Three weeks into the New Year already! I don’t really believe in New Year resolutions, but I’ll make one now: to write this diary a little more frequently than I did last year.

To begin with a sadness which has touched the people of Cléguer: the woman whose crime I wrote about in the first entry in last year’s diary finally managed to kill herself a few days ago. She had been transferred from a secure mental hospital to the prison in Rennes, and later to the prison in Nantes, where she hanged herself in her cell. She was on remand, still awaiting trial. Predictably enough, her lawyer is outraged and wishes to begin disciplinary proceedings against the prison service, but whenever these tragedies occur I always think first about the public servants, not well paid, understaffed, under constant pressure, who do jobs which not many people want to do. It’s the same when we hear of some dreadful case of child abuse or neglect which has caused a child’s death. People immediately blame social workers. I think about a young female social worker knocking on a door, to be confronted by an aggressive man, or by a suavely deceptive man or woman, telling her that her enquiry is unnecessary and their affairs are none of her business. It’s understandable, sometimes, that, with all the other work in her caseload, she might be tempted to take the parent’s or parents’ word at face value. That young social worker needs to be accompanied by a police officer with the power to enter the premises with her, if necessary. Again, it’s a matter of overstretched workers doing a job with heavy responsibility for small reward. Only when we pay prison officers, social workers and, most urgently of all, social carers a proper wage and improve their staffing levels — something which would be easier to achieve if they were paid a proper wage — will the frequency of these tragedies diminish. In the case of suicides, I’m not sure that there’s anything that can be done to guarantee absolutely that a person determined to end their days won’t succeed in that desperate act.

With the help of Dominique Gragnic, I’ve found the man who’s going to transform the wood from our fallen trees into pellets to heat swimming pools and other public facilities in Lorient. He’s François Bourvic, charming, very droll and, incidentally, a fluent English speaker. He used to be a lorry and coach driver, and has been to England many times. We walked around the grounds together. As well as dealing with the fallen trees, he will take down several which are still standing but so damaged by the storm that they’re now dangerous. His machine will turn the wood into pellets on the spot, here. He says he’ll do the work in February. We won’t be here then; we’re coming back in the second half of March, for reasons I’ll explain in a minute. I’m half hoping that he has to postpone his visit until I’m here; I’d like to see the machine at work. After that, there will be a long job sweeping up the thousands of bits of petit bois which are strewed around everywhere.

Helen has suffered from a sore throat, off and on, for several years. Recently, the discomfort has been permanent, and is worse in the mornings. Swallowing is uncomfortable. She has sought the advice of GPs and specialists in London, undergone endoscopies, and now takes a pill, in smaller or larger quantities depending on the most recent advice, which is supposed to ease the pain. It doesn’t work. So we decided to see what the French health service can offer. The GP here, the excellent Cindy Jouaux, authorised a visit to the hospital in Lorient for a fibroscopie. We went there last Friday. Administratively, everything worked perfectly: we arrived in good time, were received by the secretarial staff courteously and efficiently, and Helen was called for the procedure within a few minutes. She returned to the waiting room about fifteen minutes later, pale and trembling. The tube used for the fibroscopie was broader than any tube which had been put down her throat before. It was agony, she said. As the doctor continued to force it, two nurses held her arms down to stop her struggling. She said it was like being force-fed. The doctor removed the tube when he saw her distress, and said he’d have another go. Helen refused. The doctor said that the camera hadn’t spotted anything worrying in her throat or oesophagus: so no cancer there. The medics were obviously quite used to people being unable to tolerate this intervention without anaesthetic, and the very helpful secretary then organised two dates for Helen in March: the 22nd for a meeting with an anaesthetist, and the 26th for another fibroscopie, this time under general anaesthetic.

The result is that we’re returning to London tomorrow, taking two days as usual, and that we’ll be back here in two months’ time, which pleases me.

We sat and had a drink in the hospital café after the ordeal. I suggested that we drive to the town centre to buy a birthday present for our neighbour Annick, whose birthday was in two days’ time. As we were getting out of the car in the town square, Helen in some embarrassment asked whether we might also go to Monoprix to buy a cashmere sweater she had had her eye on. I said of course; the fact that I had spent about 400 euros on four items of knitwear for her Christmas present was of no consequence. So we did, and she did, and immediately felt better. I’ve never known a more striking case of retail therapy.

Arturo Tosi is steadily working through my translations of the Marcovaldo stories. He’s corrected fourteen of the twenty so far. When he’s checked them all, I’ll put them on my website. Meanwhile, he’s asked me to do an English translation of his novel about the Grand Tour. He’s already published a very good factual book on the topic. This fiction entertainingly describes the journey through France and into Italy of a tutor and his pupil in the late seventeenth century, complete with adventures, romantic encounters, and linguistic and cultural insights, misunderstandings and prejudices. Arturo’s preface describes Jolivet, the pupil, as ‘[differing] from many of his peers in having a marked eccentric sense (he feels himself a citizen of the world), by his nonconformity (he is passionately fond of foreign languages), and his moderation (he is not xenophobic), which often makes him ashamed of the behaviour and sense of superiority of his countrymen abroad.’

I said I’d be glad to do the work, but when Arturo sent me the text, I wondered whether I’d bitten off more than I wanted to chew. It’s about 250 closely typed pages. If I were to manage as many as five pages a day, which is good going, I’d be on the job for fifty solid days, plus the extra days for discussion and correction with the author. So, with an uneasy conscience, I decided to try the merits of on-line translation tools, to speed up the process. I’ve always scorned such things. Of the numerous funny stories I’ve heard or read about the howlers committed by these tools, the one I like best concerns a French woman (a friend of Annick’s, who told me the story) who wanted to translate from French into English the passage from the Bible in which Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night before his crucifixion, asks his disciples to stay awake with him in his hour of need. They fall asleep. At which Jesus says, ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’ Google Translate rendered this as: ‘The whisky wants to but the meat is soft.’

Anyway, I thought I’d see whether the technology has improved since that effort, and I’ve found that it has, remarkably. After trying a few sentences with various candidates, I opted for a tool called DeepL. It must be an example of the use of AI, artificial intelligence, which, depending on which prophet you listen to, is taking humanity either to heaven or to hell. The free version I’m using takes up to 1500 characters at a time, so a chunky paragraph, and within a second generates an English translation of the Italian which is extraordinarily accurate and even stylish. It somehow manages to gobble up a complex Italian sentence, with two or three subordinate clauses, and spit them out in English, often with the clauses rearranged to make pleasanter, more natural reading in the translation. I then need to go to work smoothing infelicities, correcting occasional mistakes and imposing my own style preferences, but I’m very grateful for the heavy lifting (which, since ‘translation’ literally means ‘carrying across’, isn't a bad metaphor) already done for me. I’ve already sent Arturo the preface and the first five of twenty chapters, and I’m waiting to see what he thinks of them. I haven’t yet told him about my recourse to AI. I hope he won’t think it cheating.

It’s a dull, mild, drizzly afternoon. Yesterday was bright, and I took the opportunity to do the last of the weeding and tidying of flowerbeds. Nothing more to be done now until the spring.

We returned to London six days ago. Since then I’ve checked the index for The Vygotsky Anthology: a tedious task, but much helped these days by the ‘Find’ facility on PDFs. I must say, the indexer whom Routledge has employed has done a remarkable job. There was so little wrong with the index that I began to wonder whether I was looking hard enough. So now, apart from a final glance at the whole text to check that my corrections have been incorporated, the job is done. I spoke to Susanna on Monday. We’ve pencilled in 20 June as the date for a launch of the two books, the anthology and the poetry.

I spoke to Myra’s lawyer on Friday. For some reason, her boss hadn’t then even submitted the application for probate; she was just about to. So it will be several months before we’ll be in a position to sell the house and close Myra’s affairs. It means, and I don’t mind it, that there are likely to be several quick trips back to London during the coming year.

Also on Friday I went to Ossie’s for a haircut and shave with hot towels. I’ve written about this before. This time I was looked after by Ossie himself. In the course of his ministrations, he told me that he’s been a barber since he was 13. He’s now 70. He’s never wanted to do anything else. He’s a happy man. He had one year of secondary schooling in Cyprus, and didn’t like it. So he left school (I don’t know what the school leaving age was in Cyprus in 1966), and told his father he wanted to be a barber. His father consented, and took him to be apprenticed at one of the three barbers serving the village’s population of 500 people. Those were the days, of course, when most men went every day to a barber to be shaved. On Ossie’s first morning, the barber showed him how to strop the razors. He had five. During the course of the morning, the barber shaved five customers, using one razor per customer and stropping the used razors in the intervals between customers. Lunchtime arrived, and the barber said he was going home for lunch and that Ossie should mind the shop. During this time, a sixth customer came in — a stranger to Ossie, a passer-by from another village — and wanted to be shaved. Ossie sat him down in the chair, applied a good thick lather to his face, selected a stropped razor and went to work. When he had done one side without mishap, he decided that rather than using the same razor for the other side, as he had seen the barber do after giving that razor a few swipes of the strop halfway through the operation, he would use a second razor to finish the job, not being quite confident about stropping yet. This he did. As he was shaving the other side of the customer’s face, the barber returned. He must have been a kind man, because he said nothing; simply watched his apprentice at work. Ossie finished the job without even nicking the customer’s chin. Only then did the barber tell the man that he was the recipient of the first professional shave that his apprentice had performed, and that the length of the boy’s apprenticeship had been about five hours.

After two years as an apprentice, Ossie had enough money to set up his own shop. So there were now four barbers in the village. A year later, his parents decided to emigrate to London. At sixteen, Ossie went to work for two Greek men in Holloway (I didn’t ask Ossie about Turkish/Greek relationships in Cyprus during his childhood, and whether his village had been a Turkish or a mixed village). The two Greeks had three barber’s shops, but they wanted to convert two of the premises to restaurants (by then, very few Englishmen wanted a daily shave at the barber; electric shavers were becoming popular; the fashion for longer hair was at its height). Ossie looked after the one remaining barber’s shop. He was popular, saved regularly from his wages, and at the age of nineteen opened his own shop, still in Holloway. He’s never looked back. He’s had the shop in Camden for 22 years. I’ve been going there for most of that time. ‘I love coming to work,’ he said. ‘I never need an alarm clock to wake me up.’ I asked him what time he gets up. ‘It used to be six,’ he said, ‘but now, with the 20-mile-an-hour speed limit, I get up at a quarter to six.’

I told Ossie about my parents’ disastrous attempt in around 1959 to cut their four sons’ hair, as described in my story ‘Hairdressing at home’. He laughed, and agreed that, before electricity, it was essential to know how to open the jaws of manual clippers before pulling them away from a customer’s head.

All this conversation, and the care and attention which Ossie bestowed on me, took the best part of three quarters of an hour, and I left the shop looking and smelling terrific.

Years ago, when I was first in Camden, a long time before Ossie arrived, I went for a haircut to a Greek barber. I used to wear my hair long then. ‘Oh,’ said the barber, ‘you shouldn’t have your hair long like that. It’ll fall out more quickly when you’re older.’ He must have been about 60 and was as bald as a coot. I don’t suppose his hair had ever touched his ears in his life. So far (and I’m 72) I seem still to have quite a thick covering on my skull.

We’re just back from four days in Norfolk with Adam and Hazel, Helen’s brother and sister-in-law. Good fun, lovely food and drink, and a beautiful walk yesterday across the marshes and along the beach at Cley.

I’m in a state of deep depression about my political party. Almost everyone assumes that there will be a Labour government, or at least a Labour-led government, some time this year. The Conservatives have descended to factional fighting of the kind Labour used to specialise in, and have committed so many sins in the eyes of the electorate (corruption under Johnson, economic suicide under Truss) that a change of government is almost ‘priced in’, to use a bit of economic jargon. Numerous business leaders, previously the most unlikely of allies, queue up to declare their support, and recently paid large sums to attend a ‘business conference’ organised by Labour, at which Keir Starmer declared his admiration for business, and for the financial services industry in particular, and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, promised to be the nation’s ‘iron chancellor’. On her watch, debt as a proportion of GDP would fall by the end of Labour’s first term. After the years of chaos, she said, you can trust me to steady the ship.

