The politics of language and English teaching; The role of language in learning; Story. I wrote an introduction, borrowing heavily from the obituary I did for The Guardian and the speech I gave at Harold’s memorial event. Between the three educational parts I’ve placed some of his autobiographical stories and poems. Everyone in the steering group seems happy with it; Betty is delighted. We have, as I’ve written before, the promise from Mark Leicester that he will make a website of it, but since he agreed to do that a couple of commercial publishers have said that they might be interested, so we’ll give them a look first.

The six PDFs called Curriculum and Assessment in English 3 to 19: a Better Plan have been completed and sent to the four sponsoring organisations, which have promised to put them on their websites and promote them. UKLA has already done so, very nicely; I haven’t looked at the other websites yet. A network called DARE (digital-arts-research-education), one of whose directors is Andrew Burn, who wrote the booklet on media for the original series, has also put the PDFs up on its site, equally elegantly. So I hope that the stuff will get about. When I’m back in England, we’ll send the things, probably in paper form, to senior civil servants in the Department for Education and to the Labour educational shadow ministers. I wanted to send them to the government ministers, but people in NATE, NAAE and UKLA seem agreed that it would be useless doing so. We’ll send them to various educational journals and to the trade unions.

And that, I suppose, will be that. It’s been two years and two months since Mike first put the idea to me; quite a chunk of time. Actually, that isn’t quite that, because the commissioning editor for education at Routledge has the ten booklets in paper and electronic form, and is thinking about whether to put them out as a combined volume.

I’m performing a poem at the wedding tomorrow. Here it is.

I wrote it in about four hours one Saturday afternoon in January, and I’m pretty pleased with it. Usually, as I’ve said many times, it’s getting an idea for a poem, any good enough idea, which is the hard part; once I have the idea, I can generally make something of it. On this occasion, the idea was ready-made, of course, and the decision — which came suddenly, about a week before writing — was to do with form. I knew that the metre would be trochaic. I thought that the stanzas would be quatrains, but I’ve ended up with six-liners. Of course the line about living beyond the newly-weds’ income I’ve used before, for David’s and Lindsay’s wedding poem, but I don’t suppose many people will notice. I’m having the thing framed in Fremantle, and I’ll go and pick it up this afternoon.

Theresa Cato was 70 on 31 January; there was a lovely lunch for family and close friends at the Blue Print Café near Tower Bridge, one of her and Stephen’s favourite restaurants. And Paul Ashton was 70 on 9 February, two days before we came away. His most recent book is a spoof of the work which, in the last Sherlock Holmes story, Dr Watson tells us that Holmes was writing (or had written?) during his retirement in Sussex. The great detective had taken up bee-keeping, and the volume is called A Practical Guide to Bee-Keeping, with some Observations on the Segregation of the Queen. Paul has written this in the form of a diary which Holmes keeps. The factual (and accurate) information about bee-keeping is interspersed with an account of Holmes’s personal life and circumstances. He has married his housekeeper, the former Mrs Hudson. He meets several famous people who (in historical fact) were in Sussex or London in the early years of the 20th century, among them Rudyard Kipling, Fritz Kreisler and Lenin. The evil Moriarty’s widow and children on two occasions attempt to lure him to his death. It’s a lovely read, with all Paul’s usual quirkiness but also attention to detail. The prose is exactly what one would have expected from an Edwardian gentleman of exceptional intellectual powers and a modern, progressive outlook. Paul has found contemporary photographs, including one or two famous ones, in which Holmes plausibly appears. I’ve edited the book, as usual, and it’s currently with two commercial publishers. There are so many Holmes enthusiasts around the world that perhaps it has a chance to be published at someone else’s expense, for a change.

I can hardly bring myself to write of the greater world, at least when I think of Syria. Our aeroplane flew across Turkey and into Iran before turning right to fly down the Persian Gulf to Dubai. It didn’t cross Syrian or Iraqi airspace, I expect for good reasons, though that would have been more direct. But the map on the TV screen in front of me named all the places which have been and are being devastated by war. Currently, Aleppo is undergoing a dreadful ordeal as Russian bombers destroy it, indiscriminately attacking civilian targets, including hospitals. Putin’s criminal uncritical support for his client Assad continues. Turkey is now joining in, firing missiles at the Syrian Kurds, whom it accuses of helping the Turkish PKK. I read this morning that a bomb in Ankara has killed at least 28 people and injured many more. Most of the victims are soldiers. Of course the violence across the region is only provoking an ever-greater refugee crisis, to which Europe, with some honourable exceptions (Germany, Sweden, Denmark), has failed to respond with anything like that generous humanitarianism which, we like to tell the world, our continent represents. We’re happy enough to throw money at Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey so that terrified people can be kept in lines of tents and given food and water, but we don’t want them, except in the tiniest numbers (again, I honour the exceptions) anywhere near us.

I think, alas, that another Cold War is coming, because Putin is provoking one. He seems to have no understanding of the possibility, the desirability, of a multi-polar world where power is shared. He is playing The Great Game as if we’re still in the 19th century, except that in our own century the mutilation, slaughter and destruction he casually unleashes is on an enormously greater scale.

My niece Tess is doing a project on Shakespeare for her baccalauréat. She asked me to make a little film about the poet’s life and work, which I did yesterday. Here’s the text.

I knew most of this already, but I read Michael Wood’s excellent In Search of Shakespeare to refresh my memory. The book also told me lots of things I didn’t know. I didn’t know, for instance, that Shakespeare collaborated with four other writers on a play about Sir Thomas More. The parts he wrote include a scene where, to quote Wood: ‘More faces the mob on the so-called “Ill May Day” of 1511, when London was convulsed by an anti-immigrant riot: the kind of thing still grimly familiar in our own time’. Speaking up for the immigrants, More declares (Wood has modernised the spelling):

‘imagine that you see the wretched strangers
their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage
plodding to th’ ports and coasts for transportation
and that you sit as kings in your desires
authority quite silenced by your brawl
and you in ruff of your opinions clothed
what have you got? I’ll tell you, you had taught
how insolence and strong hand should prevail
how order should be quelled, and by this pattern
not one of you should live an aged man
for other ruffians as their fancies wrought
with self same hand self reasons and self right
would shark on you and men like ravenous fishes
would feed on one another’

More ‘asks the mob to consider where they would go if they were in the strangers’ shoes, what they would do if they were thrown out of England’:

‘Why you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That breaking in hideous violence
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not nor made not you…
…What would you think
To be thus used? This is the strangers case,
And this your mountainish inhumanity’

‘Sir Thomas More remained a draft — the play was never staged.’ But mobs in Germany and elsewhere do ‘whet their detested knives against [the immigrants’] throats’, although to be literal they prefer to burn down their hostels. In other details — ‘the wretched strangers / their babies at their backs, with their poor luggage / plodding to th’ports and coasts for transportation’ — the contemporary analogy is pretty much exact.

The wedding went off splendidly. The ceremony was held in a park overlooking the Swan River, and conducted by a cheery civil celebrant called Wally. Alix arrived escorted by eight bridesmaids, two page boys, three flower girls, a matron of honour, and her father. Waiting for her were Ben, his best man and three groomsmen, these roles fulfilled by his three brothers and one brother-in-law. The bride wore an exquisite white gown like the bend of a swan’s neck, clinging to her shoulders. It had been purchased in New York at Christmas 2014 (these things need planning). Even the discount offered on it had come to many hundreds of dollars. Ben had a sharp grey suit in dull sheen, white shirt, white tie. The bridesmaids were in black dresses, all different, all expensive. The young woman who stood closest to me (we were in the front row of seats, me being a performer) had a figure-hugging number with square holes down both sides from thigh to knee, which particularly took my attention. The matron of honour (the lovely Lucy, Alix’s friend since they were two) wore a dark patterned dress, simultaneously matronly (that is, not strikingly provocative) but elegant, restrained and in control. The groomsmen and best man had identical dark suits, white shirts, scarlet ties, so that they looked like a close-harmony evangelical combo from the 1950s (the family is Catholic). The page boys had shorts, white shirts, bow ties and red espadrilles. The flower girls were all flowers.

When Wally asked aloud, ‘Who gives this woman to be married to this man?’ Bronwyn and Stephen together replied, ‘We do.’ The page boys then took the rings to the couple, to be told by Ben in a whisper that they had got them the wrong way round. Apparently they were right and he was confused.

My poem was the concluding event of the formalities, after the signing of the registers. I gave it the full treatment, and people were complimentary afterwards. Then we (that is, about 150 of us) drank champagne before climbing into coaches which took us on an air-conditioned tour of some of the more beautiful parts of Perth before arriving at a smart restaurant in the city. The building (mid-19th century) had been the residence of the Anglican bishop of Perth. Its period elegance is now overlooked by gleaming skyscrapers owned by mining and accountancy firms. More champagne on the lawn at the back of the building, and then the staged arrival of the wedding party, announced over the PA, concluding with ‘…and now, will you please welcome the new Mr and Mrs Goodwin’. Applause. Move to the lawn in front of the building, where we sat down to dinner, beginning with Turkish mezedes (Alix and Ben had met on a boat in Turkey) which were so generous that it was difficult to do justice to the main course. Speeches while we ate, of which the best was Lucy’s, a brilliant memoir of her friendship with Alix, full of affectionate irony about Alix’s tendency to drama and fantasy as against Lucy’s more literal view of the world. (A character called Mrs Clark was Alix’s imaginary friend for a period during her childhood. A place had to be laid for her at dinner, and she always accompanied the girls on holidays and trips to the beach. Her needs and even her opinions were always consulted, and when these contradicted those of Alix’s parents, the latter were understandably irritated. Stephen told me that he once said, ‘Fuck Mrs Clark’ to Bronwyn when their child was out of earshot.)

Then vigorous dancing, to a live band which had been told to play plenty of numbers from the 60s and 70s so that oldies could participate. The first dance, of course, was for the blissful couple alone. Bronwyn and Stephen then joined them; then Ben’s family. (His mother and father, alas, have died.) Luckily from the point of view of digestion, the desserts were on a trolley at the side, only to be approached after exercise had made space for them.

Before all this, on the morning of the great day, there had been complex final preparations for the female participants in the matter of make-up and hair. Bronwyn’s and Stephen’s neighbour Carole had kindly allowed her house to be used for the purpose. There was an old-fashioned, semi-secretive, slightly Biblical sense emanating from the house: the bride was being ‘prepared for her husband’. Helen had helped Alix to design a timetable for first hair then make-up for the bridesmaids, matron of honour, mother of the bride, and the bride herself. (Bronwyn came back from her session and immediately removed most of the products that had been so carefully and expensively applied to her face.) There was even a uniform for this pretend-virginal gathering: white shirts hanging loose over white slacks or skirts. Little anxieties fluttered in and around the proceedings. Émilie, Alix’s French friend, whom we remember fondly from the time when, as a 17-year-old, Alix spent six months living with a French family, by a remarkable coincidence only a few kilometres from Kerfontaine, and attended lycée in Hennebont, came running in from next door to ask where Stephen was. ‘He’s down at the reception venue,’ I said, ‘getting things ready.’ ‘Oh, Alix is so worried,’ said Émilie, ‘ because of the wind. What will happen to her veil?’ I mildly told her that although fathers have remarkable powers, control over the elements is not one of them. I added that, as she surely knew, Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson were the two greatest French photographers of the twentieth century, that both had photographed brides whose veils stood out horizontally from their heads in stiff wind, and that these photos were among the most iconic and romantic images of French life in the last century. (I may have made some of this up; I’m pretty sure that at least one of the two masters did publish such a photograph.) Émilie seemed impressed by the information, and took it back to the bride. In the event, Alix’s veil did blow out behind her, though not fully horizontally, and Lucy had the good sense and aesthetic delicacy not to control it too severely. The song accompanying the bride’s approach to the ceremony was Donovan’s ‘Ah, but I might as well try to catch the wind,’ and I’ve no idea whether or not it had been chosen once the predicted wind speed and direction for the day had been checked on smartphones.

The vestals had ordered lunch to be carried into the sanctuary, and I was, I think, the only male who crossed the threshold. I may have broken a taboo, but nothing was said. The scene was that of a 17th-century painting, where the artist teasingly shows you a group from one side, while inviting you to imagine what it might look like from the other. Alix’s naked back was toward me, and at her face the make-up artist worked with intense seriousness and precision, while attendants fluttered. I said they looked like a Rembrandt, and retired. (I may have made up that comparison too.)

Anyway, it was all great, and everyone said what a wonderful occasion it had been. The following day there was a ‘recovery lunch’, where large quantities of restorative protein were consumed. And the day after that I took the newly-weds to the airport, whence they flew to Bali for their honeymoon.

Two days after that, Helen and I rented a car and drove northwards. On our first day we took the beautiful coast road to Geraldton, stopping to admire the Pinnacles Desert just south of Cervantes. It’s an extraordinary area of bright yellow sand, quite limited in extent, dotted with thousands of pointed limestone rocks, most of my height or shorter, some up to four metres tall. No one is quite sure what geological process has produced this phenomenon over many millennia: perhaps the rocks are the remains of tree trunks calcified by crushed sea shells; more likely they are the result of a process whereby the crushed sea shells slowly mixed with the silica of land sand, and as the ground all around was eroded, rain water washing on the crushed sea shells formed a tougher, cement-like exterior to structures gradually exposed by the descending land. But the information centre was honest enough to admit that ‘experts are in doubt’.

Yesterday morning we drove up to the charming small town of Northampton, where we were fortunate enough to come upon the Northampton Ladies’ Craft Circle at work (Thursday mornings 9 to 12). We bought two pots of chutney and an exquisite, delicate crocheted doily made by one of the ladies there. In the Little Pickles Café we had better cappuccino than I had been able to find in the whole of Perth, as I told the young woman. Then to the coast at Port Gregory, where we stopped to eat Little Pickles’s excellent frittata by the sea, and admired the astonishing Hutt Lagoon, otherwise known as the pink lake, because it contains a vivid pink alga which is used as a food colouring. (I wasn’t sure whether ‘algae’ is the plural of the rarer ‘alga’. Wikipedia tells me it is; ‘alga’ is the Latin for seaweed.) The lake also contains a tiny shrimp which is harvested and fed to farmed prawns. The intense blue of the sky, the brilliant white of the salt pans in those parts of the lagoon where the water had dried or been drained off, and the pink-to-purple colour of the water, made dazzling contrasts. Then up to this pretty seaside town.

Today has been most wonderful, because we have had not one but two of the most impressive experiences of the natural beauty of the world that I have ever enjoyed. We rose early this morning, and drove on empty roads through the thick bush of the Kalbarri National Park to the gorges of the Murchison River. This is not the tourist season. It was very hot: about 40 degrees by ten o’clock. We visited four lookout points where we gazed in awe at the depth and width of the gorges, at the bottom of which were the remaining pools and trickles of the river at the end of this dry summer. The endless bush rose to the horizon. Silence, and more silence. Eagles circled. There was no one but us. One kangaroo moved in the bush a few yards from us, and there were vivid birds. I don’t suppose, even if I see the Grand Canyon one day, that I shall ever be as impressed by wild beauty as I was this morning. And the fact that we were alone (at our fourth lookout, a solitary man from the Parks and Wildlife Department, doing his job, wished us good day) gave the experience a sense that this was the Garden of Eden and we were Adam and Eve. We kept our clothes on, of course; and the air-conditioning in the car was effective.

Back to Kalbarri for an excellent bowl of tomato soup in the Kalbarri Motor Hotel, and then on to the second wonder: the coastal cliffs. Again, we visited four or five lookouts, and marvelled at the magnificence of the precipitous cliffs, their pink and grey strata eroded over immense periods of geological time, the waves on this calm day purling and falling onto inaccessible little beaches at their base, and dolphins playing a couple of hundred metres out to sea.

The day after the last entry, we completed a circle, driving back through the Kalbarri National Park to Northampton — more excellent coffee and a good chat with the owner, who was from Horsham in Sussex and had only been out here four years, and loved it — then back to Geraldton, then Greenhough just south of there, where we visited the remains of an early (mid-nineteenth century) European settlement, which brought out in me the mixture of feelings I’ve always had about ‘pioneer’ communities: admiration for their toughness and determination, their ability to improvise in the most hostile of conditions; but despair at the behaviour of invaders who, equipped with the absolute certainty of an imperialist mind-set backed up by the Christian religion, simply stole huge tracts of land and punished any efforts by the indigenous people to protest at this theft. The settlement comprised the obligatory two churches, a school (non-denominational), another school for Catholic girls, a hall for dances and wedding receptions and other social functions, the Catholic priest’s house (I’m not sure where the Anglican one lived), the Road Board meeting place (the Road Board was the precursor of local government), a general store and the building comprising the police station, local magistrate’s court and jail. There were five cells in the jail: four were for white prisoners, who had individual accommodation; the fifth, which was larger, was for Aboriginals, who were thrown in together and chained to an iron bar which is still there.

On we drove to Dongara, where we spent our last night. On the Sunday, we took an inland route through the vast, empty wheat-growing area of the state, past huge stubble fields awaiting the spring and the plough, and back to Perth. Alix and Ben returned from Bali the same day, and two days after that they left for Melbourne, to begin their new life, she as a neuro-psychiatrist specialising in sleep disorders, he to study for a degree in youth work. And the day after that Stephen, Bronwyn, Helen and I came down here, to the Margaret River area in the south-west of the state: a wine-growing region, more comfortable and more privileged than further north, cooler in summer (though hot enough for me as I write) and equally beautiful. Carole, the neighbour about whom I wrote last time, has kindly lent us her beautiful holiday house here. It looks down over Yallingup to the ocean. The great rollers form, rise and break. From the height where I sit, groups of surfers waiting, waiting, at last mounting a wave, falling off, paddling out again to wait for the next suitable wave, doing this again and again from morning to night, look in their black wet suits like water boatmen on a stream.

We have enjoyed extravagant dinners, wonderful swimming in clear water with transparent little fish darting between the reefs, a wine-tasting yesterday at Moss Wood, one of the most famous vineyards in Australia (I first visited and tasted 21 years ago), and a trip down to Augusta through forests of karri trees — great naked peach-coloured trunks rising in their hundreds high in the air. We went on from Augusta the few kilometres to Cape Leeuwin, the most south-westerly point of mainland Australia, where the Indian meets the Southern Ocean. Before the tall white lighthouse was built in 1895, there had been many shipwrecks around this corner of the continent. Since then, only one. The iron frame on which the light and its glass are mounted was constructed in Shropshire and Staffordshire; the glass itself was made in Birmingham.

The Australian trip finished amid great pleasure and indulgence. We were back in the English spring on 11 March. Since then, I’ve been solidly on English, Language and Literacy 3 to 19, because Alison Foyle, the commissioning editor at Routledge, did write on 24 March to say yes, she would like to publish a combined volume of the ten booklets. Very good news. The only problem has been that Alison wants the book to be about 100,000 words, and the length of the ten booklets together is about 250,000. I’ve done my best, but the thing is still about 130,000 words. I finished the job yesterday, and I’m waiting for comments from Angela Goddard and Andrew Burn, who wrote two of the chapters, and from Mike Raleigh and Peter Dougill. (Peter Traves, who wrote one of the chapters, has already written to say he likes what I’ve done.) When I have comments from the others, I’ll send it to Alison, hoping (but not expecting) that she can stretch a point on the length. The trouble with shortening it further is that it would sometimes fall back on assertions which, though true, aren’t argued through as they should be.

Alison said in March that she would pass the Harold Rosen book to her colleague Heidi Lee, who commissions monographs, and who would reply ‘shortly’. I decided this morning that six weeks was a generous definition of ‘shortly’, so I rang. Heidi is out of the office today. I wrote, and I’ll ring again tomorrow. I don’t have high hopes that Routledge will take it, but you never know. We have a back-up: the Institute of Education’s own press, which would be appropriate given Harold’s long career there. We tried Routledge first because of its marketing reach across the English-speaking world. Andrew Burn, who works at the Institute, will introduce me to the boss of the Institute press if Routledge says no. Should this back-up fail too, we’ll go to the original plan, which is for Mark Leicester to turn the thing into a website, paid for by Betty.

I’ve had two slight setbacks to do with my health. Soon after returning from Australia, I woke up one morning with a swollen and tender right foot and calf. I did nothing for two days, but then went to the doctor, wondering whether I might have a deep vein thrombosis as a result of spending many hours on an aeroplane. (DVTs are popularly called ‘economy-class syndrome’. We were travelling business class, with proper full-length beds, but I suppose still not immune.) The doctor thought I might have gout, or an infection, or indeed a DVT. ‘Go to A and E at UCH,’ he said. I went. Triage; blood test; doctor. He thought it indeed likely that I had a DVT. Unfortunately, the hospital’s ultrasound machines don’t work on the weekends (this was Saturday afternoon) so I was injected in the belly with a blood thinner and told to come back the next day for another shot. I did this. On the Monday morning, I was there early, and at about 10.30 I had an ultrasound. No, I didn’t have a DVT (great relief); I had something called a Baker’s cyst at the back of my knee. A nuisance, but harmless. The cyst was pressing on the vein coming up from my foot, causing the swelling and tenderness. It would probably go away by itself. I went back for a check-up two weeks later, by which time the swelling had almost disappeared, and was discharged. Happy ending to first setback.

Then, on the morning of 28 April, I woke up with a strange gauzy occlusion over the upper right quartile of my right eye. It remained there all morning, so I rang my optician, Boots in Oxford Street, and was offered an appointment immediately. I went down there. Tests. The top person told me that there was something behind my eye, in the pathway of nerves to the brain. I could tell that she was concerned. She very sweetly pressed a £10 note into my hand and told me to go in a cab to the Western Eye Hospital immediately, to be seen as an emergency. I did as I was told. More tests. The doctor there thought that I had probably had a stroke. He rang the stroke unit at UCH. ‘Go there immediately. They’re expecting you.’ I walked along the Marylebone Road in the rush hour. Brief wait in A and E; a doctor came down from the stroke unit and accompanied me up there. More tests, manual this time, checking my physical strength. All fine. CT scan at about nine o’clock. A different doctor, on night duty, looked at the pictures and said yes, there was a weak signal coming from the place in my brain (left posterior) which controls sight in the right eye. An MRI would confirm this the next day.

I stayed in overnight. At 8.30 a porter came and took me down to the MRI machine. It was less claustrophobic than the last time, ten years ago, when I had an MRI to look at my back. There’s a periscope with a camera so you can see the staff controlling the thing. Two hours later, back in the ward, the top stroke doctor, Dr Perry, accompanied by three other doctors and a nurse, came to tell me that there was or had been a small blood clot in the suspected place. The cause was unclear. I had told the doctors the previous night about my brother’s and my father’s strokes. Somewhat to my relief, Dr Perry said that there isn’t much genetic connection between haemorrhagic strokes (bleeds), of the sort which killed my father, and ischaemic strokes (blockages). (I wrongly thought at the time that my brother’s stroke had been haemorrhagic too. He has since told me that it was ischaemic, so my relief at the time was only partly justified.) I was to start taking a strong aspirin every morning and a strong statin every night. After a fortnight the aspirin would be replaced by another blood-thinning drug. I’m doing this. I’m also wearing a heart monitor for a week (two days to go), to see if there’s any irregularity in the heart which might have sent a clot to the brain. I’m seeing Dr Perry again on 27 May.

I feel exactly the same as I did before the stroke. And I think, trying not to kid myself, that the eyesight is a bit better.  If the field of vision goes from 9 to 3 on a clock, my vision is perfect between 9 and 1, then there is occlusion between 1 and 2, but then there is clarity again between 2 and 3.

The one big potential change in my life could be to do with driving. I’m not allowed to drive for a month from the day of the stroke. That takes me to the end of this month. Then I have to wait for an appointment with a specialist eye doctor, who will among other things assess my competence to drive. On Friday I had a letter offering me an appointment on 6 July. We’re in Italy then. I rang this morning to see whether I could get something in June. No, fully booked. I changed the appointment to 20 July. It may be that I’ll have to fly back from Marseille, where we could stay after Rodellosso, leaving Helen there for a couple of days. It may be that we’ll have to rely on public transport and other people’s driving in the meantime. Helen, who hasn’t driven for ten years because the Freelander is too big and cumbersome for her, isn’t confident about driving on the continent. If I really am permanently prevented from driving, we’ll have to get a smaller car which she will feel comfortable with. So there’s much uncertainty to live with for the time being.

Overall, I’m terribly grateful that it was such a minor stroke, that almost all my functions seem to be as good as before, and that I’m living close to the best hospitals in the world.

The two medical incidents have meant that two brief foreign trips had to be cancelled. We were going to Antwerp to visit André and Catherine, friends whom we’ve met at Rodellosso, when I had the DVT that wasn’t. And we were going to Kerfontaine this last weekend for Jean’s and Annick’s golden wedding anniversary. Both called off. The weekend after next, all being well, we will go to Northern Ireland for the wedding of Nicky, Helen’s nephew, to his bride Debbie, who’s a nurse at Great Ormond Street.

23 April was the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Andrew Bannerman and I did a little show about Shakespeare’s sonnets. We chose the sonnets together, and I wrote the linking passages. I’ve put the script on the website.

Last Thursday there were various elections all over the UK. I was most concerned with the election for mayor of London. I helped a bit locally, and I’m very pleased that our candidate, Sadiq Khan, won handsomely, after an excellent, principled, broadly based campaign, focusing on the things that matter to Londoners, notably affordable housing and efficient public transport. The Conservative campaign was disgusting. It tried to smear Khan, a Muslim, by association with Islamist extremism. It tried to divide communities originating in the sub-continent from each other: it sent letters to families with Hindu-looking names, for example, saying that Khan planned a special tax on jewellery; presumably the authors thought that Hindus all stash their wealth in gold and diamonds under their beds. The Prime Minister, to his shame, joined in at PMQs in the House of Commons, and so did other members of the cabinet. The thing backfired spectacularly, I’m glad to say, and now there is much recrimination about it in Tory ranks.

Elsewhere, Labour’s fortunes were much more mixed. We did win the mayoralty of Bristol, which in its way is as significant as Khan’s victory. The new mayor of Bristol is Marvin Rees, the son of a Jamaican father and an English mother. He’s now in charge of a city whose historical wealth derives principally from the slave trade. Labour had a disastrous day in Scotland, and is now not even the official opposition in the new Scottish Parliament; the Tories have claimed that, after an attractive campaign — in stark contrast to that in London — led by Ruth Davidson, an eloquent, friendly, jolly, openly gay woman, who claimed many of the votes of that substantial portion of the Scottish electorate which wishes to remain in the UK. Labour’s association with the Tories during the 2014 referendum has caused deep damage. As I’ve written before, there’s anger and a sense of betrayal on the part of Scottish people who’ve voted Labour for generations. They couldn’t understand what their own party was doing marching under the same flag with the Conservatives; and Labour now can’t quite explain its position on independence or further devolution.

The party lost a bit of ground in Wales, but is still the dominant force there and will govern in the Welsh Assembly. In the local elections in England, Labour ‘hung on’, as Jeremy Corbyn put it. Overall, the results give no great hope that Labour will be in a position to challenge for power in four years’ time. With certain exceptions (Sadiq Khan prominent among them), the big figures in the party at the moment are not people who know how to reach out beyond Labour’s core support to the centrist wedge of the electorate which actually decides elections. And we continue to inflict dreadful wounds on ourselves. Ken Livingstone disgraced himself two weeks ago by claiming that Hitler had been a Zionist until ‘he went mad and murdered six million Jews’. It was a smug, attention-seeking, grotesque perversion of the facts, which caused outrage. It is true that Hitler, in his hatred of Judaism, was considering all sorts of ways of ridding Germany of Jews in the early 1930s, including sending them off to other countries. Palestine and Madagascar were possibilities. He didn’t ‘go mad’ after that. He hated Jews all his adult life, as Mein Kampf, published in 1925, shows. Livingstone has stuck to his story nonetheless. Corbyn has had to suspend his close ally from the party. I hope Livingstone is expelled. It is as if he wilfully wishes to damage Labour. The difference between robust criticism of Israel’s actions in its conflict with the Palestinians and straightforward anti-semitism is obvious to me. Apparently it isn’t to Livingstone.

Recently, I’ve read 1812 — Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow by Adam Zamoyski; Agincourt by Juliet Barker; Joan of Arc by Helen Castor; and Ann Thwaite’s biography of Edmund Gosse. All excellent. 1812 chimed with the translation of Victor Hugo’s poem about the retreat which I did a few years ago. Agincourt and Joan of Arc were a pair, and I understood much more about the civil strife in France which allowed the unlikely English victory. Apart from being disgusted but not surprised by the sadistic self-righteousness of the theologians who condemned Joan to burn, I found myself enraged that the dauphin and his people made no attempt to ransom her once she was captured. The ransoming of important prisoners was standard practice at the time. Having used her when she was an inspiration, the dauphin’s party abandoned her to her fate as an embarrassment once Charles became king. I read Ann Thwaite’s biography of Philip Henry Gosse, Edmund’s father, a few years ago. It was Lucy, Ann’s daughter, whom I know from our time together at Teachers TV, who told me that her mother had written the biography of the son before that of the father. I came across the book in a second-hand bookshop at Cley in Norfolk when we were staying with Adam and Hazel.

Jean-Paul Prioux looks after our garden in France. One Saturday evening in the late summer of 2014, his wife Christine came to see us by herself. She had ‘some news’ to tell us. The news was that she had just discovered that she is a quarter English. She was born in Switzerland, and has known from a young age that she was adopted, her mother having died when Christine was six months old. She had a happy childhood, and loved her adoptive parents. She knew nothing about her biological family, and made no enquiries. Then, a few weeks before coming to see us, she had a phone call from a Swiss lawyer telling her of a small inheritance she was to receive from a biological aunt who had recently died. This information led her to her biological cousin, the aunt’s daughter. Through this source, many more details came to her, notably the fact that her maternal grandfather had gone to South Bank, Middlesbrough in the late 19th century, to work as a teacher in a Swiss school, Christine thought. After a few years, he had met and married an English girl. They had four children at the time of the First World War. Then the family departed to Switzerland, where more children were born, including Christine’s mother. The grandfather then died, and the grandmother married again and had yet more children, finally dying at the age of 53 having given birth, I think, to eleven offspring.

Christine wanted to find out more about her grandparents’ time in South Bank. I contacted Teesside Archives, who were very helpful. As a result of their researches, we know where the grandfather lived as a bachelor at the time of the 1911 census, and where the grandmother lived on the same day (in a house in the next street). We know where two of the first four children were baptised, and where the family lived at the time of the baptisms in 1916 and 1918. The grandfather’s profession on the census form and the baptismal certificates made no reference to teaching; he was always described as a metal slinger in the blast furnaces of the iron and steel works at South Bank, then working at full throttle and the main employer in the district.

I offered to visit South Bank with Jean-Paul and Christine. They flew to Southend from Rennes on 9 April. We had a long drive, mostly in pouring rain, up to the village of Romaldkirk in County Durham, where the Rose and Crown had been recommended to me by Julian Walton. The next day, a Sunday and a beautiful day, we drove around the magnificent Pennines in the spring, with daffodils and lambs everywhere. We visited the waterfall at High Force. Christine told me as we were standing there that her mother had been called Helen, like my Helen. I don’t know why she chose that moment to tell me, but I thought it acceptable then to ask about the circumstances of her birth and her mother’s death.

Christine’s mother had had a brief encounter with an older married man with three children. People knew he was Christine’s father. She was given up for adoption when she was born, and was being fostered at the time of the mother’s death. The mother had gone out in a boat on Lake Geneva with a man (not the father). The man returned several hours later in a state of apparent distress, saying that Helen had committed suicide by throwing herself into the water, and that he had not been able to drag her back into the boat despite his best efforts. The story was believed, was published in the local papers, and was accepted at the inquest. No body was ever found.

Christine has three theories about what happened. The first, the official story, she thinks unlikely. The second is that the man tried to take sexual advantage of Helen, that there was a struggle in the boat as a result of which she fell overboard, and that the man either tried and failed to save her or, worse, that he deliberately left her to drown, not wishing her to make accusations later about his behaviour. The third, which Christine thinks is the most likely, is that Helen didn’t die at all. She secretly agreed with the man that he would row her across to the French shore of the lake, where she would leave him and begin a new life with a new identity in a freer country. This was in the summer of 1945, when millions of displaced people were crossing Europe, trying to get back to places where they had lived before the catastrophe, or fleeing persecution, or simply wanting to hide. She could have merged into the crowd, and have escaped the shame which attended her as the mother of an illegitimate child.

I asked Christine why she thought the third hypothesis the most likely. Her only answer was that it was very strange that no body was found. I agreed with her about this, but I think perhaps that she likes to hope that her mother lived on, more happily, and that she could even still be alive, in her nineties, somewhere in France.

The next day, and the day after that, we went to South Bank. The contrast between the picture-postcard village in the Durham Pennines and a district just to the east of Middlesbrough suffering acute depression and deprivation was shocking. The iron and steel works by the river have either closed, or are closing, or are under threat. Most of the small shops and the pubs are boarded up. The A66, a four-lane highway, barges through South Bank, cutting it off from the riverside. There was ugliness and deep evident poverty everywhere. Most of the little streets on my 1911 map, kindly provided by Teesside Archives, no longer exist. North Street, where the grandfather lived in 1911, is now the car park for an Asda supermarket. Supermarket trolleys, crammed with rubbish, lay on their sides in meaningless empty spaces where streets had once been. A teenage girl, working as a prostitute, dressed in a cheap shell suit and trainers, looked at me hopelessly as she got into a man’s car after a brief conversation once he had tooted her.

All the people we spoke to were dignified and courteous. We went to the church where the baptisms had taken place: Anglo-Catholic St James, built in 1895. (There was also a Roman Catholic church, and chapels of several non-conformist denominations, all once meeting the different spiritual needs of the people drawn to South Bank by iron and steel. Some of the chapel buildings were now deconsecrated and used for secular purposes.) St James was locked, as we had expected on a Monday, but there were two ladies in the parish room at the back who welcomed us in once I explained our purpose. The church was beautifully maintained, the wood and brass all polished, and Christine was able to take photographs of the font where at least two, and probably four, of her uncles and aunts had been baptised, with her grandparents standing beside.

One of the ladies had worked in the steel works all her life, ‘on the computer side’, and had seen them go from private to nationalised to privatised to almost closed. We were visiting just as the owners of Tata Steel were saying that they wanted to sell the whole of their steel operation in the UK. Two weeks previously I had driven past Port Talbot, on my way to the funeral of Lindsay’s brother in Pembrokeshire. Also at the time The Guardian and other news providers were publishing the leaked ‘Panama Papers’, containing revelations about the vast sums of money squirreled away in tax havens by ultra-rich companies and individuals. The Prime Minister’s father had run a company helping clients to do this; Cameron had had shares in the company, which he had sold just before becoming Prime Minister.

Looking across South Bank, I thought — not for the first time — of the warnings from economists like Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz about the dangers of a world of increasing inequality; but I don’t think I had ever felt the intensity of the injustice committed against working people whose jobs are destroyed in the name of globalisation and who are offered little in return, when the lords of the earth can enrich themselves even further by means sometimes legal but immoral, sometimes illegal and immoral.

It was an important trip for Christine, at the age of 71, and she and Jean-Paul were grateful for what I had done for them. The only unsolved mystery concerned her grandfather’s profession. Christine’s cousin had been sure that he had gone to England as a teacher, or at least with the intention of teaching. I had spotted that the family with whom he was lodging in 1911 was German. Had they lived just across the border from the German Swiss town from which he had come, perhaps having known him beforehand? Had they asked him to come to England to teach their children, to keep up their German? Perhaps that was just a bit of pocket money, and the grandfather had also needed a proper job. Christine will never know; but she knows a lot more about a part of her origins than she did. (I wondered, incidentally, what had happened to that German family in England after August 1914.)

In response to my phone call and email, Heidi Lee at Routledge wrote to say no to the Harold Rosen book; or rather she said that she would only consider it if I greatly shortened it and removed Harold’s stories and poems, neither of which I was prepared to do. I wasn’t surprised, but I was irritated that, having apparently made the decision very quickly in March, and having communicated the decision to Alison Foyle, the commissioning editor of my other book, she hadn’t bothered to tell me; and that Alison hadn’t got round to telling me since. I fired off an angry email to both of them, not at all questioning the decision itself, but the laziness of the procedures for communicating it to me. Alison replied with a handsome apology, taking all the blame on herself, and we kissed and made up.

I then activated plan B, with the Institute of Education Press. Andrew Burn arranged a meeting with Nicky Platt, the publishing director, on Thursday 19 May at 4 o’clock. I had sent the book electronically to Nicky and to Andrew a week earlier. When I went in, she had a hard copy with her, which she’d obviously read pretty thoroughly, and she said yes! We shook hands. She didn’t ask for any changes; and she actively likes the mixture of educational writing, stories and poems. Wonderful. The book will be published in paperback in November or next March, with electronic publication about a month after that. We’ll have a launch, which will be combined with a Harold Rosen memorial lecture, which I’ll give. I had already agreed with Andrew some time last year that I’d do one, and this will be the perfect opportunity to promote the book.

Betty Rosen was in Turkey at the time, returning the following week, so I told no one apart from Helen the good news until Betty knew.

I walked from Nicky’s office in Holborn (on the same floor of the same building as Andrew’s) with Andrew to Kings Cross station, where he took the train to Cambridge, where he lives. I was mildly elated. I walked home and told Helen. She was due to have a drink with Deirdre in the Prince Albert, and I said I would join them. I did, and we were all very jolly. At about eight we parted, and Helen and I came home. I cooked some dinner while she was packing for Ireland the next day. At about 9.30 the phone rang. It was Theresa Cato. Stephen Eyers had died that afternoon of a heart attack.

Stephen was my best friend. I have a small group of friends to whom I’m very close. Stephen was the closest of them. I sat quietly and considered. We had known and loved each other for 42 years. I had met him on the first day of my teaching career. We had been together thousands of times, in schools, in pubs, at each other’s houses in London and France, in Italy on those school trips in the 70s, in Dorset, where he had recently bought a barn because he wanted to own a tiny bit of property ‘in the country of his heart’. Christmases at Kerfontaine, and one in Raynes Park when we couldn’t travel to France because of Helen’s foot operation, and when Stephen so overheated the claret that I had to put it outside the house to cool down. Summer visits, many of them, to Barraud, where I loved to swim in the river and, later, in the little swimming pool, where the four of us went out gaily to country restaurants down remote lanes, or to the Friday market at Ribérac. Dinner at Daphne’s to celebrate his birthday, on the day after my stroke. All finished. I thought, ‘This is what getting older means. Your friends die.’

We had, thank goodness, seen each other three days previously. We had had two pints and a good chat in the Royal Oak in Southwark. The next day we exchanged emails about the possibility of seeing some cricket before I go to France on 21 June.

I rang Theresa back and asked her whether she would like me to go with her to see Stephen’s body in St Thomas’s Hospital the next morning. She would. Jake, Stephen’s son, and her son Paul would be there too. They and Chloe, Stephen’s daughter, had all seen Stephen that evening, after the doctor had come out to tell them that he hadn’t been able to save him.

Helen and I were supposed to be taking the tube up to Burnt Oak the next morning, meeting eight of Helen’s family, going in two booked cars to Luton airport, flying to Belfast International for Nicky’s wedding. I had organised everything in advance: the flights; the wheelchair at the airports for Nick, Helen’s brother, who has great difficulty walking now; the taxis; the hotel. We agreed that Helen would shepherd the party over to Ireland alone, and I would join her when I could. I consulted the internet for flights to Belfast from various London airports.

The next morning I was waiting at St Thomas’s when I had two phone calls. The first was from Steve Webster, a good friend of Stephen’s, whom he had met when Steve was a young teacher at St Martin-in-the-Fields School; Stephen worked there from 1984 to 1989. Steve is now a professor at Imperial College. Stephen had been with him when he had the heart attack. They had had lunch together, as they often did. Then they went back to the college, because Steve wanted Stephen to meet some of his students. As they were walking along a corridor, Steve, who was a little ahead, heard a violent crash and turned round. Stephen had collapsed; fallen on his face.

Students rushed out of rooms. One knew how to do cardiac massage. Steve said that Stephen’s face was suddenly so swollen that he almost didn’t recognise him. A defibrillator arrived. Paramedics were there within a quarter of an hour, and performed the whole routine which I saw last year with John Bentil: adrenalin injections, electric shocks, the band which goes round the body and squeezes and releases the chest. Soon an ambulance was there, and went screaming off across town to St Thomas’s. Surely there must have been closer hospitals, I thought. There are. But Jake, who’s a consultant paediatrician, later told me that St Thomas’s is thought the best in London for emergency treatment after heart attacks. Steve managed to find Theresa’s phone number, and told her. She and the three children got to the hospital. I think the emergency treatment faintly revived Stephen’s heart for a little while, but both sides of it were badly damaged, and there was no telling what damage may have been done in the brain. At 6.30 the consultant came out with the news that Stephen was dead.

I thanked Steve for telling me all this. I went and had a coffee. The phone rang again. This time it was Alison Foyle at Routledge. I had written the previous day, because she had told me that the editorial board would meet on the Tuesday of that week to make a final decision about English, Language and Literacy 3 to 19: essentially, she hoped, confirming her decision already taken. It was on that expectation that I had put in all the work of shortening the text to a bit more than half its previous length. Earlier in the week, I had asked whether smoke of any colour had come out of the editorial board. Her news on the phone was yes, they would publish, but they now wanted two books, not one! However noble was my ambition to write something covering the whole waterfront 3 to 19, marketing common sense told the editorial board that more books would be sold by targeting primary and secondary teachers separately. I agreed immediately, with a little regret but not much, because I could see that this solved my problem about length. Yes, I would get each book down below 100,000 words. She wanted 80,000 to 90,000 in each case. I wasn’t sure about that. I said that I wasn’t prepared to change the wording which was addressed to teachers across the whole age-range, resorting to saying essentially the same thing in different words in the two books just so they would be different superficially. Much text in the two books would be identical. She agreed to that, though she had some question about how much common material there would be. I said I couldn’t say then, but I would do the job and send her the two books, and I would be quick.

End of very friendly and successful call (I hope). How life delivers the strangest experiences, with the most extraordinary timing! Two acceptances from publishers within about 19 hours of each other, after all this work, with the news of the death of my best friend in between. He would have been so pleased and proud.

Jake arrived, then Theresa and Paul. Theresa was calm. We went to the bereavement centre, thence to the mortuary. We weren’t long in there. They had cleaned Stephen up a bit, but he didn’t look great. There was a gash on his forehead where he had fallen, and his mouth was half open. Perhaps when death comes suddenly the mouth freezes in the desperate attempt to gain breath. We each said goodbye. Theresa kissed him and spoke to him. ‘You were the gentlest man,’ she said. So he was.

We had coffee and talked. After 20 minutes or so, Theresa said she wanted to go home. Paul would be with her for as long as she needed. He lives at Whitstable, but stays in Raynes Park a couple of nights a week anyway, when he’s working in London. I asked Theresa if she wanted me to remain in London over the weekend. No, go to Ireland, she said. I said I’d visit as soon as we were back the next week, and would ring every day. We said goodbye, and I walked across Westminster Bridge in the lovely sunshine, thinking that it was only a mile or so away, down two bridges, that Stephen and I had begun our friendship when I was 22 and he was 31.

I went to St Pancras, picked up a bag that I’d left there, took the Northern Line and then the DLR to City Airport, jumped on the first plane to Belfast City, and was in the hotel with Helen and the family by six.

The wedding the next day was a success. It was held at Greyabbey, overlooking Strangford Lough. The ceremony was conducted by David Cooper, a Methodist minister, and he did it beautifully. I performed a poem, my second epithalamion of the year.

After the ceremony there was Irish music from two guitarists, then a very good dinner, then electric music for dancing until midnight. The light evenings are long in Northern Ireland in May, of course. There had been storms and hail earlier, including a particularly impressive and timely clap of thunder just as I was reading my poem. During the evening, a spectacular double rainbow appeared in the sky, one end touching the glistening mud of the lough, where the tide was out. The photographers got the bride and groom out from the dance floor to pose under a transparent umbrella, with the rainbow in the background.

The only hiccup in the proceedings came at the end. About 50 of us had been driven in a double-decker bus from Belfast to Greyabbey. The same bus had been booked to take us back at one in the morning. (This was an hour too late. Some men were drunk and loud; there were football chants, which you don’t want at a wedding.) When a single-decker coach arrived at one o’clock, I knew it wouldn’t be big enough, especially since those wishing to go back to Belfast had increased in number during the day. The driver wouldn’t go anywhere with an illegal load. We sat tight. At a quarter to two, poor Debbie and her step-father had to ask all those who were intending to go on to Carrickfergus after Belfast to get off the bus and wait until it returned, which they did with good grace. Off we went at last, and arrived in Belfast about half past two. The Carrickfergus party can’t have got home much before dawn.

During the electric music, weary of dancing, I had gone for a walk around the village. Beyond the beautiful grey stone houses, there was the council estate, with its tattered Union Jacks, and the Orange Hall. The street names were in English, but had previously had Ulster Scots names. In Belfast itself, 18 years after the Good Friday agreement, there are the walls, the barbed wire, the two flags, a few hundred yards from each other. The shops are full, the traffic is heavy, new building is everywhere, and the killings are occasional. But the segregation, suspicion and flaunting of ‘identity’ persists.

The next day we escorted Helen’s family to Aldegrove, managed with some difficulty to find the wheelchair for Nick, and said goodbye. Then I rang Peter Logue, my old friend from Channel 4 days, with whom we had arranged to stay for another two nights. Peter lives 15 minutes from the airport, and he was with us quickly.

I may have written in this diary years ago about the sad break-up of Peter’s marriage to Sarah. I won’t go into details. The divorce proceedings were long, arduous and antagonistic. All is now settled, and has been for some time, and Peter has kept the house. He is in a poor state of health. He has very bad diabetes, is grossly overweight, and suffers from wounds on his feet which make walking difficult. But he retains his spirit, his wit, and his brilliant ability to tell stories catching the character of rural Ulster. He is in the advanced stages of selling the house, and has found another place, 40 or so miles away, in a magnificent position overlooking the Portrush peninsula and the Atlantic. We saw it on the Monday. It is impressive, very large, about 15 years old, made of the beautiful blue basalt stone quarried in the area. At the moment, all sorts of last-minute difficulties are being put in Peter’s way by the potential buyers of his house, and these aren’t finally resolved. I told Peter, at all costs, not to lose the new place. Fortunately, he has a wealthy brother, whom he likes very much, who would be willing to lend him the money for a short time to buy the Portrush house if the deal on his old place falls through.

I visited Peter and Sarah often when I was at Channel 4. I used to sleep in the converted barn across the courtyard from the main house, which was also Peter’s office. The place is sadly neglected and run down now, but it is still a fine property, with meadows and fields belonging to it, which looked lovely in the new green of May.

We were back in London on the Tuesday evening. Since then, I have been busy chopping up my book into two. I finished that on Monday, and sent the two books off to Alison Foyle. I wait to hear. My great fear is that she’ll say that there is too much common material across the two books, and will I now go back to doing one. What my response to that would be I’m not sure. I really do want to get this project off my back now. I’ve been on it, in one way or another, since November 2013. I’ve done much less poetry as a result. And when you’ve had a stroke, even a mild one, and when your best friend dies suddenly of a heart attack, you realise that time isn’t unlimited. I do have one poetry project in hand, though only just started. Seamus Heaney’s last publication, posthumous, is a translation of book 6 of The Aeneid. He loved Latin, and writes about the learning of it, including Virgil, in his own poetry. A few years ago, I did a translation of the last 70 or so lines of The Aeneid book 2, where Aeneas goes back into burning Troy in search of his wife, and meets her ghost. I’m going to do the whole book. It’s the vivid account of the sack of Troy, including the wooden horse episode. It’s only about 800 lines, and I’ve done 70 already, plus a few from the beginning. I’ll employ the usual technique: try to understand as much as I can from the Latin itself, with the help of dictionaries and grammars and a dictionary of mythology; when stuck, consult the literal, non-poetical translation in the Loeb bilingual edition. Avoid at all costs looking at other people’s poetical efforts.

Tomorrow is Stephen’s funeral, at Clandon Wood Natural Burial Ground near Guildford. I’ve suggested some readings, one of which — Stephen Spender’s poem ‘The Truly Great’ — I’m going to read myself. And I’ll give my own tribute, which I’ve written and will put in the next entry.

Stephen’s funeral went as well as such a sad occasion could. It was a beautiful day, in a beautiful place a few miles east of Guildford. There were about 80 of us there. The ceremony, entirely secular, was led by Emma Curtis, and she did it graciously. She had gathered the facts for her eulogy from the family and from the online obituary I had done for The Guardian. We sang Jerusalem and a Beatles song. As well as my tribute and reading, Steve Webster read John Donne’s ‘No Man is an Island’, and Stephen’s sister Joy gave a touching tribute to her elder brother, especially about his kindness to her when they were children and teenagers. At the end of the ceremony, Stephen’s coffin was loaded onto a farm cart, and pulled by hand across a meadow, with high grass all around us, to the grave. The coffin was lowered with a certain amount of sweating and grunting by the undertaker’s elderly pall-bearers; they looked a bit unused to the effort, cremations being so much more common than burials these days. A few more words of farewell, the scattering of red rose petals onto the coffin, and we walked back to the building where the ceremony had been held. Drinks, snacks and conversation. That was it. Helen and I, with Paul Ashton and Stephen and Bronwyn Mellor, took a taxi back to Guildford station and a train to London, as we had come down.

Here are my Guardian obituary and tribute. There’s a bit of repetition. Also the Stephen Spender poem.

A postscript: there are awards for everything these days. Emma Curtis wrote to me on Wednesday asking whether I would nominate her for Celebrant of the Year at the Good Funeral Awards. I obliged with a testimonial.

We are five days away from the EU referendum. It has been an ugly campaign, with the remain side (my side) relying too much on frightening the public with dire warnings about the consequences to people’s wealth if we leave; and, far worse, a disgusting descent into racism by the leave side, culminating in the unveiling of a poster on Thursday displaying a photograph of a long line of black and brown refugees next to the words ‘Breaking Point’. In fact, the photograph was taken at a border post between Croatia and Slovenia, but the message was clear: they’ll be at Dover next. Meanwhile, the right-wing press has surpassed itself in its daily offering of lies and distortions about the wickedness of the EU and the sinister character of some other European countries, notably Germany.

There has, on my side, been far too little of the positive case for remaining in the EU, a case based on internationalism and a remembrance of history. The continent tore itself apart twice in the last century. It’s not a coincidence that there have been no wars since 1945 involving the countries that now constitute the EU (Croatia, a late arrival, being the only exception). And the world has become increasingly interdependent: we can’t address climate change or pan-European criminality or fair trading arrangements unilaterally. I actually like the diversity of voices and languages I hear on the streets of London, and the opportunities for the forging of new understandings and experiences which these migrations offer.

But I’m a comfortably off person with an international outlook and a house in France. If I were someone scraping by on the minimum wage or on benefits because the traditional industry in my area has disappeared and very little has been done to replace it with new kinds of worthwhile work, I might be angry and looking for someone to blame. The referendum has given me the perfect opportunity to vent my spleen. I probably don’t realise that the collapse of the steel industry or shipbuilding or pottery is to do with forces beyond the EU, notably the rise of the economies of the Far East. The EU is conveniently there, so it must be the culprit. The immigrants must be to blame too. It’s an irony that the areas of the country which are most likely to vote to leave are those where the numbers of people living in the UK but born elsewhere — whether in the EU or not — are smallest.

This is not to exonerate the EU entirely from blame. With the exception of agriculture, where it engages in the most enthusiastic interventionism, the EU has an excessively laissez-faire attitude to industry, and uses its power to prevent national governments from intervening to support industries in difficulty. It is too favourable to the private sector and not favourable enough to the public sector. On the other hand, some of the laws for which we should be grateful, especially on workers’ rights and environmental protection, have come about as a result of EU-wide agreements. And I fear that, once outside the EU, Conservative governments will abandon some of those rights and protections in favour of a yet more ‘open’ (as they would put it) economy and labour market; as I would put it, one which is likely to lead to ever-greater disparities of wealth and well-being in our already deeply unequal society.

A great sadness is that many of Labour’s traditional supporters, many of the nine million who voted Labour last year, have bought the lies about immigration which their newspapers and the leave campaign have sold them, even though 95% of Labour MPs are in favour of remain, and remain is the party’s clear official position.

The result is uncertain. Recent polls have seen a surge of support for leaving. If we do leave, we will have done so entirely as a result of Cameron’s failed attempt to resolve a long-standing schism in the Conservative Party.

Thursday was my birthday. We passed the morning quietly; went shopping and had coffee out. Came back for a cold lunch. I turned on my computer mid-afternoon to read the dreadful news that a Labour MP, Jo Cox, had been shot and stabbed in her constituency in Yorkshire. We heard on the PM programme at five that she had died. Her attacker was caught and arrested. He is a 52-year-old white man, who lived alone locally, who has a history of mental illness and who has had some contact with far-right, neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups. He was heard shouting ‘Britain first’ or ‘Put Britain first’ as he assaulted her.

The nation is deeply shocked. Campaigning for the referendum has been suspended until tomorrow, Sunday. Broadcast debates have been cancelled. Parliament, which had been in recess during the last days of the campaign, will be recalled on Monday to pay tribute to Jo Cox. The usual rivalries between the parties, and the bitter terms in which this present argument is being conducted, are in abeyance.

Jo Cox, aged 41 and only elected to parliament last year, was exactly the sort of person who should give politics a good name: deeply committed to social justice, an internationalist who had worked in a senior position for Oxfam, born and brought up in the constituency which she represented. She leaves a husband and two young children. (Her husband gave the most moving and dignified tribute to her on the very day she was murdered.) She was an enthusiastic campaigner for remain. I hope that her death will play no public part in the argument when the campaign resumes; but there’s no doubt that, if it has any actual effect, it will be favourable to remain, because the actions of this crazed man, and in particular the words he was heard shouting, are an extreme, perverted caricature of the thoughts of some of the leave campaigners. And I’ve just read that when he appeared at Westminster Magistrates’ Court this morning and was asked to give his name, he said, ‘My name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain.’ Asked a second time to give his name, he said the same thing. The last three of those words have been spoken many times in recent weeks by the leaders of the leave campaign.

It’s a long time since the last entry; and a lot has happened. On 21 June, we took the train from St Pancras to Marseille. It’s a wonderful and amazing thing that this can now be done in seven hours, with no need to cross Paris. We changed trains at Lille. (There is a train that goes all the way with no change at all.) For the following three days, we helped Mary prepare for Sophie’s wedding on the 25th. Mary had prepared or was preparing most of the food for the 150 guests. I acted as sous-chef. On 23 June the two of us went out to the reception venue, a beautiful large house near Brignoles, with a wide terrasse under mature plane trees. We put some food into fridges. The choice of wines, of course, had been the subject of lengthy and strenuous debate. For the rosé, it had fallen on the Château des Hannibals, only a couple of kilometres away. Hannibal had supposedly passed nearby on his way round from Spain to Italy. (I’m not sure why ‘Hannibals’ is plural.) We went to pick up the wine, and stayed and tasted a little in the cool cellar. I bought a few bottles for consumption back in Marseille.

That night I stayed up all night to listen to the results of the referendum. My previously expressed fears were realised. A combination of lies and distortions bellowed at people over months and years, despair and anger on the part of those voters — many of them traditional Labour supporters — who have been left behind by the economic upheavals and social changes of recent decades, fear of immigration, and the lack-lustre campaign conducted by the Labour leadership tipped the balance 52% to 48% in favour of the UK leaving the EU. England and Wales voted to leave. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to stay. London, though in England, voted overwhelmingly to stay. (We had voted by post before coming to France.)

It is far too early to say what the long-term prospects for the UK outside the EU will be. There are some worrying signs: the pound has slipped significantly against the dollar and the euro (more in the case of the former). The Bank of England was obliged last week to cut interest rates to 0.25%, to increase quantitative easing and to promise to supply retail banks with plenty of money in the hope that they will lend it to their customers. There’s not much more that monetary policy can do. It remains to be seen whether the threatened exits of major companies from London to Continental cities will come to pass. What is certain is that none of the angry, abandoned people who voted to leave, seeing the EU as the source of their woes, will be helped by the decision.

This whole sorry story has been brought about by one man’s problems in his own party. Nothing to do with the good of the country. Chamberlain: Munich. Blair: Iraq. Cameron: leaving the EU (and possibly splitting the UK, if the Scots have another referendum and decide yes to independence this time, given the new circumstances).

In the immediate aftermath of 23 June, there were dramatic political shifts. David Cameron announced that he would resign as Prime Minister as soon as a new Conservative leader could be elected. Hilary Benn said publicly what many Labour people had been muttering privately: Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘pro-remain’ campaign had been weak, half-hearted. For this Benn was sacked. Most of the members of Corbyn’s shadow cabinet then resigned, as did many junior ministers (including our MP Keir Starmer, who was shadow immigration minister). There then followed a classic example of how good the Conservative Party is at getting itself out of scrapes, and how good the Labour Party is at making its own, self-inflicted difficulties even worse. After a brief period of confusion during which it seemed that Boris Johnson was favourite to become Prime Minister, supported (supposedly) by Michael Gove, Gove stabbed Johnson in the back at the last minute and presented himself as a leadership candidate. Johnson withdrew from the race, presumably because he had done the calculation which showed that he wouldn’t be one of the two candidates chosen by MPs and MEPs to offer to the Conservative membership. Gove’s act of naked treachery clearly didn’t endear him to his electorate either, as he soon realised. He withdrew too. So two women were left: Theresa May and Andrea Leadsom. Theresa May was and is regarded as a serious politician, having been Home Secretary since 2010. She had been tepidly pro-remain, while wanting the UK to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (which would be a shameful act; a decision deliberately to forget history). Not many people outside Westminster had ever heard of Andrea Leadsom, who immediately self-destructed by telling a journalist that she would be a better Prime Minister than Theresa May because she had had children and (I paraphrase), ‘Theresa must be so sad that she hasn’t.’ She then completed hari-kiri by denying that she had said it, only for the puzzled journalist to publish the transcript of the conversation showing that she had. Exit Andrea. Then there was one. A quick decision by the Conservative board that with only one candidate it wasn’t necessary to consult the membership and, hey presto, we have a new Prime Minister on the steps of Number Ten two days later, making a speech which could have been made by Keir Hardie, about the social and economic inequalities in our country and the need to address them, when she had been a member of a government for six years whose policies had only increased those inequalities.

Mrs May invented two new departments to deal explicitly with the consequences of the 23 June vote, and put two genuine pro-leavers in charge: David Davis as Secretary of State for Exiting the EU, and Liam Fox as Secretary of State for International Trade (meaning ‘Go and do new trade deals with countries outside the EU’). Her most extraordinary decision was to make Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary. What a reward for a man whose whole career has been based on calculations of self-interest, regardless of the truth value of the positions he has taken at any time! Johnson has no sincere belief in the rightness of the pro-leave position. He threw himself enthusiastically into the leave campaign because he calculated, wrongly, that he would be Prime Minister as a result. His diplomatic abilities are minus. But he won quite a consolation prize. I’ve had trouble working it out from May’s point of view. I’m sure that she doesn’t regard him as a serious politician. In the end, perhaps she calculated that, unlike most politicians, Johnson has a high recognition factor amongst the general public. People nod and smile when his name is mentioned. And he knows how to win big votes: two for London mayor, one to leave the EU. Perhaps she will need that in 2020. Or perhaps she thinks he might implode sooner, having made some huge diplomatic gaffe, and that she will be able to sack him without the worry of having the effective leader of the winning side in the referendum as a troubling presence on the back benches.

Meanwhile, in the ‘if your wounds are deep, gouge them a bit deeper yourselves’ Labour Party, four-fifths of Labour MPs voted that they had no confidence in the leader. There is going to be a contest for the leadership, only a year after the last one. Angela Eagle, for whom I would have voted with some enthusiasm, was the first to put her name forward. She promised that, if someone else could get more nominations than she, she would stand down in favour of that person, arguing correctly that the likeliest way to unseat Corbyn is to present only one challenger. Someone I’d never heard of, Owen Smith, gained more nominations than Angela Eagle, so he is the challenger. I think Corbyn will win again, handsomely. There has been unseemly recourse to the High Court in our fraternal party. Did Corbyn need to have 51 nominations to be on the ballot paper (a number he wouldn’t have got) or, as the incumbent, was he on the ballot paper as of right? The NEC decided by a small majority that he was on it as of right. A High Court challenge to that decision was later rejected. The NEC decided, at the same meeting, that only those who had been full members or trade-union affiliated members by 18 January could automatically vote. Those who had joined since that date could not vote, at least automatically, but anyone who paid £25 (up from £3 last year) within a given two-day period could. This was a clear case of policy being made up as the meeting went along. Many members of the NEC obviously feared organised ‘entryism’ amongst Corbyn’s supporters, with its echoes of Militant in the 1980s. A High Court challenge to the denial of the automatic vote to post-18 January joiners has been successful, and the party is appealing against the judgment. If the appeal is turned down, the party will have to send out thousands more voting papers in the next two weeks, unless the process is delayed, and may have to pay back £25 to thousands of people who will say they wouldn’t have paid that money if they had known they had the right to vote as recently joined members.

Most shaming of all, ordinary monthly meetings of constituency parties have been suspended until after the vote, for fear of bullying and intimidation.

It’s never been as bad as this. If Corbyn wins again, without the support of four-fifths of his MPs, there may be a split in the party, with all the bitterness and anger that will cause. There will be arguments over who has the right to the name. Furious members will try to deselect MPs they regard as traitorous. And the Tories, with their narrow majority of 12, will sail smilingly on.

Sophie’s wedding to Julien was a great success. All my brothers, one cousin, three nephews, one niece and various partners were there. The ceremony itself, in the mairie of the 6th and 8th arrondissements of Marseille, was brief, as civil ceremonies in France are: nothing more, essentially, than the reading aloud of some articles of the civil code. The deputy mayor of the 8th did his best to lighten the tone by announcing that, as maire adjoint, he was in charge of dustbins, by commiserating with Sophie, who has a British passport, on the events of two days previously, and, on hearing a baby crying while he was speaking the articles, by interrupting himself to ask the baby whether he or she disagreed with any of their provisions. Then, after half an hour of photography and hanging about, off we went to the big house near Brignoles. Lovely champagne, great food, delicious wines, speeches, dancing. Helen and I went to bed at half past two, but lots of younger people danced till dawn and beyond. The main thing is that Sophie and Julien were happy, visibly so, and I’m sure they will be happy in their life together.

Four days later Mary drove us up to Aix early in the morning, where we met Glenda and Julian Walton. Julian drove us to Bologna. We had two nights in that magnificent city, which I hadn’t visited since the late 70s, then a night in Ravenna, with enough time to see the wonderful mosaics, then a spectacular drive over the Apennines down to Rodellosso. Two weeks there, with friends coming and going, and the usual pleasures.

After 23 June, I had prepared a speech of lamentation to give, in French and then in Italian, whenever puzzled and hurt French and Italian people asked me why we had done what we had done. I was asked often. In the vegetable garden at Rodellosso, I was helping Claudio’s mother Rina tie up tomato plants, which were in danger of breaking in a strong wind. A young woman called Maria, originally from Ukraine but resident in Italy for 15 years and married to an Italian, asked me the Brexit question. By this time Rina and I were putting rotted grass and straw around the roots of the plants to stop them drying out too quickly after watering, and Maria was coming after us with the hose pipe. A couple of minutes into my speech, to which Maria was paying close attention, Rina interrupted and said to Maria, ‘Be careful! You’re not giving those plants enough water.’ The health of her backward tomato plants, after a difficult, cold and rainy spring, was a more urgent priority than wider European problems.

After Rodellosso, Peter and Merle Traves dropped us at Florence airport, from where we flew to Marseille via Charles de Gaulle. Two days after that, I took an early train back to London. A day later, Helen, Mary and Tess drove in Mary’s car here to Kerfontaine.

In London, I stayed with Paul and Vikki because we have rented our flat to an Australian friend, Michael Davidson, for the summer and early autumn. I had five medical examinations: DVLA have appointed Specsavers, a chain of opticians, to conduct all their tests on people who’ve had strokes affecting vision, to see if they’re fit to drive; I saw a neurologist, Dr Leff, who specialises in visual impairments after strokes; I saw my GP to give a report on everything that’s been happening to me recently; I had an echocardiogram; I saw my stroke consultant, Dr Perry.

The upshot, so far as driving is concerned, is contradictory. Dr Leff gave me a test which showed that there’s a patch on the right side of my visual field where I’m not seeing things, and advised that I shouldn’t drive at least until he sees me again next May, when he’ll give me the test again. The previous day I had undertaken the same test, or one very similar, at Specsavers in Swiss Cottage. You look into a black field, and every time a white light flashes momentarily, you press a button. This morning I hear that, so far as DVLA is concerned, I’m OK to drive straight away! (In any case, I’ve decided that the legal situation is sufficiently ambiguous here in France to justify my driving, so we rented a little car when I got back from the London trip. Adam is looking after the Land Rover in Norfolk.)

Dr Leff also showed me the MRI scan of my brain, done on the morning after the stroke. It’s quite something to look at your own brain. I now understand exactly what happened. The blood clot has long gone. It may have gone by the time I woke up on 28 April. The artery itself is undamaged. But the effect of denying blood to a portion of my brain for a few minutes or a few hours while I was asleep was to kill that portion. It will never recover. The dead part was clearly visible on the scan as a bright white shape amid the encircling grey. The doctor said, reassuringly, that the dead part amounts to no more than 1% of the total brain space; it’s magnified on the scan so it’s easy to see. He said that it’s quite probable that the brain is still trying to find ways around the problem, literally, so as to restore the area of lost vision.

Dr Perry looked at the echocardiogram and said that the origin of the stroke remains a mystery. There’s nothing wrong with my heart that the echo and a previous test have detected, though he still suspects that the problem did come from the heart. There are to be no more tests. I will continue to take a blood thinner in the morning and a statin at night. I’ve agreed to take part in an international study comparing the effectiveness of the kind of blood thinner I’m on at the moment with another one, more recently developed. I won’t know which one I’m on. The study will last three years. I’ll start when I return briefly to London at the end of this month.

Towards the end of our time at Rodellosso, I had the welcome news from Alison Foyle at Routledge that they will publish the two books I wrote about on 7 June, now called Curriculum and Assessment in English: A Better Plan, one for primary and one for secondary, exactly as I had sent them, with no changes required. So while I was in England I went down to Milton Park in Oxfordshire to meet Alison. It was a day of great heat, and we sat outside in a bit of shade and did business. I like her very much. I was amazed that Routledge will publish the books in hardback as well as paperback and electronic. Alison said that there’s a large market, especially in the Far East, amongst new universities with enormous library buildings and not enough books to fill the miles of shelves. The universities ask Routledge and other big respectable publishers to send them everything they publish, whatever the content! And they want hardbacks. Alison said that they’ll charge about £90 per hardback volume. I was pleased when she offered me a 10% royalty, no quibbles, though I noticed in signing the contract the other day that it’s only 5% for hardback. Cunning, but I shan’t complain. Perhaps it’s standard. I’m just glad that the books will be published at last, probably in February.

I also went to see Nicky Platt at the Institute of Education Press. She’s lovely. The Harold Rosen book seems to be going ahead with no hitches or delays. Probable publication in March now. I’ll sign the contract at the end of the month.

And I went to Canterbury to see my brother, with a side trip down to Margate because I wanted to visit the newish Turner Gallery. It’s very impressive, but the thing that struck me most about the town takes me back to the EU referendum result. It was the beginning of the school holidays, and the weather was hot. Families had come for their week or two by the sea. These were the people who had voted to leave the EU: good-hearted, tattooed, overweight families, taking a break from insecure unskilled jobs or getting by on benefits, rightly enjoying the affordable pleasures that Margate offers. Many of them had stuck St George’s flags in the sand on the main beach.

‘On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My people humble people who expect
Nothing.’

Margate is in the parliamentary constituency of the Isle of Thanet, where Nigel Farage just failed to win last year. It’s the most dispiriting place, once you move away from the beach and walk a mile or so in either direction along the sand. A hotel with former pretensions to grandeur has open upper windows where seagulls fly in and out. It’s not clear whether the whole place has been abandoned. The lido certainly is abandoned and covered in graffiti. Litter everywhere; I’m sure the district council doesn’t have the income to employ enough street cleaners. Terraces of villas with peeling paintwork and gloomy basements accommodate families speaking Eastern European or Middle Eastern languages on the pavements outside. Are they cheap labour, seekers of work, seekers of asylum, refugees? A tower block by the station is one of the ugliest buildings in England. A man in a vest stands at an open window on about the tenth floor, smoking, gazing out to sea.

Meanwhile, after my visit to the gallery, where a collection of otherwise unrelated works of art has been brought together because they all have some connection with circles (the thematic is trendy these days in galleries), I eat in the excellent restaurant the kind of food which people who go to galleries prefer: organic, fresh, terribly healthy, with a glass or two of something dry and white. Outside, refreshed, I’m in privatised, deregulated, low-wage England. Anyone who can afford something better has gone somewhere else.

It needs money. I wouldn’t say the same cruel things about seaside resorts like Southwold or Aldeburgh or Brighton or Portsmouth, city of my birth. They’re richer. The Thanet coast has many natural advantages and beauties, as Margate’s numerous information panels are keen to point out. But the whole area needs investment which doesn’t depend on the holiday season. Perhaps the new fast train which brought me here will help. I’m a bit depressed as it pulls out of the station and takes me away.

