I explained in the later entries of Occurrences 20 why we didn’t go to Kerfontaine for Christmas and New Year as we usually do. I visited my brother every day in King’s College Hospital from 12 December until yesterday, when he was discharged. On 3 January he had an angioplasty. Four stents were put into blood vessels feeding the heart. The doctors say that Andy’s blood flow there is much improved. He now awaits the major operation on his aneurysm, which will probably happen in early February. There have been lengthy discussions between the cardiac and the vascular specialists. The cardiac people want Andy to take a certain blood-thinning pill for the rest of his life. The vascular people, while respecting that decision, need Andy to stop taking that pill for a week before the aneurysm operation. Thinned blood is much more likely to cause a life-threatening haemorrhage on the operating table. The compromise was that Andy should take the pill for a month from 3 January, then stop until after the operation. At the moment, he has a 60% chance that his aneurysm will burst, which would lead to immediate death. He has a 5% chance of dying during the operation. The correct choice was obvious.

So now, for the first time for a month, I don’t have to visit a hospital every day. I will go down to my sister’s house in Camberwell, where Andy is living, every two or three days. If the aneurysm operation is successful, there will be a period of recuperation in intensive care. If he emerges from that, his plan is to return to Bulgaria, where he will take all the medication prescribed for him, including that which retards the inevitable progress of his cancers. But he’ll return to the hospital every six months, because the stent which was put into his kidney when his illnesses were first diagnosed needs to be replaced twice a year.

In the latter half of 2024, I didn’t write anything about my reading. I read and enormously enjoyed Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. It’s beautifully written, while being an engrossing and surprising tale, and of course I loved all the stuff about lunatic forms of Christian belief. Because Helen hasn’t been able to read easily since her eye operations (which were successful, and she hopes to go to her optician next week to be measured for new spectacles which will complete the dramatic improvement in her vision), I read the book aloud to her. I also read aloud The Levant Trilogy, which I had previously read to myself. Alexandria features frequently in that book, and I remember reading somewhere that the great library of Alexandria was a noisy place, because the habit of silent reading hadn’t been discovered then. This may or may not be true. Our living room wasn’t noisy when I was reading aloud, but it was pleasant to be doing something which I hadn’t done since I was a classroom English teacher.

At Bedford Modern School, the second of the two secondary schools I attended as a boy, the debating society was named after Mark Rutherford. When I was there, I knew only that Mark Rutherford and Christopher Fry were the two most famous literary old boys of the school. When I was working with Myra Barrs, more than 50 years later, she told me how much she admired the Mark Rutherford novels. I admitted with some shame that I had never read them. When she died, I helped myself to those volumes which were on her shelves, and bought the rest. I should have read them decades ago. William Hale White, the writer who took the nom de plume Mark Rutherford, isn't as good as George Eliot (who is?), a woman with whom he worked for a while in John Chapman’s publishing house (I think he was a bit in love with her as well as in awe of her), but he’s still pretty good. I’ve read all six novels: The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (which, despite its title, is a novel, not an autobiography), Mark Rutherford’s Deliverance, The Revolution in Tanner’s Lane, Miriam’s Schooling, Catharine Furze and Clara Hopgood. Their preoccupations are very much up my street. White had a Calvinist upbringing in Bedford. He was destined (good Calvinist word) for the non-conformist ministry, but was expelled from theological college for questioning the authority of the Bible. A major theme of the books is the close relationship between dissent, in the ecclesiastical sense, and political radicalism. In the later books, there is a growing element of what I might call proto-feminism, if that is an appropriate description of the work of a male writer whose female characters are quite often inclined to dissolve into tears. I mean that there is sharp, angry criticism of the social conventions which condemned so many intelligent women to idleness. White’s female characters, tearful or not, have opinions which they utter clearly and sometimes robustly. They act, when they can. In the last novel, Clara Hopgood, Clara and her sister Madge are clever, ‘advanced’. Madge becomes pregnant out of wedlock, but there is no calling down of shame on them; the sisters go to London, the baby is born, and they manage, without apology. Madge refuses to marry Frank, the father of the child. At the end of the novel Clara goes to Italy to follow Mazzini’s campaign for the unification of Italy, and dies there. It’s an odd ending, but the author is clearly saying, ‘Women can, and should, act.’ I read that the novel caused something of a scandal at the time. It reminded me of the fact that Helen Schlegel’s pregnancy in Howards End was also regarded by social conservatives as an inappropriate topic in a work of literature as late as 1910, when that book was published. D.H. Lawrence admired the Mark Rutherford novels very much, and from the point of view of what some progressive voices in the nineteenth century called ‘the woman question’, I can see why. White/Rutherford allows himself to philosophise, ruminate, especially on religious questions, sometimes at great length in the midst of the narrative. George Eliot does that too, at lesser length, and her philosophical ruminations are always of a humanistic kind. It’s easy for someone like me, with my own religious background, to see how White/Rutherford was using his novels to work out his own departure from faith, or at least from the faith instilled in him in childhood. He was a friend of F.D. Maurice, which doesn't surprise me.