Not long ago, this same iron chancellor-in-waiting was promising to spend £29 billion a year greening the economy. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her then that you can’t do that and simultaneously be an iron chancellor. Either you announce that you are indeed going to spend £29 billion a year and that you’ll need to borrow a lot of it (as the Tories necessarily did during Covid), arguing that saving the planet is an even more important task than defeating a pandemic. You could add that you won’t need to borrow quite so much because you’re going to raise some serious money quickly by, for example, taxing capital gains at the same rate as income (I read that £12 billion a year would be raised that way, and there’s no moral or economic case for taxing capital gains at a lower rate than income).  Or you say that you’re going to be fiscally prudent, but still do some good, cheaper environmental things.  What you don’t do is give the Conservatives and their newspapers days and days of gleeful headlines by first promising a green £29 billion a year, to great applause from Labour supporters, environmentalists, trade unions and business leaders, then realise that you can’t do that and have iron fiscal discipline, then water down the commitment (to £20 billion year? to a third of what was initially promised?), before finally announcing a figure of £4.7 billion a year. Keir stood in front of the cameras last week and glumly admitted that the £29 billion had been ‘stood down’ only two days after he had said how important that figure was.  It looks as if the party doesn’t know what it’s doing.

There will be two by-elections this week. Labour is expected to win both of them. There’s another by-election on 29 February, in Rochdale, over which chaos has broken out. Just after the 7 October massacres in Israel, the Labour candidate, a man of Asian and Muslim heritage, said in a conversation he thought was private that Netanyahu had deliberately ignored warnings from Egypt and the US about the imminence of the attacks, because he wanted them to happen so that his revenge on Hamas and his assault on the people of Gaza would be justified. There are dirty tricks here; someone recorded that conversation, and gave it to the Daily Mail, who published it in last Sunday’s Mail on Sunday. Labour initially backed their man, saying that he’d made a mistake, he’d fallen for a conspiracy theory, but he was a good guy and not an anti-Semite. Then (the oldest trick in the tabloid journalist’s book), the Daily Mail leaked out a bit more of what Labour’s candidate had said months ago, and the leadership changed position and withdrew its support. Senior Labour politicians imagining that a Labour-hating paper like the Daily Mail wouldn’t do such a thing… It’s too late now to change candidate, so Azhar Ali will be the party’s candidate, without the party’s support, and because his name begins with an A he will be at the top of the ballot paper. If he wins, he will sit in parliament as an independent. He’ll probably lose: the serial opportunist George Galloway is now the likely winner. Again, it looks as if the party doesn’t know what it’s doing. And as I write this, I read on the internet that a second prospective Labour parliamentary candidate has been suspended from the party for similar remarks made at the same ‘private’ meeting.

On the more general tragedy in Israel/Gaza, we’re now in a position where Lord Cameron, the Conservative foreign secretary, is ahead of Labour in calling for a ceasefire.  Keir has never really recovered from his gaffe, made soon after 7 October, when he said to an interviewer that Israel had the right to withhold food and water from Gaza.  He should have corrected the record straight away, but he didn’t, he let it drag, and it’s done him much damage.  His subsequent persistent refusal to call for a ceasefire has alienated many in the party, especially on the left, as well as thousands of potential Labour voters, especially in Muslim communities. Here I’m partly with Keir, but only partly. An unconditional ceasefire would merely allow Hamas to regroup and rearm. It’s easy to forget, amid Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza, that it was Hamas which provoked it, deliberately, knowing what Israel’s response would be, and that Hamas still wishes to drive Israel and Israelis off the map. What Keir should have said, and should say now, is that there should be a ceasefire the moment Hamas releases all the remaining hostages.  Both sides, it’s true, would then regroup and rearm, but at least the agony of those hostages and their families would be eased, as would the lives of millions of people in Gaza.  

Going back to Ali’s remarks: yes, the idea that Netanyahu deliberately ignored warnings from Egypt and the US, and was prepared to accept the massacre in order to justify his revenge afterwards, is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.  On the other hand, Netanyahu is a seriously bad man, the most cynical and corrupt of politicians (along with Trump, Putin and a long list of others), and it is a matter of fact, not a conspiracy theory, that he did withdraw many of Israel’s security personnel from the Gaza border in the months before the invasion, because he has no sympathy with the left-leaning kibbutzniks who live near Gaza and who want to be at peace with the Palestinians; he would much rather protect the Zionist zealots on the West Bank who are stealing the Palestinians’ land. Netanyahu is on record as saying that, in order to prevent a Palestinian state ever coming to pass, Israel must support Hamas (divide and rule).  And it’s also a matter of fact that the women in Israel’s predominantly female border surveillance force, the tatzpitaniyot (‘look-outs’ in Hebrew), told their superiors in the weeks before the massacre that there was unusual activity inside Gaza, such as Palestinian guerrillas training with explosives, or rehearsing attacks on a replica tank and a mock observation post.  Their warnings were ignored, and many of them were slaughtered on 7 October.  So, although what Ali said was anti-Semitic, the idea that Netanyahu wouldn’t do the most cynical and corrupt things in order to protect his position isn’t.  It’s one of the tragedies of history that it’s very difficult robustly to criticise an Israeli government’s policy without being accused of anti-Semitism.

Will Labour’s self-inflicted wounds so damage its prospects as to give the Tories a chance of electoral survival? I don’t think so, but just at the moment I despair of my party.

Meanwhile, in America the dreadful, unhinged Trump has said that so far as he’s concerned Putin is welcome to invade any NATO country which doesn’t spend 2% of its GDP on defence (as, admittedly, NATO members are supposed to do). A former US president invites a Russian dictator to invade a NATO ally. And remains the person most likely once again to be the Republican presidential candidate. Extraordinary.

Here we are back in Brittany, as previously planned. We went to the hospital in Lorient on Friday for Helen’s meeting with the anaesthetist. Everyone there was charming and efficient. I’ll get a phone call on Monday afternoon telling us at what time we need to be there for the procedure on Tuesday. Helen will have a light general anaesthetic. The fibroscopie will only last between three and five minutes. So we hope she’ll be well enough, once she wakes up, for us to go home straight away. If there are complications, which we don’t expect, she can stay in overnight.

Since I last wrote, The Vygotsky Anthology has gone to press. It will be published on 1 May. The combined launch of Myra’s two books, this one and Myra’s book of poems, will now be on 6 June, not 20 June, at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution, where we launched Myra’s first book on Vygotsky.

During Myra’s last years and month, she often spoke to me about yet another book she was working on (this with three other people): a selection of the writings of James Britton. When she died, I thought, as her literary executor and as someone who had known and admired Britton, that I should take over her work on the book. She had frequently complained that the project was taking far too long. So, with the agreement of the other editors, Tony Burgess, Jenifer Smith and John Yandell, I’ve joined the editorial group. I read everything that the group had compiled, and volunteered to do a job on the text, bringing the word count down close to the 80,000 limit which Routledge (once again the publisher) requires, and somewhat reorganising the structure. Last week I sent my effort to the others, electronically and on paper, and I’m waiting to hear what they think. Also last week we signed the contract with Routledge, undertaking to deliver the final script by a date in August. It should be ready much earlier than that. Because I’ve had much recent experience of dealing with Routledge, I expect I’ll see this book through the production process as well.

Arturo Tosi has finished correcting my twenty Marcovaldo stories, and I’ve sent them to Mark to go on my website. I don’t have any expectation of conventional publication, since there is a translation still in print in Vintage Classics, first published, I think, in 1983. Immodestly, I reckon mine is a bit better.

Last weekend we had our annual play reading at Peter and Monica’s. It was The Comedy of Errors this time. Good fun, as ever. To say that one admires a Shakespeare play is to state the obvious, but the quality of the plotting, in what is generally regarded as one of the Bard’s lesser works (certainly one of the less frequently performed), is amazing. And the situational comedy arising from the mistaken identities is wonderful.

The trees are still lying on the ground here. I understand why: it has rained constantly here for months, and the earth is so soft that heavy machinery would cut deep ruts in it. But I hope François turns up as soon as we have a spell of dry weather.

When we arrived on Thursday afternoon, we found that a mouse or mice had been in the house before us. Much cleaning; Helen was very upset. Yesterday Jean lent me four mousetraps, which I put down. We went to Mary and Jacques for dinner last evening, with Jean and Annick and Jérôme and Aurélie and their children. A jolly evening and delicious food. When we got home just before midnight, there was one mouse dead in a trap. I put it and the trap outside. At about three o’clock in the morning I went down to the loo for a pee. There was a second mouse, dead, a few centimetres from the trap. On that occasion it hadn’t even managed to eat the cheese before the device sprang. The force must so have injured the creature that, although it managed to extricate itself from the trap, it died soon afterwards. I’m just glad that it was I who discovered this second cadaver. If it had been Helen, the scream would have woken me up. This morning I took the two mice to Jean. He will give them to his son Marc, who will feed them to his snakes.

On Wednesday night, on our way down here, we stayed for the first time at L’Auberge de l’Abbaye at Hambye, since our usual overnight stop near Avranches was closed for the week. Delightful. It’s by a river called La Sienne (not to be confused with La Seine). The ruined abbey in the hotel’s name is 300 metres away and was closed until April. But the grounds, from what we could see by squinting through the gate, are beautifully maintained, with the remains of the abbey church open to the sky. Then we walked up a path into woodland above the abbey on this, the first afternoon of spring. Wild flowers in profusion; loud birdsong; gentle but insistent sunshine: it felt Arcadian. Helen said, ‘There ought to be a poem in this.’ I agreed, while remaining suspicious of ‘too perfect’ conditions for poetry production. On the other hand, I hadn’t written a poem for months, a sin of omission for which my conscience was troubling me. So I sat down yesterday and had a go. Here it is. The ‘radio announcer’ was the man who presents the breakfast show on BBC Radio 3.

The wider world is bad, bad, bad. The vile Trump will be the Republican candidate in the US presidential election in November, unless, which is getting less and less likely, a court somewhere manages to send him to jail first. (Even then, I read, he could still stand from behind bars.) Israel/Gaza is no further forward; the Americans finally got round to proposing the kind of UN resolution they should have proposed months ago — immediate ceasefire once the hostages are released — only to see it vetoed by Russia and China. The UN Security Council is now useless as an arbiter of international disputes. Palestinians in Gaza face starvation while hundreds of trucks are held up at crossing points by Israeli checks whose deliberate purpose is to obstruct and delay. One example, according to David Miliband on the radio on Wednesday: medical scissors, vital for hospital operations, are refused entry because they might have ‘a dual use’, meaning that they might fall into the hands of Hamas fighters. What good they would be to such fighters is not explained.

Yesterday there was a terrible atrocity in a suburb of Moscow. Gunmen opened fire at a rock concert, killing many people. The building later collapsed. The death toll at the moment is about 130, with more than a hundred injured. Islamic State has claimed responsibility, though with what motive is not clear. Demanding Chechnyan independence? Protesting against Russia’s support for Assad in Syria (IS being zealously Sunni; Assad and his chronies being Alawite Shia)? The US believes that IS is the likely culprit, and say that they privately warned Russia earlier this month that something like this was about to happen. Russia ignored the warning. Contemptibly, Putin, fresh from his recent ‘triumph’ in a rigged election, has suggested that the killers were Ukrainian, and that some of those arrested since the atrocity were ‘trying to make their way back to Ukraine’, as if any assassins in their right mind would attempt to cross territory stiff with the Russian army and Russian security services. It’s clear that he will use this lie to justify further and yet more brutal attacks on Ukraine.