More dreadful atrocities have been committed in France since I last wrote. On 14 July, Bastille Day, a man inspired by Islamic State’s instruction to kill Christians at random drove a lorry into the crowd on the Promenade des Anglais. The people were watching the firework display. He deliberately ran over and killed 85 people, injuring many others, before the police killed him. On 26 July, two teenagers slit the throat of a priest celebrating mass in a church near Rouen. They filmed their actions and preached in Arabic from the altar. They took five hostages, seriously injuring one of them. The special police arrived quickly, and killed the teenagers as they left the church, saving the other hostages. Many big public events and annual festivities in France have been cancelled since, for fear of more terrorism.

In Syria, especially in Aleppo, the situation is dire. The regime, backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, fights against rebels divided between those who simply want the overthrow of Assad and a measure of the freedoms I enjoy, and djihadists who would replace Assad with a Sunni Islamist theocracy. In Quetta, Pakistan two days ago, a faction of the Taliban killed at least 70 people at a hospital, many of them lawyers accompanying the body of a colleague, himself killed the day before. It’s the same story: fundamentalist Sunni Islam doing violence against any alternative view of the world, whether that be another interpretation of Islam, or Christianity, or a simple secularism which wishes to separate private faith from the system of government in a country. It’s pure barbarism, and at the moment I see no end to it.

It’s a beautiful, quiet calm day in Brittany. September often produces such days. This September has excelled itself. I’ve spent the last two days gardening, and now the place looks as good as it ever will under my less than perfectionist care. The only job remaining is to cut the hedges, which Jean-Paul will do with me next month.

My recent big mental task, completed a week ago, has been the translation of Book 2 of The Aeneid, about which I wrote in June. I’m pleased with what I’ve done, and Peter Hetherington and Bronwyn Mellor, two of the five people to whom I’ve sent it, have been very complimentary. So, of course, has Helen, to whom I read the thing aloud. I sent it to Ken Pearce, one of my Latin teachers at Bedford Modern, and he’s looking at from the point of view of accuracy of translation as well as its poetic qualities. When I’ve heard from him, I’ll put it on the website, and Peter and I will have another session in the London sound suite where we record his and my readings of my poems.

Bronwyn and Stephen run a small publishing company in Australia, called Chalkface Press, which publishes resources for students studying English in secondary schools, and books for English teachers. Bronwyn has often said to me that she’d like to see my poems, or some of them, in print, not just on the website. I asked her whether Chalkface might be prepared to publish them, even though that’s not what the company normally does. She was reluctant at first, simply because, as she said, they don’t have the marketing power of an established UK-based company with a poetry list. But in July, when we were in Italy, I told her that I didn’t mind about marketing, and I quite liked the idea of having a book in print which didn’t mean that I’d have to remove the poems from the website, which presumably I would have to with a mainstream poetry publisher. So she and Stephen have agreed to publish a collection of my poems next year, if no one else will. I say ‘if no one else will’, because Nicky Platt, who’s publishing my collection of Harold Rosen’s writings, saw my website and liked the poems a lot. She asked me if I would mind her drawing them to the attention of a few colleagues working in companies which do publish poetry. I said I would love that. I’m going to give her until November to see what she can do; if nothing comes of it, Bronwyn and Stephen will bring out a collection, which it will be fun to work on with them.

In late August, I popped back to London for the second time this summer, staying with Paul and Vikki again. I had one medical appointment this time, at which I was started on the medical trial to see whether the newer drug rivaroxaban is better than aspirin or its equivalents as a blood thinner to prevent future strokes. Emma, the charming young woman who worked with me for an hour, administering tests which remind me of doing the 11-plus 54 years ago (I’ve had two of three of these sessions since the stroke), asked me to undertake one task which caused particular difficulty. She said, ‘I have a stopwatch here. In the course of one minute, I want you to say as many words as you can think of beginning with… f.’ The room was hot; there were no windows; she is very good looking. I thought, ‘You cannot say that word. You must put that word completely out of your mind. If you say that word, she may press a panic button and two burly men in brown coats will come and drag you away from her.’ Consequently, I was rather slow in getting going, and the words that I pronounced were multisyllabic and tended to be obscure, keeping well clear of dangerous Anglo-Saxon monosyllables: filibuster, fallacious, fibrillation, forensic… The experience reminded me of a story about Diana Dors, which the person who told it to me swears is true. At the height of her fame as Britain’s answer to Marilyn Monroe and other curvaceous American beauties of the immediate post-war years, Diana Dors was invited back to Swindon, her home town, to open one of the first supermarkets. The local vicar was invited to give the speech of welcome. Diana Dors’ real name was Diana Fluck. The reverend gentleman, well aware of the closeness of the deep pit into which a slip of the tongue might project him, spoke to this effect: ‘We’re here to welcome one of our own, who has gone far. This lovely lady is known throughout the world, and on the silver screen, as Diana Dors. But, of course, to those of us who’ve known her since she was a little girl, she will always be… Diana… Cunt.’ I avoided a minor version of the compulsion to say a word you know you must not say, but only just. Emma said that I had done ‘not too badly’ on that test; she was being kind.

I had another failure, but one which I was able to correct. While Emma was out collecting the pills from the pharmacy, I filled in a form containing dozens of statements about what I am or am not able to do unaided: wash myself, go to the toilet, eat, drink… The first group was headed by the question: ‘Do you have any difficulty with the following activities?’ Glancing quickly down the list, I checked all the ‘No’ boxes. There was then a second group of activities, similarly unremarkable and everyday, and I checked all the ‘No’ boxes there too. Having completed the form, and looking back over it, I saw that the second group of activities was preceded by the question, ‘Can you perform any of the following activities unaided?’ I had announced on the form that I can’t hold conversations with others, or remember events for more than a day. I quickly crossed out the ‘Noes’ in the checked boxes, and checked almost all the ‘Yes’ boxes, noticing however that the first activity was ‘…follow written instructions on forms, etc’. I left that checked as ‘No’ until Emma got back. She gave me permission to change it to ‘Yes’.

The following day I briefly attended the party to celebrate the wedding of Chloë, Stephen Eyers’ daughter, to her partner Mark. They already have two children. It was a happy but poignant occasion. I remembered that Stephen and I had spent several evenings in the pub where the party was held, The Bull and Last in Highgate Road, after professional-development sessions which we had run in the school across the road. I spoke to Chloë and Mark and a few other people, including Jeannie, Stephen’s first wife. Theresa and I then went back to her house by tube and train, and I stayed the night. The next day we drove down to the burial ground. On the last Sunday of every month, relatives and friends of those who are buried there are invited for tea, cakes and conversation: a good idea, and comforting. We talked to two recently bereaved women, then went out and found the grave, which wasn’t obvious because the long grass had been cut since the funeral. The rules of this natural burial ground forbid the putting up of monuments in stone; modest wooden memorials are allowed, but they are temporarily removed when the grass is cut, and Theresa hasn’t yet had a wooden memorial made. But there was a little metal tag indicating the place. We stood there for a few minutes, which was enough for Theresa, before driving back through the Surrey hills and the south-western suburbs of London to her house.

On the Monday I visited Betty Rosen; all well there, and she’s very pleased about Harold’s book, of course. The day after that, our friend Deidre Finan flew back to Brittany with me, and stayed with us for five days.

On 4 September, we had the annual fête de Saint Guénaël, which was a success as usual, with about 650 people sitting down to lunch, followed by entertainments of various kinds in the afternoon, including a display of vintage cars by the Amateurs de Véhicules Anciens du Morbihan. I was once again in charge of the sale of wine before lunch. Two weeks later, last Sunday, we volunteers were treated to an outing. A coach and a minibus were hired, and 71 of us went to La Roche-Bernard, where we trundled around the town on a little electric train, admiring the buildings and the bridge over the Vilaine, and had coffee or whatever people wanted to drink at eleven o’clock. Then the buses took us to the Barre d’Arzan, where we embarked on a boat which plied slowly back up and down the river for three and a half hours, doing 40 kilometres there and back, while we ate a five-course lunch. Home about six, and all very jolly.

Things are moving forward steadily on the publication of the three books next spring.

Tomorrow the result of the Labour leadership contest will be announced. Corbyn is certain to win again. The big question then will be: will the party split, or will the majority of Labour MPs, who have no confidence that Labour can ever win a general election under Corbyn’s leadership, just decide to sit this parliament out, let the Tories win again in 2020, before replacing Corbyn with someone with a chance of winning in 2025? A deeply depressing choice.

The situation in Syria is worse than ever, with Assad and his Russian allies bombarding Aleppo, and the strong possibility that this time the rebels may be forced from the city. At that point, Assad could say that he had ‘won’ the war, although the rebels would simply revert to guerilla tactics to attack him. The problem has been that the West has been pusillanimous in supporting the legitimate rebels, because of fears of becoming embroiled in another Iraq, and Russia has had no such compunction about arming and aiding a monster, so long as that monster serves Putin’s interests. I think back to the moment in the House of Commons when Cameron wanted to punish Assad for using chemical weapons against his own people, and Labour, to burnish its credentials as an anti-war party, submitted an amendment to the government motion only slightly different from the substantive text, causing the government motion to be defeated. It was a shameful decision to do nothing, which I think persuaded Obama to abandon his plan to bomb Syria’s weapons facilities, which enabled Assad to sign the international treaty renouncing the use of chemical weapons, just after he had used them, perversely making him look good. The clear sign that the West wasn’t going to do very much was enough to allow Putin to decide to do a great deal, with heart-breaking results.

Cameron, incidentally, is about to stand down as an MP. He can’t even wait until 2020 before abandoning the people of Witney in order to make serious money elsewhere. Contemptible. Gordon Brown, a man much older than Cameron, served a full five years as an MP after losing the 2010 general election. But he, with all his tragic flaws, was and is an honourable man.

Next Tuesday we’re taking the train to Avignon, where Brownyn and Stephen are staying, to surprise Bronwyn on the eve of her 70th birthday. Three nights there, and then on to Marseille for five nights, where Tess will be alone over the weekend; Mary and Jacques will be on holiday in Sicily until the following Monday evening, so we’ll have a day with them before returning here on 5 October.

Jeremy Corbyn did win, easily, with an even bigger share of the vote than last time, though that was not so hard given that he had only one competitor. His position in the party as a whole is very strong; much less strong amongst his parliamentary colleagues. I voted for Owen Smith with no great enthusiasm. I imagine that he will now return to obscurity. Corbyn made a good speech calling for unity after all the blood-letting. Perhaps the threat of a split in the party won’t materialise. But I see no prospect of a Labour government before 2025.

We had a great time in Avignon. Bronwyn was astonished to see us on her doorstep; Stephen’s secrecy had been complete. They’re in a house just outside the walls of the city, next to the railway station, belonging to their friends Janet and Tom (Bronwyn has known Janet since they were twelve years old; we went to a lunch in Fremantle in February to celebrate Janet’s 70th). Champagne and ravioli on the night we arrived, then dinner in two excellent restaurants on Wednesday and Thursday. The first, on Bronwyn’s actual birthday, was outstanding: Entre Vigne et Garrigue, in the country about seven kilometres north of the city. The food was beautiful and generous, and the setting memorable. As the name says, so it was: vineyards on one side, and rocky scrubland on the other.

On both days we explored Avignon, something I’ve never done, though I’ve been there a few times for very short stays. It’s a truly impressive European city, and not just for the famous monuments (the Palais des Papes, the bridge). Quiet, winding streets are lined by grand mansions and gracious smaller dwellings. There are some lovely churches, including Saint Pierre, which has magnificent carved doors. An impressive, impeccably kept public garden above the Palais des Papes gives a spectacular view over the Rhône northward. On both afternoons I went for walks alone outside the walls, and there reality intervenes: HLM blocks which I would never consent to live in, ugliness and mess, as well as acceptable if unremarkable suburban streets.

This morning we took the train from Avignon Centre station to Avignon TGV station (five minutes) and sat in the quiet warmth of the late morning until the TGV arrived, and swept us here in half an hour.

Tess was back from school for her lunch. She has coped well all by herself since her parents went away on Monday. I haven’t mentioned it before, but at the beginning of the month she was frighteningly ill. Appendicitis wasn’t diagnosed until the appendix had burst, causing peritonitis, requiring an emergency operation to remove the appendix and drain the filth from her abdomen. It’s an illness which still kills thousands of people around the world every year, mainly in poorer countries. Tess was weak, with a high temperature, for several days after the operation, but she seems completely recovered now. As I write, she’s in a philosophy class, studying Socrates, Plato and Bertrand Russell. Tonight we’ll take her out to a good little restaurant the other side of Notre Dame du Mont.

David James has lost his closest male friend, a remarkable man called David Bradshaw, whom we have got to know in recent years. He was an English don at Oxford, until recently chair of the faculty there. He specialised in 20th-century writers: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Huxley, Waugh. He was a full-scale scholar, bringing to light information about those people from sources which hadn’t previously been tapped, and he wrote in such an engaging, often witty style that the scholarship never weighed on the reader. He was 60, and it was cancer. His widow Barbara is a wonderful, courageous woman. She spent many days at Lindsay’s side when Lindsay was dying. The funeral is next Friday in Oxford. I won’t go, but I will go to the memorial event later.

We returned from Marseille eleven days ago. Train to Nantes, and then we dined in the little restaurant, Le Rosmarin, which we found by chance a few years ago on the way back from Mary’s wedding. It was that occasion when we had suffered a truly dreadful experience in a hotel in the middle of France the night before, and needed cheering up. The food was as nice as before, and the same woman presided.

Since then I’ve spent three days with Jean-Paul making the garden look presentable, I’ve read a draft of a book by Simon Gibbons about the history of English teaching over the last 50 years (very good, and with some gratifying puffs for my occasional contributions to that history), and not done much of a literary sort. I’m still waiting to hear from Ken Pearce what he thinks of my translation of The Aeneid book 2. I’ve been organising a jolly little get-together for our small group of Bedford Modern School chums, plus partners this time, on 12 November at Peter and Monica Hetherington’s house. It will be the third time we’ve met like this, and for a change we’re going to do something other than just talk: we’re going to read Twelfth Night. The parts are assigned, Peter has organised the music, Monica will do tea, I will do drinks after the reading, and then we’ll go to dine at The Falcon.

On the train going down to Avignon I read Le Monde and then continued with Vanished Kingdoms by Norman Davies, which is a collection of historical essays about parts of Europe and Asia that once were states, and are no longer. Very impressive. Anyhow, the newspaper and the book provoked the thoughts which follow. I’ve tried to make a poem of them, but even though the lines are in iambics, I don’t think it will ever succeed. It’s too preachy, didactic.

Ruminations on the TGV

I’m racing southward in the comfort of the train,
supplied with coffee and Le Monde, which offers
worldwide information on our self-inflicted woes.
Sated at last, I swap the present for the past.
The history book I’m reading is a catalogue
of vanished states, a litany of bygone cruelties:
the greed and pride of kings and emperors,
the sufferings of the poor, the bravery and failure of the good.
Remote, foreshadowing examples drag me back
to news still fluid, not yet hardened into history.
In Palestine, the stronger brother steals
the weaker brother’s birthright, piece by piece.
In Syria, two monstrous forces, one inspired by faith,
one merely brutal, with a bigger brute for backer,
silence voices which were raised in hope to claim
the simple freedoms which this passenger enjoys.
In lands where simple freedoms long ago were won
— in France, America or England — citizens
with little, who know less, are thrilled by champions
who feed their fear, who stoke their indignation,
jabbing righteous fingers at the strangers
it’s convenient to blame, while conjuring
a future like their fiction of the past.
If orators like these prevail, their listeners will learn
the vanity of signals they mistook for hope.

Now most of us are healthier and richer
than our ancestors, are we equivalently
wiser, kinder, abler to distinguish
complex truth from easy lies? Is tyranny
a rarer poison plant than once it was?
Will we, in time, desist from actions
which will make our pleasant, only home
a hellish place for billions unborn?
There are days, like today (the sunshine smiling
on the landscape, and all’s well with me)
when early confidence gives way to later doubt.

On Thursday we took Jean and Annick out to Le Vivier to thank them for everything they have done for us over the past year, and also to make up for missing their golden wedding anniversary in May. Last night Jean-Paul and Christine took us out to L’Art Gourmand, I think partly to thank me for what I’d done for them last April (the trip to Durham and Middlesbrough).

On Friday Helen and I had one of our occasional days where we take off in the car not sure of where we’re going. We drove up towards Carhaix, turned left onto the road which I’ve often taken when going to Brest airport, and found the impressive little town of Châteaulin in its valley, astride the Aulne, which forms part of the Nantes-Brest canal. I’ve looked at the canal and walked along parts of it numerous times. Construction work started in 1811. The panel I read at Châteaulin says that it was opened to traffic in 1836. Wikipedia on the other hand says that ‘Napoléon III of France presided over the canal’s opening in 1858’. Whichever is right, it was an enormous achievement: 385 kilometres in length, 238 locks, all done with the technology of the time. And within a few decades, the railway arrived, and the canal’s industrial purpose — to link the two great western cities and carry goods between them — was surpassed.

We lunched in a little hotel called Le Chrismas, which is not a misspelling of our English word, but — so madame told me — a combination of parts of the first names of two of the owners. Good and old-fashioned: I ordered the pâté to start with, which arrived in a large bowl with a knife stuck in it, and I was left to take however thick or thin a slice I liked, and however many gherkins I wanted from a deep jar. That is rare these days. Then I had andouillette: excellent, though I had to keep the dish well away from Helen’s nose. She finds the smell disgusting. After lunch we strolled up and down the riverbank before driving off into remote, lost country until we came out at Sainte-Marie-du-Ménez-Hom, where there is an impressive chapel with a spectacular retable, restored and repainted in recent years. From there it was five minutes up to the top of Ménez-Hom, one of the high points of Brittany. The view all around is wonderful: westward to the sea, northward to the peninsulas of Crozon and Plougastel, with Brest beyond them, southward to the big peninsula which starts at Quimper and ends at the Pointe du Raz, eastward inland, where the Aulne and the canal wanders. Beautiful, calm, rolling country on that sunny, windy afternoon. Then we descended to the coast and found a little road which sometimes skirts the sea, sometimes rises away from it for a bit. I knew where we were going to come out: Sainte-Anne-la-Palud, with its little sandy beach and the gracious hotel where Helen and I stayed once on her birthday. We had an expensive brandy at the bar and thought of David and Lindsay, who had stayed there too. I tried to persuade Helen that we should have a night there before we go back to London, which we will do on the last day of the month. I might succeed. Then back home in the early evening on the fast road past Quimper. A glorious and romantic day.

In recent weeks, and especially when driving back from shopping this morning, I’ve noticed groups of beautiful white birds feeding in fields next to herds of cows. I assumed they were egrets, and the internet has just told me that they are indeed ‘cattle egrets’, a successful worldwide species that likes to feed near cattle, because the larger animals’ movements disturb the insects and other small creatures which the birds eat. Cattle egrets also sometimes eat the flies and ticks directly off the animals’ bodies. I read that they’ve moved up from southern Europe into France in recent decades. I’ve seen single birds in previous years (I remember discussing this with Albert) but I’ve never seen such large groups as recently.

Heavy rain on Saturday and last night has brought to an end this long period of dry weather. Now, whenever I bump into French people in the shops or on our walks, they speak excitedly of the prospect of mushrooms.

I’m glad to read that a coalition of Iraqi government forces and Kurdish peshmergas, with Western backing, is beginning the offensive to retake Mosul. I’m afraid it will be bloody, but it’s necessary. The recapture of Mosul won’t be the end of IS, but it will be a major blow to them, since it was there that their ‘caliphate’ was proclaimed. The great question then will be whether Iraq can survive as a state containing both strands of Islam, Arabs and Kurds, and various minorities, including Christians. That is not certain; the country could still break up into statelets, and maybe should, if inter-communal violence seems unending in a country only invented by French and British civil servants during the First World War.

We returned to London on the last day of October. We dropped our little hired car at the supermarket in Pontivy. A coach took us from Pontivy to St Brieuc. There used to be a railway line. It closed in 1987. The station building is still there, and the rails. The coach took a route linking the former intermediate stations between the two places. So we found ourselves going down tiny country roads to hamlets which once had some significance — a bar or two, a hotel next to the then station — and now have none. TGV from St Brieuc to Paris; metro under Paris; Eurostar to London.

Having finished the translation of book 2 of The Aeneid, I’ve started translating bits from Virgil’s Georgics: beautiful, concrete, closely observed details about farming and country life. I’m going to do about four from each of the four books. The first is on tillage and crops, the second on vines, the third on cattle, the fourth on the keeping of bees.

I’ve done the indexes for the two Routledge books, and with Betty Rosen made decisions about which photographs of Harold to use for his book.

Amongst the lines which I included in the 16 October entry were these:

In lands where simple freedoms long ago were won
— in France, America or England — citizens
with little, who know less, are thrilled by champions
who feed their fear, who stoke their indignation,
jabbing righteous fingers at the strangers
it’s convenient to blame, while conjuring
a future like their fiction of the past.
If orators like these prevail, their listeners will learn
the vanity of signals they mistook for hope.

On Tuesday those citizens elected their champion in America. Donald Trump won the election, against all predictions. I stayed up to watch, as usual, and found myself actually trembling with fear at about three o’clock in the morning when his victory seemed probable. His campaign was dirtier than any Republican campaign I’ve seen, and that’s saying something. Simply abuse your opponent with whatever cheap shot you care to; lie; blame foreigners for America’s woes: and, hey presto, you’re the president. The intervention of the director of the FBI, 12 days ago, to say that he would be re-investigating Hillary Clinton’s unwise decision, when she was Secretary of State, to use a private server to conduct both private and state business, now looks like a deliberate, and successful, effort to damage her. She was cleared of any wrongdoing, again, two days before the election, but the damage had been done. Then there was the leaking of the emails of members of the Clinton campaign team: probably done by the Russians, possibly with the encouragement of Trump’s team. Who knows? At any rate, the following things are true.

Trump questioned Obama’s right to be president, claiming that he wasn’t born in the US: a knowing, malicious act. He says he will abolish Obama’s modest reform of America’s health system, thus endangering the health insurance of more than 20 million people. Obama’s historic agreement with Iran over its nuclear weapons is likely to be scrapped. Trump, the worst person to have got to the White House in my lifetime, tweeted of Obama, the best person to have got there in my lifetime, that he ‘will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States’.

Trump wants to ban Muslims from going to the US. He wants to build a wall across the Mexican border. He is abusive to women, accusing one female interviewer of attacking him unfairly because ‘she was bleeding from the whatever’, and joking with a male interviewer that he could have whichever women he wanted because he was a star: ‘you just grab them by the pussy’. He encouraged his supporters, in the event of a Clinton victory, to shoot her should she attempt to change the Second Amendment. ‘Lock her up,’ he ranted, referring to an opponent who had committed no crime; his adoring supporters enthusiastically chorused the words back to him. He doesn’t believe in climate change, and wants the US to get on and burn fossil fuels without restraint. He acknowledges that he has paid no tax ‘because I’m smart’. He has the support of the Klu Klux Klan. There were constant, generalised attacks on ‘the elite’, ‘the Washington establishment’. There was the promise to ‘make America great again’. That was it. And he won.

The dark side of this is that the worst elements in American society — the racists, the homophobes, the gun-toting males itching to prove their masculinity through violence, the evangelical Christians who see in Trump God’s hand at work in restoring America to its former greatness, and sense a coming Armageddon in the Middle East — are massively encouraged. The world is immensely more dangerous now.

The more understandable side of it is that in America, just as in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, there is a big chunk of people who have been left behind, as they see it, by the deindustrialisation of the West and the migration of jobs to the developing world, who think they deserve better (which they do) and who are looking for someone to blame and for a saviour. They have lost all faith in established political parties. They put their faith in demagogues offering simple solutions: Farage, Trump, Le Pen. The parties who traditionally have represented the working classes of richer countries have not been able or willing to put in place worthwhile alternative jobs when the mines, the steelworks, the shipyards, the car factories, the chemical plants have gone to India, China, Korea, Mexico, Brazil: places where the management and shareholders of multinational companies see that they can improve or at least maintain their profits. The abandoned people, in their rage, blame the immigrants who are doing the jobs they don’t want to do — not the jobs which no longer exist — and the elites in government, business and finance.

As ever, Trump the abuser became Trump the healer when he made his victory speech. I’ve seen this happen so many times — with Reagan and both Bushes — that I discount it completely. For the moment, Trump has both houses of Congress on his side, and he will be able to appoint at least one and maybe more new members of the Supreme Court. Expect America to make an even greater contribution to the planet’s despoliation than before. Trump says he’s going to repair America’s crumbling infrastructure, which certainly needs it. Where he is going to get the money from, as he cuts taxes on the rich and on businesses, I don’t know; perhaps by borrowing. Reagan borrowed hugely, and Americans are still paying Reagan’s debts, especially to the Chinese. Trump says he knows all about debt, having been in debt so many times. The difference is that if a corrupt or unwise businessman goes bankrupt, he can walk away and start again, as Trump has often done. It’s true that other countries have defaulted on their debt; it’s not an option for the richest country in the world.

Just at the moment, I’m in despair. I said to Helen last night, and I don’t think I was being melodramatic, that political events in recent years have tipped me to a position where, for the first time in my life, I no longer expect the world to improve. All my life so far, I’ve hoped and believed that tolerance, respect for difference, a sense of individuals’ and nations’ obligations to each other, an understanding of the interconnectedness of the world, a realisation of the precious and fragile inheritance we have on this planet, were all increasing, slowly if unevenly. I no longer believe that. All that remains for me now, in however many years I have left, is to do as little harm as possible, to do good in my insignificant, habitual ways, and to enjoy the gifts and pleasures which my lucky life has brought me. The idea that I might be part of some broad movement towards enlightenment has gone, I think for ever.

A beautiful, dry, clear autumn day, and I can’t shake off this profound gloom. As at other times in my life when I’ve been depressed, I go to bed in the afternoon and hope that the mood will pass. The trouble with sleeping in the daytime is that I lie awake most of the night, feeling useless.

Yesterday we went up to Bedfordshire for the little Bedford Modern School reunion and reading of Twelfth Night. Good fun. I shook myself out of my gloom, but every news report, every piece of analysis I read, threatens to tip me back into it. This really is so much worse than a defeat at the hands of the Conservatives in a UK general election; worse even than the referendum. The most hate-filled, bigoted, isolationist people are beginning to take their place in Trump’s future governing team. The next few years are going to be bad for the world in a way that no previous period in my lifetime has been; the best that can hoped for is that the extremity of Trump’s positions — describing NATO as obsolete just when Russia is at its most dangerous, reneging on the global climate deal agreed in Paris last year, dumping international trade agreements without consulting former partners, claiming that he will round up and expel or imprison the two or three million people he describes as illegal immigrants and criminals — produce a kind of chaos which slows their malignity.

The gloom returned. I had a dreadful, and uncharacteristic, long weekend, lasting from last Friday to last Monday, when I felt quite unable to do anything. I slept for far longer than I needed to, including going to bed for two or three hours in the afternoon. The state reminded me of Sundays many years ago, when I hadn’t entirely shaken off the mental damage inflicted by the religion of childhood and youth, when I similarly went to bed and lay there for hours, feeling wretched.

I had one comfort: a few months ago Peter Hetherington gave me a copy of Augustus by John Williams. It’s an epistolary novel, fictionalising some of the true events of the life of Augustus Caesar from the death of Julius Caesar onwards. Peter admires the book, and thought, correctly, that one reason I would be interested to read it is that both Horace and Virgil figure in it. It’s a magnificent work. There’s an extraordinary passage in Octavius’s long letter which forms Book 3, written a few days before he died, where he compares the work of the poet to the work of the general, the consul and the emperor.  The first two sentences of that paragraph are an apologia for poetry which could hardly be bettered: ‘The poet contemplates the chaos of experience, the confusion of accident, and the incomprehensible realms of possibility — which is to say the world in which we all so intimately live that few of us take the trouble to examine it.  The fruits of that contemplation are the discovery, or the invention, of some small principle of harmony and order that may be isolated from that disorder which obscures it, and the subjection of that discovery to those poetic laws which at last make it possible.’

The book is also a marvellous account of the agonising dilemmas of power, culminating in Octavius’s decision to exile his daughter.  Williams cleverly leaves uncertain the question as to whether Julia did actually conspire with Jullus Antonius and others to kill her husband Tiberius and therefore to threaten her father’s life: Octavius writes, near the end of Book 3, that she did; she says, in conversation with him, that though she might have expressed a wish for the death of a husband she had been forced to marry for political reasons, and whom she hated, so that she could marry the only man she had ever loved, she had had no intention beyond that.  The very last words of the Epilogue, ‘...let us pray to the gods that, under Nero, Rome will at last fulfil the dream of Octavius Caesar’, are an envoi sending a chill down the spine, as if someone had expressed the same hope about a Trump presidency after that of Obama, who also has known the dilemmas of power. I consumed the book over that miserable weekend.

I may have written before that I found Stoner disappointing when I read it a few years ago, despite the praise heaped on it from all quarters.  I thought it was merely consistently glum rather than poignant, and sometimes overwritten to the point of pretentiousness.  But this is on another level altogether.

On Monday evening, the pall lifted. I am quite myself again (to quote Houseman), though of course the external situation is unchanged. The only bit of less-than-disastrous news was that Sarkozy was roundly beaten on Sunday in the first round of the primary elections for next year’s presidential candidate for Les Républicains. I hope we will hear no more from him, with his opportunistic appeals to the most divisive, chauvinist and racist elements in French public opinion. Indeed, he may be fully occupied defending himself in the courts against charges of corruption in the receipt of funds for his party in previous elections. Fillon’s dramatic victory was quite unexpected; I was sure that Juppé would come first, as were most people. I expect that Fillon will win in the second round of the primaries, especially since Sarkozy asked people to vote for him, despite having insulted and humiliated him when he was his Prime Minister; and that he will then go on to win the presidency. It’s a strange time we’re living in, when I can contemplate almost with equanimity the prospect of having as President of France an avid admirer of Thatcher, a man who thinks France should support Assad uncritically in order to defeat IS, because Fillon is not Sarkozy and not Le Pen.

France is sleepwalking towards a repeat of Vichy. In 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen got to the second round of the presidential election, the nation was shocked and ashamed. Lazy Socialist voters who hadn’t bothered to vote in the first round, because they had been on holiday or had had other things to do, hung their heads. There were huge demonstrations. This time, it’s taken for granted the Marine Le Pen will get to the second round. Brexit and the Trump victory have blown more wind into her sails. Socialist voters will once again have to vote for a right-wing candidate. It will be interesting, and perhaps terrifying, to see how the vote for the daughter in 2017 compares with the 17.8% which the father got 15 years previously. I fear it will be much greater. And 2022?

This assumes, of course, as everybody seems to in France, that the Socialists are so damaged after Hollande’s five desperately disappointing years, that no candidate of the left stands a chance of getting to the second round. I suppose that’s true, although I’ve been so completely wrong about almost all major elections in recent years, and about the referendum, that it would be pleasant one day to be glad to be wrong rather than miserable about it.

In all the democracies, the dog beneath the skin is growling.

Today I sent my translation of Aeneid 2 to Mark to put on the website, plus the first three of what I hope will be a dozen or so extracts from the Georgics. It’s been a good writing day: and a day when IS killed about 80 Shia pilgrims, many of them Iranian and Afghani, on their way back from an annual ceremony in the Iraqi holy city of Karbala. Is translating Latin as the world relentlessly darkens fiddling while Rome burns? Probably; but at least I’m cheerful again, however irrational that may be.

We arrived yesterday. I’ve just been out for a walk up to the dustbins and back in the twilight of the winter solstice, amid thick mist and light drizzle.

We left London a week ago. We went first to Bletsoe, to Peter and Monica Hetherington. We dined very well with them at The Plough, and stayed the night. The next day we went on to Shropshire for the usual pre-Christmas weekend with David and Tom James. We saw all our Shropshire friends: on Friday night Juginder and Lesley; on Saturday night Glenda and Julian, Peter and Merle, Andrew and Annie, and Mike. We drove straight from Harmer Hill to Montreuil-sur-Mer on Monday.  I expect I’ve written about Montreuil before; we’ve stayed there many times. It’s an impressive walled, fortified old town, now several miles from the sea, though it has retained the name.  Les Hauts de Montreuil is a stylish little hotel with a good restaurant, where we toasted the first night of our winter holiday.  Yesterday was a longish but easy drive down here.

I’ve been proofreading the Harold Rosen book, and that’s done now. It took a good few days, because it is 572 pages and nearly a quarter of a million words. I showed the corrected proofs to Betty last Wednesday morning, before taking it to the publisher. She was very pleased, and slipped me a generous cheque which will more than cover the cost of seasonal festivities.

On 27 November Helen and I went down to Colliers Wood to hear a concert by a string quintet of which Kate Hetherington — Peter’s and Monica’s daughter — is first cello. It was wonderful: Glazunov in the first half, Schubert in the second. The experience produced a little poem, ‘Quintet’, which I’m pleased with.

Tom Deveson and Richard Patterson, both fellow students at Bedford Modern, were at the concert. I’ve seen Tom occasionally in the intervening decades; he is perhaps the cleverest person I’ve ever met, and one of the best. I haven’t seen Richard at all. He’s been an English teacher and adviser, like me. I liked him immediately, after all these years. His wife Kay was lovely. They have a house in the Lot, so perhaps we’ll visit.

We had three nights, from 30 November to 3 December, with Adam and Hazel in Norfolk. On 1 December we walked on the marshes and by the sea at Cley, admiring the thousands of migrating birds which gather there. We drove back on the Saturday morning, and that evening went to Tosca at the Coliseum. We had a box, which Betty had kindly paid for. Gabriel Genest came too. We packed in quite a few cultural experiences in the few weeks we were in London: Lulu and The Pearl Fishers, also at the Coliseum; Mary Stuart at the Almeida; The Tempest at the Donmar’s temporary theatre at Kings Cross; Amadeus at the National; the Abstract Expressionists exhibition at the Royal Academy. I went to Tara Arts’ beautiful new little theatre at Earlsfield to see their pantomime, Bollywood Jack, in which Jack and the Beanstalk meets Bollywood and Tooting. Very funny: Farrukh Dhondy, whom I’ve known from English teaching and Channel 4 days, wrote it. Jatinder Verma, who runs Tara, is a good friend. I gave him my script of Roger II in the summer, despairing that Paul Halley will write any music after all this time. Jatinder’s thinking about it, but I doubt that he’ll take it on. I think it’s doomed to remain a paper project.

On Monday an Islamist terrorist drove a lorry into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing twelve people and injuring many more, copying the atrocity in Nice in July. The lorry and its innocent driver were Polish; the terrorist hijacked the vehicle, which had been delivering goods from Poland to Berlin, and killed the driver in a struggle. The authorities know who did it: a Tunisian national with a string of aliases and a criminal record, who had applied for asylum in Germany, who left his German residence permit (no doubt by accident) and his DNA in the cab before escaping. The asylum application had been rejected, but the papers from Tunisia authorising his deportation hadn’t arrived when he committed the mass murder.

Angela Merkel’s admirable, statesperson-like policy of admitting about a million asylum-seekers and refugees into Germany — a kind of penance, perhaps, for Germany’s past crimes, but also of actual benefit to an economy that needs younger workers as its indigenous population ages — is under fierce attack from right-wing populists who are ideologically the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Nazis. She may well suffer in the German general election next September. Fortunately, she has great popularity among calmer, wiser Germans, and both her party and the Social Democrats, currently in coalition, have said that they would never enter a coalition with Alternative für Deutschland, the racist party.

Islamist fundamentalism is the scourge of our times. Naturally, we Europeans are shocked when our cities are attacked and our people killed, but fundamentalist organisations continue to kill people in far greater numbers in Asia and Africa all the time. I see no option but to defeat these organisations militarily, whatever the dreadful cost. They’re not like, say, the Provisional IRA or ETA or some violent Palestinian groups or the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, where, however we might have condemned and — where they are still active — continue to condemn the wicked brutality of their actions, we knew and know that these were an incoherent response to long-term oppression. Islamic State and al-Qaida and their associated terror groups have not suffered specific, long-term oppression at the hands of more powerful forces or governments; their only purpose is to impose on the world their own perverted vision of Islam. Islamic State must be driven out of Mosul and Raqqa, though that will be very far from the end of the threat they pose.

The heart-breaking scenes in Syria continue. Assad’s forces now control Aleppo. Civilians are being swapped in their thousands from rebel-held areas to government-controlled areas, and vice versa. Although the retaking of Aleppo is a major gain for Assad, the end of the civil war is nowhere in sight. The rebels — both the democratic forces that the West should have supported much more robustly, and the Islamists — still control large swathes of the country. I think there will now be a period of stand-off and division. Russia’s wicked role in the tragedy is there for all to see. We should have attacked Assad after he used chemical weapons against his own people. We didn’t, and once Putin noticed that, he moved in.

The Berlin killer has been shot dead in Milan. Two policeman found him in a working-class suburb of the city, and asked to see his papers. He responded by shooting one of them, who fortunately is not seriously injured. The other policeman, who’s only been in the job a few months, killed the killer, who had travelled from Germany to Holland, thence by bus to Lyon, thence by train to Turin and then Milan. The ease with which he was able to cross national frontiers raises serious questions about the Schengen agreement. Naturally, the parties in various EU countries which want the EU to break up are making the most of the story, but the authorities have so far, I presume, decided that to inconvenience hundreds of thousands of innocent travellers who cross national borders in the Schengen area every day, and to take on the huge extra cost of checking them, is not justified, at least not yet.

Christmas passed pleasantly, but with the underlying sadness that Stephen Eyers wasn’t with us. Theresa, quite rightly, spent Christmas with her son Paul at Whitstable. We ate coquille Saint Jacques on Christmas Eve, took a hamper of very British food to our neighbours on Christmas morning, walked at Fort Bloqué in the afternoon, and came home to open presents with champagne while a guinea fowl was cooking. Yesterday evening we went to our restaurant at Pont-Scorff, where we shall go again, of course, on New Year’s Eve.

Yesterday and today I’ve been in the garden, pruning, weeding and raking, generally making the place look tidy. Tidiness does yield a certain satisfaction. Both days have been beautiful: clear and cold. I’ve been accompanied by a robin, most of the time, and occasionally by a dunnock. As I was having a rest and drinking tea yesterday, both birds were within my view, but as soon as the robin noticed the dunnock, he chased her away. Robins are aggressive little beasts, however much love we love them. The other day, through the kitchen window, we saw a magnificent male great spotted woodpecker hammering away at a fallen branch. We watched it for a couple of minutes before it flew off. And I’ve seen green woodpeckers twice at the top of the lane.

I’ve done a funny little poem which I’m pleased with. Brownyn gave me a very good book called Reading Dante, by Prue Shaw. In it, I came upon the extraordinary fact that, in Dante’s lifetime, some of his verses were brazenly used by lawyers to fill up the last pages of documents, to stop future falsification by the addition of codicils (I suppose the way that, when we write cheques, we put a line across the vacant space, or write ‘Only’, to stop a fraud adding more money). I often say that the hardest thing, with me, is to get an idea in the first place. As soon as I read that, I knew I could do something. The title is a bit learned, but it made me smile when I thought of it, it alliterates nicely, and I’m going to stick with it. Here’s the poem.

A beautiful cold clear day today. I finished maintenance work by emptying the gutters of leaves: a curiously pleasurable activity. The gutter down the side of the house is the trickiest, because I have to jam a big stone under the right foot of the ladder to make it level. A health and safety inspector would be appalled.

We went for a long circular walk after lunch. Saw no one. These days between Christmas and New Year are recessional, or as if someone has breathed in and not yet breathed out. I enjoy them. The Prue Shaw book is absolutely excellent; the chapters ‘Numbers’ (mainly about the rule of three which governs much of the Commedia, beginning with the doctrine of the Trinity) and ‘Words’ (self-evidently about Dante’s use of language) are marvellously informative. Though I knew that Dante was exiled from Florence and that he died in Ravenna, I didn’t know that he travelled widely in Italy after his exile, and that his vocabulary includes common words and conjugations of verbs in a variety of forms drawn from different dialects of the language, which — apart from anything else — helped him meet the formidable challenge of the terza rima rhyme structure.

We lurch towards a dangerous 2017. Trump is making up international US policy on Twitter. On Friday, the UN Security Council condemned Israel’s continual and illegal construction of settlements on the West Bank, saying — quite rightly — that it threatens any prospect of a two-state solution. I don’t believe that Netanyahu really wants a two-state solution, whatever he may say officially to the contrary. I don’t know what his real wish is. Is it that the Palestinians will just go elsewhere, perhaps to Jordan? Is it that they will accept a condition of permanent subjugation as he expands Jewish territory? Neither of these will happen. The proportion of Arabs — Muslim, Christian or Druze — in Israel proper is already 20%, and likely to rise to 25% by 2025. They will form increasingly influential coalitions with their brothers and sisters in the West Bank and Gaza. In past entries, I have also written that a two-state solution isn’t the answer; but my one-state solution is the utopian idea — utopian at least for the foreseeable future — that Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze living in the whole area currently occupied by Israel and Palestine should establish a secular government on the basis of equal rights for all and complete respect for religious difference. The US abstained in the Security Council vote, infuriating the Israeli government. John Kerry has just made a speech pointing out the obvious: there will be no peace while Israel keeps taking Palestinian land. So Trump tweets that Israel should ‘stay strong’ until 20 January, when things will be different. And Netanyahu tweets a grateful response. Trump, Netanyahu, Putin, Erdogan: these are some of the masters of the universe now. Information-free opinionation; vast egos; profoundly complex international issues reduced to slogans of no more than 140 characters: terrifying.

The year moves quietly towards its end under grey skies. No breath of wind. We’ll go, as usual in recent years, to L’Art Gourmand at Pont-Scorff for the Saint Sylvestre meal. I expect there will be singing, and I expect I shall be called upon. Helen heard Charles Trenet’s ‘La Mer’ the other week, and suggested it to me as a possible extension of my repertoire. A slow, sentimental ballad is a departure from the vigorous folk songs I’m more comfortable with, but I’ve just rehearsed it a dozen or more times under Trenet’s personal direction (on YouTube), and I think I’ll risk it.

The year moves violently towards its end in Baghdad, with another atrocity committed by Islamic State in a Shia district of the city. I hope that this evil organisation can be defeated during the course of 2017, at least in Iraq and possibly in Syria. Apart from that, I have no great hopes for next year: too many bad people are in too many positions of power. I shall remember 2016 as the year when my best friend died, and when I realised, for the first time, how insignificant have been all my efforts in the little spaces where I have some expertise: not worthless, but hardly registering on the scale of change for good in the world. In that sense, I suppose I’m just like almost everybody else. The necessary thing is to stay cheerful while living with the realisation.

On Thursday I did a little love poem for Helen. I’ll end with it.

We got back here late last night after a pleasant last few days in Brittany. 'La Mer' was a bit of a disaster at L'Art Gourmand on New Year's Eve. It needed much more rehearsal than I gave it, and it's one thing to sing along with Charles Trenet on the internet, and another to do it with no accompaniment after having drunk plenty. I think people forgave me. The folksongs went down well, as usual.

I've brought with me a cutting from Le Monde of 6 January. It's an article by the paper's UK correspondent, Alain Frachon, and entitled 'Brexit, tristes lendemains'. It discusses the difficulties in which we find ourselves after the referendum. Approximate translation of a few paragraphs:

'The Brexiters' argument [during the referendum campaign] was founded on an enormous lie. They guaranteed that the UK could leave the EU while keeping access to the single European market. This is false or, at the very least, the situation is much more complicated than that. Then, the debate of last spring didn't have to do with Europe, or at least very little. The Brexiters never said what kind of relationship they wanted to have with Europe. They don't know; they are divided. The campaign turned on two questions: financing the health service and the control of immigration.

On the first question, the Brexiters put forward extravagant figures. They "apologised" for them after the count, naturally. On the second, they cultivated a confusion between intra-European immigration (free circulation within the EU, of which London [meaning the UK government] was for a long time one of the most ardent defenders) and the migratory flows coming from Africa and the Middle East. But on the links to be preserved with Europe, on future co-operation with Brussels, on the role which the UK intends to continue to play on the continent when no longer a member of the EU, there was no discussion or hardly any. As if that wasn't the topic.

Since then, how do we interpret the 52% in favour of Brexit? What is Mrs May's precise mandate? Her silence is worrying. She seems to refuse to recognise the complexity of Brexit. Exasperated, the chief British representative at the EU, Ivan Rogers, has just resigned. Within her majority, the Prime Minister has to achieve a synthesis between the fundamentalists and the empiricists of Brexit. She has to avoid heightened tensions between the different peoples of the UK. During December 2016, Scotland and Wales announced that they weren't imagining leaving the single European market. A sign of the current unease: a poll conducted by WIN/Gallup indicates that 54% of the UK electorate would now say no to Brexit.

The press speculates on a compromise which would see the UK staying in the European customs union, at least for a very long period of transition. This medium-intensity Brexit would be the least devastating for the British economy. In the Financial Times, Philip Stephens remarks philosophically that history has taught us that "there are transitory arrangements which can become definitive".

Mrs May has an impossible mission because the question of Europe was perhaps not the central one in the June vote. The EU was the pretext for, and the victim of, one of those protest demonstrations which shake Western electorates. We know the reasons. The twin forces of globalisation and technological revolution continue to alarm, and are a cause of deindustrialisation, growth which is as sluggish as it is unequal, and worry about uncontrolled migratory flows. The complexity of this volatile and unpredictable world frightens people. They respond by voting for simple solutions: a return to the past. A withdrawal to the national. In the FT again, Gideon Rachman speaks of "nostalgic nationalism".

The problem for the British is that leaving the EU will not aid the treatment of any of the elements of this malaise…'

Perfectly put.

I've now got the proofs of the two Routledge books. So plenty to get on with.

Since I last wrote, the most disastrous person to occupy the White House in my lifetime has been sworn in. He brought immediate chaos to the world by signing an executive order which indefinitely barred Syrian refugees from entering the United States, suspended all refugee admissions for 120 days, and blocked citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen), refugees or otherwise, from entering the United States for 90 days. He signed the order on a Friday afternoon. Over the weekend, people with an absolutely legitimate right to fly to the US were prevented from boarding planes at airports around the world. Senior lawyers, who understand something about the US constitution, succeeded in blocking the measure, causing Trump to rage against 'so-called judges' and the mainstream media, which he accuses of running an immoral campaign against the people's will. The idea that a president can be so ignorant of one of the essential elements of his country's constitution — that there can be no prejudice against a person on the grounds of her or his religious conviction — is truly remarkable, and shows us that we are now in uncharted territory so far as the governance of the most powerful country in the world is concerned. Trump's aides tried to plead that the order wasn't an anti-Muslim measure; only an anti-terrorist measure. That argument collapsed when it became clear that specific exceptions to the ban had been made for non-Muslim minorities in the seven countries. Further, none of the terrorist acts in the US since September 2001 has been committed by a person from one of the seven countries; Saudi Arabia, for example, some of whose nationals were involved in 9/11, was not on the list. Finally, the US at this moment is in coalition with groups in Iraq and Syria in the struggle to defeat IS; the measure seems the surest way to alienate those people. I read today that the frustrated president is going to issue another order on Wednesday to try to reactivate the ban on some different basis, to get round the judicial blockage.

Trump's National Security Adviser had to resign when it became clear that he had engaged in conversations with the Russian government about future relations between the two countries before he had been sworn into his post, something which is illegal in US law, and had then misled the vice-president, after the vice-president's and his own swearing-in, about whether he had done this or not. Trump's first choice of replacement refused the offer. Now he has chosen a serving soldier, apparently widely respected. It is too early to say whether that decision, and the more emollient tone taken by some of Trump's senior lieutenants in their dealings with the rest of the world, signal a shift in the direction of sanity. But it's government by Twitter for now. There was an extraordinary scene when Trump, the Japanese prime minister and the two men's wives were dining at Trump's luxury club in Florida, a place which is open to anyone who's extremely rich. The lunatic who runs North Korea chose that moment to fire a 'test' missile in the direction of Japan. It landed in the sea. A potentially lethal moment in international relations was then discussed in full view of fellow diners, some of whom took the opportunity to photograph or film the discussions and upload their efforts to social media.

The threat to build a wall the length of the border between Mexico and the US remains. The threat to deport millions of illegal immigrants, most of whom are doing low-paid work essential to America's economy, remains.

Trump casually remarked, in the company of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was visiting, that he'd be just as happy with a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict as with a two-state solution. Ironically, I've written in the past that a one-state solution is the only long-term answer to the problem, following Edward Said's wisdom. But Netanyahu's idea of a one-state solution wouldn't be Said's. Said's was based on the idea of absolute equality between Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze in a state whose constitution is secular, while guaranteeing rights of religious observance. Any one-state solution proposed or imposed by Netanyahu would involve the subjugation or removal of the Palestinians. There are people in the Israeli government even more extreme than he who would happily embrace that solution; he must realise its impracticability, regardless of its injustice. I'm reading a book called The Arabs, by Eugene Rogan. There's a chapter about the British mandate in Palestine, about the civil war between Jews and Arabs there as the British were leaving — a series of appalling events in which atrocities were committed by both sides but whose dominant narrative was that the better-armed Jews simply drove the Arabs from their homes — and about the first Arab-Israeli war as soon as Israeli independence was achieved. I'm tempted to say that the dreadful continuing tragedy in Israel-Palestine owes much to the UK's disastrous governance of Palestine between the wars; and it's certainly true that the Balfour declaration's intention to provide a homeland for the Jews while maintaining the rights and property of non-Jewish people already living in Palestine proved a hopeless (but possibly idealistic?) ambition, succeeding only in antagonising both sides. But no one in 1919 could have foreseen the Holocaust and the resulting moral imperative to provide a place of safety for Jewish people. What could and should have been foreseen is that you don't atone for one epic evil by the persecution of another group of people innocent of that evil.

I've strayed a bit from Trump. The only thing I'm sure of is that he has no grasp whatever of the ferocious complexity of the situation in Israel-Palestine, and is only giving comfort to the most intransigent voices in the Zionist camp.

My books are nearly done. The Rosen book will be in my hands, I think, next Monday; and there will be a launch, at which I'll give a talk, on 20 March. I've signed off the text of the two Routledge books too, so they're on track to appear some time this spring. And I've finally agreed with Bronwyn and Stephen Mellor that Chalkface Press will publish a selection of my poems. (The vague possibility of Nicky Platt interesting a mainstream poetry publisher in the work didn't come to anything.) Last Friday I had a good session with Peter Hetherington, recording readings of 36 poems for the website. I've done five extracts from Virgil's Georgics now, including a long piece at the end of Book 4 about how Aristaeus lost all his bees because he had tried to ravish Orpheus' wife Eurydice, with the poignant account of Orpheus' failed attempt to recover his wife from the underworld. I've also done a philippic against Trump called 'Inauguration Day: January 2017', inspired by Robert Lowell's 'Inauguration Day: January 1953'; it's a sonnet in tetrameters like his. And I've written an elegy on my loss of Stephen Eyers, which I've had framed and have given to Theresa.

It's a most beautiful day. Spring is here. I walked in the park this morning: crocuses and daffodils in full flower.

I gave myself a fortnight to write my speech for the launch of the Harold Rosen book next Monday. I knew that I wouldn't need that long; perhaps I was being ultra-cautious because it's a long time since I've done a big educational talk. Anyhow, I got it done in two days last week. I read it to Helen, who was precise in her criticisms as ever. It was too long (about 75 minutes), so I've taken out 20 minutes, and I think it'll do now. The book is published, and I'm very pleased with it. It's quite a doorstop at 582 pages.

The two Routledge books are scheduled for publication in late April: earlier than expected.

I've been watching the Six Nations rugby, as I do every year, often thinking about Harold, with whom I used to watch the England games whenever I could.

Today, parliament is completing the dismal business of formalising the UK's intention to withdraw from the EU. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's First Minister, threw a rock into the pond this morning by announcing that the Scottish parliament will vote next week on a measure to request the UK parliament's permission to hold another referendum on Scottish independence, given the complete change in the situation since last year's EU referendum, in which Scotland voted heavily to remain in the EU. She wants to hold the second referendum in the autumn of next year or the spring of 2019. It's a big gamble for her. She will win the vote next week, since she has the support of the Greens, but it's much more doubtful that enough people in Scotland have changed their minds since September 2014. Perhaps they have; and I suppose she calculates that if she were to postpone another referendum until after the UK has exited the EU, and were to win it then, there would be a long delay while Scotland applied to join from outside, but if Scotland won the referendum while the UK was still in the EU, there's a chance that Scotland could, as it were, take the UK's seat. One problem for her is that about a third of SNP voters voted to leave the EU; they wouldn't agree that the situation, so far as that question is concerned, has changed for the worse. On the other hand, there certainly are Labour and Liberal Democrat voters who think that the decision to leave the EU is disastrous; perhaps they might decide that being independent and in the EU is a lesser evil than being in the UK and out. There are pro-European Tory voters in Scotland, but I doubt that any of them could bring themselves to vote on the same side as the SNP, however damaging is the prospect for Scotland's economy of the UK's exit from the EU.

Although I like and admire Keir Starmer, our MP and Labour's shadow secretary of state for exiting the EU, I think Labour's position on triggering article 50, the EU instrument which allows for member states to leave, is wrong. Psephologists tell us that about two thirds of those who voted Labour in the 2015 general election voted to remain in the EU in 2016. That is a big enough mandate, I would have thought, to enable Labour to vote against triggering article 50. We would almost certainly have lost the vote, even with the support of other parties, but there would have been coherence with the party's official position during the referendum campaign, however unimpressively Corbyn promoted it, and we would have represented the wishes of a two-to-one majority of Labour voters.

There's an election on Wednesday in the Netherlands, in which the far right, led by the vile racist Geert Wilders, is expected to do well, but will be prevented by some kind of coalition of the other parties from participating in government. Meanwhile, Turkey is moving towards full-scale dictatorship under Erdogan. There is to be a referendum next month which he is likely to win, since he controls most of the media now. Assuming that he does win, he will take even greater powers to himself than he currently has. There were to have been rallies for Turks living in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and France, some of whom are entitled to vote in the referendum. The first three of these countries blocked the rallies, citing security concerns (which presumably means the fear that there might be violence between pro- and anti-Erdogan Turks, and/or between Turks of either persuasion and far-right thugs). Two Turkish ministers were barred from addressing rallies in Rotterdam, with one of them escorted to the German border. Police in Rotterdam used dogs and water cannon against protesters waving Turkish flags. Erdogan has reacted by calling the Dutch Nazis: a ridiculous and disgusting thing to say. Ironically, the banning of the rallies may have done the Dutch Prime Minister no harm at all, a few days before his own election. He's shown that he can be tough on a matter of public order which happens to affect a largely Muslim minority in his country, perhaps spiking Wilders' guns a little.

Turkey still imagines, at least according to its official statements, that it could one day be a member of the EU. There's absolutely no chance of that, given the country's direction of travel under Erdogan.

Referenda are said to be a device popular with dictators. One can't accuse Cameron or Sturgeon of being dictators, but the UK's referendum has brought out the worst elements in Britain's character. The fear of foreigners and an easy tendency to blame them for the country's ills have been legitimised by the result. And we are about to engage in adversarial negotiations with the very people with whom we should have the closest relationships — other European democrats — just at the moment when, all around the world as well as in Europe itself, the authoritarian dog is growling not far beneath the skin.

Walked in the park again this morning, and decided to take paths that I usually miss. Was rewarded by the sight of a pair of mistle thrushes quietly flitting back and forth between two big plane trees. Wonderful: a rarity. Also saw a scarlet camellia in full flower, and catkins everywhere on hazels and willows. I didn't know, until Wikipedia told me just now, that 'the word "catkin" is a loan word from the old Dutch katteken, meaning "kitten", on account of the resemblance to a kitten's tail'.

This is the third extraordinarily beautiful day in a row. Wednesday was peerless: bright blue sky all day, and the temperature of early summer. Flowering trees behaved as if on speeded-up film. On Tuesday evening I passed the little cherry tree on the corner of Bayham Street and Pratt Street, which I always keep an eye on at this time of year. Nothing yet. 24 hours later, walking back from Daphne's restaurant with Helen, the whole performance had occurred; it was in full bloom, in that spectacular way that cherries have, with the starkly lovely contrast between flower and bark, no leaves yet.

I've just read Christopher Hibbert's The French Revolution. It's an old book, first published in 1980. I was looking along the shelves in the flat for something to read, having finished The Arabs. There it was, and I realised that, strangely, I'd never read a one-volume account of those astonishing events, although I'd come at them from various oblique angles, like the life of Bonaparte or the revolution's place amongst other proletarian upheavals. It's very good, and a terrifying reminder of the inchoate violence which occurs when dominant powers refuse to recognise the necessity of change. One particular statistic struck me. It's popularly imagined that the majority of people who went to the guillotine were aristocrats. No. 'Less than nine in a hundred of those guillotined in the Terror were of noble birth; about six per cent were clergy. The rest, eighty-five per cent, came from that class of people once known as the Third Estate. Among them were "twenty peasant girls from Poitou", so one contemporary recorded: "All of them were to be executed together. Exhausted by their long journey, they lay in the courtyard of the Conciergerie, asleep on the paving-stones. Their expression betrayed no understanding of their fate… They were all guillotined a few days after their arrival… From one of them a baby she was feeding was taken from her breast."' Occasionally I hear jolly Brits, on holiday in France, speak approvingly of some aspect of French society in contrast to that prevailing in Britain. They say, 'Of course, they had a revolution here.' They would be less uncritical if they read some of the detail in the book about the sadistic atrocities committed in the name of revolution. As Manon Roland famously said, looking up at the statue of Liberty in the Place de la Révolution just before her execution, 'Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name.'

On Wednesday, the Dutch decisively rejected the vile politics of hatred as propounded by Wilders. Thank goodness. They'll now spend a long time constructing a coalition government, but the best news is that Wilders' party does not have the largest number of seats: with 19, nowhere near. If it had had, Wilders would be able to say that the other parties were ganging up against the will of the people.

On now to France, where I fear that Le Pen will come first in the first round of voting, but where it looks as if Emmanuel Macron will beat her in the second. Fillon, the surprise winner of the primary held by Les Républicains before Christmas, is mired in scandal over payments he is alleged to have made to his wife and his children for non-existent work. He's now been placed under formal investigation. He's battling on, even though he had previously said that he would withdraw his candidacy if that happened, and in the autumn mocked Sarkozy's candidacy in the primary, with Sarkozy also under formal investigation.

Macron, a centrist of no established political party, was Hollande's economy minister until he resigned to make his own run. He has founded a vague, optimistic movement called En Marche!, which is attracting people from various parts of the French electorate who are despairing of everyone else. He represents a phenomenon which couldn't happen here, because we don't have a presidential system. If he does get through to the second round, voters of the left will find it easier to vote for him than they would have done for Fillon; and voters of the non-racist right will find it easier to vote for him than they would have done for a candidate of the Socialist Party (who will come nowhere near the first two places in the first round anyway). So the young, party-less man has been the lucky beneficiary of the travails of both left and right. On top of that, François Bayrou, the leader of the centrist party Mouvement Démocrate, has joined forces with him. Macron is positive about the EU, and not afraid to say so, which is a relief in these times. If he wins the presidency, it will be intriguing to see how he does business with a government formed by members of a party or parties (not sure which one or more than one — that will wait till June) which he will appoint but to which he doesn't belong. There has been cohabitation before, of course; but (I think) never in the Fifth Republic cohabitation between a no-party president and a conventional party-based government.

The launch of the Harold Rosen book on 20 March went well. There were about 200 people in a lecture room in the UCL Cruciform Building (the old hospital, as I remember it). Michael and Betty Rosen introduced me, and I spoke for an hour. Here is what I said.

And most people did go up to drink, eat and talk; it was a great gathering of old friends. We sold about 100 books and about 40 booklets. Afterwards, Helen took me for dinner in a little Italian place on the other side of the Tottenham Court Road, and I was happy.

Two days later an atrocity was committed at Westminster. A man drove a car at high speed on the left-hand pavement of Westminster Bridge, going from south to north, killing four people and injuring 40. He crashed the car into the railings of the Palace of Westminster and managed to get into the open yard inside the Palace precincts, where he killed an unarmed policeman with a knife, before being shot and killed by armed police. He was a British man, not originally Muslim, who converted to Islam, and he seems to have been another crazed, lone fanatic following the instructions of leaders of IS to hurt the West with whatever weapons they can. It was shocking, of course, happening so close to the heart of UK government, and for a few hours the whole place was locked down, I imagine for fear that the attack was part of a co-ordinated series. It wasn't. But by comparison with attacks in France in recent months, and with almost daily atrocities in Syria, Iraq, Pakistan and Nigeria, London was lightly wounded, however much we mourn the loss of those innocent lives and in some slight way share the grief of their families.

Two days after that, we went with Theresa Cato to spend the weekend with David and Heather Loxton in Bury St Edmunds. Beautiful weather in Suffolk. We ate in Pea Porridge, the restaurant in Bury that I like so much, and we walked in the lovely grounds at Ickworth.

Four days later, we went to France for a fortnight. The weather continued to be astonishing for the time of year. It was summer in spring. With the primroses out and all the trees in blossom, the place was as close to paradise as I'm going to get. Four large trees had blown down during winter storms. Fortunately, they had fallen only on our land (none on Jean's and Annick's next door), and nowhere near the house. Separately, I had also agreed with Jean that I would hire a tree surgeon to trim the line of firs and oaks between his house and ours, because their lower branches were touching his roof. I spent three days with Jean-Paul (the tree surgeon came for one day) on this forestry work: in my case mainly piling onto Jean-Paul's lorry the vast heaps of branches which the élagueur had cut.

The other work I did was to make fast progress on the poems which Bronwyn and Stephen are going to publish through Chalkface Press. We've decided to have two books: one of original poems and one of translations. The first will be called My Proper Life, like the website. The second will be called Bring Me the Sunflower, which is a quotation from a translation of a little poem by Montale, Il Girasole. The design of the first book is more or less finished. The second has a little way to go. I finished the text yesterday. The first book, by pure chance, made exactly 192 pages, a perfect six times 32. The second was 11 sides short of 160 pages (five times 32), so I had the pleasing task of writing to order, to fill up space. I did a Horace epode, a translation of Lorca's haunting little lyric 'Despedida', five more Sappho fragments and a prose afterword about the work. Stephen hasn't done the covers yet. I think we're going to print the books with Short Run Press, a firm in Exeter which specialises, as its name suggests, in limited-edition publications. I saw one of their books by chance when I was in Exeter at Swales and Willis in February, looking at the final proofs of the two Routledge books (which I think will be published next week). I'm not sure whether the poetry books will be out by mid-June, in which case we'll launch them then, or later, in which case we'll hold the launch back until the autumn.

Unusually, we went to France on the Plymouth to Roscoff boat, returning by the same route, because over the Easter weekend most of my family gathered at my brother Mark's house near Taunton to celebrate the significant birthdays (on the Saturday) of two of my nieces: Tess's 18th and Stephanie's 30th. Great fun, although some of the party (not Tess, who was a model of restraint) disgraced themselves by getting completely drunk after the meal, noisily carousing in the hot tub in the garden until five the next morning. Very good walk on the Quantocks on the Sunday, and a wonderful walk on Easter Monday downhill from Countisbury on Exmoor through oak woods and then beside the East Lyn river to Lynmouth. Mary, Jacques and Tess came back with us to London on Tuesday. They stayed in Bronwyn's and Stephen's flat. They returned to Marseille yesterday.

While driving to London on Tuesday, we heard that Theresa May had decided to ask parliament to vote for a general election on 8 June. (Under the Fixed Terms Parliament Act 2011, which is a good law, there can only be a general election before the five-year term is finished if two thirds of MPs vote for it, or if the government loses a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons.) The House of Commons obligingly voted for the early election on Wednesday.

Mrs May had previously said — several times, in the most explicit terms — that there would be no general election before the scheduled date in 2020. She said on Tuesday that she had decided to ask for the election 'recently and reluctantly', claiming that she needed a stronger mandate for her exit negotiations with the EU. However, nothing has changed, in terms of the UK political parties' positions, since her earlier promises. There are two actual reasons for her decision: one, given the catastrophic current state of the Labour opposition, she thinks she can crush Labour (quite possibly right); two, a majority of say 50, or even a bit less, would give her the room she needs to accept the undoubted concessions she is going to have to make to the EU without being murdered by her own extreme right wing. It's true that the electorate doesn't like being lied to, and some voters may punish her for dragging them to the polls unnecessarily. It's true that there are few Tory/Labour marginals (many which were marginals went to the Tories in 2015). It's true that the Liberals might do better than in 2015, because they've been punished enough for having been in the 2010-2015 coalition, and the Richmond Park by-election showed that there are potential Tory/Liberal marginals where the Liberals might pick up some seats.

But overall, I think Mrs May will increase her majority. On the other hand, I've been wrong so many times when making political predictions that I hesitate in making this one. If, after all the fuss and expense of the election, the Tory majority is not significantly greater than it is at present (seventeen), the Prime Minister will be weaker, not stronger, than at present.

Silver lining: assuming we lose (which I do), Corbyn will surely have to resign. The PLP will not make the stupid mistake again (I hope) of letting a far-left candidate get onto the ballot paper because it's feeling sentimental; and we might have a persuasive leader in September. Possibly even our own MP, who knows?

Just at the moment, I can't get up much enthusiasm for going out to bang on doors asking for support for Keir Starmer, whom I like and admire, when the whole exercise is the consequence of the government's partisan political calculation. Labour should have voted against holding the snap election. We would of course have been accused of being frightened; but if Theresa May had failed to get her two-thirds majority, she would have looked foolish too. The whole point of the Fixed Terms Parliament Act is to stop Prime Ministers calling elections merely to suit their political advantage. Only six years after the Act was passed, Parliament has made a nonsense of it. We shall be abroad on 8 June anyway (we're going to Sicily for a fortnight with Glenda and Julian Walton). We have postal votes.

More voting: the first round of the French presidential elections is tomorrow. The average of polls published yesterday, the last day on which the publication of polls is allowed in France, gives Macron 24%, Le Pen 22.1%, Fillon 19.6%, Melenchon 18.9%. So I hope that Macron hangs on and makes it to the second round, ideally as leader from the first. He will presumably then win the second round, because lots of socialists will vote for him, however half-heartedly. If Fillon squeaks past Le Pen, despite the recent scandals surrounding him and his family, with Macron in first or second place, the second round will be, to some extent, a traditional right/left choice, although Macron isn't really left at all; he's a Blairite centrist. The worst outcome would be a Fillon/Le Pen second round, because I fear that a lot of socialist voters will then abstain, which will hand an advantage to Le Pen, whose supporters are the most likely to turn out to vote. A Melenchon/Le Pen second round would be extraordinary: far left versus far right, with an unlikely degree of agreement between the two extremes in a rejection of globalisation, a profound suspicion of the EU, and an appeal to different kinds of nationalism.

There was another atrocity, possibly IS-related, in Paris on Thursday evening. A man with a gun shot and killed a policeman on the Champs-Élysées and wounded two others before being shot and killed himself. This dreadful event of course plays into the hands of the far right. Some conspiracy theorists even suggest that acts like these are being committed or controlled by extreme-right agents provocateurs in the hope of bringing a far-right government to power. I'm not a conspiracy theorist. Crazed, marginalised, angry people are being infected by the wicked ideology promoted by the leaders of IS and other Islamist groups. That's all.

A relief. The second round of the French presidential election will be a contest between Macron and Le Pen. Better, Macron beat Le Pen by more than 2% (23.8% to 21.5%). He will certainly be France's next president, since all the senior figures in Les Républicains except Sarkozy, plus the soundly defeated socialist candidate Hamon, plus Hollande, plus of course the centrists of MoDem, have endorsed him. Mélenchon hasn't said anything yet. He got a creditable 19.6%, only just behind Fillon's 19.9%. I expect that some of his voters will switch straight to Le Pen, as has happened in past years with disillusioned communist voters. Despite the certainty of Macron's victory, there is the disquieting probability that Le Pen will get far more votes in the second round than her father did in 2001. One recent poll suggests that she might get 39%, which is more than double what Jean-Marie Pen got in 2001. Even if she drops back considerably from that figure, the FN vote will have advanced spectacularly. And in five years' time? Macron has a lot to do to bring back hope to those FN voters who are not ideological racists and street thugs, but who are struggling with poverty, unemployment and the sense that the state has abandoned them. If he fails, the awful prospect of a neo-fascist presidency in France in 2022 will loom larger. But for the time being, and speaking purely selfishly, I haven't got to ask myself whether I should be paying taxes and spending money in a country whose president is a direct inheritor of Vichy.

We're just off to Bedfordshire to spend the night with Peter and Monica Hetherington; then up to Durham tomorrow morning for three days, to explore the country of Peter's heart. He was born and grew up there. Tomorrow afternoon we shall visit his secondary school at Wolsingham (a grammar school when he went there; a comprehensive now). Peter has endowed a cup in his name, awarded every year for poetry.

Yesterday, for the first time, Labour produced a clear proposal for what it would do in negotiations with the EU in the highly unlikely event of its winning the general election. Keir Starmer put the case very well on the radio and in a speech. Leave the options of some kind of single-market and customs-union membership on the table, while accepting that there will no longer be unfettered free movement of people. Welcome anyone from the EU here who has already got a job. On day one of a Labour government, guarantee to EU citizens already living in the UK the right to stay. Whether we win or not (we won't, I fear), have parliamentary votes which mean that, if the government were defeated, it would have to go back to the negotiating table with the EU to seek a better bargain. Have a transitional period after March 2019 if the business isn't finished satisfactorily by then.