It’s a miserable, cold, rainy Sunday afternoon. I went for my usual vigorous walk around Regent’s Park this morning, and got back just as the rain was starting. The meteorological authorities have taken to naming storms recently, using alternate male and female first names, going through the alphabet. We’re in the midst of Storm Herminia. I know that the frequency of serious, life-threatening storms is the result of climate change, but I can’t decide whether my awareness of these storms has or has not been made more acute now that they have names.

Andy is still with Mary in Camberwell. I went there for lunch yesterday. My cousin Ceri and my nephew George were there too. Andy’s news is that, as we expected, he will go back into hospital on about 4 February and have the major operation to fix his aneurysm on about 7 February.

I’m writing this on a beautiful new Apple computer. I had a video call with Mark Leicester on Tuesday morning (my time — he is 13 hours ahead in New Zealand). In the course of conversation about various difficulties I was experiencing on my old computer, Mark advised me to bite the bullet and get a new machine. The old one is so old (only in Apple’s terms — I don’t regard a life lasting 14 years as even approaching the geriatric stage) that it won’t accept essential upgrades of various applications which I need. So, never having been one to let the grass grow under my feet, I went straight down to the Apple Store in Regent Street and spent a thousand pounds. I was then directed upstairs to the ‘Genius Bar’, where I asked whether they could take both computers away and transfer all the data from the old to the new. Answer: no. My old computer counted, not as vintage (these terms are precise in Apple’s language), but as obsolete. But if I was prepared to stay there for several hours, brooding over the transfer myself until it was done, of course with regular help from the assistants, I could. So I did. Fortunately, I had a book with me: Turgeney’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album, about which more in a minute. After half an hour, I looked at the other people around my table. They were all about my age. I asked the woman across from me, ‘Is your machine obsolete too?’ ‘Yes,’ she said. It turned out that we were the obsolete table. Old people like to hold onto their machines until they stop working: the equivalent of running a car into the ground (which I also do). About five hours later I left the Apple Store with all my old data sitting in my new machine. I’ve needed two or three more conversations with New Zealand to get everything exactly as it should be, and I’m very happy.

This week I received the generous legacy which Myra left for me. Susanna Howard, my co-executor, has quite rightly received an even more generous legacy, which has allowed her, for the first time in her life, to buy a house. The money she received was a bit short of what she needed, so I’ve lent her a bit of my legacy for six months. On Friday she became the house’s outright owner, so she should soon be able to borrow money at a reasonable rate of interest on the security of the property.

On 14 January, Helen finished the regime of eye drops following her cataract operations. On the next day she had an eye test and chose her new frames. Last Friday we went and picked up the glasses. Helen can now see to read, and her longer vision is better than it has been for years. So she’s happy too.

It looks as if I’m going to do another book with Michael Rosen. He gives lectures at Goldsmiths, University of London, on children’s literature, and he and the head of department there would like the lectures to be gathered into a book. Michael wants me to edit it, as I did with his What is a Bong Tree?, the collection of his talks and articles which I edited a couple of years ago. I shall enjoy doing that.

Betty Rosen’s book of poems and prose, I Have a Threepenny Bit, which I also edited, has just been reprinted. The books arrived at her house (where my books are stored too) on Thursday.

As well as helping myself to Myra’s Mark Rutherford books, I took the Turgenev novels she had. I’ve since bought those which weren’t on her shelves, plus the short stories Sketches from a Hunter’s Album and Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country. I read Sketches and Fathers and Sons 50 years ago, and we saw A Month in the Country, I think at the National Theatre, 20 or 30 years ago, but I had forgotten everything about them. I’ve now read all the books except Virgin Soil and Spring Torrents, which I’ll get round to shortly. Turgenev is a completely marvellous writer. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, of course, are regarded as the two giants of nineteenth-century Russian prose, but I think Turgenev is just as good, in a gentler, more ‘literary’ way. He combines lyricism in his descriptions of the Russian countryside with pungent satire at the shortcomings of the gentry and aristocracy, together with an urgent sense that ‘something is rotten in the state’ of Russia. His laconic way of describing the appalling injustice — ‘crime against humanity’ as we would now call it — of serfdom is moving and shocking. I have the feeling that his political position, in the context of his times, was a bit like mine is today, absurd as such a comparison sounds. He knew that imperfect, gradualist change was the only option with a chance of avoiding disaster; that Russia had to move in the direction of Western democracy, that the inflexibility and cruelty of the Tsarist regime would bring catastrophe, but that violent revolution was not the answer to the problem. And so it proved, 34 years after his death.