There has been the appalling suggestion that Russia itself committed the atrocity, in order to give it an excuse to extend its war in Ukraine and to raise further the paranoia in the general population, deluded by the state’s control of the media, about the West’s intentions. I’m almost sure that this is a conspiracy theory, but my scintilla of doubt comes from an excellent and chilling book I read a couple of years ago, which Myra gave me: Putin’s People. It’s written by the former Moscow correspondent of the Financial Times, and documents in detail the whole story of Putin’s rise. There, the author allows some credibility to the possibility that Putin might have ordered previous massacres of his own people for reasons similar to those I’ve just mentioned. From my memory of the book, she doesn’t say for certain that this was the case, but she does assemble some strongly suggestive circumstantial evidence. I can’t believe that Friday’s murders are anything other than the work of IS; but Putin and his regime are so evil, lying as easily as they breathe, that anything is possible.

The EU has two rogue members at the moment: Hungary and Slovakia. Both are supporters of Putin. Orban in Hungary even congratulated Putin on his ‘victory’. Both countries currently widely ignore the principles of governance which all democracies in the EU are legally obliged to observe. I would sanction both severely, as the EU was beginning to do with Poland until that country came to its senses and elected a decent government; or (but I imagine that the following is impossible because of the need for unanimity in major decisions) suspend their membership until the democratic forces in those countries overcome the authoritarian, populist figures who have so misled large numbers of their citizens in Trump-like style. It’s a dreadful irony that after enthusiastically admitting countries of the former Soviet bloc, the EU finds itself dealing with an anti-democratic authoritarianism of the political right no more palatable than that of the political left.

It’s Good Friday, although in France this is a normal working day. I’ve often wondered about the inconsistencies here in recognition of religious festivals. France is, on the one hand, proudly secular, laïque. While respecting all religions as matters of private conscience, it prohibits displays of religious affiliation in the public sphere except, I imagine, in the écoles privées, the Catholic schools. Earlier this week the director of a school resigned because he had received death threats from Islamists after he had asked three Muslim girls to remove their headscarves. Two did; one refused. He has the full support of the government; he has met personally with the Prime Minister. Everyone remembers the beheading of the teacher of history and geography for offending Islamist sensibilities, and I think another teacher was killed last year in similar circumstances. Yet this proudly secular country, which works normally on vendredi saint, gives itself a holiday on Whit Monday (and keeps to Whit Monday; it hasn’t changed the holiday to the last Monday in May, as we have in the UK), and on 15 August, to celebrate the arrival of Christ’s mother in heaven.

Our visit to the hospital on Tuesday was highly satisfactory. We were there at seven in the morning and were shown to a private room. Nurses took Helen’s blood pressure and temperature. At eight a porter arrived and wheeled Helen away. She was back soon after nine, fully awake, despite having had a general anaesthetic before the fibroscopie. One nurse returned and offered her breakfast, for which she was grateful, not having eaten or drunk anything since early the previous evening. A while after that, the doctor who had performed the procedure came in with a written report. Nothing worrying had been spotted by the camera. Somehow the machine had taken a sample from Helen’s tract (is there a little digger on the end of the camera?), which will be analysed to see if a particular bacterium, which was named, is present and causing the inflammation in the throat. If so, antibiotics are available to kill it. If not, Helen will just have to live with the discomfort, and continue to manage it as best she can with medication. At least, in that case, we will know that we have explored every avenue of possibility, on both sides of the Channel.

It pains me to say it, and I may well have written this before, but there is no doubt that the French health service now works better than the British. Perhaps it always did. We would not have had a private room, free of charge, in London. We would not have had two nurses waiting especially for us at seven in the morning. I’m not sure that Helen would have had five people attending her in the operating room. Perhaps she would. I doubt whether she would have received a follow-up phone call the following day to check that she was feeling OK. It’s true that, when I write ‘free of charge’, I’m omitting to mention that we have bought a mutuelle, a top-up facility, which costs a bit more than a thousand euros a year for the two of us. Perhaps, without a mutuelle, we would have had to pay something. I haven’t got to the bottom of how the system works here. I must talk to Sophie about it. However the system works, we both feel that France, not England, is now the better place to be treated for illnesses of any kind.

Linguistically, I’m a descriptor, not a prescriptor. As the great linguist Henry Sweet put it in 1891, ‘Whatever is in general use in a language is for that very reason grammatically correct.’ And I remember Harold Rosen’s remark to me that language is a psychological, not a logical, system. I don’t chafe about split infinitives (which people used to happily split, or happily to split, before Dr Johnson told them not to), the use of ‘disinterested’ to mean ‘uninterested’ (of which there are plenty of examples from writings in earlier centuries), or the use of ‘beg the question’ to mean ‘provoke the question’ when the phrase, in logic, properly means ‘to assume that the thing to be proved is already true in one of the premises, or in part of the proof’ (Chambers Dictionary). Nonetheless, I get hot under the collar at some linguistic tendencies I regard as lazily fashionable: my current bêtes noires are ‘to take a deep dive’ (investigate something closely), ‘more granular’ (more detailed), ‘we’ll take this offline’ (we’ll discuss this on another occasion), the habit of beginning every answer to an interviewer’s question on the radio with ‘So’, and the ubiquitous practice — which has been with us for many years now — of ending each contribution to a conversation with a rising intonation of the voice. My unpleasant experience, several times recently, of being on the receiving end of this last tendency provoked a poem the other day.

After the two ‘Arcadian’ days we had on our way down here in March, the weather has been dreadful until last Thursday: constant rain, high winds, and cold. Mud everywhere. Then, suddenly, it changed. Now the birds are singing at the tops of their voices; a woodpecker somewhere in the wood is hammering away as if his or her life depended on it (it does); the roads, paths and lawns are drying quickly in sunshine which, by the afternoon, could almost be described as hot.

David James was here from last Sunday until Friday. We’ve made great progress on his grand projet in Pont-Scorff. It looks as if all the preliminaries necessary before demolition and reconstruction of the inside of his house will be completed by early autumn; actual work can start at the end of this year or the beginning of next; the work will take about ten months; so David should have a habitable (and very beautiful) house by Christmas of 2025 — having spent something in advance of half a million euros, that is. But it’s what he wanted to do.

I’ve been getting on with the Britton book. It’s to be called James Britton on Education: an Introductory Reader.

I’ve translated another chapter of Arturo Tosi’s novel about the Grand Tour. So now he has the preface and the first five chapters (he had those in January) and a chapter about the travellers’ adventures in Naples. I’m still waiting to hear what he thinks of them, and I won’t do any more until he does. But my astonishment at the power and precision of the translation tool I’ve been using persists. It must surely be having a big influence on the translation industry. I wonder whether it will put many human translators out of business, rather as the arrival of digital technology ruined many of the manufacturers of analogue clocks and watches in Switzerland.

A few days ago, Israel attacked the Iranian consulate in Damascus, killing several people. Last night Iran responded by firing about 300 missiles and drones at Israel, almost all of which were intercepted and destroyed. So now there is a real threat of a full-scale war in the Middle East. There will be an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council (a body which I have recently described as useless) this afternoon (Sunday). I don’t imagine that much progress towards reducing the danger will be made there. The usual parties will make the usual speeches. The only possible ray of light I can see is that this attack might, just might, persuade the Republicans in the House of Representatives to remove their objection to Biden’s bill providing huge amounts of aid to, yes, Israel, but, more importantly, even larger amounts to Ukraine, in the absence of which it is currently losing the war with Russia. Unless, contemptibly, those Republicans want a separate bill to help Israel, while still starving Ukraine of the arms it desperately needs.

Yesterday afternoon, finally, the House of Representatives voted to send a huge amount of money — $61 billion — to Ukraine. The bill will now pass the Senate this coming week, and Biden will be able to sign it by next weekend. Two things seem to have occurred to bring about this shift on the part of some Republicans. First, their leader, Mike Johnson, has changed his mind about Ukraine. He was installed as Speaker by some of the most crazed, far-right Republican congressmen and congresswomen, with Trump’s approval, because they thought he was one of them. Predictably, they now hate him and want to unseat him. I think he may be safe, nonetheless, because the whole House has to vote to replace a Speaker, so the Democrats, if they have any sense, will vote to keep him, and enough Republicans will support him to ensure that the lunatics will lose.

Johnson achieved this success by dividing Biden’s bill into four separate parts, so members could vote with their consciences on each.

Secondly (and this is my speculation), Iran’s attack on Israel last weekend did Ukraine a favour. Some Republicans seem to have worked out that if Iran, which supplies weapons to Russia to kill Ukrainians, can legitimately and openly be resisted by Western allies of Israel (the USA, the UK and France), despite Israel being a non-NATO country, what are we doing not openly resisting Russian aggression in Ukraine in support of another (as yet) non-NATO country? The answer, of course, is that we fear Russian nuclear weapons in a way that we don’t yet fear Iranian nuclear weapons; but if we can’t openly fly American, British and French planes over eastern Ukraine and the Crimea, at least we can give Ukraine the help it needs in other ways.

Whatever the reasons behind the change of heart, yesterday’s vote is a huge relief. Michael Clark, who knows more about the situation in Ukraine than almost anyone else in the UK, spoke on the radio this morning. He compared the present situation to that in the Second World War until 1941. Up to that point, Hitler was winning. Thereafter, slowly but surely, the tide turned, and during 1942 Hitler began to lose. I think the comparison is absolutely apt. Putin is the Hitler de nos jours. He must be driven out of the whole of Ukraine, and be seen to lose. If that happened, he would be finished, alive or dead. Like all tyrants, his personal fate is now so interlocked with his political and military actions that he is obliged to continue killing Ukrainians and sacrificing the lives of his own people. The latest estimate is that 350,000 Russians have died in the war so far.

It looks for the moment as if the threat of a full-scale war between Israel and Iran has receded. Israel hit various targets in Iran in response to Iran’s attack, but so far Iran has not responded. The situation remains tense, however. There are figures on both sides who would actually welcome a conflict, crazy as that sounds. If Iran and Israel began bombing each other’s cities, America would be forced to come to the aid of Israel, and Putin no doubt would do the same for Iran. There would be widespread death and destruction on both sides. I imagine the West would win that encounter, but it would be as close to a third world war as we have come since the Cuba missile crisis.

Green is everywhere here. The young oak, beech and horse-chestnut leaves glow with sap. We’ve now had ten days of dry weather, with plenty of sunshine, although the north-east wind keeps the air cold.

More than a month since I last wrote. A lot has happened.

There will be a general election in the UK on 4 July. Everyone predicts that Labour will win. Some predictions give Labour a very large overall majority, perhaps even bigger than it won in 1997.

Goodness knows why Sunak suddenly made this decision, from the Tories’ point of view. Perhaps he just couldn’t bear it any more. Perhaps he knows that economic circumstances will get even worse in the autumn. There’s a piece of gossip, probably baseless, going round which says that he wants to depart for California as soon as possible, and will resign his seat when he’s no longer the Prime Minister, as Cameron did in 2016.  Anyway, we can hope for a period of at least competent government if Labour wins.  I don’t have anything like the excited expectation I had in 1997, but Keir’s great achievement, after the catastrophe of 2019, is to have made his party electable again.  People complain about his lack of charisma.  Boris Johnson was supposed to have had charisma, and look what happened.  Attlee, was thought not to have charisma (‘a sheep in sheep’s clothing’) but look what Labour achieved from 1945.

I’ve written before about Labour’s recent mistakes, of which the humiliating retreat from its previous bold promises on the environment is perhaps the most grievous. There have been others. Last week the party agreed to restore the whip to Diane Abbott, the veteran left-wing MP and critic of Starmer’s shift to the centre ground of politics. She had written a letter to The Observer — I think nearly a year ago — which claimed that Jewish, Irish and Traveller people didn’t experience racism in the way that black people did. She obviously did this in support of her friend Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to accept the verdict of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission that anti-Semitism had been rife in the party under his leadership. Labour withdrew the whip from her. She later apologised and retracted her claims. It has taken Labour more than a year to make up its mind what to do about her. Although, finally, Starmer has said that there is nothing preventing Abbott now from standing in her constituency of Hackney North and Stoke Newington on 4 July, the decision will not become official until Tuesday 4 June, when the National Executive Committee meets to approve remaining nominations for candidates. It’s impossible to understand, from the outside, why the party has taken so long to make its decision.