The ironic thing is that proposals of this kind, and their ensuing negotiations, could, in a dream world, be the means by which the whole of the EU could revisit and change some of the rules and practices which have provoked cynicism and disappointment across the whole bloc. More power to the parliament. (Make the parliament stay in one place, not shuttle back and forth from Strasbourg to Brussels.) Make the commission genuinely the civil service for the bloc, doing what the parliament tells it to do; strip it of its law-making powers. Have freedom to work anywhere in the EU; not freedom to move and settle permanently whether you've got a job or not. Have an Australian-style points-based immigration system country by country. Let states nationalise basic industries which are essential to the public good: water, electricity, gas, railways. There was a sad little letter in the paper today pointing out that, in the EU, 'from 2019 all new railway franchises must by law be open to competitive tender (the "Fourth railway package" ratified by the European parliament last December).' The writer concludes: 'The only route to nationalising Britain's railways is to leave the EU, including the single market.' I can't help thinking that if a country wants to nationalise or renationalise its railways, it should be free to do so. Going further, I also think that if a major industry and a huge employer, like Tata Steel in the UK, looks as if it will leave a country and provoke mass unemployment there, as it did for a while last year, a national government has the right to step in and support that industry. But state subsidies are against EU rules. So this is all dreaming. But at least Labour at last has a coherent policy on our exit from the EU.

I imagine (I don't know, of course) that Keir has had to tread carefully with Corbyn and some other members of the shadow cabinet to get to the position where he can say, unambiguously, that unfettered freedom of movement will cease. You can kind of sense when journalists respect a politician with intellectual grip: one who's not just spouting pre-heated slogans. Keir has that.

Despite what I wrote a few days ago, I went down to Labour's smart new constituency office in Crowndale Road and did an hour's work there yesterday, sorting out canvassing clipboards.

Tomorrow would have been Stephen's birthday. I've left messages on Theresa's phones. We won't be there, but I've told her I'll be with her on the anniversary of the day he died (19 May) if she wants that.

Nearly three months have gone by, and an enormous amount has happened. Where to start?

Start with the small things. We had a wonderful few days with Peter and Monica Hetherington in Weardale and Teesdale, staying in an excellent little bed-and-breakfast place in Wolsingham. On our first afternoon there, we did visit Wolsingham School, where we were shown round by the deputy head. It's exactly what a comprehensive secondary school should be: genuinely serving the needs and nurturing the talents of all its students, whether those talents be academic, practical, social, sporting or anything else. A beautiful new building has been grafted onto the old grammar-school building, leaving the library at the join between the two. There, on the honours board going back through most of the last century, is Peter's name, recording his state scholarship in 1948. He was the first student from that school to go to Oxford.

The next day we visited Killhope lead mine near the top of Weardale. Disused since 1910, it's now a museum. We went about 200 metres along a low tunnel into the dark, wearing hard hats and wellington boots. I kept banging my protected head on the roof. I didn't know anything about lead mining before that day. Lead ore is called galena, and it comes in vertical seams. Lead miners, on the whole, were a different sort of men from coal miners, who were a proletariat on weekly wages. Lead miners were speculators, making a contract with the owners of the land to exploit a part of it, with the possibility that they could make a good living from their findings, perhaps even enough to emigrate. (It's a preposterous idea, when you think about it, that anyone should privately own underground chunks of the planet.) The miners rarely struck it rich. Generally, the only real beneficiaries were the owners. The work was hard and dangerous. Water flowed throughout the underground workings, and without waterproof footwear the men's feet were constantly wet and suffered rot. Then, as with coal miners, the continual inhalation of dust damaged the lungs. Our guide told us that lead miners were often Methodists, literate, total abstainers. They knew their Bibles well. Some were lay preachers, walking miles on Sundays to preach to little groups of the faithful in chapels up and down the dales.

Occasionally, the men found a different kind of rock deep underground: a black limestone which they called marble. This was valuable, and a bonus. It was used for centuries on the roofs of grand buildings. It's on the roof of Durham cathedral. The mine at Frosterley yielded this rock quite frequently, so it's known as Frosterley marble, although the description is geologically inexact. The miners called these slabs 'cockle posts', because they contain the fossils of small sea creatures which look a bit like cockles. One slab pulled from Frosterley now stands upright at Stanhope Visitor Centre, having been polished and turned into a kind of sculpture. When I was studying it, with the knowledge that lead miners were often devout men, believing — I suppose — the literal truth of the first chapters of Genesis, I could see the possibility of a poem. Here it is.

The following day we went to the little village of Escomb, where there is a very old Saxon church (some say the oldest in England). It was built around 670. Its dark stone is beautifully simple. Much of it came from a nearby Roman fort. On the north wall, one of the reused stones has the marking "LEG VI" (Sixth Legion) upside down. An amazing thought: a new monotheistic religion using the building materials of polytheistic departed former conquerors.

We went on to Barnard Castle, to the extraordinary Bowes Museum, housed in a building which might easily be mistaken for the grandest of Loire chateaux. John Bowes, a wealthy member of the local nobility, met and married a French actress, Joséphine Coffin-Chevallier, in 1852. (He owned a theatre in Paris where she performed.) They had pots of money, and began to collect paintings, sculptures, jewellery, porcelain, glassware, marquetry, costumes. The building was erected so they could put all the stuff in one place. Joséphine laid the foundation stone in 1869 but died in 1874. John died in 1885, with the building still incomplete. According to the museum's website, the pair had some idea that they were bringing art and culture to the folk of the north-east of England. He had his wealth from coal mines on his land. I don't suppose the men who went down the pits to keep him and his wife in style were especially grateful.

A weariness comes over me, walking round treasure hoards like this, and an anger on behalf of workers who had made this conspicuous consumption possible. But there was one consolation: a beautiful silver sculpture of Sappho, looking as alluring as I imagine her. I bought the postcard.

We walked up the Yorkshire side of the Tees to High Force, where I was last year. There we met a Saudi family sitting on a bluff, gazing down at the waterfall. They had brewed tea on a gas stove, and insisted that we drank some with them, accompanied by Arab sweetmeats. They were delightful, and the encounter, in this otherwise seemingly monocultural place, felt extraordinary. On the last evening, we drove over a high, spectacular moor to Blanchland, a village almost too perfectly preserved, where we had a good dinner in the Lord Crewe Arms. The next day we sped back down the A1 to Bedfordshire, and then on to London.

At the end of April, my two Routledge books came out. There was no fanfare. I rang the publisher to ask if there was to be some kind of launch. The answer was no, but I could organise one myself if I wanted to. No thank you to that. Everyone at Routledge has been individually charming, and the commissioning editor wrote me a nice email at the end of the process, but I've had a sense throughout of being a small item on one of many production lines. The experience with the Institute of Education Press was much more personal. The Routledge paperbacks sell for £24.99; the hardbacks for £90! Libraries will pay that money, apparently, and the commissioning editor told me that there are numerous new universities in China and elsewhere in the East which have library buildings the size of football stadiums, with not enough books to fill the shelves, and they ask Routledge to send everything they publish, regardless of topic or quality. So I'm hoping to flog hundreds of boring-looking hardbacks (plain blue covers), although the royalty on those is only 5%. Still, there are two books; 5% of £180 is £9. We shall see next year, with the first royalty statement. Whether readers in a city of three million people somewhere in the west of China, a city which didn't exist a generation ago, are fascinated by developments in curriculum and assessment in English in England, I doubt.

During May, I got on with preparing the poetry books for publication. On 16 June, my birthday, I went down with Stephen Mellor to Exeter, to visit the printer. I was gratified to see that they publish a lot of poetry, including publications by Carcanet, Enitharmon and Fyfield, so I will be in good company. We're going for hardback, with dust covers beautifully designed by Stephen. To show me what my books will look like, more or less, the young man produced a recently printed hardback, consisting entirely of poems written by people who'd attended Trinity College, Cambridge: Marvell, Byron and Tennyson among them. I said that the publication had been a bit premature, but perhaps I might squeeze into a second edition. I think my books will go to print next week. We're doing 500 of each, and Betty Rosen has kindly agreed to store them in a spare room in her house in Muswell Hill. There will be a launch on 19 October in the upstairs room of the Prince Albert pub in Camden Town. I was back in England last week for three days, and collected 150 invitations from Raj at Prontaprint in the high street. The printing of the books will cost me about £4000. We're selling them for £10 each (£7 to those who turn up at the launch) so I'm hoping to recoup at least part of the money.

Doubling back, on 31 May we went for a fortnight to Sicily with Glenda and Julian Walton. It was the first time any of us had been there. The place is spectacular: a splendid, noble landscape, some astonishing towns, a superfluity of baroque architecture, a wonderful coastline, lovely accommodation in four different agriturismi, delicious food — quite different from the equally good Tuscan fare we're used to — and old-fashioned courtesy and warmth from everyone we met. We had five days in the south-east, near Modica; four days in the south-west, near Menfi; three days in and near Cefalù; and two days near Piazza Armerina. We did a certain amount of conventional sightseeing: the narrow streets of old Siracusa; the re-erected Greek temples at Selinunte (which 2,800 years ago was a city of 100,000 people); the floor mosaics in the Villa Romana near Piazza Armerina. But the main pleasure was simply being in a place so different from anywhere else in Europe. You sense its closeness to Africa.

One evening we drove from our agriturismo near Menfi to Sciacca. Here, Helen and I nearly had a major falling-out. We parked the car, and I suggested walking down the hill to the port to find somewhere to eat. The walk was longer than anticipated, the evening hot, the port district when we got there poor and dilapidated. I'd left my phone in the car, so there was no chance of calling a taxi to take us somewhere more salubrious. Helen began to accuse me of thoughtless and irresponsible behaviour: 'Why do you always do this to me?' Glenda and Julian kept diplomatically quiet. I refused to engage. Just as we passed a large rubbish bin from which a scrawny cat was removing a fish skeleton, I glimpsed what I had been praying for: a seriously posh restaurant in the midst of the shabby authenticity of a genuine fishing port (no smart yachts here), with a wonderful view over the sea from the terrace. The evening was saved, the food superb (it will be worth returning to Sicily just to eat that marinated raw fish again), the sunset over the water unforgettable. I pretended that I had known about the place all the time, though I did admit that we could have brought the car a bit closer. Julian and I gallantly paced back up the hill to get it, leaving the women to linger over coffee and digestivi.

We'd decided not to go to Palermo this time. Perhaps we'll do that next year, allowing a week to see all the wonders there and at Monreale. I hadn't known that Cefalù would be so clogged with tourists like us. It was the only overcrowded place we went to. But of course I enjoyed Roger II's huge cathedral, which we visited on the morning of Trinity Sunday, arriving towards the end of high mass, with the organ at full volume and the air heavy with incense. I thought of Paul Halley, of our stalled project — a collaboration which I fear will never advance further — and of a Trinity Sunday 45 years ago, when Paul conducted the choir of Trinity College from the roof of Great Gate. Half the choir was with him there, and half on the roof above the clock tower. They sang a two-part anthem which crossed and re-crossed Great Court. All traditions have to start some time, and Paul hoped that year to start a tradition whereby every Trinity Sunday would be so marked. I don't know whether his hope has been fulfilled. I wrote an email to him about the coincidences of place and date, ending with the words '…and my words still await your notes'. He hasn't replied.

Of the negatives about Sicily, one is not their fault, or largely not. Terrible earthquakes have destroyed large parts of the island over the centuries. In the west, there was an earthquake in 1968 which flattened many of the country towns, so that you arrive in hope after a drive on winding roads through glorious country to find dreary, ugly modern dwellings, built with cheap materials, devoid of all charm. I'm used to places rebuilt after the war (Lorient, Portsmouth) and I know the loss represented there. I guess it's the relative poverty of Sicily, combined perhaps with the evil hand of the Mafia, which has meant that so much ugly building has been allowed, when more money, better planning and less corruption could have made the loss less severe. The other negative is the presence of rubbish everywhere. People just abandon their waste by the sides of the roads, especially at the approaches to towns. Lay-bys are choked with heaps of plastic bags, stinking in the heat. You gaze across a majestic landscape while being aware of a filthy mattress and a pile of mixed rubble at your feet. It is backward. We could see what efforts the local authorities are making to encourage greater civic responsibility and to promote recycling. There's a huge clean-up job to be done.

One day, I drove alone from Cefalù on a big circular tour inland. (Glenda and Julian wanted a day at the beach, and Helen wasn't feeling well.) The corn harvest was finishing. Little fields, high, high up in the hills, were being cut. It is the most exalted feeling, driving alone in heat and silence through landscape of such nobility. I stopped at one small, remote mountain town (untouched by earthquakes, I think, for it retains the integrity of a place which has developed organically over the centuries, the building material all the same dark stone). I wondered if I would find anything or anyone stirring there at all. But there was a bank machine, several bars where men played cards which carried images I didn't recognise, shops, a hairdresser. In one bar I had an excellent piadina with hot sauce and a couple of glasses of red wine. Passers-by offered me 'Buon giorno' with elaborate courtesy. One family brought their baby over for me to admire. I left with regret, as I always do when I get to such places, and did a long loop through ever higher mountains, until I topped a pass and sped down towards the sea.

French politics: thank goodness, Emmanuel Macron was elected president on 7 May with two thirds of the vote. In June, his newly formed party, La République en Marche, won a convincing overall majority in the Assemblée Nationale, with the help of the centrist party MoDem. So he should be able to govern efficiently, and he's got on with it quickly. New laws on labour relations are being pushed through at high speed, sometimes by decree. Some of the unions object, of course, and I think there will be strikes in the autumn, but by that time the new legislation will be in place, and I'm sure that the government will sit out any protest. France does need some relaxation of its rigid labour laws. Quite rightly, they will still be much more protective of workers' rights than in the UK or the USA. But if the government does nothing, unemployment will remain stuck at around 10% on average across the country, and much worse than that in certain areas, with the inevitable temptations to populism and racism which come when people with limited education and no power feel themselves abandoned. Then, there is an ambitious plan on the environment, involving a big programme for the insulation of homes, 100% recycling of plastic, reduction of dependence on nuclear power stations, and — most eye-catching of all — the intention that all new cars sold in France from 2040 onwards will be 100% electric. Meanwhile, the government promises to reduce the budget deficit to 3% this year, and to balance future annual budgets during the course of this presidency and parliament.

Macron has been an audacious politician, but also lucky. If Fillon had not self-destructed because of the scandals involving huge payments to members of his family for work they didn't do, he might now be the president. France and the eurozone are, for the first time in years, beginning an upward curve economically. Hollande, whose five years were most disappointing, did have to struggle with a stubbornly sluggish economy. Macron has arrived just as the business cycle is turning. Still, you can't take away his ruthless brilliance in seizing his chance. He is enthusiastically pro-EU. He evidently hopes that Merkel will be re-elected chancellor in September. I think that we will then see some dramatic moves in the EU, including much greater fiscal coherence, and possibly a minister of finance for the eurozone with the power to enforce that coherence.

Overall, France is in a better mood now than it has been for years. There is consent to the idea that the young man should be allowed to show what he can do, even if he takes a few short cuts in the democratic process. The unions will accept the labour reforms, however grudgingly, if the wealthy are asked to shoulder their fair share of the tax burden. But there's the problem. At the moment, so far as I can see, the wealthy are set to become wealthier. Le Monde (14 July) reports that tax cuts announced for 2018 are 'ciblées pour près de trois quarts sur les entreprises et les revenus les plus aisés'. Jean, our neighbour, believes that Macron is just another economic liberal in the Thatcher mode, who will inevitably favour the already fortunate. Perhaps. In order to persuade the disaffected, cynical, poorer section of the population that not all politicians are corrupt, not all are there simply to give more to those that already have, concrete measures to ease the burden on the poorer need to be taken. It's true that the government is going to abolish the taxe d'habitation, one of the two local property taxes, which will help those who rent their homes.

Meanwhile, the traditional parties are in complete disarray. Les Républicains (down from 229 to 136 seats in the parliament) are split between those who are now in the government (including the Prime Minister and several cabinet ministers) or who are cooperating with the government in parliament, and those who are staying outside as a greatly diminished opposition. The diehards, absurdly, want to expel the Prime Minister and the other cooperators from the party. The Socialist Party is in tatters, having gone from 331 seats to 45.

It is a mercy that the Front National only got eight seats. If Macron doesn't achieve what his supporters and many open-minded French people expect him to achieve, the Front National will be back again in 2022. It's terrifying to think that fully a third of French voters voted for a fascist on 7 May. She nearly doubled the vote her father got in 2001. Macron has promised 'a dose of proportionalism' to be injected into the electoral system. He needs to be careful that the dose doesn't give the Front National bigger representation in the next parliament. The FN's meagre tally of seats means that it doesn't get recognition as an official group (the minimum number needed to gain that status is 15). Good — but it still got six more than in 2012. [Note added on 18 July: When I wrote that Marine Le Pen is a fascist, the thought crossed my mind that perhaps the word was slightly too strong; she's a vile, xenophobic populist, certainly, but a promoter of a specific, evil political idea? Perhaps not. But then yesterday I read about the ceremony to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the notorious Vél d'Hiv round-up of 16 and 17 July 1942, in which many thousands of Jews were taken from their homes and herded into the vélodrome before being transported to concentration camps in the East, where at least 13,152 of them were murdered. Macron and Netanyahou were at the ceremony, and Macron made a speech repeating two previous French presidents' full admission of France's active complicity in this atrocity, and saying pointedly: 'Recemment encore, ce que nous croyons établi par les autorités de la République, sans distinction partisane, avéré par tous les historiens, s'est trouvé contesté par des responsables politiques français.' He was referring to Marine Le Pen's repeated statements that France was not responsible for the Vél d'Hiv round-up. He then said, hammering the point: 'Ce serait faire beaucoup d'honneur à ces faussaires que de leur répondre. Mais se taire serait pire, ce serait être complice.' Very good. So yes, fascist is the word to describe her.]

Now to UK politics. I did a bit for Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras before we went to Sicily. The Labour manifesto was excellent. I agreed with all of it, including the policy on Trident (no to unilateral abandonment of the nuclear deterrent, yes to multilateral negotiations aiming to dramatically reduce nuclear arsenals). It was a positive, hopeful document, calling among other things for an end to austerity, much more public investment in infrastructure, abolition of university tuition fees. The Conservative manifesto, meanwhile, was an utterly dismal thing; no hope in it at all. Free school meals for infants to be abolished (this only a few years after the measure had been introduced by the coalition government) and replaced by a bowl of cornflakes before school for those who wanted it. Make people who need social care in old age pay much more for it, to the point that they would only be able to retain £100,000 of the equity in their houses. This particular proposal caused such consternation in Tory ranks that it had to be abandoned a few days later: the only example I can remember of a political party abandoning a manifesto commitment before being elected to government, rather than after. The Tories made a complete mess of their campaign. Theresa May was stiff, humourless, repeating stock phrases like 'strong and stable government' over and over again. She refused to debate directly with Corbyn. Several government ministers were kept out of the campaign, which was tightly controlled by May and a couple of her advisers. The result was that I sat in the cool in the courtyard of the agriturismo on the night of 8/9 June listening to Radio 4 on the internet, and was amazed and delighted to hear the result of the exit poll at 10pm UK time: the Tories would lose their overall majority. As the night went on, it became clear that, in the constituencies where UK elections are decided, Labour's offer had been heard and appreciated, and the Tories' had been rejected.

The Tories lost 13 seats, Labour gained 30, the SNP lost 21, the Liberals gained four, Sinn Fein gained three, the DUP gained two. Labour's share of the vote was 40.0%, up 9.5% on 2015. But the Tories' share was up 5.5% too, largely as a result of the total collapse of the UKIP vote, and also because it bit deep into the SNP vote in Scotland.

May was obliged to do a deal with the DUP. Sinn Fein, alas, has refused to seize the historic opportunity to make life difficult for the Tories and the DUP by taking its seats at Westminster. So the government has an effective majority of 13, relying on the support of a party which is anti-gay, anti-abortion and doubtful about climate change. It's a complete humiliation for May, who is now a dead duck politically. She had a majority; she several times assured us that there would not be an early election; she changed her mind, seeing an opportunity to crush the Labour Party; this she notably failed to do.

Which brings me to my own opinions and my previous statements in this diary about Labour under Corbyn. I was sure that, however honourable Corbyn is as a politician, however good he is as a constituency MP, he has no chance of convincing enough people outside the Labour clan to elect a Labour government. I may still be right about that. Labour has now lost three elections in a row, and we see the damage done meanwhile. But I was wrong to predict that Labour would lose badly last month. In raw numbers of seats gained, it was the big winner. Corbyn, who last year made a lacklustre case for remaining in the EU (I still think he doesn't really believe in the institution), who seemed to shy away from interviews, who just didn't look anything like the person who might competently lead a country, has grown in confidence. He projects a much greater sense of ease. And he has tapped into a seam of anger at the way the country has been governed since 2008: making the innocent pay for the sins of the guilty. He has offered hope, especially to the young. People with high public profiles (Blair, Mandelson) have had to admit that they were wrong to criticise Corbyn so openly. Labour was in a total mess last year, with four fifths of its MPs expressing no confidence in the leader, and those terrible, fratricidal visits to the High Court over the second leadership contest. But now it's the Tories who are in a deep hole, cabinet ministers briefing against each other to the press, making no progress at all in the Brexit negotiations, and Labour does look like a government in waiting. My political judgements and predictions have been wrong so many times in recent years. Perhaps I'm wrong again. I hope so.

In the early hours of 14 June, fire took hold of a tower block in west London. At least 80 people were killed. [Later note: In the event, 71 people died.] It was a dreadful catastrophe, made even worse by the utter ineptitude of the Tory leadership of Kensington and Chelsea to respond swiftly and appropriately in the aftermath. The fire probably started in a fridge-freezer in a flat on the fourth floor. This event may have been caused by a surge of electrical power to the flat, of the sort that had occurred numerous times in the block over the previous four years. The emergency should have been confined to one flat, but it swiftly engulfed the whole block. It seems likely that new cladding applied to the outside of the block last year contained a flammable substance between two aluminium skins, speeding the conflagration up the building. The Council specifically ordered that kind of cladding, rather than another sort with better fire-resistant properties, to save money. The fact that some of the richest people in the country live in Kensington and Chelsea, and that those people received a rebate recently on their council tax, is a symbol of how the leadership of the Council regards the poorer people living in the north of the borough: a nuisance that they'd rather be rid of, but can't, but don't intend to spend any more money on than absolutely necessary.

The Grenfell Tower fire is the worst peacetime disaster in the UK since, I think, that in Aberfan in 1966, when the collapse of a colliery spoil tip killed 116 children and 28 adults. It has brought into sharp relief a brutal fact about our country: inequality is endemic and increasing. Thatcher's freebooting capitalism, which Labour managed slightly to restrain during its years in power, an ideology of which we are the inheritors, and in particular a policy steadfastly opposed to properly funded, publicly owned housing, is ultimately responsible for the deaths of those people, whichever organisations or individuals turn out to be the more immediate culprits.

It wasn't the sale of council houses in itself which was wrong under Thatcher. I am the part-owner of two private properties. I can't without hypocrisy deny other people the right to buy property if they wish to, and I can understand that they might wish to buy the property in which they are already living. It was the refusal of Thatcher's and Major's governments to allow councils to spend the money from those sales on building new council houses and flats, or buying existing property of equivalent quality, which was the crime. And the inducements to people to buy, in terms of the large discounts on the market price of their rented property, meant that, even if councils had been allowed to spend the income from sales on new property, they wouldn't have been able to afford like for like. Labour, alas, did not reverse the Tories' policy; only ameliorated it a little.

There will be a public enquiry into the cause of the disaster, and criminal investigations are under way. I wish I could say that this terrible event will bring about a change of attitude to publicly owned accommodation on the part of central and local government. I cannot be so optimistic.

We came here on 21 June. I flew back to England on 4 July and stayed three nights in Camden. On 6 July, Betty Rosen and I took the train to Newcastle, to a conference of teachers of English, mainly from universities, where I gave a repeat of the 20 March Harold Rosen lecture. Unfortunately, the publicity for the talk had been inadequate, and I spoke to about 12 people. They were all most appreciative, but I wouldn't have gone to all the trouble and expense if I'd known how small the audience was going to be. On 7 July I flew back here, and the next day we went to the wedding of our friends Aurélie and Jérôme. Good fun. Since then I've been somewhat idle: a bit of gardening and listening to cricket. The old Land Rover, at which we've thrown a lot of money in the last two years, finally gave up the ghost just before my brief trip back to England. We're going to buy a new, French-registered Renault. The administrative hurdles to an English couple buying a French car in France have been formidable, but I've just had a phone call from the young man at the Renault dealer in Caudan to say that after long consideration Reanult has passed us as creditworthy. So we should have the new car next week. I was surprised and pleased that we're getting 3,000 euros for the Land Rover in part exchange, though I'm sure that Renault has factored its apparent generosity into the deal.

There has been a brief crisis in the French state. The head of the armed forces has resigned and been replaced. He had been criticising the cuts to his budget which the government had imposed in order to help to get the deficit below 3% in 2017, as Macron had promised to do in his election campaign. In particular, the general had told a committee of MPs, in approximate translation, that he was not going to be fucked about like this. He thought he was speaking off the record, but his words leaked. Most heads of state, most prime ministers, would have called the general in and told him in private not to do such a thing again. Instead, Macron, at the traditional party at the defence ministry on the evening of 13 July, publicly humiliated the man, 21 years his senior, in front of his subordinates, saying that he, Macron, was the commander-in-chief, he had made certain promises to the French people, and he didn't need to hear alternative opinions or commentaries from subordinates. The general went through the usual 14 July ceremonies in a state of shock, and resigned three days later.

Macron reminds me of only two former leaders of the French nation: de Gaulle and Napoleon. Most opinion that I've read believes that he was wrong to have behaved as he did; there is sympathy for an honourable soldier defending his patch. One general, writing in Le Monde, describes Macron's action as 'juvenile authoritarianism'. Macron says that it's the soldier's job to lead his troops; it's the government's job to decide on the budget. A legitimate reply would be that if the government asks the armed forces to undertake numerous tasks at home and abroad, as is the case at the moment, without providing the necessary means with which to do it, the top soldier has a duty to speak out. I don't know, of course, whether there is indeed a shortage of necessary equipment. All I do know is that Macron is highly unusual: ruthless in establishing himself as a president whose word and will is not to be questioned. He is a not particularly democratic person who has perfect democratic legitimacy. He says that, despite the cut he imposed in this year, he will over the course of his mandate raise the level of funding on defence towards 2% of GDP, as NATO requires. I expect he will do that. The French political establishment, used to all sorts of compromises and velleities, is having to get used to someone who actually does what he says he is going to do. France needs a bit of that, even though the French hate being governed.

The summer is wandering away, pleasantly enough. I've been extraordinarily lazy the last few weeks; I can't work out why. Sometimes I wonder whether the pills I'm taking to reduce the chance of another stroke are weighing me down, making me more tired, less inclined to take on new tasks. I don't think, at the age of only 66, that it can be anything to do with getting older. Anyway, I've certainly listened to a lot of cricket recently; sometimes whole days have passed under the apple tree, or on the shady terrace in front of the house — me, the radio and Test Match Special. The most recent match, the second against West Indies, was easily the most exciting of the summer. The four Tests against South Africa were all one-sided affairs, three to England and one to South Africa. In the first Test of the West Indies series, the visitors were so bad that there was no pleasure at all in England's win, and the thought crossed my mind that West Indies might never again become even a competitive Test-playing side, let alone approach the grandeurs of their past. But then, magically, they rallied at Headingley, England didn't score as many runs in their first innings as they should have, West Indies bowled better, and two of their batsmen, Brathwaite and Hope (there are two Hopes, brothers, in the side; this was Shai Hope), batted splendidly in both innings. The match lasted all five days. West Indies won in the last session. Their five-wicket victory, with overs to spare, was comfortable in the end.

I thought back to the first time I saw a West Indies side playing a Test match in England. It was August 1963. I went with my grandfather to The Oval, to the last day of the final Test. The internet means that I can easily be precise: 26 August. West Indies had won two of the previous four Tests; England had won one; there had been the famous drawn Test at Lords. The Oval Test was low-scoring: England first innings 275; West Indies first innings 246; England second innings 223. So West Indies needed 253 in their second innings to win. Looking at the scorecards now, I see that the only English batsman who really distinguished himself was Phil Sharpe: 63 in the first innings, 83 in the second; top scorer in both. Charlie Griffith had been destructive in England's first innings: 6 for 71. In England's second innings the wickets were shared between Griffiths, Hall and Sobers. But what I remember, of course, is West Indies' second innings, when suddenly they made batting look easy. Conrad Hunte got the only century of the match: 108 not out (he had top-scored with 80 in the first innings). I can still see, in my mind's eye, Rohan Kanhai's famous falling-over pull shots to square leg or midwicket. The scorecard tells me he hit one six, the only six of the match. I remember it. I remember the mounting excitement, the eventual jubilation in the large West Indian contingent in the crowd. These were the new Londoners, the Samuel Selvon generation, in their smart suits and painted ties and pork-pie hats. When the winning run was scored, 255 for only two wickets, there was a pitch invasion. That sort of thing didn't happen in those days. My grandfather and I walked to the Underground station, and thence home to the quiet suburb of Bromley. I was 12, but even at that age I had a sense that something significant had occurred: significant beyond cricket, significant in terms of relations between black and white people in Britain. No more deference. 'We'll come here and we'll beat you fair and square.' No more Kamau Brathwaite's great line in his wonderful poem 'Rites', which I came across years later (and heard Brathwaite read once): 'Yuh cyan find a man to hold up the side.' And after that, of course, West Indies went on to dominate world cricket, which is why it is such a sadness to me that they have been in this deep, largely self-induced decline for 20 years. I want them to be back, with a swagger, amongst the top teams.

Deirdre Finan joined us here for a week in August, and after that came my Marseille family: Mary, Jacques, Sophie, Julien and their three-month-old baby Paul. Yesterday I wrote a little poem to celebrate Paul's arrival.

I've just finished reading or re-reading all the Canterbury Tales. For the sake of my own memory, I'm going to record the stories of all the tales, in order.

The Knight's Tale tells of the competition between the knights and cousins Palamon and Arcite for the love of Emily, the sister-in-law of Theseus. Theseus has imprisoned them after their defeat in his battle against Creon. At different times the two knights see Emily from their prison, and are smitten. Eventually Theseus decides that the suitors must joust for their lady's hand. Palamon is successful, but only after Arcite, who is dying, recommends to Emily that she should marry his rival.

The Miller's Tale tells of a foolish carpenter at Oxford who is expertly cuckolded by Nicholas, an astrological scholar who lodges with him and persuades him that a flood on the scale of Noah's flood is imminent. Alison, the carpenter's wife, enjoys herself with Nicholas at the expense of her husband, who has lodged himself in a boat hanging in the air in expectation of the flood, and of the hapless parish clerk Absolon, who is also in love with her.

The Reeve's Tale (a reeve is a carpenter, and the tale is told as revenge for the miller's tale) is of a foolish and corrupt miller (he cheats his customers) who lives near Cambridge and is expertly cuckolded by two young Cambridge scholars, Aleyn and John. Between them, they enjoy both his wife and his daughter in the mill.

The Cook's Tale is only a fragment. It was clearly going to be a tale of the same sort as the previous two. A riotous apprentice is kicked out by his master. He goes to stay with an equally riotous friend, whose wife keeps a shop for appearances, and prostitutes herself for a living. End of fragment.

The Man of Law's Tale is about the trials, tribulations and travels of Custance, daughter of a Roman emperor. She reluctantly agrees to marry a Syrian sultan, who has promised to convert to Christianity. The sultan's mother, furious at her son's apostasy, organises a massacre, of which Custance is the sole survivor. A rudderless boat eventually takes her to Northumberland. Many more adventures and misfortunes befall her, but at last she comes to Rome, still in the rudderless boat, now with her son Mauricius. Her Northumbrian husband Alla, who has killed his mother because of the wicked things she had done to deceive him about Custance, also comes to Rome on a pilgrimage of penitence, and the couple are reunited. They return to England, but Alla dies soon afterwards, and Custance goes back to Rome again, where her son eventually becomes emperor. Mothers-in-law do not have a good press in this tale.

The Wife of Bath's Prologue is twice as long as The Wife of Bath's Tale. In the prologue, the wife of Bath challenges the notion that virginity is preferable to marriage, or that there is anything dirty about sex, procreation and the organs of procreation. She enjoys sex, and is frank about it. In each of her five marriages, she has been the boss, especially in the bedroom. But ultimately it is equality, not domination, that she desires.

Her tale is about a knight in King Arthur's time who rapes a young maiden. He is condemned to death, but Queen Guinevere persuades her husband to let her pass judgement. She sends the knight away for a year and a day, to find out what it is that women desire most. The knight sees 24 maidens dancing in the woods outside a castle. They disappear, leaving behind only an old hag, who agrees to help him in his quest, as long as he will grant her any favour she then asks. After the year and a day, the knight returns to court and gives an answer to the women there which satisfies them: women desire lordship over their husbands. The hag's price for the help she has given is that the knight should marry her. On their wedding night, the knight is repulsed by the ugliness of his bride, but he gives a correct answer to her puzzling question: would you rather a faithful ugly wife or a beautiful wife about whose fidelity you will always have doubts? He says that he will give his wife the choice. Now she has power over him, she tells him to kiss her. He turns, and she is young and beautiful.

The Friar's Tale is an attack on summoners. A corrupt summoner meets a yeoman who turns out to be a devil in disguise. They come upon a carter whose horses are stuck in the mud. The angry carter says that the devil may take the horses. The summoner asks the devil why he doesn't indeed take them, since they are offered. The devil replies that the carter's oath is not his sincere intention. The two go on to the house of an old woman whom the summoner intends to cheat. The old woman resists the summoner's wicked false charges, and damns him to hell unless he repents of them. The summoner refuses to repent, and because the old woman's intention is sincere, the devil does take him off to hell, together with the frying pan which he has corruptly claimed from the woman.

The Summoner's Tale is a revengeful attack on friars. A corrupt friar visits a Yorkshireman called Thomas, who is ill. Thomas's wife tells the friar that their child has recently died. The friar pretends to be sure that the child is in heaven. He boasts about how well he has recently preached. He claims alms from Thomas, who tells him that he has a gift which he is sitting on, and which he will give as long as the friar will promise to split it twelve ways, amongst the other friars in his house. The friar agrees, and puts his hand down behind Thomas' back. Thomas lets out an enormous fart. The enraged friar leaves the house, and goes to the lord of the village to denounce Thomas, and to ask how a fart could possibly be divided into twelve. The lord is highly entertained, and his squire has a good suggestion: put the friar at the centre of a cartwheel, and let his twelve colleagues put their nose to the end of each of the twelve spokes. The spokes would then carry the fart equally to each of them. For this, the lord rewards his squire with a 'gowne-clooth'.

The Clerk's Tale tells of a marquis in Piedmont who marries a poor peasant girl, Grisilde. He subjects her to appalling tests of her loyalty and obedience, arranging for both their children to be removed from her, telling her that they will be killed, but in fact removing them to be cared for in Bologna. He then pretends that he has permission from the pope to annul the marriage, sends her back to her father, but then recalls her to help prepare for the wedding. Grisilde does his bidding in all things. In the end, the children return from Bologna, and the marquis, having presented Grisilde's daughter to her as his intended new wife, reveals the deceit, and explains that all the time he has been testing her. She is overjoyed, and everyone lives happily ever after.

The Merchant's Tale is about old January, who marries young May and is obsessively jealous of her. May outwits him, cuckolding him with young Damyan, who is sorely in love with her. The climax of the story has May copulating with Damyan in a pear tree in the secret garden which January has organised for his coupling with his young wife. He has unfortunately gone blind, which should make May's deception easier, but Pluto and Proserpina are in the garden. Pluto says that he will restore January's sight, so he knows the truth. Proserpina in return says that she will give May the words to justify herself when the moment of truth comes. When it does, January is of course appalled and angry, but May protests that she is instrumental in bringing back January's sight, having been told that the best remedy for his blindness was for her to struggle with a man in a tree. January is sure that she has been doing a great deal more than struggling, but May at last persuades the old fool that his newly restored sight is still imperfect.

The Squire's Tale tells of Cambyuskan (Genghis Khan) who holds a feast to celebrate twenty years of his reign as king of Tartary. A strange knight appears during the feast, like the green knight of that poem, bearing various magical gifts. One of these is a ring through which humans can understand the language of birds, which is given to Cambyuskan's daughter Canace. The next morning Canace rises early and goes for a walk. She encounters a grieving female falcon, who tells her how she has been abandoned by her faithless lover for a kite. Canace builds a shelter for the poor bird, painted blue inside, for true faith, and green outside, for falsity, with pictures of faithless birds. The squire promises much more action, involving Cambyuskan's two sons and Canace's suitor Cambalo, but is then impatiently interrupted by the franklin, and stops.

The Franklin's Tale is set in Brittany. Arveragus and Dorigen marry. They agree that their marriage should be one of equality, though Arveragus will make the marital decisions in public, for the look of the thing. Arveragus then goes off to Britain to pursue his knightly exercises. Dorigen misses him very much, and is particularly anxious about the rocks around the coast of Brittany which might cause his shipwreck. A squire, Aurelius, falls in love with Dorigen. Eventually he tells his love. Dorigen is shocked, but also feels sorry for the man. He persists, and at last, as a joke, she says that she will become his lover if he will arrange for all the rocks of Brittany to be taken away. Aurelius goes off to Orléans and returns with a magician-scholar who manages to makes the rocks of Brittany disappear, for a fee of a thousand pounds. (Possibly the magician makes use of the exceptionally high tides in Brittany.) Aurelius demands that Dorigen become his lover. Arveragus comes back from Britain safe and sound. Dorigen admits her fault to her husband, quoting examples of women who have killed themselves rather than be dishonoured. Arveragus says that she must keep her promise to Aurelius. She goes to him, but he is so moved by Arveragus' nobility that he releases her from her promise. The magician is in turn so impressed by Aurelius' compassion that he releases him from the debt. So everyone has behaved well.

The Physician's Tale is a miserable story. A corrupt lecherous judge, Appius, sees a beautiful young woman, Virginia. He decides to have her for himself. He arranges for a peasant, Claudius, to appear before him in court and falsely accuse Virginia's father, Virginius, of having stolen Virginia when she was a baby. Appius connives in this lie, and orders Virginius to return his daughter to the court, without listening to Virginius' defence. Virginius goes home and explains the dreadful situation to his daughter. Should she consent to be dishonoured, or die by his hand? Virginia agrees to be killed by her father. He beheads her, and takes the head to Appius, who orders that Virginius be hanged. But a crowd bursts into the court, declaring Virginius' innocence. They arrest Appius and throw him into prison, where he commits suicide. They want to hang Claudius, but Virginius mercifully asks that Claudius be exiled instead. It seems to me that he could have resisted the judge's wickedness a bit more stoutly than he did.

The Pardoner's Tale is the one I know best, because I used to tell it to students when I was teaching. It is preceded by The Pardoner's Prologue, in which the pardoner frankly tells the other pilgrims that he is a fraudster. His tale concerns three ne'er-do-wells, gamblers and drunkards, seated in a tavern, who hear the passing bell of a dead person outside. The boy in the tavern tells them that the deceased is a former friend of theirs, whose life has been stolen away by a thief called Death. The drunkards determine to go out and find Death, and punish him. They come across an old man, whom they treat roughly and discourteously. He tells them that they will find Death on the top of a hill, under a tree. They go there, and find gold. Amid their astonishment and delight, they agree to wait until nightfall to take the gold away. The worst of the drunkards proposes that they should draw lots to see which of them should go to the town to buy food and wine to see them through the day. The youngest draws the lot obliging him to run the errand, and goes off. The other two then conspire to murder him when he returns, so that they may divide the gold between two rather than three. The youngest, meanwhile, plots his own evil scheme. He visits an apothecary and tells him that he is plagued by rats, and that a polecat is slaughtering his capons. The apothecary, though suspicious, gives him a powerful poison, which the young man puts into two of the three bottles of wine he buys. He returns to the others, who murder him immediately, and sit down to eat and drink. They are poisoned, die horribly, and thus it is that all three do find Death under the tree.

At the end of his tale, the pardoner, despite the frank admission of fraud in his prologue, tries to sell relics to the pilgrims, beginning with the host, who rebuffs him with vulgar abuse, offering to cut off his testicles and enshrine them 'in an hogges toord'.

The Shipman's Tale is an entertaining tribute to female sexuality, cunning and deception of the male, a bit like The Merchant's Tale. It tells of a merchant whose wife enjoys revelry and socialising, on which she spends a great deal of money. A young monk, who is friendly with the merchant, comes to stay with them. After confessing that she does not love her husband, the wife asks the monk for one hundred franks to pay her debts. The monk, without her knowledge, borrows the money from the merchant to give to the wife. In return, she agrees to give the monk a night of sexual pleasure. After satisfying himself in this way, the monk tells the merchant that he has already repaid the loan to the wife a few days after borrowing it, and departs. When the merchant asks his wife about the money, she says she has spent it on clothes, claiming that she thought the money was in payment for the lengthy hospitality the monk had enjoyed at their house. She tells her husband not to be angry; she will repay the debt to him in another way: 'I wol not paye yow but abedde!' The foolish merchant is obliged to accept her offer.

The Prioress's Tale is a straightforward piece of anti-Semitism. It's extraordinary to find it so nakedly unapologetic, after the variously humorous, humanistic, moral but broadly tolerant tones of the other tales. A little boy in a Christian city of Asia, with a Jewish ghetto, is determined to learn the words of the hymn 'Alma Redemptoris Mater', to which he has been introduced at school. He sings it on the way to and from school, walking along the Jewish street. The Jews are offended at this and kill him, throwing his body on a dung heap. His mother eventually finds the body, which miraculously continues to sing the hymn. The murdering Jews are torn to pieces by wild horses, and then hanged. A requiem mass is held for the boy, who still continues to sing. The abbot asks him how he is able to do this. The boy says that he has had a vision of Mary, who laid a grain on his tongue which enables him to keep singing although his throat is cut. The abbot, deeply moved, removes the grain from the boy's mouth. The boy dies.

As if that degree of anti-Semitism weren't enough, the tale ends with a request to 'yonge Hugh of Lyncoln, slayn also / With cursed Jews' to pray for 'we sinful folk unstable'.

Was Chaucer an anti-Semite himself? As with Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, I'm reluctant to ascribe hateful bigotry to such a great and wise intellect. Perhaps Chaucer was simply acknowledging the existence of anti-Semitism in the society of his day: the Jews had been banished from England about a hundred years before the tale was written. But there's no challenging of the hatred by any voice, within or after the tale. At least, in The Merchant of Venice, there's the great 'If you tickle us, do we not laugh?' speech.

Chaucer's decision to make himself the narrator of the Tale of Sire Thopas is a mystery. Why did he embark on this foolish, mock-heroic story? A knight, Sire Thopas, dreams that an elf-queen will be his lover. He goes off in search of her, but runs into a giant called Sire Olifaunt, who bars his way, threatens to kill him and throws stones to chase him away. Sire Thopas rides back to town, where he summons his 'myrie men' to a feast consisting of sweets, and is extravagantly armed and armoured for the battle he intends to resume against Sire Olifaunt. Off he rides again, until… the host interrupts Chaucer, telling him that this is all worthless nonsense, 'rym doggerel'. It's true that the form of the tale is unique in Chaucer, sextets rhyming AABAAB or sometimes AABCCB, as in some popular stories of the time. Perhaps the intention was a full-scale comedy like Don Quixote, but with the form as well as the content a parody. But why go to the trouble of writing more than 900 lines and then abandoning them? Perhaps Chaucer tired of the joke, but couldn't bring himself to throw the thing away.

As if in revenge for the rebuke he has suffered, Chaucer then tells The Tale of Melibee, in prose. It's more than a thousand lines long, worthy and dull. Melibee is away from his house one day when three enemies break in, beat his wife Dame Prudence and attack his daughter, leaving her for dead. Melibee is naturally enraged, and summons friends to his side to discuss what action to take. They offer contradictory advice. Prudence, on the other hand, is clear. At exhausting length, debating with her husband point by point, adducing numerous authorities, she advises him not to seek revenge on the wrongdoers, but to turn the other cheek. She arranges to meet the men, and tells them that they should meet her husband and apologise for their actions, which they are pleased and relieved to do. Melibee in turn forgives them. The tale is a translation of the Livre de Melibée et de Dame Prudence by Renaud de Louens.

Why did Chaucer the author disoblige himself by putting into the mouth of Chaucer the narrator two such unsatisfactory efforts?

The Monk's Tale recounts the lives and tragic fates of 17 historical or mythological figures. I had to plough through it as I did Melibee.

The Nun's Priest's Tale is a masterpiece, a thing of pure delight, with the learning it displays put to wonderfully comic use. Chauntecleer is a proud cockerel. One night he dreams of his own approaching death. He wakes his wife Pertelote and tells her of the dream. She chides him for his foolishness, telling him that he is only suffering from indigestion. He quotes numerous examples of baleful dreams that came true for the dreamer, but eventually, as day approaches, acknowledges that his night fears are overcome by love for his wife. Unfortunately for him, a fox is in waiting, wishing to murder him just as he did the cockerel's father and mother. The fox flatters Chauntecleer, persuading him to close his eyes and open his mouth to sing, so sweet is his voice. Chauntecleer's vanity is his undoing; the fox grabs the singer by the neck and makes off, followed by the whole farmyard in pursuit. Chauntecleer then tests the fox's vanity, suggesting that he taunt his pursuers, telling them that all pursuit is in vain. The fox falls for the suggestion and opens his mouth. Chaunticleer flies up into a tree, and this time no amount of persuasion by the fox will bring him down. Both animals ruefully reflect on their folly. The tale ends with the advice to 'Taketh the moralite, goode men'; it may be a fable about talking animals, but the lessons for humans are clear.

The Second Nun's Tale (there is no first nun, unless she be the prioress) tells the life and death of Saint Cecilia. It's a straightforward hagiography. Cecilia, already a Christian, is to be married to Valerian. On their wedding night, she persuades him not to consummate the marriage. She tells him that an angel is protecting her, and that if Valerian will consent to love her 'in clene love', he will see the angel too. Valerian naturally wishes to have this unlikely promise tested. Cecilia sends him down the Appian Way to see Saint Urban. As a result of this meeting, Valerian does indeed see the angel. He becomes a Christian. Later, his brother Tiburce is converted too. All three fall foul of the prefect Almachius, who orders them to worship an image of Jupiter, or be executed. The prefect's chief officer, Maximus, and numerous other executioners are converted by the Christians' example. Cecilia offers Valerian and Tiburce the right to worship Jupiter in order to save their lives, but when they are led out to perform the sacrifice they refuse, and are beheaded. Maximus says that he saw their souls gliding up to heaven, escorted by angels. This witness converts many more people, so Almachius has Maximus beaten 'With whippe of leed' until he dies. He then turns his attention to Cecilia, who boldly defies him with powerful theological arguments. He orders her to be placed in a scalding bath. The boiling water does her no harm. So Almachius orders her beheaded. The executioner half chops her head off. In this inconvenient state she continues to preach the Christian message for three days, until she dies. Saint Urban buries her body and names her house 'the chirche of Seint Cecilie'.

The Canon's Yeoman's Tale, preceded by The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue, is an attack on alchemy. I studied it for A-level. The canon, with his yeoman, joins the party of pilgrims 'At Boghtoun under Blee'. In the prologue, the yeoman betrays his master's shameful secret — cheating gullible fools by promising to turn base metals into silver — so that the canon 'fledde awey for verray sorwe and shame'. In the tale, the yeoman reveals all the tricks of the alchemist's deceitful trade. He tells how his master conned a greedy priest, by trickery and sleight of hand, into believing that he had made solid silver ingots in his alembic. The priest asked for the 'receit', the secret recipe, so that he could make silver himself. The canon charged him forty pounds for it, which the priest willingly gave him. The canon then abruptly disappeared, and of course the recipe was useless. The tale ends with philosophical and religious musings on the futility of seeking the philosopher's stone.

The Manciple's Tale is preceded by The Manciple's Prologue, in which there is an entertaining exchange at the expense of the cook, who is clearly drunk. The host invites the cook to tell a tale (we remember that the cook has already begun a tale, which exists only as a fragment). The cook isn't up to it. So the manciple takes over. His story concerns the god Phoebus and his crow. The crow is white in colour, and can speak. (In a digression, the manciple declares that it is impossible to change the essential nature of any creature.) Phoebus has a wife of whom he jealous. He keeps her shut up in the house. The abused wife takes a lover, and the crow betrays her infidelity to Phoebus, who kills her in rage. Later, he regrets his action, and in his grief he blames the crow. He turns it black and gives it an unmelodious voice. Moral: don't gossip, even if the substance of your gossiping is true.

Which brings us to the last, The Parson's Tale, an exhaustingly long prose treatise on penitence. It's divided into three parts, each part then further and minutely sub-divided. Penitence consists of contrition of the heart, confession of the mouth, and satisfaction (the enactment of penitence in practical ways such as the giving of alms, waking, praying, fasting, scourging oneself). The second part, confession of the mouth, includes a section on the seven deadly sins and the remedies for them. The tale occupies 36 solid pages of my Robinson edition, and I was spent by the time I got to the end.

Chaucer's envoi, 'Heere taketh the makere of this book his leve', asks the reader to pray for Christ's forgiveness for his 'giltes', by which he means all the writings which we most enjoy, including Troilus and Criseyede and the Canterbury Tales, 'and many a song and many a leccherous lay'. It's interesting that it's placed after the Tales, but refers to Chaucer's whole oeuvre. Was he really hedging his bets at the end of his writing life? Did he really believe that the bawdiness of some of the tales, the rough physicality of some of the language — qualities which we value as much as anything in his work — might damn him for eternity? Or was it merely lip service? Was he worried about falling foul of an ecclesiastical court on a charge of obscenity? We'll never know.

Here we are in the same beautiful place to which I came 14 years ago, on my first visit to South Africa. I was so struck by Bartholomeus Klip then that I determined to return for longer the next time I came to the country. This time Helen is with me. Last week we were in Cape Town, choosing the scholars whom we will enable, through the Ros Moger/Terry Furlong Scholarship fund, to study for PhDs or MAs in South African universities in the coming one, two or three years. We also helped the colleagues who run the Canon Collins Education Trust to choose the larger number of scholars they can afford to fund. We chose six people; Canon Collins as a whole chose about another 30. As ever, there wasn't enough money to fund all the applicants who deserved support, but we shall make a significant difference to the lives of those whom we eventually chose.

It's 23 years now since South Africa was liberated, but the desperate poverty in which many of the black and brown people live remains a shame and a scandal. The townships on Cape Flats still stretch for miles, as far as the eye can see: rows and rows — or blocks and blocks — of corrugated iron shacks leaning against each other, boiling hot in summer, freezing cold in winter. The lanes between the shacks are of bare earth, which turns to mud when it rains. There is some sort of informal electricity supply, and many of the shacks have television reception dishes on their roofs. There are often portable toilets in rows, each used by scores of families. I remember the shock, 14 years ago, of my first sight of these slums as I drove into town from the airport. Now, those particular dwellings have been replaced by perfectly respectable small houses. I wondered whether their visibility to the wealthy traveller who has just arrived by air was the reason for the good fortune of those who have been rehoused there. But the scale of the task remains formidable, and I'm not well informed enough to know whether the government is doing its best with the resources it has, or whether it can and should be criticised for not doing enough, quickly enough. I'm inclined to the latter suspicion.

On a day off from our work with the scholarships, we were driven all the way down the peninsula to Cape Point by Maxwell, a taxi driver whom we had met on our first evening. On the way back we came to Hout Bay. We passed the pretty little settlement there. About a mile later, we came to the black people's dwellings. There had been a fire recently, Maxwell told us. Many of the shacks had been destroyed. Across the road, in a field, emergency replacement accommodation had been provided: hundreds of small containers, like miniature versions of those which carry the world's goods on ships, trains and lorries. One door into each; no windows; a letter and a number on each. At the edge of the field, rows of toilets and shower cubicles. It was like a refugee camp, but these people weren't refugees.

All the scholars whom we funded desired sincerely to ameliorate some aspect of the woeful reality facing poorer people in South Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Lesotho or Zambia. They wished to provide better health care for women; to improve the education of deaf-blind children; to bring about better working conditions through changes to the labour laws; to involve women more actively in the services provided by local government, whether as clients or as employees. Some of them were doing voluntary work of various kinds in the townships. But none of the applicants had offered to study ways of addressing the housing crisis; for me, that and unemployment are South Africa's principal challenges. As has often been pointed out in the context of less severe housing crises such as that which we have in the UK, the great thing about building houses is that, provided that people are trained, the work is labour-intensive; you need lots of skilled and semi-skilled people.

On most of the streets in central Cape Town there are destitute people. An evidently wealthy foreigner can't walk around without being asked for money every few minutes. When I was out by myself, women offered me sex for money. In none of these encounters did I feel threatened. I gave nothing to beggars; there were too many. Most of the destitute people, sitting on doorsteps or lying on flattened cardboard boxes, didn't even bother to beg as I passed. Their hopelessness was complete. On our last evening, I went for a walk by myself. Returning down Plein Street, very near the parliament building, I passed a young brown girl squatting in an old sleeping bag. She just looked up and smiled at me. I walked on to the hotel, then turned round, went back and gave her 50 rand — about three pounds. 'Eat something,' I said. She smiled at me again but said nothing. That particular encounter broke me up. In the hotel bedroom, I found myself suddenly weeping for the whole awful wickedness, over decades and centuries, which has brought so many people, including that girl, to this pass. Then we went out and had an expensive and delicious meal.

I'll catch up, briefly, after this long pause since the beginning of September.

On 3 September we had the fête de Saint Guénaël, as usual on the first Sunday of September. It poured with rain, but I still sold more than a thousand euros-worth of wine, and four hundred people turned up to eat lunch, despite the weather. Two days later, we drove south, via Agen (one night), Marseille (two nights), Podere Conti (one night) to Rodellosso. Two weeks there, with friends coming and going, and the usual pleasures. (I think this will have been the last year when we've block-booked all five apartments for a fortnight. The friends who've been coming have seen enough of the place, much as they have enjoyed it. Next year, Helen and I will go just for a week, by ourselves, as part of a little tour of northern and central Italy.) Then we made our way back via Podere Conti (one night), Marseille (two nights) and Avignon (three nights), where we stayed, as last year, with Bronwyn and Stephen in the house they borrow from their friends Janet and Tom. We celebrated Bronwyn's 71st birthday on the last day. Then a long drive up through the massif central to the Loire valley. I suffered a minor disaster that day: I lost my wallet, with two credit cards, my driving licence and some money. The credit cards and driving licence have been replaced, and the one fraudulent attempt to use a card was thwarted by the bank's security system. The worst loss was that of the little black-and-white photograph of my parents as young lovers, I think before they were married, which, as I wrote in the poem 'A Child's Farewell', I kept 'deep in my wallet'. Irreplaceable. We stopped for one night at Cour-Cheverny, stopped again for coffee and to buy some wine at Amboise, and were home at Kerfontaine at teatime on the last day of September.

In the first week of October, Jean-Paul and I cut the hedges and chopped wood, which I stored. We left Kerfontaine on 11 October, and were in London the next day. On 16 October, Stephen Mellor and I went up to Betty Rosen's house and took delivery of 500 copies each of my two poetry books. (Betty, as I think I've said earlier somewhere, is kindly storing the books in her spare bedroom.) On 19 October, we launched the books at a party in the upstairs room of the Prince Albert pub in Royal College Street. About 100 people came; we gave them drinks and canapés, and the event was a success. I was particularly pleased that Peter Hetherington, Ken Pearce (my Latin teacher) and Chris Carmell (my French teacher) were there, with their wives. Stephen addressed the company briefly, then Bronwyn made a witty and flattering longer speech introducing me, and this was my reply.

We sold about 155 books that night, which disappointed me a little. Some wonderful people bought multiple copies (Ann Whittaker bought 13!). But that must mean that many people bought only one, or none. A few days later, I wrote emails to everyone who had come, thanking them, and telling them where they could get more copies if they wished. I wrote a different email to a further 80 people whom I hadn't invited, providing availability details. So far, I've had a handful of orders. I'm disheartened, really, at the moment, and in an absurd way embarrassed. I certainly overdid the print run. I should have confined myself to 200 copies of each book, although a shorter print run doesn't actually cost much less money. Bronwyn and Stephen have generously said that they would pay for the printing of one of the books, and they haven't asked me for the £2000 for the other yet. Chalkface has sent review copies to the usual literary journals. I find myself reading my own poems, trying to reassure myself that some of them really are good, that it was worth all that bother. I don't have the heart to go tramping round bookshops to see whether they might take one or two on sale or return. I should investigate ways of getting onto online outlets.

Towards the end of a year during which five books have come out with my name on them, I'm stuck, wondering what to do now. I don't have a big project on. And the undermining thought keeps returning: has anything I've done with my life really made any difference to anyone? These South African scholarships will make a big difference to a few people, yes. But I have no great expectations now for the lasting effect of my own intellectual work. The proposals in the two Routledge books and in the ten UKLA booklets, for example, won't change government policy on curriculum and assessment in English one iota. I've had a good time during an entertaining, wandering career, but that's it. I know that lots of people like me, love me even, on a personal basis, and South Africa is the last place in the world where a privileged person like me should feel sorry for himself, and I don't. But disheartened is the word, at least for now.

We came up here on Saturday, in a rented car. Bartholomeus Klip retains its old-fashioned charm, just as I remember it from 2003. Tea at three, served in a silver teapot, with scones and jam and cream; a drive into the game reserve in the Land Rover at five, to spot eland, springbok, bontebok, zebras, ostriches and an enormous variety of smaller birds; drinks on the terrace at seven; a four-course dinner at eight. The farm of which Bartholomeus Klip is the farmhouse comprises 3,000 hectares of farmland and 4,000 hectares of reserve. The signs I can spot suggest that the business treats its workers well. Paternalistic it is, no doubt. The son of the owner flew in from Cape Town yesterday in a helicopter, with half a dozen friends. They enjoyed a noisy lunch, and flew out again at five. But there does seem to be a genuine care for the workers and their families, and the little houses on the estate are brightly painted in white and green, with wooden verandas and good roofs on which solar panels have been installed. The children are well dressed. There are various conservation projects, for geometric tortoises and disease-free African buffalo, which suggest enlightenment. And the place is astonishingly beautiful, bounded by a range of sandstone mountains to the east, beneath an azure sky with, today, a strong warm wind from the south which whips up waves on the little lake in front of which I was writing until the wind became too strong and almost blew the computer off the table.

We enjoyed four days at Bartholomeus Klip. The only hazard there is the simultaneous presence of older English people of conservative opinions. The place is so small that you can't get away from them, and in their jovial conversation they begin to hint that perhaps apartheid wasn't such a bad system after all, given the mess that South Africa is in now; or words to that effect. Of course, when I open my mouth they immediately go into reverse gear, but it means that we're then wary of each other as we sip our drinks. Meanwhile, the younger guests from other European countries are absolutely of our persuasion, and easy to get on with. I had to repeat my 'I do apologise for Brexit' speech on several occasions.

A more general difficulty about going to South Africa is that you are constantly being told about its dangers. 'Don't drive at night,' 'Don't walk alone in the city after dark,' 'Don't carry much money around with you,' 'Don't pick up hitch-hikers.' Of course I'm not going to walk into the middle of a township late at night with a wallet hanging out of my back pocket, but otherwise I'm inclined to ignore such excessively paranoid advice. The alternative is that you never meet ordinary black and brown South Africans except when they're serving you. On our last full day at Bartholomeus Klip, we drove over magnificent mountain passes to Ceres, where we stopped for coffee and saw the only baboons on this trip. One female was carrying a baby on her back as she loped along to the junction in the middle of town. She didn't stop at the red traffic light, it's true, but then nor do most cyclists in London. Then we took a long road up through fruit orchards and vineyards, always under a beautiful blue sky, with hardly anyone about. I had hoped to complete a circular route by returning over another mountain pass, but when we arrived at the bottom of the pass the tarmac gave out, and we decided that a couple of hours on a dirt road was too much, so we turned round and started back the way we had come. We soon came upon the broken-down car which we had seen half an hour before. This time its driver waved and stuck his thumb out. I passed the car but stopped on the road about two hundred metres further on. 'What are you doing?' asked Helen. 'I'm going to see what he wants.' 'Don't do that, please don't do that. Just drive on.' I began to reverse towards the man, who saw me and ran towards me. Another man, younger, appeared from the car. Helen became frantic. 'There are two of them! Please stop and drive on.' I ignored her and waited until the man was alongside me. 'What can I do for you?' I asked. The man explained that his car had broken down, they needed to get back to Ceres (which was a good hour's drive at normal speed), and just wanted a tow over the hill to the next settlement where he could get help. We had a great big SUV with a tow bar and he had a tow rope. So we towed them over the hill and down the other side for a quarter of an hour, and left them at the little settlement as agreed. I got out and we shook hands and they thanked me warmly. The older man told me that they had been waiting all night for someone to stop.

I write this not because I want to criticise my darling wife, who's the most generous, kind, anti-racist person you'll ever meet, and not to present myself as some kind of saint for giving a couple of blokes a tow. Immediately after we left them, Helen said, 'You were right and I was wrong.' I write it to point out how fear can get into the minds of the best people, and that fear has the effect that white visitors to South Africa don't meet black and brown people there except when the latter are serving the former.

The day after that we drove to Cape Town airport for a night flight back to Paris. I must have slept pretty well, because we were over the Sahara when I woke up, and at Charles de Gaulle by eleven the next morning. A five-hour wait there for the hop across to London, and we were home in the early evening.

We met many Zimbabweans in South Africa: refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants fleeing the disaster that has befallen Zimbabwe under Mugabe. And this week there is significant news. The army moved in on Tuesday and placed Mugabe under house arrest, while insisting that this was not a coup. It's now clear that he is finished. I expect that he and his wife Grace will go into exile in one of the several places where they have wealth and property which they have stolen from their country. Zimbabweans are elated. There is a huge demonstration in Harare today, which the army supports, telling Mugabe to go and calling for a new start for the country.

The crisis began last week when Mugabe dismissed his vice-president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, in order to clear the way for Grace, who is 40 years younger than him, to accede to the presidency. That was a fatal error, and he has reaped the whirlwind. Mnangagwa, however, is just as much of a thug as Mugabe has been. He was directly responsible for the atrocities in Matabeleland in the early 1980s, among other crimes. The best hope is that he will see that Zimbabwe needs a government of national unity for a good few years, and invites the principal opposition party, the Movement for Democratic Change, to participate.

Something happened yesterday which made me feel a bit ashamed of my gloomy thoughts a couple of entries ago about my life not having made any difference to anybody. Out of the blue, I got an email from a woman called Pat Cummings. Mark Leicester passed it on to me; Pat had come across my writings online. This is the Pat Cummings of 'Progress in Pat's Writing', the close study of the development of one girl's writing that I had made in 1976. (That paper went into Becoming our own Experts.) Pat wanted Helen and me to meet her and some of her contemporaries; they had been together at the funeral, alas, of Angela Coley, a girl I remember as charming and very funny, who had died of cancer. At the wake afterwards they had decided to try to contact their teachers. They are now women of 55. The result was that they invited us to lunch at a restaurant at the top of the Gherkin, one of the skyscrapers in the City. It was a bright day, the view was spectacular, and the pleasure was intense. These women had all done worthwhile things in their lives: one was a musician who had toured the world, one ran a musical booking agency, one had been a midwife, one was a Royal Mail supervisor, one worked for the social services of a London borough, engaged in the delicate and difficult task of deciding where children who had to be taken away from their family would be best looked after. They all said that we had been big influences on their lives. I didn't get the impression that any of their emotional lives had been straightforward. Four of the women were black, one white. The black women talked frankly about the men they had lived with, and none was especially complimentary: I had a picture of unreliable, immature, thin-skinned, proud men, intimidated by the very strength, steadiness and competence which the women had developed, facing a world which had done them no favours but from which they had wrested benefit.

Christmas Eve at Kerfontaine. I've made the brandy butter, all the shopping is done, and we shall have the usual réveillon dinner together: smoked salmon, foie gras, baked sole with vegetables, cheese, Christmas pudding or perhaps something lighter.

We arrived on Wednesday, having spent a few days with Adam and Hazel in Norfolk.

The last eleven days, however, have been overshadowed by the sudden and unexpected death of one of my dearest friends: Mike Raleigh.

We were at David James's house on the weekend of 9 December for the traditional pre-Christmas dinner party with Shropshire friends. Mike was there, with Kate, and in good form. They usually stay the night after the party, but they drove back home that evening, because there was snow on the ground and much more snow was forecast overnight. It did indeed snow more, so that they were snowed in on the Sunday and Monday, but they managed to get out on the Tuesday and Kate took the train to London, leaving her car. Mike was alone on the Wednesday when he walked up his steep drive to the road where he had left the car. He was going swimming; his costume and a towel were later found in the car. He drove for about 200 yards, and then the car came to a halt against the hedge. He had suffered a heart attack. A neighbour who noticed the car and motorists who stopped called the emergency services, who called the air ambulance. The professionals did everything they could to revive Mike, but though his heart did respond once or twice to their attempts at resuscitation, alas he died.

He was 69, and had already talked to me and others about plans to celebrate his 70th birthday next July (he was five days older than Helen).

I knew Mike for 40 years, since we were young English teachers in London, working together at the ILEA English Centre, then when he went to Shropshire as English adviser, was promoted within two years, and I took his place as English adviser and we did a lot for education in the county. When Helen and I came back to London and he left Shropshire to join HMI, we didn't see each other professionally so much, but we remained close friends, and often spent holidays together. When I was at Teachers TV and Andrew Bethell needed to bid to the government for the right to continue running the service (an absurd requirement), I suggested to him that Mike, who had retired from HMI by then, was just the person to write a persuasive bid; so it proved. And then, of course, he came to me in November 2013 with the suggestion that we produce the series of booklets on curriculum and assessment in English, which we did, and which have become the two Routledge books. The very last words he said to me, sitting in the snow in Kate's car waiting for her to come out of David's house, were a joke about what we are going spend our royalties money on when it arrives early next year (it'll be tuppence ha'penny, I expect).

So we had an intellectual comradeship as well as a personal friendship, although we were different personalities. He was more reserved than I, not heart-on-sleeve like I am, and a long time ago I stopped worrying about a certain gruffness in his manner; it didn't at all signal lack of friendliness or warmth. And of course I was a support to him when his wife Sue was ill with cancer and died in 2010. He came out to San Francisco at Easter 2011, still sorely bereaved, and our time together was a comfort to him.

When he took up with Kate Myers a couple of years later, their love brought both of them deep, unexpected happiness. Kate had been alone for many years. She is, of course, devastated.

Mike was one of the cleverest people I have ever met, but he never showed it off. It just showed in his achievements. At the English Centre, he was the person people went to for help with their writing, in search of new ideas, or just for general encouragement. He was a brilliant writer himself, and an unerringly brilliant editor of other people's writing, though his idea of editing sometimes amounted to a total rewrite, which was nearly always better than the author's original. He was loved at the Centre, and I saw how he was loved in Shropshire, how the leadership he offered really did make people feel proud and pleased to be working there. I didn't see, but I did hear, how he made the same impact in HMI. He rose high there. He would have made a great HMCI, and I asked him why he didn't go for it when the post became vacant. 'I don't fancy getting up early enough to be on the Today programme,' he said, though there may have been more mundane or perhaps even negative reasons why he didn't apply.

And he was kind. Peter and Merle Traves, both of whom suffered different kinds of cancer soon after Sue died, were deeply touched by his practical and emotional support. Mike knew what it is like to love a person with a life-threatening illness. They are both well, I'm happy to say, but as sad as any of us.

Kate and Mike's step-daughter Sophie are the executors. They've asked me to conduct the funeral service on 8 January, which I am honoured to do though it is a heavy responsibility. We'll assemble the programme over the next week.

So just at the moment I feel profoundly weakened and diminished by this loss. Of course, as we get older, we must expect our friends to die, and to die ourselves. But it was the suddenness of this, and Mike's relative youthfulness by today's standards, that have shocked us all. I must say that he smoked all the years that I knew him, despite my and others' numerous attempts to get him to stop (he did go on to electronic cigarettes in recent years); whether smoking was a cause I don't know. There will be a big gathering at Shrewsbury crematorium, followed by drinks at The Mytton and Mermaid at Atcham. Both were venues for Sue's funeral too.

Christmas Day was as Christmas Days always have been in recent years. We got up late, Helen cooked me a delicious fried breakfast, we took a hamper of British delicacies up to Jean and Annick, we drove down to the sea at Fort Bloqué where we walked on the beach into a biting head wind going and an encouraging tail wind coming back. Then home through the quiet lanes, no one about, sherry, presents, a few phone calls, then a dinner of foie gras and smoked salmon, as the night before, followed this time by roast goose, with champagne and a very good claret which Helen had bought for me in Shrewsbury. By the time we'd finished as much goose as we could eat we were full, so postponed the Christmas pudding, probably until tonight.

Today, as every day since we've been here, it's raining. The countryside is sodden. I'd like to get out to prune the roses, hydrangeas and fuschias, and to clear the dead leaves away from the borders, but it's too wet.