I was impressed to read that Sketches had an influence on Tsar Alexander’s decision to emancipate the serfs in 1861. A Month in the Country, the only one of Turgenev’s plays now performed, is very funny. A 29-year-old woman, Natalya Petrovna, married to a 36-year-old wealthy landowner, is in love, not with one but with two other men, one of whom is the 20-year-old tutor to her son, hired for ‘a month in the country’. The tutor is quite unaware, until near the end, of the emotional turmoil into which he has thrown his employer. He has also innocently tugged at the heartstrings of Natalya’s 17-year-old ward, Vera. The 29-year-old and the 17-year-old become rivals. In the end, several people have to leave, so difficult has the situation become. The bittersweet note in the comedy is that Vera finally decides to throw herself away on a ridiculous, ugly but rich old man, simply to escape the clash of passions into which she has been drawn.

I’ve now read Virgin Soil and Spring Torrents. Virgin Soil is quite unlike the other books. It’s plot-driven, and political. A secretive group of revolutionaries, a bit like the Carbonari in other European countries, is planning an uprising. The plan goes catastrophically and sometimes comically wrong. The principal character, Nezhdanov, is flattered by the attentions of an aristocratic gentleman whom he meets by chance and who expresses sympathy for the radical opinions of the young. He agrees to become the tutor to the man’s son during the summer holidays. He falls in love, so he thinks, with a young woman who is the aristocrat’s ward, and who seemingly has the same political views as he does. The two run away, and are hidden by a sympathetic but less starry-eyed republican, who I think represents Turgenev’s own political point of view. Nezhdanov ‘goes to the people’, as idealistic young bourgeois indeed did in Russia at the time, with disastrous results. In the end, the uprising is snuffed out, partly because the very peasants on whose behalf the uprising was attempted deliver one of its leaders over to the authorities, and partly because one of the group of supposed revolutionaries betrays the others, though without meaning to (herein is some of the comedy). Nezhdanov kills himself. His lover marries the admirable republican. The ruling class closes ranks, as it always does. It’s an extraordinary, subtle, cold-eyed tale of political intrigue and muddle-headed revolutionary idealism.

As soon as I began Spring Torrents I realised that I had read it before, and not that long ago. It took me a while to remember that I have an Everyman edition of Turgenev in France, entitled First Love and Other Stories. The first and the third pieces in that volume, ‘First Love’ and ‘A Fire at Sea’, are indeed story-length. Spring Torrents, the second piece, is a novella.

In several of Turgenev’s works a similar theme is played out, almost to the point of obsession. A weak-willed, socially privileged man finds himself in love with a woman who is strong-willed and sure of herself. In the case of Spring Torrents, Sanin, a young Russian landowner on the way home from a trip to Italy, stops in Frankfurt and by pure chance brings about the recovery of a boy who had suffered a fainting fit, and whose life may or may not have been in danger. He falls passionately in love with the boy’s elder sister, Gemma. So: landowner adores daughter of pastry cook, and is adored by her, especially as he has defended her honour in a duel with a German officer who has insulted her. What to do? Answer: sell the estate in Russia and move to Frankfurt. Thinking that he will have to return to Russia to do this, Sanin meets, again by pure chance, an oaf of a man, Polozov, with whom he was at school. The oaf is married to a very rich woman, so is rich himself. She is at that moment in Wiesbaden. The two men go to Wiesbaden, Sanin with the hope of persuading the woman, Maria Nikolaevna, to buy his estate, thus saving him the trouble of returning to Russia. By slow degrees, described with agonising subtlety, the woman seduces him. There is no doubt that the seduction ends with full-on sexual intercourse, though of course this is not described explicitly. Sanin in utter shame breaks his engagement to Gemma, and becomes the submissive third party in a ménage à trois with Polozov and his wife, beginning in Paris. The novella starts thirty years after its main events, and returns to that period right at the end. The older Sanin, now alone and back in Russia, considers that he has wasted his life. In an attempt to expiate his youthful sin, he returns to Frankfurt, finds that Gemma long ago emigrated to America, discovers her address, writes grovellingly to her, receives a friendly reply telling him that she has married and has five children, and enclosing a photograph of her 18-year-old daughter, who is about to be married and who looks exactly as Gemma did when she was that age. The novella ends with the suggestion that Sanin is about to sell his estate (which of course he didn’t do after he broke off his engagement) and move to New York (perhaps to join another ménage à trois?).