Labour has promised not to raise taxes ‘on working people’. They have however proposed three new taxes: on private-school fees, on non-domiciled residents in the UK, and on oil and gas companies. These won’t raise the kind of money that’s needed to fix the country’s broken infrastructure. I hope Labour will introduce two more new taxes when they take power. First, as I’ve written before, there is no moral argument whatever for not taxing capital gains at the same rate as income. It’s a disgrace that, to take an extreme example, the inhabitant of Buckingham Palace pays the same amount of council tax as the inhabitant of a semi-detached house in Blackpool.  Secondly, the houses and flats which yield council tax need to be revalued. These two measures in themselves — capital gains tax at the same rate as income tax, and revaluing houses and flats — would, in themselves, raise a very significant amount of money, which would pay for some of the things of which the country is in such need.  Labour says they’re going for growth: fine.  But growth, and the tax benefits of growth, take a while to come through.  Labour needs money urgently, and at the moment I can’t quite see where they’re going to get it from if they stick to the hair-shirt policies which Rachel Reeves is proposing.

Ukraine: my heart bleeds at what they’re suffering, and I can’t bear the West’s failure to see that Ukraine is a faltering bulwark against barbarity.  The Republicans in Congress have a huge amount of blood on their hands for holding up Biden’s bill for six months.  But Biden himself is too cautious.  Why should Russia be allowed to fire missiles at civilian targets in Ukraine from within Russia, and Ukraine not be allowed to respond?  I’m glad that, last week, Biden has changed his policy, and some missiles will be allowed to attack military targets in Russia.  If the unthinkable happens and the convicted criminal Trump is returned to the White House, Europe will have to stop being the US’s obedient little brother and take much more responsibility for defending civilisation on its own continent.

‘Convicted criminal’: yes, last week Trump was unanimously found guilty on all 34 counts of falsifying records in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election in order to hide his previous sexual relationship with a porn star. Naturally, he has condemned the whole process, baselessly, as a sham, a kangaroo court. (Why are kangaroos not thought to have a sense of natural justice?) The terrifying thing is that the conviction doesn’t seem, so far, to have damaged his popularity with those who continue to believe his deranged lies. One can only hope that moderate Republicans — there must be some of them — will be so appalled at the prospect of a criminal becoming the next president of the USA that they will at least stay at home in November, if not switch to Biden. The failings of the system for electing American presidents, about which I’m sure I’ve written before, remain stark. How can it be that the result will depend on the choices of perhaps a few tens of thousands of voters in eight or nine swing states? Crazy.

Israel/Gaza remains a grotesque, murderous tragedy. The number of Palestinians killed is estimated at more than 36,000. Many kidnapped Israelis remain hostages; no doubt some of those are dead. Gaza is, mostly, a pile of rubble. Terrified refugees in their own country live in makeshift tents. Biden last week proposed a peace plan which he said emanated from Israel, involving the release of all hostages in exchange for the release of many Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, a permanent end to hostilities, large-scale food deliveries and the start of reconstruction in Gaza. But the Israeli government immediately declared its, at best, lukewarm support for the plan which was supposed to be its own. It still insists that only the complete extermination of Hamas will suffice. The problem there is that, yes, you may be able to kill all the current leaders of Hamas, at the expense of killing many innocents who happen to be near them when the missiles drop, but you can’t kill an ideology. To remain in power, Netanyahu is dependent on the support of far-right Zionist nationalists. The only faint hope at the moment is that the main opposition party in the Knesset might agree to join a coalition with Netanyahu as long as the latter promised to accept the peace plan, in which case he could dispense with the zealots on his right.

Tomorrow I go to London for a week. The launch of The Vygotsky Anthology and of Myra’s book of poems is on Thursday. We expect about 80 people there.

I’ve just finished reading Metaphysical Animals, a book which Myra recommended, about the four remarkable women philosophers who met at Oxford during the war and had such a good influence on philosophy thereafter.  Insofar as I understand any philosophy, I’m in favour of the kind which asks big questions like ‘What are we doing here?’, ‘What is the just society?’, and struggles with complex ethical questions, as Mary Warnock (the only famous philosopher whom I’ve ever met, and that only once) did so admirably right through to the end of her life.  I’m not in favour of clever men at Oxford and Cambridge trying to pin down the exact, unambiguous meaning of sentences, and posing conundrums (conundra?) like ‘If a Cretan says, “All Cretans are liars,” should we believe him?’ Crossword puzzles; acrostics; brain teasers: don’t waste my time.  But a lot of very clever people in philosophy did waste their own and a lot of other people’s time throughout much of the last century doing just that.  I’m not sure whether Wittgenstein was one of them or not. So far, I can only understand two things that he said: ‘If a thing can be said, it can be said clearly,’ and ‘Wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen: Concerning that of which we cannot speak, we must be silent.’  I agree with both those statements.  I have a particular affection for Wittgenstein in that he and I shared a doctor, although I only came under Doctor Bevan’s medical supervision at Cambridge 18 years after he and his wife cared for Wittgenstein in his last illness.

I’m sampling Robert Graves’s formidable, magisterial The Greek Myths.  How anyone gets to be as comprehensively learned as that (and be a good poet at the same time) I don’t know.  Anyhow, I’ve started on a project inspired by the book: I’m writing 26 poems, A to Z, each on a character of Greek myth whose story is told in the book. ‘A for Atalanta’, ‘B for Bellerephon’…  I’m up to ‘I for Icarus’.  So still a way to go.  I shall cheat slightly and co-opt my Leda poem, ‘Leda Ponders Yeats’s Sonnet’, for L.

I have had a painful and stiff left knee recently, which turns out to be caused by ‘moderate arthritis’. So I shall live with it.  The discomfort comes and goes; just at the moment it has almost gone; I don’t think of it, it doesn’t interrupt sleep.  I hope that’s the way it’ll stay. People say arthritis is worse when the weather is wet.  From that point of view, we’ve just turned the corner and — I think — can expect some fine weather at least for a while. This Sunday afternoon the temperature hovers between warm and hot, and there’s a clear blue sky. Sumer is icumen in.

Arturo has thanked me for my work so far on the translation of his Grand Tour novel, paid me, but said that he doesn't want me to do any more. He’s not sure that I’ve quite caught the nuances of his deliberately antique and sometimes dialectal Italian; he’s not quite sure that anyone could do it. And he hasn’t found a publisher for the Italian original yet. So we’ll leave it. I’m a bit relieved.

Tomorrow the UK votes, and I’m sure that Keir Starmer will be Prime Minister on Friday. The only question is the size of Labour’s majority. Some are predicting that it will be bigger than Tony Blair’s majority in 1997. There are even a few wild imaginations that the Tories will be so reduced that the Liberal Democrats will become the official opposition. I’d like to believe that, but I doubt it. I promise not to retrospectively change this admission of doubt if I turn out to have an insufficiently ambitious imagination.

It’s difficult to overestimate the scale of Keir’s achievement since I first met him in a coffee bar in Camden Town when he was bidding to become the MP for Holborn and Saint Pancras. To have taken the party, once he became leader in April 2020, from the 2019 result, the worst for Labour since 1935, to a handsome governing majority in 2024, is quite remarkable. Has there been anything like it in the political history of the UK since, say, the Labour Party was founded? I can’t think of an example.

Meanwhile, on this side of the channel, the mood is contrary. There were elections for the EU parliament on 9 June. The Rassemblement National did very well in France: better than ever before. Macron panicked. That same evening he announced that he was dissolving the French parliament and that there would be elections on 30 June and 7 July. He was gambling that the shock of 9 June would awaken people to the threat posed by an ascendant racist, neo-fascist party, which is what the Rassemblement National is, despite its success in rebranding itself as a more consensual, ‘normal’ political party of the right. Macron’s gamble has failed, disastrously. Although it’s true that the Assemblée Nationale has been more than somewhat dysfunctional since the president failed to gain an overall majority in 2022, some business did get done, often with the help of the measure known as 49.3, which enables a president and the government to overrule parliament if the latter won’t allow the government’s business to pass. And Macron’s centrist grouping had about 250 seats out of the 577 in the Assemblée.

As soon as the elections were called, the parties of the left got together (as they did in 2022), and have shown, for the time being, a remarkable degree of cohesion. This won’t last.

Last Sunday saw the first round of the elections. The Rassemblement National did terrifyingly well. It gained about a third of the votes, more than the left group and much more than the centrists. (The Gaullist party, Les Républicains, is in a sorry state, since a few of its nastier members have joined forces with the Rassemblement National. What’s left of De Gaulle’s party will be a rump.) As soon as Sunday’s results were announced, the left group and the centrists got together and have agreed that in more than 200 of the constituencies where three candidates qualified for the second round, the candidate who came third — left or centrist — would stand down to give the remaining non-RN candidate a good chance of beating the RN. This will work in many cases. But whether a coalition going from ‘reasonable’ Républicains, through the centrists, to most of the left grouping, led perhaps by a technocratic prime minister (such things are possible in France), is feasible is deeply doubtful. The left’s problem is that La France Insoumise, though the largest party in the group, is mistrusted or even hated by other parties in the group, and loathed by parties going rightwards from there. Meanwhile, it’s likely that the president’s group will be reduced to about 100. It’s a mess. I think that the most likely outcome after this coming Sunday is another parliament with no overall majority and a degree of chaos for a year. (The president can’t dissolve parliament again during that time.) I shudder at the possibility that the RN might get an overall majority.

Across the Atlantic, there is similar gloom amongst those who are not of the rabid populist right. Joe Biden, who has some remarkable achievements to his credit in his first term — notably the Inflation Reduction Act, a misnomer for the most far-seeing public investment in green technology the world has so far seen; and his support for Ukraine, backed by many billions of dollars (still insufficient and too late in coming, in my opinion) — is a frail old man. He gave the most embarrassing, confused, incoherent performance in a televised debate with Trump last Thursday. Some Democrats are now openly calling for him to stand aside as their presidential candidate. That would require a top-speed process to choose an alternative candidate to take on Trump. Kamala Harris, the present Vice-President, with a new running mate? One or other of the best respected state governors, in Michigan or California? Whatever happens — stick with Biden or not — there will have to be a decision within a few days.

The Britton book is almost ready. I shall send it to the publisher next week.

Well, we voted, and the result was as wonderful as it was in 1997. Labour has 412 MPs, a gain of 211, and a majority only three short of that which Tony Blair achieved 27 years ago. Keir’s achievement is even more remarkable than was Blair’s, given the distance the party has had to travel in the four-and-a-half years since 2019. I sat up all night listening to the BBC. The exit poll, predicting a result not much different from that which was actually achieved, meant that the night was one of joy, not of nervousness. No, we didn’t manage to humiliate the Conservatives to the point where the Liberal Democrats would become the official opposition, but the Tories had the worst result since their party was founded (I think that was after the 1832 election, which began the long slow march towards universal adult suffrage). They lost 251 seats, and now have only 121 MPs. Several of the most contemptible Tories have been ejected: I took particular pleasure in the defeats of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Liz Truss. The latter, who apparently and absurdly has and will have for the rest of her life close security protection as a former Prime Minister (of 49 days), sat in her car with her security people outside the sports hall in Kings Lynn where the count was held, while all the other candidates were already lined up for the announcement. She was slow-handclapped when she appeared. After the announcement, she didn’t even stay to make a concession speech following that of the Labour winner (a narrow winner, by 630 votes). Her vote dropped by 43.4%.