The main political preoccupation in the UK in recent weeks has been the terms of our exit from the EU. Theresa May did get an agreement from the rest of the EU that next year the two sides can begin to talk about an eventual trading relationship. It seems certain that a transitional period will begin as soon as we leave the EU in March 2019, during which nothing will change from the status quo, except that we will have to abide by any decisions which the rest of the EU takes, without having any influence on those decisions. The EU would like the transitional period to end on 31 December 2020, which is the end of its current budgetary period. After that, who knows? Passing the enormous queue of lorries waiting to go through the channel tunnel a week ago, this at a time of free movement, I thought that a deal of some kind will have to be done, otherwise the queues waiting for customs checks will back up halfway to London. And the farmers, many of whom voted to leave, despite the benefits to them of the common agricultural policy, will simply not allow their potatoes and strawberries to rot in the ground because not enough UK citizens are willing to bend their backs to such work. If I had to guess, my guess would be that a customs union of some kind will be invented, thus getting round, by the use of weasel words, the government's commitment to leave the customs union as it is at present. I can't see the government, or even a future Labour government, consenting to free movement of people after 2020, because the anti-immigration mood in the country is so toxic. So I think that there will be some kind of quota system whereby we say that we need so many agricultural workers, so many nurses, so many care workers, and so on. Complicated and burdensome to administer. That still leaves the problem of services, which as I understand it are not included in the present customs union, and which account for nearly 80% of the UK's GDP. I just can't see the rest of the EU consenting to a customs union which includes services, as the UK would like, but allows the UK to set its own rules about movement of people. If it allows that, it will need to allow other countries to have their cake and eat it in the same way.

I suppose it's possible that some other members of the EU would like to modify the arrangements about free movement into their countries, thus creating a sort of league division two of EU countries, which would allow us to stay in on new terms, and allowing the central EU countries to get on much faster with the integration which France and Germany want. Possible but not likely. Meanwhile, the EU has big problems of its own, with Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia lurching in a far-right, almost fascist direction, losing their historical memory: vile anti-Semitism in Hungary, Poland quashing the independence of the supreme court, all four countries flatly refusing to accept their fair quota of refugees pouring into Italy and Greece. And Austria now has a government which includes a far-right, anti-immigrant party, although the young leader of the major party in the coalition, pretty right-wing himself, is strongly pro-EU. There are times when I wonder whether it's possible to keep such a diverse collection of nations together in any meaningful way.

(By coincidence, having written this paragraph I looked at the BBC's website, to see that the German foreign minister has said that an eventual agreement between the UK and the EU could serve as a model for EU deals with Turkey and Ukraine. That's not quite what I was speculating about, which was to do with 'outer-ring' countries already in the EU, but it's along similar lines.)

We are further than ever from peace in Israel/Palestine now that Trump has declared the whole of Jerusalem the capital of Israel, thus overturning decades of international agreement that East Jerusalem should be the capital of an eventual Palestinian state. There is dreadful slaughter in Yemen, as Saudi Arabia and Iran fight a proxy war there. In Syria, it looks as if the butcher Assad will eventually 'win' his war, with the help of Russia, Iran and Hezbollah. Turkey moves ever closer to an Islamist theocracy. In Russia, Putin has effectively forbidden or crushed all opposition to his leadership; he will be 'elected' president again next year. Atrocities continue to be committed in Pakistan in the name of a perverted version of Islam. In fact, there's not much good news — at a political level at least — in the world at the moment.

Here, it continues to rain. I'd like to go for a walk to chase the blues away, but the rain is too heavy at the moment. Instead, I shall seek treatment for my present mood in the philosophic wisdom of Montaigne, whose essays I am reading for the first time.

Our friends David and Heather Loxton have come for New Year, and tonight we four will go to L'Art Gourmand for the Saint-Sylvestre meal, as Helen and I do every year.

I've been busy organising Mike's funeral: dozens of phone calls and emails. It's coming together. I need to get the finished programme to the printer on Tuesday (in two days' time).

The rain continues unabated.

The Saint-Sylvestre meal was fine, though the atmosphere was a little more subdued than usual. Marie-Thérèse, the lady who is usually the life and soul of the party, was sad because her husband had died during the year. So she sang less and with less enthusiasm, which meant that I did too, and so did everyone else.

There was a violent thunderstorm in the early hours of this morning, which cleared the sky for the first time since we’ve been here. At noon, the four of us (Heather and David Loxton are staying until tomorrow) drove down to the Côte Sauvage on the Quiberon peninsula. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more impressive sea: mountainous waves, the colour of jade, rearing and crashing against the cliffs, driven on by a wind from the west so strong that it nearly blew us over. Showers of spray attacked our faces, and spume detached from the tops of the waves rolled up the beaches. When you put your hand in it it’s dry, airy. All this in dazzling sunshine under a bright blue sky: exhilarating after the recent monotony of cloud and rain.

Fish pie tonight.

Getting back to England was complicated. Initially, we cancelled the return trip through the tunnel and booked a sea crossing from Roscoff to Plymouth, intending to drive straight from there to Shropshire for Mike Raleigh’s funeral, saving me hundreds of kilometres of driving. Brittany Ferries then cancelled the crossing because of the violent storms in the first week of January. So we rebooked the tunnel and came all the way round after all, stopping for one night in London.

The funeral on 8 January was an intensely emotional but dignified tribute to Mike. About 150 people crammed into the crematorium at Shrewsbury. I led the ceremony. This was the order of events:

This is what I said in my tribute:

And this is what I said by way of concluding words, including the reading of Spender’s ‘The Truly Great’, which I had read at Stephen Eyers’s funeral in 2016 (with a similar but not identical introduction), and at Terry Furlong’s funeral in 2002:

Afterwards there were refreshments at The Mytton and Mermaid at Atcham, just as there had been at Sue’s funeral in 2010. We drove back to London that night.

Mike’s death has affected me, hurt me, more than any other death in my fortunate life so far: more than my parents’ death, more even than Stephen Eyers’s death. I’ve been trying to work out why. Perhaps it is that, just at the moment, I find myself wondering what to do next, after a year in which five books came out, wondering (as I know I wrote last year) whether anything I’ve done in my life has really made any difference to anything, and Mike’s sudden departure is a reminder that quite possibly I haven’t much time left myself, having had a stroke, and having been told last week that I have high blood pressure and am pre-diabetic. At the same time I feel very well physically, and in the mirror I don’t see a person who looks likely to depart this life soon. But then nor did Mike look that way when I saw him last, four days before he died. Perhaps the difference between the loss of Stephen and that of Mike is that the friendship with Stephen had become for many years a matter of habit: dear old friends (despite our political differences, he the idealist socialist dreamer, me the grubby socialist pragmatist), seeing other each other regularly, enjoying life’s pleasures, but with our professional, intellectual collaboration a distant memory. With Mike, I was still in harness; there could well have been more to do.

We had the best possible cure for these blues last weekend when we flew down to Marseille to see my niece Sophie inaugurated as a doctor in an old-fashioned ceremony. Sophie presented a summary of her thesis, on a new technique for detecting cancerous cells in the cervix, to four men dressed in red or black mediaeval robes. She wore a black gown with white tabs and a piece of what looked like white rabbit fur dangling on her shoulder. Apart from the rabbit fur, she looked a bit like an English seventeenth-century puritan divine (though her glamorous orange shoes would have turned the heads of the most ascetic of that persuasion). Then all four men responded in turn and at some length. I could tell immediately that they liked her a lot; she is one of their stars. They left the room, pretended to confer for no more than thirty seconds, and returned. The president officially conferred on Sophie the title of doctor. She raised her right hand and swore the Hippocratic oath before a bust of Hippocrates. It was very moving.

Then we drove back through the traffic to Mary’s and Jacques’ flat for a party. Mary had prepared some delicious food (catering for 80 people doesn’t faze her). I circulated with champagne and other drinks. The gathering got pretty lively, and finished with presents, speeches, and then dancing until about 1.30. We were staying with Jean-Louis and Annie, Jacques’ sister and brother-in-law. The next day we went back to Mary’s and helped with the clearing-up. In the afternoon I visited Tess, who is working at the Lacoste shop, and bought two polo shirts to encourage her (though I don’t think she gets any commission). That evening we dined chez Jean-Louis and Annie. On the Sunday we visited my nephew Sam in his new flat, met his charming girlfriend Léa, then went on to Sophie’s for lunch (leg of lamb). A walk in the park at Montolivet in the afternoon, Spanish omelettes at Mary’s in the evening, and back to Jean-Louis and Annie to sleep. Mary took us to the airport on Monday morning, and we were back here by mid-afternoon.

I spent a lot of time with Sophie’s and Julien’s son Paul, my great-nephew, who’s a delight. He smiles all the time, finding life deeply agreeable as long as he has enough to eat. He enjoys my singing.

It’s been a strange couple of months since I last wrote. I think I have been suffering from a kind of depression. This was made worse a fortnight ago when I contracted an illness which might have been a heavy cold and might have been flu. Apart from the usual symptoms — effluvium in the head, catarrh on the chest, aches and pains all over — I have been listless, exhausted, lacking in energy or enthusiasm for anything. I’ve been going to bed at nine in the evening and sleeping for twelve hours, plus a two-hour nap in the afternoons. I think I’m getting over it now: both the illness and the depression. There’s no rational excuse for being depressed, but then everyone knows that depression isn’t rational. Perhaps it’s a long-drawn-out response to Mike’s death. Perhaps it’s the lacuna I’m in at the moment, with no big projects on. Perhaps it’s the hardening certainty that the effect my whole life has had on the outside world is insignificant.

Two great Cambridge scientists have died in the last few days: Sir John Sulston and Stephen Hawking. Both were born in 1942, nine years before me. There isn’t much time left, their deaths seemed to be telling me. John’s death was a shock to me, since I had the privilege of meeting and working with him briefly when he delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures while I was the commissioning editor in charge of them at Channel 4. He had led the UK side of the transatlantic team which mapped the human genome. He fought fearlessly and successfully for the idea that this epoch-making discovery should be shared freely with whoever in the world could understand it; and so the draft of the sequence which makes up human DNA was published on the internet in 2003, fifty years after Crick’s and Watson’s discovery. Though our collaboration was brief — a couple of weeks — we somehow seemed to understand each other, to know that our view of the good society was the same. He always enjoyed a pint or two after his lectures, and I once told him in the pub that ‘I got it’ that scientific research should be available to the world at large, which had after all paid for it through people’s taxes, rather than privatised, as his American rival Craig Ventner had wanted to do. ‘I know you do,’ he said. So it didn’t surprise me to read in the obituaries that John was a lifelong socialist who said that you shouldn’t do things just for the money, and that his parents, like mine, had been religious people who had bred in him a sense of the importance of personal integrity and a disdain for the accumulation of wealth for its own sake. As with me, John had completely abandoned the religious element of his upbringing, but had retained his parents’ moral values. He was the most delightful, humorous, modest, approachable man, always stressing the importance of collaboration in the endeavour of discovery. I’ve met perhaps four people in my life for whom I would reserve the word ‘great’ (in its conventional sense, that is; I used the word in its more generous, old-fashioned and inclusive sense at Mike’s funeral): John, Seamus Heaney, Harold Pinter and Harold Rosen. Of the four, I think it will be John, through his work as a geneticist and his insistence that the findings of the research he led should be freely available to all, who will bring the most obvious benefit to humankind in the future. He died of stomach cancer, only a month after the disease was diagnosed.

Stephen Hawking was of course much better known to the general public than John was. I take on trust the assertion that he may have made the greatest contribution to unravelling the fundamental mysteries of the universe — how it came into being, how quantum mechanics and Einstein’s relativity can be linked, what black holes are and what they do — since Einstein himself. Nor can we doubt the profoundly beneficial effect he has had on popular perceptions of disability and of what disabled people can achieve. His stout championship of the NHS and his publicly expressed regret about Brexit are admirable too. But I think that John’s work in biology will yield greater practical good.

I attended a conference of the London Association for the Teaching of English last Saturday. The conference was about research, and was entitled ‘Becoming our own Experts’. I only found out about the event by chance, and I thought that someone might have mentioned to me that they were using the title of our book as the title of the conference. But when I got there, it was gratifying to hear the first main speaker, John Yandell, praise the work warmly as a landmark in teacher-initiated research, which had affected other work subsequently. Other people said affirming things to me as well. One head of department told me that my alternative English curriculum was the basis for all his department’s work, and that he was promoting it to other schools in his area. So I returned from the conference feeling more cheerful than I had for weeks, went to the pub for a deserved pint, opened The Guardian and read that John had died. It knocked me back again. A fragile little thing, life!

I’m helping to organise a memorial event for Mike. It’ll be on 21 May, I think, but we’re having trouble finding a venue which is affordable and big enough. I’m hoping that we can use the same room at King’s College London which we used for the London launch of the purple booklets in 2015.

Two weeks ago we had a bout of savagely cold weather: much colder than even the chilliest ‘cold snap’ which we expect once a year. Snow was heavy on the ground even here in London. In other parts of the country villages and isolated houses and farms were cut off for days by huge snowdrifts. Since then the weather has been wet and mild, with some sunny mornings feeling spring-like. More cold weather is promised for the weekend: winter’s last fling.

Mary, Jacques and Tess went to New Zealand last month. They drove around both islands in the converted bus which Andy keeps there. They had a great time. Mary and Jacques returned on Monday, leaving Tess to work in Wellington for a few weeks. Mark Leicester has kindly arranged for his neighbour Janet to accommodate Tess while she’s living there. She’s been sending her CV around to prospective employers. Everyone seems confident that she’ll find a job quickly. Her English is now almost perfect. She’s applied to the university at Aix-en-Provence (languages or English) and the Sorbonne (cinema), to start in September.

The Sunday before last, we drove to Bury St Edmunds for two nights with David and Heather Loxton. We had a lovely time there, including a terrific concert at The Apex, the new concert hall in Bury. The Britten Sinfonia with Jonathan Denk performed Stravinsky, Milhaud and Gershwin. The next day a country road narrowed by snow caused a speeding white van to smash the offside wing mirror of our left-hand-drive car as we passed: £400 to replace it. We left the car at the Renault garage in Bury and returned to London on the train. I went back today to collect the car. Heather told me on the phone yesterday that she’s finally retiring from teaching at Easter. I told her, and I meant it, that she’s the best classroom teacher I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a few.

Tonight we’re going out to dinner with my god-daughter Clare Harrisson and her boyfriend Kieren, whom I haven’t met. They’re both Labour activists. Clare works for Unison, the trade union, and is a councillor in Tower Hamlets.

On Sunday 4 March in Salisbury a former Russian double agent and his daughter were poisoned by a chemical weapon. They are both still critically ill in hospital. British experts in chemical weapons have identified the substance as novichok, which was developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. So it seems certain that either the Russian state committed the attack deliberately, or that the substance had got out of Russia’s control and into the hands of criminals. Russia of course denies all knowledge of the affair. The USA, France and Germany have joined the UK in condemning the attack. The UK is expelling 23 Russian diplomats, identified as ‘undeclared intelligence officers’, increasing checks on private flights, customs and freight going into and coming out of Russia, freezing Russian state assets where ‘there is evidence they may be used to threaten life or property in the UK’, and suspending all planned high-level bilateral contacts. No minister or member of the Royal Family will attend the forthcoming football World Cup in Russia (Prince William is President of the Football Association). Russia will of course retaliate. No one believes anything that any senior Russian says these days, about anything much. Russia has become a state so used to lying that the difference between truth and falsehood hardly exists. Putin will win Sunday’s election easily, because he has crushed, intimidated or exterminated any opposition. The official media is ubiquitous and utterly tamed. The common people have no access to anything like independent journalism.

I can understand that spying is a dangerous game, and that betraying your own country while spying is doubly dangerous. But to use a chemical weapon for the first time on European soil since the Second World War in order to attempt to kill a man, to be willing also to kill his daughter, who I imagine is completely innocent of spying offences, to be willing to endanger the lives of equally innocent British citizens, including the policeman who went to help the stricken couple, is the work of a rogue state. I’m inclined to agree with a no-nonsense letter published in The Guardian yesterday, which criticises Jeremy Corbyn’s initially equivocal response to the outrage (he has somewhat hardened his tone since):

‘Jeremy Corbyn’s response to Mrs May was totally inadequate. Novichok agents were never standardised and weaponised for military deployment by the Russians. Any stocks probably exist in only one research institute which is one of the most, perhaps even the most, secure place in Russia. The idea that “rogue” elements got hold of the material is a complete fantasy. This action was done by the Russian state on the direct instructions of Putin. There is absolutely no other remotely credible explanation…

This is attempted murder using a poison which would have a role as a chemical weapon in warfare but the attack in Salisbury is not a use of chemicals in war. The reference [to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] is a complete red herring created by the Russians for which Corbyn has fallen hook, line and sinker. As for sharing samples with the Russians, that is akin to sharing the evidence of a murder with the murderer. Corbyn’s question about the analysis is also confused. The identification of the agent as a novichok agent means that it is adequately characterised. Since the country that invented and developed these agents is Russia, its source is Russia and since an ex-Russian agent is the target, to claim there is any ambiguity is ludicrous.’

I’m not sure how Mr Cookson, the writer of the letter, can be so sure that rogue elements could not have got hold of the material, given the chaotic state of Russia in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, but otherwise his argument convinces me.

Meanwhile, London is awash with corrupt Russian money. Wealthy Russians have given large sums to the Conservative Party. We have thus colluded in the giant rip-off of Russia’s wealth which has occurred since the end of the Soviet Union. I don’t know what we can do about Russia other than to isolate it to such an extent that it finally occurs to its people that the nineteenth-century idea of greatness which Putin and his criminal circle have promoted — enlarging power by stealing land from other countries and subverting the democratic processes of other countries — is no way to increase their wealth and happiness.

It’s the ninth anniversary of my father’s death.

We’ve been here for a week now, since Good Friday. After several days of continuous rain, the sky cleared yesterday morning and I’ve been able to do quite a bit in the garden, making up for the fact that I didn’t do any pruning when we were here at Christmas and New Year, partly because the weather was dreadful then too and also because we returned to England early for Mike’s funeral. This afternoon, as I sat on the bench in front of the house with my tea and bread and jam, the sun was positively warm on the face. I’m told it won’t last.

I’ve done two poems recently, to my great relief: a simple little thing about a chance meeting I had with a Nigerian woman who was carrying a huge bunch of palm fronds, no doubt to her church, two days before Palm Sunday; and a literary thing (as Rosalind in As You Like It might have said of it, it’s ‘not for all markets’) contrasting statements by two great poets about whether or not poetry has any effect on the world — Auden’s ‘For poetry makes nothing happen’ and Shelley’s ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world’. I’m pleased with both poems, in different ways. The palm fronds one came so quickly that I was a bit embarrassed. The literary one took a lot more effort, and Peter Hetherington was wonderful, as he always is when I call upon him as critic.

I’ve spent a good deal of time with Kate Myers since Mike’s death. We’ve postponed from May until November the memorial event we’ve been planning. It will be held at Kings College London, as I had hoped, but that was only confirmed just before Easter, not long enough before May to get the invitations sent out. Also, Kate was feeling more and more that she would still be a bit too fragile in May.

I’ve updated the little memoir on my website. I looked at it a few weeks ago and realised that it stopped in 2012. Quite a lot has happened since then. I’ve been wondering whether it would be worth making it into a book.

Tonight Helen is taking me out to Le Vivier at Lomener. It’ll be a treat to sit and eat and gaze over the sea on this spring evening.

There was much more rain after last Friday, then two days of sunshine and warmth yesterday and today, culminating in a thunderstorm as I write. Yesterday I sat on the terrasse reading Ovid, and was positively hot.

Last weekend the Syrian government, probably with the agreement of the Russians, used chemical weapons against its own people in Douma, a town east of Damascus, the last area of opposition to Assad. In 2013, as I’m sure I wrote at the time, Assad did a similar thing. Obama said then that this was a red line that could not be crossed, but didn’t follow up on his threat. The monster Assad promised to get rid of his chemical weapons, making himself briefly look virtuous. Russia saw that the West wasn’t going to do anything serious to overthrow Assad, and moved in. Assad was obviously lying about the weapons. It was the only big foreign-policy mistake that Obama made. This time I think that there will be a military response to the outrage, and I support it. It is to the Labour Party’s shame that it brought about a defeat in the House of Commons in 2013 for Cameron’s proposal to join with the US in striking at Syria’s chemical weapons production. Rogue states cannot be allowed to use these dreadful weapons and expect to get away with it. It’s a hopeless irony that I’m prepared to support the appalling Trump in taking this action, and that he probably will fulfil his threat, as Obama did not. There should definitely be a debate in the Commons, and I think Theresa May would win it this time, and it could happen in the next day or two. Parliament might have to be recalled from its Easter recess; that is a minor inconvenience compared to the gravity of the crime committed, so far with impunity.

Russia continues to lie over the poisoning of the former Russian spy and his daughter. The daughter is now out of hospital, and at a secret location for fear that someone will try to finish her off this time. The father is still in hospital, closely guarded, I’m sure. The Russians continue, absurdly, to suggest that the British might have been the poisoners. Because the daughter is a Russian citizen, they keep demanding consular access to her. She quite rightly doesn’t want to see anyone from her country at the moment. Her cousin has been prominent on Russian television, and is obviously being used by the Kremlin to give a personal touch to their fabrications. I imagine that father and daughter will in the end be given new identities and move to another country. But their lives will never be entirely free from threat. I feel particularly for the young woman, who I don’t imagine had anything to do with spying, but who happened to be with her father when someone tried to kill him.

On Monday we ate at L’Art Gourmand, and booked a big table there, probably for sixteen people, for Helen’s 70th birthday in August. On Tuesday we dined with Jean-Paul and Christine: raclette, her Swiss speciality. Today I went round there again and gave Jean-Paul a card and a bottle of claret for his birthday.

We returned to London in mid-April, after a fortnight here, and arrived here once again on 4 June. In the interim, Helen did her day or two days a week at St Dominic’s primary school. She has agreed with Deirdre, the headteacher there, that she’ll do another November-to-May stint next school year; after that she’s not sure. She enjoys the work (apart from getting up in the dark at six during the winter months), and the money’s handy. But it may be that she’ll stop after next year. Primary schools’ budgets are increasingly strained, and sometimes she thinks that she’s too expensive. On the other hand, Deirdre obviously values her presence enormously, as an adviser and friend at hand in the sometimes difficult decisions she has to make.

Betty Rosen has published a book of her poems and autobiographical prose. It’s called I Have a Threepenny Bit. The title poem delightfully describes the pure childhood happiness of being given a threepenny bit by her piano teacher’s mother for playing well. I edited the book for her, and Chalkface Press published it. Stephen Mellor did his usual wonderful design job. I went to the numismatist in Cecil Court and bought a couple of 1935 twelve-sided threepenny bits. I took them down to Len Brown, who’s a brilliant photographer. He photographed one of the coins (both sides) for the front and back covers. Betty organised a launch at her house on 28 April. About 40 people were there, from all parts and periods of her life. It was a happy occasion. Betty drank rather a lot, which she never normally does. She read two of her poems with great theatricality, and I read a few paragraphs from one of her prose pieces.

Kate Myers has published a little book of Mike Raleigh’s poems. Again, I edited it and again Stephen designed it, though this time on a private basis, not as Chalkface Press. Mike didn’t write many poems; the only two published previously appeared in Yesterday Today Tomorrow, an anthology oƒ poems mainly by and entirely about women, produced by the ILEA English Centre in the early 1980s. (Mike, Yevgeny Yevtushenko and I were the only male poets included. Mike and Yevtushenko both died last year.) But he did write occasional pieces, especially for birthdays; and he wrote Kate a love poem on each of the six anniversaries of the day in October when he and she became ‘more than friends’.

On the subject of editing, I also edited a book put together by David Parker, my old friend from Channel 4 and Teachers TV days. It’s a collection of sound recordings of conversations he had with Laurie Lee, in the course of making a TV programme about the writer’s life and his connection with the village in Gloucestershire where he lived.

UK politics has recently been dominated by an appalling scandal, in which some of the people who came to our country from the Caribbean between 1948 and 1973, at the invitation of our government and to help rebuild the country after the war, have been told that they have no right to be here. The group affected are people who’ve never applied for a passport, because they’ve never left the country since arrival. Most of them are poorer people, doing humbler but essential jobs, paying taxes, leading quiet, regular lives. When Theresa May was Home Secretary, she declared that she wanted illegal immigrants to experience a ‘hostile environment’ in the UK. These innocents of Caribbean origin have been caught up in the practical effects of that declaration. A particularly malevolent aspect of the legislation introduced after May’s declaration is that actual or potential employers of people working or seeking work, and actual or potential landlords of people renting accommodation or seeking rented accommodation, have been recruited as spies for the government; they check an employee’s or an applicant’s immigration status, and can be fined heavily if found to be employing or housing people who have no right to be here.

Members of the ‘Windrush generation’ have been sacked, refused work, refused housing, locked up in detention centres, threatened with expulsion from the country, refused a passport when they eventually applied for one (which in many cases they did in order to visit their country of origin to attend a family funeral). Some years ago, the agency of the Home Office responsible for immigration destroyed the documents (‘landing slips’) which had previously been used to prove a person’s right to remain in the UK indefinitely.

The scandal cost Theresa May’s successor as Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, her job, when she misled a parliamentary committee as to whether or not there were numerical targets for the removal of people from the UK (she said there weren’t; there were). She had previously criticised her own department in parliament, even though it had been enacting the policies which she and her predecessor had required and were requiring. That’s usually a fatal error for a minister to make: if you blame your officials for doing what you’ve told them to do, don’t expect them to help you dig yourself out of a hole. Theresa May herself, with disgusting hypocrisy and lack of historical memory, while regretting the whole affair and promising to put it right, said that we had ‘welcomed the Windrush generation’. ‘No blacks, no dogs, no Irish,’ the notorious posters in the windows of boarding houses and cheap hotels in the 1950s and 1960s, was the ‘welcome’ for many who arrived in the ‘mother country’ in those years, full of hope. They read or heard about Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’ speech. I remember Stephen Eyers telling me that, when he was working at Henry Thornton School in Clapham in the 1960s, a teacher came into the staff room, having just conducted a test with one of his classes, and announced with scornful astonishment, ‘Do you know, a black boy came top!’

The scandal has now dropped from the headlines; I think the injustices are slowly being put right. In classic British fashion, and with no great sense of irony, there was a service in Westminster Abbey this week to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the arrival of Empire Windrush from Jamaica in 1948, and to celebrate the contribution of people of Caribbean origin to our society.

The enquiry into the Grenfell Tower disaster has heard heart-breaking testimony from survivors and relatives of those who died. This week, some of the courageous firefighters who were there that night have told their story. I really hope that eventually some people, whether Kensington and Chelsea councillors or executives of the Tenant Management Organisation to which the council had delegated management of the block, will be tried in court for manslaughter and criminal negligence. I have no doubt that Kensington and Chelsea’s Conservative councillors have always found the presence of poorer people on their territory an irritation they’d rather be rid of; hence their decision to divest themselves of direct responsibility for publicly-owned housing in the borough. Someone took a decision to install cheaper, potentially flammable cladding around the block when a more expensive non-inflammable cladding had previously been considered. That decision led directly to 72 deaths.

The government remains utterly divided as to what kind of relationship we wish to have with the EU after we leave it. The 27 other members of the EU see no clarity in our position at all. There is to be a meeting of the Cabinet at Chequers next week, to see whether some kind of unified UK position, likely to be acceptable to the 27, can be achieved. I doubt it, unless the extreme Brexiteers resign or are sacked.

The bill to incorporate EU law into UK law received royal assent this week. The Commons overturned all the amendments which the Lords had put into the bill. The Prime Minister has the following things going for her: no one on the Tory side wants another snap election, because they fear they would lose this time; almost no one on the Tory side wants to challenge May’s leadership, because that would look chaotic to the country, and increase the chances of Labour winning in 2022 or beforehand; and although there are a few Tory Europeans prepared to vote against the government, there are also a few Labour anti-Europeans prepared to vote with it.

There will soon be a White Paper which will set out the UK’s negotiating position with the EU. I fail to see how anything short of a customs union of some kind, whatever it’s called, will guarantee our future prosperity and solve the problem of the Irish border. Big employers like Nissan, BMW and Airbus are serious about moving out unless frictionless trade with Europe remains.

Here, we have had two weeks of the most glorious weather. It’s high summer, and hot, but with a refreshing breeze. I sit out in front of the house in the evening, under the light, reading until late. After a long interruption, I’m back into Montaigne’s Essays; I’m over a thousand pages in, and there are still more than two hundred to go. Recently I read, with great pleasure, Stendhal’s The Red and the Black (in English). Before that, Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (Loeb parallel text). And I’m still making my way through the whole of Ovid. I’m glad to say that, after a gap of several years, I’ve done a translation which I’ve entered for the Stephen Spender Prize: two successive Ovid elegies in Amores book 2, which I’ve turned into one poem. In the first part, the poet complains indignantly at his mistress’s accusations of infidelity; he is particularly offended at her suggestion that he is carrying on with the maid who dresses her hair. In the second, he chides the maid for perhaps revealing the affair that they are in fact having. He presses her to go to bed with him again, and when she refuses, he threatens to reveal the whole thing to the mistress. Here’s the poem, plus the commentary which the judges ask for.

A couple of weeks ago, I did this little villanelle for Helen:

Bronwyn and Stephen were with us for a week soon after we arrived. They would have been here for Helen’s 70th birthday, but brought their visit forward because they have to be in Melbourne in July and August; Alix is expecting a baby. So we had an early celebration. They gave Helen two lovely pieces of Clarice Cliff pottery — a teapot and a milk jug — and took us out to Le Vivier on 10 June. Six days later, after they had left, Helen took me there again for my birthday.

We have had the best summer weather here since 2003; in fact, better than then. 2003 was a summer of relentless heat. This year, long periods of heat have been punctuated every few weeks by bursts of refreshing rain. Now, as so often in the latter part of August, we have steady, calm warmth, easy to be in.

Helen’s 70th birthday was a great success. Mary, Jacques, Tess, Glenda, Julian and Deirdre were here for it; they stayed for several days. On the evening before the birthday, we all dined here, together with Jean and Annick. On the evening itself, a Saturday, the ten of us, plus Aurélie and Jérôme (Helen’s hairdresser and her husband), Jean-Paul and Christine (our gardener and his wife), and Dominique and Jocelyne (the friends who used to farm at Saint Guénaël, and who came to Rodellosso last year) dined at L’Art Gourmand. We had the restaurant to ourselves; the food was delicious; it was an evening of perfect happiness. Helen had lots of presents. I gave her a necklace which she had chosen from the jeweller in San Francisco she discovered when we were there seven years ago, and which they shipped over.

David and Tom James came for a week after the other guests had gone. More feasting; a trip to the seaside; a day at Port-Louis, visiting the Musée de la Compagnie des Indes. The two of them played golf three times. They left on Sunday. Tom is looking forward to going to York University to read history. (And, equivalently, Tess is looking forward to going to Aix-Marseille University at Aix-en-Provence to study English, Spanish and Chinese. What bliss!)

I mentioned in the last entry that I’ve been reading Montaigne’s essays.  I finished them a few weeks ago. They are an extraordinary, massive series of thoughts on all aspects of life: personal, sexual, political, theological, philosophical. Montaigne continually draws on his extensive knowledge of classical authors. He is often referred to as a great humanist, and I suppose he is, in the sense that very few people before him had written about the human condition in such a direct and lively way. But he was also a devout Catholic. Some of his remarks about women belong entirely to his time; on the other hand he is clear that women are sexual and emotional beings and have a right to sexual and emotional pleasure. In the third book, there’s a long essay called ‘On some lines of Virgil’.  The lines referred to are from the eighth book of the Aeneid, where Venus embraces a human man.  The essay is about human sexuality.  I came upon this passage:

I thought: I can do something with that, so I wrote this little comic number.

In early July we had a wonderful week in the Tarn, where we spent five days with David and Heather Loxton. They were staying near Gaillac, for the wedding of the son of a friend.  By pure coincidence, the wedding was held in a magnificent chateau only half an hour away from a house belonging to another friend of David’s, which they had borrowed and where we stayed in some grandeur.  It’s a magnificent region: wooded, hilly, covered by vineyards, and with ancient bastides — small fortified towns — every few kilometres.  The bastides tend to have beautiful arcaded squares in the middle, and these tend to have restaurants where one can sit and sip the local wine and generally think the life has dealt us a pretty good hand.

Because David is handicapped at the moment — he has lung cancer (which, thank God and the NHS, he’s keeping at bay) and he needs a new hip — I drove them about.  On the way home after our week, we stopped at Agen, as we tend to every year, staying in our usual hotel and drinking aperitifs in our usual cafe in the square.  Then we went to our usual excellent little restaurant, only to find, despite it being a Tuesday not a Monday, that the restaurant was closed exceptionally. The owners didn’t think that they would get any customers that evening because it was the semi-final of the World Cup: France v. Belgium.  So there was only one thing for it: walk along to the one-star Michelin restaurant and throw ourselves on the mercy of the madame there, who was of course quite happy to show us to a delightful table in the garden, under the trees, where we ate and drank like king and queen amid the discreet company of French people who have priorities other than football.  Over the wall of this seclusion, however, was the fan zone for supporters watching the match on the big screen, and we could tell from the howls of triumph that France had won.

When we got back here the next day, we watched England’s impressive and unlikely run in the competition come to an end, and a few days later joined our neighbours Jean and Annick for that rather extraordinary final, after which France was in a state of euphoria for a few days.  The mood has worn off now.

I wrote a sonnet commemorating our visit to a little town near Albi for its Sunday morning market.  Here it is.

I’ve decided to have a go at translating some Rilke.  I haven’t done anything from the German until now, and in the Afterword to Bring Me the Sunflower I mention the significance of my coming across, as a teenager, Leishman’s and Spender’s translation of Duino Elegies on my father’s bookshelf.  I made neither head nor tail of the poems at the time, I seem to remember, but they stirred something in me which, decades later, caused me to begin to translate the work of greater poets than I.  Having a go at the poet who started me off seems a proper thing to do.  (And Seamus Heaney translated two Rilke poems: the one about the apple orchard and the one about the boy coming out of his burnt-down house. Wonderful work.) I’ve only done five pieces so far, but I’ll try to do a dozen or so, including Rilke’s great, freer-verse poem about Orpheus and Eurydice.  His version has Eurydice being accompanied out of the underworld by Hermes. She is dead, though able to walk, so she’s not conscious of the poignancy of the moment when Orpheus turns around, which makes a good contrast with Virgil’s version which I’ve translated. For my birthday Betty Rosen gave me Orpheus: the Song of Life by Ann Wroe. Very good indeed, although in style a little too lush for my taste. But I was grateful for the information in the book, especially about Rilke’s preoccupation with the Orpheus myth and the circumstances in which he wrote Sonnets to Orpheus.

Disappointing news: My Proper Life got nowhere with the Forward Prize; all the nominated entries were from big publishers.  I had hoped also to enter the book for the Costa Prize, but Chalkface Press was prevented from doing so because it isn’t a UK-based publisher.  I tried to argue that it’s a publisher with a UK address, but apparently you have to show the address where you’re registered for tax purposes, and that is in Australia.  Bronwyn has looked for equivalent competitions in Australia which we might enter, but without success.  Maybe my Ovid will get somewhere with the Stephen Spender Prize.

On the other hand, I’ve had a hilarious communication from an American called Kenneth Rosen (no relation to the British Rosens I know or knew), who had come across my website.  He was particularly taken with the Hugo translations.  He wrote to me as follows:

‘I sent you a fan letter per your website. Ordered My Proper Life via Amazon USA. Enjoy nibbling on your imitations and translations thanks to all that utterly estimable work represented by website table of contents, but would much prefer the risk of exposing Bring Me the Sunflower to my turmeric- and cocoa-laced golden coffee than squinting at my cellphone screen at [here he gives his address in Portland, Maine].

This past Friday I read your translation of Hugo’s ‘La Vache’ to a gaggle of old ganders who meet Fridays for the consolations of our unquenchable geriatric aspirations, joined on this occasion by a somewhat long in the tooth goose, a soi-disant Francophone Studies (i.e. evils of colonialism) professor at a private college 25 miles north of here, who hadn't read any Hugo, steadily flashed her excellent teeth, flaunted her ringless left hand and fluttered her long dark eyelashes through lunch and poem, which provoked I thought a tableful of sweet postprandial tranquility, including said French professor’s not unattractively roiling inner syrup and lava, whose antipathies to Eurocentrism I’d evidently evaded by my fervent reading of ‘The Cow’ and astute ironical silliness. Afterwards one of the rising or not yet quite there ROMEOS (retired old men eating out), asked for an link to your version, which I swiftly provided, and I’ve posted the poem, credited per your instructions, on my pitiful Facebook page. Shame on me, but that's the news from Portland, Maine, and so, ciao for now.’

I wrote back that I was so pleased by his email that I would send him my two books free of charge, which I’ve done.

The correspondence with Kenneth Rosen continued for some time. He turns out to be a significant published poet. He sent me two of his books in return for the ones I sent him.

I did do a translation of Rilke’s ‘Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes’. I sent it to Peter Hetherington and to Paul Ashton. They were both very complimentary. Peter said that he thought it was the best thing I’ve done. I must say, I’m pleased with it.

Towards the end of August, Deirdre came back and stayed with us for a few days. Jean-Paul and Christine had given Helen tickets for a cruise on the Odet, from Bénodet up towards Quimper, as a birthday present. So we took the cruise with Deirdre, and very beautiful it was. The day after Deirdre left it was the fête de Saint Guénaël, and as ever I sold the wine, cider and water for the diners — more than 1,100 euros taken in about three hours. Last year it rained solidly all day, but this year the weather was perfect: hot but not oppressively so. The event was a great success. About 700 people dined; there were traditional Breton games in the afternoon; the bar did a roaring trade. I helped with the clearing-up the following morning. Overall takings amounted to about 13,000 euros, of which about 7,000 euros are profit. The little chapel will be well looked after.

Then, the following day, we started on the trip which we are now about halfway through. We crossed France slowly, staying at Issoudun (made famous by Balzac in La Rabouilleuse, which I haven’t read and will), then near Macon. We ate a delicious meal just across the Sâone at Saint Laurent. Thence to the Mont Blanc tunnel, emerging into the Aosta valley for the first time since the 1980s, when it was usually our first stop in Italy. We stayed for three nights in a charmingly eccentric, slightly hippy-ish agriturismo, surrounded by rabbits, turkeys, hens, guinea fowl, sheep and a donkey. On successive days, we drove up three of the side valleys into the mountains. We left the car as far up the Val di Rhêmes as cars are allowed, then walked for a couple of hours in the direction of the glacier at the top of the valley, but stopped and turned back when we realised how far it was. Even this mild exertion had given me a keen appetite, and we lunched enthusiastically in the little restaurant above the car park. I ate an entire plate of lardo (cured pig fat) with honey and walnuts. I have a tendency to go for dishes which I’ve never tried before. It was an unwise choice. Although I wasn’t ill, my stomach registered a grumbling surprise at having to deal with such a quantity of pure fat, and I ate nothing that evening and had to go to bed early. I was fine the next day, when we drove up the valley which leads to the Matterhorn (Monte Cervino), a mountain I have always wanted to see.  We walked beneath the stupendously beautiful giant for half an hour, in bright sunshine.  Sublime.

Last Sunday we had a long drive down the valley, into Piedmont, across the Po valley to Mantua. Approaching the city, it was clear that something special was going on.  The place was packed.  It turned out to be the last day of a literature festival, one of the most famous in Italy.  The local paper the following day said that about 110,000 people had visited. Mantua is Virgil’s birthplace (at least, it is the town nearest to the village where he was born). The young woman on the reception desk in the hotel asked if we knew about Virgil, and when I told her that not only did I know something about him, but that I had translated some of his poetry, and that, in fact, my book of translations was in my bag, and I was going to make her a present of it, she was — though I say it myself — impressed. Her English was evidently good enough for her to make some sense of my efforts. Virgil is everywhere commemorated in Mantua. There is of course a Piazza Virgiliana, with an enormous classical statue of the poet at one end. Helen photographed me in front of it. The learned society is called the Accademia Nazionale Virgiliana; it has been going, under various names, for about 500 years, since the time of the Gonzaga dynasty.

And, to extend the coincidences, we also just missed a performance of translations into Italian of the poetry of Rilke. The following day the place was quiet, apart from the noise of stages and scaffolding being taken down. Helen bought me the poetry of Leopardi and Saba, and — as a curiosity — Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern in parallel English and Italian text.  We lunched that day at the Osteria dell’ Oca, which we came across by chance, and which is obviously a local institution.  We ate the best risotto we’ve ever had, risotto all’ubriachi because it’s made with red Lambrusco.  

The town reminds me a little bit of the scenes in a film we enjoyed earlier this year, Call Me by Your Name: elegant people on old-fashioned sit-up-and-beg bicycles pedalling serenely around the flat streets, with dramatically beautiful ancient buildings as backdrops. We visited the Palazzo Ducale (huge — a monument to the power of the Gonzaga dynasty) and the exquisite Teatro Scientifico Bibiena, built between 1767 and 1769. Mozart, aged 14, performed there with his father on 16 January 1770.

I didn’t know that Monteverdi’s Orfeo was first performed in Mantua, in the Palazzo Ducale, on 24 February 1607. Monteverdi was master of music at Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga’s court. So Orpheus is following me around.

After three days in Mantua, we drove to the Colli Euganei, a little group of hills — volcanoes millions of years ago — about which I knew nothing, but which are extraordinarily beautiful and fertile.  The grape harvest was in full swing. And there are large olive groves (some of the trees have leaves of the classic grey-green kind, and some are of a kind I hadn’t seen before — their leaves are shiny, not matt, and the fruit is fatter, turning to dark brown, and must already be ripe, because I saw a woman picking some off her tree and putting them straight into her mouth).  

Then, to my total surprise and great delight, we discovered that the village of Arquà Petrarca, ten minutes’ drive from our agriturismo, is where Petrarch spent his last years, where he died on the eve of his seventieth birthday, and where he is buried.  We visited his house: very beautiful, and simply maintained.  You can see (behind glass) the actual chair which he was sitting on, reading a Latin text, and where he was discovered, lifeless, on the morning of 19 July 1374, with the book still in his hand.  And his tomb, outside the church down the hill, is terribly simple and dignified, with no great fuss, no excessive amount of signalling that this is where one of the great poets of Europe lies.  (I read that they did move his bones to a safer place during the last war, but put them back afterwards.)  Last year we visited his house in the Vaucluse; on two or three occasions we’ve been to the house in Arezzo where he was born.  So I’ve been following him around. The discovery has encouraged me to go back and see if I might do a few more Petrarchs once I’ve done enough Rilkes.

On the evening of the visit to Petrarch’s house, we went back to the little bar in the upper village of Arquà Petrarca for an aperitif, because we had liked the place so much when we had had coffee there in the morning. Driving up to the car park a hundred metres above the bar, we passed four men walking down. They were formally dressed, in suits and ties, despite the heat. I said to Helen, ‘Those men are important.’ When we got to the bar, there they were, having ordered aperol spritzi all round. The woman behind the bar was having difficulty getting ice out of a large plastic bag to cool their drinks. The men were the soul of courtesy and good humour. Eventually, after much banging and hammering, she detached some pieces of ice, and served them. They drank their drinks, looked around, wished everyone good evening, and left. Once they were gone, the woman looked at me and asked if I spoke Italian. ‘Enough,’ I replied. These had been top, top policemen, from Padua, she said, including the actual chief of police of the city. She was so embarrassed that she had had such difficulty serving them properly, with all that banging of the bag of ice on the counter. She needed to tell someone. We laughed; I told her not to worry. She thought that they might be going on to eat at an expensive restaurant outside the village.

The next day we drove to Padua. We visited the Scrovegni chapel, with its wonderful frescoes by Giotto, and wandered around that elegant city: the first visit for both of us. And yesterday we came to Rodellosso. This is our ninth year here, and the first alone. It will be something of a relief not to be the travel agent that I have been in previous years, when we’ve booked all five apartments for a fortnight and friends have come and gone and I’ve looked after them, although I always enjoyed doing that. But there were times when Helen thought that I was paying more attention to them than to her.

Two days ago I received the sad news that Ron Carter has died. It was expected; he had been afflicted by a rare cancer, a kind of sarcoma, which was diagnosed in the autumn of 2016. I loved and admired Ron very much. It was so fortunate that our lives were brought together during the LINC project in 1989. We were comrades-in-arms through the political turbulence of that experience. Then he arranged for me to have a Visiting Professorship at Nottingham University for three years. And we collaborated on other projects, including a booklet about English teaching for the British Council. I went to him for advice about the booklet on grammar in the Owen Education/UKLA series. He advised me to see whether Cambridge University Press, with which he had close connections, would publish a combined edition of the ten booklets. When CUP declined, he suggested Routledge. I know that he wrote a glowing account of the value of the booklets when asked to do so as a reader; that may well have been decisive in getting Routledge to publish the contents of the booklets as two books. And he wrote kind endorsements for the covers of the books, and for the Harold Rosen book too. His wife Jane sent a brief email with the news, saying that Ron had wanted neither a funeral nor a memorial event. I wrote back this morning:

Two days after I last wrote, on the Tuesday morning of our stay at Rodellosso, Alessandra, who is Claudio’s business partner in running the place, brought the terrible news that Claudio had suffered a heart attack while bicycling on the Sunday morning (it must have already happened by the time I was writing the last entry), and was in an induced coma in hospital in Siena. The doctors had performed a heart by-pass operation, but there is serious brain damage, and Claudio is not expected to survive. Jacopo, his elder son, told me that under Italian law (I don’t know to what extent the law here is different from that in other European countries) the doctors are obliged to keep someone alive if there is any brain function at all, even if there is no chance of anything like a recovery.

Claudio was in great spirits when we arrived on the Saturday. He was so pleased to see us, and was immediately planning one of his evening suppers for the Rodellosso guests that week, plus the annual trip to Montalcino, to taste and buy some of Luciano Ciolfi’s wine at San Lorenzo. Alessandra and Jacopo didn’t want any of the other guests, who were staying for the first time, to know what had happened, but of course they had to tell us. So the rest of the week was strange: the usual pleasures, without the responsibility of looking after friends, but this overwhelming sadness and a sense of waiting for the inevitable. More than once I said, ‘Is there hope?’ They were sure that there is none. That is the situation still.

The only English friends I’ve told are Glenda and Julian Walton, with whom we stayed last weekend in Umbria (more on that in a moment). I shall wait until Claudio dies — or, hoping against hope, makes some sort of recovery — before telling the other people who have come with us to Rodellosso. Extraordinary: there I was telling Claudio about Mike Raleigh’s death from a heart attack, and the next day Claudio suffered the same fate, the only difference being that Mike departed almost immediately, and Claudio is lingering. He will leave Lucia, his wife, his sons Jacopo and Matteo, and his mother Rina. Alas.

I hope we shall go back to Rodellosso next year (it would be our tenth year there) but how the business will carry on, if it will, is uncertain.

Last Saturday we drove from there to Montefalco, in Umbria. We stayed at an elegant hotel, an 18th- and 19th-century villa in its own park, complete with cypresses, a loggia to catch the breeze, and a swimming pool for morning and evening exercise. It’s just outside the walls of the beautiful little town, which is jammed with visitors during the day, but somehow the buses take the crowds away about tea time, and in the evening the place is quiet, the locals emerge, and we tourists who like to think that we’re a cut above the common herd were able to admire the charm of the place. Glenda and Julian had decided to join us there as part of a week they’re having in Umbria and Tuscany.  On Sunday evening Julian and I walked around the town walls, with spectacular views south to Spoleto, east to Trevi and the main chain of the Appennines, north to Foligno and Spello, and west to the sunset.  On Sunday morning we drove to Spoleto. I’ve been there two or three times before, and was reminded what a noble, dignified, particular place it is, climbing up its hill.  When you get to the place where you suddenly look down on the cathedral square, the effect is breathtaking, since they’ve just finished cleaning the facade, and it dazzled in the morning sunshine.

Yesterday morning, before leaving the district, the four of us performed a sentimental hommage for Helen and me.  I don’t know whether or not I’ve ever mentioned in this diary that three times in the late 1970s, when Helen and I were teaching at Vauxhall Manor School, we took parties of students (all girls — it was a girls’ school) to Italy, in two 15-seat Ford Transit minibuses.  Having crossed France and Switzerland, we always started the Italian journey in Venice, thence moving south, variously over the three years, to Ravenna, Bologna, Florence, Arezzo, Foligno and Rome.  On the first year, we stayed in the youth hostel in Foligno. Helen and I were the de facto leaders of the party, and the three colleagues who were with us that year invited us to take the evening off, as a reward for our labours in planning and leading the trip.  They would look after the girls, they said.  We accepted the invitation, got into one of the minibuses, and drove off towards Spello, deciding, on a whim, to go up the mountain above the town to see if we could find a dinner in conditions of extreme remoteness.  Which we did, at a lovely little village called Collepino.  We arrived at the fall of night (this in springtime) and ate a wonderful dinner in the only restaurant there, all alone, before returning to our charges.  This was 42-and-a-half years ago.  

The rest of the story causes me to blush.  Parking the minibus outside the youth hostel, we immediately heard a sound which I can only describe as wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Our colleagues had let us down badly.  All being quiet in the youth hostel after the simple dinner there, they had decided to go out for a drink, leaving the girls to their own devices. These devices involved inviting the young men from the town fire brigade into the hostel, to enjoy a party generously irrigated by rough Umbrian red wine, which the hostel’s owner had made and which he supplied without stint. The result, acting on 16- and 17-year-old constitutions, most of which were contained in Caribbean bodies directed by minds imbued with Pentecostalism, was a religious catastrophe of a high order.  Deplorable scenes: hands raised to God for forgiveness, one maiden holding another’s head as she vomited, and the one girl who had abstained (Noreen Mitchell, who couldn’t read when she came to us at eleven, but who got a PhD at the age of 24, thanks to our and her efforts), moving amongst the crowd like a black female Old Testament prophet (I don’t think there were any of those), her right hand raised in judgement, declaiming to the prostrate penitent, ‘First you sin, then you suffer!’  And one of our colleagues was totting up the damage with the help of a clipboard on which he had drawn three columns: OK, Not OK, So-so.  As if that were any use!  Clearing-up operations finished at about three that morning, and the atmosphere in both buses, as we drove south the following day, was subdued.

Anyway, yesterday morning we went back to Collepino after those 42-and-a-half years, and it was just as beautiful as we remembered it.  The one bar/shop was officially closed (Monday) but the man who ran it, who was cleaning, made us a coffee.  The whole place is in pink stone, with narrow, secret-feeling little streets and one chapel.  The restaurant is still there, and we would have loved to eat there, but it was closed too.  Maybe next year.

Buggiano is a tiny place in the hills above Montecatini Terme.  There is no single Buggiano; the commune is a collection of hamlets variously called Colle di Buggiano, Buggiano Castello, Borgo di Buggiano…  We are at Colle.  Our hostess, Fulvia, is that kind of principessa of a certain age who might have been a prima ballerina in the Milan ballet until her retirement, with roses thrown from the stalls, some 20 years ago.  That is fiction, of course, but she did say that she’s been living in this quiet place for 20 years, and she sashays in silks in a way that suggests dance.  She also remarked yesterday that she finds it useful that from Pisa, only half an hour away, she can fly straight to New York.  I somehow imagine that as soon as she lands at JFK, a car picks her up and she’s in the stalls at the Met that evening.  All fantasy. Anyway, she makes delicious marmalade, peach jam and ricotta, which I ate for breakfast this morning.  Last night we ate in the only trattoria here; the food was simple but delicious, but something didn’t agree with Helen, so she’s confined to bed this morning with green tea.  As she says, the price of living with me is that sometimes her stomach says, ‘Hold [or rather, Don’t hold], enough!’

I’ve done one more Rilke translation: his famous poem about the carousel in the Jardin du Luxembourg. I shall keep going for a bit longer. Peter Hetherington suggests that I have a go at ‘Der Geist Ariel’.

Our hostess in Buggiano, who we thought might have been a ballet dancer, turned out to have been, in her younger years, a physical education teacher and an expert in martial arts.  So we weren’t far wrong. The room we slept in was covered with 200-year-old frescoes depicting flowers, birds (especially swallows, which had given the place its name — Le Rondini) and classical columns. Fulvia had discovered them after cleaning off three layers of paint. She had called in an expert, who looked at them and said, ‘Not Michelangelo, but not bad.’  

Helen recovered quickly from her illness, and on Wednesday we made the trip which was the reason for staying in that district in the first place.  We drove back a short distance towards Florence, to visit the town of Prato.  A few years ago, Helen and I both read Iris Origo’s book The Merchant of Prato. Iris Origo was the aristocratic Irish-American woman who, with her equally aristocratic Italian husband, had owned La Foce, south of Montepulciano. During the 1920s and 1930s they had improved the unpromising land being farmed by their fifty or so tenant farmers, and had built a school, a medical centre, and a social club for the workers. Her book War in Val d’Orcia is a remarkable diary of her and her husband’s courageous care for orphans during the war and, even more dangerous, support for partisans and allied soldiers who were moving behind the German lines as the front advanced slowly up Italy.  She also wrote a biography of Leopardi, which I haven’t yet read but will. The Merchant of Prato is about Francesco di Marco Datini, born 1335, died 1410.  He grew up in Prato, but moved to Avignon as a young man, where he began to make his fortune in the manufacture and supply of goods of all kinds.  He returned to Prato in middle age, and continued to expand in business so successfully that eventually he controlled a network of trade covering the whole of western Europe (including southern England) and northern Africa.  He founded a bank in Florence.  When he died, he left all his immense wealth to the poor of Prato (he was most particular that the church shouldn’t get its hands on it), for which he is still revered.  The gift was a kind of welfare-state provision for the area, centuries before the welfare state.  He had also instructed in his will that every item relating to his life and business dealings be preserved in the grand house which he owned in Prato.  So it was that Iris Origo was able to write a book giving a detailed picture of life in the town in the 14th and early 15th centuries.

For several years, we’ve been saying that we want to visit the house, which is open to the public.  It’s most impressive, although only the ground floor is accessible.  The rest of the building houses state archives containing all the Datini documents.  The displays downstairs are extensive and detailed enough to give a clear idea of the man’s life and work. There is one particularly touching display: a letter from his wife to him, dated 12 September 1402, she at home minding the shop, he somewhere travelling.  She senses that he is suffering from melancholy, and this saddens her.  He is not to worry about affairs at home; she has it all in hand.  Then: ‘Io avrei voglia di sapere se tu dormi solo o no; se non dormi solo, avrei caro di saper chi dorme con te.’ I presume that she is not suggesting that he’s sleeping with another woman; simply that, after the fashion of the time, he might be sharing a bed with another (male) traveller, who might possibly not be of the cleanest habits.  And a piece of profound wisdom to finish with: ‘Il bene e il male che noi abbiamo in questo mondo ce lo facciamo noi stessi.’ I don’t think we’ve improved on that, as a statement of our responsibilities towards each other and the planet, in the intervening 616 years.

We left the house and crossed the road to the cafe.  The owner rapidly questioned me about my origins, and when I explained what we had been doing, he said that a professor who had written a book about Datini was in the cafe, and he would like me to meet him.  The professor was summoned.  We shook hands and exchanged pleasantries.  ‘So,’ he said, ‘you have read my book?’  No, I explained, I had read the book by Iris Origo.  Our mutual affection immediately cooled by a few degrees. ‘That is a very old book,’ he said, ‘and mainly fantasy.’  ‘So,’ I asked rather bluntly, ‘is your book better?’ Naturally it was better, he replied, and I could buy it in Datini’s house opposite.  But I couldn’t, so I shall continue to rely on Iris Origo.

Prato is a magnificent medium-sized walled city, flat, with a handsome cathedral complete with frescoes by Filippo Lippi, and a splendid municipio dominating a square in which Datini’s statue proudly stands.  There were hardly any tourists there, perhaps because it’s so close to Florence, and people go straight to the more famous place.

The next day we drove to Marseille, including making a long detour because of the collapsed bridge at Genoa. We enjoyed the company of my family there, and in particular that of my great-nephew Paul, about whom I wrote a sonnet last summer.  He’s very entertaining.  He has a remarkable gift for heading balls and for throwing them with two hands just as if he’s taking a throw-in from a football touch line.  I have him lined up for the French World Cup team in 2038.

We’ve been back here since Tuesday. Today we have bright sunshine, warm enough when you’re directly in it, but with a wind from the north to remind you that it’s definitely autumn. I keep thinking of the Rilke poem, ‘Autumn Day’, which I translated when it was still summer:

We were at Kerfontaine for two and a half weeks after Italy and Marseille. I worked in the garden with Jean-Paul for several days. Now all the hedges are cut, all the fallen wood chopped and stored. There was so much wood that two other people, Alain (a neighbour) and Nicholas (Jean-Paul’s former employee), came and helped in the chopping, and the four of us took a quarter each.

The weather, at the end of this magnificent long summer and autumn, continued to be beautiful, with freshness in the morning and enough chill in the evenings for us to light the first fires. We drove back to London on Friday and Saturday of last week. On Monday night I flew down here for the annual task of interviewing candidates for the Ros Moger/Terry Furlong Scholarships which we offer through the Canon Collins Trust. To read the application forms is always inspiring and often heart-breaking. Earlier this year, our fund received two big donations: one of £10,000 from Anne Dobson, and one of £100,000 from an anonymous donor (the same person who has twice previously given us the same amount). These gifts have transformed the fund’s fortunes, just when we were beginning to wonder whether to wind it up and encourage our regular small donors to continue their contributions directly to the main Canon Collins fund. So there’s about £124,000 uncommitted in the pot at the moment, and tomorrow, in conversation with friends who run Canon Collins, I’ll spend quite a bit of it: perhaps up to half. When we started the fund, I used to say that we were a little boutique within the big Canon Collins supermarket. But the supermarket has shrunk since, and we now constitute a significant part of Canon Collins’ spending power.

Last year Helen and I stayed in the city centre. This year I’m at Medindi Manor in Mowbray, where the interviews took place yesterday. It’s a gracious old house turned into a small hotel, and I have a large elegant room with its own balcony. Springtime in the south! I remember writing about the shock of a warm wind in November in the poem ‘My Proper Life’, the first time I came to South Africa in 2003. Last night I went with my Canon Collins friends to a very good fish restaurant in Observatory. I had ceviche and then pasta in squid ink.

I wrote in March about being depressed, and I remember describing a similar feeling at this time last year, when we were at Bartholomeus Klip. I had another bout of listlessness two weeks ago at Kerfontaine. I go to bed at nine o’clock in the evening and stay there for twelve hours. I lie down on the bed in the afternoon. I can’t bring myself to read and write anything. I’ve now worked out why this mental state assails me from time to time. It’s because I’ve always, until recent years, cherished the delusion that my life and work were going to have some kind of significant effect on the world beyond my immediate circle of friends and colleagues. It’s the vanity which comes from having gone to an elite university. In recent years I’ve realised that my eventual lasting effect on the outside world will be insignificant and perhaps non-existent. It’s the process of coming to terms with that truth which is causing me these moments of lassitude.

On the other hand, sometimes encouragement breaks through. Lots of individual people have praised my books of poems, and many of them have done so with the sort of attention to detail which shows that they’re not just flattering me in order to get that little duty done. And when I got back to London and was opening the pile of accumulated post on Monday morning, there was a magnificent, prominent review of the two Routledge books in Teaching English, one of the journals of the National Association for the Teaching of English. Perhaps, after all, I’m helping a few teachers out there, people whom I’ll never meet, to see things more clearly and act more decisively, despite the retrogressive stupidities in the teaching and assessment of English imposed on them by the government.

I’ve done eight Rilke translations now: ‘The Swan’, ‘The Panther’, ‘The Carousel’, ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes’, ‘Autumn Day’, two sonnets about spring from Sonnets to Orpheus, and ‘The Spirit Ariel’. Peter Hetherington has been very complimentary about them. He’s compared them with other translations, some done by famous names, and he’s sure that they don’t suffer in the comparison. So, more encouragement there.

The Cape Town trip was successful. In all, we offered scholarships to 27 people, of which 11 will be paid for directly by the Ros Moger/Terry Furlong fund. Flying back at night, the beautiful half moon was lying on her back as we crossed the equator. Coming out of King’s Cross St Pancras Underground station a few hours later, at half past six in the morning, the same beautiful half moon was standing on her side.

Today is Sunday. On Thursday, Helen and I drove to Bedfordshire and stayed the night with Peter and Monica Hetherington. On Friday we came on here. After lunching with David James, I left Peter, Monica and Helen in David’s company, and went to the Unitarian Chapel in the High Street in Shrewsbury for a rehearsal for the reading of a selection of Wilfred Owen’s poems, to be given in the chapel the next day (yesterday). Owen, an Oswestry and Shrewsbury boy, was killed 100 years ago today, one week before the end of the First World War.

Andrew Bannerman, with whom I have performed many times, had organised a whole series of commemorations of Owen’s achievement to mark the centenary of his death, but he hadn’t been able to take control of this event as firmly as he would have liked, and I was worried, given the less than impressive quality of some of the other readers’ efforts at the rehearsal, that the performance next day was going to be something of a shambles.

I needn’t have worried. Overnight, Andrew composed a series of prose linkages for the poems to give the programme a shape, and the less than brilliant readers raised their game significantly from the previous day, and we gave about 100 people on Saturday morning, and about 50 on Saturday afternoon, an intense 75 minutes of that great poet’s extraordinary work: especially extraordinary when you consider how technically innovatory it is, and in how short a period of time it was composed. I read ‘Asleep’ and ‘Insensibility’ and part-read a couple of others. Last evening we dined at Carluccio’s in Shrewsbury, at Peter’s and Monica’s expense, and this evening we’re dining here. This morning we climbed the Lawley, my favourite Shropshire walk, before lunching at the Royal Oak at Cardington. Tomorrow we’ll return to London via Bedfordshire. Peter and Monica have been glad to be introduced to our Shropshire friends. Peter has particularly enjoyed meeting Julian, since they’re both Durham lads.

I’ve been reading a remarkable book called East West Street, by the international lawyer Philippe Sands. It concerns the city of L’viv (in Ukrainian), Lvov (in English after 1945), Lemberg (in German and Yiddish), Lwów (in Polish) or L’vov (in Russian), and the neighbouring small town of Zólkiew. It links the history of Sands’ Ukrainian Jewish family, including the murder of several of his forebears by the Nazis and his mother’s escape to Paris as a baby, with the fact that two lawyers, Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, also both Jewish, who, respectively, have given the world the concepts and terms ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide’, lived and worked in L’viv before emigrating, the one to England and the other to the USA. So it’s a mixture of the personal and the political, or the legal-political. Particularly extraordinary is the friendship which Sands established with the son of the member of the German high command, Hans Frank, responsible for the atrocities in that part of the Reich, and therefore ultimately the murderer of some members of Sands’ family, who was tried and executed at Nuremberg.

I’ve also read Iris Origo’s biography of Leopardi: an account of the life of a great poet who made an art of being miserable.

There is no quieter moment than nightfall on a Sunday in late November.

Today, the leaders of 27 EU countries agreed, in a matter of minutes, the legally binding document of nearly 600 pages which lays out the terms on which we shall leave the EU next March, and the 26-page aspirational document which sets out the broad parameters within which the EU and the UK will negotiate their future relationship.

This is a sad day for me, because I don’t believe we should ever have voted to leave the EU. The question shouldn’t have been put. We should have stayed, as a prominent member, and argued for improvements and reforms from within. The only reason we had a referendum in 2016 was because David Cameron thought that he could lance a boil which had been festering on the body of the Conservative Party for decades. He was deluded. Chamberlain: Munich; Blair: Iraq; Cameron: the 2016 referendum. All three Prime Ministers were deluded on those topics.

Once the referendum was lost, it was obvious that the UK would be in a weak position in our negotiations with a bloc six times our size, and determined that our exit should not encourage other members to peel off. So it has proved. But, having read the withdrawal agreement, I find myself a heretic vis-à-vis Labour’s official position. Labour says that the two documents represent a bad deal and that the party will vote against adopting them when Parliament debates the matter in a couple of weeks’ time. Because the Prime Minister also faces a substantial rebellion from within her own party — mainly from her right wing but also from some pro-European Tories who believe that we should have a closer relationship with the EU than that proposed in the documents, or who even hope that we could stay in the EU after all, following a second referendum in which the UK electorate changes its mind — it’s difficult to see at the moment how she is going to get the measure through.

For me, the sections of the withdrawal document on citizens’ right and on the cost of the divorce are not controversial. Nor are they the main area of controversy for most MPs, whatever their point of view on ‘remain’ or ‘leave’ (though there are a few lunatics who think that the UK should simply renege on our legally binding financial commitments, made as members of the EU). The controversy comes over Ireland. How historically appropriate that Britain’s oldest colony should be the last one causing us serious difficulty! Nobody wants a return to a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The only way to avoid that is to have frictionless trade across the border, as at present, and identical environmental, food-safety and other standards. The only way to achieve that, so far as I can see, is for the UK to remain in the existing customs union or to join a new customs arrangement which would amount to the same thing. Theresa May has foolishly ruled out remaining in the customs union, but has proposed that the two parties should try to work out a way of having frictionless trade and equivalence of standards during the ‘implementation period’ — the 21 months from the end of March 2019 until 31 December 2020. (There is the possibility that the implementation period could be extended by one or two years if more time were needed to agree the permanent relationship.)

If the details of a permanent relationship can’t be achieved by the end of 2020 (or possibly the end of 2021 or 2022 — though there will have to be a general election in May 2022, so I think the longest extension possible would have to cease before then), the UK would agree to be in a customs arrangement with the EU until such time as a permanent trading relationship could be settled. There would be common environmental, social and labour standards both in the temporary customs arrangement, if it were needed, and the eventual permanent relationship. Now, a customs union with common environmental, social and labour standards is what Labour officially wants. Theresa May is proposing, as a theoretical temporary expedient to which she hopes never to need to resort, exactly what Labour wants on a permanent basis. Of course I can see why right-wing Conservatives hate May’s compromise. But, given that all this argument is mainly about how we get out of the EU, and much less about the detail of our future permanent relationship, I can’t see why Labour is determined to vote against the government when what is being proposed is so close to what it says it wants. If, later, the detailed proposal for the permanent relationship were to be unsatisfactory, by all means vote against it then.

It doesn’t matter what I think. If the vote goes against the government next month, a number of scenarios open. We could leave the EU with no deal on 29 March 2019, and trade with the bloc thereafter on World Trade Organisation terms. There would be chaos, at least for a while. The Prime Minister could come back to Parliament after Christmas, with some revisions to her plan. That isn’t going to happen because the EU isn’t going to budge; the only revisions would be further concessions on the UK’s part, which would enrage her own rebels even more. (One drily humorous administrator in Brussels, when asked whether there was any possibility of the EU side making changes to the withdrawal agreement, said, ‘We could change the font.’) The Prime Minister could resign, bringing about a leadership contest. But a new leader would be faced with the same difficulties. There could be another early general election, despite the provisions of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act. That isn’t going to happen because another general election before May 2022 requires either a two-thirds majority voting for it in the House of Commons, or that the government loses a confidence vote. However much some right-wing Tories dislike Theresa May, they are not going to allow the possibility of a Labour victory before 2022. The interesting scenario revolves around amendments (and it was Labour, and Keir Starmer in particular, who saw to it that there will be a meaningful vote on leaving the EU, with the opportunity for amendments to be debated). The only way that I can make sense of Labour’s current position is that they are keeping their powder dry in order to combine with other parties — the SNP, the Liberals, Plaid Cymru and, most important, a big chunk of pro-European Tories — to force through an amendment keeping us permanently in the customs union, or in something very much like it, a proposal which presumably the EU would accept.

It could also be that there will be an amendment calling for a second referendum. If there is, I hope it will be defeated. The first referendum was a divisive disaster. The second would be equally so, though it would at least be fought by opponents in possession of better information than they had in 2016. If the vote were to go the same way as in 2016, what would have been gained? If the vote were to switch to ‘remain’, the rage and civil disobedience of the leavers can only be imagined. The only certainty is that the strife would continue thereafter. No, we have made our bed and we must lie on it; we must seek as close a relationship with the EU as can be managed, given the principles and priorities of both sides. Theresa May’s achievement is the best that could be managed, given her misguided determination to leave the customs union. As I’ve said, it wouldn’t surprise me if we end up, by hook or by crook, in something like the present customs union, though it may have to have a different name, for the look of the thing.

The desire to control immigration was the most significant factor in bringing about Brexit. People thought that the single market automatically means that we have to accept immigrants from the EU, house them and pay them benefits, in all circumstances. We know the facts: EU immigrants pay more tax and claim fewer benefits, as a proportion of their income, than indigenous UK citizens, and have been essential to the UK economy’s slow recovery from the disaster of 2008, although in some parts of the country their arrival in large numbers has put a strain on public services. But even if we were to accept the argument of those who wish to control immigration from the EU, there is no binary choice between ‘no immigration’ and ‘uncontrolled immigration’. It emerges that some of the most committed EU countries, fervent supporters of the single market, have more constraining laws on immigration from other EU countries than the UK does. Immigrants there must have a job to go to; they can’t claim state benefits until they have been working for a period of time, and have begun to make a significant contribution to the host country. We could have had this arrangement — we could still have it, theoretically, though in practical terms it’s now too late — without giving up the benefits of the single market.

It’s all a dreadful cock-up. Mostly, it’s been a shouting match between the ignorant. No one knows what the outcome will be. I predict that the UK will be worse off than we would have been had we stayed, and that those poorer people who voted in the largest numbers to leave will be those who will suffer most as a result of our folly.

The winter solstice. It rains without cease here. I’ve just come back from a windy, wet walk.