Something similar happens in Smoke. The youthful Litvinov is passionately in love with Irina, his neighbour in the country. He is heartbroken when she leaves for Petersburg, having written him a brief note saying that their relationship is over. Some years pass. Litvinov recovers his peace of mind and becomes engaged to Tatyana, who is obviously a lovely and upright person. It seems that their future happiness is assured. He goes to Baden-Baden. The novel includes much mockery of the Russian gentry and nobility there, all of them expensively doing nothing much. Turgenev is no kinder to the radicals than he is to the reactionaries. Litvinov meets Irina again, before Tatyana and her aunt join him at the spa. By now Irina is rich and married. He falls for her once more. They seriously plan an elopement. Tatyana and the aunt arrive. Litvinov breaks off the engagement. Tatyana receives this shocking news with great dignity. Then Litvinov gets a note from Irina abandoning the plan for elopement and saying that she is going to stick with her husband, despise him as she does. Litvinov has lost everything. More years pass. At the very end of the novel, back in Russia, he goes to Tatyana’s estate and is forgiven (is this convincing? it’s the only bit of optimism about love that I can remember in any of Turgenev’s work). Happy ever after? Perhaps.

Turgenev himself lived in a ménage à trois with Pauline Viardot and her husband. He had a number of brief sexual relationships, one of which produced a daughter, but no long-term, loving partnership, at least of the conventional kind. He might have insisted that the relationship with Pauline was long-term and loving, but there was a strong element of the submissive, if not masochistic, in it.

It's easy to see why Turgenev attracted such hostility from right and left. The Slavophiles and the Tsar-loving authoritarians couldn’t bear his hatred of serfdom and his determination that Russia must move towards some kind of Western parliamentary governance. The radicals and revolutionaries couldn’t bear the fact that he saw clearly the dangers of blind faith in some kind of total overturning of the status quo, as evidenced in Virgin Soil and in Fathers and Sons, where Bazarov, the ‘hero’ of the novel, dies, not on the barricades while performing a self-sacrificial act for the fatherland, but as a result of his own carelessness while performing a medical procedure.

Turgenev is a very great writer, one of the greatest, and if I had to say in a few words wherein his greatness lies, it would be in the clear-eyed pessimism with which he views the hopes to which humans cling, and the compromises and self-delusions which they seem incapable of avoiding.

We arrived at Kerfontaine nine days ago, and are very glad to be here. It’s raining as I write, naturally, but this is Brittany. I offer no excuses for the inordinately long gap since the last entry. I have been busy. First, the editing of Michael Rosen’s book of lectures took a lot of time, but it’s done now, and has gone to the designers at Goldsmiths. I’ll read the proofs when they’re ready. There will be a launch in late September. Secondly, looking after my brother Andy has also taken much time. He had the important and dangerous operation to repair his aneurysm in February, though later than the date he was originally given. He was in critical care for several days after that, then back in a general ward. When he emerged from the hospital, he spent a few days in the Camberwell house before I escorted him to Paddington station and he took a train to Taunton. He spent several weeks with my brother Mark and his wife Gill, in the middle of which, when Mark and Gill were away, he was with his good friend Paul (a friend from Bulgaria) and Paul’s partner Hannah. Paul is a retired policeman. He and his wife Vicky owned a house in the next village to Andy’s in Bulgaria. Then Vicky died of cancer, and Paul sold the house. By a good coincidence, the house he bought in Somerset is very near to Mark and Gill. Paul escorted Andy back up to London for more tests in the hospital during the week he was staying with him.

While this was going on, Helen and I had a welcome little break visiting friends in England. First, we had our annual playreading at Bletsoe in Bedfordshire with Peter and Monica Hetherington, plus chums from Bedford Modern School plus partners. This year we deserted Shakespeare for the first time, and read Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. Very funny. Peter and Monica’s daughter Kate played musical intermezzi on the harpsichord. Dinner as usual in The Horse and Jockey. Stayed the night as usual at The Queen’s Head. The next day we drove on to Shropshire and stayed five nights with Glenda and Julian Walton. They have moved to a smaller house in Shrewsbury, on a new estate, and are very happy there. We saw David and Tom James, twice, and Andrew and Annie Bannerman, once. Andrew and Annie are finally going to sell their beautiful Georgian house in Shrewsbury, with its difficult staircases and lovely garden, and buy a flat in the old hospital in the town, long since converted to shops on the ground floor and flats above. After Shrewsbury we drove across to Norfolk and spent the weekend with Adam and Hazel. Back in London after nine days away.