Amid the joy, two points of concern. Truss’s defeat, and that of many other Conservatives, was helped, perhaps enabled, by the rise of Reform UK. In her constituency, the Reform candidate got nearly 10,000 votes: 22.5% of the total, to Truss’s 25.3% and Labour’s 26.7%. Fortunately for sanity and enlightenment, Reform ‘only’ won five seats because of our voting system, but they came second or a close third in many constituencies, and there’s no doubt that Labour must show in the course of the next few years that they have a grip on immigration, both legal and ‘illegal’ (although the latter term is only valid within the meaning of the last government’s Illegal Migration Act). The facts of the matter are secondary to the perceptions of the matter by those who voted in such numbers for Reform. It didn’t trouble them, or not much, that numerous of Reform’s candidates were shown to be racists, homophobes or misogynists, or all three. It didn’t matter that the country’s economy would collapse without the labours of immigrants. It didn’t matter that the ‘illegal’ immigrants arriving in small boats are a tiny proportion of total immigrant numbers, and that many other countries — including much poorer countries — carry far heavier burdens. The perception in the minds of many Reform voters, not all of whom are themselves racists, homophobes or misogynists, is that the country is being swamped by black and brown people asking for a free lunch. Labour must face that reality and address it. If we don’t, there will be more than five Reform MPs in 2029.

The second point of concern is that Labour lost four normally safe seats to independent candidates in constituencies with large Muslim populations appalled by Israel’s actions in Gaza, and angry at Labour’s — to their minds — failure to condemn those actions. I’ve already written that Keir did make a mistake — I’m sure unintentional — in telling a radio interviewer that Israel had the right to withhold food and water from Gaza, and then a bigger mistake in not immediately correcting the initial ‘misspeak’. In this case, the errors are facts, not fantasies in the perception of those who abandoned Labour. The independents (one of whom has been shown to have deplorable misogynistic views of the sort we have seen in the actions and beliefs of, for example, the Taliban, the Iranian theocracy and Islamic State) had only one policy: free Gaza. Yes, Labour did eventually call for a ceasefire in Gaza along with the release of all the Israeli hostages; it should have done that at the start. I can understand Keir’s reluctance to engage in virtue-signalling which has no effect on Israel’s agony and the Palestinians’ greater agony. While Hamas and Hezbollah still entertain the murderous fantasy that the state of Israel can be destroyed; while the Israeli government continues casually to murder thousands of innocent Palestinians in Gaza, to oppress the Arab population of the West Bank and to turn a blind eye to the murderous actions of some of its settlers there; while the Israeli government is headed by a deeply corrupt, self-serving man only maintained in post by the support of religious extremists: while these are the facts, the solution is far off. If Labour can play a part in finding a solution, or part of a solution — a goal which has eluded the efforts of some of the best brains and wisest diplomats for all of my lifetime — it will have done a great thing, while regaining the trust of those sections of the Muslim population which have abandoned it.

And so to France. Relief was the primary emotion at eight o’clock last Sunday night. The left group (La France Insoumise, socialists, greens, communists) won the largest number of seats (182). Macron’s centrists lost of third of their number, but still got more (168) than the Rassemblement National (143). So the hasty agreement between leftists, centrists and — in a very few cases — moderate conservatives to erect un barrage against the far right has worked.  But the problem hasn’t gone away.  The Rassemblement National is of course saying that they’ve been cheated of their victory. It is true that they polled more than 8,700,000 votes. The left group polled just over 7,000,000 votes, and the centrists just over 6,300,000. Les Républicains, originally De Gaulle’s party, riven by the decision of their president to align himself with the Rassemblement National, were reduced to 1,474,722 votes and 45 seats.  The truth is that a large swathe of French political opinion, whatever their other differences, have put those aside to stop a neo-fascist party taking over the government of the country.  At present, very complicated negotiations are under way to try to find a large enough coalition to govern.  I think it may be impossible. It’s true that if La France Insoumise (74 seats) under its deeply unpleasant, borderline anti-Semitic leader Mélenchon were excluded, with the RN, from the coalition, and an unlikely spread from moderate conservatives through the centrists to the rest of the left (communists, socialists, greens) could be put together, it would have a modest overall majority (321 seats, when 289 is an overall majority of one). But the disagreements between these prospective ‘partners’ are enormous. Some sort of technocratic government, perhaps?  France is different from the UK in that in the present circumstances Macron can appoint whom he likes as prime minister.  That person doesn’t even have to be an MP.  Whatever happens, Macron’s gamble on the evening of 9 June has blown up in his face.  The RN has 63 more MPs than they did before, the left is stronger although divided within itself, and the centrists weaker.

On Tuesday I sent the Britton book to the publisher. Nothing to do now, I hope, until I see some proofs.

We left Kerfontaine on 12 July, arriving in London the following day. I did various bits of business to do with Myra’s estate over the next eleven days, before flying to Johannesburg on the evening of 24 July. The annual conference of the Canon Collins Trust, held over the weekend of 26-28 July, was a great success. About 100 scholars were there, including 21 funded by our Ros Moger Terry Furlong Scholarships Fund. I think I managed to speak to all 21 of those people, at greater or lesser length, during the weekend. Their gratitude was intense and very touching.

Politically, however, there was something of a difference between scholars who were just grateful to have a scholarship (all of our people were in that category, I think), and more explicitly leftish people who see the struggle against ‘imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy’, to use four words which tripped easily off the tongues of some of those attending, as a continuation of the anti-apartheid struggle.  This difference came to a head on the Saturday afternoon, when a film presenting the achievements of the six short-listed candidates for the Change Maker Awards was shown, and the conference was asked to vote, later that day or on the Sunday, for the best three, each to receive 20,000 rand.  Raised voices in the room complained about the ‘neo-liberalism’ of expecting people to choose, and indeed I thought that all six presentations were equally good, in a diversity of areas from giving dignity to ‘reclaimers’ — the people who collect waste material from the streets for recycling — to support for children learning to read. I had a quiet word with Catherine Sofianos, who was running the session, who then announced to the meeting that all six projects would receive 20,000 rand each, three to be paid for by RMTF.  Wild cheering broke out, and I was on the receiving end of congratulations and thanks for the rest of the weekend.  Cost to our fund: a bit less than £3000.

On the Saturday evening there was a gala dinner, at which I gave a speech. Here it is.

After saying goodbye to the scholars on the Sunday afternoon, the Canon Collins team (seven people) and I went to a different venue in Johannesburg, where the team was to hold a series of planning meetings on the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning. I only attended one of those meetings, at which I spoke again about the RMTF initiative to representatives of three organisations with which Canon Collins has links: the second-biggest teachers’ trade union, the South Africa Youth Council, and Equal Education, a not-for-profit organisation which does what its title suggests: campaigns — and lobbies the government — for better opportunities for all children and young people in South Africa’s state schools, many of which, especially in rural areas, are in a deplorable state. The rest of the time I sat in the Johannesburg winter sunshine (20 degrees, blue sky, light breeze) and read poetry.

On that Monday, a dreadful atrocity was committed in Southport, Lancashire. A man carrying a knife entered a children’s dance event there. He stabbed and killed three young girls and injured other children and adults before being arrested. Appalling; heart-breaking. The murderer is a 17-year-old British citizen born in Cardiff to parents from Rwanda. His motivation is still unclear, although according to Wikpedia he has ‘a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, and had reportedly been “unwilling to leave the house and communicate with family for a period of time”.’

Lies were immediately disseminated on social media, especially on encrypted sites, stating that the murderer was a Muslim asylum-seeker who had only recently entered the country. These falsehoods had their intended effect, provoking waves of destructive violence in towns and cities across England and in Belfast. Mosques were attacked, as were hotels housing actual asylum-seekers. Criminal thugs orchestrated the violence; ignorant individuals enthusiastically joined in. Prominent, malevolent figures on the far right licked their lips at the prospect of a full-scale breakdown of the state; some spoke gleefully of the imminence of civil war.

And they were wrong. The Labour government, in power for only a month, has dealt with the disorder with exemplary speed and firmness, helped by the excellence of the co-ordinated police response to the riots and the arrival at the scenes of conflict of crowds of anti-racist demonstrators who far outnumbered the rioters. Arrests, charges, imprisonment on remand, appearances in court, severe prison sentences, all in a matter of days: these have clearly deterred people who were thinking of rioting, and have shown that we have a government, led after all by a former Director of Public Prosecutions, that knows what to do when a national emergency presents itself. ‘Events, dear boy, events,’ said Harold Macmillan in another age. An event has occurred, and the government has been equal to it.

In the USA, thank goodness, Joe Biden has withdrawn his candidacy for the presidency, and Vice-President Kamala Harris will be the Democratic Party’s candidate, with Tim Walz, the Minnesota state governor, as her running mate. There is huge relief, and considerable excitement, amongst Democrat supporters and strategists, who now believe that they have a realistic chance of winning. Before Biden’s withdrawal, they had more or less given up hope. My hope is fervent, of course. The democratic consensus which has prevailed in the West for all of my lifetime is under greater threat now than it has ever been, and if Trump were to enter the White House for a second time that threat would become extreme.

Here we are back in France. It’s the final day of the Paris Olympic Games, which have been a hugely successful, largely joyous celebration of sporting excellence and international comradeship. Tomorrow (or perhaps later this month, for the French do love their holidays) Macron’s problem reasserts itself. The current government was asked to continue to operate for the duration of the games. What will Macron now do about nominating a Prime Minister and trying to put together a government with a working majority in the Assemblée Nationale when the numbers remain those I listed on 11 July? If he does nothing, it’s almost certain that the current government will lose a vote of confidence soon after the Assemblée resumes. On verra.

We arrived here on Friday afternoon. In the evening we drove up to Priziac. Sophie, Paul and Anna had been staying with Mary and Jacques there since the previous Saturday. Paul remains a sweetly affectionate boy; he thought to ask me whether my back had recovered from last year’s break, which is something not many seven-year-old boys would do. Anna, aged four, is charming, bright as a button, and wilful. When reluctant to come from the garden to eat her dinner, she stood on the lawn in her pink dress, hands on hips, arguing her case — a legitimate desire to continue to play, as she saw it — like what the Australians call ‘a bush lawyer’. I bribed her with the promise of ‘une surprise’ after dinner if she would come and eat it. This worked: she and Paul each received a large packet of chocolate-covered almonds once they had consumed an acceptable proportion of the food provided. Never having been a parent, I nonetheless imagine that regular bribery is the only means by which parents can hold on to some kind of adult sanity during the years of child rearing. Of course, chocolate-covered almonds don’t work when the challenge, later, is whether to allow a teenager access to the more dubious social-media sites, or to parties where vodka may well be available. In fact, as I know from my sister and numerous friends who are grandparents, child rearing is a life sentence. Grandparents these days are constantly in demand as substitute parents: a responsibility they take on, more or less willingly, just at the moment in life when they might want to put their feet up. Yesterday the family went up to Île Grande, on the north coast of Brittany, where Jacques’ sister and brother-in-law have a house. Later this month the rest of the Marseille family will descend on Priziac, so we shall see them all.

Glenda and Julian Walton will come to stay with us on Tuesday for five days. It’ll be great to see them.

To start with French politics: about two weeks ago, President Macron finally appointed a Prime Minister. He is Michel Barnier, whom those of us who are politically conscious in the UK know well. He was the EU’s representative during the Brexit negotiations, where his cool, steady, rather dry manner contrasted sharply with the ill-briefed, whistling-in-the-dark nonsense uttered by his UK counterparts. The funny thing is that whereas he is better known to British people than any other incoming French Prime Minister ever (except De Gaulle, when he was called back as PM at the very end of the Fourth Republic), most ordinary French people have never heard of him. He is a member of Les Républicains, the centre-right party which performed so disastrously in the recent elections, winning only 47 seats. It has taken him all the time since his appointment to choose his ministers and propose them to the president. If Macron approves, the composition of the government will be announced by Sunday, the day after tomorrow. Today’s newspaper says that there will be sixteen ministries with 38 ministers working in them. Almost all of the ministries will be run by politicians of the centre or centre-right, with only one allocated to a minister of the ‘divers gauche’. If this coalition of forces can command the support of all the MPs belonging to its various groupings, it will muster 238 votes in the Assemblée Nationale. That wouldn’t be enough to survive a vote of no confidence if the left and the far-right voted together, but Marine Le Pen has apparently promised Macron that she won’t bring the government down. So a centrist and centre-right government might be able to stumble on until next June — when the president has the right to dissolve parliament again — thanks to the tolerance of a neo-fascist party. The left grouping will be enraged; they won the largest number of seats in the summer election, and now have nothing or almost nothing. I imagine that they will be as obstructive as possible.