We arrived on Wednesday. Last weekend we were in Shropshire, for our usual pre-Christmas weekend with friends there, this time alas without Mike Raleigh.  It was on the equivalent occasion last year that we saw him for the last time.  And that reminds me that I’ve haven’t written about the memorial event for him that we held on 8 November at Kings College London. It was a good do, with about 100 people there, and nice food and drink. There were speeches from Mike’s step-daughter and his sister-in-law, and from Michael Simons (about Mike’s time as his deputy at the ILEA English Centre), David James (about Mike’s time in Shropshire) and Peter Harris (about Mike’s time as an HMI). I think that Kate Myers, Mike’s partner these last few years, who organised the event with me, was comforted. She has sensibly decided to avoid this Christmas in England, and gone to South Africa to visit relatives.

On Tuesday morning we left David James and drove straight to the Channel Tunnel.  We stayed the night at Montreuil-sur-Mer, in a nice little hotel, Le Coq.  We ate at Le Clos des Capucins in the main square, where delicacies such as whole calf’s kidney, pig’s trotter and tripe are available.  It was an easy drive to Kerfontaine the next day. Today I’ve helped our neighbour Jean to saw and stock wood blown down from one of his trees by a gale on Wednesday night.  

Since my last despairing entry about Brexit, things have got worse. The Prime Minister continued to insist that her withdrawal agreement would be presented to parliament for a vote on 11 December. On 10 December, facing the certainty of defeat, she changed her mind, interrupted the five-day debate and postponed the vote which was to have been held the next day. This enraged many MPs on all sides of the House, whatever their position on Brexit. The right-wing Conservatives who want us to leave with no continuing connections with the EU immediately accumulated enough letters to send to the chairman of the 1922 committee to force a vote of no confidence in the leader of their own party. The vote was held on 12 December. The Prime Minister won it by 200 votes to 117. She went straight off to Brussels the next day to try to scrape together some support for ‘clarification’ or ‘reassurances’ about the contentious part of the withdrawal agreement, to do with the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. This she signally failed to gather. This week, the government announced that the debate on the agreement would be resumed in the week beginning 7 January, when parliament reassembles, and that the vote would finally take place in the following week.

Before that, in the first week of this month, the government achieved a first: the only time in the UK’s modern constitutional history (I think since 1688) that it has itself has been in contempt of its own parliament. Keir Starmer had tabled a motion requesting that the full legal advice relating to the withdrawal agreement, provided to the government by the Attorney General, its most senior lawyer, should be laid before parliament. The government, foolishly from its own point of view, didn’t bother to vote against the motion. So it passed and was law. The government then refused to produce the full legal advice. The Attorney General came to the House, made a statement and answered questions for some hours, but declined to do what parliament had required him to do. So Keir proposed a motion declaring the government in contempt of parliament, and it passed! Some Conservatives must have supported it. Whether anyone in the government will face any kind of punishment for so sneering at democracy I very much doubt. The government published the full legal advice the next day. It wasn’t greatly different from the version the Attorney General had given orally earlier in the week. It was just that some of the ‘risks’ (or guarantees, depending on your point of view) associated with the Irish backstop were spelt out less ambiguously, thus enraging the right-wing Conservatives even more.

If only I could be more enthusiastic about Labour’s position! It lurches by the day, and I think it’s because there is almost as much disagreement on Labour’s front bench about what to do as there is in the Cabinet. I suspect Corbyn is deliberately refusing to come off the fence because he’s enjoying the government’s agony too much. Several times since I wrote the entry on 25 November I have read it again, wondering whether whenever Corbyn stood up in the House and condemned the withdrawal agreement as a bad deal he was referring to some obvious failing in it which I had missed. (And of course I keep reminding myself that we’re only talking here about a way of leaving the EU; the detailed terms on which we will eventually trade with the EU and relate to it in all necessary ways have yet to be discussed.) Then, on Tuesday, I opened The Guardian while waiting to drive through the Channel Tunnel and there was an article by no less an authority than Vernon Bogdanor, one of our wisest and most authoritative political commentators. He writes:

That expresses exactly what I have been thinking. Since the article appeared, Corbyn has declined to propose a vote of no confidence in Her Majesty’s Government, despite being encouraged to do so by many in his own party and by the leaders of other opposition parties. Presumably he realises he’s likely to lose such a vote. If there’s one thing that unites the Tories and the DUP, it’s their determination that there will not be another general election before 2022. On Wednesday, during the last Prime Minister’s questions before Christmas, the Tories were in full pantomime action, jeering at Corbyn with ‘Oh yes he will,’ ‘Oh no he won’t’ call a vote of no confidence. Corbyn may or may not have muttered the words ‘Stupid woman,’ referring to the Prime Minister, in his anger. He later claimed that his muttered words had been ‘Stupid people.’ I haven’t seen the video of his lips. The Tories then put on a show of sanctimonious feminist piety, as if, for example, they hadn’t, the previous week, restored the whip to two of their MPs who had been caught sending disgusting sexually explicit texts to women, so that these two men could support the Prime Minister in the party’s own confidence vote. If Corbyn did say, ‘Stupid woman,’ he shouldn’t have, and he should have apologised. But he was mightily provoked.

Parliament is now on holiday. Perhaps that’s a good thing. But I don’t expect any improvement in this dismal situation during the dark days of January. We’re now spending billions of pounds preparing for a no-deal Brexit which, I’m sure (and so is Professor Bogdanor), the great majority of MPs do not want. It’s just that they can’t bring themselves to agree on what a majority of them do want.

A week ago I met Keir Starmer, to talk about our plan for the redevelopment of the industrial estate across the road. Alex Smith, the chair of our Neighbourhood Forum, and Richard Crutchley, from our planning consultants, were there too. It was a good meeting, and Keir was supportive. Being a politician is extraordinary: one day you’re in the midst of the most important constitutional debate the UK has had since 1945, and the next you’re talking about the future of a collection of sheds. And his father had just died. The funeral is today. I gave him my poetry books, and invited him to a reading which I’m doing at Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town on 7 February. He’s a Kentish Town resident, and he joked that if he gave up politics he hoped to get a job there. I said that I was sure that Gary, who runs the bookshop, would be happy to employ him.

In France they like to burn and break things.  Generalisations about national character are deeply dangerous, but here’s one: the French are naturally revoltés (rebellious, mutinous); the British are naturally paisible (peaceable, meek).  I make no value judgement either way.  For several weeks now, France has been rocked by an extraordinary movement of violent protest. The protestors are called the gilets jaunes, because they wear the high-visibility yellow jackets which motorists are required to carry in their cars in order easily to be seen if standing by their vehicle after an accident or breakdown. There are no leaders of this movement, at least not at the moment, and a few people who have put themselves forward as leaders have immediately been threatened by the rest of the protestors. It’s a typically modern phenomenon, driven by social media. The spark which ignited the flame was the government’s apparently reasonable proposal to increase the price of diesel from 1 January next year by a few centimes more than the increase in the price of petrol, in order slowly to wean people away from diesel cars, which have been proved to cause many more deaths, especially in cities, than do petrol cars. Of course it’s true that the government, a couple of decades ago, encouraged the purchase of diesel cars, because diesel emissions make a smaller contribution to global warming than do petrol cars. The same happened in the UK. The difference is that the higher price which UK motorists now pay for diesel as opposed to petrol (an actually higher price, not — as in France — a lower price but one where the differential is diminishing) is accepted, however reluctantly. In France, no. The diesel issue became the first item in a lengthening list of enraged complaints by people who feel that they have been left behind, taken for granted, patronised and even despised by a sophisticated urban elite, perfectly exemplified by Macron, his government and his governing style. After four weeks of increasingly violent demonstrations across France, the government backed down, as it always does when the people take to the streets and bring the country to a halt. Macron went on television and announced that the fuel increases would not happen, that there would be an increase of 100 euros per month in the minimum wage, and that overtime and pensions below a certain level (I think 2,000 euros a month) would not be taxed. He encouraged businesses to pay special bonuses to their workers. Since then, the protests have diminished but not ceased.

In 2017 the French vote for a president; in 2018 they decapitate him in effigy, and the police have to protect his family’s house at Le Touquet by dispersing a crowd with tear gas.  Thugs hack Marianne off the Arc de Triomphe.  Hundreds of cars are burnt and shops smashed. Macron has made mistakes, and said some unwise things.  He abolished a tax on wealth, and replaced it with a different tax. It’s true that the new tax does take more from the majority of better-off people than did the previous tax. But foolishly, the new tax actually benefits the 1% who are super-rich, and actually hurts the very poorest. How stupid, how wrong is that? Was it deliberate, or just an unintended consequence which civil servants and politicians didn’t notice? I don’t know, but it has been the perfect justification for popular rage.

As an internationalist, Macron has been clear about the threat which the whole of Europe faces from fascism or from quasi-fascism in its modern forms (in Italy, in Germany, in Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic and of course in France itself), not to mention the rise of authoritarianism elsewhere in the world: USA, Brazil, Turkey, Syria, China, Russia… He recognises that the EU is an important bulwark against active, malign forces which really do want to destroy the interrelated, rule-respecting, broadly democratic consensus within which I have lived my life and which, perhaps wrongly, I have thought secure. I admire Macron’s clarity about that, but it cuts no ice with the only-just-managing common people.  

Jean, our neighbour, of whom I am very fond, who with his wife Annick has a deservedly comfortable retirement on their two teachers’ pensions, is proud of the fact that he voted blanc (that is, spoiled his ballot paper) in the second round of the presidential elections last year.  When I ask him how he, a life-long socialist, can in effect have given half a vote to a fascist, his reply is such that there’s no common ground between us. Meanwhile, there’s no doubt that, amid the genuinely disgruntled, honourable ordinary folk who have put on the yellow jackets, there are plenty of far-right, far-left and anarchist activists who enjoy violence and just want to see the state totter.

The government will have to borrow a lot more money to pay for the concessions it has made to the street. That will probably mean that it will be in conflict with Brussels over the its borrowing level as a percentage of GDP.

It’s a beautiful, cold, clear day. I’ve finished all the practical work which needs doing at this time of year: pruning roses, hydrangeas and fuchsias, removing large quantities of leaves from the flower borders, and clearing the gutters.

In the evenings I’ve been reading The Pickwick Papers for, I think, the second time in my life. There are passages of comic writing in that book which are as funny as anything in English. On Christmas Day we opened a bottle of 1983 Warre’s vintage port which Adam gave me many years ago, and the combination of Dickens’ prose, a blazing fire and a 35-year-old fortified wine is enough to give me a deep sense of gratitude for my existence, despite the ills of the wider world: a planet in danger, too many people on it, and too many bad or stupid leaders running it.  We’ll keep on keeping on.  You do what you can.  I’ve just had a lovely email from a woman to whom we gave a Ros Moger/Terry Furlong scholarship in Cape Town last year.  Having finished her MEd at Stellenbosch, she’s just applied for and got a paid job working for Canon Collins itself, as an assistant to Eva Lenicka, the scholarships officer. She’s determined to work for a better future for her country, and thanks us for the opportunity we’ve given her.

Peter Hetherington has written a wonderful memoir about his childhood and youth in Durham in the 1930s and 1940s. I’m editing it, and Stephen Mellor is designing it. It’ll appear early in the New Year.

Mary and Jacques are coming for New Year, flying up from Marseille to Brest. I’ll go and pick them up on Sunday.

The light has just failed on the last day of the year. Mary and Jacques are with us, and we’ve come back from one of our favourite circular walks, past the hamlet of Kerviden, which Helen calls ‘God’s special place’, not that she has any particular religious conviction, because it is so beautiful at any time of the year, thanks to the skills of Jackie and his wife, who live there. The walk passes several water mills, whose races still race, though now they don’t do any work. One of the mills functions, using electricity. I once asked the owner what kinds of flour he produces. ‘All sorts,’ he said, ‘but especially blé noir, for crêpes.’ Where does the best blé noir come from?’ I asked, thinking that he might name some district of rural Brittany. ‘Mongolia,’ was the reply.

On the way to Brest airport yesterday, I had a phone call from Monica Hetherington. The little screen on the phone said ‘Peter H’, and I thought it was Peter ringing to talk about his book. I was going to wait until I got to the airport before replying, but when the phone rang again only five minutes later, I wondered if it was something urgent. I parked and rang back. Monica told me that Peter suffered a stroke, a ‘bleed on the brain’ as she put it, on Thursday. He was taken to Bedford hospital, where they scanned his brain and sent the pictures to Addenbroke’s in Cambridge. (They did exactly the same, in the same hospital, when my father suffered his fatal stroke, and decided that there was nothing that could be done for him.) On this occasion, the decision was that they could save Peter. He was driven in an ambulance to Cambridge, where on Friday the doctors inserted a tube into his groin, with a coil on the end of it, pushed it all the way up his body to his brain, where — as I understand it — they left the coil so that it stopped, or blocked, the bleeding. Extraordinary. I spoke to David, Peter’s son, this morning. Peter is fragile and sometimes confused, but on the other hand he has my two poetry books with him, and has apparently been reading some of the poems to other patients in the ward (and possibly to the nurses? — I must ask). And he did a crossword puzzle with David yesterday afternoon. He will be in hospital for at least a fortnight. My most fervent hope is that his mental capacity hasn’t been too much impaired: such a beautiful, subtle mind, operating at full power a few days ago. Naturally, I said to David that above all Peter mustn’t worry about the book; assuming that he recovers sufficiently to be able to attend to it, we’ll make the final few editorial decisions together, and then get it printed as soon as possible. More than anything I want him to see the thing published. I’d hate to have to write a regretful afterword to the work (he called it a ‘parvum opus’ in his usual modest way when he wrote to me just before Christmas — but you could say the same of Gosse’s Father and Son) if he should no longer be with us. Several times recently I’ve told myself that the man to whom, more than to anyone, I owe my intellectual life, will not be alive for many more years, and that I must prepare myself for that. He’s been writing the memoir for two years. He promised to have it finished this autumn ‘before the leaves have fallen from the trees’, and so it was. I promised to have it published ‘before the leaves return to the trees’, and so it will be, whatever happens. I just want him to be there.

I sent an email to Alessandra in Italy, with good wishes at the end of the year, and asking her how Claudio is. He’s still in a coma, three and a half months after his heart attack.

Tonight, as ever on Old Year’s Night (as it used to be called) we’ll go to L’Art Gourmand for the special Saint-Sylvestre meal. It’ll be especially nice to have Mary and Jacques there. They’ve told us that they’d like to buy a property in Brittany, not far from here, so that we can be neighbours for part of the year. That would be great. Mary of course wants to be in Marseille too, so she can be close to her children and grandson; but a few months here in the country during the summer could fit in with that, and the children and grandson (and any future grandchildren) would enjoy it, just as Jean’s and Annick’s grandchildren do.

This is very late in the New Year to start writing the diary. No excuses. Just get on with it.

On 7 February I had a reading of my poems in the Owl Bookshop in Kentish Town. It was a success. About 60 people were there, and they enjoyed the show. For 90 minutes I read a mixture of original poems and translations, with a linking commentary. I sold 22 copies of the books. Our friend Carolyn Boyd was there, and she has since put me in touch with the Crossness Engines Trust, which looks after Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s magnificent sewage works at Crossness, on the south bank of the Thames downriver from Woolwich. Today, a person who works at the Trust has written to ask if I will read my poem ‘‘For this Relief, Much Thanks’’ at an event on 28 March making the 200th anniversary of Bazalgette’s birth. What an honour! Of course I said yes.

Next Tuesday I’m giving a talk at Exeter University to the British Educational Research Association. It’s about the work we did which led to those ten booklets about curriculum and assessment in English, and then the two books published by Routledge. I finished writing the talk this morning, so I’m feeling relaxed about it now. I shall go down to Taunton on the train on Monday afternoon. I’ll stay with Mark and Gill overnight, and Mark will drive me to Exeter the next morning. I’m the first speaker, but I’ll stay all day and come back on the train that evening.

I’ve been visiting Peter Hetherington twice a week since returning to England in January. He’s much better. After a spell in Addenbroke’s, he was taken back to Bedford hospital, where he remained for about three weeks. Now he has moved to a brand-new rehabilitation centre on Manton Heights (just above Bedford Modern School), and he’s becoming himself again. His voice has returned, as has some of his conversation, although he’s still frailer and quieter than he was. I don’t know whether or not he will ever return to that extraordinary state of vigour and agility, mental and physical, with which he was blessed as an 88-year-old until the stroke, but the principal blessing is that he’s neither physically paralysed nor mentally impaired. His book is now at the printer, and I’m sure it will be out this month. I think there will be a little party at Bletsoe to launch it. We’ve postponed our annual play-reading (The Winter’s Tale this time) until the autumn.

I’m spending a lot of time on our project to do with the industrial estate across the road. Slow progress. The six-week public consultation finished in mid-January. Now our planning consultant is amending the Neighbourhood Plan in the light of some of the more sensible responses. Predictably, powerful organisations which can afford to employ smart lawyers and estate agents have weighed in against the plan. They simply want Camley Street to become a ghetto of luxury apartment blocks, and to make a great deal more money in the process. I hope that the decision will finally be made this year, and that it’ll go our way: keep the businesses where they are, in new and environmentally much better accommodation; build several hundred genuinely affordable dwellings for rent. The Neighbourhood Forum has been on the case for more than five years now, though I’ve only been actively involved for the last two.

Brexit remains a site of utter confusion. The withdrawal agreement which the 27 EU countries other than the UK unanimously agreed on 25 November was finally put to a vote in the House of Commons in January, and defeated by a huge majority. Since then, the Prime Minister has been trying — I think with little success — to persuade people in the EU to soften or amend the proposals on the Irish backstop, which enraged a significant group of right-wing Tory MPs and the Democratic Unionist Party, on which Mrs May depends for her slim majority. Other MPs had voted against the agreement for a variety of reasons. We’ve got to the stage where we will be leaving the EU in 22 days’ time, unless the agreement, having been amended, is passed by MPs next Tuesday. If it is, which I doubt at the moment, there will be an implementation period of 21 months during which nothing will change, although we will formally have left. During that time, the UK and EU will negotiate arrangements for our future relationship in all areas: trade, security, crime, environmental protections, workers’ rights. A huge task. If the agreement is again rejected, there will be a vote the next day to see if there is a majority in the House for leaving on 29 March with no agreement. If that were to fail, which I think it would, there will be a vote a day later to see if there is a majority for a short extension of Article 50, which would mean that we would still be in the EU, perhaps until the end of June. If we’re still going to be in the EU beyond that date, we should really take part in the EU parliamentary elections in May: a further complexity.

I don’t think I’ve really changed my mind since I wrote about this in November. At the moment, the Prime Minister is trying to bribe Labour MPs in poorer, leave-voting seats to vote for the agreement in return for money to go to their areas, as if such a sticking plaster could compensate for the grievous wound inflicted on poorer areas by the government’s policies since 2010, and indeed by larger forces which governments have only limited (but not negligible) powers to counteract: globalisation and the move of basic industries — mining, ship-building, chemicals, steel production, ceramics — to other parts of the world. The most interesting thing I’ve read in the paper in the last few days concerns a potentially more tempting offer to Labour MPs: let the agreement go through, either by voting for it or by abstaining, in exchange for a legally guaranteed right to consider, vote on and amend the eventual proposal for our future relationship with the EU. That’s more or less what I was musing about in November.

There’s a real possibility that far-right, nationalist and xenophobic parties will make big gains in the European elections. There’s a kind of destructive, hate-filled mood abroad, combined with a deliberate amnesia about why the entity which has become the EU was founded in the first place. That plus dictatorships or authoritarian governments in so many other parts of the world — Russia, China, Turkey, most of the Arab countries — plus Trump in America and Bolsonaro in Brazil make me tremble sometimes at the thought that the legitimate span of political thought and action under which I’ve lived all my life, from centre-right through social democracy to democratic socialism, is an endangered species, and that something much worse is coming along as I enter my last phase. There was a good piece by Macron in the paper the other day, syndicated across numerous other papers in Europe, reminding us of the reasons why the EU was founded, and arguing that we should be proud of its achievements while recognising that the institution has faults that need addressing. Amen to that, but the job needs doing: Eastern European countries, the main beneficiaries of EU largesse in recent years, flout its principles with apparent impunity; we can’t do anything collectively about refugees and asylum seekers; and trivial but symbolically significant absurdities continue, such as the EU parliament’s constant shuttling between Strasbourg and Brussels.

Last weekend we were in York with Tom James. He seems to be enjoying studying history at the university. He sent me two of his essays, one on the fourteenth century and one on the Enlightenment, which show a real developing grasp of fluent, unstuffy academic prose. We visited the Minster, and went to evensong; we ate in three restaurants, of which a Polish one was the best; we drank in a tiny old-fashioned pub; we walked on the city walls.

It’s a beautiful ‘clear-sunned’ (Hardy) March day. I’m feeling virtuous because, for the first time this year, I jumped out of bed, walked down to the swimming bath next to St Pancras station, and swam 20 lengths. Walking back after such exercise makes me feel terrific. My usual breakfast is muesli, which I glumly munch. Today I allowed myself two boiled eggs with buttered toast and Marmite.

I wrote last year about the enthusiastic review of the two Routledge books which Gary Snapper wrote for Teaching English, one of the journals of the National Association for the Teaching of English. I noticed when reading that edition that the summer 2019 edition will be called ‘Becoming our own Experts’. I wrote to Gary reminding him that it had been our little group of teachers at Vauxhall Manor School who had written the papers on language and learning which were combined in the 1982 book called Becoming our own Experts, and offering to do an introductory piece for the forthcoming edition about our work. He was glad of the offer. I did the piece yesterday and sent it to him. I’m pleased with it; it reminds me of something important that I was involved in a very long time ago now. He’s just written back to thank me.

Yesterday afternoon I walked in the park. The buds are coming. I mused in my usual way about the curiosity that, in a row of trees of the same species, of about the same age, in what looks like the same soil, there are those that are forward and those that are backward as spring approaches. I’m better informed about this than I used to be. I was talking to Mike, who with his mate Steve looks after the gardens around this block of flats, and at various other places on the estate. They do a great job. I’m a director of the management company of our block, and I gave Mike my business card, in case he ever needed my help. On the card is the address of my website, which he then visited. He read the chapter in my memoir called ‘Living in London’, in which I ask myself the question about trees’ varying rates of progress. Later, he wrote me an email including this:

‘I don’t know if anyone answered your question asking how can two trees of the same species in close proximity live such different lives? There are two answers, a combination of nature and nurture really. Naturally each individual specimen is unique, just like us humans, so although they are the same species, as individuals they are different. Take that as a starting point. Although they are growing in close proximity the unique characteristics of one individual will enjoy that soil, that elevation, that exposure, that biosphere etc., more compared to the other individual. Having said all that the really beautiful story is that trees of the same species will graft their roots together and the stronger will help the weaker. You see they are all socialists really.’

In my reply, I wrote:

‘Thank you for explaining why trees live different lives.  You are the first person to do it!  So they are like humans, or at least — given what you say about the grafting of roots — like humans at their best rather than their worst.  It’s nice to put that information in the balance against the classic Darwinian idea of the survival of the fittest: a ruthless fight for life, and the devil take the hindmost.  Though of course Darwin, being the most humane of people, would have been appalled at how his theory, supposed to work over geological periods of time, was later hijacked by fascists and, in our own day, right-wing populists, to argue for an entirely individualistic view of our condition.’

This afternoon we’re going down to Portsmouth, city of my birth, to stay with my cousin Ceri and her husband Vince. Vince is doing a PhD in drama at the university there. As part of the degree’s requirement, he has to write a play which is then performed. The play is about Portsmouth in the English Civil War. Details from the internet: ‘Set in 1642, just before Charles I raised his standard and started the Civil War, the drama focuses on Governor George Goring and his Machiavellian double-dealing. The play will be performed in The Square Tower in Old Portsmouth, itself part of the action of the play, and brings to life many figures of the time including Queen Henrietta Maria, John Pym, Sir William Waller and, of course, George Goring.’

We’ll stay the night.

The government lurches ever deeper into difficulties. The Northern Ireland Secretary of State on Wednesday said that murders committed by the security forces during the Troubles ‘were not crimes’. She later had to apologise. It’s completely extraordinary that a person in that job should be so ignorant. Amber Rudd, the Work and Pensions Secretary, made an error when speaking to a radio interviewer about abusive tweets. She said, ‘It definitely is worse if you're a woman, it's worst of all if you're a coloured woman. I know that Diane Abbott gets a huge amount of abuse, that's something we need to call out.’ Diane Abbott immediately objected to the use of the word ‘coloured’.

I’m a bit more sympathetic to Ms Rudd about this, because although she should not have used that term, the phrase ‘people of colour’ is frequently used by black people in the UK in a progressive, anti-racist sense, and in America the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is a proudly anti-racist organisation with a membership of half a million. Much worse was a response by Andrea Leadsom, Leader of the House of Commons, to a proposal by Naz Shah, the shadow women and equalities minister, for a Commons debate on Islamophobia, after Baroness Warsi, who used to be the Tories’ Chair, criticised her own party over the prevalence of Islamophobia within it. Ms Leadsom (it was she who, in the contest to replace David Cameron as Tory leader, had said that she would be a better Prime Minister than Theresa May because she had had children) proposed that Ms Shah could ‘discuss with Foreign Office ministers whether that would be a useful way forward’. In other words, Muslims in Britain are foreigners. In a later statement, her office said that she had thought that Ms Shah was referring to a global definition of Islamophobia. Laughable, since all the recent news about Islamophobia has been about its prevalence in Britain, and particularly amongst some Tory councillors. On the other hand, Naz Shah herself is not beyond criticism: she lost the party whip and was banned from party activity for three months in 2016 following social-media messages about Israel which she later admitted had been anti-semitic.

We’re lurching towards another vote next Tuesday on the EU withdrawal agreement, with no sense that the EU is willing to change its position on the Irish backstop. I think the vote will be lost again, if by a smaller margin. One former Tory cabinet minister is quoted in today’s paper as saying that ‘it’s like the last days of Rome’. There are no barbarians at the gates this time; the barbarians are within the walls.

The most appalling atrocity has been committed in Christchurch, New Zealand. Last Friday an Australian white supremacist killed 50 Muslims and injured 50 others who were worshipping at two mosques in the city. In a grotesque abuse of social media, he live-streamed his actions on Facebook as they were taking place. He was arrested after he had left the second mosque, while on his way to a third mosque where he intended to kill more people.

New Zealand is profoundly shocked by the deadliest act of mass shooting in the country’s history. The Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, has shown impressive and dignified leadership in responding to the outrage. I hadn’t realised how lax New Zealand’s gun laws are: they seem to be as libertarian as the USA’s. People can buy semi-automatic weapons perfectly legally. The government has already promised that this will change. It needs to, quickly.

My brother Andy, who’s in New Zealand at the moment, writes: ‘The shock of Friday still resonates around the country. Very impressed with the prime minister's action and words. Many people were shocked to realise that assault rifles could be bought legally here. That should be easy to fix. The rise of white supremacists down in the south is a more difficult problem. It’s been there for some time but treated as an embarrassment rather than a threat. Airport security has been stiffened, threats of reprisals have been made. The days of Kiwi innocents are over.’

Here we are again, in springtime, with the primroses everywhere and April showers. Looking down the garden, the sight is different from usual, since in January an enormous oak fell down, fortunately into the garden from the bank which marks the boundary of our land. The situation would have been much more complicated if it had fallen the other way, across the public bridleway running down to the stream. But the tree smashed into two apple trees as it fell, and I don’t know whether or not they will recover. Jean-Paul has been here several times and begun the task of cutting the fallen giant into pieces, but there’s a place where the trunk is nearly two metres in diameter, and that will require some specialised heavy tools. The thing looks like a slaughtered elephant at the moment, and images keep coming into my mind of the wickedness of elephant poachers in Africa.

We took two days to get down here, because on Friday we stopped at Betton, a little town north of Rennes, to hear Simone Dinnerstein play the piano. Last autumn we went to a concert at the Barbican at the suggestion of Martyn Coles and Pamela Dix. Pamela’s sister Gill, whom I’ve known since 1972 when she was a girl, is a friend of Simone, who is a wonderful classical concert pianist. That evening she played Philip Glass’s third piano concerto. Glass had written the piece for her. I haven’t always been a great fan of Glass’s music, finding the repetitiveness wearing, but this piece is marvellously lyrical, moving between meditation and exaltation. We met Simone at the interval, after she had played. In conversation, it emerged that she was playing the Glass again in Brittany this spring. So we arranged to be there. She played Bach’s seventh concerto first, then the Glass. The performance was equally brilliant, and moving, although the acoustic wasn’t as good as at the Barbican, and the Orchestre Symphonique de Bretagne aren’t as good as the London Symphony Orchestra. But 400 people crammed into the newly built hall behind the mairie, and enjoyed themselves. The next morning we drove into Rennes and had breakfast with Simone at her hotel. She’s a lovely person. I’ve just sent her my poems, and the libretto of King Roger, which she’s going to show to a composer she knows. I’ve given Paul Halley enough time to write some music. I can’t remember now whether it’s six or seven years since I wrote the libretto. He hasn’t made a start.

Jean and Annick came to dinner last night. We shan’t see much of them while we’re here. They’ve gone to Paris today, and next week they’ve hired a gîte down south, where they will be joined by their children and grandchildren. Jean helped me this morning to solve a problem which has been bothering me for months. In the summer of 2016, the EDF installed a meter which supposedly can be read remotely. Despite this, our bills have continued to be estimated, and very large. Finally, this February, I paid close enough attention to the latest bill to realise what had happened. I wrote a letter to the EDF, which did no good. I found the address of their local office on the internet this morning, went there, and found that it exists no longer. Though I could have phoned myself, I felt the need of a native speaker to help me fight through the electronic hell which is obligatory these days in dealing with utilities. The upshot was that after about ten minutes of listening to music and pressing buttons, we got through to a woman who, having considered my case, admitted that I am owed 560 euros and promised that I will be reimbursed within a fortnight.

And this afternoon I’ve run various other errands, successfully. So I’m feeling cheerful.

It’s hard to know where to start about Brexit, so much has happened since I last wrote. Briefly, the government’s withdrawal agreement and political declaration have been defeated twice, by huge margins. The withdrawal agreement, shorn of the political declaration, has been defeated a third time, by the smaller but still large margin of 58 votes. Parliament has successfully wrested control of parliamentary business from the government, despite whipped government attempts to prevent this. On two occasions. various options for leaving the EU were proposed, but none commanded a majority. Kenneth Clark’s proposal for a customs union came closest to acceptance, losing by only three votes on the second occasion. Yvette Cooper introduced a bill that, if passed, will force the Prime Minister to ask the EU for an extension to Article 50. Again, the government did everything it could, unsuccessfully, to stop the bill being debated. When the bill was debated, it passed the Commons by one vote. It’s now being debated in the Lords, where I think it will pass.

Last Wednesday, Theresa May did what she should have done immediately after the 2017 general election, when she lost her majority, and said that she would collaborate with the Labour Party in seeking an orderly way of leaving the EU which would command a majority in the Commons. She infuriated her right wing and the DUP in doing this. Conversations between the government and the Labour Party, with Keir Starmer leading our side, are going on at the moment. I wonder whether — indeed I hope that — a compromise will emerge of the kind I thought necessary last November, on the day that the EU leaders unanimously accepted the withdrawal agreement and the political declaration. That compromise is a customs union. It may have to be dressed up in other language for the look of the thing, since Theresa May has repeatedly said that we would be leaving the customs union. Some of the hard-line Brexiteers would be genuinely apoplectic; others in that group would wish to appear so. But for me it’s the only solution to one of the most intractable political problems of my lifetime. It solves the Irish border problem; it solves the movement of goods problem; we can take back control of immigration, given that so many people on all sides think that we should, although in reality we shall continue to need immigration from the EU and from elsewhere to keep the country running. Goods are only 20% of GDP while services are 80%, so we would still be free to strike deals around the world on services. No doubt there are lots of technical difficulties to be faced, such as the fact that some goods come in and go out with associated services attached. But in principle the deal could be done; the EU would accept it; our parliament would vote for it. It might break the Conservative Party, which of course from my point of view would be welcome, but I doubt it: Conservatives are notoriously good survivors, because — at least until recently — ideology mattered much less to them than it did to Labour.

We were supposed to have left the EU on 29 March. The EU granted us an extension of membership until 22 May if by 29 March Parliament had agreed something. If Parliament failed to do this, the extension would be until 12 April. Parliament duly failed to agree. So, with 12 April fast approaching and amidst continuing disagreement, Theresa May wrote last week to the EU asking for a further extension until 30 June, should she need it. The EU leaders will consider this request on Wednesday. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, has suggested a flexible extension of a year, with a break whenever we manage to agree something with which the EU also agrees. As things stand, it’s still theoretically possible, but very unlikely, that we shall leave the EU on Friday with no deal, and face the resultant chaos.

If we stay in for many more weeks, we shall have to contest the European elections on 23 May. Large numbers of far-right rabble-rousers will emerge and stand, backed by the millionaires who funded the Leave campaign in 2016. I don’t want another referendum because it would provide a further platform for those forces, although I respect the argument that says that the first referendum was conducted on the basis of ignorance and lies, and at least this time people would be voting on the basis of better information. And I respect the one million people who marched in London the other Saturday to demand a second vote. I can’t see that, however much Theresa May is hated by some in her own party, a general election is likely, since under the Fixed-term Parliaments Act (which I support) two thirds of the Commons have to vote for it, and the Conservatives will surely remember their mistake of 2017. The only other way in which a parliamentary fixed term can be shortened is by a successful vote of no confidence in the government. Jeremy Corbyn did propose such a vote in January. It was defeated, and I think a further attempt to unseat the government would also fail. So we’re left with the compromise being discussed this afternoon.

My talk at Exeter on 12 March went well. About 60 people were there, and I gave them a full hour on curriculum and assessment in English 3 to 16: the best that has been thought, written and done over many decades; what’s wrong with government policy now; the practical alternatives we’ve proposed. People seemed to appreciate it. The talk and the supporting material I provided are now on the British Educational Research Association’s website.

I read my poem ‘“For this Relief, Much Thanks”’ on 28 March at the event to mark Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s 200th birthday. About 150 people were there, and the poem was a success. I presented a framed copy to Peter Bazalgette, the chair of the Crossness Engines Trust. Carolyn Boyd and her husband Richard were there; so was Ann Whittaker, who had arranged the reading on 7 February which Carolyn attended and which gave her the idea of contacting the Trust; so were Bronwyn and Stephen, who had just arrived from Australia. It was a great evening. When I stayed with Mark on 11 March, he lent me an excellent book by Stephen Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis, which I’ve just finished.

Peter Hetherington’s book, A Northern Childhood — My Boyhood Years, arrived from the printer on 18 March. He’s very pleased with it. I was there when the boxes were delivered, and we sat in the dining room at Bletsoe and just quietly turned the pages. Then, on 31 March, there was a little family party at the house to celebrate. Stephen had designed the book, so the four of us drove up from London. 150 copies were printed; most of them will be posted to Peter’s and Monica’s wider families, friends and former pupils. Peter is continuing to make remarkable progress since his stroke. We’ve walked round the fields at the back of their house. He still wobbles a bit, and says that he might resort to trekking poles, which have become so popular and which until recently he scorned (as do I; I see people going round Regents Park with them as if they’re attempting the ascent of F6).

I’m going to put something in here which I should really have included somewhere in the diary last year. My uncle Peter, known as Miles in his latter years, wrote a letter to his son Philip, my cousin, a few weeks before he died in autumn 2008. I wrote about my uncle and about that side of my family in the diary entries at that time. A copy of the letter came into my possession then, and I remember reading it to my parents as they sat up in bed one morning in late 2008 or early 2009. I must have left them the copy, and I didn’t keep one myself, and then it disappeared when we were clearing the house after my parents died. Anyway, Mary had a copy too, and copies of various other documents to do with my uncle and his parents, and she made further copies for me last year. Here’s the letter.

In the same and the next month, my uncle wrote the following two brief memoirs of his parents. The first covers some of the same ground as in his letter to Philip.

I’m very grateful to have these writings, because previously I knew much less about my father’s and uncle’s forebears than about my mother’s. Both my paternal grandparents had died before my parents were married (perhaps Mum and Dad were already courting when my paternal grandfather died, but I know that she didn’t meet him), whereas I knew my mother’s and my maternal grandmother’s parents well. I remember saying humorously to my parents after I had read them the letter, speaking of my paternal grandfather’s socialism, ‘I’ve always wondered where I got it from.’ They laughed. He was an old-fashioned Liberal, she a Conservative. I’ve probably recorded this next exchange with my father somewhere in the diary before, but here it is again. We were sitting in my parents’ pleasant back garden one day, discussing politics. Dad said, ‘The point of politics is to enable people to sit quietly in their back gardens.’ I said, ‘The point of politics is to enable people to have quiet back gardens to sit in.’

My uncle’s complex relationship with both his parents is touching. Concerning his remark at the time of the spilling of milk that his father ‘believed that children should decide on a career for themselves’, the thought crossed my mind while typing the piece that my grandfather didn’t exactly follow that belief when my uncle told him he would refuse to fight in the war.

I’ve heard various stories about my grandfather’s secret heroics during the war. The most exotic is that the Royal Navy had a major engineering problem with some ships in Alexandria. My grandfather was wrapped up in a blanket and flown there in a Lancaster (no heating on board). He fixed the problem, and then reported to the nearest RAF base to request a flight back, as he had been promised. Some officious person laughed in his face, not knowing who he was or the importance of what he had done. My grandfather, the least likely person to pull rank, telephoned the Admiralty to tell them he was stuck. Hours later, an angry order from Churchill himself arrived at the base, telling them to put this man on the next plane home. I don’t suppose that the return journey was any more comfortable than the outward.

David Bomberg was the defining influence on my uncle’s development as a young painter. He taught him at Borough Road Polytechnic (now South Bank University), and my uncle later followed Bomberg and his wife when they moved to the south of Spain, near Ronda. I’ve seen the painting ‘The living know that they shall die, the dead know not anything’, to which my uncle refers in his memoir of his father. The title quotes Ecclesiastes, chapter 9, verse 5. It stayed with me for years after I saw the painting, and emerged in my poem ‘Internal Eclogue at 60’. I noticed the other day, walking down Borough High Street, that a building containing halls of residence for South Bank University is now called David Bomberg House.

Last Saturday was the tenth anniversary of my father’s death.

Brexit update: on Wednesday evening/Thursday morning, the 27 EU leaders extended our membership of the EU until 31 October. Theresa May had asked for an extension only until 30 June, but the eventual decision of the 27 was that there was no chance that we could sort ourselves out by then. Macron wanted to stick to 30 June, and throw us out on that date if we hadn’t previously decided how to leave; many of the others wanted to give us a full year to make up our minds. So at about two o’clock in the morning of Thursday they split the difference. If we do agree how to leave at any time before 31 October, we can leave on the first day of the month following ratification by both sides. It seems very likely that we shall have to participate in the European elections on 23 May, since getting an agreement to pass Parliament before then is almost impossible, particularly as MPs yesterday went off on their Easter holidays. They’ll return on 23 April. So we may be in the anomalous position of electing representatives to a parliament which we intend imminently to leave. If we don’t take part in the elections, and have not come to an agreement by then, we shall be ejected on 1 June.

No one has said, definitely, that 31 October is the very last extension date. The agony could even be prolonged beyond that, though I doubt it. The Conservative Party is now mainly preoccupied with getting rid of its leader, although she has no obligation to leave until some sort of deal goes through (and even then, I suppose she could argue that she had only promised to stand down once her deal got through, not once any deal got through). The customs union compromise still seems to me the obvious one, particularly as the Irish prime minister supported it the other day, and said that the UK couldn’t be expected to be a ‘silent partner’ in such a union; we would have a full voice at that table. I’ve always thought that those who have confidently said that we would have to be ‘rule-takers, not rule-makers’ (weary cliché) in a customs union were wrong; it seems I was right.

My great fear is that whatever we may agree in the short term while Mrs May is prime minister could be undone once she is replaced by someone more extremely anti-EU. We could be in for years of angry wrangling over our future relationship with people who should be our closest allies and friends. If I were Jeremy Corbyn or Keir Starmer, I’d yield something quite significant (the second referendum) in return for getting something quite significant (the customs union) and then approach the EU about making this a legal treaty too, rather than just an aspiration. A treaty would be much harder to undo. But I know that’s wishful thinking, because the hard politics of the matter means that Mrs May is not going to do anything that threatens to split the Conservative party. At the moment, it’s hard to see any way out of the slough of despond and impotence which we have knowingly got ourselves into.

I wrote quite a lot last year about Montaigne. I just want to transfer into the diary a few last quotations I made then.

Page 590 of the Penguin edition: ‘Most of the world’s squabbles are occasioned by grammar!’ (I kept thinking about this when I was doing my talk for Exeter, which included a section on the grammar debate.)

Pages 637 and 638: ‘Even in the case of my own writings I cannot always recover the flavour of my original meaning; I do not know what I wanted to say and burn my fingers making corrections and giving it some new meaning for want of recovering the original one — which was better. I go backwards and forwards: my judgement does not always march straight ahead, but floats and bobs about, velut minuta magno / Deprensa navis in mari vesaniente vento. [Like a tiny boat buffeted on the ocean by a raging tempest.]’ (A lovely admission by a great writer about the difficulty of really saying what you want to say.)

Page 709: ‘Nihil tam inaestimabile est quam animi multitudinis. [Nothing is less worth esteeming than the mind of the many.]’ (This is a piece of elitism to which I find myself more and more attracted as Brexit drags on. A burgher of Watford was on the radio at lunchtime saying that what our country needs now is ‘my old mate Boris’. Winston Churchill, that great believer in the European project, was right when he said that parliamentary democracy is the worst possible way of organising societies apart from all the others.)

Page 715: ‘…there is no polity which has not brought in some vain ceremonial honours, or some untruths, to serve as a bridle to keep the people to their duties; that is why most of them have fables about their origins and have beginnings embroidered with supernatural mysteries.’ (Absolutely right, although I would include Christianity in that charge, and of course the great humanist Montaigne was a pious Catholic.)

Page 722: ‘Nothing of mine [he means of his writings] satisfies my judgement. My insight is clear and balanced but when I put it to work it becomes confused: I have most clearly assayed that in the case of poetry. I have a boundless love for it; I know my way well through other men’s works; but when I set my own hand to it I am truly like a child: I find myself unbearable. You may play the fool anywhere else but not in poetry: Mediocribus esse poetis / Non dii, non homines, non concessere columnae. [Poets are never allowed to be mediocre by the gods, by men or by publishers.] Would to God that the following saying was written up above our printers’ workshops to forbid so many versifiers from getting in: verum / Nil securius est malo Poeta. [truly nothing is more self-assured than a bad poet.]’ (Amen, except that it’s not true that publishers don’t allow mediocre poets to get printed, and I don’t quite understand the distinction by which publishers apparently forbad mediocre poetry but printers allowed it, at a time when — I suppose — there was less difference between the two than there is today.)

A few weeks ago, we had lunch with Martyn Coles and Pamela Dix and our old friend Peter Howell and his partner Edward. Peter is a classicist and an expert on Martial. He kindly sent me his book about the poet’s life and work. Martial wrote hundreds of epigrams, gathered into fourteen books: satirical, sardonic, saucy or obscene. Epigram was the only form he used. I bought the complete works in the Loeb edition, and read them all. In the end, I can’t truly love these neat, pert little squibs, but I’ve just done loose translations of a dozen, and sent them to Peter in the hope that they aren’t too loose. Here they are.

Easter Sunday, and a day which should be one of joy is clouded by a dreadful series of events in Sri Lanka. More than 200 people have been killed and many hundreds more injured by bombs exploding in churches while worshippers were celebrating Easter, and in expensive hotels. It’s a clear attack on the Christian minority in the country, and on foreign visitors. So far, no one has claimed responsibility for the atrocity, nor has the government named any suspects. The Tamil separatists were defeated in 2009, after a civil war in which between 70,000 and 80,000 people were killed. Inevitably, thoughts turn towards Islamist extremists. The BBC’s coverage says: ‘The nation has seen some sporadic violence since [the end of the war]. In March 2018 a state of emergency was declared after members of the majority Buddhist Sinhala community attacked mosques and Muslim-owned properties.’

My niece Tess has been with us for eight days, studying for exams at Aix University next week. She had decided, rightly I think, that Kerfontaine offers fewer distractions than Marseille. But we took her out on her 20th birthday on Monday, and again for crêpes (her favourite) on Wednesday. I had picked her up from Nantes airport a week ago yesterday and took her back there this morning.

We’ve had several days of the most glorious weather: between warm and hot, but with a refreshing breeze. Yesterday afternoon, giving Tess a break from the six or seven hours’ study she’s done every day, we drove up to Guémené-sur-Scorff so she could buy the andouille which her father loves. The countryside ‘[wore] her confirmation dress’ (Heaney). I’ve never seen it so lovely.

One morning this week, as Helen and I sat outside with coffee, the birds were singing at the tops of their voices. Lots of different calls, but I could only identify blackbird and chaffinch for certain. The chorus (not the right word — I mean the diversity of strings of notes, each ignoring the others) provoked a question which I’ve often wondered about, as — I’m sure — have countless others over millennia. It may be that ornithologists know the answer. Anyway, I did a little poem this afternoon, and sent it to Peter and Monica.

Tonight we’re going to eat at L’Art Gourmand.

We drove back to London on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Six days after the atrocities in Sri Lanka, the death toll has settled at a little more than 250, with hundreds more injured. There was a period when the estimate rose to more than 350, but it has since been reduced. The government is still hunting the perpetrators, and there have been further deaths as the police and the army have raided the premises of suspected terrorists. It emerges that the murders were indeed committed by Islamist militants, Sri Lankan nationals, many of them from privileged, well-to-do backgrounds. Islamic State has claimed responsibility for the outrage, and it does seem unlikely that such a sophisticated, co-ordinated, carefully timed set of murders could have been carried out by anything other than a large organisation with experience in planning terrorist acts. Of course the thought crosses the mind that these murders are a kind of grotesque revenge for the murders of Muslims in New Zealand in March. Two utterly opposed but strikingly similar mindsets, which see the world in simple binary terms: hatred of the other, and the idea that it is legitimate to kill in order to impose one’s own view of the world. I suppose the difference is that white supremacists are inspired by racism, without a religious element to their obsession, whereas Islamist fundamentalists draw their comfort from a perverted misinterpretation of their own religion: hence their willingness to slaughter other Muslims whom they consider apostates. There was a deeply depressing piece on the ten o’clock radio news last night about the continuing loss of life amongst the security services in Afghanistan. We hear of the peaks of atrocity, in Christchurch or Sri Lanka; meanwhile, the number of members of the Afghan security services who have been killed in the last four or five years (I think that was the period the piece mentioned) is between 40,000 and 50,000 — an average of 30 a day. 30 young men killed every day as the government struggles to combat the Taliban.

I’ve just finished Antony Beevor’s latest book, about the Arnhem offensive. It’s a detailed, heart-breaking account of the waste of life which occurs when a vain and stupid general, Montgomery, is allowed to have his own way. His insistence on trying to cross the Rhine delta in Holland, despite the obvious geographical disadvantages of doing so; his decision to use troops delivered by air, rather than relying on a slower build-up of infantry from the south; his failure to clear the estuary leading to the port of Antwerp before doing anything else: these were terrible, costly errors, and only brought about by his obsessive desire to be the first to cross the Rhine, and his refusal to accept the authority of an American. Eisenhower strikes me as a man weary of dealing with such a peacock, who should have been much firmer with his subordinate. If he’d simply said no to the mad scheme, thousands of innocent American, British, Canadian and Polish soldiers would not have died. Montgomery doesn’t come out well from any of Beevor’s books that I’ve read.

We’ve been in Sicily for a week now, with Glenda and Julian Walton and David James. David flew back to England last night. The four of us have another week here. David’s father died nine days ago. His body had been offered to science (and accepted by the University of Birmingham), so there were no funeral arrangements, and David’s mother insisted that he come with us, as previously arranged. It was the right thing.

We had three days in Palermo, then took a boat to the little island of Ustica for two days, then two more days back in Palermo. In Palermo we visited the places which I had read about, and then wrote about in my libretto: the palace of the Norman kings, with the Cappella Palatina, and George of Antioch’s little church, later called La Martorana. One day we took a taxi up to Monreale, and marvelled at the mosaics in William II’s cathedral. You could see how the vain grandson wanted to outdo the achievement of his grandfather. The mosaics in the cathedral, done about fifty years after those in the Cappella Palatina, often show exactly the same Bibilical scenes: the creation of the world, Adam and Eve, Noah’s flood, and many more. There is a huge Christ pantocrator dominating the central apse, very similar to that in Roger II’s cathedral at Cefalù.

Ustica is delightful. We walked around most of the island, along the southern coast on the first day and the northern on the second. The place has a grim history as a natural prison. In ancient times the Greeks left thousands of disobedient mercenaries there to starve to death, and more recently the fascists used it as a prison. Its most notable inmate was Antonio Gramsci. There didn’t seem to be any actual prison buildings; it was more a matter of house arrest. There is a plaque outside the house where Gramsci was confined. Now the island is a holiday place, especially in July and August, but it wasn’t crowded when we were there.

This village, Scopello, is across the Golfo di Castellamare from Palermo. It’s a bit of picture-postcard-ish, very pretty, and we’re in an excellent pensione where we ate simply and well last night. I’ve just driven the others down to a nearby beach. Glenda and Julian will be happy to spend the whole day under a sun umbrella; I think I might get a call from Helen after a couple of hours. Back in the room it’s quiet and the ideal place to write.

There’s little in the wider world to be cheerful about. The stupidest and most corrupt American president of my lifetime has this week been offered the United Kingdom’s red-carpet treatment in London. At this moment he’s present in Portsmouth at the 75th anniversary of the D-Day departures from the south coast of England. On Friday Theresa May will resign as leader of the Conservative Party, though she will stay on as Prime Minister until a new leader is chosen. That will take several weeks. At the moment, the self-interested, vain and untrustworthy Boris Johnson looks likely to win the contest. If he is one of the last two candidates — the others having been eliminated, at which point all members of the Conservative Party have a vote — he will certainly win, because he’s popular with the membership. The only positive thing to say about such an eventuality is that because Johnson is not an ideologically committed Brexiteer — that is, he only became a Brexiteer because he calculated that such a stance would speed his rise to the top — he might in the end perform some kind of fudge to do with our exit from the EU, relying on the honeymoon early period of his premiership, which would keep us closer to the EU than some of the purer Brexiteers would wish. But this is to clutch at straws. Nothing will happen before the end of July. Then there’s the parliamentary recess, then the conference season, and before we know it we’ll be up against the latest deadline agreed with the EU — 31 October — by which time we are supposed to have made up our minds about the manner of our leaving. When I come to continental Europe, it’s so plain to me that this is our home that the grief about the self-inflicted wound we have dealt ourselves is more painful. I don’t need to remind myself of the EU’s shortcomings, but I remain convinced that our role should have been to remain in the club and argue for reforms. It’s too late now.

The elections to the European parliament last month did not turn out so disastrously as I had feared. It’s true that Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party was the overwhelming winner in the UK, and that Marine Le Pen’s renamed Rassemblement National narrowly beat Macron’s party in France, and that Salvini’s La Lega won decisively in Italy. But the advance of far-right, nationalist, populist or racist parties was more mixed elsewhere, and the good news is that there were significant advances almost everywhere for centrist parties and for the Greens. This means that the two big centre-left and centre-right groupings, which have dominated the European parliament since its inception, will have to form an alliance with the liberals and the Greens in order to pass legislation (Macron’s La République en Marche has joined the centrist grouping in the parliament). That’s a good thing. Farage and his gang will make a nuisance of themselves there until we leave the EU.

Not many people get killed in Europe while we commit blunders. It’s a different matter elsewhere. The heroic uprising in Sudan which led to the overthrow of the dictator there is currently being crushed, with many deaths, by the same mobs of armed thugs who used to commit atrocities in the Darfur region of the country. At the UN, the effective dictatorships of Russia and China refuse to support any international condemnation of the brutality. The message to armed thugs in poorer countries in Africa and elsewhere is: carry on as you like, because Russia and China will give you cover at the UN; they’re not that worried about human rights themselves.

We’ve been here for two and a half weeks now, after completing our fortnight in Sicily, returning to London for five days, then crossing to France and staying three nights at the Auberge du Terroir at Servon, so we could explore that area a little bit, as we had several times promised ourselves.

After Scopello we visited the wonderful ancient site of Segesta. I knew about it because Peter Hetherington, when he visited Sicily alone forty years ago, arrived there from Palermo on the train, walked up to the temple and the amphitheatre from the station, and was the only visitor. No gates, no information, no cars, no coaches. Just him and the wonders. On the evening after our visit, I rang him from our hotel in Erice to tell him what we had done, and later I wrote to him.

‘Segesta was indeed an unforgettable experience, even in the latter-day context of mass tourism.  We drove there by a small, bumpy road, passing the station — Segesta Stazione — where you alighted, Peter.  Now, visitors have to park at a place about a kilometre from the museo archaelogico, as they call it, and take a shuttle bus up to the site.  The bus drops you a short distance from the temple, and you pay six euros to enter.  But the temple is still breathtakingly beautiful in its silence and completeness.  It’s surrounded by a low wooden fence, so no one is climbing over it, but one can walk all around it, as you will have done.  The day was pleasantly cool and overcast.  After a good half an hour of marvelling, we made our way back to the road which leads up to the theatre, scorning yet another shuttle bus which takes lazier people the kilometre or so up the hill.  The effort was rewarded.  I didn’t know what to expect, but was entranced by suddenly coming to this perfect 4,000-seater stone auditorium with its immense view across the landscape down to the Golfo di Castellamare.  People just sat quietly on the seats and wondered.  I’ve been reading about the Elimi, the original inhabitants of Segesta (and also of Erice, where we now are).  Legend has it that they were fugitives from Troy after the war with the Greeks.  Indeed, I see from the internet that in book 5 of The Aeneid Aeneas comes to Eryx (Erice) on his way to Italy.  His mother being Venus, a cult in her honour was established in a building just up the road from our hotel.  We’re in a chastely austere former Carmelite convent, but the cult of Venus allowed — indeed commanded — less restrained behaviour.  Sacred prostitutes gave themselves ‘with lust and passion’ to passing sailors who had managed the 750-metre climb up from the plain.  It was the young women’s religious duty to do so: from the sailors’ point of view, this was an unusual example of the nice and the good being the same thing.

It’s historically certain, whatever doubts there may be about the identities of Aeneas’s mum and dad, that when Segesta and Erice fell under Roman rule after the final Punic war — ‘Delenda est Carthago’ I remember Ken using as an example of the gerund, never forgotten it, please tell him — they had especially favourable treatment from Rome — no taxes and a large measure of self-government — because of the assumed (or invented) common Trojan ancestry.

Erice is swarming with tourists in the daytime, but the coaches go away about five o’clock, and it is the most spectacular hilltop mediaeval town.  The view down to Trapani and Marsala and across to the Egadi islands is awesome (overused word; when I was in San Francisco everything was awesome, even the waiter’s response to my ordering coffee and orange juice in the morning), but this was.’

The reference to Ken is to Ken Pearce, who taught me Latin at O-level at Bedford Modern School.

We stayed in Erice for five nights. One day we visited Trapani, in great heat, and lunched very well in the shade of a back street, and then Marsala, where I drank a glass of the famous wine in the cathedral square. On another day we just drove around the interior of the west of the island, stopping at Salemi, one of the towns wrecked by the 1968 earthquake, and now rebuilt. It’s definitely not on the tourist circuit. We walked up to the piazza at the top of the town, where there was one bar which served us a good plate of pasta. The earthquake had destroyed the main church; it was impressive to see how the authorities had secured the standing remains of the apse and left them open to the sky. The Norman castle had apparently not shifted. It was closed. I walked all around it. An information plaque told me that Salemi is mentioned in al-Idrisi’s book.

We flew back to Liverpool, where it was pouring with rain, stayed one night with Glenda and Julian in Shrewsbury, then drove to London. A lot of unpacking and repacking and organisation. My birthday on the Sunday was quieter than usual, because Helen was going to treat me to the three nights at Servon, starting the next day.

We drove there on 17 June. The day after that we went to Avranches, where the highlight was a visit to the Scriptorial, the museum in the town where the manuscripts made or acquired by the monks of Mont Saint Michel are kept.  They’ve been there since the leaders of the French revolution removed them from the Mont and deposited them in the town as items of purely sociological, pre-Enlightenment public interest.  It’s a most impressive place, with a depth of information quite exceptional for a provincial museum.  I learnt, for instance, that Henri II Plantagenet, he who had Thomas Becket killed, performed his act of public penance, as required by the pope before he could be absolved of his sin, at Avranches. I understood for the first time how the Plantagenets came to be ruling England: they were counts of Anjou, one of whom married Matilde, William the Conqueror’s granddaughter, because her father, the last of William’s sons alive, had no male heir, and thus they got their hands on vast tracts of England and France.  I discovered that there was a close connection between the worship of Saint Michael here and his adoration on Monte Gargano in Puglia.  I already knew that one of the possible reasons for the Norman invasion of southern Italy and eventually Sicily was that some of the knights wanted to visit Monte Gargano on their way back from a crusade, but now I realised why they were so interested: the archangel had been adored on their own home patch since early in the eighth century. Bishop Aubert of Avranches was asleep one night in 708 when Michael came to him and told him to create a sanctuary in his name on the islet then known as Tombe.  The next morning, the bishop woke up and decided that his dream had no significance. That night, Michael, somewhat irritated, visited again and asked the bishop why he hadn’t already started work.  The following morning the bishop again decided that the dream meant nothing, and that in any case he was unworthy of such a great undertaking. The third night Michael, now thoroughly angry, came back and dragged his finger across the bishop’s skull, leaving a permanent mark, while repeating his instruction.  When the bishop woke up and felt his head, he knew that the visit had been real and that he’d better get on with the job.  Hence Mont Saint Michel.  One can see the bishop’s skull in one of the churches in Avranches, complete with Michael’s mark.  (We didn’t.) 

There was very interesting information about the making of parchment and the various inks and tints used in the writing and illumination.  All in all, it was one of those experiences where you realise how interconnected things are: in 1969, I played Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, directed by Peter Hetherington, who later visited Italy and Sicily; Henry II did penance at Avranches; I’ve written a (probably never to be performed) libretto about how the son of a Norman knight became ruler of Sicily; Saint Michael is one of the links between Normandy and southern Italy; I admire Seamus Heaney’s poems about the labours of mediaeval scribes.  Funnily enough, the last time I took communion, before giving up the practice as being hypocritical, was with my friend Peter Adams, who was chaplain at Trinity when I was there, and who stayed with us at Kerfontaine a few years ago.  He very much wanted to see Mont Saint Michel, so we went there on a Sunday before I took him to the airport at Dinard.  We walked to the top, where high mass was in progress in the abbey, and it was Michaelmas Sunday.

The next day Helen and I went to Granville, a few kilometres up the west coast of the Cotentin peninsula.  It’s an important port, with a noble granite high town and nice little art gallery where there was an exhibition of Corbet’s seascapes.  And the day after that we arrived here and ate a simple omelette for dinner, after three nights of our host Thierry Lefort’s unapologetically Norman cuisine.

I’ve just finished Antony Beevor’s book about D-Day and the battle for Normandy. I mentioned the other day that this year is the 75th anniversary of the débarquement, as the French call it. (They don’t call it an invasion; it was the Germans who invaded.) As always with Beevor’s books, the story is one of heart-breaking destruction and mass killing, with acts of barbarism interspersed with gestures of chivalry and kindness. I hadn’t previously appreciated the rather obvious fact that Normandy suffered terribly so that much of the rest of France could be spared the same degree of destruction as the Allies moved east. Once again, Montgomery comes out badly — vain, inflexible, unable to admit that anything he had done was mistaken — and Eisenhower comes out well: a diplomat holding together a set of ferocious egos, and somehow keeping them pointing in the same direction. Once again, I find myself enraged by de Gaulle’s hauteur, his refusal to acknowledge that the Americans, and to a lesser extent the British, Canadians and Poles, were the real saviours of France. Leclerc’s French soldiers liberated Paris only because the Americans enabled them to do so. There were real heroes in the French resistance, disrupting German supply lines, blowing up bridges, cutting telephone wires. Once Paris was liberated, de Gaulle did everything he could to see that the communists in the resistance were excluded from the governance of post-war France. One could say that the French Communist Party’s rigid adherence to the party line from Moscow hadn’t helped them; they had been in favour of the Nazi-Soviet pact until the Germans invaded Russia and the line abruptly changed. And there were communists in France at the end of the war who didn’t realise that the last thing Stalin wanted at that time was a revolution there: he wanted American aid to the continent.

We are basking in the most lyrically lovely summer weather: hot but not too hot, with a refreshing breeze.  Soon after we arrived, we did have two or three days of suffocating heat, with humidity reminding me of my trips to Bangkok.  The humidity combined with the fact that it had previously rained solidly for almost a month meant that damp patches appeared all over the house, and the bathrooms streamed with water.  We were a bit worried until we heard that everyone else was suffering in the same way.  Now dry heat has returned.

I spent a few days getting the garden under control, in the face of the rife profusion occasioned by so much rain.  Now it’s done, apart from the enormous oak tree which blew down last winter, and which Jean-Paul, our gardener, and a few of his mates are slowly chopping up.  The crown of this tragic giant resists even the largest chain saws.  On Wednesday Jean-Paul and his wife Christine took us out to a little restaurant in Lorient, not previously known to us, run by a woman who had been a school friend of one of their daughters.  A lovely meal, taken in the restaurant’s sweet little back garden.  We heard elegant singing from somewhere nearby, and asked what it was.  It was the students of the local lycée, who had just finished their bac, and who were having a sing-song to celebrate.  I thought what a contradictory country this is: capable of smashing shops, burning cars and desecrating the Arc de Triomphe in the recent gilets jaunes protests, but also old-fashioned enough for 18-year-olds to want to join in a sing-song to celebrate the end of their schooling, and doing it with style.

Last night we went to the annual hunters’ fête in Cléguer. We are the very opposite of hunters ourselves, but good friends now with Jérôme Debon and his wife Aurélie, who live just up the hill at Collogodec. Jérôme is an enthusiastic hunter. Nothing we ate had been hunted, unless you count prawns: as last year, it was paella, Camembert and apple tart.

I’ve done some more translations: this time a dozen of Catullus’s poems. Number 101, very famous, is the moving tribute to the poet’s dead brother. I sent it to Paul, who showed it to Andrew Bethell, who’s just finished a book about his beloved and brilliant younger brother, who killed himself in 1980 at the age of 29 or 30, having damaged his brain with drugs. Andrew’s going to print the translation as the frontispiece to the book.

The summer has continued ‘sublime’ (the word I used in the first line of my translation of Rilke’s ‘Herbsttag’ — ‘Dear Lord, the summer of your blessing was sublime’). But now it’s cooler, and it has even rained a little this morning. The garden looks good now. Jean-Paul, Alain and Nicolas have come on successive Saturdays and chopped up the remaining fallen wood, which we’ve shared between us. It’s been quiet all month: just Helen and me, apart from two nights when my friend Graham Caldbeck came to visit from Jersey. On Friday we begin a month of non-stop hospitality.

Graham had trouble finding the house, as many occasional visitors do. After driving round the commune for half an hour, he stopped at a house where two men were working, to ask if they’d heard of Kerfontaine. They were most helpful, and supplied him with an ancient map plus detailed instructions. But he had been astonished when, at the beginning of the conversation, they had asked him if he were a nudist. He didn’t know that there is a naturist campsite not far from us, and that lost people driving cars with foreign number plates in the summer are often presumed by the locals to be looking for a destination where they can take their clothes off.

Graham told me a good story told to him by Richard Chartres, who was then Bishop of London, and who had overlapped with Graham at Trinity. He must have left the year before I arrived. He attended a concert which Graham conducted. Afterwards they were reminiscing over drinks, and Graham said he remembered that Richard had lodged in Green Street Hostel. ‘Yes,’ said the bishop. ‘When I got there my bedder [one of the women who ‘did’ for the young men — made their bed, washed their crockery, cleaned their room] said this to me: “There’s some young gentlemen as likes to have young ladies staying with them overnight, and I don’t object to that. There’s some young gentlemen as likes to have young gentlemen staying with them overnight, and I don’t object to that. But what I can’t abide are vegetarians.”’ I suppose she must have objected to cleaning the pots and pans the vegetarians left after cooking their own dinner, rather than going to Hall to eat carnivorously like everyone else.

Politically, I’m in despair. Boris Johnson became Prime Minister last week, as widely predicted. He immediately chose a Cabinet stuffed almost entirely with hard-right, hard-line Brexiteers, including advocates of the death penalty and dreaming latter-day imperialists: a kind of fascism English-style. The government has adopted a gung-ho attitude to Brexit: we’re leaving on 31 October, come what may, with or without a deal with the EU. No deal is now the more likely eventuality, they say. This despite the warnings from every responsible economic or industrial body that we shall damage ourselves grievously if we leave without an accord. I fervently hope that the EU 27 stick to their oft-announced position, confounding the know-all opinions of Conservative commentators who say, ‘Ah well, Johnny foreigner always comes to the negotiating table at the last minute.’  There’s a part of me that would like to see Scotland become independent, and — but this would cause bloodshed — Ireland reunited, leaving a ‘United Kingdom of England and Wales’ to make its way in an unfriendly world.  I think Helen could apply for Cypriot citizenship if she wished to, thus remaining an EU citizen, and I could apply to be French.  Maybe we’ll do that. But of course the better part of me still hopes against hope that some kind of deal will be done, despite the government’s public position, because those who will be most hurt by our leaving with no deal will be those who can least easily sustain that hurt.

The trouble is that the Labour leadership is quite inadequate in response, and I predict that Johnson the showman will wipe the floor with Corbyn, who can really only read off the card what an adviser has written for him.  I heard on the radio the other day that someone had suggested a government of national unity under Keir Starmer, which would be wonderful but is, I think, a pipe dream. More realistically, so I read yesterday, Keir is talking to Philip Hammond and other sensible Tories about ways of preventing no deal when Parliament resumes in September.

When I think back to the stupidity of electing Ed Miliband instead of his brother in 2010…  David Miliband as leader would have won the 2015 general election, and we wouldn’t be in this dreadful mess.  It was the unions who tipped it for Ed, thinking him more left-wing than his brother.  Ed then changed the voting system, doing the unions no favours at all, but bringing about a situation where, if enough left-wing MPs continue to nominate a left-wing candidate as they did Jeremy Corbyn, the many enthusiastic socialist dreamers in the party’s membership will continue to elect far-left Labour leaders who will fail to gain power. Maybe the MPs won’t sentimentally nominate a left-wing candidate, just for the look of the thing, next time there is a leadership contest. It’s true, I admit, that Labour did far better under Corbyn than expected in 2017. But that was because the electorate hates being lied to, as Theresa May did by repeatedly saying that she wouldn’t hold an early election and then doing exactly that, and because the Conservative campaign was so awful. Neither of those factors is likely to be in play next time. Regardless of who is the Labour leader, we are now in a situation where Labour and the Liberals really need to agree a pact at the next general election, each standing aside in the constituencies where the other is stronger. The crisis is that urgent.

Meanwhile, all over the world, bad, stupid people are in control: USA, Russia, Turkey, Brazil, China, Egypt, Syria and most of the other Arab states… There’s a frightening stand-off between Iran and the West at the moment, with increasingly belligerent words on both sides. The root cause of the increased hostility is Trump’s withdrawal from the historic agreement achieved by the Obama administration. But it’s true that Iran unconditionally supports the monster Assad in Syria, and so it was right that the UK intercepted an Iranian oil tanker in Gibraltar, which was on its way to supply Assad’s armed forces, since EU sanctions forbid support for the Syrian regime. Inevitably, Iran denies that the oil was bound for Syria, and almost inevitably it then intercepts a UK-flagged tanker in the Persian Gulf.

China is trying to crush democratic dissent in Hong Kong; it’s imprisoning large sections of the Muslim population in the west of the country. Russia imprisons people demonstrating for the right of opposition candidates to stand in elections in September. Thousands of political prisoners languish in Egyptian and Syrian jails. The Brazilian president makes openly homophobic and misogynistic remarks, and is unconcerned about the destruction of the country’s rain forest. Yesterday there was another shooting of innocent people at a festival in America. The BBC’s website says: ‘Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as a gun attack in which at least four people are either killed or wounded. In total, it estimates that 8,434 people have died as a result of gun violence in the US in 2019 so far.’ More than 8,000 people killed by guns in seven months. And absolutely no chance that the US is going to do anything about its gun laws.

I’m not sure that democratic legitimacy, the right to dissent, the values of an open society and the use of respectful political discourse have ever been so much under threat in my lifetime. To lie, to imprison, to murder: that seems to be becoming a normal method of governance in many countries. And the standard mode of discourse is the tweet: the glib shorthand of the ignorant and the wicked.

Throughout August, as I predicted in my last, Helen and I supplied non-stop hospitality to a succession of friends and family. Very enjoyable, and a bit exhausting. We’ve agreed that we won’t let that happen again. Two weeks out of the four at most will be given over to shopping, cooking, bed-making and sheet-changing, and entertaining visitors in other ways. Of course we love all the people who came.

Now we’re here in the house which used to be Stephen’s and Theresa’s, and now is principally Theresa’s, although Stephen’s children have minority stakes in it. It’s four years since we were last here; three years and three months since Stephen died. We drove down to Angoulême on Tuesday, expecting to meet Theresa at the station and bring her here, but when we arrived there she rang to say she’d missed the train at Montparnasse and was still in Paris. Fortunately, her son Paul and his partner Phil were still at the house, so we came on and then Paul went to the station to fetch his mother that evening. The result was that five of us had a jolly and delicious dinner which Paul and Phil cooked. They left yesterday morning, so now it’s the three of us.