By this time, Andy was ready to return to London, so I met him at Paddington and spent time with him in the Camberwell house in the week before he flew back to Bulgaria, where he now is. But he’ll be back in London for a few days again next week, to have the stent which links his kidney to his bladder changed. This procedure may have to be repeated every six months for the rest of his life. Or, more optimistically in one sense, the fact that the hormone therapy he will receive for the rest of his life (an injection every three months, which can be done in Bulgaria) has reduced the size of his prostate may mean that the normal route from kidney to bladder is no longer blocked. I say ‘more optimistically in one sense’ because the prostate cancer is incurable, though mercifully slow to develop now that the hormone therapy is eating the testosterone on which the cancer cells feed. This causes unpleasant menopause-like hot flushes. More seriously, once the therapy has severely reduced the amount of testosterone in the male body, the cancer cells turn to something else to feed on. Andy has been given a prognosis of six or seven years of life remaining to him. He and we hope fervently that he will have more.

Overall, he and we have been overwhelmed with admiration for what Kings College Hospital, and the NHS generally, have done for him. He was and is a complex case: heart problems, prostate and secondary cancers, weak lungs (more than fifty years of smoking — now he vapes), and the advanced aneurysm. Appropriate medication for one condition was inappropriate for another, so decisions had to be made about what to do, when; what measured risks to take in order to avoid a greater catastrophe. We met the surgeon and his assistant who performed the five-hour operation to repair the aneurysm. Brilliant, charming people.

On Good Friday, we went to the Dulwich Picture Gallery to see a wonderful exhibition of the work of Tirzah Garwood: paintings in various media, pictures in embroidery, woodcut prints, beautiful box-like 3D models. We had lunch there and then took the train from West Dulwich to Shortlands, the 12-minute journey I made for three years from 1962 to 1965 when I attended Dulwich College. We walked up Shortlands High Street and looked over the wall at the Valley County Primary School where I spent four happy years from 1958 to 1962. It’s obviously still a popular school, with several new buildings. Then along Farnaby Road to number 21, which is a substantial semi-detached house in dark brick. Mum, Dad and we four boys lived there from 1958; Mary was born nearby in 1963. I remembered how I probably saved Andy’s life one day. The house is built on a steep slope which falls away to the valley of the Ravensbourne, so it has two storeys at the front and three at the back. One day, for a reason I can’t remember, I happened to walk into the spare bedroom at the back of the house. It was summer and one of the sash windows was open. Andy, aged perhaps three or four, had climbed out of the window, and was just about to fall from the window sill straight down three storeys to the concrete paving stones below. I pulled him back. Mother of course claimed that the Lord had guided me into the room. I’ve written about playing in the back garden with my brothers in my little poem ‘The Impresario’. Then we walked along Farnaby Road and into Warren Avenue, where my friend David Milner used to live. Across the road from his house are the Warren Avenue Playing Fields, where we used to play cricket and football, and where David and I once ran a marathon. It was the time of the 1960 Rome Olympics. Inspired by the efforts of the athletes there, we decided to run round the 440-yard circular track 105 times without stopping, just exceeding the 26-mile, 385-yard distance of the marathon. This we did one morning. I think it took about three hours. I don’t remember feeling any especial physical weariness when we finished; we just went home for lunch.

Then Helen and I walked back along Warren Avenue, up Bromley Avenue, where I pointed out the house where the famous wrestler Mick McManus had lived. One day, when I was distributing tracts issued by our church, Christ Church, Bromley (coming to that in a second), I daringly knocked on Mick’s door, hoping to meet him. He did indeed come to the door, wearing a pinny. He must have been doing the washing or the washing-up. He accepted the tract most courteously. It was difficult to square this charming person with the figure who, on ITV every Saturday afternoon, was known as ‘the man they love to hate’. He hated having his cauliflower ears attacked by opponents. When this happened, as it did every week, it brought forth the bloodthirsty cry from the spectators, ‘Not the ears, not the ears!’ (I had only heard about his reputation, of course, since at that time we had no television, and my parents would not have allowed us to watch something so gross as wrestling even if we had had one.) Then along Madeira Avenue to Highland Road and up to Christ Church, the evangelical Anglican church where we worshipped every Sunday. The church building is exactly as it was, but there is now a large church hall across the road instead of the little one which used to be next to the church. Peering into the building through the door (there must have been a service earlier in the day — Good Friday — but evangelical churches don’t go in for the three-hour noon to 3pm service favoured by broad- and high-church Anglicans), I could see that the straight, solid, screwed-down rows of pews I remembered had been replaced by semi-circular rows of chairs facing towards me, away from the chancel, in the opposite direction to the former rows. The chairs were off-centred, so I couldn’t see the new pulpit, if there was one. I thought of all the hours I had spent in that building, and of the moment when I realised (I was then 11 or 12) that all the theology that had been drummed into me up to that time existed merely as an invention of the human mind.