Dreadful events in the Middle East. Israel has found a fiendish way to kill or injure senior members of Hezbollah. These people have stopped using mobile phones, because their location can be traced, and have reverted to pagers and walkie-talkies, which are of an earlier technology. Somehow someone put something (you see how vague I am) into these devices (was it an electronic signalling device or an explosive?) which meant that when detonated the devices killed or injured many people. At the moment rockets are being fired back and forth between Lebanon and northern Israel. Killings meanwhile continue in Gaza and the West Bank. There is no end in sight to the conflict. Western diplomats come and go, calling hopefully but impotently for a negotiated solution. We are close to a full-scale war in the region, with Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen coordinating their attacks on Israel, and Israel responding in kind. The worst could still be avoided, but even if it were, the intractable problem and its associated historic hatreds remain. I heard a Lebanese MP on the radio yesterday saying that what her country needs is for its democratic apparatus (which does exist there, I know, at least in theory) to assert itself and challenge Hezbollah, which is an armed undemocratic militia; and then to agree peace with Israel. She claimed that the Lebanese army is powerful enough to do so. Hers was a calm, civilised voice, but hopelessly optimistic, I fear, about the actual authority of the Lebanese government and its armed forces, both of which, as other sources tell me, are broken. And Hezbollah, like Hamas in Gaza and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, provides social services such as food and medicines to the people. In Lebanon and Egypt, these organisations benefit in terms of local loyalty from the abject failure of the official state.

There are one or two optimistic signs in the Ukraine war. Though the Russians have continued to make very slow progress in the east, they’ve done so at great cost, with Ukrainian forces fighting a determined rearguard action. And very slowly — better late than never — Western military aid is telling. ‘On Wednesday, a large Ukrainian drone attack triggered an earthquake-sized blast at a major Russian arsenal,’ says The Guardian. The Russians have a huge advantage in manpower, and they’re prepared to sacrifice lives quite casually, but I think the Western kit is better. Today, the president of the EU Commission promised Ukraine a loan of 35 billion euros. If the West had coordinated its actions a long time ago, and had armed Ukraine properly in 2022, recognising that it is fighting on our behalf for the very survival of the principles which, wrongly, I had thought for much of my life had been securely established after 1945, this war would be over by now.

On 10 September Harris and Trump ‘debated’ before 67 million watching Americans. She was well prepared, incisive and ruthless; he was reduced to making a series of reality-free assertions, of which the most extraordinary and comical was that in Ohio immigrants are stealing their neighbours’ dogs and cats and eating them. Whether her decisive victory, in what will be the only televised debate between the two candidates, will make any difference to the voting intentions of some of the millions who continue to adore Trump, whatever his crimes and derangements, remains to be seen. Numerous Republicans of the more sensible sort have broken ranks and advised people to vote for Harris. As I wrote last month, at least the Democrats now have a fighting chance.

David James came for a brief stay eleven days ago. We had a good meeting to do with his grand projet in Pont-Scorff, with the architect, clerk of works and quantity surveyor. Invitations to tender for the various elements of the demolition and reconstruction of the house have now gone out. In November David will make decisions, no doubt guided by the professionals, as to whom to employ. It’s possible that some actual work will begin early in 2025.

The day David left, Deirdre came for a week. After 40 years as a teacher, including 27 as head teacher, successively, of two primary schools, she retired in July, so these first weeks of freedom have been especially sweet, as she said.

Earlier this year, I lost patience with François Bourvic, the amusing man who was supposed to be dealing with our fallen trees. He kept promising and promising, but never appeared. So I hired other people. On 7 September, two young men arrived with an enormous machine which felled the trees which had been so damaged last November that, though still standing, were dangerous. Then they dragged the tree trunks — those just felled and those which had been on the ground since the storm — up to the top of our land. Two days later my friends Francis and Alain came. They have been here for the last two weeks, cutting up and carting away the wood. It’s a huge job; I think they’ll need two or three more days to finish. The weather has been kind to them and us; this last fortnight has been the sunniest of the whole summer.

I’ve proofread the Britton book. I shall see the laid-up pages, looking as they will when the book comes out, in early October. Routledge says that it will be published in December. We’ll have a launch at the Institute of Education, where Britton was head of the English department for many years, early in the New Year.

And we’re going to have a little holiday in Tuscany next month, staying in Arturo Tosi’s barn, as we did two years ago. This time we’re flying down; when I was at Nantes airport yesterday, seeing Deirdre off, I noticed that there is a direct flight from there to Florence. So I’ve booked it today, with the help of my friends at Janaway Travel in Camden Town, and they’ll organise a rental car too.

There was an amusing piece on BBC Radio 4 the other day. Someone took a platter of whole uncooked fish, of various varieties, out into the street, and asked passers-by to identify them. Not a single English person could. All that most English people now see in supermarkets are fillets, either white or (in the case of farmed salmon) pink. But there was a passing Frenchman who immediately named several varieties, including John Dory, which he correctly called Saint Pierre, because of the legend that the dark blobs on either side of the fish are the fingerprints of Saint Peter. O tempora, o mores!

My A-Z of poems about characters in Greek myth is up to Q. Nine to go.

I’ve often remarked that the Labour Party — my party — is better at shooting itself in the foot than any other organisation I know. The last few days have again demonstrated this painful truth. The party conference is under way in Liverpool. It should be an occasion of unalloyed triumph. Instead, the party is having to deal with the embarrassment and anger of many of its own members, including me, over gifts which some of its senior leaders, including the Prime Minister, have accepted from a rich and influential donor. I met that donor once, either just before or just after the 1997 Labour victory. He took me to lunch at the Ivy Restaurant, as a result of which I wrote a paper on education policy which he promised to pass to ministers, and which may or may not have had any influence on some of their decisions. He struck me then as someone excessively sure of himself, and the remarks he casually made about the treatment of his own staff sounded more like those of a seigneur referring to his peasants than those of an enlightened leader of a modern business.

The facts are as follows. Keir Starmer accepted from this person gifts of clothing for him and his wife, and spectacles for himself. He has also accepted, from other people, hospitality at football matches so he could watch his beloved Arsenal, and tickets to a Taylor Swift concert. In the last parliament, he received gifts whose total value was greater than that of any other MP. I understand — and I think the majority of the population understands — that in his position it’s not viable for him and his son to go and sit in the stands at a football match like other members of the public. The security risk would be too great. It’s also possible, though I don’t know about this, that the same principle applied to the Taylor Swift concert. Perhaps he took his daughter. I don’t know. What nobody can understand is why a well-to-do couple (he and his wife between them earn over £200,000 a year) cannot afford to buy their own clothes and spectacles. This information, gleefully salivated over day after day in the Tory press, came to light in the context of the government’s decision no longer to pay the £300 winter fuel allowance to any but pensioners on pension credit and certain other benefits. Pensioners just above that level won’t get anything. It’s true that Helen and I absolutely don’t need the winter fuel allowance. Our friends Bronwyn and Stephen, until now both perfectly entitled to receive the allowance, have been sweltering in temperatures of up to 40 degrees in Western Australia during most recent English winters. But the combination of public belt-tightening because of the alleged £22 billion ‘black hole’ which Rachel Reeves has found in the public finances, and revelations about already comfortably-off people being made yet more comfortable by a very rich person, have been disastrous for trust in the government. The same very rich person lent Angela Rayner, the Deputy Prime Minister, his flat in New York for a holiday. Rachel Reeves accepted the loan of a flat in Cornwall for a family holiday from another rather rich person who is now Mayor of the West Midlands. A personal friend of hers gave her a few thousand pounds to buy clothes.

There are one or two things to say on the other side of the argument. These revelations have emerged because Labour has been completely open about gifts received, and has broken no rules or laws in accepting them. The Conservatives, by contrast, took gifts in cash or kind on a hugely greater scale, and often tried by devious means to conceal their acceptance of this generosity. During their period in office, most of the Tory papers did everything they could to minimise coverage of this corruption: ‘nothing to see here’. But the political naivety of Labour, knowing what it knows about the malevolence of the Tory press, is infuriating. Ministers have appeared on the airwaves to say that this kind of thing has always happened; that all MPs receive gifts; that many MPs have their offices paid for by generous donors, thus sparing the taxpayer. The Foreign Secretary pointed out that the President of the USA gets a huge expenses allowance in addition to his salary. All these protestations are true, but not sufficient to see off the unarguable truth that senior politicians are well paid for what they do and therefore should not need private perks.

Today Keir made a very good speech at the conference. It was coherent and honest, balancing tough realism about the state the country is in with the promise that a competent government, his government, would make the lives of most people in the UK better. The trivial preoccupations of many commentators meant that his unfortunate gaffe, saying that ‘sausages’ instead of ‘hostages’ should be returned from Gaza, a slip of the tongue that he immediately corrected, went viral; and I predict that it will feature on several front pages tomorrow. It was particularly unfortunate given his previous ‘misspeak’, when he said that Israel had the right to deny food and water to the people of Gaza — an error he didn’t correct for a week — which did him so much damage. He must privately be furious about sausages rather than hostages as he flies to New York for the UN General Assembly, and for the unnecessary harm to Labour’s standing which the revelations about gifts have caused. Labour is emphatically not like the Conservatives; not all politicians are the same; they aren’t all in it just to feather their nests; but the clothes, glasses and entertainment donations have given plenty of people a reason to think that they are.

I would do the following things to clear this mess up once and for all, across all parties. Taxpayers should pay for the offices of MPs. That money should directly fulfil the purposes for which it is intended; it shouldn’t be channeled through MPs’ bank accounts, as I think it is at the moment. The ‘office payment’ should include a decent allowance for research as well as for secretarial help. MPs shouldn't take on other paid jobs. If necessary, they should be paid better for their day job so that there’s no excuse for them supplementing their income from other sources. And MPs and ministers should be forbidden from receiving gifts, whether for clothes, entertainment, holidays or anything else.

I give £15 a month to the Labour Party. That’s in addition to my annual subscription. In what way, in principle, are my subscription and donation different from a rich person paying for clothes? I think there is a clear difference. My tiny contributions go toward the party’s organisation; I imagine that they get called on especially at election time. Someone giving the party thousands a year is, or should be, doing the same thing, with no ulterior motive. When leaders of an organisation, whether it be the Labour or the Conservative Party, become leaders of the government, the distinction between party and government should be unambiguous. Taxpayers pay for government; private contributors pay for party.

It’s a tremendous honour to be an MP and an even greater honour to serve in government, as well as exhaustingly hard work. These people should be well rewarded, should buy their own clothes, and if the price of power is having to watch football on television, they should do that.

De Gaulle paid rent, out of his salary, for his apartment in the Élysée Palace. Like Keir, he loved football. When he and his wife moved into the apartment, he had a television set delivered. He paid for that too.

We returned to London ten days ago. We didn’t go to Italy. My brother Andrew came to London in late September to help my sister Mary lay a new floor in the kitchen of her house in Camberwell. She’s hoping to sell the house in the spring. As I may have written before, it’s the one asset — and a valuable one at that — that she got out of the wreckage of her first marriage 37 years ago. When Mary saw Andy, it was clear that he was unwell. A few days later, after detailed tests at King’s College Hospital, he was diagnosed as having an enlarged and cancerous prostate, various secondary cancers, a defective kidney and a large aneurism of his abdominal aorta. The aneurism is of such a size and shape that it won’t be possible to operate on it with keyhole surgery, which was the procedure used in dealing with our father’s aneurism in 2007 or 2008. The surgeon will have to cut Andy open. He told him that he has a 50/50 chance of surviving the operation.