This morning we went into Aubeterre-sur-Dronne, still a beautiful village, though overrun with people like us: English spoken everywhere. It’s one of my peculiarities, perhaps snobberies, that I don’t like to rub shoulders with too many of my compatriots when I’m abroad. Tonight we’re going to a good restaurant at Chalais, where Stephen and Theresa took Helen and me on my birthday a few years ago. I hope that there may be fewer English there than in Aubeterre. The countryside has all the charm for which I’ve loved it since we first started coming here when Stephen and Theresa bought the house: gently rolling hills, a mixture of sunflowers, maize, vines, walnut and fruit orchards, ancient blonde farm buildings with red tiled roofs. We’re here until next Tuesday, then we take Theresa back to Angoulême, spend a couple of nights in a hotel, possibly at Agen, and then meet David and Heather Loxton at Toulouse airport. We were with them for a few days in July of last year, in a beautiful house near Gaillac belonging to a friend of David’s. This year we’re going to spend a fortnight with them, including, I think, a trip down to Pyrenees. David has lung cancer, which he is resisting well with the help of immunotherapy. I’ll do the driving. Then back to Kerfontaine near the end of the month.

We’re living through extraordinary times politically in the UK. Boris Johnson as Prime Minister first said that he wouldn’t prorogue Parliament in order to frustrate the efforts of those who wish to avoid the UK leaving the EU with no deal. He then did exactly that. Sometime next week, Parliament will rise, and not return until 14 October. Johnson and his ministers say, with straight faces, that this is a perfectly normal procedure, that the current parliamentary session has been very long (it has), and that the country needs a new legislative programme. Everyone knows that proroguing Parliament in order to begin a new session needs a few days at most, not five weeks, and that this is a nakedly politically manoeuvre. In response, the opposition, with the support of more than twenty Tories utterly in despair at the direction their party has taken, has successfully pushed through a measure forcing the Prime Minister to ask the EU for a further delay to our exit until 31 January 2020 if he hasn’t got a deal with the EU by 19 October. The measure has to pass the House of Lords, but after some late-night filibustering yesterday evening, the government yielded and said it wouldn’t frustrate the bill by attempting to talk it out. So I think it will go through. In response to that, Johnson has tried to provoke a general election. His problem is that, under the terms of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011, an early general election can only occur if at least two thirds of MPs agree to it (as happened in 2017), or if the government loses a vote of no-confidence in the House of Commons, and can’t regain the confidence of the Commons within a fortnight. So there was a debate and a vote last night, after the opposition’s measure was successful, which failed because only 298 people voted for an early general election, and more than 400 would have been needed.

Somehow, and I don’t understand this, Johnson says that next week he’s going to have another go at bringing about an early election. I can’t see how the result would be any different, unless the opposition changes its position or unless the Fixed-term Parliaments Act itself were to be rescinded, which could be done with a simple majority. But Johnson now doesn’t have a simple majority. He had a majority of one (with the DUP supporting him) when he became PM. He lost that when one of his MPs went to the Liberals. Now, and this is the most extraordinary thing, he has expelled those Tory MPs who voted with the opposition to prevent a no-deal Brexit. So, although of course many of them might well vote with the government on all sorts of non-Brexit matters, in strict arithmetical terms his government has a minority, not a majority, of more than forty. And some of the people who are no longer officially Conservatives are among the most senior former members of the party: Ken Clarke, Philip Hammond, Alastair Burt, Nicholas Soames. Johnson has expelled these people when he himself, and all those others who frustrated Theresa May’s effort to get the Withdrawal Agreement passed, regularly voted against their own government and got away with it. (Johnson himself voted for the Agreement on the third occasion, having done everything he could to damage and defeat it earlier.)

It’s a preposterous situation, which really does bring closer the likelihood of a significant realignment of politics in the UK. As I’ve written before, I would be delighted if Labour, the Liberals, the Greens and whoever else wished to join could form a coalition government to get us out of this mess. And I think that the opposition was right to refuse to agree to an early general election now. It was a trap which Johnson set. Yes, Labour has been clamouring for a general election for most of the time since the last one. Yes, Johnson will go around now saying that Labour is frightened. But he is so patently untrustworthy that, had the opposition agreed to a general election, he could easily have changed the proposed date from mid-October until early November, thus more or less guaranteeing that the UK would leave the EU on 31 October with or without a deal.

The Europeans are looking at all this with astonishment. It’s as if your most sensible, most prudish maiden aunt suddenly began shouting dirty words and showing her bottom at the dinner table. The British were supposed to be the pragmatists, the moderates, in the face of the wilder idealisms of their Continental friends.

In the end, we didn’t go on down to the Tarn. Heather Loxton texted to say that David was too ill to travel. His most recent session of immunotherapy had so exhausted him that he was in hospital and being given enormous quantities of steroids. I’m glad to say that he’s back home now, and that the steroid doses are much smaller, but he needs to stay close to the hospital for weekly visits.

Our week with Theresa at Barraud was an emotional experience, because until 2015 that visit was always part of our year.  I used to take my overalls and gardening gloves, because Stephen needed a hand keeping encroaching nature at bay.  Since he died, various improvements have been done to the house, so now it’s a good deal more comfortable than it was.  It really was a metaphor for Stephen’s character: noble, romantic, but without some of the banal modern conveniences which the rest of us have come to rely on.  Now we go to sleep in a bedroom without fearing that a large insect might fall into our mouths if we open them to snore. There’s a shower room that you actually want to go into. There’s more light in various rooms, Velux windows having been installed.

Instead of the Tarn, we contented ourselves with two nights in Agen, staying in that eccentric hotel we love, whose plumbing is antique but whose breakfasts, including the famous Agen prunes, are delicious.  There’s no restaurant in the hotel, but there are two excellent ones nearby, where they know us.  We explored the town on the intervening day. There’s a very good museum, whose most famous possession is an exquisite Venus (she lacks head and arms, but she’s still gorgeous) from the first century BCE, discovered nearby in 1877. The Garonne skirts the town, and the Pont-Canal, the bridge over the river carrying the canal linking the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, is a noble and beautiful example of nineteenth-century engineering.  

Then back here last Friday.  Driving home from shopping this morning, I noticed a field full of cattle egrets: beautiful white birds which the cows not only tolerate but welcome, because they eat the insects which otherwise torment them.

It’s a bit late for me to be writing about this summer’s cricket, but I will just say that the final of the World Cup was one of the most extraordinary and exciting matches I’ve ever listened to. The 50 overs for each side, England and New Zealand, ended in a tie; then there was one ‘super over’ for each side, which also ended in a tie; so England won the World Cup on the basis that they’d scored more boundaries during their innings. I sat outside the house with Radio 4 from beginning to end.  Helen brought me an aperitif at about seven, and at about nine French time said rather plaintively, ‘Couldn’t we eat now?’  I had no idea it was so late.  The English commentators and summarisers, with the honourable exception of Simon Mann, who is easily the best English commentator, abandoned any attempt at impartiality.  The usually entertaining Philip Tufnell kept forgetting that ‘we’ were playing New Zealand, not Australia, as if the match were merely a warm-up for the Ashes.  In contrast, the NZ summariser Jeremy Coney and commentator Brian Waddell maintained admirable objectivity to the end.  Coney did say that he thought the trophy should have been shared, and I agree with that.  Alec Stewart gruffly remarked that you can’t share a trophy, and the thought occurred to me that if you can share a Nobel Prize, as is regularly done, surely you can very occasionally share a sporting cup.

Then there were five Test matches against Australia. England lost the first one spectacularly, partly because Anderson played and then had to withdraw after bowling four overs. He shouldn’t have started; the young Archer should. The other reason was that in Steve Smith the Australians have one of those batsmen who come along only very rarely: not as elegant as Vivian Richards or Sachin Tendulkar, in fact not elegant at all, but astonishingly good at scoring enormous numbers of runs, and almost impossible to get out. In the second Test, young Archer was unleashed. He’s the first genuinely fast bowler — not fast-medium, genuinely fast — that England have had for many years. There was a gladiatorial contest between him and Smith, during which he struck Smith and concussed him. Smith couldn’t bat in the second innings. The match was drawn.

In the third Test, in which Smith couldn’t play, still being concussed, England produced, in their first innings, one of the most deplorable batting displays I can remember. They were dismissed for 67 by some wonderful bowling, but also by some appalling batting. All hope of England regaining the Ashes was given up. Australia batted well enough, and England had to make 359 in the fourth innings to win. Ben Stokes then played the most extraordinary innings that I have ever seen or heard played by an Englishman (he was born in New Zealand): boundaries to all parts of the ground, including an unbelievable six from a reverse sweep. Towards the end, there was only one wicket left, and the heroic Jack Leach, number 11, saw it through with Stokes. So the Ashes were still alive. England lost the fourth Test, so Australia, with Smith back in the side, retained the Ashes. England won the fifth and final match; the series was drawn. Australia deserved to retain the Ashes, because their bowlers were almost always brilliant. England’s bowlers were usually excellent, but there were some crucial periods when they weren’t. Neither side was reliable with the bat, apart from some individual performances approaching genius. Yes, we had Stokes; but they had Smith. It has been a great summer of cricket.

I’ve just finished reading Les Misérables (in a brilliant English translation by Julie Rose).  1200 pages.  What a whopper! What an extraordinary achievement, rising above most modern fiction like a great oak above scrub.  Hugo allows himself numerous lengthy digressions from the plot.  The one I enjoyed the most was that to do with the Paris sewer system, which comes before Jean Valjean’s heroic journey through the sewers, with Marius on his back.  It made me proud that, in my minuscule way, I’d also written imaginatively about the sewer system of a great city.  A cat may look at a king.  Of course the plot relies on a whole succession of impossible coincidences, but then so does Dickens and so does Hardy.  As with Dickens and also Dostoevsky (but not Hardy), a certain sentimental Christianity, or at least deism, hangs over the nobility of the author’s social and political rage.

Brexit update: Parliament was prorogued, and now the UK Supreme Court is hearing two appeals, one against a ruling in a lower English court that proroguing, whatever Johnson’s motives, is no business of the law; and one — an appeal by the government, this — against a ruling by the highest Scottish court that Johnson’s action in proroguing was illegal. We’ll get the Supreme Court’s judgment on Friday or early next week. Some people are saying that it’s the most important constitutional decision since 1689.  Maybe, but I remind myself that, so far, only one person has been killed because of this disaster: poor Jo Cox.  Much worse things happen around the world all the time: 24 people were killed in Afghanistan yesterday while waiting to vote.

The Prime Minister of Luxembourg was brilliant yesterday, having just met Boris Johnson, in his analysis of the mess we’ve got ourselves into.  And Alan Johnson on The World at One today said exactly what I wrote here in November last year: Labour should, with regret, have voted with the government to agree the 585-page withdrawal agreement, which only zealots on the far right of the Tory party and the DUP objected to, and then by all means be as trenchant as possible in insisting that a customs union with some agreed access to the single market be accompanied by guarantees on workers’ rights, environmental protections and standards for consumers.  We haven’t even got to the point of agreeing how to leave, let alone discussing what our future relationship will be.

The harvest of poetry recently is meagre: little pieces, nice enough in themselves, but nothing to make me really proud. I’ve gone back to Petrarch for translations: so far I’ve done three of the sonnets he wrote after Laura died (the translations in Bring Me the Sunflower end with the poem announcing her death for the first time). I’ll do a few more. I read the one I did yesterday to Helen. She admired it and said, ‘You’re always saying that you don’t do as many poems as you’d like to, because you don’t get good ideas often enough.  That didn’t bother Petrarch.  He just wrote about the same thing over and over again.’

Yesterday the Supreme Court delivered its ruling on Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament. And it was a historic decision. Lady Hale, the President, in the plainest possible terms, and representing the unanimous decision of all eleven judges, said that the Court does have the right to intervene on matters of this kind, and that the decision to prorogue was illegal. The judgment has an implication beyond the immediate context.  The Court insisted that it will intervene, and that it has a right to intervene, when it is convinced that one branch of the constitution — in this case, the executive — is acting to suppress or prevent another branch of the constitution — Parliament — from fulfilling its proper responsibilities.  Although Lady Hale used moderate language, it is clear that the judges were convinced that the exceptionally long prorogation was a device, a wheeze, to try to get us to 31 October and exit from the EU without further complications.  It’s extraordinary that Johnson, Rees-Mogg and Gove are saying simply that they ‘disagree’ with the verdict, as if they’re having a chat in a pub and that they disagree with what someone else is saying.  Of course we all have a right to disagree, but in this case the law trumps agreement or disagreement.  I don’t know what means opposition politicians have at their disposal to punish Johnson for breaking the law.  His offence was civil, not criminal, but unless he resigns, which I don’t think he will, I think their only option would be to go for some kind of impeachment. This would take time, and there isn’t much of it at the moment.  Johnson said in New York yesterday that the UK would be leaving the EU on 31 October.  He wasn’t necessarily right about that.  There is a law on the statute book, sponsored by Hilary Benn, which says that, unless we have a deal with the EU by 19 October, or unless Parliament votes for a no-deal exit (which it won’t), Johnson must ask the EU for an extension of our membership until 31 January next year.  I don’t see how he can get round that law.

Anyway, yesterday was a great moment, and it was impressive to see such complex matters explained so clearly. I’ve just written a little squib in celebration.

It’s been raining all week. I don’t mind; the land needed it after a dry summer, although the Morbihan hasn’t suffered from drought in the way that much of the rest of France has.

The extraordinary political struggle over Brexit continues. Parliament resumed last Wednesday, by permission of the Supreme Court. By one of those judicial fiats which replace reality, the Court said that the prorogation simply hadn’t happened; the weeks during which Parliament hadn’t sat had the status only of a long moment of silence. On Wednesday, there were some of the most bitter, angry exchanges in the House of Commons that I can remember. I think most of the anger on the opposition side was generated by Johnson’s and his allies’ blithe refusal to recognise that they had done anything untoward, let alone illegal. Some women MPs accused the Prime Minister of using violent language — calling the Benn Act, which I mentioned in the last entry, a ‘surrender act’ — which had encouraged threats of physical violence to them on social media. Johnson casually dismissed one such intervention by answering, ‘I’ve never heard so much humbug in my life.’ It’s the posh-boy sneer, the hubris, which maddens all his opponents and which troubles quite a few on his own side. So it wasn’t surprising that Parliament voted down a motion to suspend sittings for the first three days of next week so that the Tories could hold their conference in Manchester. The conference will go ahead anyway, but it’s possible that Parliament might bring forward a vote of no confidence in the government at some point during those three days, and that some Conservatives might still be in Manchester, or on the train back, when the House divides.

The problem with the no-confidence vote is Corbyn himself; not enough people who genuinely want to see the back of Johnson’s government are sanguine about Corbyn leading an alternative government, even for a short time. It’s true that as the leader of the second largest party in the House, he has the obvious right to try to form an alternative government; but I have trouble believing that enough of the expelled former Tories would support the no-confidence vote, or even abstain, if that were to bring about a Corbyn-led administration. If a more consensually supported person like Kenneth Clarke were to offer himself, and if Labour were to agree to his becoming a short-term Prime Minister for the sole purpose of getting the Withdrawal Agreement through and then negotiating a customs union with the EU, I think that a no-confidence vote would pass. But I can’t see Corbyn agreeing to that; imagine the rage directed at him from his own inner circle and from the zealots in Momentum. So I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I suspect that most of the key actors in the drama don’t either. It could even be that Tories stuck on the train from Manchester might make the difference between success and failure for the vote.

I’ve just read Darwin’s Armada, a very good book describing the travels of Darwin, Hooker, Huxley and Wallace, the way that their discoveries led to the development and publication of Darwin’s and Wallace’s theory, and the battle to get it accepted from 1859 onwards. I knew quite a lot about this from Janet Browne’s biography of Darwin, but I didn’t know any detail about the travels of the three younger men, and in particular about Wallace’s achievement. His journeys to Brazil and then to the East Indies involved a degree of physical hardship — often life-threatening — far beyond the relative (only relative) comfort of the other three on ships of the Royal Navy. And it was interesting to read about his lurch into spiritualism, and his attempt, late in the day, to suggest that human consciousness had come about as a result of the intervention of a higher power, or ‘Intelligence’: a proposal which dismayed Darwin and the others. I wonder whether Wallace’s error was caused by an early concern about what later came to be called ‘social Darwinism’: the carrying-across of the principle of the survival of the fittest from the world of animals and plants to that of humans. There have been plenty of eugenicists and other racists prepared to adopt Darwin’s theory for evil ends. And the book does refer to a paper which Wallace wrote in 1864 called ‘The Origin of Human Races and the Antiquity of Man, Deduced from the Theory of Natural Selection’, of which Darwin and the others approved, which proposes that, in the case of humans, natural selection has shifted, because of the development of consciousness, from a process supporting the fight for survival to ‘the sphere of morals, where progressive improvements could continue indefinitely’.

Wallace, so far as I can see from the book, was the one of the four, because of his much more extensive contact with indigenous people than that of the others, who was the least affected by conventional nineteenth-century assumptions about the superiority of white, European civilisation to the cultures of other peoples. Not that the others were racists; they abhorred slavery and fought hard against brutal notions, such as that encouraged by the Anthropological Society, founded in 1863, which tried to insist that white people were civilised, black people primitive, and that the two should never mix. It’s easy to see how such prejudices were both a cause and an effect of imperialism.

I think I’ve written before that I long ago came to the conclusion that the reason for one of the persistent products of consciousness — the existence in human societies of religious faith — is that, once our species came to have consciousness, a state which — so far as we know — no other living species has achieved, the realisation that we are born, we live a little while, we die, and that is that, so horrified our ancestors that they invented stories to console them by delusion. Hence religions. As to whether, on balance, religious faith has done more harm than good in the world, or more good than harm, I don’t know, but my suspicion tends towards the former.

I’ve popped back to London to attend the wedding of my goddaughter Clare Harrisson. It was a lovely affair yesterday, held at the Stanley Halls in South Norwood. Plenty to eat and drink, of very good quality; touching and not-over-length speeches; dancing. Clare is the daughter of Mike and Judith Harrisson. Mike was killed in a motor accident in Barcelona in 2003. As I’m sure I wrote then, we went straight up to Huddersfield, where the family was then living, when we heard the dreadful news. Clare was doing her A-levels at the time. She passed them with distinction, despite her bereavement, and went to Trinity College, Cambridge to study history. Mike would have been very proud of her. I expect I wrote about her graduation ceremony too.

There were several of her university friends there yesterday, including a woman sitting next to me. I was amused when she told me that in her last year she occupied a room in Great Court — P7 — right opposite the one I had occupied — P6 — several decades previously. She didn’t know that the bathroom between the two rooms, which she used, was only there because the Prince of Wales had occupied a room on the floor below — P3 or P4 — in his last year, two years before mine. There was a lot of stuff in the press at the time about how he was being treated just like any other student. Not true, of course. For one thing, he wouldn’t have been at Cambridge at all, with his two unimpressive A-levels, if Charles Mountbatten-Windsor had been a private citizen. And at the time (late 1960s), there were no en-suite bathrooms for the students at Trinity. They had to wander across the court in their dressing gowns to the communal bathing places. No such indignity for Charles, at least in his last year (I’m not sure what happened in his first two); and I inherited his privilege two years later. No one else on the staircase wanted to make use of the facility, which was even more convenient for me than it had been for Charles: he had had to walk up one flight of stairs; the bathroom door was right next to the door of my rooms. The person in P7 that year, whom I met only once, was a hermitic, chess-playing mathematical genius who had no interest in washing.

I’ve just come back from a walk in Regents Park on this beautiful blowy autumn afternoon. I shall go to the Prince Albert later to hear, I hope, Paul, Chris and Rupert of Acoustica play: always a pleasure on a Sunday evening. I have to be up before five tomorrow morning to get the plane from Southend airport back to Rennes.

There was no attempt at a vote of no confidence in the government last week. The various opposition forces can’t agree on a common plan of action, and I’m sure that the problem is the lack of enthusiasm on the part of everyone other than Corbyn and his allies for the idea that he should become Prime Minister, even for the short time that a government of national unity would need in order to do a deal with the EU which would keep us in the customs union. Plenty of Labour MPs are waiting for the moment, which may come more quickly now than expected in 2017, when Labour will lose its fourth general election in a row, despite the Conservatives’ catastrophic mismanagement of Brexit, so that Corbyn will stand down, to be replaced by a leader able to attract the level of support which actually wins elections.

In the immediate emergency where we find ourselves, I think that a government led by Ken Clarke and Harriet Harman — Conservative and Labour respectively, and Father and Mother of the House respectively — would command the necessary majority. That’s probably a pipe dream. Meanwhile, Johnson has proposed the most preposterous, unworkable new plan, which he describes as a generous compromise on the UK’s part. Northern Ireland stays in the EU’s single market for goods; it leaves the customs union with the rest of the UK. This would require regulatory checks for goods travelling from Britain to Northern Ireland; and it would require customs checks of some kind for goods travelling across the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. How did Johnson manage to gain the DUP’s support for a measure — staying in the single market for goods — when it so evidently treats Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK? By promising them lots more money, and by giving them an effective veto over the continuation of the arrangement. In order that the single-market idea should come into being in the first place, it must be approved at Stormont and by the Northern Ireland executive. It must then be re-approved every four years, or the measure fails. This would be absurd if Stormont were working; but it hasn’t sat for more than two years, because of a stand-off between the DUP and Sinn Fein. And even if Stormont were to get back to work, the effective veto which I mention comes about because the Good Friday Agreement brought into being something called a petition of concern, which allows either of the two main parties to block a measure they don’t like. This apparently undemocratic but necessary device was introduced to stop one community imposing its will on the other. I read the other day that it’s been used 159 times since 1998.

I’m pretty sure that Johnson knew that the EU wouldn’t be able to accept his plan; and they haven’t. They’ve remained perfectly loyal to Ireland, not for a moment suggesting that Ireland should bend to Johnson’s will for the sake of getting this wretched business over with. Johnson meanwhile is caught in an apparent contradiction: the Benn Act requires him to seek an extension of our membership of the EU until 31 January next year unless the UK and the EU have agreed a deal by 19 October; he says that the UK will be leaving the EU on 31 October, come what may; but a government lawyer also says that the Prime Minister will respect the law. The only way out of this, as I know I’ve written numerous times already, is to get a government that will request that we stay in the customs union, while leaving the political structures of the EU. This won’t solve all the problems, but it will solve the Irish problem, and it will solve the Dover-Calais problem. And it will give us the breathing space — the implementation period — to work out what our long-term relationship with the EU is going to be.

Tomorrow afternoon we end our wonderful long summer and autumn here, drive to Servon for the night, and on Saturday evening we’ll be back in London.

It’s been raining continually and sometimes heavily for a couple of weeks now. The land is saturated. But this afternoon, as I write, the sun is out, making bright stripes across the lawn.

Two days after I returned from my weekend in London, Peter and Monica Hetherington came on the train. They stayed for six days. It was the happiest of times. Peter has made a remarkable recovery from his major stroke of last December. We walked (in his case more slowly than used to be his way), ate very well at home and in familiar restaurants, visited the Pierre de Grauw exhibition at Pont-Scorff and the Musée de la Compagnie des Indes at Port Louis, and on the last day drove to the côte sauvage. It was a rainy Monday, and there was hardly anyone else there. We walked down to one of those beautiful little yellow sandy beaches, with the rocks standing blackly up above the flat sand (it was low tide), and looked at the sea. I could see how much Peter enjoyed it. Its wildness appeals to the Northerner in him. He’s always saying how Bedfordshire is too domesticated for a Durham boy used to moors and empty spaces. Despite this, he’s put up with the domestication for 60 years.

Last week there was tree surgery here. Several large trees have fallen down on our land during the last two winters. No great damage has been done, and we have a new supply of wood. But I’ve been a bit worried that trees very close to the house might one day fall on the roof, given that climate change seems to be increasing the frequency of violent winter storms. That would be serious and expensive, although we’re insured. So Nicolas Izquierdo, our local élagueur (not to be confused with the other Nicolas who used to be Jean-Paul’s assistant and who has also been helping with wood-chopping) came with Jean-Paul, and now seven trees near the house have had haircuts, some more severe than others.

Brexit continues. Since I last wrote, Johnson has managed to agree a new treaty with the EU, despite the latter having repeatedly said that they would not reopen the treaty which Parliament had rejected three times under Theresa May. The extraordinary thing about it, however, is that it is far ‘worse’, from a Unionist point of view, than was Theresa May’s deal. Northern Ireland is now to be in a customs union with the EU as well as in the single market for goods. This means that there will be regulatory and customs checks between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. The DUP is understandably enraged, but most of the extreme Tory Brexiteers, who took such pleasure in frustrating Mrs May, have fallen into line behind Johnson’s deal. This makes no rational sense at all. It can only be understood as misogyny (we’ll back a buccaneering, blustering male who makes things up as he goes along, rather than a careful, charisma-free female who does her homework), or as exhaustion. Anyway, Johnson called a sitting of the House last Saturday: the first on that day of the week since 1982. He wanted to get a meaningful vote in favour of his deal on the day that he was obliged by law to ask the EU for an extension of our membership if we hadn’t agreed a deal by then (or hadn’t voted to leave with no deal). Sir Oliver Letwin put down an amendment proposing that the House should only back the deal once the full legal text of the bill to leave the EU had been debated. The amendment passed. The government then declined to proceed with the amended motion to accept the treaty, and announced that it would attempt to bring it back, unamended, two days later.

Two days later the Speaker of the House made a long and perfectly clear statement explaining why he wouldn’t allow the unamended motion to be debated. There’s a rule that says that a government can’t ask the same question of the House more than once in any parliamentary session, unless there are exceptional circumstances. The Speaker had decided that there were no exceptional circumstances. The only extraordinary thing that had occurred since Saturday was an act of petulance by the Prime Minister. He had sent the letter to the EU asking for an extension to our membership until the end of January next year, as he was obliged to by law; but he hadn’t signed it. He sent another letter with it, which he signed, saying that he thought an extension was a bad idea.

Tory extremists were enraged by the Speaker’s ruling, but he stuck to it. The next day, Tuesday of this week, the government introduced the full 110-page bill detailing the legal arrangements required as a consequence of our exit. Johnson wanted this massively complex and significant piece of legislation to be agreed in three days. He won a vote to give the bill a second reading, which meant that the UK has got closer to leaving the EU than ever before in this unhappy story, but he lost the programme motion which would have imposed the three-day timetable. So now he has ‘paused’ the legislation. We wait to hear whether the EU will agree to his ill-mannered request for an extension; they, the grown-ups, wisely decided that the letter required by law, though unsigned, was the one they should respond to.

Sensible Tories have counselled that 31 October isn’t a date to be fetishised; give the bill a decent amount of time to be debated, and see what amendments are proposed. Just do the normal thing. But I think that Johnson fancies a general election before Christmas, which he thinks he can win, given Corbyn’s unpopularity with the undecided public: the part of the electorate that actually decides the result of elections. Of course, Labour has to vote for a general election, under the provisions of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. Given that Labour has repeatedly said that it wants a general election once ‘no deal’ has been taken off the table, if the EU agrees an extension it’s hard to see how the party could refuse to vote for one. But I fear the results. On the other hand, as I’ve written previously, I’ve been so wrong in my political predictions so often before that it’s foolish to keep making them.

Just before leaving for my short break in London, I wrote one line on a piece of paper on the desk here: ‘Poem about how I’m becoming more aware of the bones beneath my flesh.’ At five o’clock in the morning of my return, I grabbed, more or less at random, a book to read on the journey back: Theodore Roethke’s Complete Poems. On the plane and over the next few days, I re-read all the poems. During my previous reading, many years ago, I had listed on the flyleaf all the poems I particularly liked. After the text of one favourite poem, I had written in pencil, within single quotes, ‘You see this goose flesh? And I am not cold.’ I thought, ‘That’s a good line. I hope it’s mine and not Roethke’s or anyone else’s.’ Having re-read the whole collection, it’s not Roethke’s, and I’m going to assume it’s mine, despite the single quotes. And I realised that the line would make a good ending to the poem I had planned before the trip. Anyway, the resulting poem is one of my best. It’s called ‘This Living Hand’, with every respect to Keats. Its last line is owed entirely to the chance that I picked up Roethke’s book that morning, and not some other.

We got back to London twelve days ago. I always enjoy the vigour of autumn: ‘gusty emotions on autumn nights’ (Wallace Stevens), but gusty emotions on autumn days too, and the sense that mild sunshine is a gift not a given.

We are, alas, embarking on a five-week election campaign. The EU granted an extension to the UK’s membership for up to three months, until 31 January next year. The government then brought in a simple bill which had the effect of by-passing the requirements of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act (extraordinary what law-makers can do when they really want to), and only required a simple majority of MPs, not a two-thirds majority, to pass. It passed easily, because most of the Labour MPs abstained. Corbyn had always said that Labour would support a general election once ‘no deal’ had been taken off the table. He decided that the extension granted by the EU meant that ‘no deal’ is now off the table, at least for the time being. (Of course, it could be back on the table if we haven’t decided what we’re doing by 31 January, or if we get to the end of 2020 and the negotiations for a future relationship with the EU haven’t been concluded or have broken down; but I think the EU in that case will allow an extension of the transition period for another year or two.) So, there will be a general election on 12 December, the first held in that month since 1923.

If Johnson wins with a working majority, he will ram through his Withdrawal Agreement Bill by reintroducing the programme motion which was previously defeated. He might even do it in the one week remaining between the election and Christmas, and we might then be out of the EU on the first day of next year. Or it might take a bit longer, and we’ll be out on the first day of February. If Labour wins with a working majority, it will attempt to renegotiate the withdrawal agreement with the EU, despite the EU saying that they won’t agree to any renegotiation (but they said that about Theresa May’s deal, and then changed their minds when Johnson became Prime Minister). Then, having achieved a deal which, while leaving, keeps us closer to the EU, it will put to the electorate, in another referendum, the choice of leaving with that deal or of remaining. Alas, I have the strongest doubts as to whether it will be possible to convince undecided people that more months of negotiation and then a second referendum are a good idea. All the other parties have a simple message: get out or stay in. Labour has a complicated message.

Of course, it’s perfectly possible that on 13 December we’ll have another hung parliament. The SNP is likely to gain seats in Scotland from the Conservatives. The Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Greens have just announced an electoral pact covering 60 seats in England and Wales; that is likely to hurt the Conservatives. Nigel Farage has just said that his Brexit Party will stand candidates in every constituency in Great Britain. It’s likely that this will hurt the Conservatives more than Labour, though it will hurt both. The Tories have made a disastrous start to their campaign, with Jacob Rees-Mogg suggesting on radio that the reason so many people died in the Grenfell Tower fire was that they didn’t use common sense (as he would have done, of course, being an Etonian and therefore so much cleverer than the sort of people who live in tower blocks); and with the resignation of the Welsh secretary, who had claimed that he knew nothing about an associate deliberately wrecking a rape trial (as a result of which there had to be a retrial, at which the associate’s friend was found guilty), when it appears that perhaps he did. Labour has its own troubles, too. The deputy leader, Tom Watson, last night announced that he would not be standing at the election, and would resign from his post immediately after it. His differences with Corbyn are well known. And this morning two former Labour MPs actually told people to vote Conservative, so intense is their dislike of Corbyn. Extraordinary.

So Brexit rumbles on. Labour in particular wants to talk about all the other things it would do if it gets power, but Brexit will hang over the next five weeks like a storm cloud. Keir Starmer will certainly retain his seat here, and I admire very much the way he has managed to maintain clarity on Brexit, albeit a complex clarity, and has maintained a public loyalty to Corbyn, whatever his private doubts. But at the moment I have no enthusiasm for going out to knock on doors and stuff leaflets through letterboxes.

I’ve just read Richard Holmes’s biography of Shelley. The book has been on a shelf in France for years, but I’ve just never got round to it. It’s a magnificent achievement, and I notice that it was first published in 1974, when the author was 29. That a person can by that age have learned so much, and can handle scholarly sources so well, is a wonder to me. Somehow I’ve never until now taken on the Shelley oeuvre properly, so when I’d finished the biography I took down the 1894 ‘Albion’ edition of the complete poems, which sat on my father’s shelf throughout my lifetime until he died, but which I hardly opened before transferring it to my shelf in London in 2009.

I have now made my way through the 646 pages, but only as a result of much skip-reading. I can only sincerely admire a number of the short lyrics, including some of the obvious ones: ‘Ozymandias’, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, ‘Song — To the Men of England’, ‘Lines written during the Castlereagh Administration’, ‘England in 1819’, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, ‘Evening — Ponte a Mare, Pisa’, ‘To Emilia Viviani’, ‘To William Shelley’, ‘To the Moon’, the translation of Dante’s sonnet ‘Guido, i’ vorrei’ (which I’ve also done, and I think my effort is better). The long pieces are indigestible. Nearly 400 pages are taken up with the first twelve poems and verse dramas in the book. I find their diction mannered and over-blown. None of the stories engage me in the way that Keats’s narrative poems do, especially The Eve of Saint Agnes. There are occasional moments of brilliance in the long pieces, such as the remark given to Count Maddalo (Byron) near the end of Julian and Maddalo: ‘Most wretched men / Are cradled into poetry by wrong: / They learn in suffering what they teach in song.’ Shelley obviously intends this as a statement of his own position. The simple descriptive beauty of ‘Evening — Ponte a Mare, Pisa’, was such a relief when I got to it. And even though some of the diction of ‘Ode to the West Wind’ is high-flown, the connection the poet makes between the elements and his own despair that he is any more than the dead leaves flying before the wind, while hoping for greater recognition in the future, is moving. I should add that ‘Peter Bell the Third’, the satire about Wordsworth, is very funny.

The biography filled in the detail of what I vaguely knew already. I can only feel enormous admiration for a young man so passionately given to the cause of justice and liberty in the face of the dreadful oppressions visited on the common people of England. Rage contorts him. I’m not surprised that ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ became a sacred text to the Chartists. It’s remarkable that such a scholar as Shelley — able to read and translate from Greek, Latin, Italian, German and Spanish — should have also been able to write a popular ballad in response to Peterloo. I haven’t yet read any of his extensive prose output, apart from the bits quoted in the biography. I must do that next. Meanwhile, his personal and sexual life was extraordinary: running off with and marrying two girls, one after the other; charging about England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Switzerland and Italy; causing, unintentionally, the deaths by suicide in despair of his first wife and of the half-sister of his second; having a continuing sexual relationship with another half-sister of his second wife; fathering children, most of whom died, by four women; striking up new passionate relationships right until the end; sustaining an admiring friendship with Byron, heavily tinged with jealousy that Byron had achieved, apparently effortlessly, the public fame which he never did; holding on to a dream, never achieved, that somehow he would be able to form a community of like-minded, free-loving, socialist (avant la lettre), atheistical people held together in opposition to the stupidities and cruelties of the world he saw about him. All just about sustained because he had enough inherited wealth to keep debtors at bay. Drowned before the age of 30.

I’ve just heard that Frank Dobson has died. He was our MP until 2015 when he retired. I’m very sorry. I knew Frank a little, from the period when I was a more active member of the local Labour Party than I now am, and I liked and admired him enormously. He was exactly the sort of Labour person we need: passionately clear about what the party should be doing to reduce inequalities and increase opportunities for those to whom they are denied, but not sectarian, and not given to vicious attacks on people representing different strands of thought within the Party. Left, but not ultra-left; able to see how unattractive doctrinaire ideologues are to the majority of working-class people, who are still Labour’s natural constituency. He was a very good health secretary for a short time, abolishing the internal market in the NHS which the Tories had set up (only for his successor to reinvent it in another form, alas), and it was a great shame that he decided, or perhaps was forced, to run for mayor of London against Ken Livingstone. It was one of Blair’s worst errors to prevent Livingstone from standing as Labour’s candidate, however unpleasant a character Livingstone has turned out to be in more recent years, with his provocatively anti-Semitic remarks (‘Hitler was a Zionist until he went mad and killed six million Jews’).

General election news: Farage has changed his mind about standing candidates in every constituency in Great Britain. Now he’s not going to contest the 317 seats which the Conservatives won in 2017. At the moment he intends to stand candidates in every other GB seat. This could change again. My first thought when I heard the news yesterday was that this was a huge benefit to the Tories; and surely it must be to their advantage, given that most pollsters think that the Brexit Party, and previously UKIP, have taken and will take two votes from the Conservatives for every one from Labour. Maybe this move alone will be the difference between another hung parliament and the Tories winning an overall majority. On the other hand, the Conservatives need actually to gain seats, principally from Labour, in order to have a majority, and with the Brexit Party splitting the pro-Brexit vote in constituencies which the Conservatives need to win, that will be harder than it would otherwise have been. As I wrote the other day, I think the Tories will actually lose seats in Scotland, to the SNP. The Liberal Democrats have some strong candidates in the south and south-west of England, who could unseat incumbent Tories. If Labour were to become the largest party, but without an overall majority, it will be much easier for Corbyn to make some kind of agreement with smaller parties, whatever is being said at the moment, than it would be if Johnson leads the largest party, but short of an overall majority. Johnson has burnt his boats with the only party with which he had been in collaboration — the DUP — and no one else will touch him, unless the Brexit Party actually wins a seat or two, which I don’t expect, despite their strong showing in the European elections in May. But I still think, pessimistically, that the Tories will win some sort of majority, because their offering on Brexit is so much easier to sell than Labour’s, however disastrous its longer-term consequences.

General election day, and my prediction of a month ago — that there will be a Tory majority tomorrow — hasn’t changed. Despite writing on 7 November that I had no appetite to go out canvassing or leafleting, of course I’ve changed my mind and done a bit of pavement-bashing and letterbox-stuffing, principally because I have enormous respect and admiration for Keir Starmer, who will win comfortably here in Holborn and St Pancras. Nationally, though, Labour has failed to break through, as it should have done after the cruelty, incoherence and mendacity of the Conservatives over the last nine years.

Jeremy Corbyn, a decent man and a good, diligent local MP, doesn’t have the quality — hard to define but easy to recognise — which reaches out beyond the Labour tribe to the persuadable but uncommitted centre of the electorate: the people who actually decide elections in this country. Tony Blair had that quality, despite his dreadful error over Iraq, and he won three elections, two handsomely and one more than adequately. And though I respect Corbyn as an individual, I can’t forget, for example, that a contemptible attempt was made, at the Labour conference only two months ago, to unseat his deputy, Tom Watson, by abolishing the post of deputy leader. The attempt failed, but it was clearly the work of the Momentum faction which supports Corbyn and his policies, and he must have known about it. He didn’t stop it. So the thought crosses my mind that perhaps he is more sinister than he appears. As I wrote on 7 November, Tom Watson has decided that he has had enough; he isn’t standing at this election, and the deputy leader’s post will be vacant after today.

Labour’s Brexit position, despite being the only reasonable one to take, given the mistakes the leadership made earlier, is much harder to sell to people who are simply tired of hearing that word. By ‘mistakes the leadership made earlier’, I mean Labour’s failure to back Theresa May’s original withdrawal deal, the only contentious element of which was the Irish backstop, which proposed a temporary customs union in the unlikely event that a full-scale trade deal couldn’t be done before the end of the transition period. Labour, after all, went into the 2017 election promising to respect the result of the referendum. Its official position, as announced by Corbyn at the party’s 2018 conference, was for a customs union. So Labour officially wanted, on a permanent basis, exactly what May’s deal was suggesting on a temporary basis. The brief political declaration about the future relationship between the UK and the EU was nothing but aspiration. By all means Labour should have opposed anything it didn’t like in the eventual proposals for that future relationship. If Labour had backed May’s deal, or at least abstained, the zealots on the Tories’ far right and in the DUP would have been neutered. In autumn 2019, however, to say, ‘We’ll enter into a third series of negotiations with the EU, aiming for a softer Brexit; then we’ll put the outcome of those negotiations to the people in another referendum, with the option to remain also on the ballot paper,’ doesn’t cut through like ‘Get Brexit Done’.

Labour continues to be mired in allegations of anti-Semitism. As a Gentile and fervent anti-anti-Semite, I continue to be puzzled. I read the views of distinguished Jewish people saying the worst about Labour. Then I read the views of other, equally distinguished Jewish people saying that Corbyn has done more to root out anti-Semitism from the party than any previous leader. In the end, and having talked to Labour-supporting Jewish friends, I have to accept that the party has been too slow to prosecute people accused of anti-Semitism and to expel those found guilty. But, having organised a few things myself, I can imagine that the administrative load of conscientiously investigating hundreds of cases, while giving the accused a fair hearing and keeping to the principle of ‘innocent until proved guilty’, has simply proved too heavy for the party’s systems to deal with swiftly enough. A few weeks ago, the Chief Rabbi, who speaks for about a quarter of British Jews, made an extraordinary attack on Corbyn: extraordinary in the context of religious leaders’ usual reluctance to take political positions during an election campaign. He claimed that Corbyn was unfit to lead the country. The accusation was gleefully taken up by the right-wing papers, who have been as filthy in their anti-Labour bias as ever during the last six weeks.

So I think we’ll lose. I fear for the effect of Johnson’s withdrawal deal with the EU — so much worse than May’s — on the fragile peace in Northern Ireland. The deal enrages the DUP and encourages those who want a united Ireland. It places an invisible border between Northern Ireland and Great Britain through various administrative controls, while leaving the province in the EU customs union and single market. It exacerbates tensions that are already there, with the devolved assembly closed down and the two biggest parties not speaking to each other.

And of course I fear for the prosperity of the UK as a whole. Johnson’s promise to get a permanent deal with the EU by the end of 2020 is a fantasy. He might get a deal of some kind within that time, but it will leave many important things to be negotiated later. We’ll be talking about Brexit for years to come, although probably not every day.

I agreed with almost all of Labour’s manifesto this time. Yes to bringing rail, water, electricity and gas into public ownership. Yes to bringing broadband into public ownership, but I couldn’t see why it should be free. We agree to pay for other utilities; why should the most recently invented one be free? I agreed enthusiastically with the radical and expensive measures proposed to address climate change, which is easily the most significant challenge and most present danger facing our world. I honestly don’t mind how much we borrow, particularly at today’s ultra-low rates, if we can then move swiftly to a sustainable future. Of course one country can’t go it alone. On the other hand, if everyone waits until the others do something, the planet’s future will be grim for those coming after us. I agreed with the proposal to tax capital gains at the same rate as income. I’ve never been able to understand the moral case for allowing a person who makes a capital gain to be taxed at a lower rate than they face on their income. There will be a few people who make a small capital gain and who are taxed on income at the basic rate. The great majority are higher-rate taxpayers, and so should be taxed at 40% or above for the amount of their capital gain which exceeds the basic-rate limit. The need to increase funding for the NHS and for schools is urgent and obvious. Our country is becoming more and more unequal. The Conservatives between 1979 and 1997 began this disastrous trend. Labour between 1997 and 2010 made some progress in reversing it. Since 2010, the trend has resumed. There is extreme and dire poverty in this rich country. I remember writing about it in the diary on the day before the 1997 election, after hours of campaigning on an estate geographically close to here, but where people live lives indescribably distant from mine.

Despite all this, I think we’re going to lose.

We lost, much more emphatically than in my direst fears. Johnson has an overall majority of 80. Labour had its worst result since 1935 in terms of seats gained (the only measure that really matters). Large numbers of previously unassailable seats in north Wales, the Midlands and the north of England went straight from Labour to the Conservatives. We shall now leave the EU on 31 January. During the rest of 2020, the UK will try to negotiate its future relationship with the EU. It would amaze me if anything more than a small part of what eventually needs to be agreed actually gets agreed within that time.

Labour lost for three reasons: Corbyn, Brexit and anti-Semitism. Corbyn was an electoral liability, not an asset, in those places where the Conservatives broke through so spectacularly. Traditional working-class Labour voters didn’t like or trust him, and enough of them had such strong feelings against him that they changed the habit of a lifetime and voted Conservative. The party’s position on Brexit, as I wrote nine days ago, was complicated and indigestible. In particular, people were derisory about Corbyn’s refusal to say which position he would take in the event of Labour’s proposed second referendum, where a renegotiated withdrawal deal was to appear on the ballot paper along with the option to remain in the EU. Finally, the accusations of anti-Semitism in the party must have caused damage, obviously in areas with significant Jewish populations, but elsewhere too. Labour simply didn’t look to enough people like an organisation worthy to govern.

One or two little things did occur as I predicted. The Tories lost seats in Scotland to the SNP. On the other hand, Labour’s position there is much worse: it only has one Scottish MP. Liberal Democrats did pick up two seats in the south of England, but overall it has one fewer MP than after the 2017 election. And its leader lost her seat.

In Northern Ireland, for the first time, nationalists have more seats than unionists: SDLP two, Sinn Fein seven, DUP eight (and one seat for the Alliance Party, which is a hopeful sign), though the nationalist majority doesn’t mean much given Sinn Fein’s ridiculous refusal to take up the Westminster seats they win.

Since his victory, Johnson has repeatedly used the slogans ‘one nation Conservatism’ and ‘the people’s government’. It remains to be seen whether the policies he will pursue genuinely do attempt to reverse the damage of 1979-1997 and 2010-2019, or whether we shall continue down the path of increasing inequality, a smaller state, yet more unbridled capitalism. I fear he will take the latter course, although his words at the moment are emollient. He says he wants to heal the divisions which the country has suffered in the three and a half years since the Brexit referendum. He must be aware that to a significant extent he owes his victory to people who live in areas most hurt by Tory policies since Thatcher, and that they could turn against him as quickly as they have turned towards him. Perhaps this fact, rather than any principled attachment to social and economic justice, might weigh with him.

Meanwhile, Labour is in tatters. There will be a new leader in March or April. I’m pretty sure that Keir Starmer will stand. The only other likely candidates for whom I could vote are Jess Phillips and Yvette Cooper. Phillips is passionate and eloquent, and would immediately attract the support of working people in the areas where Labour lost so badly. Cooper is a wise, sympathetic and experienced politician: the only one of the likely candidates who has actually held office. But her majority was slashed last week; she might decide that it’s too risky to be leading the party at the next general election when her own seat isn’t safe.

The danger is that a Corbyn-style candidate will get enough support from MPs to be on the ballot paper. Then, given the size of the Momentum-influenced faction within the membership, and Labour’s ultra-democratic voting system, we shall have another leader in Corbyn’s mould, and lose again, perhaps not so badly once Brexit is no longer an issue, but still lose.

A few post-election statistics. 56% of 18- to 24-year-olds voted Labour, 21% Conservative. The Tories beat Labour at all ages from 40 up. Amongst the 70+ group, only 14% voted Labour, against 67% Conservative. Women were more inclined to vote Labour than men, at 35% to 31%, while men were slightly more inclined to vote Conservative than women, at 46% to 44%. The Conservatives easily beat Labour across all social classes; remarkably, their support amongst the lower social classes — C2s, Ds and Es, taken together — was higher at 48% than amongst the As, Bs and C1s taken together, at 43%. Labour had the support of 33% of voters in both cases. So perhaps we can say that, for the first time, social class is no longer an influencing factor in voting decisions.

Labour has only won elections since the war when it has, to paraphrase something which Tony Blair said on the radio this morning, brought the socialist and liberal instincts in the British electorate together in an effective governing force. Attlee, Wilson and Blair himself were able to do that. I think Keir Starmer could do it. In my lifetime, there have been Conservative or Conservative-led governments for 44 years and Labour governments for 24. That difference will now increase, at least by five years and quite possibly by ten.

The day after the election, we drove up to Shropshire for our usual pre-Christmas weekend with David and Tom James and other friends. There was a happy dinner for ten on the Saturday. After the meal, people read bits of seasonal literature. A few weeks earlier, I had written a funny poem about an event told to me by Julian Walton concerning his uncle, a serious drinker, who in the snowbound winter of 1962/3 had lost his false teeth in a snow drift while returning from the pub one night, but who retrieved them from the same spot months later when the snow had melted, and put them straight back in his mouth. The poem is called ‘Pisser Willy’s Teeth’, and Julian and I read it together.

We arrived here this afternoon for Christmas. Everywhere is sodden, with standing water in most of the fields. Two more of our trees have been blown down in recent storms, and more violent weather is forecast. Pot au feu with our neighbours tonight.

Extraordinary weather here. Every so often it rains violently, with strong winds. Then all is still and the sun comes out. The ditches are filled with water. Two small rivers have been running down the road outside the house before combining in a single course in the middle of the lane which descends to the stream, carving a deep rut. The stream has burst its banks.

I had a look at the two fallen trees. They are both large oaks. The one that fell across the public lane has already been chopped up by workers from the commune. (Jean went to the mairie to tell them what had happened.) The other, though uprooted, hasn’t fallen to the ground, but is leaning against an adjacent oak. It can’t stay like that: too dangerous. It will have to be dealt with.

Throughout the world, there are signs of imminent catastrophe, whether from floods, violent storms, fires or drought. The ice caps at both poles are melting fast. The actions governments are taking are inadequate and too slow. I may have written before that only when the rich countries really begin to suffer is there likely to be a change of gear to address the crisis. It may be that the fires devastating Australia at the moment will cause that deeply unpleasant government, until now shamelessly committed to mining coal to sell to the Chinese, to change course; but I doubt it. Meanwhile, the Chinese people are choking in the cities because of coal and oil. The Chinese government, which doesn’t have to bother with inconveniences like democracy, could move swiftly to sustainable forms of electricity generation if it wished to. That would be a huge benefit to the planet, given that China burns more coal than any other country.

I still drive a car which runs on petrol. Our London flat is still heated by gas burned in a reliable but inefficient 30-year-old boiler. At least the electricity there is sustainably generated, according to our supplier. Here, all our energy — apart from the heat from the wood-burning stove — is generated by electricity, of which about 80% comes from nuclear power stations. As I understand it, nuclear power is much better from the point of view of climate change; on the other hand, its waste product is a fearful poison which must be guarded for millennia to come. Occasionally I read hopeful articles in the paper or online: there was a day recently when most of the UK’s electricity was generated by wind; more and more wind turbines are being built. Several excellent UK charities are busy planting trees around the world. All good. But the change, both at individual and at governmental and inter-governmental level, needs to accelerate immediately, or the world after my death won’t be the pleasant place that I have known.

Having read the biography of Shelley recently, I decided to read Andrew Motion’s biography of Keats, which has sat on our shelves in London for years but which I’ve never got round to. Very impressive. The book offers a touching, poignant but never soppy portrait of that extraordinary young man, like Shelley caught up in the politics of his day, like Shelley passionately of the radical persuasion, though less polemical in his poetry. A person ‘acquainted with grief’ from childhood onwards: shocked by his father’s sudden death, nursing first his mother then his brother Tom as they died, familiar with the gruesome facts of mortality from his work as a surgeon’s apprentice. Attacked with vile, sarcastic snobbery by the Tory reviewers; always aware of his (relatively) humble origins and his shortness of stature; taking on the responsibilities of an eldest sibling towards his younger brothers and sister; constantly worried about money; courageously atheistical; sexually deeply frustrated, I’m sure, although he may well sometimes have satisfied his longings with prostitutes; crazily in love with Fanny Brawne; unable to see how extraordinarily he had succeeded with the odes in 1819; brought low soon after that by the consumption that killed him; suffering dreadfully on the way to Italy and when he arrived there, until the end. Despite saying that he thought he would be among the English poets after his death, he died with no consoling evidence that that would be the case.

And, in his short life, he produced some of the most beautiful poetry in the language. I’m just re-reading the oeuvre. For me, as for countless thousands of readers, his greatness rests on the five great odes, ‘The Eve of Saint Agnes’, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and numerous wonderful sonnets. After ploughing through Endymion, I can see why Keats was dissatisfied with it even as he published it, and why it tends not to be read these days: it has the same mannered, high-flown diction which I found indigestible in Shelley’s long poems. I don’t think I’ve read either version of Hyperion before. The first two stanzas of book 1 of the first version, describing the dejected Saturn, are very beautiful, and Oceanus’s speech in book 2 of that version equally so, as he tells his fellow fallen gods that they are but a stage in a process:

‘As Heaven and Earth are fairer, fairer far
Than Chaos and blank Darkness, though once chiefs;
And as we show beyond that Heaven and Earth
In form and shape compact and beautiful,
In will, in action free, companionship,
And thousand other signs of purer life;
So on our heels a fresh perfection treads,
A power more strong in beauty, born of us
And fated to excel us, as we pass
In glory that old Darkness: nor are we
Thereby more conquer’d, than by us the rule
Of shapeless Chaos.’

It reminds me of Arthur’s moving words at the end of Tennyson’s Morte d’Arthur:

‘The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.’

I’m more cheerful than I was yesterday, having taken a Stilton cheese to the pharmacist in Cléguer, who was delighted by it. In October of last year, I went in there to ask for some statin pills, which I’ve been taking since my stroke in 2016. My London chemist had made a mistake and issued me with twice as many packets of another pill, a blood thinner, as were specified on my prescription, instead of the statins. The French chemist told me that she wasn’t strictly supposed to let me have the statins, since normally they are only available on prescription, but she would make an exception for me as long as I would supply her with a Stilton at Christmas. Her father had spent time in England and adored the cheese, which he used to bring back to the family home. So I willingly obliged, and this year repeated the gesture. Then I crossed the road and, as usual, gave Valérie, the postmistress, three bottles of wine. Valérie has been looking after us now for nearly 30 years. We used to pay for letters sent to Kerfontaine to be redirected to London during the months we were there. Then, one summer, La Poste increased the cost of international redirection by an enormous amount. Valérie said, ‘C’est le vol,’ and since then she has been redirecting our mail by more informal means. It’s the sort of thing that could only happen in small communities. I hope that readers of this website won’t shop her to the authorities.

I picked up the Christmas capon from the butcher. Capon is a popular choice in France for the Christmas meal. My brother Peter, who has inherited from our father a specialism in terrible jokes, asked me the other day, ‘What does Batman do for Christmas?’ Answer: ‘He usually has a cape on.’ And in the same shop I also bought foie gras, coquilles Saint Jacques and several cheeses. It may be surprising that a butcher has the best cheeses in the district, but that’s the case here.

Christmas passed pleasantly, as it always does. We walked by the sea during the afternoon, as we always do. The weather was astonishingly mild, even warm. When we got back into the car, the little panel which shows the date and the temperature read: 25.12.2019 19°. During the three days after Christmas the air remained mild and the rain held off, so I did the necessary in the garden: pruning roses and hydrangeas, cutting back the fuschias, clearing dead leaves, weeding. The place looks neat now, as it should at this time of year. But there are two huge oaks — not just one, as I wrote the other day — partially uprooted and leaning against their upright fellows, which will need attention in the spring; a third oak worryingly hanging over the main electricity line, which I should have asked Nicolas to attend to in October but didn’t; and a large willow fallen in the stream.

In a moment Mary and Jacques will come, and we shall go as usual to L’Art Gourmand for the Saint Sylvestre meal. They’ll stay a few days, and will look at a house nearby on Friday. They’ve more or less decided that they’d like somewhere in Brittany to which they can escape from the extreme summer heat of Marseille; it will be great to have them as neighbours.

I can’t shake off a feeling of dread for the planet in the years beyond my lifetime. I’m not sure that the following is a particularly good poem, but it says what I want to say at the moment.

The Saint Sylvestre dinner on 31 December went very well. The main improvement on the last two years was that Marie-Thérèse was back in full voice again. This is the lady who always used to belt out Edith Piaf numbers at full volume, addressing particularly poignant love songs directly to her seated husband. Two years ago, she was sad because her husband had died during the previous year, so didn’t sing, and last year she was absent. Here she was again, full of vigour and joy, so much so that during one of her performances she swept me up and we waltzed round the restaurant. She must be well into her eighties. I sang too. A day or two later we played the CD of Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga singing classic numbers together, and I suggested to Helen that Marie-Thérèse and I are their equivalent in Pont-Scorff, except that in our case the man is the younger performer.

Last Friday Mary, Jacques and I went to look at a house near Priziac, about half an hour north from our place. It’s well kept and recently decorated, with a beautiful little garden, and they’ve made an offer for it. I hope it goes through. It’ll be lovely to have them as near neighbours for a part of the year.

We arrived back in London on Sunday.

The world is anxious because in the early hours of last Friday morning the Americans killed Iran’s most senior military leader, Qasem Soleimani, and several of his associates, at Baghdad airport. This provoked an outpouring of rage and grief in Iran, with threats of violent revenge. Dozens of mourners were killed in a crush as Soleimani’s body was about to be buried in his home town. So far, the only external response from Iran has been to fire missiles at two bases in Iraq containing some American troops, with no casualties and little damage. But it’s too early to say whether or not Trump’s grotesque act of provocation will lead to a war on not. It may be that the event will eventually lead to the departure of American troops from the region, which would, I think, on balance, be a good thing, although it might lead to more violence there and the possible dismemberment of Iraq.

There is no doubt that Soleimani was a tyrant, responsible for the deaths of many thousands of people in Iraq and Syria as well as in his own country. But his death, and Trump’s abandonment of the nuclear deal which Obama achieved, have made it more likely that Iran will go on to develop nuclear weapons, not less. The event strengthens the hand of the hard-liners in the Iranian leadership, who see America, Israel and the rest of the West as implacable enemies rather than forces which must be negotiated with, however cautiously. In a characteristic bit of cynical manipulation of public opinion, the government claimed that the strikes in Iraq had killed 80 Americans when it knew that it had killed none, probably because its missiles had been intended to miss their targets.

After Labour’s disastrous performance in the election last month, the party is about to choose a new leader and deputy leader. Keir Starmer is standing, and yesterday received the support of Unison, the biggest trade union, which is a major boost. We shall vote for him because he is clearly the candidate most likely to lead intelligent, articulate opposition to Johnson’s government, and to revive Labour’s fortunes at the next general election in four or five years’ time, even if it might be too much to expect Labour to overturn the Conservatives’ 80-seat majority. I’ve offered to help his campaign. Most of the other candidates are women, and there is a point of view which says that it’s time Labour had a female leader. That’s an admirable aspiration, but none of the women who have said they will stand would be able to do the job I’ve described as effectively as Keir would. In particular, he has made it clear that he accepts that we’ll be leaving the EU on 31 January, whatever his regrets. That decision has been taken. The task now is to see what kind of deal can be done with the EU which keeps us as close as possible to our most important trading partners, preserving jobs here, while collaborating helpfully on the other areas where collaboration is essential, notable security, the fight against international criminality, and — crucially — the protection of the planet.

It’s a beautiful, mild, sunny January day.

Hours after I wrote the preceding entry, the Iranians shot down a civilian airliner which had just taken off from Tehran on its way to Kyiv. 176 people were slaughtered. The regime then tried for several days to deny responsibility, insisting that a missile could not have caused the crash, and even accusing the West of making such an accusation as an act of psychological warfare. Eventually, the overwhelming technical evidence was too strong to deny, and the Iranian government owned up. In the paranoid hours after Iran’s attacks on the bases in Iraq, people in control of Iran’s missiles had mistaken the departing airliner for an incoming cruise missile. It has so far not been explained how an aircraft which gives out a civilian call sign, travelling at that moment at only 500 kilometres an hour — much slower than a cruise missile — could have been taken for an American weapon. Other aircraft had taken off from Tehran airport that early morning, in the dark, without incident.

63 of the people on board were Canadians of Iranian origin, on their way back, as they hoped, to Canada via Ukraine. There were 82 Iranians and 11 Ukrainians, as well as nationals from Sweden, the UK, Afghanistan and Germany.

The public reaction in Iran to all these momentous events has lurched violently. Last year, months before the killing of Soleimani, protests against the regime were brutally suppressed, with hundreds of deaths, by forces led by him. His death briefly closed the rifts in public opinion, so that hundreds of thousands of people protested against the American action. Now, rage and resentment against a government which casually and confidently deceives its people has brought a moment of vulnerability for the regime more dangerous, I think, than at any time since 1979. It would be nice to think that the people might overthrow the mullahs and the military thugs who do their bidding, and usher in governance by moderate, open-minded, well educated people, of whom there is no shortage in Iran itself and amongst the Iranian diaspora. And, despise Trump and his actions as I do, I should admit that his unpredictable behaviour, leading to the catastrophe of the air crash, might push Iran in that direction. But, as I wrote the other day, it’s more likely that those actions will force the regime the other way, towards even greater paranoia about Western intentions and even harsher brutality in its suppression of dissent.

It’s been the most beautiful day. There have been several of them this month. Last night was very cold; there was a heavy frost this morning, even here in central London. But the sun has shone from a cloudless sky, and the air was almost warm as I walked round the park this afternoon.

I’m still fully engaged in the campaign to do with the industrial estate across the road. We have a Neighbourhood Forum, whose members are leaders of the businesses over there and residents of Elm Village on this side of the road. I’m secretary of the Forum. We want to keep the businesses where they are, transferred to new and environmentally better accommodation, and to build lots of dwellings which would be genuinely affordable to people on ordinary incomes. It’s a long slog. I’ve learnt a few things about the complexities of planning law. Our Neighbourhood Plan, which has legal status under an Act of Parliament which came into force in 2011, is currently being considered by an independent examiner appointed by Camden Council, after consultation with us. We don’t know whether it will succeed. We wonder whether the Council, which owns the freehold of the land across the road, would rather make a lot of money by selling it to conventional developers, who would then build blocks of flats for private sale at market rates, which around here means about a million pounds a unit, and use the money to build social housing elsewhere in the borough. We say no, Camden shouldn’t have rich and poor ghettoes, and the 500 people working on the industrial estate are serving the local community.

I’ve also been leading a project affecting our own block of flats. 24 of the leaseholders in the block (which has 44 flats) will shortly employ an agent to apply for a 90-year extension to our current leases, beyond the 87 years they still have to run. It seems mad, in a way, to be worrying about something which will only occur many years after our lifetimes, but if fewer than 80 years remain on a lease, the resale value of a property begins to wobble, it becomes more difficult for buyers to get a mortgage, and something iniquitous called marriage value becomes payable. This is justified by the notion that a freeholder has a right to share in the enhanced potential value of a property once its lease has been extended. There has been much legal consultation about this recently, and perhaps the government will at some point change the law to make it easier and cheaper for leaseholders to extend their leases or to buy the freehold of blocks of flats, but we’ve decided that we’d better act now. Currently, an intermediate organisation, sitting between Camden, which is the freeholder, and us, scoops up £150 a year from each flat for doing precisely nothing. When we get the 90-year extension, those payments will stop. £150 a year is insignificant by comparison with the price we’ll pay — perhaps as much as £10,000 — but at least we’ll have secured the value of the flats should we ever come to sell.

Keir Starmer has cleared the necessary hurdles to get onto the ballot paper for the Labour leadership. He has been endorsed by the shop workers’ union USDAW, as well as Unison and the Socialist Environment and Resources Association. Lisa Nandy has just been endorsed by the GMB union, and already has the support of the NUM, so she’ll probably be on the ballot paper too. There are now four candidates, because Jess Phillips dropped out today. I’m sorry about that. I wish she could have stood also for deputy leader. I would have voted for her there. The rules don’t allow it. She has said that if she couldn’t be leader, she would support one of the other female candidates. Which one she chooses will be significant.

In Davos, Trump has just made a disgusting, ignorant speech criticising those who warn us of the climate crisis as ‘prophets of doom’. The remarkable Greta Thunberg then said the opposite: ‘I wonder, what will you tell your children was the reason to fail and leave them facing... climate chaos that you knowingly brought upon them? That it seemed so bad for the economy that we decided to resign the idea of securing future living conditions without even trying? Our house is still on fire. Your inaction is fuelling the flames by the hour, and we are telling you to act as if you loved your children above all else.’

Amid Trump’s bluster and lies, some of the world’s wealthiest investors are pulling out of coal, oil and gas. The more the better, and quickly. Capitalism is unsentimental. If there’s no world left, there’s nothing to make money from.

I flew out two days ago to spend some time with my brother Andy, who lives here with his partner Beryl, known as Bez. It’s Bez’s birthday today. She’s 81, and tonight there’s a party at her son’s and daughter-in-law’s house. They also live in this village. Bez suffers now from dementia at quite an advanced stage, so I’m here partly to give my brother a bit of emotional support, and partly to see something of a country which I’ve only visited once before, in 1974, and then only to travel straight through it on a train.

Kriva Reka is in the east of the country, two hours’ drive from Varna on the Black Sea coast, where I landed on Monday. Most of the people in the village are Roma. There are other villages nearby which have majority populations of Turks or Bulgarians. It’s a poor place economically, with a scarcity of motor vehicles and the continued use of horses and donkeys to pull carts. The houses are vernacular, with mud brick walls surmounted by the classic curved roof tiles of southern and eastern Europe. If you go into the middle of the larger villages, where there are public buildings of various kinds, you see the remnants of the brutalism of the Soviet era. In the fields around this village, and probably similar villages throughout the country, there is another kind of scourge. Modern shopping practices, and the unchecked use of plastic, combined with unreliable refuse collection systems and perhaps a local mentality not educated in ‘advanced’ notions of civic responsibility, mean that the beautiful fields above this house, on common land rising up to hills where deciduous trees are about to come into leaf, are covered in thousands of pieces of refuse of all kinds, mainly plastic bottles. As I write, men in the fields are burning some of the waste (my brother says the mayor probably told them to do so) in small bonfires. Fortunately, the toxic smoke is blowing away from the house.

I’m sleeping in a house belonging to friends of Andy’s in a neighbouring village. The good road taking us there sports a sign announcing that this improvement has been financed with the help of funds from the European Union. Unfortunately, a small section of the route of about half a kilometre crosses a sliver of municipality which was not party to the agreement made by the two municipalities on either side, so we slow for a few minutes to negotiate a wrecked carriageway with deep potholes. Both the road problem and the litter problem are examples of enlightened civic attitudes and benevolent pan-national intentions frustrated by local political rivalries or inefficiencies and by the backwardness of some of the population.

The people are unfailingly friendly. My brother says that they welcome the significant British expatriate presence here (more in the village where I sleep than here) because it brings money to the community, and houses once ruined are being restored. The British, of course, have come here partly because property remains extraordinarily cheap by western European standards, as does the cost of living generally. It’s also a healthy climate, with savagely cold, clear winters (though less so last winter, I’m told — climate change) and long hot summers. Today is a beautiful spring day, with invigorating air and the trees in blossom.

The world is going through a crisis quite unlike anything I’ve known. A virus known as novel Corona virus has caused a disease which the World Health Organization has named as Covid-19, and which is rampaging across the planet and causing many deaths: I think the number now stands at about 8,000. Although that number is small by comparison with the toll taken every year by such afflictions as malaria, AIDS or seasonal influenza, the strangeness and unpredictability of this virus has brought about huge economic and social changes throughout the world, and there is the dreadful possibility of truly huge numbers of deaths and the breakdown of national health systems through overload.

The virus almost certainly started in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Expert opinion says that the Chinese predilection for killing, cooking and eating exotic wild animals might have meant that some of these animals, possibly infected by the virus from bats, carried it across to humans when their meat was eaten or touched. The infection is transmitted by droplets of water from breath, carried in the air, and perhaps the virus can also linger on physical surfaces.

China, which has one of the most authoritarian governments in the world, and one of the most obedient populations, imposed extraordinary controls on the behaviour of the people of Wuhan and the surrounding region. For weeks they were not allowed to leave their dwellings except under the most limiting of conditions. One heroic doctor, who warned about the imminence of the disease late last year and was punished by the state for his unpatriotic attitude, later died of Covid-19 and is now regarded as a hero by those Chinese who have any access to media other than that controlled by the government.

The disease has for now passed its peak in China, and infections and deaths are diminishing. But in almost all other countries, governments are struggling to contain the outbreak, and taking more or less drastic measures to do so. In Europe, Italy has been the worst affected, with — the last time I looked — about 2,500 deaths, and the whole country is in lockdown. No one goes out except for essential reasons, such as to buy food or because they are health workers, police officers or other personnel essential to the state. There is a similar situation in Spain, as there is since noon yesterday in France, where President Macron decreed that for the next fifteen days everyone except essential workers must stay at home. A form has been published online where are listed the only legitimate reasons for being outside. Those venturing outside must carry the form, ticked as appropriate, and if they are found to have disobeyed the decree, they will be fined.

My poor sister in Marseille has had a difficult few days. Last Friday, to her and our joy, her daughter Sophie was delivered of a baby girl, Anna Daphne Marie. Sophie returned from hospital on Sunday. On the same day, Sophie’s brother Sam, who was in Lisbon, contacted Mary to say that he was worried about his father, Mary’s first husband and a person whom I have cordially hated and despised since he abused my sister, sexually, physically and emotionally, during their marriage. Mary went to Sam’s flat, collected the keys to his father’s flat, went there and found the man dead on the floor. She touched the body, to see if there was any life, and then had to alert the authorities and to tell her children, who of course were deeply shocked and distressed. Despite my feelings towards the man and whatever his shortcomings, he was their father and that is a deep bond. This all coincided with the national health emergency, and Mary understandably couldn’t dismiss from her mind that her former husband might have died of Covid-19 (the elderly are overwhelmingly the group most at risk of death from the disease, and he must have been about 80), that she had then caught it, and perhaps later transmitted it to her family, including to the nursing mother and the new-born baby. Today, to our relief, it’s been confirmed that the death was not caused by Covid-19. It has been attributed to ‘Natural Causes’, with no autopsy done, leading me to wonder whether the authorities have more urgent things on their mind than to investigate further a sudden death not connected to the present emergency.

It’s one of those things about life. Sometimes nothing much happens for a very long time, and then a collection of extraordinary things happen all at once.