After that we walked up Park Road to the London Road and along into Bromley High Street. Both it and Shortlands High Street have ‘come down’ since my childhood. Genteel shops and department stores have been replaced by branches of the cheaper multiple chains and convenience stores. My beloved library — an absolutely crucial contributor to my development as a reader and lover of books — is still there (though closed on a bank holiday) but is now housed in a repulsive brutalist concrete box which also contains the Churchill Theatre. But the Library Gardens and the Queen’s Mead are as they were. I remembered the joy of tobogganing down the slope of the mead on Monday and Thursday afternoons during the harsh winter of early 1963, when the snowfall meant that there was no rugby on those afternoons at Dulwich College, and we were sent home after lunch. Then along to the station, and home. It was a good experience, and I had plenty of opportunity (I think to Helen’s tolerant amusement) to reminisce.

Andy and I went through West Dulwich, Sydenham Hill, Penge East, Kent House, Beckenham Junction and Shortlands without stopping nine days later, on the way down to Kent for a party for my brother Peter’s grandson Percy’s second birthday. The train stopped first at Bromley South; then a leisurely ride through beautiful green Kent to Canterbury. The party was held in the village hall next to a picture-postcard village green, a few miles from Canterbury, complete with cricket pitch, sight screens and pavilion. No play that day, though the weather was fine, even hot, as it had been through some of March and much of April. It was the same here in Brittany; the rain now is welcome to the farmers and the gardeners.

I’m hoping that Florian, who has taken over from Jean-Paul as our gardener, will soon get to work on the wreckage still left by the storm of November 2023. He has said that he will. I expect I wrote last year about the three weeks of tree-cutting which Francis and Alain did. The wide area left after their efforts needs clearing and then reseeding. Meanwhile, the grass everywhere except on the lawn next to the house is knee-high. I cut the lawn with the little mower; the cut grass needs to be gathered up, and I’d rather that Florian did it with his big machine than that I do it with a rake.

We’ve had two great and recent sadnesses. The first goes back to mid-January. Michael Gerrard was the partner of John Calow, who was Helen’s partner before she met me. After five years with Helen, John was coming to the conclusion that he was gay. So his separation from Helen, Helen’s attachment to me, and John’s meeting with Michael were achieved without any rancour. The four of us remained friends for 45 years, until John died. Michael looked after him patiently and selflessly in his long last illness and incapacity. He was then alone for a while, until he met Barry Carpenter. It was a joyful rediscovery of love for both of them, and they were planning a new life together in the house in Malvern which Barry owns and of which they would become joint owners. Then we had an email in January saying that Michael was very unwell, and was in Kings College Hospital. So by a strange coincidence I found myself for several weeks visiting two people in the same hospital. Michael had an aggressive endocrinal cancer. He died on 17 March in St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham. He and Barry had been married a few weeks previously in the day room of the hospital ward. He was 70. His funeral was on 1 May, just before we came to France. Helen wrote and read a beautiful tribute, which I reproduce here.

I read ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’, as I’ve done at numerous funerals now.

The second sadness is even more recent. Last Thursday we went to Le Vivier at Lomener, where we have spent many happy evenings, sometimes just the two of us, sometimes with friends and family. We had a beautiful table by the window. The sea was flat calm across to the Île de Groix. Ivon, the owner and our friend, wasn’t there to greet us, and we supposed he was having a night off. The meal was splendid, as usual. When we paid (Helen was treating me), I asked his colleague whether Ivon was well. The answer was no; he was very ill with two kinds of cancer. Alas, we read in the paper yesterday that he died two days later. His funeral is on Friday at the church in Ploemeur, and I shall go. Ivon was 57, full of life and joie de vivre, like Michael.

We nearly always listen to the In Our Time programmes on BBC Radio 4, presented by Melvyn Bragg. A few months ago, the topic was Plutarch’s Lives. I’d never read Plutarch, so I bought Greek Lives and Roman Lives, both of which are selections from the complete work, while finding it strange that modern English translations separate the Greek from the Roman lives, when their author had presented Greeks and Romans as pairs for comparison. Still, the essays are very impressive, although the casual murderous brutality of many of these ‘great men’ (not all) continues to shock despite the lapse of time since they lived. That led me on to the realisation that really, at the age of 73, I still didn’t have an overarching sense of classical (by which I mean ancient Greek and Roman) history. This lack has been to some extent supplied by Robin Lane Fox’s excellent The Classical World, which took me on a whistle-stop tour from Homer to Hadrian. I realised then that I needed to read Herodotus, often regarded as the first historian and the first Western writer of non-fiction (perhaps there were other and earlier historians and writers of non-fiction in other cultures). I’m halfway through The Histories. The principal topic of the nine books is the wars between the Greeks and the Persians, but amid the history proper there are many long digressions and traveller’s tales, often of the tall sort, at which a modern research- and fact-based historian would frown or smile. More about The Histories later.