Mary bravely carried the initial load of worry and responsibility. After three weeks in hospital, Andy was discharged yesterday. The doctors and nurses have done wonders. He is now receiving hormone therapy to attack the prostate cancer. This seems also to be having a beneficial effect on most of the secondary cancers. The one metastasis which the doctors were most worried about, which is close to the upper part of his spine and was beginning to affect the vertebrae there, was zapped by radiotherapy. There is now a stent in the damaged kidney, linking it again to the bladder. For most of the last three weeks, Andy has had two urine bags hanging from him, one from the bladder and one from the kidney. The one from the kidney has been removed, together with the tube which was inserted in his body, and which was used to place the stent. Meanwhile, the laboratory in the hospital is building (they say growing — I’m not sure whether the process is physical or biological) a covering, made exactly to measure, which will be placed over the aneurism as a reinforced second skin. So if the natural tissue does burst, there is a further line of defence to prevent the blood escaping. Burst abdominal aortic aneurisms without such protection always lead to immediate death. At some point he will go back to hospital to have the operation. In the meantime, he’ll go in regularly as an outpatient.

We hear much about the desperate state of the NHS, and I’m sure that in many respects the gloomy news is true. But when there’s an emergency, as here, the people working for the NHS, employing the extraordinary technology now at their disposal, rise magnificently to the challenge.

It’s very fortunate that Mary and Jacques are in London now, preparing the house for sale. Andy will be their lodger for a while. If he doesn’t actually work on the replacement of the kitchen floor, he can at least sit on a chair and offer advice.

The sale of Myra’s house moves slowly forward. We have cash buyers, with no chain, offering a bit more than a million and a half pounds. About a month ago the pipe behind the toilet on the first floor leaked and flooded the living room below. Because the house is empty for most of the time, it was only when Sue Ellis, Myra’s friend and colleague, went in to water the pot plants that she alerted Susanna and me to the damage. Now the leaking pipe has been replaced, the ceiling and walls in the living room have been dried out and repainted, and the wood-block floor polished where it had been stained. We had to confess what had happened to the buyers, through the estate agent, because they understandably wanted to have a survey done. The admission doesn't seem to have put them off.

I’ve proofread the Britton book. There were about 40 errors, a number of which had been introduced somehow by staff at Routledge or a sub-contractor; that is, previously correct text had been made incorrect. It amazes me that a distinguished international academic publisher, whose parent company, Informa UK Ltd, made a profit in 2023 of over £500 million, employs semi-literate people. I’m going to take a last look at the proofs once, as I hope, the 40 errors have been removed.

I’m up to T (Tantalus) in the A-Z of characters in Greek myth. Six to go.

Unspeakable catastrophes continue in the Middle East, Ukraine and Sudan. In the Middle East, Israel has assassinated several of the leaders of both Hamas and Hezbollah, imagining that these actions will increase its security. The reverse is true. Meanwhile, more than 40,000 people, most of them civilians, have been killed in Gaza in the course of Israel’s response to the atrocities it suffered on 7 October last year. Israel has begun an invasion of Lebanon, with aim of destroying Hezbollah, and the death toll there is rising. The USA seems to have no influence on the Israeli government. Iran recently fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel. Israel will soon reply. There is no chance at the moment of any political solution based on an impartial understanding of the events of the last 76 years: yes, it was right that Jewish people in 1948 at last had a safe homeland after the Holocaust and after all the previous persecutions visited on them; no, it was wrong to displace millions of Palestinians from land which they had occupied for a thousand years in the course of giving Jewish people that homeland.

Ukraine is currently losing the war against Russia because the West won’t give it permission to fire long-range weapons at military targets inside Russia. If there is, in the end, a negotiated settlement giving Putin the four oblasts of the Donbass and the Crimea, we shall be no further forward in terms of the conduct of international relations than we were during the Second World War.

The two rival armies in Sudan struggle for supremacy, and slaughter huge numbers of their own citizens in the process. Those not killed in the fighting face starvation. In terms of numbers dead, injured or suffering, Sudan is a worse example of human cruelty than either the Middle East or Ukraine. It receives scant and occasional media attention.

Labour seems to be recovering from its recent self-inflicted wounds. It’s doing lots of good things: big steps forward on the environment and climate change; nationalisation of the railways; breakfast clubs for all primary schools in England; giving powers to local authorities to municipalise bus services; a complete overhaul of workers’ rights, including abolition of zero-hours contracts except where workers ask for them; re-establishing cordial relations with the EU; attracting huge funds from private investors. There is intense speculation about the new government’s first budget, to be announced on 30 October. I predict that Rachel Reeves will make sure that from now on government receipts meet the cost of the State’s day-to-day spending, while allowing herself wider scope to borrow for investment, thus encouraging yet more investment from private sources. I hope she will have the courage to raise the rates of capital gains tax to something close to those of income tax, though I fear she won’t go all the way in that direction. I’d like to see a tiny percentage tax on all share and foreign-exchange dealings. There are numerous loopholes in rules on inheritance tax and pensions, all benefiting the wealthy, which could be closed. I’ve written before that the government should embark on a re-calculation of property values. The last one was done in 1991. (Myra’s house, about to be sold for more than £1.5 million, is in a council-tax band for properties valued at between £120,001 and £160,000.) Fixing that would go a long way to easing local authorities’ desperate financial situation.

Rachel Reeves presented Labour’s budget last Wednesday. Broadly speaking, it’s excellent. She’s raising taxes by very large amounts, and increasing her scope for borrowing by changing the basis on which the national debt is calculated, so as to include the government’s assets as well as its liabilities. These dramatic measures are necessary given the dreadful state of the government’s finances, the shameful condition of many public services and much public infrastructure, and the very weak growth the economy has seen in the last fourteen years. It’s courageous in the sense that the full benefits of the investment in public services and infrastructure may not come through until after the next general election in 2029. So Keir’s phrase, ‘a decade of renewal’, meant what it said. 2029 is a long way away, and we must hope that enough positive change is evident to enough people by then for Labour to win a second term. Here are a few of the measures in the budget.

Employers’ national insurance contributions will go up to 15% from 13.8%, and the threshold at which those contributions begin to be paid will reduce from £9,100 to £5,000. This will raise about £25 billion a year by the end of the parliament.

Capital gains tax will be increased. The lower rate will be raised from 10% to 18%, and the higher rate from 20% to 24%. The 18% and 24% capital gains rates on the sale of second homes will stay as they are.

There will be no change before 2030 to the threshold for inheritance tax, allowing £325,000 to be inherited tax-free. From 2027 inherited pension pots will be subject to the tax.

Business and agricultural assets valued at over £1 million will attract inheritance tax at 20%.

The minimum wage for over-21s will increase by 6.7% to £12.21 per hour, equivalent to £1,400 a year for an eligible full-time worker. A single adult rate for the minimum wage will be phased in over time, so that eventually 18- to 20-year-olds will be paid the same as other adults.

Private schools will pay VAT on school fees.

Non-domiciled status, which has allowed very rich people to pay less tax than they should, will be abolished.

Education and the NHS will get big above-inflation increases, and there will be more money for transport, energy, defence, local government and the devolved administrations.

The HS2 railway will come to Euston station.

There will be compensation for victims of the infected blood and Post Office Horizon computer scandals.

Another scandal is being addressed. Carers in receipt of carer’s allowance — most often women also working in modestly-paid jobs — have had to pay back large sums to HMRC because their earnings have tipped, sometimes by no more than a pound, over the limit up to which they are entitled to receive the allowance. Working carers will now be able to earn £196 per week and claim carer’s allowance — an increase of £45 per week in comparison to the previous earnings threshold of £151.

This is a big budget: big in the sums involved, big in its ambition. I admire a great deal of what Rachel Reeves has done. But I have some reservations.

Employers have screamed about the rise in their national insurance contributions, saying that the effect will be to reduce the number of staff they employ and/or to lead to lower pay increases. (The larger employers never mention the possibility that slightly smaller dividends to shareholders might be a preferable way to absorb the extra cost.) Some of this outrage is confected. Reeves could reply that the government will introduce permanently lower business rates for retail, hospitality and leisure businesses from 2026-27, that until then these businesses will receive 40% relief on business rates up to a cap of £110,000, and that employment allowance will be increased from £5,000 to £10,500, reducing national insurance costs for smaller businesses, charities, care and support workers. Meanwhile, the headline rate of corporation tax has stayed the same at 25%, the lowest in the G7 countries. But it does look odd, after Labour’s pitch before the election to be on the side of business, so substantially to have increased the load on wealth creators. Yes, the money has to come from somewhere. I would have raised much more from other sources.

People paying capital gains tax are not wealth creators by virtue of having made a profit, for example on the sale of shares or second homes. If Reeves had simply raised all rates of capital gains tax to the same rates as are imposed on a person’s income, she would have raised much more than the paltry £2.5 billion expected by the end of the parliament. The purchase and sale of shares, and the purchase and sale of currencies, are not transactions which in any direct sense create wealth. A tiny tax on share and currency dealings would raise huge sums, and the usually wealthy or comfortably-off people who engage in these activities would hardly notice it, though their squealing would be deafening for a while. When private equity executives make a profit on a deal they are not, again in any direct sense, creating wealth. Extraordinarily, the profit they make on a deal is currently taxed as a capital gain, at 28%, not as income, where it would attract a rate of 45%. Labour’s manifesto said: ‘Private equity is the only industry where performance-related pay is treated as capital gains. Labour will close this loophole.’ Instead, ‘carried interest’ — the profit on a deal— will be still be taxed as a capital gain next financial year, at 32%. Yes, from April 2026 it will be taxed as income, but probably at around 34%. Private equity practitioners have been toasting a Labour chancellor in the most expensive champagne since last Wednesday. If carried interest were taxed as income at the usual rates, it would yield much larger sums than the paltry £140 million a year currently projected.

My point is that if Reeves had fully taken the opportunity offered by that rarest of occasions — the first budget of an incoming Labour government with a huge majority, certain to be in power for more than four years — she would have been able to ease the burden on genuinely wealth-creating businesses, perhaps by leaving the employer’s threshold at £9,100 or by imposing a smaller rise from 13.8%.

Farmers and foresters are furious that for the first time, they say (actually it’s not the first time — only in 1992 were they exempted from inheritance tax by Norman Lamont), they will have to pay inheritance tax at 20%, half the usual rate, on farms and forests valued at more than £1 million. For 32 years, these properties have been exempt from inheritance tax. The rest of us (except King Charles) pay 40% on estates valued at more than £325,000. One of the reasons for the introduction of the measure is that many of the recent purchasers of farms and forests have not been farmers or foresters, but wealthy individuals seeking to avoid paying inheritance tax. To that extent I can see a strong argument for the change. And the threshold for paying the tax increases by £325,000 once a farmhouse or other principal dwelling on the land is added to the calculation.

I start from the principle that everyone should pay inheritance tax. Farmers tell us that they provide food, supplying the most basic of human needs, and that they look after the countryside. Yes of course to the first assertion, and a more nuanced yes to the second, considering what some — not all — farmers have done to the countryside during my lifetime (tearing down hedges, doping the land with excessive amounts of artificial fertiliser, thus decimating wildlife). Does that mean that they — often the recipients of generous subsidies, previously from the EU and now from our own government — should pay no inheritance tax? What about water engineers? They supply us with an equally basic human need. How about nurses, who see us into the world and, often, see us out of it? There’s a long list of people without whose services life would be difficult if not impossible.

There has been much discussion of the change in parliament today, and I’ve just read a good article in The Guardian on the topic, from which I’ll quote a few paragraphs.