In the UK, the government has stopped short of decrees, but has issued the advice that people should stay at home as far as possible, and that the elderly should self-isolate for several weeks. It has also announced a huge package of economic stimulus measures, I think as big as those announced at the time of the financial crisis in 2008, to stop companies going bankrupt. This is in addition to the measures announced in last week’s budget, where significant but perhaps inadequate sums were provided specifically to address the health emergency, and an enormous new investment in infrastructure was promised, mainly paid for with borrowed money. (Interest rates at the moment are the lowest they’ve been in modern history.)

Essentially, the new Conservative government has abandoned the policy its predecessors have been following for the last ten years. In 2010 it decided not to follow straightforward Keynesian practice, as Obama had been doing since he took office in January 2009, and which has meant that the American economy emerged relatively healthily from the near-catastrophe of 2007 and 2008, which was a series of events caused by the greed and stupidity of overwhelmingly right-wing people and organisations, as I know I’ve written many times before. Instead, the UK embarked on a programme of austerity which has badly hurt our country socially and economically. All the time, it justified this action by making the cheap but effective political point that the crisis had occurred on Labour’s watch, and was therefore Labour’s responsibility, and that the Tories were clearing up the mess. Now, that programme having failed, it is going to borrow money on a scale far greater than that which would have been needed in 2010 and the following years to set the economy back on its feet. It is doing what Labour has been recommending during the past decade, and what Labour would probably have done if it had been in government from 2010. Which places Labour in a slightly awkward position, in that it cannot criticise a government too harshly for doing, albeit belatedly, what it would have done. However, trying to see things from the point of view of the good of the country rather than from that of party-political advantage, it’s a mercy that the Conservatives have seen some sense at last.

Such are wonders of the internet that I was able to vote yesterday for Keir Starmer as the next leader of the Labour Party from rural Bulgaria. I’ve done a little bit of work for his campaign, ringing people up and asking for their support. I went to a party for volunteers a couple of weeks ago, and had a good chat with Keir there and on the tube train going home afterwards (he lives not far from us). I told him why I thought he was the right person to lead the party and eventually the country, and warned him that he might need two goes to achieve the latter. I said, ‘You might be nearly as old as I am before you get to be Prime Minister. But don’t worry; those two guys [Biden and Sanders] who want to be the next Democratic President of the United States are already ten years older than me.’

It looks certain now that Biden will be the challenger to Trump. Democrats have decided in favour of platitudinous reassurance rather than forensic anger, despite the fact that America badly needs something very like the range of solutions to its problems which Sanders proposes. But they think that Biden is likelier to beat Trump. Perhaps they’re right. Anyone will be better than the most disastrous, ignorant, boastful, out-of-his-depth person to have occupied the White House in my lifetime. Trump’s inadequacy has been starkly illustrated by his incoherent, information-free, prejudice-rich statements to the American people as the Covid-19 crisis has worsened in his country.

I haven’t written any poetry so far this year: a bit worrying. But I have written four autobiographical pieces, and I’m translating some of Montale’s stories. I’ve so far done six out of the 47 which were collected and published in 1960 in a book entitled Farfalla di Dinard. They were originally written for two Milan newspapers between 1946 and 1950, and are full of the Zeitgeist of Italy in the early decades of the 20th century, coloured by the pessimism of a hero who had been through the fascist period on the right side, and survived. Despite my best efforts and the help of printed and online dictionaries, there are still places in the texts where I’m not sure that I’ve got the translation right.  The difficulty is compounded by the fact that, as a modernist, Montale didn’t write straightforward narratives.  Sometimes there is more than one narrative level, or he uses devices to cover what must be autobiography, or there are suggestive hints that leave you wondering and going back to the text to check you haven’t missed something. Some passages have genuinely perplexed me.  He was a great admirer of Eliot, who wasn’t all that bothered about always making himself clear either. On top of that, there are period references which an Italian reader just after the war would have got, but which are beyond us now, and occasionally I’ve given the translation a helping hand to make those clearer.  At some point I shall need the help of a native Italian speaker, preferably one with literary interests.

Until tomorrow, when I hope to fly back to England, I’m going to stay in this house belonging to my brother’s friends, where I’ve been sleeping. The quarantine regulations have become severe in the light of the Covid-19 crisis. When I landed at Varna on Monday, there were no restrictions on incomers’ behaviour apart from a quick check on our temperature before passport control. Since Tuesday it’s got stricter. Incomers from other countries now have to sign a form saying where they will be staying, get there within five hours, stay there in isolation for two weeks, and be prepared for checks by the police. I was walking openly around Kriva Reka with my brother on Tuesday and Wednesday. Perhaps someone reported my presence, because this morning I was told that the police and the mayor there would like to see me this afternoon. Fortunately, Bez’s son explained to the authorities that I was sleeping here, and the mayor of Kriva Reka — who perhaps wanted a quiet life — said that in that case he didn’t want to know any more about it as long as my presence is reported to the mayor of Lisi vrah. My hosts John and Tracey have agreed to do this once I’ve left tomorrow. I say ‘I hope to fly back,’ since flights all over the world are being cancelled. At the moment, tomorrow’s Wizz Air flight from Varna to Luton is still on.

I got up early this morning and went for a walk with John up through extensive woods of beech and oak. We looked down on a huge field of lavender. John said that in August, when the plants are harvested, the smell is wonderful.

The nations of the world are taking ever more stringent steps to try to slow the progress of the disease. In the UK, there is as yet no decree requiring people to stay at home except for essential reasons, but it may come soon. As from tomorrow, all the schools in England will be closed; those in the other parts of the UK already are. Poor Italy has more than 3,000 deaths, most of them in Lombardy. Spain has 767. Worldwide, the death toll is near 9,000.

The European Central Bank has followed other central banks in offering huge sums of money in the form of loans or asset purchases to help businesses which would otherwise fail. The lesson is the same as in 2008: market capitalism is all very well, for some, when the sun is shining; when the weather changes dramatically for the worse, the state has to intervene. Unfortunately, the lesson is soon forgotten when the crisis has passed. For many businesses, smart practice is to diminish tax liability as far as possible, usually legally, sometimes illegally; and when things get tough, to cry out to governments for help. Several airlines may soon be nationalised, in whole or in part. I’d be quite happy about that. The trouble is that recent economic policy has been to return to the private sector companies which had been nationalised in an emergency, once the trouble has passed, rather than keeping a stake in businesses when they are profitable again so that the state and the people may benefit directly.

I got back to London on Friday evening as planned. After narrowly avoiding the police on Thursday, I did meet two officers on Friday afternoon when they came round to the house. Evidently, my presence in Lisi vrah had been noted also. The men were charming, but they took all my passport details, and when I got to Varna airport a couple of hours later the woman on passport control spent a very long time looking at my passport, putting it back into the machine two or three times, and reading something on a screen which I couldn’t see, not that I would have understood it if I had.  My details must have been passed to the central computer, but probably the advice at the end was to let me go.  After about three minutes my passport was returned and I was through. The flight back was straightforward.

On the train from Luton to St Pancras I talked to a young Bulgarian man who had been on the plane with me. He was heading to Margate, where he has a fish and chip shop which he has been running for ten years. He hoped that business this coming season might be better than usual because holidaymakers probably won’t be able to travel abroad. On the other hand, he didn’t know whether or not he’d be allowed to open. That day, though I didn’t know it at the time, the government announced that all pubs, cafés and restaurants must close immediately. Restaurants will be allowed to sell food to be taken away. So I expect he’ll be all right. I was full of admiration for his courage and sense of initiative. He said that he’s going to apply for settled status in the UK, and then citizenship. I hope he succeeds; he’s the very opposite of the ‘scrounging east European overwhelming our public services’ which the Brexiteers have encouraged us to fear. But I was reminded, though I didn’t tell him this, that I went to Margate a short time after the 2016 referendum, at the height of the holiday season, and saw the white English working-class families on the beach with their St George’s flags fluttering in the breeze.

Last week Andy told me that in the villages in his region people wear red and white ribbons on their wrist from about mid-February. They’re called martinitsi, ‘March bands’. The tradition is that when you see your first stork each year, usually in March, you take the March band off and tie it to a tree closest to the point where you observed the bird. It’s a kind of fertility symbol. This year he and Bez were given March bands by Rosalinda, Bez’s granddaughter. She made them by plaiting wool. Having a pair of storks nesting in a village is seen as a good omen: hence the use of cartwheels or something similar on the top of poles to encourage storks to make their nests there.

Then, yesterday, he sent an email to say that the storks had returned. About a hundred of them were hanging in the sky. Everyone cheered. A pair have nested in Kriva Reka every year since he and Bez have lived there. Today he wrote that this morning twenty or so landed in the field behind the house and were feeding after their trip. ‘Frogs and lizards beware!’ I remember the description of the arrival of the storks in this part of the world in Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s A Time of Gifts.

A beautiful day, and Helen and I have just come back from shopping. The streets and the food shops are quiet. People are coming to understand the extraordinary changes which Covid-19 has imposed on our lives.

At the level of economic and social policy, the whole set of orthodoxies introduced under Thatcher and Reagan, which has done such deep damage to our societies, has been unceremoniously dumped by governments, including — as in the UK — by right-wing governments previously fixated on the idea of the small state. ‘There is no such thing as society,’ said Thatcher. Public bad, private good. The market can do almost everything better than the state. All this has been swept away. This morning the railways have been effectively renationalised. The private franchisees who still run most of them will be paid a management fee for continuing to do so. The state will shoulder all the railways’ liabilities and will own its assets, for at least six months. Private hospitals will now provide services to the NHS at cost, making no profit, bringing enormous new resources of people and equipment to the state at a stroke. And the huge interventions made by the chancellor since his first budget on 11 March — interventions which dwarf even those which the state made in 2008 — are there to stop complete economic collapse and the resulting social breakdown. The government will pay 80% of the wages of employed workers temporarily laid off, up to £2,500 a month, for at least three months and longer if necessary. This is a huge financial undertaking: tens of billions of pounds. They’ll make an announcement about self-employed workers later.

So it has taken an invisible force — the virus — to show how dangerous, how venal is the uncritical worship of the market. Suddenly, the state has a role to play, as economic observers of the sort I admire have been advocating for decades. Amongst those companies pleading for help from government are some whose owners and shareholders have grotesquely enriched themselves at the expense of the health of their business and the fair treatment of their workers. They have the loudest voices calling for rescue.

I expect that the airlines will have to be renationalised. National flag-carriers may once again become just that, rather than subsidiaries of multinational private entities.

I also expect, alas, is that once this is over — in three months, six months, a year? — the lessons will be forgotten, and we shall go back to business as usual, with the accompanying injustices and increases in inequality. Meanwhile, as stock markets crash and the super-wealthy seek ‘safe havens’ for their assets, they continue to avoid paying their share of tax.

It’s still the case that the UK’s death toll is greatly lower than that in Italy (which has suffered worse than any other country), Spain and France. Whether it remains that way, or whether we’re in for the same degree of loss, remains to be seen. I think the government may introduce sterner measures to restrict movement in the next few days.

We’re now four days into a state of lockdown unprecedented in my lifetime, although the restrictions aren’t as severe as they are in France, Italy and Spain. The Prime Minister broadcast to the nation on Monday evening, essentially telling everyone to stay at home unless obliged to go out for essential reasons such as food shopping. One daily walk or run for exercise is allowed. The weather in England and Wales all week has been sunny and clear, so there is a dreamlike feeling in the streets: hardly anyone about, warm sunshine on the empty, quiet buildings, and birdsong audible as it rarely is in London in the daytime.

Yesterday, as previously promised, the chancellor made another enormous offer of financial support from the government, this time to the five million self-employed people normally working in the economy. Those with profits up to £50,000 a year will get the same benefits as employed people: the government will pay 80% of their average income, as calculated from tax returns over the last three years, up to £2,500 a month, for three months at least and for longer if necessary. Those with tax returns of a shorter time than three years will be treated on the basis of one or two years of tax returns. Because dealing with the self-employed is more complex than it is with the employed, the system won’t start paying out until June. Until then, self-employed people no longer working will have to rely on savings, or borrow from their bank, or apply for Universal Credit, which pays £94 a week. The quantity of debt which the government will be taking on to see us through this crisis is vast: I’m sure larger than ever before (perhaps except for lend-lease during the Second World War?).

Italy has more than 8,000 deaths, Spain nearly 5,000, France about 1,700, the UK ‘only’ 578, although the NHS is braced for many more in the next two or three weeks. China, where the worst of the crisis seems to be past, has suffered more than 3,000 deaths. The US, where — so far as I can see — the worst is just beginning, now has about 1,300 deaths. Trump is talking about getting Americans back to work by Easter. I think that may be another of his fantasies, although of course I hope he’s right. Some research reported on the BBC’s website estimates that the US will have more than 80,000 Covid-19-related deaths over the next four months. That is a very big number when you compare it with the current total number of deaths from Covid-19 in the world: 24,000. I suppose you could say that, on a planet with a population of 7.5 billion, 24,000 is a small number. But if the prediction for the US comes to pass, and there are similar huge increases elsewhere, we could be facing very significant losses. More significant than losses in the wars that we live with all the time, and seem unable to stop? Wars continue as the world’s economy booms. This virus, on the other hand, has brought the world’s economy almost to a standstill. One good thing: the planet is breathing more freely.

Meanwhile, we live in our little flat, going out only to shop for food every two or three days and to walk round St Pancras Gardens several times each afternoon. We play Scrabble and do the quick crossword in The Guardian. We’re members of the lucky generation, with nothing to worry about. Our generous pensions pop into our bank accounts as we find ways to fill our time.

I’m carrying on with the translations of Montale’s stories. I’ve done seven now. When I’ve done the first group of thirteen, I’ll try to find a native Italian with an interest in Montale, as I wrote a few days ago.

I’ve just finished the thirteen translations. And I’ve found, through Betty Rosen, the perfect person to correct my mistakes. Arturo Tosi was a friend and admirer of Harold Rosen. I think he worked at Royal Holloway College. He spoke at least once at the Language in Inner-City Schools conferences which Harold and I, with others, used to organise. He’s a sociolinguist, and I was naturally interested, given my Bedfordshire background, in the study he made of the language of the migrant Italian community in Bedford. The London Brick Company had travelled to villages in Calabria and Sicily after the war to recruit labourers for the Bedfordshire brickfields. I worked with some of those people when I was a student. ‘Blocking’, where you transferred the bricks which had come out of the ovens in a honeycomb formation, which had let the heat circulate, to a solid three-dimensional block, was the most exhausting physical work I’ve ever done. Arturo had discovered that the highly dialectal Italian of the Bedfordshire migrants had remained remote from standard Italian, whereas those people’s families who had remained in the villages of southern Italy had shifted their language closer to standard Italian under the pressure of mass communications and formal education.

Arturo now lives near Buonconvento, not far from Rodellosso. He’s correcting one story a day. We should finish the thirteen on Sunday if he keeps it up. I’m going to pay him by a consignment of Luciano Ciolfi’s Rosso di Montalcino.

The Covid-19 pandemic has now killed nearly 100,000 people across the world, according to official figures published by Johns Hopkins University. I’m sure that the true figure is much higher than that, because of all the people who have died in care homes and other places which are not hospitals, where the statistics are harder to collect. The countries with the largest numbers of reported deaths to date are Italy (18,849), USA (17,842), Spain (15,970), France (12,210) and UK (8,958). The official figure from China, where the disease started and where it has now almost ended, is 3,336. I’m inclined to distrust that figure, simply because governments in autocracies tend to lie. (I was pleased to hear today that China is considering changing the status of dogs, so that they are to be regarded as pets rather than a source of food, and that they want to discourage the eating of wild animals. It’s very probable that this virus was transmitted to humans because of the Chinese predilection for exotic meat.) I also distrust Iran’s figure of 4,357 deaths. Germany, whose figures I do trust, has ‘only’ 2,591 deaths, because it did much more testing much earlier, and because it has a greater supply of the essential equipment for fighting the disease, including ventilators.

I fear very much for the USA, with its lying braggart of a president and the inequalities in its population’s access to health care, grievous despite Obama’s modest reforms, which Trump’s lawyers are doing their best to reverse. Governor Cuomo of New York has been a hero throughout the crisis: clear, straightforward and compassionate.

We continue with our routine. Helen learns French with the help of a charming on-line teacher called Alexa. I translate Montale. We shop for food once every two or three days; we exercise once a day. We have no idea when this will end. It’s the most significant enforced change in the lives of those of us born in the rich West after 1945.

After several days of clear skies and summer-like weather, it clouded over a bit and a light shower fell as Helen and I walked round St Pancras Gardens. But now the sun is out again, pouring through my window.

More than 10,000 deaths from Covid-19 have now been reported from hospitals in the UK. The actual figure is much higher. The Prime Minister has been discharged from St Thomas’s Hospital, after a week there, including several days in intensive care. He’s at Chequers and has just made a little film, thanking the people who looked after him, which I must say is very moving. The question is: after all this is over, will there really be a change in priorities, so that the NHS gets the resources it needs, either through an increase in taxes — my preferred method — or through even more borrowing than is going to have to occur anyway?

There’s a stark comparison between the UK’s and Germany’s performances during the crisis so far. Both are rich, industrial western-European countries. Infections began in both at about the same time. Germany has had 125,452 confirmed cases so far: 1,509 per one million of population. It has suffered ‘only’ 2,871 deaths. The UK has had 84,279 confirmed cases so far: 1,269 per one million of population. We have suffered 10,612 deaths. So, despite having more than 41,000 fewer confirmed cases than Germany, we have suffered 7,741 more deaths. The lessons are clear: Germany has not limited funds to its health service, as our government has done since 2010 in the cause of austerity; and, once the pandemic declared itself there, it immediately instituted a large-scale system of testing which meant that those infected could be isolated. It did so because it could. It had the kit. We didn’t, and we’ve been trying to catch up ever since. And Germany had enough emergency equipment in its hospitals to make sure that those who had a fighting chance of survival when they got there were given that chance.

The percentage of reported cases that have ended in death in the UK is 12.59. Comparisons with other European countries: France 14.74; Italy 12.79; Spain 10.22; Germany 2.29. So Germany has done enormously better, not just than the UK, but than other comparable countries too. So far as the UK is concerned, I hope that the shameful comparison — and other equally stark bits of evidence — will make their presence felt in funding decisions in the future; but I can’t say that I’m sure that they will, despite the unprecedented nature of the experience we’re going through.

Not much new to report about the health emergency:

‘I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.’

The number of confirmed deaths from Covid-19 in UK hospitals is 14,576. The actual figure, as I wrote the other day, is much higher. Equivalent figures in other countries: USA 34,814; Italy 22,170; Spain 19,478; France 17, 920; Germany 4,105. Smaller countries, where the gross figure is lower, have also suffered very badly per head of population: Belgium 5,163; Switzerland 1,318. Belgium’s and Switzerland’s numbers of confirmed cases per million of population are almost double that of Germany. But the key statistic, so far as one can extrapolate anything from these figures, is the relationship between confirmed cases and deaths. The UK’s percentage of reported cases ending in death has gone up to 13.41; France 16.46; Italy 13.12; Spain 10.36; Germany 2.97. The USA has easily the highest number of deaths in the world, at 34,814, but its percentage of deaths as against reported cases is low at 5.14. Of course I’m pleased about that; I’m not sure how the country has managed it, given the ineptitude of its leader and the fragmented nature of its health service. There is the heroic performance by those caring for the sick, of course, and the proper leadership shown by some state governors, notably Andrew Cuomo; but then those caring for the sick here, and in other European countries, have been equally heroic. So that low percentage in the USA is a bit of a merciful mystery.

In the UK, we face at least another three weeks of lockdown. There are louder and louder calls, from authoritative sources, for the scale of testing practised in Germany to be achieved here as soon as possible, so that those infected, and their contacts, can be isolated, and the uninfected can get back to whatever represents normality in their lives. Without that, and during the long period before a vaccine is widely available, the fear is that the virus will simply run riot again as soon as there is any significant lifting of the restrictions.

I’ve finished my first 13 Montale stories. Arturo Tosi sent me one each day with his corrections. I’ve sent them now to Mark for the website. I think I might send them also to the Istituto Italiano in London, to see whether they might be interested in doing anything with them. I wrote to Luciano Ciolfi, who owns the San Lorenzo vineyard at Montalcino, only a few kilometres from where Arturo lives. He’s going to deliver a case of Rosso di Montalcino to Arturo when people in Italy are allowed to move around more freely.

Peter Dougill rang on Monday. I mentioned my sadness that I’m not going to get down to Hove in May to watch a bit of cricket with Mick Robertson and him. He jokingly remarked that attendances at four-day county games are so sparse that social distancing, as required by the government, wouldn’t be difficult. This gave me the idea for a light piece which I’ve sent to the two of them. I’m not sure whether it’s substantial enough to put on the website under ‘Other Works’, but here it is anyway.

I’ve been meaning for a couple of weeks to write a poem about the pandemic, using the same dactylic ABBA form as ‘At a Banking Crisis’, which I wrote in 2008. I’ve sent it to Paul Ashton to see what he thinks. It doesn’t have the wit of the other poem; it’s perhaps a bit po-faced. But here it is.

Before Paul had replied to the version of the poem above, I’d already changed it to:

He agreed that this second version was better than the first, but quite correctly asked how an invisible stain could tarnish glitter. So I had another think. Here’s the third and, I hope, the final version:

I’m rather pleased with ‘invisible hand’, because of the ironic reference to Adam Smith, although it could be criticised as excessively learned. And I’m pleased to have maintained the religious metaphor throughout. Heaney admirers will notice a similarity with his line near the end of ‘Anything Can Happen’, that extraordinary updated version of one of Horace’s odes:

‘Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.’

I’ve been editing a second book by Peter Hetherington, to be called After Words. It’s a collection of his prose, poetry and pictures. Stephen Mellor is doing a wonderful job with the design.

I’ve just finished reading or re-reading all Herbert’s lyric poems, in the awesomely scholarly Oxford edition containing all his works, including great swathes of Latin.  The very last poem in the collection published in 1633 as The Temple, ‘L’Envoy’, isn’t one of his best: not up the standard of ‘Prayer’, ’The Collar’, ’The Pulley’, ‘The Pearl’, ‘Love (III) — Love bade me welcome but my soul drew back…’ or ‘Jordan (I) — Who says that fictions onely and false hair / Become a verse?’ But here it is.

‘King of Glorie, King of Peace
With the one make warre to cease;
With the other blesse thy sheep,
Thee to love, in thee to sleep.
Let not Sinne devoure thy fold,
Bragging that thy bloud is cold,
That thy death is also dead,
While his conquests dayly spread;
That thy flesh hath lost his food,
And thy Crosse is common wood.
Choke him, let him say no more,
But reserve his breath in store,
Till thy conquests and his fall
Make his sighs to use it all,
And then bargain with the winde
To discharge what is behinde.

Blessed be God alone,
Thrice blessed Three in One.

Finis.’  [That is, the end of the whole book.] 

I can’t con the last lines of the last poem in a book of devout verses in any way other than that Herbert is telling ‘sinne’, defeated by God, to fart, so as to be humiliated in that way.  The scholarly but perhaps prudish Canon Hutchinson says nothing about it in the notes. I consulted Paul, and he is as puzzled as I am. As he writes: ‘I still can't quite believe he would end the whole highly devotional work with such a rude gag — but there it is.’

Herbert is a very great poet, and would be if he’d only written the poems I mention above. I’ve always thought the label ‘metaphysical’ unfortunate, because although he, Donne, Vaughan, Marvell and others do discuss philosophical matters, the peculiar genius of the best works of the best of the 17th-century lyric poets — by which I mean the four I’ve named — is that they are physical, not metaphysical.  Doctor Johnson’s disapproval is to blame. Wikipedia tells me that Johnson ‘refers to the beginning of the seventeenth century in which there “appeared a race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets”… he was probably referring to a witticism of John Dryden, who said of John Donne: “He affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verses, where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of love. In this... Mr. [Abraham] Cowley has copied him to a fault.”’  I’d rather an inch of Herbert or Donne than yards and yards of Dryden or Pope.  So perhaps Herbert did intend the whole book to end with that most physical of references. 

A beautiful spring day. Helen and I have just come back from our regular walk around St Pancras Gardens. Yesterday I bought food for the next three days. Our lives are perfectly regular in these strange times. We get up about 8.30, bathe, breakfast, depart to our respective tasks (Helen learning French with the help of Alexa; me writing, or working on the lease extension business for about twenty-five of the flats in this block, or on the project to do with the redevelopment of the industrial estate across the road). We eat a cold lunch at about one. Back to the tasks for an hour and a half. The walk at three. Back to the tasks again. Aperitif at 6.30. Watch the news on Channel 4 at seven, while eating. Do The Guardian crossword together. Play Scrabble some nights. Helen watches lots of films on her computer. I return to the study to read (just now, I’m re-reading all of Robert Frost). Coffee about ten. Bed about midnight. And so it goes on. Every three days I read stories to Paul, my great-nephew in Marseille, via Facetime.

Deaths mount up. The official total for the UK is now 28,131. The actual total will be much higher than that, as I’ve written before, because the official total is of those who have tested positive for the disease, whether in hospitals, care homes or elsewhere in the community, and have been certified as dying from it. Many people who have not been tested, whose deaths have been caused directly or indirectly by Covid-19, have not been formally certified as dying from that cause.

The USA has recorded 65,905 deaths due to Covid-19; Spain 25,100; Italy 28,236; France 24,594. Germany continues to do well, with ‘only’ 6,735 deaths. Worldwide, the death toll at this moment, according to Google News, is 238,999.

Governments across the world are faced with a dilemma: how to reassure increasingly restive populations that there is a way out of this crisis, even if gradual, while persuading those populations that the premature easing of restrictions might only see the virus return with full force. No government in my lifetime has had to make decisions of this kind and of this awesome consequence.

Monique Le Gal, the co-president of Les Amis de Saint Guénaël, has died of a vascular aneurysm in the brain. She was a lovely, vivacious, busy person, mother of two children, grandmother of three, adored by her husband Eric. She was 59. Because of le confinement, as France calls the lockdown, only five people were allowed to attend the funeral. It must have been a comfort to Eric and the family that Jean-Marc Harnois, the priest of the parishes of Cléguer and Pont-Scorff, is a wonderful person, a friend of the family and always active at la fête de Saint Guénaël, over and beyond his celebration of the mass in the morning. He will have conducted the funeral. I’ve written to Eric.

I’ve written two new Madame Granic stories. I then re-read the whole series, and was afflicted by the thought that my casual use of some of my friends’ real names, including Le Gal, transferred to characters in the stories, might cause hurt or embarrassment. The name Granic itself is also a bit too close to the family name of Dominique and Jocelyne, who have their own troubles (not death, thank goodness) at the moment. So I’ve changed all the names, both for people and for places, to put a bit of distance between the ‘fictions’ and the facts which gave rise to them. Madame Granic is now Madame Menez. Plouay is now Plouzalver, ‘zalver’ being the Breton word for ‘saviour’, ‘sauveur’. The Ruisseau du Saint Sauveur runs through Plouay, and marks the boundary of our land at the bottom of the wood. I’ve also re-ordered the stories (there are now thirteen) so that the main events affecting Madame Menez are interspersed with narratives which she supposedly hears on her rounds. I’ve asked the long-suffering Mark to replace the existing stories on the website with the new versions.

Two nights ago, I was awoken by the most stupendous noise across the car park. It went on and on. No chance of getting back to sleep. I stumbled to the window in the living room. Lamplight leaking from the street revealed two full-grown foxes, brushes up, bellowing, baying, howling at each other (what is the word? ‘barking’ is inadequate): an unholy, violent, machine-like racket. While still in bed, emerging from slumber, I had wondered whether it was magpies. This was a bit like that unpleasant football-rattle call of magpies, but magnified five times. One animal was male. He cocked his leg up to urinate against the beech tree. I wasn’t sure about the other. Was this an argument over territory? Or the weirdest, most public kind of courtship ritual? After a while they disappeared behind the big communal dustbins. For several minutes I heard scuffling but no more howling. Were they fighting in there, one establishing dominance, or copulating? Then the male emerged, and went his way. He seemed triumphant. He returned, twice, before disappearing permanently into the night. Later, the other fox emerged, and left in the opposite direction. That animal seemed dejected: tail between the legs.

Solitary foxes are of course a common sight in London these days. But I’ve never seen or heard anything like that.

Today is a public holiday, to mark the 75th anniversary of the ending of the Second World War in Europe. The celebrations are muted because of the lockdown. On Sunday, the Prime Minister will announce some easing of the restrictions, but I expect them to be cautious. The popular newspapers had ridiculous headlines yesterday, such as ‘Magic Monday!’, imagining that life will return to normal then. The price we pay for a free press is the latitude it gives some newspapers to say things which are palpably untrue and get away with it.

I’ve just re-read all Robert Frost’s poems. I expect, if I were to go back through the diaries a few years, I might find an entry noting that I’d just read them all for the first time. Yesterday I went back through the collected edition and listed the poems I had particularly admired. There were 106. If other great poets (Auden, Rilke, Montale) get up to 30 or 40 poems which, I reckon, really are in the top bracket, that qualifies them, for me, as great. But more than 100! I suppose my admiration has something to do with his preference for form (his famous remark about why he didn’t write free verse), and to do with the plainness of his diction. He was a learned, educated person, it’s true, and that is often wittily evident; but he’s never obscure, and his preference is for the language of the common person.

Here are my 106.

‘The Pasture’, ‘A Late Walk’, ‘Rose Pogonias’, ‘Waiting’, ‘Going for Water’, ‘The Tuft of Flowers’, ‘In Hardwood Groves’, ‘Mending Wall’, ‘The Death of the Hired Man’, ‘The Mountain’, ‘A Hundred Collars’, ‘Home Burial’, ‘The Black Cottage’, ‘Blueberries’, ‘After Apple-Picking’, ‘The Code’, ‘The Fear’, ‘The Self-Seeker’, ‘The Wood Pile’, ‘Good Hours’, ‘The Road Not Taken’, ‘An Old Man’s Winter Night’, ‘The Exposed Nest’, ‘In the Home Stretch’, ‘Meeting and Passing’, ‘Hyla Brook’, ‘Birches’, ‘Putting in the Seed’, ‘A Time to Talk’, ‘The Cow in Apple Time’, ‘Range-Finding’, ‘The Hill Wife II — House Fear’, ‘A Girl’s Garden’, ‘“Out, Out —’’’, ‘The Gum-Gatherer’, ‘The Line-Gang’, ‘The Vanishing Red’, ‘Snow’, ‘The Census-Taker’, ‘The Star-Splitter’, ‘Maple’, ‘The Ax-Helve’, ‘The Grindstone’, ‘Paul’s Wife’, ‘Wild Grapes’, ‘Place for a Third’, ‘To E.T.’, ‘The Runaway’, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘For Once, Then, Something’, ‘The Onset’, ‘Two Look at Two’, ‘Not to Keep’, ‘A Brook in the City’, ‘Evening in a Sugar Orchard’, ‘On a Tree Fallen Across the Road’, ‘The Need of Being Versed in Country Things’, ‘Spring Pools’, ‘A Passing Glimpse’, ‘A Peck of Gold’, ‘Tree at my Window’, ‘The Thatch’, ‘Acquainted with the Night’, ‘West-Running Brook’, ‘A Soldier’, ‘The Investment’, ‘The Door in the Dark’, ‘On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations’, ‘Two Tramps in Mud Time’, ‘The Gold Hesperidee’, ‘A Roadside Stand’, ‘On the Heart’s Beginning to Cloud the Mind’, ‘The Figure in the Doorway’, ‘At Woodward’s Gardens’, ‘They were Welcome to their Belief’, ‘The Strong are Saying Nothing’, ‘Moon Compasses’, ‘Design’, ‘Unharvested’, ‘There are Roughly Zones’, ‘Ten Mills VIII — The Hardship of Accounting’, ‘The Silken Tent’, ‘The Most of It’, ‘Willful Homing’, ‘The Quest of the Purple-Fringed’, ‘The Gift Outright’, ‘Our Hold on the Planet’, ‘To a Young Wretch’, ‘To a Moth Seen in Winter’, ‘An Equalizer’, ‘Trespass’, ‘Not of School Age’, ‘A Young Birch’, ‘An Unstamped Letter in Our Rural Letter Box’, ‘A Mood Apart’, ‘The Fear of Man’, ‘A Rogers Group’, ‘On Being Idolized’, ‘The Ingenuities of Debt’, ‘One More Brevity’, ‘Auspex’, ‘Ends’, ‘Peril of Hope’, ‘Questioning Faces’, ‘The Objection to Being Stepped On’, ‘On Being Chosen Poet of Vermont’.

If I could only have one of these, it would be ‘There are Roughly Zones’. And I will just write out ‘The Hardship of Accounting’, the eighth in a series of shorts called ‘Ten Mills’, because it sums up my approach to money:

‘Never ask of money spent
Where the spender thinks it went.
Nobody was ever meant
To remember or invent
What he did with every cent.’

I’ve done two more lockdown poems: another heavy one, and one light. Here they are.

The second of these I owe to Paul Ashton. I had mentioned to him in an email that Jean had told me about the damage the deer were doing. Paul commiserated, while suggesting that it shows what good taste those creatures have. In the first, I’m sure that Frost’s frequent use of irregularly occurring full rhymes must have had its effect on me. It certainly did when I wrote ‘After “After Apple-Picking”’ a few years ago.

Not much to report. Our lives are extraordinarily regular. The sun shines in this summer-like spring. Helen learns French. I write poems, or translate them. I’ve done six of Ronsard’s lyrics, and I’ll do a few more. I shan’t attempt any of his long political poems, often concerned with the religious wars ravaging his country (and where, like Montaigne, he took a strictly Catholic stance in the face of the rise of Protestantism). I’ll stick to the love poems.

Last week the government eased the lockdown a little. We’re now allowed to visit one person not of our household, as long as we stay outside and keep two metres’ distance between us. We’re discouraged from using public transport unless absolutely necessary. On the first day of the new dispensation, I drove up to Betty Rosen’s house, and we had coffee in her garden. This afternoon we’re going to Helen’s brother and sister-in-law. Helen needs to borrow some summer clothes from Christine (Helen’s are all at Kerfontaine). There’s no prospect of getting to France before mid-June, and perhaps not even then.

Several European countries are beginning to open up, cautiously. It does seem, for the moment, that the worst of the crisis has passed in Europe. People are still dying, but in smaller numbers. In the USA, the death toll has passed 90,000, although new cases are on a slight decline. Trump’s responses to the crisis continue to be incoherent. Never has the USA had such inept leadership in a time of international crisis. In several South American countries (notably Brazil, with its equally disastrous president) and numerous other poorer countries of the South, cases and deaths are still on the rise, although — apart from Brazil — the raw numbers of deaths are still relatively low (India 3,163, Mexico 5,332, Pakistan 939, Bangladesh 349, Nigeria 192, Ghana 29, Egypt 645, Indonesia 1,221). Of course, these figures (which I’ve got from Google News, which in turn reports its sources as Wikipedia and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) only include people who were tested and confirmed positive for the virus. There must in reality be many more cases and many more deaths.

I’ve only done one more Ronsard translation, and I think I’ll stop there. I began to feel a bit guilty that I was spending my time translating highly wrought bits of smut, however canonically great Ronsard is. To ease my conscience, I’ve written a riposte by the three women to whom his love poems are addressed: Cassandra, Marie and Helen.

If I produce a new book of poems and translations, I’ll put this after the seven Ronsards.

We’re in Bronwyn’s and Stephen’s flat in Southwark. We drove over last night, after ten, with several bags. I got up at six this morning and took the car back to our car park: these timings to avoid the central London congestion charge, which now applies seven days a week from seven in the morning until ten at night.

It’s delightful to be here, in another district of London, in a flat with a balcony in this summery weather. We spoke to Bronwyn and Stephen this morning, and they’re happy for us to stay here as long as we like.

But the reason we’re here isn’t delightful at all.

A couple lives above us in Weavers Way, with whom I’ve been on perfectly civil terms over many years when we’ve passed each other on the stairs on in the street. Occasionally they play their music too loud late at night. We are not obsessive about this; we understand that there are disadvantages to living in flats. And of course in recent years there have been long periods when we’ve been in France. Helen or I have been up a few times — at intervals of many months — to ask them to turn the music down when it’s coming quite clearly through our ceiling after 11.30 at night. This I did last Friday at about that time. I knocked on the door, which the man opened a crack. I simply said, calmly, ‘Too loud, too loud.’ He may have said, ‘OK,’ but I could tell just from that brief interchange that he was intoxicated, whether by drink or drugs or a mixture I don’t know. The result of the exchange was the opposite of what I had asked. He turned his music up contemptuously loud, and then began shouting abusively as loud as he could. He uttered frequent obscenities, naming me. He called me a filthy cunt: not once, but several times. He also periodically got a stick or some other hard object and banged repeatedly on his floor, determined to keep us awake. This behaviour continued until about 1.30 in the morning. At this point I telephoned the police. I explained what was happening, was told that this was a matter of second-order priority, and that someone would arrive within about an hour. When the abuse and banging became more frequent, I telephoned again. I was told that help was on its way. Eventually two young constables turned up, one male one female; they had got lost, and I had to retrieve them from the block of flats across the car park. From the car park, I pointed out the flashing red strobe lights which were accompanying the music. The constables went up, and we overheard what happened. The man’s partner gave them a long intoxicated monologue, attempting to justify their behaviour, to which the police listened politely before asking that the music be lowered. They came back downstairs and reported to us that the woman was drunk. I described, using the actual words, the abuse which had been directed at me. They told me that nothing could be done about this because I was in my own flat, and not in personal danger; there was no public-order offence. They departed. As soon as they had gone, the music, abuse and banging resumed, this time with sneering shouts of ‘Call the police, call the police.’ It stopped at about 3.15.

I lay down on the settee in my clothes, and remained awake until six. Then I went to bed and slept for a couple of hours. When I got up, I rang the police again to report what had happened since the constables’ visit. I wanted to be sure that everything was on the record in case this happened again.

During Saturday, I examined my state of mind. I realised that I was in a state of utter rage. I knew that the frustration and sense of offence — offence that this could happen to us with apparent impunity on the part of the perpetrators — was doing me no good at all, physically or mentally. My heart was beating much faster than normal. I was sweating heavily. I kept having violent fantasies about what I would like to do to the man; I wasn’t sure, if I were to pass him on the stairs, that I wouldn’t assault him with whatever sharp instrument I had to hand. Now this may sound implausible, but I do remember the only other time in my life when I was close to physically assaulting another man. It was when I flew down to Marseille 23 years ago to rescue my sister from her abusive husband (about whose death I wrote on 18 March; although I was concerned then about the distress which the circumstances of the death would cause to my sister and her children, the truth is that I was delighted that the man was dead; I had been looking forward to the event). In January 1997 I was certainly prepared to commit violence if necessary, even if that violence might land me in jail. On Saturday morning my feelings were the same. But of course the rational bit of me knew that I should avoid any such encounter; not out of fear of the offender, but out of fear of what I might do to him, and of the turmoil into which a violent act would throw my and Helen’s lives.

I knew that the possibility of calm, undistracted mental normality had gone. It was impossible to imagine settling down to write anything. I knew that every evening I would be waiting for the music to start, wondering whether to put up with it, wondering whether to attempt another reasoned request or to go straight to the police. I think there’s a slight difference between Helen and me in our attitude to what happened. Although she is as shocked and upset as I am, she is a little more inclined to make some allowance for the fact that the couple were out of their heads with intoxicants of some kind, certainly including alcohol. And I admitted at the beginning of this entry that my casual encounters with the man over the years have been civil. But I am absolutely not prepared to make any such allowance. The young woman constable smiled slightly, simpered, when she described the other woman’s drunkenness. I don’t share that tolerance at all.

Before pursuing this rant, I’ll add something not connected with Friday night’s events, but which has contributed to a decision which we’ve come to over the weekend, and which I shall describe in a moment.

I have, in recent years, become a sort of unpaid concierge for our block of flats. What that means in practice is that I pick up the litter which drug dealers and drug users, and people engaging in prostitution, casually throw onto the floor of the car park when they have finished their business. Less seriously but still culpably, lots of residents don’t bother to put their rubbish in the bins where it should go; or they put into the bins objects which definitely shouldn’t go there. Last week I retrieved a black leather armchair and four or five items of electrical gardening equipment from the ordinary bins. The council offers a good service for the disposal of heavy items which are not household refuse. People ignore it. I try to keep our immediate environment as pleasant as possible. It’s a losing battle.

I’m a director of the management company for the block, and I fulfil my responsibilities cheerfully. No one forced me to take the job on. On 21 January, I wrote about the project I’ve been leading to get our leases extended; again, no one forced me to do that. (And the neighbour upstairs is one of the people I’ve helped to do this!) But as I fight the losing battle against constant anti-social and sometimes illegal behaviour, the thought has come and gone in me that I should give up this ‘active citizen’ business; I’ve done enough of it over decades. I was a school governor for more than twenty years, and I’m still the joint secretary of the organisation campaigning for the socially and environmentally responsible redevelopment of the industrial estate across the road. These were and are admirable activities which I don’t regret. But what happened on Friday night has provoked a decision which Helen and I have taken, I think firmly, after several conversations.

Once we have the 90-year extension of our lease, we shall sell the flat. We are in the fortunate position of having a property in France to which we can go, and — as I’ve written — we’re welcome to use this flat in Southwark when Bronwyn and Stephen are in Australia. So we could sell the Camden Town flat without needing immediately to move somewhere else in England. If I had my way, I’d buy an apartment in an Italian city, for use in the winter, and live at Kerfontaine in the summer. I’ve had enough of England. But Helen is worried about what might happen to her if I were to die before her, and she were left in a foreign country without mastery of the language and far from friends. I respect that. So the most likely thing is that we will look for a property in England, outside London, where we can have more space for our money. It would be bliss for me to have a decent-sized room which I could actually call a study, where my books could be shelved in some kind of order rather than toppling around me as they do in the tiny room where I write in London. (The situation is much better at Kerfontaine.) Helen sensibly says that she’d like to live in an English town so she can walk to shops. She doesn’t want to have to resume driving, something she hasn’t done since 2006. She would like to be close to friends. All this points towards Shrewsbury.

We won’t be putting the flat on the market before next year, because I’m sure it will take at least the rest of this year to get the lease extension. But Friday’s events have provoked in me a more immediate decision. I simply don’t want to sleep in the Camden Town flat any more. We don’t need to, immediately, because Bronwyn and Stephen are locked down in Australia just as we are locked down in London. I very much hope that we can stay here until the French government allows us to go to France. That may or may not happen this summer; it depends on France’s success in eliminating or at least containing Covid-19. But even if Bronwyn and Stephen need this flat back and we’re still in England, I would rather go to other friends (to David James in Shropshire, for instance) than go back to worrying about abuse from my neighbour, and unsuccessfully battling against the anti-social and often illegal behaviour which is commonplace in our neighbourhood. Of course I’m quite happy to pop back to the flat during the daytime to get things and to check on post and to water plants. I was there briefly this morning. But I feel tainted by the contact I’ve had with that man, and I wish not to feel unclean. So it’s quite possible that I may not sleep in the flat again. When we do come to sell it, we can easily put our stuff in storage for a while if we need to.

I’m a serious and diligent writer, however modest my talent and limited my reputation. That is what I should be doing for the rest of my active life; not spreading myself thinly across all manner of other activities.

To end this entry on a positive note: Bronwyn and Stephen have just written confirming what they said when we spoke. We can stay as long as we like. We can treat the place like home. Wonderful. The view from the balcony is pretty spectacular, and the walk by the Thames this morning was soothing.

We’ve been here nearly two weeks now, and are enjoying it very much. Southwark has become a trans-Thames holiday destination, and we’re taking full advantage of its facilities and attractions, though of course they do not at the moment include pubs or restaurants. (This must be the reason why we have found ourselves somewhat richer than usual these last few months.  As we keep saying to ourselves, we really are the lucky ones, with pensions dropping into our bank accounts regularly, unlike all those younger people whose income has become so much more precarious. The only good thing which our government has done in its otherwise inept handling of the crisis is to borrow huge sums of money in order to stop millions of people falling into destitution.)

We wander off in different directions to explore.  Two days ago, I walked down a side street and came across All Saints Gardens, with information about how George Reindorp — well-known radical Anglican cleric — was responsible for the rebuilding of the church after the war. (Alas, his vision didn’t last; the church later closed and became a recording studio.)  Paul Ashton remembers Reindorp as the fearless scourge of parents wasting their substance in pubs in the area where Paul grew up.  Reindorp would walk into those pubs — including the one in Pimlico just next to where the ILEA English Centre, where I worked from 1981 to 1985, used to be — and drag the parents out, commanding them to go home and feed their children on something more sustaining than bags of crisps.  I know from another source that he was once on the top deck of a number 24 bus.  He was wearing his clerical collar and smoking a pipe.  A nosy, self-righteous evangelical came up to him and asked, ‘Would Jesus Christ have been seen smoking a pipe?’  To which Reindorp replied, ‘Would Jesus Christ have been seen on a 24 bus?’  He ended his career as Bishop of Guildford.

On Wednesday we walked along Long Lane, and came to a beautiful little Italian deli called Locanda del Melo.  We bought some pecorino cheese and a bottle of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo: both very good.  The place also does take-away food, and we shall certainly sample its pasta before long.  We’ve already taken away curries from Simply Indian, the little restaurant in Tabard Street, twice in my case, because last Sunday Helen went back to Camden for the night, to be there for the delivery of a parcel on Monday morning.

Yesterday I took the train down to Canterbury to visit my brother Peter and nephew George.  George is living with his father at the moment, which is a good thing for both of them.  Peter and I sat in a local park until it came on to rain.  We then lunched in the flat, but with the sliding doors wide open to the balcony, so I don’t think any harm was done.  The tube to St Pancras and the train through Kent were almost completely empty.  Nonetheless, I put a mask on as soon as I entered the transport system.  The difficulty with a mask comes with reading, for those of us who need glasses.  Expelled breath, which normally goes horizontally outwards or downwards, goes upwards when it meets the obstruction, and steams up the glasses.  This is particularly irritating when one is reading something pretty demanding, as I was: Bryan Magee’s Confessions of a Philosopher, which is a canter through Western philosophy, but certainly not an easy ride.

Myra Barrs gave me the book last Saturday, when I went over to see her in Bedford Park.  She has cancer, but this week the oncologist told her that the drug she’s taking has shrunk the tumour a bit, and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of other tumours developing. She’s writing a book summarising and commenting on all of Vygotsky’s major writings.  She’s sending it to me chapter by chapter and I’ve been making a few comments.  It’ll be very good, I think; most people, including me, only know Vygotsky through Thought and Language and Mind in Society.  Myra is determined to get the book done as fast as possible, in case her illness worsens.  Routledge will publish it.

And tomorrow I’m going up to see Betty Rosen.  We sit in her back garden at a good distance.  She’s been telling her concerned children that she and I have been communicating on the pavement in front of her house.  But now, I notice, we’re allowed to walk swiftly through a person’s house in order to get to an open space behind, which is what I’ve done twice already.  So she can now tell her children the truth.  Being the ultra-good person she is, she hasn’t liked deceiving them.  And tomorrow afternoon, Paul is going to drive over, park in the Marshalsea Road, and we’ll have a coffee in the nice little park there.  The pop-up Bird’s Hill coffee shop round the corner is lovely; I go there every day with my environmentally virtuous cup. And the excellent man who owns The Cobbler’s Nest, right next to this block, has repaired two pairs of my sadly neglected Italian shoes. So we’re making use of local services.

Writing-wise (and entirely because of the balm of the quiet of the spare bedroom here), I’ve continued the series of replies, or ripostes, by women to male poets who have made the women famous, usually by complaining about the women’s behaviour (or lack of a certain kind of behaviour).  To the Ronsard riposte I’ve added responses, in various different tones, to poems I’ve translated by Petrarch, Catullus, Ovid and Dante.

Mary rang two days ago.  She and Jacques are going to be in Brittany, at Kerfontaine, on the weekend of 20/21 June, because on 22 June they will sign the deed to give them ownership of the house they’re buying at Priziac, half an hour north from us.  I don’t think we’ll be there by then; we’re waiting to see what the French government wants to do about letting foreigners in.  But in the meantime, we couldn’t be happier than we are here.

To the existing crisis in the USA has been added another. A few days ago, a black man was murdered by a white policeman, while the policeman’s colleagues stood by and let him do it. This was filmed. Social media now means that almost any act can become worldwide property instantly. So there have been protests and demonstrations across the USA, and in other countries too. In America, there has also been rioting and looting in several cities. The authorities have responded by imposing curfews and sending in the National Guard. Trump’s response to the emergency has of course been deplorable, to the extent that Twitter, the president’s preferred means of communication, actually obscured (not deleted) one of his tweets, which said that shooting would be a response to looting: clear incitement to violence.

America has a continuing and perhaps endemic problem of grotesque inequality; and this inequality is extreme in the case of many black people. Built into the mindset of some ignorant white people, including those in positions of authority, there is still the idea that black people may be oppressed with impunity; that the merest suspicion of wrongdoing on the part of a black person justifies a violent and sometimes deadly response. I’m not sure that America has any chance of recovering its former supremacy, or even its standing as first among equals of the major powers, until it is able to address the failings which are crippling it, of which the two most serious are interlinked: inequality and a natural tendency towards violence, as evidenced most starkly by its gun laws.

More than 387,000 people have been confirmed as dying from Covid-19 throughout the world. The USA has more than 110,000 deaths, with recent increases in those states which, with Trump’s encouragement, have defied lockdown instructions or advice. The other country whose leader is criminally culpable, Brazil, now has the third-highest number of deaths, at more than 35,000, and that number is rising fast. Shamefully, the UK has the second-highest number of deaths, at more than 40,000 (and I expect the real number to be nearer 60,000), although the rate of increase is slowing. Alas, the number of deaths in India is also now rising fast: inevitable with that country’s huge population, many of whom are crammed together in urban slums, and with a health service struggling to cope.

My birthday, and it’s a beautiful day. We’re still here in Southwark. Our stay here is going to end soon, because President Macron said on Sunday that people from the UK may now go to France without restriction, although they are ‘invited’ to enter into a ‘voluntary’ 14-day quarantine (lovely oxymoron in that phrase, and France has invented the word ‘quatorzaine’ to meet the case exactly). So we shall go back to Camden for three days on Sunday, and then take the tunnel a week tomorrow.

I’ve had lots of cards, texts, phone calls and presents. Deirdre is coming over at five, and at six I shall go to the excellent Italian delicatessen which we’ve discovered in Long Lane, and we’ll have a takeaway meal on the balcony after champagne.

I’ve gone back to Montale’s stories, and I’m translating the second batch in Farfalla di Dinard. There are twelve, and I’ve done six. I hope Arturo will correct them for me when I’ve done them all, but it’s a lot to ask, and if he’s busy I’ll have to find another Italian to help.

England is returning to a new sort of normality. All shops may now open. Bars and restaurants not until next month. Since yesterday it’s been compulsory to wear face masks on public transport. There are fears that the relaxing of the previous restrictions will inevitably mean a second spike in infections and deaths, though there’s no evidence of that in this country yet. Around the world, the disease continues its dreadful work. Poorer countries with less robust health systems are the worst threatened, of course; but up to now, at least so far as official figures are concerned, some of the poorest countries have escaped relatively lightly, perhaps because there is less international travel to and from them. Bangladesh, for example, is reported to have suffered ‘only’ 1,200 deaths, though its graph is going upwards; India, with more than a billion people, has suffered nearly 10,000 deaths, which is dreadful but less than a quarter of the UK’s, with our 65 million people; Pakistan’s figure is less than 3,000. These numbers may be completely inaccurate, for all I know, but they are the only ones to which I have access. And there may be much worse news to come. The USA, with its disastrous leader and a big chunk of its population opposed to any restraint on their behaviour, however socially irresponsible or indeed personally risky, continues to lead the world in the gruesome league table; it has suffered more than 117,000 deaths. Brazil, about whose appalling leader I’ve already written enough, has now overtaken the UK in second place, with more than 44,000 deaths. Our own figure is not far behind, at nearly 42,000; and of course the real number — as I’ve tediously repeated numerous times — is much higher than the official confirmed figure in all countries.

The government has been providing food vouchers or food parcels to families whose children normally qualify for free school meals. Initially it said that this provision would cease in England at the end of the summer term, as it usually does, although Scotland and Wales have announced that they are going to continue the provision through the summer holidays. The Manchester United and England footballer Marcus Rashford, who remembers that his mother relied on free school meals and food banks when he was growing up, has just brought about a spectacular U-turn by the government. Using his high profile and his access to 2.7 million followers on Twitter, he argued that, in these exceptional circumstances, where many poorer families have found themselves even poorer, despite the financial provision the government has made to cushion the worst effects of the most precipitous economic downturn in history, it would be right to continue to offer food vouchers through the summer holiday. And he’s just won the argument! The government changed its mind today. They obviously realised that being on the wrong side of an argument with a young national hero, who although wealthy now has direct and recent experience of poverty, was not a good look.

We’ve been here for three weeks and two days now, and delightful it is. We came through the tunnel on 24 June, and drove all the way in intense, dream-like heat, without stopping except for petrol. After that there was a week or so of cloud, rain and cold, but now summer has resumed. We’ve been gardening and painting (artisanal not artistic painting, that is, although Helen does both).  The place looks lovely, I must say, and the weather these last few days has been beautiful: warm but not hot, a bit of a breeze, birds singing, combine harvesters droning in the distance, ‘All the live murmur of a summer’s day’ — Arnold’s ‘The Scholar Gypsy’, which my dad used to quote by the yard.  I damaged my finger two weeks ago, weeding without gloves, when a spine or a splinter entered under the nail.  The internet recommended plunging the finger into vinegar for half an hour, which reminded me of Jack and Jill going up the hill and his treatment with vinegar and brown paper.  I think the vinegar helped a bit, but a week ago I went to the doctor, and have now recovered after a course of antibiotics and an antiseptic finger bath which smells like a swimming pool. I must buy those thin but strong weeding gloves. Another hazard of the outdoor life: tics have been more and more of a problem in recent years, as the climate has changed, and I found one boring contentedly into the most intimate part of my anatomy. Helen had a travail délicat to get it out with tweezers and a special plastic device called Tire-Tics, available from the chemist.

I sit outside until midnight most nights, reading under the light. I re-read Annie Proulx’s charming novel The Shipping News, Tom Keneally’s magnificent account of the first European arrivals in Australia, The Commonwealth of Thieves, and now I’m into Thomas Piketty’s second economic/historical doorstop, Capital and Ideology. I read Capital in the Twenty-first Century as soon as it came out about five years ago. Essentially, Piketty gives me the detailed statistical information to support what I know to be true: that the world since 1980 has been heading in the wrong direction, towards greater and greater inequality, for a host of reasons, and unless we do something to reverse this, there will be major though unpredictable disasters ahead. I know what his prescription is: action at an international level to constrain capitalism’s native energy and recycle some of the wealth created by that energy towards social and environmental good, rather than allowing it, as at present, to be captured by a smaller and smaller number of people and organisations. It is the right prescription, but the difficulty of bringing it about is formidable. What real progress has been made on exposing and reforming tax havens? The elite of the world fly to Davos at the end of every January, spend a few days bewailing increasing inequality on the planet, and get into their helicopters and fly away again. Perhaps only violent, terrifying revolutions, or environmental catastrophes with many deaths and genuine fear amongst those elites, will provoke the right kind of change. I fear that elegant, humane argument won’t do it.

In this part of France, at the moment, there’s no immediate sense of panic or danger from Covid-19.  We bump elbows instead of shaking hands, we don masks and squirt gel onto our hands before entering shops, and in the fruit and veg shop the staff serve us rather than we serve ourselves (I like that).  But the government has just announced that the wearing of face masks will be compulsory in enclosed public places from Monday, throughout France. There is a concern that the disease might take hold again now that the confinement has been relaxed. We’ve been to eat twice in our little restaurant in Pont-Scorff, and will go again tonight.  No masks when you eat — that would be difficult — but masks when you move about the restaurant. Helen thinks that we might stay here until the crisis has passed.  We shall see.  Without being starry-eyed about French politics, the general feeling is that the government here has handled the crisis pretty well.  The French can be the most disobedient of people (vandalising speed cameras when the speed limit on roads without central barriers was reduced from 90 to 80 kph), but the most unified when there’s a real crisis.

More than a month has passed, most pleasantly, since I last wrote. Deirdre Finan came for a week at the end of July/beginning of this month, and David and Tom James were here for a week until last Saturday. Now we’re alone, although we have Mary and Jacques up the road at Priziac. Before they arrived, Jean-Paul, our gardener, and I went over in his lorry to mow their lawn and meadow.  On Saturday I drove to Rennes airport to pick up Sophie, Julien, Paul and little Anna, born in March, whom I met for the first time. She seems a contented baby: drinks a lot, sleeps a lot, smiles a lot, doesn’t complain except when she needs to. I drove them to Priziac, and stayed for lunch.

Many days this summer have been quite beautiful, lyrical, spiritually magnificent: hot but not unbearable, a light breeze in the trees, the countryside still green enough to look youthful even in middle age.  David and I swam twice, from different beaches. The water was exquisitely cool, and you just get in and splash about and lie on your back and then swim a few strokes and turn over again and look and the sky and think, ‘Well, life has treated me well.’  As it has.  

Of course no one would have wished for the dreadful tragedy which has overtaken the world these last few months, but in this part of France at least (I think it may be different in seaside resorts like Southend or Bournemouth) there are noticeably fewer people about.  No traffic jams even in places where there are often traffic jams on Saturdays in the summer.  A sense of summers as I remember them from the 1950s and 1960s on the south coast of England.  More relaxed.

Our own garden looks lovely, though I say it myself, and there’s nothing much nicer than sitting in the shade listening to Test Match Special, especially when the games (against the West Indies and Pakistan) have been so absorbing, as they have all been except the last one, which was ruined by rain and bad light (in Southampton, not so many miles north of here).

I’m still helping Myra Barrs with her book on the life and work of Vygotsky.  She’s nearly finished it; just one more chapter to do.  And Paul Ashton has written another novel, which I’ve also helped with.  It’s a latter-day Animal Farm. Committees of animals around the world decide that they must do something to stop the humans destroying the planet and the animals with it.  They go for various forms of violent direct action, co-ordinated by a heavy-drinking parrot called Captain Flint, who’s the property of a New York couple and who knows how to turn on their computer when they’re out at work during the day so as to inform himself of the worst offenders in the abuse of the earth and of the creatures on it. The current presidents of the USA and Brazil are both assassinated by animal hit squads using various methods.  There is a dreadful but also rather topical conclusion to the book: apparently there are deadly viruses which have been buried in the Siberian permafrost for thousands of years (Paul does his research), but which are emerging now that the permafrost is melting.  These are harnessed in order to exterminate the human race once and for all.  Despite all this gloom, the book is very funny, as are all Paul’s books.

And I’m still translating Montale’s stories. I’ve now finished the second batch, so I’ve done 25 out of the 47 in Farfalla di Dinard. I need another native Italian to correct my mistakes and explain some obscurities.  Arturo Tosi, who helped me with the first batch, is too busy with a book of his own.

Last night I finished reading Capitalism and Ideology. It’s taken me a long time, but it is solid matter and more than a thousand pages long. All of Piketty’s prescriptions for dealing with the world’s current woes and injustices I support. Sadly, perhaps because I am twenty years older than him, I’m more pessimistic than he is about how many of his proposals are actually achievable, given the unimpressive and sometimes downright wicked character of most of the world’s leaders. Briefly, Piketty proposes: a steeply progressive income tax; a steeply progressive annual wealth tax; international co-operation to limit the secretive use of tax havens; practical measures to reduce educational inequalities; much greater participation by workers on the boards of private companies, along the lines of the German and Swedish models; a tax on carbon emissions, targeted so as to hit the worst polluters; huge investment in green technologies; renewal of the EU, in which those countries that wish to move quickly towards common fiscal systems and the establishment of common euro-debt can do so (so eliminating the ‘spread’ between what Germany pays to borrow money and what, for example, Italy pays); another aspect of EU renewal, bringing into being a ‘European Assembly’ which would be a body combining the MEPs of the countries moving towards greater unification with a selection of the MPs from the national parliaments of those countries; much more generous debt forgiveness for poorer countries. If we don’t do these things, or at least some of them, he says, the increasing inequality which the world has seen since the Thatcher/Reagan reforms of the 1980s will continue to generate nativist, nationalist and sometimes downright xenophobic movements amongst the poor and the modestly placed 50% of the populations of first-world countries: something we’re seeing already. In the past, the poorer and the modestly placed voted for parties of the left; they do so no longer. On top of all this, there is the ultimate challenge of climate change, which we are not addressing with anything like the urgency which the situation demands. Piketty wrote the book before Covid-19, so he has nothing to say about it, but it will only have increased his conviction that international co-operation, however hard to achieve in practice, is the only way that the human race will save itself.

I had a lovely email out of the blue from a woman in Miami Beach, who’d come across my poems and translations on the website.  Her mother, who died in April, had been a professor of Italian literature at Columbia University, and an expert on Montale.  One of her favourite poems had been ‘Portami il Girasole’.  After she died, the daughter was looking for a good translation of the poem, came across mine, and decided that it is the best available.  I sent her the two books in the post, and she wrote back to say that although her mother was now three months dead, the funeral still hadn’t been held because of the pandemic.  It’s to be held shortly.  The funeral card will have Montale’s poem on the front cover, and my translation on a bit of paper inside, ‘for those who can’t read Italian’.  I’m very touched.  An amazing thing, the internet, for good and ill.  My friend Peter Traves runs an English Literature group for the University of the Third Age in Pontesbury, near Shrewsbury.  At his request, I sent a few of my poems with notes about how I came to write them, and the two books for each member of the group. Peter wrote to tell me that a member of the group had said, at the end of one of the Zoom sessions, ‘Well, there are a lot a poets buried in Westminster Abbey that I don’t care for, but this chap who’s still alive is just up my street.’  But I’m not letting it go to my head.

A while ago I had another email out of the blue, from an English woman living in France who is doing an advanced degree in translation studies at Bristol University. She asked whether she could make my translation of the first part of Victor Hugo’s poem ‘L’Expiation’ — the piece I called ‘The Retreat from Moscow’ — the topic of her dissertation. I wrote back to say yes, of course. She sent me the dissertation a few weeks later, and very good it is. I sent her the two books too.

There has been a grotesque scandal in the UK over the awarding of grades for A-levels and BTecs. Essentially, because of Covid-19, final examinations have not taken place. Teachers have awarded grades to their students on the basis of the work they had done during their courses. These judgements have of course been moderated and standardised. But the governments of all four parts of the UK, and the organisations overseeing examinations, obviously had no confidence in teachers’ professionalism, so they imposed an absurd algorithm on the process, whereby grades were changed, upwards or downwards, but usually downwards, depending on the school’s or the college’s results in previous years. The result was that thousands of students received results far worse than those which they and their teachers were sure they deserved. The error has been corrected now as a result of the outcry. Teachers’ moderated, standardised judgements will now stand as the grades which the 2020 students have achieved. The chaos means that universities are having a very hard time organising admissions for the coming autumn.

The wretched algorithm was presumably removed for GCSE grades before they were announced today, so there hasn’t needed to be a last-minute revision of grades for 16-year-olds, thank goodness. Teachers’ judgements have been accepted. There has been a significant improvement in grades since last year. I don’t believe that’s because teachers are ‘soft’. I just think, as someone who, years ago, before the internet gave governments the excuse to reintroduce final examinations as the main method of assessment because of the supposed risk of cheating, that coursework is a fairer method of judging students’ real capabilities than time-limited final examinations. I don’t have up-to-date information about the extent of cheating at GCSE and A-level. The most recent figures I have are from 2014, when 2,550 penalties were issued, representing 0.012% of the total number of entries in all GCSE and A-level subjects across all examination boards in England. That was twelve examples of cheating for every 100,000 entries, a lower figure than in previous years. It was twelve too many, but not a justification for casting doubt, as the government has done, on the whole principle of continuous assessment.

It’s a habit of mine to get angry after listening to the announcement of the A-level and then GCSE results every August, when some pig-ignorant Tory MP comes on to say that results are improving because standards have dropped.  This baseless opinion goes against the academic research on the question, and is as if to say that people like Helen and me and scores of our friends, who’ve spent our working lives one way or another helping to improve the quality of teaching, might as well not have bothered.  ‘Grade inflation’ is the cheap phrase used. If standards continue to improve year by year, it could just be because, overall, the quality of teaching is improving. In the exceptional circumstances of this year, official incompetence and the lack of trust in teachers’ professionalism have reached a new low.  Gavin Williamson, the current Secretary of State for education, has been contemptible whenever I’ve heard him on the radio.

Here, we have the steady, calm warmth of late summer.  The children have gone back to school (masked, alas, in the case of the older ones) and the roads and shops are even quieter than they have been since June.  Mary and Jacques are enjoying their little house up the road.  Mary’s daughter Sophie and family visited, as I mentioned in my last, and I had a day at the beach with Paul, making sandcastles and carrying him into the sea.  He wanted to pretend that he was driving a car in the sand, complete with wheels and various other accessories, and as I remarked to Mary and Sophie, ‘Let the boy’s imagination run riot today; he’s going to school next week; they’ll sit him down and teach him the subjunctive.’  Which, so I hear, is not far from what has happened.

This has been a good year for fruit.  We have loads of little peaches, falling on the ground, and on Friday Mary, Helen and I made peach chutney.  Delicious with cold meat.

On Sunday we attended the outdoor mass for the Pardon de Saint Guénaël, but this year alas with no fête to follow.  I wrote in April about Monique Le Gal’s death. The whole community has been deeply shocked, and her husband Eric is inconsolable.  The mass was in Monique’s memory, and the priest, Jean-Marc, presided with great charm and sensitivity.  I should think that 200 people were there, sitting on chairs and benches on the grass.  When Eric tolled the bell before the service, I found tears in my eyes.  Then there were drinks afterwards, and all in all it was about as affirming a ceremony as one could imagine in such circumstances.  As I mentioned in April, only members of the immediate family were permitted to attend the funeral. Yesterday I wrote this little poem:

Myra Barrs has now finished the main text of her book about Vygotsky, much to her relief, although there’s still the drudgery of checking references and seeking permissions for quotations.  Fortunately, she’s found someone who can help her with permissions.  I’m now going through all the chapters again as she sends them to me for polishing.

People arriving in the UK from France now have to quarantine for 14 days. As long as that lasts, we’ll stay here.

On Monday Helen and I celebrated the anniversary of our first meeting, which occurred on the first Monday of September 1974 in a classroom at Vauxhall Manor School.  We remember it on the first Monday of every September, whatever the date.  Of course, each 28 November we also celebrate our wedding in 2008.

I’ve just finished Vanity Fair, which I’d never read before.  It’s most entertaining, despite the casual racism, both towards people of colour and towards Jews, which crops up occasionally.  And there is psychological complexity in many of his characters, something which is rare in Dickens, despite the latter’s genius.  And I’ve also read White Mughals, one of William Dalrymple’s books of Indian history, which is splendid.

The other night something unfortunate occurred, about which I wrote this poem:

As the poem says, I was reading Elizabeth Bishop’s poems. Amongst them are some wonderful pieces. My favourites are: ‘The Fish’, ‘Cootchie’, ‘A Cold Spring’, ‘The Bight’, ‘At the Fishhouses’, ‘Cape Breton’, ‘The Prodigal’, ‘Faustina, or Rock Roses’, ‘Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore’, ‘The Shampoo’, ‘Manuelzinho’, ‘Manners’, ‘First Death in Nova Scotia’, ‘Filling Station’, ‘From Trollope’s Journal’, ‘In the Waiting Room’, ‘The Moose’, ‘Poem’, ‘One Art’, ‘The End of March’, ‘The Wit’, ‘Exchanging Hats’, ‘A Norther — Key West’. Not as many favourites, I admit, as I listed for Robert Frost. I suppose that’s partly because he wrote more anyway, and partly because of my preference for form over freedom. Sometimes, her very free poems, notably ‘The Fish’, ‘At the Fishhouses’ or ‘Cape Breton’, work beautifully; they sustain a quality of rarity, a diction hovering a distance above prose, despite the freedom. But sometimes I find the free poems too easily written down. This is probably deeply unfair to the poet’s efforts, because I believe she worked and re-worked her poems again and again, and only put them out when she was completely satisfied. But I stick to my feeling of mild dissatisfaction with poems which are only slightly heightened prose. And I wish my output had a tenth of the quality of hers.

I’m feeling light of spirit because of two contrasting things which happened yesterday. The first was that I wrote ‘A Breton Pardon’ after a longish period when I was really beginning to wonder where the next poem was coming from. The second will take longer to describe. As I’m sure I’ve written on previous occasions, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort in the last five or six years engaged in a campaign to try to see that the industrial estate across the road from our flat is redeveloped in a way that allows the existing businesses on the estate to remain there if they wish to (which several of them do), in new and environmentally better accommodation, and that also allows for the construction of several hundred dwellings for rent at levels which people on ordinary incomes can afford. This as opposed to the possibility that the whole site would be sold off to private developers, who would put up more blocks of flats there, each flat costing a million pounds or more.

We have had some success in this campaign: success to which I think I’ve contributed. But — and I don’t need to go into the details — I’ve found some of the actions of the person who chairs our group increasingly at variance with the way I would do things. There’s no doubt of his sincerity; he’s energetic, and his ultimate vision for the place is the same as mine. But the differences between us have accumulated, and when he wrote to me yesterday asking me to confirm that I wouldn’t raise a dissenting voice at the meeting next Tuesday (all meetings are on-line at the moment, of course), despite my doubts about a particular course of action he favours, I decided to resign my post as joint secretary of the group, and also from membership of another group, a committee including some of Camden’s officers and councillors, and members of other local organisations, on which I was one of our group’s representatives. It will cause a bit of a fuss within the group, but I can’t help that. The result is that a large body of work has left my shoulders. There would, for example, have been the meeting next Tuesday and three the week after, each of them generating work of one kind of another, usually involving my writing things or improving other people’s efforts.