The rain has stopped. Bright sunshine. It always surprises me how quickly the wood of the terrasse dries after rain.

I wrote on 13 May that Andy would need to go back to Kings College Hospital for a few days towards the end of May, to have the stent which links his kidney to his bladder changed, and that the procedure might have to be repeated every six months for the rest of his life. He did go back to the hospital, and they did attempt to change the stent. They couldn’t get a new one in, for some reason, but then they discovered — as I speculated in May that they might — that the hormone therapy had been working so well that his prostate had shrunk sufficiently to allow normal draining of urine from his kidney to his bladder. And the kidney (I think I’ve got this right) isn’t badly damaged. So, no stent needed after all, nor will Andy have to visit Kings every six months. Good news.

I’ve finished Herodotus, and for the first time for a long time I’ve decided to read him all over again, straight away. It’s partly because there’s so much detail, and so many names (so-and-so son of so-and-so son of so-and so…), that I’ve forgotten most of what I’ve read after only a few days. But it’s also because I’ve never read anything like this before: an enthralling mixture of fact and fiction, historical (of course), geographical, ethnographical, psychological. The style, as rendered by the translation, is direct and salty; you can hear the writer speaking to you. Two things strike me above all: as mentioned in the last entry with regard to Plutarch, the atrocious, whimsical brutality of those with power in all the peoples and states Herodotus describes (but then the 20th and 21st centuries haven’t done any better); and the taken-for-granted assumption that women and girls, with very few exceptions, were property — often sexual property — to be disposed of as men thought best. I was going to go straight on to Thucydides, who, I read, doesn’t brook any nonsense about gods, omens or dreams having any influence on human affairs, unlike Herodotus, but he'll have to wait.

We drove down to Marseille on 21 May and came back two days ago. We saw all the family there: my niece Sophie and her children Paul and Anna; my nephew Sam, his partner Céline and their child Charles; my niece Tess, her partner Stephen and their new baby Murphy. Murphy is three months old now, and a complete delight; she smiles at everyone, rarely cries, sleeps all night and drinks enthusiastically. We ate and drank well ourselves. We stayed in Sophie’s flat, and gave her a bit of company and support, alone as she is, with her demanding job as a gynaecologist working in two hospitals, one in Marseille and one in Aubagne. She and her ex-husband have the children a week at a time, in turn; relations and arrangements are not always easy.

In January I went to our dentist in London, in considerable pain. He provisionally filled two molars, while telling me that the upper one needed to be extracted and the lower one needed its roots replaced with cement. I didn’t do anything about this while we were there; I was busy, what with visiting my brother and Michael Gerrard, and finishing the editing of Michael Rosen’s book before we came here. When we got here, the pain returned, and I had one sleepless night, with agonising throbbing in my head. I tried for an appointment with our dentist in Pont-Scorff. She could only see me when we were going to be in Marseille. So, thanks to my brother-in-law Jacques’s connections there, my third dentist is in that city. I had excellent treatment. The upper molar was removed (no pain, either at the time or when the anaesthetic wore off), and the lower tooth was dévitalisé, as they say, and temporarily rebuilt. The dentist advised that I should really have a crown. So I’ll be going back to Marseille for twelve days in July, alone, on the plane, for the three successive consultations which this will require. The trouble and the expense are definitely worth it.

Stories about the shortcomings of GPS on car journeys are legion. I try to use the technology as little as possible, but when I’m on a journey never undertaken before, or when going into an unfamiliar city, it’s handy. On the way back from Marseille, we arrived at the outskirts of Lyon. The motorway which would have bypassed Lyon on the city’s south-west was closed. We were forced onto little roads around the area of chemical works on the banks of the Rhône. There then began a kind of madness. The GPS, thinking that I had simply made a mistake, directed me back to the point at which I had deviated from its instructions. Twice I made my own mistake of obeying it. On the third occasion, I struck out in defiance of authority, and was immediately reassured to see signs for Clermont-Ferrand, which was on our intended route. Nonetheless, the machine still plaintively tried to get me to turn off onto smaller roads, presumably to take us back to where it supposed I had erred in the first place. After about half an hour it gave up, sulked for a bit, and then resignedly directed me towards Clermont-Ferrand, where I was going in any case.