‘…many tax experts and campaigners argue that for all the political backlash, the vast majority of family farms will still not pay a levy that is aimed at some of the wealthiest people in Britain. They question whether the archetypal “family farm” will truly be affected. Pre-budget analysis by the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation (CenTax) suggested that only 200 estates out of 1,300 a year between 2018 and 2020 claimed more than £1m in relief [that is, agricultural property relief from inheritance tax] each year. Those 200 estates — by definition among the wealthiest in Britain — reaped 64% of all the agricultural relief.

The updated relief can in fact be even more generous for true family farms than the £1m headline. A married couple owning a farm together can split it in two, meaning it qualifies for £2 million of agricultural property relief, plus another £500,000 for each partner if a property is involved. That means a farm worth £3m might pay zero inheritance tax, said Arun Advani, associate professor of economics at the University of Warwick and a director of CenTax.

Even farms worth £5 million might in practice only pay inheritance tax of less than 1% a year, because they will be allowed to spread the cost over 10 years.

Advani said only 44% of the individuals who gained agricultural [property] relief had received any trading income from agriculture at any point in the five years prior to death. It is “not the classic working farmers” who will bear the brunt of the changes, he argued. The change could help cool the rural property market because fewer people will buy a field as an inheritance-tax dodge, he added — although he did not expect the effect to be substantial.’

On the other hand, I’m inclined to listen to the voices of farmers who haven’t been screaming blue murder, but who suggest that the reform could have been more fairly implemented. Here is one of those voices, from another piece in today’s Guardian.

‘Andrew Brown, from Rutland in the East Midlands, owns about 100 acres of land, but he is mainly a tenant farmer producing wheat. He feels more ambivalent about Reeves’s new rules. “I think this is ultimately a good idea, because some of the very, very rich landowners aren’t farmers, they’re people who just bought land to take advantage of the IHT rules. So, if this stops very wealthy people from buying farmland to avoid taxes, then all the better, as those people could afford to pay the tax anyway,” he says. “I don’t disagree with the principle, but there were better ways of doing it. The threshold is too low, which will affect a lot of people, and it should be gradual, so 5%, say, for up to [a farm value of] £5 million, then 10% until £10 million, and so on, to a maximum inheritance tax rate of 50% for farms worth over £50 million. That would have been fairer.’

That makes good sense to me.

Meanwhile, the IMF is happy with what Labour has done, and so, it seems, are the bond markets, though they wobbled just a little last week. Contrast that with the reaction of the IMF and the bond markets to the catastrophe of October 2022. And it is a proper Labour budget. Many people, especially those on lower incomes, will be financially better off as a result. I hope that before long they will also see improvements in the public services on which we all depend, and will remember who made them possible.

Tomorrow the people of the USA decide who will be their president for the next four years: a competent, honourable, consensual woman, or a convicted criminal, serial fantasist and liar, misogynist, promoter of hate speech, real and present threat to the maintenance of democracy in his country? I’m holding my breath.

Since about 6.30 on the morning of 6 November I’ve been stunned. ‘He went like one who hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn…’ Trump’s decisive victory — he will now be President again, and he has the Senate, the House of Representatives and, as a result of his appointments when he was last President, the Supreme Court, all in his pocket — plus the fact that he won the popular vote as well as the electoral-college vote, have brought me to despair. Until now I’ve always been politically engaged, but since that dreadful morning I have bought no newspapers, watched no news on television, sought no political information on-line. I expect this withdrawal from the wider world to pass, but just at the moment I’ve gone into a mode which says, ‘Do the things you can do.  Exert whatever tiny influence you can in the areas where that tiny influence operates. Human history more widely is a tragedy.’ 76,774,608 people knowingly voted for a crook, a bully, a misogynist, a sex offender, a promoter of hate speech, a full-scale danger to the world. I tremble for Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, Taiwan, to name only the most prominent theatres in which Trump’s baleful influence will once more be exerted. The climate catastrophe tops all these; Trump remains convinced that ‘it’s just weather’, and will give the oil, coal and gas companies every encouragement to keep drilling and digging. The rule-governed, post-1945 democratic (as I used to think) consensus is now a minority form of governance in the world. Various versions of authoritarianism dominate, and Trump will flatter and concede to their leaders, because he has no interest in maintaining any kind of democratic consensus in the country which elected him. Meanwhile, contemptibly, Biden has decided, in the lame-duck last months of his presidency, that yes, we can fire some weapons into Russian territory in response to the criminal destruction of Ukraine wrought by Putin over the last almost three years. Why did he not authorise their use earlier? Because he was afraid of public opinion at home before the election. That didn’t work out well, did it?

I remain perfectly cheerful on a personal level.  On a global level, the tragic view of history seems to me more and more accurate.

I’ve finished my ‘A-Z of Greek Mythology’. This morning I sent it to Mark for the website.

My brother Andy is still awaiting for a date for the operation on his aneurism, and in the meantime happily living with Mary and Jacques in their house in Camberwell.  On 5 November, that fateful day in America, Helen had an operation to remove a cataract from and to insert a lens in her left eye. The procedure was successful, but she is now in a strange period when one eye is telling the brain one thing and the other the other. For the first fortnight, she or I put ten drops a day into the improved eye. That number has now dropped to four, and will drop to two on 3 December, when she will have an operation on the right eye. For two weeks after that there will be a regime of 12 drops (10 in the right and two in the left), then four in the right for two weeks, then two for two weeks, which takes us to mid-January. Then she’ll go to the optician for an eye test, and will no doubt have a new, much weaker, prescription for glasses, assuming that her extreme short-sightedness has been cured.

Myra’s house is slowly emptying. Contracts have been exchanged, and the new owners will take possession on 17 December. I spend most days up here. It’s only four stops on the Northern Line, and it’s pleasant to have a bigger space in which to work than the tiny box room in our flat.

I’ve recently seen two birds in London which startled and delighted me. There’s a building site near us where I saw a cormorant sitting on a crane, drying its wings. A cormorant in NW1, miles from the sea! Last Sunday I went down to Putney Vale Cemetery. My cousin Ceri annually organises a trip there to remember her brother, my cousin Huw, who died of AIDS in 1995 and whose ashes are scattered beneath a maple tree. I saw the most beautiful green woodpecker sitting on a gravestone. Green and greater-spotted woodpeckers I see (and hear) quite often in Brittany. This was the first time I’d seen one in London.

One other small thing. My great-grandparents used to drink Camp coffee. I remember them heating it up in a saucepan. This was in the 1950s. I’ve never drunk Camp coffee myself, but I used to admire the label on the bottle, which featured a kilted Scotsman (white, obviously) sitting ‘in camp’ outside his tent, appreciatively sipping the beverage, whilst his Indian servant stands respectfully behind him. The other day I saw a bottle of Camp coffee in Waitrose, and inspected it. Now the Scotsman and the Indian are sitting side by side, taking equal pleasure in the chicory substitute for the real thing. Progress!

A lot has happened since I last wrote; hence the long gap.

I have seen my brother Andy every day since 5 December, when Mary and Jacques went to their house in Brittany for ten days. They returned on 15 December, only to leave again for Marseille on 17 December. They stayed there with their families until 28 December, when they drove up to Brittany. They’ll be there until some time in January, when I think Mary will return alone to London.

On 12 December I accompanied Andy to the hospital at eight o’clock in the morning. Since I last wrote about his complex condition, an extra level of complexity has been added: blood vessels going into his heart are blocked up, probably because of a lifetime of smoking, causing the muscle in the heart to have to work too hard to get blood to flow through the organ. So the doctors proposed an angiogram, followed possibly by an angioplasty, to clear the vessels. Leaving Andy at the hospital, I went and ate breakfast in a café before returning to the house in Camberwell to do some work and await the outcome of the procedure. The phone rang; a doctor told me that Andy’s heart had stopped beating for two minutes. This, strangely, was before the procedure had been started, not during it. If you’re going to have a cardiac arrest, it’s a jolly good thing to be surrounded by cardiac specialists, as he was. They jumped on his chest and pumped some adrenalin into him. I walked up to the hospital and waited until they allowed me to see him. He was groggy, but I could tell immediately that his brain wasn’t damaged. Later that day, he did undergo the angiogram, but the doctors didn’t proceed to an angioplasty because the blocked blood vessels are in an inaccessible place. They later told him that the only solution would be a full-scale open-heart bypass operation, taking a length of vein from his leg and inserting it near the heart as the bypass.

Andy has been in hospital since that day. The news subsequently is that the cardiac people have said that they won’t do anything (apart from continuing to prescribe medication) until the vascular people have decided whether or not to do the operation on his aneurism. This would be a big, risky procedure: five hours under a general anaesthetic, involving actually stopping the heart for a time, using a machine to supply the heart’s usual functions. Andy is now waiting for the vascular people to decide whether to propose the operation to him or not. He’s clear that if they tell him that there’s a significant risk of death or of permanent disablement, he’ll refuse the operation, and accept that he must henceforth manage his conditions conservatively, taking all his medication and not over-exerting himself. He’s also clear that if he does suffer another cardiac arrest, or if the aneurism does burst or leak, he doesn’t want to be resuscitated if there’s any risk of permanent disablement, physical or mental. He would like the doctors to make a decision quickly, because (to move to yet another site of his illness) the oncologists want to give him an extra drug to further retard the progress of his cancers, but won’t do that until the vascular people have made up their mind… Complicated. Meanwhile, he’s warm and dry in the ward, with books to read and films to watch on his computer, and with three good meals a day going into him. Considering everything he’s going through, he’s pretty cheerful.

As I say, I go to the hospital every day, and stay for about two hours in the afternoon. I shall continue this routine until something changes. As ever with these unexpected challenges, a good outcome is that we’ve had much lengthier and more detailed chats about our lives, going back to our childhoods, than we would have had if this hadn’t happened.

Myra’s house was finally sold on 17 December. The great majority of Susanna’s and my work is now done. I expect there will be a few more papers to sign. On 20 January the individual beneficiaries of Myra’s will, including me, will inherit some money. That date is six months after probate was granted.

I’ve updated my memoir, and changed the name from ‘My Life in Prose’ to, simply, ‘Memoir’, because I’ve dropped a few poems in at appropriate points in the text.

The Britton book was supposedly published four days ago — an odd date for the publication of a book. I haven’t heard anything yet about free copies. Perhaps I will when people at Routledge get back from their holidays. We’ve arranged a date for the launch — 28 February — and I want to send a shot of the front cover of the book to the person who’s going to design the electronic invitation card.

I’m still in a state of withdrawal from the wider political world, but I will just mention two things. The Assad regime has been overthrown in Syria. That in itself is a matter for rejoicing. Assad and his family have fled to Russia, where they are being hosted and protected by an even greater criminal than the former Syrian dictator and butcher. The overthrow was conducted by a coalition of forces led by an Islamist group which has committed atrocities in the recent past. At the moment, its leaders are saying that they want an inclusive, free Syria. Thousands of Syrians, refugees in neighbouring countries, have been streaming back to their homeland. I fear the worst; once the new government really gets its hands on power, it will move the country to an Islamist theocracy, and many of the returning Syrians will find that they need to flee again.

The Barnier government in France lasted only until 4 December, when it was brought down by a vote of no confidence in which the forces of the left and the far right combined: an unholy alliance. On 13 December, Macron appointed the centrist François Bayrou as replacement Prime Minister. Bayrou’s new government took office on 23 December. France has now had four Prime Ministers in a year. The first of these, Élisabeth Borne, is back in the cabinet as Minister of State, Minister of National Education, Higher Education and Research. Who knows whether this government will stumble on until next June, when Macron can dissolve parliament again if he wants to? Chaos.

It’s been a quiet end to the year. No log fires in the French countryside. No giving of hampers filled with crackers, Christmas puddings, brandy butter, shortbread biscuits and other British goodies to our friends there. We celebrated quietly: at Daphne on Christmas Eve, at home since then. Guinea fowl on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, rack of lamb on 27 December. Tonight, gravadlax, fillet steak with sprouts and mash, cheese, Christmas pudding and custard. Champagne, claret and Chablis. Not bad at all. I’ve had a heavy cold which I’m just getting over, so I’m as cheerful as my brother is.