It’s a grey, rainy afternoon. Helen and I have decided that we’re going to stay here until early next year. The news from the UK about the second wave of Covid-19 infections is bad. It’s true that, at the moment, nowhere near as many people are actually dying from the disease as died in the spring; but rates of infection are increasing, and no one is absolutely sure that this trend won’t eventually lead to many more deaths. If we went back to London, we’d have to self-isolate for two weeks in our little flat, not even — strictly — allowed out to buy food. We’re much better off here, where, apart from the wearing of masks in shops, restaurants and other enclosed public spaces, life continues unaffected. It’s a different story in the big cities.

Mary and Jacques are returning to Marseille today. They would have preferred to stay in Brittany, but various needs call them back. Mary wants to support Sophie, who tested positive for Covid-19 just as she was starting a new job. My great-nephew Paul has also had it, though without symptoms. It was probably the innocent baby Anna who brought the virus back from the crèche. Then Mary and Jacques have some complicated business concerning their immeuble. The building is more than a century old, and the city authorities have declared that the façade is in urgent need of repair. This will be expensive. Jacques, who would like soon to retire as a painter and decorator, needs to jump through the necessary administrative hoops to get his pension organised. But they’d both like to come back here as soon as they’re free to do so, perhaps after a month.

Talking of administrative hoops, I’ve just posted requests to the local branch of the social security system here for Helen and me to have French medical insurance. Throughout the last thirty years, our medical expenses in France have been small, and we’ve been happy to pay doctors, dentists and chemists when we’ve had to. We haven’t even bothered to try to reclaim some of the money, which I think we’re entitled to do under the reciprocal agreement between France and the UK while both countries have been in the EU. (In fact, for the first time, I did yesterday send off some papers which might mean that we’ll get back the majority of about 150 euros which we’ve spent on drugs at the chemist; Sophie wrote us the prescriptions.) But with the UK’s final departure from the EU imminent, and the doubt about whether there will be a future reciprocal arrangement, I enquired of Sophie, went on-line, and talked to a helpful woman on the phone, as a result of which I discover that it is possible to get something called Protection Universelle Maladie, which is designed for people in our situation: citizens of other countries living for most or all of the time in France. I fully expect that my first attempt will fail for want of some bit of correct documentation, but I will persist.

I’ve now finished the third group of stories in Farfalla di Dinard; 35 down, twelve to go.

I nearly always meet local friends when I’m out on one of my regular walks or drives. I might meet Philippe, who now walks several kilometres every day since the doctor told him that he must do more exercise or take stronger medication for high blood pressure. He sensibly chose the former. If I’m driving, I have to slow down when coming up behind him, because he has earphones and doesn’t hear me until the last minute. Through his earphones he is learning English as he walks. We have a brief chat in my language. Two days ago, while walking myself, I turned right at the top of the road, going towards Saint Guénaël, to see two small pet goats running towards me, followed by a car. A young man jumped out of the car and attempted to catch the goats. They eluded him. I was ready to try to grab one myself, but the animals, seeing me up ahead, about-turned and ran the other way. Again, the man failed to lay a hand on either of them. The young woman driving the car turned it round and chased the goats slowly back in the direction from which they had come. I expect they got the pretty beasts home. Then I passed Paul’s house. Paul is one of the farmers in the hamlet. Normally, he is amongst the most sociable of my neighbours, but since he was on his knees dealing with what was evidently human excrement coming out of a blocked drain, he was understandably disinclined to pass the time of day with me. If I meet Louis, who lives across the road from Paul, there will be a long conversation. Louis is a builder. He has just finished constructing, with his own hands, a substantial family house for his son, next to his own. Louis takes a keen interest in international affairs: our talk is usually of climate change, Covid-19 and the wickedness and stupidity of Donald Trump. If I turn left at the top of the road, and left again, I get to Kerdurand, where Robert lives. As he says himself, he was born there and wants to die there. Unfortunately, he has had cancer of the stomach, which is being treated with drugs, and he does look frailer than he used to. But he walks up and down the road; ‘il faut rester debout’. ‘When are you going to become French?’ he asks. I tell him I’m thinking seriously about it. ‘Do you think I’d pass the test, with my accent?’ I ask, committing the Englishman’s besetting sin of false modesty. ‘Accent? Don’t worry about that. Everyone’s got an accent,’ says Robert, showing a grasp of sociolinguistics which eludes many people I’ve met who have more advanced educational qualifications than he has.

If, before getting to the top of the road, I do a sharp left at what the French call ‘une patte d’oie’, by the dustbins, I shall get to Collogodec, where our friends Jérôme and Aurélie live. Before their house, I pass the house where Julien, a fighter pilot in the French air force, and his American wife Michelle live. They met when he was training in Mississippi, her home state; perhaps he was learning to fly a kind of jet which France had bought from America. They have a baby girl, Kate, and each of them takes turns to push her round the lanes. Michelle tells me that her husband is doing his last stint as a fighter pilot, based at Lann Bihoué, the airport near Lorient which is part military, part civilian. When he finishes this five-year commitment, they’ll move to Corsica; he’s from there. He’ll become an airline pilot. I remark that the weather in Corsica will be a bit different from that in Brittany. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but we’ll manage. Mississippi weather can be warm too.’

Jérôme and Aurélie, and their children Morgan and Olivia, have become close friends. They regularly supply us with eggs. Aurélie used to do Helen’s hair every week, but she’s had to stop work because of calcification in her shoulder, no doubt a kind of repetitive strain injury brought on by constant use of hair dryers and other equipment requiring the lifting and lowering of the right arm. She’s considering another career. Jérôme works for the environmental department of Lorient council. He’s the city’s principal pest controller, dealing with Asiatic hornets’ nests, rats, cockroaches and other undesirables. They are the sweetest of people; we’re very fortunate to have them nearby.

Since I started writing a couple of hours ago, the rain has been relentless. Brittany is a peninsular sticking out into the Atlantic, and when the wind is from the south-west and the air pressure low, rain can continue for days and days.

Nine days ago I attended, with Jean and Annick, the funeral of a man I knew only slightly, one of Les Amis de Saint Guénaël, Luc Gragnic. He was the brother of Dominique, whom we know much better; Dominique and his wife Jocelyne are close friends too. Luc had died of cancer at the age of 60, a year younger than his brother. I should think that 500 people, all masked, were at the church at Gestel, most of us standing outside, on a fortunately dry, mild afternoon. Jean-Marc, the wonderful priest of whom I’ve written before, conducted the service with Gestel’s priest. The ceremony was broadcast on loud speakers. At the end, everyone processed past the coffin to pay respects. Those of us outside entered through the west door and walked up the central aisle, bowed to the coffin and turned right to exit by the door in the south transept. Luc’s and Dominique’s mother is very much alive, and a dynamic force in Les Amis. With her family, she stood and watched as the coffin containing her son was unloaded from the hearse. Her wreath — one among dozens — bore the words ‘A mon fils’. After the service, she walked with the family behind the hearse for the interment in the village cemetery. It’s hard to imagine how a woman in her eighties must feel, saying goodbye to a child. Annick tells me that she is both croyante and pratiquante. I hope that may provide some consolation.

Last night there was a violent rainstorm: no thunder or lightning, just very strong winds and a downpour. I lay in bed looking up through the Velux window at the branches of the oak flailing wildly in the gale. No damage has been done, although a huge bough of another oak overlooking the lane which leads to the house has been half broken off and hangs down dangerously. Jean-Paul came to look at it this afternoon and will return on Monday with his lorry and a rope and hook, pull it away completely and chop it up.

The red squirrel is tireless in its collection of walnuts from the tree a few yards from where I write. If I keep perfectly still, it goes about its business swiftly: scamper up the tree, pluck walnut with mouth, either transfer nut to paws immediately and begin eating, or keep nut in mouth, descend, run across the grass into the wood next door. Repeat. But if I make the slightest movement while it’s facing me, it remains stock-still for several minutes until it’s sure the danger has passed, even though I’m usually in the house, observing its activity through the French windows.

Days and days of rain are forecast.

And now nearly two and a half months have gone by since I last wrote. I long ago stopped making excuses or even feeling guilty about these long gaps. In the interval, there have been tumultuous events in the world, and I’ve been keeping pretty busy with projects which will have the merest, tiniest influence on our revolving planet.

The most important, and wonderful thing, is that Donald Trump was soundly defeated in the presidential election on 3 November. He is the worst, the stupidest, the most dangerous occupant of the White House in my lifetime, and possibly ever. ‘Evil’ is the strongest of words, but not too strong as a description of his influence on America and therefore the world. Since his defeat, he has continued to insist that the election was stolen from him, principally because he claims that postal ballots, whose use greatly increased this year because of legitimate concerns by voters about being infected by the Covid-19 virus if they went to vote in person, were used fraudulently. There is no evidence for this; not a scrap. But that hasn’t stopped him and his lawyers making repeated appeals to state supreme courts (only, of course, in the states where Biden won) seeking to overturn their results. Every appeal has been swiftly and comprehensively rejected. Last week, he arranged for an appeal to the federal Supreme Court (a body which he has stuffed with judges of a conservative persuasion). The Court rejected that appeal in short order and with some contempt, showing that judges holding conservative opinions on matters like abortion or the right to bear arms are not therefore corruptible on constitutional questions. Trump’s behaviour has divided America like it’s never been divided before, and encouraged the possibility (though, thank goodness, a possibility not yet converted to reality) of violence being committed against people, Republicans or Democrats, trying to do a fair job of recording and reporting the election results. Whether he’ll bother to turn up on 20 January for Biden’s inauguration, who knows? And who cares? Since his defeat, he has managed to raise a quarter of a billion dollars, only a small amount of which will be needed to pay his hapless lawyers; the rest will, I imagine, go to a fighting fund enabling him to make life for Biden as difficult as possible, while Trump plans a campaign for re-election in 2024. And here the Republican Party will have to make up its mind. Do they really want to go into that campaign as the party of Trump version 2, with all his isolationism, disregard for the planet, visceral divisiveness, ignorant opinionation, favourable nods towards armed insurrectionists and extreme right-wing conspiracy theorists? Or do they want, even though they will fiercely contest that election, to remain in the broad stream of engagement with the world, dealing with the challenges we face as a species (climate change being the most important, of course)? From Biden’s point of view, the best outcome would be that the Republicans choose a different candidate, but that Trump also presents himself under his own flag. That would split the conservative vote nicely, but it’s probably too much to hope for.

In the meantime, we can hope for a better America these next four years. The signs are already good. Biden will rejoin the Paris climate accord; he will attempt to refashion some sort of deal with Iran; he will build on Obama’s achievement in health care; he will bring serious federal muscle to the fight against the Covid-19 virus, which has ravaged America. About 300,000 people have already died of the disease there. This is easily the largest number in any country in the world. The number of cases of infection per one million of population is also very high, at about 50,000.

In Georgia, the state whose result Trump contested most bitterly (it was a narrow but definite win for Biden, after two recounts, in a traditionally Republican state), there will be two run-off votes for the Senate on 5 January. If both those contests go to the Democrats, there will be a 50/50 balance in the Senate, and Vice-President Kamala Harris will have the casting vote there. If one or both are won by Republicans, there will be a Republican majority there, making it much harder for Biden to get his measures passed. But there’s still a lot he can do even if the result goes the wrong way, and overall most of the world is breathing a deep sigh of relief that the better part of America has prevailed in this election.

Covid-19: about 1.6 million people worldwide have died of the disease, according to official figures. The effect of the disease on the lives and livelihoods of billions of people is incalculable. Governments have borrowed inconceivably large sums of money — many hundreds of billions of whichever currency you care to name — to prop up their economies and to ward off total civil collapse. As ever, the poorest and the most vulnerable have been hit hardest. Helen and I, in our nice warm house with its big garden, are only inconvenienced in the most minor ways. We fill in a form when we go shopping. That takes 30 seconds, and here in France even this obligation will cease tomorrow. There’s more money in our bank accounts than usual, since our pensions arrive every month and there are not so many opportunities to spend it. But for a young couple on the minimum wage, with uncertain employment prospects, living in a small flat with two or three children, it’s a different story.

The one bright light on the horizon is a vaccine; or rather, several vaccines. The first to be cleared by the UK for use on the general population arrived in the country last week, and is already beginning to be administered to the very old, and to health workers in care homes and hospitals. Other vaccines will soon be available, bringing the possibility that some time next year enough people will be protected from the disease to allow life to return to some kind of normality. The research and testing which has brought the first vaccine to market so quickly is quite remarkable, and testament to what humanity can achieve when there is genuine international cooperation. An American company, Pfizer, with a German partner, BioNTech, using the knowledge of Turkish scientists, produce a vaccine which is manufactured in Belgium and shipped to the UK. Oxford University and Astra Zeneca will soon have their own vaccine available. The Russians have one called Sputnik V. And there will be others. Unfortunately, there is a significant group of benighted people in most countries who cast doubt on the efficacy and/or safety of these vaccines. Many such people peddle conspiracy theories about how ‘the state’ will use the vaccine to take control of our brains. Less crazed sceptics ask why there hasn’t been such urgency in the development and distribution of cures for malaria, or HIV, or other diseases which principally devastate poorer parts of the world. That’s a good question, but irrelevant to the current situation. Not one extra child in Africa would be cured of malaria if the current international effort on Covid-19 hadn’t happened. And there is serious and successful work going on against malaria, notably by the Gates Foundation.

Christmas has come and gone. As usual at this season, my mood fluctuates between conviviality and despair; between gratitude for the good fortune that chance and fate have offered me, and shame at how little, really, I have managed to achieve in my life so far. Friends of course will tell me what nonsense that is; ‘Look at what you did here, or there.’ But such kindly encouragement doesn’t remove or even diminish the feeling. It’s something I’ve lived with for a few years now. It comes and goes. It’s a relief when the moods lifts, but I can’t predict when that will happen, nor do anything to hasten the clearing of the sky.

On Christmas Eve, the UK and the EU finally agreed a deal on their (our) future relationship, in trade and some other matters. This will mean that the chaos of the UK’s departure from the EU in five days’ time with no deal, to trade thereafter on World Trade Organization terms, will be avoided. It doesn't mean that the UK will enjoy the ‘exact same benefits’ of membership as continuing members enjoy, despite that foolish (and, I think, ungrammatical) phrase having been bandied about by the magnificent isolationists on the far right of the Conservative Party. There will be a heavier administrative burden on businesses trading between the EU and the UK, but at least, in most cases, there will be no tariffs or quotas. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland effectively — though not constitutionally — remains in the EU, since it will continue to be a part of the single market and the customs union. This should avoid, thank God, any recrudescence of violence to do with the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. I anticipate that there will be a big increase in the transport of goods and people from the whole island of Ireland direct to France and Spain, via ports in the Republic. There will inevitably have to be some administrative checks on certain goods passing between Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and, of course, between Great Britain and the Republic. This is all sad, expensive and unnecessary; but the worst has been avoided. Parliament will be recalled next Wednesday, 30 December, to debate and vote on the deal. It will go through, because Keir Starmer has said that Labour will vote for it. I expect there will be some rebels on the Labour side, and it may well be that some extreme Brexiteers on the Conservative side will foam at the mouth about ‘betrayal’, but the vote is not in doubt. And I expect that the European Parliament and the member states will nod it through as well.

And that will be that, at least for a few years, and maybe beyond my lifetime, although no doubt there will be arguments and mini-crises over particular matters, most likely over different interpretations of the extent to which either partner is subsidising businesses in its jurisdiction. So far as I can see from a read of the excellent brief summary of the agreement provided by the BBC, the UK has yielded a lot more than the EU. In the matter of fish, for example, the value of fish caught by EU fishermen in UK waters will initially be cut only by 25%, the cut to be phased in over five and a half years. Thereafter, it is true, the UK will fully control its own waters, but I imagine that it will continue to do deals with the EU in order to maintain tariff- and quota-free access to EU markets for its own fish. And on the ‘level playing field’ — rules about fair competition — there are ‘measures which commit [both sides] to maintain common standards on workers’ rights, as well as many social and environmental regulations’; and ‘the UK has also agreed to stick to common principles on how state aid regimes work’. The fig leaf which disguises the nakedness of our claims about ‘taking back control’ is that the machinery to arbitrate on disputes will no longer be the European Court of Justice, but ‘a binding arbitration system involving officials from both sides. It means that even though this is a tariff-free agreement, the threat that tariffs can be introduced as a result of future disputes will be a constant factor in UK-EU relations.’

It feels as if the two sides have said, ‘We’ll trust each other to behave, but there are more stringent checking measures in reserve should the trust break down.’

Life has a way of arranging coincidences which might affect historical decisions. A new, more easily transmitted strain of Covid-19 is running ‘out of control’ (the phrase used by the Secretary of State for Health) in large parts of England, especially in London and the south-east. This caused many countries, notably France, to close their borders a few days ago to travellers from the UK. France did so for a 48-hour period. The result was that thousands of lorries have been stranded in east Kent, waiting to get on ferries at Dover or trains through the Channel Tunnel. Drivers have been sleeping in their cabs over Christmas, with limited or no access to food, water or washing and toilet facilities. France then agreed to let lorries cross the Channel as long as their drivers held a certificate showing that they had tested negative for Covid-19 in the last 72 hours. The logistical challenge of getting this done has been formidable, but it is being achieved, and the backlog of lorries is gradually being dealt with. But, courtesy of an unrelated scourge, the rehearsal before their eyes of the nightmare of what might happen for a long period of time if there were no deal between the EU and the UK might just have persuaded politicians that a deal had to be done.

We have easy access to media in France and the UK. In official statements about the deal, the tone is starkly different on the two sides of the Channel. In France (and I think in other European countries) the tone is one of regret and relief. In the UK, it is one of triumphalism: ‘At last we’re free.’ The facts dispute the boast.

The main text of Myra Barrs’ book about Vygotsky is now finished. I arranged for a printed typescript to be delivered to her a few days ago. There is some topping and tailing to do (acknowledgements, the contents page, an afterword) and we’ll both have a relaxed final read before it goes to the publisher. It’s taken a lot of time in recent weeks, but I’ve enjoyed it (and Myra has paid me generously). The trickiest thing, since it’s an academic work, has been to make sure that all the references in the text connect properly to the reference lists at the end of each chapter, and that the style in which the references are set out is consistent throughout. It’s the pedantic exactitude required in microsurgery or mediaeval theology. (I’m sure I’ve never been a surgeon in a previous life, but I might well have been a mediaeval theologian.)

A couple of weeks ago I finished translating the last of the 47 Montale stories in Farfalla di Dinard. I shan’t put the remaining 34 stories on my website, nor offer them to any prospective publisher, until I’ve found a native Italian to do for me what Arturo Tosi did for the first 13. Three people — Paul Ashton, David James and Helen — have read and enjoyed these last three batches, despite the uncertainties and faults they contain.

The days have stopped getting shorter, as the ancients noticed. The trees are bare, the sky grey. We were blessed with sunshine on Christmas Day, but are threatened with a violent storm tomorrow.

Just after I wrote two days ago, Dominique Gragnic rang up and invited us over for aperitifs yesterday morning. We went, and my mood seemed to lift. We discussed the sad loss of Dominique’s brother Luc in September. Dominique and Jocelyne were so positive about life, looking forward to their respective retirements in 2021, proud of their children and grandchildren. Whether it was the champagne as we sat and talked or the break from the almost relentless rain of recent days, I don’t know. But I felt better.

Glenda Walton rang last night. She has been taking Italian lessons with a woman in Bologna. I asked Glenda for the woman’s email address, and have written to her asking whether she might be interested in reading and correcting the 34 Montale stories.

I was interrupted for a couple of hours today by one of those dreadful scams so common on the internet. A woman I know well, who until recently lived in Saint Guénaël, appeared to write to me saying that she was mortally ill, and would I do her a favour? I wrote back saying of course, what was it? As soon as the answer came, ‘Send me some money to Ajaccio,’ I knew what was up, but I had been conned by the excellence of the French in the original appeal. Normally these criminals can’t spell or punctuate, but in this case the grammar, spelling and punctuation were perfect, so far as I could see. You always feel a fool, to be taken in so easily, but since the person in question lives alone, and is of a reserved nature, her cri de coeur seemed plausible.

All the sane commentators I’ve heard since the UK/EU deal was agreed on Christmas Eve have spoken with one voice: what are we doing spending four and a half years negotiating an arrangement which will make it more difficult, not less difficult, to do business with our biggest market and our closest neighbours? I read that New Zealand (a country I admire enormously, which has just about the best leader of any country in the world at the moment) will from 1 January 2021 have fewer administrative burdens in importing its goods into the EU than will the UK. We’ve done this so we can wave the tattered flag of sovereignty.

The variant strain of Covid-19 is continuing to spread across England, and has been detected in more and more countries as a result of the arrival of infected people from the UK. The NHS is under extreme pressure. Our country has now suffered nearly 71,000 deaths from the disease. The numbers in the USA, and the continuing rise in cases there, are terrifying: 333,000 deaths and 152,000 new cases per day. Brazil has the second highest number of deaths, at 191,000. India: 148,000. Mexico: 122,000. Italy: 72,000. France: 62,000. Russia: 54,000 (a figure I’m inclined to suspect). Meanwhile, the vaccine doses are being distributed as fast as possible to those who most need them, and perhaps, some time next year, the brilliant imaginations and painstaking work of scientists will slow and eventually halt the incidence of the plague.

Our friends Jérôme and Aurélie and their children went to relatives near Grenoble for a week over Christmas, leaving me and my neighbour Jean in charge of 32 guinea pigs, about a dozen hens, several rabbits and two caged magpies.  It’s been an education looking after them and observing their habits, but I’m quite glad their owners came back yesterday. The two rabbits of which I became particularly fond, one white and one dark grey, usually pass their separate lives in the same cage, but with a stout partition dividing them. On the second day, I found them together in one half of the cage. I was sure that they hadn’t taken the opportunity to cohabit while my back had been turned the previous day. The dark grey rabbit must have clawed its way up the partition wall and squeezed through the narrow gap between the top of the wall and the roof of the cage. I was concerned that they might fight or, if they were of opposite sexes, that they might mate, against their owners’ wishes. Throughout the rest of the week it was clear that they were enjoying each other’s company, so I left them together. Today Jérôme told me that they are two males, so no danger of unplanned progeny.

The rain resumed today. The countryside is swimming in water. Streams and rivers sprawl across fields. And it’s very cold, with a wind from the north-east. Dry, cold weather is promised from Wednesday, which will be a great relief if it happens.

Today I wrote a poem and then did something I don’t usually do: sent it immediately to about twenty friends. I have a horror of being the sort of poet who imposes his most recent effusion on kindly readers, who then privately feel irritation at having to find something nice to say in response. But I was moved, at the end of this extraordinary year, to overcome my diffidence.

Trying to recall the thought or experience which has provoked a poem can be difficult, but on this occasion I know that the sight of a holly tree covered in red berries, as I drove back from shopping, and then a line from Heaney’s poem ‘Servant Boy’, in Wintering Out, which came into my mind a few moments later as a good title (normally titles are the last, not the first, thing to be settled), did the trick.

Several people wrote back to say they were grateful for the poem, and two or three asked if they could pass it on to other friends. I said yes, of course.

Mary and Jacques arrive from Marseille today. We’ll see them often between now and 10 January, when they return. We’ll celebrate Saint Sylvestre with them, and they’ll stay the night.

A new book! And starting not too late in the year. The reason for the slight delay is that I’ve been busy getting Myra Barrs’ book about Vygotsky finished. It finally went off to the publisher yesterday evening. I know from experience that there will be hiccups and irritations before the book comes out, but the major work is done. That leaves big spaces of time now, which I haven’t had for several months.

Angela Stoffella in Bologna is turning out to be an excellent critic and corrector of my Montale translations. There are two or three things in each of the stories which aren’t just matters of nuance; they’re plain wrong. In ‘The Storm Fly’, for instance, I had the servant taking away Federigo’s visiting card ‘in the most convenient vessel’ as a translation of ‘nella sede più opportuna’. Quite wrong. Now it’s ‘to its most appropriate destination’. I’m still not absolutely sure that this is right either. But Angela was clear that ‘sede’ refers to Signora Dirce herself, the appalling person whose insistent hospitality imprisons Federigo, not to an inanimate object. On the other hand, Angela occasionally makes mistakes herself, including correcting my ‘pyjamas’ to ‘pyjama’. I had to tell her that there’s no such thing as a singular pyjama in English.

Covid-19 is now so severe in London that there’s no question of us returning any time soon. More than 100,000 people in the UK have now died of the disease. Many hospitals, especially those in London, are full of very sick and dying patients. If we had to return for some reason, we would be required to show a negative result of a Covid-19 test taken not more than 72 hours before crossing the Channel, and fill in forms promising to self-isolate in our flat for 10 days. At the moment, the government is considering a more stringent measure: requiring people to self-isolate in hotels, at their own expense, for that period. That may not happen, but the fact that the government is even considering it shows how concerned they are. Essentially, in a liberal democracy, many people will do what they want to do, not what it is in their and their fellow citizens’ best interests to do. I read that fewer than one in five people required to self-isolate in the UK have actually done so consistently.

Millions of people in the UK and around the world are now being vaccinated, and I think the story for the rest of this year will be that of a race between the vaccines and the disease, with all the mutations which the virus performs in its attempt to outwit humans’ immune systems. The world has taken a knock more severe than any in my and most people’s lifetimes. Governments around the world have borrowed unthinkably large sums of money in order to stave off complete social collapse. Meanwhile, we are safe, I think, in this quiet corner of rural Brittany. It’s true that there is a curfew from six in the evening until six in the morning, but at the moment there’s nothing much to go out to in the evening anyway.

Two huge events have taken place in America. I’ve written enough in previous books about Donald Trump. The scale of his wickedness reached new heights on 6 January when, in his continuing campaign to question the outcome of the election in November, he made a speech inciting his deluded followers to march on the Capitol, where Congress was going through the (usually ceremonial) process of finally certifying the election result. Having whipped them up into a frenzy, including saying that he would be going with them, which of course he didn’t, he ‘let slip the dogs of war’. They went to the Capitol and burst in, making murderous threats against some of the leading legislators, including Vice-President Pence who, despite having been for four years the most charisma-free Vice-President I can remember (though there was Dan Quayle…), was at least prepared to recognise the legitimacy of the outcome of the election. There was then mayhem and destruction at the heart of the symbolic and physical centre of the world’s most powerful democracy.

It was an attempted coup: a failed, chaotic, incoherent attempt, but an attempted coup nonetheless. A group of people used violent means to frustrate a democratic process. Biden emerged to make a sober, gloomy speech, calling on Trump to condemn the violence and tell the invaders to desist. Trump, having a few hours previously described his followers as patriots and heroes, then condemned them for the actions which he had incited. Eventually the mob dispersed.

There are continuing questions about the inadequacy of the security arrangements at the Capitol on that day, with the suggestion (unproven as yet) that there was actual collusion between Trump’s circle, some of the leaders of the Capitol police and some members of the National Guard, who were sufficiently sympathetic to Trump as to betray their oath to uphold democratic legitimacy whatever their personal political persuasion. It’s certainly true, as many people pointed out at the time, that the security presence in anticipation of a march overwhelmingly involving right-wing white men bore no comparison with that mounted at the time of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations last year.

Once the building had been cleared of the rioters, Congress resumed its business, and did finally approve the election result, at about three o’clock in the morning. Unbelievably, a significant minority of Republican senators and congressmen used the legalistic instruments at their disposal, before and after the invasion, to delay the inevitable. They knew they would lose. The only explanation for their contemptible behaviour is that they feared for their own electoral prospects at the hands of enraged and revengeful Trump supporters the next time they have to present themselves.

The anger of the mob had been intensified by the news that both Senate seats for the state of Georgia had been won by Democratic candidates the previous day. This means that the Senate is spilt 50/50 between Democrats and Republicans, and that if there is a tie in voting, Vice-President Kamala Harris has the casting vote. So, for the moment, the Democrats have all three arms of government: the Presidency, the House of Representatives and the Senate, though the last by the narrowest of margins. It is certain that Republicans in both houses of Congress will use whatever procedural devices they can find to frustrate and delay Biden’s agenda. But still, the outcome is much better than I had feared, and the prospect of two Democratic senators, one black, one Jewish, representing a former slave state, is enormously encouraging.

Two weeks later, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris were inaugurated. We watched with pleasure and, I must confess, damp eyes. Lady Gaga, in an extraordinary dress, belted out the national anthem effectively, and Jennifer Lopez gave a bravura rendition of ‘This Land is your Land’ and ‘America the Beautiful’, but the star of the show was a 22-year-old poet, Amanda Gorman, whose poem ‘The Hill we Climb’ managed to encapsulate the spirit of the time, its dangers and its defiance, in long legato lines where the rhymes came as delicate chimes to remind us that this was a poem, not a prose poem.

Then the new administration got to work immediately to undo the damage of the Trump years. Biden has rejoined the 2015 Paris climate accord, rejoined the World Health Organization, stopped the building of an environmentally disastrous pipeline across the USA from Canada to Mexico, stopped work on the absurd wall at the Mexican border (not that a great deal had been done anyway, despite all Trump’s boasting), lifted the restrictions on people travelling from Muslim-majority countries and, perhaps most immediately urgent, began to address the Covid-19 crisis properly. About 430,000 people have died of the disease in the country, and it’s certain that the total will rise to at least 600,000, even with the measures now in place. Just to have sane, sage people in charge in America, instead of crazy ideologues and craven courtiers, is an immense relief.

Most Republican senators, contemptibly, are announcing that they will refuse to consider the case for Trump’s impeachment when it comes to the Senate. Trump has already been impeached in the House: the first time in history that a president has been impeached twice. Some of those who condemned Trump’s behaviour in the days following 6 January are now issuing statements completely contradicting their previous words, and the few brave Republican law-makers who are sticking to previous positions, like Liz Cheney, are facing efforts to unseat them. American politics will remain as venal and duplicitous as it has ever been, despite Trump’s departure.

We’ve just come back from an afternoon walk in what I might call the avant-printemps. In the last few days we’ve had a fall of snow (very rare here; I think the last one was ten years ago), some bitingly cold days and nights, and days and days of continuous rain. But this afternoon there is a mild wind and some intermittent sunshine. There are crocuses on the lawn, which we didn’t plant. A few primroses are out already, and there will be many more in the next few weeks. They spread every year.

We’re staying here for the foreseeable future. Nothing has changed since I last wrote, except that, if we did return to London now, we’d have to get ourselves tested on the second and eighth days of our ten-day confinement at home, in addition to all the other obstacles we’d have to overcome. It turns out that the obligation to self-isolate in a hotel, at the traveller’s own expense (£1,750), applies only to UK residents coming from 33 countries where potentially dangerous variants of the virus are most prevalent. France is not one of the 33.

As I predicted when I last wrote, Myra Barrs and I have had various bits of extra business to attend to now that her book is in the hands of the publisher; but nothing difficult. And I’ve written a piece about public-service broadcasting for children, to go into a document which will be published by the Children’s Media Foundation later this year, and a copy of which will go to every MP. Angela Stoffella has corrected 22 of the 34 remaining Montale stories: those in the second and third groups of Farfalla di Dinard. I expect she’ll finish the last 12 in the next week or two. I’ll then add the 34 to the 13 already on my website, and see whether I can find an interested publisher.

We’re hoping that on 22 June there will be an event in St Paul’s Cathedral to mark 40 years of the Canon Collins Educational Trust for Southern Africa, and 20 years of the Ros Moger/Terry Furlong Scholarships Fund at the Trust. If large indoor gatherings are still not permitted by then, the event will be postponed until next year. But in any case I’m gathering testimonials from scholars whom we’ve supported over the last ten years, and from a few who also contributed to the booklet we produced for our tenth anniversary event in 2011. They’ll go into a new booklet.

As expected, the Senate failed to convict Trump. Only seven Republicans had the courage to vote with the Democrats, when 17 were required for a conviction. But enough new evidence emerged in the course of the trial to show that Trump was beyond doubt responsible for the invasion of the Capitol on 6 January. Mitch McConnell, the former Senate majority leader who had defended the indefensible for the four years of Trump’s presidency, said as much himself, but then hid behind the dubious legal argument that it is unconstitutional to impeach a person who has become a private citizen. I don’t see that; the offence was committed when Trump was the President, and surely therefore the sanction should relate to his status then. Trump faces various other legal challenges, notably one from Georgia, where his hour-long telephone call in early January to Georgia’s secretary of state, including the extraordinary statement ‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’, seems a clear case of attempted corruption. Meanwhile, Biden and Harris are just getting on with governing sensibly, as I knew they would.

The military in Myanmar staged a coup on 1 February, to prevent Aung San Suu Kyi’s party, which won a general election by a landslide in November, from taking office. They have imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi herself. There has been continuous courageous civil disobedience across the country since. The soldiers are now saying that they will hold fresh elections soon; nobody believes them. If there were fresh elections, and they were at all fair, the result would be the same as it was in November. Any attempt by the West to put pressure on the soldiers is largely neutered by China’s support for the military; it and Russia will veto any motion of condemnation at the UN. Neither of those powers has any interest in Western notions of democratic freedom. Myanmar’s history since independence is tragic. The West’s uncritical support for Aung San Suu Kyi was called into question when she refused unequivocally to condemn Myanmar’s genocide of the Rohingya people. Perhaps, out of pragmatism, she thought that the chances of achieving sustainable democracy in her country were greater if she didn’t criticise the soldiers too openly. If that was the case, the coup shows that she was wrong.

It’s a peerless, soft Saint David’s day here, not that the Bretons, I think, notice Saint David, despite the close connections between Brittany and Wales. (I’ve just checked the local paper; Brittany is commemorating Saint Grégoire today.) The last few days have been bright and cloudless, but with a biting north wind. Today everything has seemed to relax. There will be more wintry days before spring truly takes hold, but I’ve always regarded the first of March as the beginning of spring, whatever the external reality, and will continue to do so.

We went for our usual after-lunch walk this afternoon. As we descended the track from Collogodec, the post lady drove up behind us in her van (rural postal deliveries take all sorts of off-road short cuts) and handed me a package containing Andrew Bethell’s book about his brother, which I edited in the autumn. As I probably wrote then, it’s a poignant memoir about his only sibling, Robin, younger than Andrew, charming and brilliant, who wrecked his brain with drugs while at university in Perth, Australia and probably also on his way home, and later committed suicide. That was 40 years ago. Andrew tells the story of their childhood, including the ordeal of boarding school at Sherborne, and recounts how in recent visits to Australia he has managed to find out more about his brother’s life there, making contact with some of Robin’s friends and lovers. The epigraph to the book is my translation of Catullus’s famous tribute to his dead brother.

At the moment, nothing much changes here. The Vygotsky book is finished until the proofs arrive, which won’t be for a few weeks or months; Angela Stoffella is correcting the last group of my translations of Montale’s stories; I really need to get back to some more serious work of my own, either original writing or translation. I’ve just finished reading a book about Montale’s poetry, which confirms something about which I had a doubt last year: there are one or two extra stories which Montale added to a later edition of Farfalla di Dinard, so I should translate them too while I’m at it. I’ve just sent off for a second-hand copy of a 1994 impression of the book, which I hope will contain the extra pieces.

The UK government has announced a slow, four-stage process which, it hopes, will lead to final freedom from Covid-19-related restrictions by 21 June. Of course nothing is certain. We won’t go back to London until it’s easy to do so. It’s true that the UK has done much better than France, and the rest of the EU, in getting people vaccinated. We could have been vaccinated weeks ago had we been in London. I read that vaccinations will be offered to everyone in France over the age of 65 from the beginning of April. Whether that includes foreigners I don’t know, but we’ll go to the doctor in Plouay and ask.

We’ve postponed the event which was to take place in Saint Paul’s Cathedral on 22 June. It would have been too close to the end of restrictions, even if everything goes well. Also, people coming from South Africa are currently obliged to quarantine in a hotel near the airport for ten days, at their own expense (£1,750). We wouldn’t want to put our South African visitors through that. So we hope that Saint Paul’s will accommodate us some time next year.

The world lurches dangerously on. Events in Myanmar are unspeakable. At least 18 people were killed yesterday during peaceful protests against the coup a month ago. It seems dreadful that a bunch of soldiers can do what they’ve done while the world’s democracies are powerless to intervene. I can see that a military invasion by the West would lead to a war with China. Over the weekend, Myanmar’s ambassador to the UN broke ranks and denounced the military thugs who’ve been in charge since 1 February. Of course he was immediately dismissed; I hope he and his family will be safe. Autocracies are perfectly capable of sending assassins across the world, as Russia has repeatedly shown.

Shamima Begum was 15 when she left London, with two friends, and went to Syria to join Islamic State. She was immediately married off to a fighter and had his children, I think three. They have all died. The UK government stripped her of her British citizenship; she retains Bangladeshi citizenship. She is now in a camp in a Kurdish-held part of Syria. The UK Supreme Court last week ruled that the government is not obliged to bring her back to Britain. Hearing this news on the radio, Helen and I had a conversation about the rights and wrongs of the case.  In the end, having listened to an impressive woman who said that the hard-headed bosses of MI6 and other security services don’t believe that Begum represents a threat to national security, our feeling is that the UK and other democracies ought to have the self-confidence to take back people who have committed terrible crimes elsewhere, or have encouraged others to commit such crimes, and/or who still believe dreadful things, and expose them to our system of justice (of which we’re so proud).  Whether Begum now regrets what she did when she was 15, or whether, as an adult, she continues to justify Islamic State’s atrocities in the name of that perversion of Islamic doctrine, is irrelevant.  She should be tried on the basis of the law as it stands for offences she committed when she was a minor and/or when she was an adult.  (Of course the legal fact that in the UK people become adults on their 18th birthday, and thereafter are deemed wholly responsible for their actions, is arbitrary; but there it is, and you have to draw the line somewhere.) European democracies have tried the Nazis, both at Nuremberg straight after the war and many times more recently.  Last week a vile minor participant in Syria’s tyranny was tried and convicted in Germany on the basis of a piece of international law which allows states other than that in which an offence was committed to prosecute wrong-doing; and the same court hopes to punish a more senior member of Assad’s regime soon.

So, on balance, I would bring Shamima Begum back, try her, and keep her under tight surveillance and control if we don’t send her to prison.  I would do the same for the other women who are currently in camps in Iraq and Syria, and who retain British citizenship. There are numerous perfectly innocent children stuck in these camps, who deserve to be released and educated. At the same time, I’m in favour of the principle of stripping people of their citizenship if they’re guilty of dreadful crimes against their own country, even though I read that to do so is illegal under the 1981 British Nationality Act and the UN’s 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness; the UK government has used the convenience of Begum’s Bangladeshi citizenship to justify the removal of her UK citizenship. Bangladesh, meanwhile, has said that she might well face the death penalty if she went there, as punishment for her terrorist crimes. Despite the cruelty of the situation, I don’t think Begum’s UK citizenship should be restored, at least until we are absolutely sure that she has renounced her former beliefs and been punished for any crimes she is proved to have committed.  After the war, the French revoked the citizenship of senior people who had collaborated enthusiastically with the Nazis, and they’ve done it more recently with French citizens who have committed Islamist atrocities.  

President Macron is currently trying to get the leaders of Muslim communities in France to sign up to a statement of acceptance of democratic and republican values. Predictably, the attempt is running into difficulties. Some groups accept the statement, some not. All the religions of which I have any knowledge have some dreadfully violent passages in their holy texts; which doesn’t mean that all or even most of the followers of those religions are violent.  Democracies which have significant communities of diverse ethnicities and faiths, which is more or less all of them now, need to tolerate, even foster, peaceful diversity while being uncompromising when a group within that diversity incites hatred and violence.

I’ve just finished reading The History of Germany since 1789, by Golo Mann.  The English edition was published in the early 1960s.  It’s been sitting on my shelf for years.  It’s very good; and he comes to the conclusion that totalitarian certainties, as represented of course by the evil of Nazism but also by the intolerant violence of Soviet Communism, must be avoided in Germany at all costs.  60 years later, the uncertainties and compromises involved in democracy are still a mess; but the authoritarian alternatives (Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Syria, Egypt, several other African countries, all the Arab oil states, several states which were formerly part of the USSR, Myanmar…) are unspeakable, as is the drift in that direction in Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Brazil, India…

It’s a freezing cold but beautiful day. Last month, as often in recent years, there was unseasonably warm weather, almost summer-like, so the plants hastened to burgeon, but now they’re being punished for their precocity. French viticulteurs and fruit farmers are particularly concerned; some of them have been out all night, lighting fires or launching drones to keep the air circulating. I read that these violent lurches of temperature are all part of global warming, which should more accurately be described as global climate disruption. Normally, the jet stream and the vortex going round the North Pole move in the same direction. But now they’re moving in opposite directions, allowing blasts of arctic air to penetrate much further south than they usually do. Newspapers are full of mixed stories about the planet: here are dire warnings which more or less suggest that our grandchildren are doomed; then here are examples of countries or states or cities embarking on projects (electric cars and bicycles, off-shore wind farms, huge arrays of solar panels, better insulation) which give some hope that we might be able to avoid the worst. We’ll only make a significant difference in the right direction when the huge investment funds that dominate world finance stop investing in coal, oil and gas. I sometimes think that the best contribution to the avoidance of global warming which Helen and I have made is not to have had children. (I say this with respect and love to all my family and friends who have had children, and to all the children I know and adore.) The Duke of Edinburgh died last Friday, two months short of his hundredth birthday. Of the various recordings of his interviews which were played on the BBC that day, I was struck by one in which he remarked that the world then contained three times as many people as it did when he was born, and that we can’t go on multiplying like this without causing an eventual catastrophe.

I’ve been busy with the Vygotsky book and with the Montale translations. This morning I finished the first proof-reading of the Vygotsky. The next stage will be page proofs on PDFs, which will look like the pages of the eventual book. And when the 1994 edition of Farfalla di Dinard arrived, it did indeed contain three extra stories, bringing the number up to 50. I’ve done them now, and Angela Stoffella has corrected them. On Tuesday I wrote to Pushkin Press, a publisher which specialises in translations, to see if they would be interested in taking a look at my efforts. No reply so far. If no one’s interested, I’ll just put the remaining 37 stories, plus a few notes, onto my website along with the thirteen that are already there.

Mary and Jacques came in the middle of March and painted the outside of this house, and all the woodwork of the gates in the garden. It looks beautiful now, the white paint gleaming in the sunshine. They did a very serious job, involving hacking out great lumps of plaster which the rain had penetrated. Meanwhile they enjoyed being in their house at Priziac. Last Sunday (Easter Day) I drove them to Brest airport; they’re leaving their car at their house for when they come back in May. They were both quite doleful at leaving. I remember the same feeling whenever we left Kerfontaine in the first few years after we bought it.

Tomorrow I shall ring the local doctor to see about getting us vaccinated. I become eligible from next Friday. Helen has been eligible for a couple of weeks now, being over 70, but we thought we’d wait and get it done together. France and the rest of the EU still lag behind the UK, much to the delight of the Brexiteers across the channel, but supplies are slowly arriving. A week ago France entered a third quasi-lockdown: not as severe as the confinement of a year ago, but still a major interruption of normal life for many people. President Macron promises that this imposition will only be for a month, and then things will open up; the French, he says, will once again practise their famous art de vivre. We shall see. Other parts of the world are in dire difficulties. Brazil is probably the worst case, with its vile president continuing to deny the reality of the situation, or to take urgent action, as thousands of people die every day. In the USA under Biden, vaccinations are being rolled out fast, and there have been huge stimulus packages for the economy and for individual households, aimed particularly at the poorer.

We’re going to stay here until it gets easier to get back to London (and indeed to leave England again; at the moment one risks a £5,000 fine for leaving the country without good reason, and I don’t think ‘going to our second home’ counts as a good reason). It’s been an enormous pleasure to see all four seasons here, for the first time since we bought the place 31 years ago. I’ve done quite a lot of my writing at this desk with four layers on plus a woolly hat, plus an electric fire in extremis. Somehow, in a centrally heated, well insulated flat in the middle of a large city, winters seem to pass without us realising quite how cold that season can be. Here, we’ve been a little bit closer to ‘milk coming frozen home in pails’, though of course in our case it comes home from the supermarket. But, foolishly playing at the way things used to be, we have started to collect water from the spring in the wood across the track. Michel, the owner, said, ‘Help yourselves.’ So we go down with a few empty plastic bottles and get it. Michel has it analysed every year. It tastes delicious. And at last I’m not adding to the world’s mountain of plastic bottles. (Plastic, I read, can only be recycled three times; after that it’s useless, unlike glass and metal which can be recycled almost infinitely.) Of course we could get water from the tap in the house, but there’s a certain pleasure in wheeling the wheelbarrow up the hill, carrying water which has just come straight out of the ground. There would be absolutely no such pleasure if we were obliged to do it every day.

We’re going to be vaccinated by the doctor in Plouay on Saturday. A step forward. It’s become the fashion for people to ask, ‘Which one will you have?’ as if it were a matter of a choice of ice cream flavours.  I reply, ‘Whatever I’m offered.’  I have a favourite when it comes to ice cream — vanilla — but I’m indifferent as to vaccine varieties.

We’ve applied for titres de séjour here: an obligation forced on us by the accursed Brexit. French bureaucracy being what it is, my first effort wasn’t sufficient, so I’ve had to gather up further bits of evidence that we are who we say we are, that we live where we say we live, and that we’re not destitute. I’ve sent these off today. Meanwhile, the bank also wanted me to prove that I live where I say I live, despite us having been customers of theirs for 31 years, so I took in a water bill this morning. The insurance company, noticing that I’m approaching the age of 70, strongly recommended that I take out personal accident insurance, so I’ve done that too. There were various little niggles to do with proof-reading the Vygotsky book which have required detailed exchanges with the copy editor. Helen and I are directors of the management company for our block of flats in London, and the managing agent hasn’t been paying the bills which the company has incurred, so I had to write the boss an email last Friday instructing him to pay the bills by the end of today, and to confirm in writing to me that he’s done that. The application for a 90-year lease extension on our flat, and on that of about twenty other leaseholders, which is a campaign I’ve been leading for the last eighteen months, has got stuck somewhere between our surveyor and the property company acting for Camden, the freeholder, so I rang our surveyor this morning to encourage him to push the business along.

This truly tedious list of minutiae (I can’t imagine that anyone else would be remotely interested in it) weighs on me. The banality of it. The precious time thrown away on it (Larkin’s marvellous phrase: ‘time torn off unused’; I suppose you have to remember those old-fashioned calendars where the days of the year were a fat block of pieces of paper in January, diminishing as the year passed, to really get the metaphor). I’m certain that, when the lease extension is achieved and when we can get back to London, I want to sell the flat and get shot of those responsibilities (and expenses).

It’s another beautiful day here, but with a cold wind. In the corner of the terrasse, out of the wind, it’s blissful as long you’re wearing enough clothes. We’ve just come back from our afternoon walk, and had tea and (in my case) half a scone with butter and raspberry jam.

Mary rang this morning to say that their flat in Marseille has been burgled. She was on the way back there from Avignon, where she and Jacques are doing a decorating job. She rang again, later, to say that the police had caught the three criminals — two women and a man — because a neighbour living above had heard the noise and called the police, who miraculously came almost immediately and apprehended the thieves as they were leaving the building with most of Mary’s jewellery, including some precious items which had belonged to our mother and grandmother. These are now back in Mary’s possession. The only thing missing, Mary thinks, is a gold ring which had belonged to our great-grandmother. So it could have been worse. But Mary and Jacques, like us, are wearying of their great city, with its inconveniences, incivilities and criminality. They have even greater worries than we do over the management of their flat. Because an immeuble elsewhere in the city fell down a while ago, causing deaths, the city authorities have become hyper-anxious about old buildings, and unfortunately some probably over-enthusiastic fonctionnaire saw the façade of the building where Mary and Jacques live and decided it was dangerous, with the result that the five or six owners of the flats there will between them have to pay many tens of thousands of euros for the repairs. That plus the fact that their former syndic, the equivalent of our managing agent, has turned out to be at the very least grossly inefficient and quite probably a crook. He promised them for months that he was actively addressing the problem, while in fact he was doing nothing. They now have a new syndic who they hope will be better. So Mary and Jacques have their cares as well.

This evening I’m going to read to my great-nephew Paul on FaceTime. I did this regularly last year, when we were in London. His mother tells me that he’s been asking for the sessions to resume.

The other day I was buying petrol in Plouay, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty of a peach tree in full blossom in the corner of a little patch of tended earth — a small vegetable garden — right next to the forecourt. Just the tree, and the flowers, and the bare earth. No leaves yet, and certainly no sign of vegetables. It was sensational in its starkness and simplicity.

Progress on tedious matters: I’ve just had an email from the préfecture in Vannes instructing me to attend on 12 May to receive my titre de séjour. So one of us has broken through the wall of French administration. Helen has been presented with greater difficulties, because all the regular bills here (electricity, water, insurance, phone, internet) are in my sole name. So she has yet to prove to the authorities that she does live here, even though we’ve been joint owners of the place since 1990. Amazingly, a paying-in slip from our French bank, with both our names on and our address, was refused as justicatif de domicile. We’ve sent off a document from a delivery company with Helen’s name, this address, and the required year (2020) on it, to see if that works. If not, we’ll do something else; perhaps get a notaire to write an attestation for us.

After applying extreme pressure to the incompetent man who owns the managing agent for our block of flats in London, including the curtest of voicemails left by me on his phone, we got him to issue a cheque for the payment of the annual insurance premium on the block. It arrived at the insurance company’s office today. I hope it doesn’t bounce. We’ve decided, nonetheless, that we’re going to change managing agent.

Enough of tedious matters. On Saturday, I received a text from Jacopo Barbi, Claudio’s son, telling me that Claudio had died that morning. He had been in a coma since September 2018, following his heart attack. I wrote to Jacopo, of course, and to everyone who had been to Rodellosso with us since we started going there in 2010. Claudio was the very spirit of that place, and a dear friend. The last day we saw him was the day we arrived for a week’s stay. He suffered the heart attack the next morning. He was 56 then. I’m sure that we’ll go back to Rodellosso when the pandemic has receded, assuming that Jacopo and the family wish to keep it going as an agriturismo.

This morning we bought herbs, rosemary, thyme and basil. I’ve transplanted the thyme and the rosemary to bigger pots, and put them out on the terrasse. We’ll keep the basil indoors for a while longer, in case of late frosts. And I’ve put compost and fertiliser on the roses and hydrangeas. In the lower garden, which I still call the ex-potager, remembering Albert, a mole has gone into overdrive. There were perhaps twenty-five huge molehills there this morning. Over the years, I’ve lurched between Genghis Khan and St Francis of Assisi in my attitude to moles. I’ve tried exploding them, gassing them, trapping them, bleeding them (they’re supposed to be haemophiliac). Nothing works. So I try not minding them. That doesn’t work either. So this afternoon I tried a technique which so far seems to work for my neighbour. I shovel away the excess soil of a molehill. I find the little hole up which the soil has been excavated. I place a bamboo stick in the hole, tap it with a mallet so it stands upright, and put an inverted plastic mineral water bottle on its top. The vibration of the bottle when the wind blows, transferred down the stick, is supposed to persuade the mole to go elsewhere. (In fact, I wonder whether the effectiveness of the technique in my neighbour’s garden is the reason for the beast’s emigration to mine.) The display of five upturned plastic bottles on sticks is not pretty. But if it works, I shall be content.

We were successfully vaccinated with the Astra-Zeneca jab on Saturday morning, and given a date for our second dose in July. All very efficient, and we didn’t even have to pay. I’ve had no ill effects, but Helen was feverishly cold on Saturday night, and a bit fragile yesterday. We and Jean and Annick went to lunch with Jérôme and Aurélie just up the hill, which was the usual and delightful affair lasting all afternoon, but Helen had to leave before the end and go to bed. She seems fine today, thank goodness.

I’ve recently re-read The Sleepwalkers, Christopher Clark’s magnificent account of the ten years leading up to the First World War, and the failures of statesmanship which permitted that catastrophe. Before that I read The Last Mughal, in which William Dalrymple brilliantly describes the fall of Delhi in 1857 during what the British refer to as the Indian mutiny and some Indian writers describe as the first Indian war of independence. Unspeakable atrocities were committed on all sides, but the British reprisal once the uprising was defeated was extreme in its violence and bloodlust. Before that I read Giorgio Bassani’s The Novel of Ferrara, which is in fact a bringing-together of four novels and two sets of short stories, all set in Ferrara, and all concerned, one way or another, with the approach of fascism to that city, and its dreadful implications for the large Jewish community there. The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is the longest of the novels, and the most famous, because of Vittorio de Sica’s film adaptation. Beautiful, restrained writing, with some poignant ironies, such as the fact that many of the Jewish community’s most prominent members had joined the National Fascist Party in the early years, taken in — as were so many others — by the promise of a modernity and dynamism which would sweep away the inefficiencies, inequalities and archaic practices which, it is true, so hampered the country.

I decided a while ago that I really must read all of Dickens before I die. I took in Nicholas Nickleby a few weeks ago, and now I’m halfway through Our Mutual Friend. I’ll go on to A Tale of Two Cities next. Then there’s The Old Curiosity Shop, Little Dorrit and Edwin Drood. I’ve read everything else. Nicholas Nickleby and Our Mutual Friend confirm me in my feeling that Dickens is a wonderful comic writer, a masterful manager of plot, and a sincere social critic. There are passages of description, especially details of the London he knew so well, which are quite sublime in the exactitude of their observed detail. Dickens’ characters, with rare exceptions, are morally and psychologically simple: they’re good or bad, and if they’re comic they’re comically good or comically bad. Morally good young women with pretty or beautiful faces and shapely figures abound. And Dickens is often mawkishly sentimental, especially in matters of religion. His sincere social criticism doesn’t go beyond a forlorn hope that those with power might change their ways. Those who overcome poverty or oppression usually do so thanks to the kindness of wealthy individuals: shining exceptions to the dark and brutal rule. But what an output!

A sublimely beautiful May evening. Wind from the south in the trees. Birdsong constant. I’ve been translating the poems in the ‘Ossi di Seppia’ section of Montale’s Ossi di Seppia that I’ve haven’t done before. I think I’ll make myself do them all, even though some of them don’t appeal immediately, and some are pretty mysterious.

I’m now reading War and Peace for the first time. I’m not sure why it’s taken me to my seventieth year to get round to it. More when I’m further in. I did manage to get to the battle of Austerlitz, and Napoleon’s encounter with the wounded Prince Andrew, on the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death last Tuesday.

There were elections throughout Britain on Thursday. Labour has performed badly in England and Scotland, well in Wales. To start with the small amount of good news for Labour in England: popular Labour mayors like Andy Burnham in Manchester and Sadiq Khan in London have been returned; in two places — Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and West of England — Labour mayors have taken over from Conservatives; Labour holds nine of the eleven elected mayoral positions in England, with one yet to declare. But there is much more bad news. There was a disastrous by-election result in Hartlepool, where Labour lost the seat for the first time since it was created in 1974. And the council results are equally grim. At the moment, the Conservatives control 58 councils (up 12) and have gained 239 councillors; Labour controls 43 councils (down seven) and has lost 301 councillors. It’s very unusual for a sitting government, in power for 11 years, to pull away from the opposition rather than yielding to it.

In Scotland, the SNP has won handsomely, but with 64 seats is one short of an overall majority. With the help of the Greens, however (eight seats), there will be a handsome working majority — 72 to 57 — at Holyrood for independence. The Conservatives remain the official opposition with 31 seats. Labour, which not many years ago was the dominant political force in Scotland, has 22 seats, having lost two. There will now be a battle royal over whether or not Scotland can have another referendum on the independence question. I’m sure that the result of any such referendum in the next few years will be much closer than the 72-to-57 difference suggests, but I’m equally sure that the pro-independence vote will be bigger than it was in 2014.

In Wales, Labour has 30 seats in the Senedd, up one. The Conservatives have 16, up five. The big loser is UKIP, which had seven seats and now has none.

How to make sense of this? It does seem that incumbency in England, Wales and Scotland during the pandemic has helped the Conservatives, Labour and the SNP respectively. Then there is the post-Brexit effect. Wales voted for Brexit, and it looks to me that Brexit-voting people in Wales have returned in more or less equal numbers either to Labour or to the Conservatives now that UKIP has disappeared. England voted for Brexit, and here, by contrast, Brexit-voting former Labour voters seem to have gone across to the Conservatives much more than back to Labour. This must mean that Labour has emphatically lost its appeal to many of the people who traditionally supported it, especially in the Midlands and the North. And Johnson the showman has been lucky. Despite the disastrous start to the government’s response to the pandemic, and the fact that the UK has a very high proportion of deaths from Covid by head of population (1,871 per million, only just short of Brazil’s catastrophic record, and slightly more than the USA’s, where the Biden administration has made great strides since inheriting Trump’s appalling legacy), the success of the vaccination programme has brought about a feel-good factor in the population in recent months.

Which brings me to Keir Starmer, whom I know personally and admire very much. I was glad to have played a small part in his campaign to be leader. At the moment, his evident integrity, clarity of mind and forensic dismantlement of Johnson’s bluster at Prime Minister’s Questions every week have not reached through to the people whom Labour needs in order to win a general election. I supported Keir’s campaign to be leader because I genuinely thought, and still think, that he is the person most likely to bring Labour back into government. When I supported his campaign, I wasn’t thinking about what party members like me wanted; I was trying to think about what those millions of people who don’t spend much time worrying about politics, who mainly just want to get on with their lives, who care first and foremost about their families and livelihoods, would want; and I was trying to think about who would best withstand the vile assaults which any Labour leader will get from the Tory press as an election approaches.

But it’s evident that the damage Brexit has done to Labour in the North and the Midlands has survived and will continue to survive the conclusion of that debate at the beginning of this year. And Keir, despite the ordinariness of his upbringing and the shining example he offers of aspiration and success from the starting point of an ordinary upbringing, looks to many working people, especially those a long way from London, like another privileged Southerner, and one who campaigned, to the last, to remain in the EU. I expect he has lots of people around him giving him advice. My advice would be that he needs to be a bit more of a politician and a bit less of a lawyer. A tougher, rougher voice; more slogans, less analysis. When Blair came to power — and he was a person from a more privileged background than Keir, and also a lawyer in a sharp suit — he knew the cutting edge of the slogan, hence ‘Tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’. It’s ten words rather than the three of ‘Take back control’ and ‘Get Brexit done’, but it cut through in 1997.

It may be, as the pandemic recedes and normal politics resumes, that it will be easier for Keir to make his voice heard. And it’s possible that Johnson will come a cropper at some point. But there no doubt that he’s a vote winner at the moment, and there’s something about his jovial bad-boy bluffing which uncommitted people are amused by and like. I may have written before that I remarked to Keir, a few weeks before he became leader, that he might need two goes at being Prime Minister. He said, ‘I know.’ Whether the party will give him another go if he fails in 2023 or 2024 I’m not sure. There are figures more easily associated with the North and the Midlands, where Labour has suffered the most, waiting in the wings: Andy Burnham certainly, for whom we voted when Corbyn won the first time, and Lisa Nandy, who has the further advantage of being a woman, something that a lot of Labour members think it’s high time for.

There’s been a further unfortunate development in Labour’s woes since last Thursday’s election. On Saturday night, just as there was some good news for Labour with the election or re-election of Labour mayors, came the news that Keir Starmer had ‘sacked’ — I put the word in inverted commas because I have no idea whether it was true — Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader, from her post as campaigns co-ordinator. This prompted the usual explosion of rage on social media, especially from people on the left of the party. By last night, a limited shadow cabinet reshuffle had taken place, with the welcome arrival of Rachel Reeves as shadow chancellor, and with Ms Rayner promoted, if anything, to shadow Michael Gove at the Cabinet Office. As Ian Watson writes on the BBC’s website, Ms Rayner ‘is now not only deputy Labour leader but shadow first secretary of state, shadow chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster and shadow secretary of state for the future of work. The key issue, her allies stress, is that she will have a say over party policy, particularly on the economy and workers’ rights.’ So, good news from the point of view of the wing of the party she represents. But the affair smacks of incompetence. The whole reshuffle should have been announced in one go, with no rage-inducing talk on Saturday night about a sacking. As I say, sometimes things happen behind the scenes which can’t be admitted. Perhaps Keir floated the idea to Ms Rayner that she should move and she then put the word ‘sacking’ into the public sphere. Those of us not in the inner circle will never know. But it only adds to a feeling that Keir’s grip is not completely sure. Events like this fade quickly in the memory. If Labour begins to regain popularity in the polls, if the government comes unstuck for one reason or another, it’ll be forgotten. I’m sticking with Keir, for reasons I’ve given before, despite the voices who say that he would make a great Home Secretary and of course an effective Attorney General, but hasn’t got the popular characteristics to lead Labour to victory in a general election.

I forgot to mention that, amid the largely gloomy news after 6 May, there was one tiny but resounding success. The referendum on the Camley Street Neighbourhood Plan was held that day, along with all the elections. The Yes vote won with a whopping 92% of the turnout. The turnout was only 30.8%, but the returning officer told Peter McGinty, who’s now the sole secretary of the Neighbourhood Forum after my resignation last year, that 30.8% is very good for Neighbourhood Plan referenda. This doesn’t mean that Camden is legally obliged to do what we have proposed in the Plan, but it does put significant pressure on the Council to pay attention to our proposal: maintain all the businesses which want to stay on site; build hundreds of dwellings, mainly for rent, at prices which people on ordinary incomes can afford; do the whole thing in as environmentally sustainable a way as possible.

I’m just back from an office in Vannes, and am now a French resident. I was photographed and fingerprinted, as if I were a criminal, but it was all done in the friendliest manner. I have to take Helen back to the office in a couple of weeks so she can get her titre de séjour too. I had thought of taking her with me today, but was sure that, French administration being what it is, she would have to appear on the date and at the time she has been given. But no! When I told the young woman that I’d be coming back in a fortnight with my wife, she said, ‘Oh, why didn’t you bring her with you? I could have done her too.’

One small success on the tedious news front: we have now changed the managing agent for Elm Village Block D. A firm called Scott and Stapleton has taken over from Goldfield Properties. I only bother to record this in recognition of the fact that the change has required scores of phone calls, dozens of emails, three sets of letters to all 42 leaseholders, and a certain amount of stress last month, when it looked for a moment as if the building might not be insured, since the owner of Goldfield Properties hadn’t paid the insurance premium, having held the invoice for five months. In the end, the premium was paid, and the building was never not insured, but that piece of incompetence was the final straw.

I keep pushing and pushing about the 90-year lease extension.

Such inconsequential matters! Meanwhile, Israel and the Palestinians are at war again, with familiar heart-breaking scenes, and the familiar ratio of many more Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths. The last report I heard today had 139 Palestinians killed; 11 Israelis. Hundreds more injured, of course. A new development since the last serious conflict in 2014 is that this time there have been outbreaks of inter-communal violence within Israel itself, between Jews and Arabs. Israel continues to build settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank. These acts are illegal so far as most of the rest of the world is concerned, but Israel will continue with them because it knows it has the tacit consent of the US in doing so, although the Biden administration may well take a more critical stance than did Trump, who essentially encouraged Netanyahu to do whatever he liked.

The threat to evict Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem in order to make way for a Jewish settlement is one of the sparks which has ignited this new blaze. Then the desire of Zionist youth to march through largely Arab areas of East Jerusalem to celebrate the Israeli victory in 1967, just as some Protestants in Northern Ireland wish to march through largely Catholic areas of cities in the province to celebrate their victory of 1690. The march was re-routed at the last minute. Then violence at the holiest Muslim shrine in Jerusalem during Ramadan. The site is equally holy to Jews. On 10 May, when Hamas issued an ultimatum to Israel to withdraw its soldiers from the site, and when Israel of course refused, Hamas began firing rockets into Israel. The Israeli response has been devastating. Great numbers of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. Many civilians have been killed. Israel says it is only targeting Hamas militants. This afternoon the Israelis blew up a tower block housing foreign media. Again, it said that there were militants in there. The landlord of the building denies this. He managed to evacuate all those inside just before the destruction.

I don’t expect any end to this dreadful waste of life and outpouring of hatred in my lifetime. Those with any influence in the matter continue to speak of a two-state solution. As I’ve written so many times before, I see no solution other than a one-state solution: Israel proper, both parts of Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights united as one country, called Israel-Palestine or some similar name, the state strictly secular in its apparatus but with absolute right of religious belief and practice for Jews, Muslims, Christians and Druze. A dream. But you could say the dismantlement of apartheid in South Africa was a dream. Despite that country’s continuing enormous difficulties, the dream was realised.

I find, when I’ve written about this over the years, that I must also say that Hamas is a dreadful organisation: a violent authoritarian theocracy, as backward in its attitude to freedom of thought and the role of women as the Taliban. But it is in power because it won an election, and I don’t think anyone has suggested that its victory was rigged. I can’t see how it can achieve any reconciliation with the more moderate Palestinian faction on the West Bank. The recent exposure of shameful anti-Semitism in the British Labour Party concerns those who are unable to restrict their criticism to the actions of the Israeli government, as I try to do, but who go further and question the right of Israel to exist at all. Israel has every right to exist, despite the dreadful short-sightedness of 1948 which imagined that a new state could simply be brought into existence by clearing away large numbers of people of a different ethnicity and faith who had lived in that land for a thousand years. It was a short-sightedness caused by the West’s understandable desperation to do something to atone for allowing one of the world’s worst ever atrocities — perhaps the worst ever in the history of humanity — to have been enacted in Europe. And Israel faced the implacable hatred of most of its Arab neighbours, who declared war on it and made remarks about driving it into the sea, although several Arab states, starting with Egypt under Sadat, have since formally recognised its existence. Now you can hear casual Israeli voices wishing that Gaza could be wiped off the map. Equally, you hear wise and tolerant voices, Jewish and Arab, Israeli and Palestinian, pointing to actual examples of peaceful and mutually respectful coexistence and collaboration.

Perhaps only some dreadful crisis, greater than that which is now occurring — and I suppose I mean full-scale civil war in Israel itself and the West Bank — might shake the parties into the realisation that they must, they must, find a way to live together, children of Abraham as both sides are, rather than continuing to spill blood as now. Of course, both sides would have to deal with their own zealots and extremists, but that always happens in the resolution of bitter long-running conflicts, as Northern Ireland has shown. The rich world, starting with the US, would have to put in enormous sums of money and huge efforts of technical knowledge to drag Gaza out of its dire poverty and dependency. But it could be done. We’ve seen how unthinkably large sums of money have been found in response to Covid-19. The wealth is there if the will were there.

Miserable, cold, windy weather! Not like May should be at all. Here’s a complaining poem I’ve just written.

It’s a lovely day here. May was wet and cold almost to the end, but it brightened up on the 30th. So there’s the answer to my rhetorical question in the last line of that poem.

Jean-Paul came last Monday and Tuesday and cut the meadow. I’ve left big parcels of wildness on both lawns, to encourage the bees. Last week, using my newly acquired electric chain saw, I cut the lower branches from the double row of fir trees at the top of the meadow. So now more light comes in, you can walk between the trees, and Jean-Paul will be able to get in there with his big machine. It’s made quite a difference; before, that part of the garden was gloomy.

Mary and Jacques arrived at Rennes by train from Marseille on Thursday. I went to collect them. They stayed the night here, and I took them to their house the next morning. I think they’re very happy to be back in Brittany. They’re coming to tea and dinner later. Jacques fell off a ladder recently while doing a painting job and has broken several ribs. He fell from quite a height: I think five metres. Thank goodness it wasn’t worse. There’s nothing to be done about the ribs, other than to let time heal them. In the meantime, he’s on strong painkillers.

A ceasefire was eventually agreed between Israel and Hamas, with both sides claiming victory. But the underlying problem remains. Since then, Netanyahu has been challenged as Prime Minister by a coalition of eight unlikely partners, which between them have 61 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, and which hold a wide disparity of positions. As Jeremy Bowen writes on the BBC’s website, the coalition ‘would be trying to span the entire Israeli spectrum, from the nationalist right to the liberal left’. It includes, for the first time, an Israeli Arab party. Netanyahu will do everything he can to sabotage the coalition. Even though I can’t see this extraordinary partnership working, I’d love to see the back of Netanyahu, whose duplicity — occasionally seeming to offer the possibility of some sort of agreement with the Palestinians, then withdrawing the offer, while continuously encouraging the building of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — has been a major contributor to the continuation of the tragedy in Israel/Palestine. He is on trial in Jerusalem at the moment on serious corruption charges.

People keep asking me if I’m going to do anything special for my 70th birthday in ten days’ time. I say no. I like to celebrate my birthday, but I see no reason to depart from usual practice just because there’s a nought on the end this time. It’s true that from this Wednesday the restaurants will be allowed to open indoors, but there will be restrictions on the number of customers they can accept, and on the number that can sit together at the same table. The curfew moves from 9pm to 11pm on Wednesday, but I don’t want to invite people out to dinner when they have to be looking at their watches while drinking their coffee. So we’ll probably just have a nice evening here with Mary and Jacques.

I wrote a funny little poem the other day about being 70. It pretends that I wrote it on my birthday. The idea came to me via one of my favourite quotations from Horace, which I had wrongly remembered as ‘Naturam expellas furca sed revenit’. I thought ‘revenit’ would make a good rhyme with ‘maintain it’ or ‘restrain it’. But the actual quotation, when I looked it up on the internet, is ‘Naturam expellas furca tamen usque recurret’. So I had to jiggle things around a bit. Here’s the poem.