Later that afternoon we arrived safely at the château in the Cher where we were to stay the night. At about seven we made off for a restaurant in Saint-Amand, the local town. Not knowing the way, I put the address of the restaurant into the GPS, and followed it obligingly until we arrived at a rough concrete bridge, quite narrow and with no parapet, which crossed the river Cher itself. A sign said Voie privée, and there was a barrier on the other side of the river. I stopped the car, walked across the bridge in the hope that the barrier could simply be lifted. It was locked. So, reverse gear and then 20 minutes of using my native wit and, though I say it myself, good sense of direction to find our way to Saint-Amand. There is a sense in which much modern technology is making us all stupider.

The last day of my birthday month. I had a wonderful day on the 16th, with the usual pleasures and gifts, culminating as ever with dinner at Le Vivier. An additional delight was the arrival by train of our goddaughter Alix Mellor (no baptism; she calls us her ‘godless parents’) that afternoon. She lives in Melbourne with her husband and two children, and was on a whistle-stop tour of Europe, the main event of which had been a wedding in Spain. She stayed with us for two nights, then whisked off to Paris for another two, before flying back to her wintry city. She’s 41 now; no time seems to have passed since I carried her as a baby round the villa in Tuscany which we and her parents, Bronywn and Stephen, had hired. We said to the parents, ‘You go out for dinner à deux. We can manage the baby.’ Alix was sleeping peacefully in a small dark room. Because I’m the eldest of five children, I know quite a lot about babies, though I’ve never been a parent myself. Because Helen is the youngest of three children, she doesn’t know so much. She decided to go into the room to see if everything was all right there. Her arrival awoke the baby, who, missing her parents, then screamed for several hours while I walked round the house with her in my arms. She kept pointing wildly in all directions. I later learned that this was a perfect example of pre-linguistic meaning-making: Alix hadn’t the words to ask where her parents were, so the deictic would have to do.

I did finish Herodotus the second time round. I haven’t much to add to what I wrote in the last entry; only that the dreadful conflict between Iran, Israel and the US at the moment made me reflect, several times, as I read about the Persian invasion with its accompanying brutality on both sides, that nothing much has been learned in the last 2,500 years. The main change has been that the weapons are more deadly.

Thucydides is going to have to wait a bit longer, because I’m reading Voyage au Bout de la Nuit by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (nom de plume of Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches), which Jacques has lent me. I already knew that, when it was published, it represented a significant moment in the evolution of French fiction, and now I can see why. In 1932, its slangy, casual first-person style must have been a slap in the face to the refined manners of the French novel up to that point: the absolute obverse of Proust. The book is robustly shocking, amoral and nihilist. The narrator, Ferdinand Bardamu, experiences the horrors of the First World War, the equally appalling but different horrors of French colonialism in Africa, the brutality of American capitalism, and the degradation of life in a working-class suburb of Paris. The chapters set in Paris also involve a side trip to Toulouse.

Destouches was a doctor. I’ve just read the Wikipedia entry on Destouches/Céline, so I now know that he later became ferociously and influentially anti-Semitic, and fled first to Germany and then to German-occupied Denmark when it became clear that the Allies were going to win the Second World War. In 1951 he was tried in absentia by a French court ‘for activities harmful to the national defence. He was found guilty in February 1951 and sentenced to one year in jail, a fine of 50,000 francs, and confiscation of half his property. In April a French military tribunal granted him an amnesty based on his status as a disabled war veteran. In July he returned to France.’ He continued to write, and to practise as a doctor, and died in 1961 of a ruptured aneurysm (the same thing that killed De Gaulle nine years later, and nearly killed my brother until his successful operation earlier this year).

It's clear, as with so many individuals and issues associated with the French far-right and its collaboration with the Nazis, that Destouches/Céline remains a troubling figure even today. Wikipedia again: ‘In December 2017, the French government and Jewish leaders expressed concern over plans by the publisher Gallimard to republish Céline's antisemitic books. In January 2018 Gallimard announced that it was suspending publication. In March Gallimard clarified that it still intended to publish a critical edition of the books with scholarly introductions.’

While the UK has had, and still has, its history of fascist, anti-Semitic and far-right activities, it remains a mystery to me how France, and other countries of mainland Europe, can so have embraced those values that they became an accepted and major part of the national debate. It was possible, in the 1930s, for explicitly anti-Semitic French intellectuals to write, lecture and influence public opinion with impunity. (Some of them paid a price for their activities after 1945.) Yes, we had Mosley and his blackshirts, yes, we had the ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in 1936 (which, as Harold Rosen has written, wasn’t a battle of Cable Street at all; it was a blockade at Gardener’s Corner); yes, we’ve since had the National Front, the British National Party and, more recently, UKIP and Reform UK. But these malignancies haven’t been and aren’t on the scale, for example, of the Front National (now the Rassemblement National) in France or its equivalents in Germany and Italy. The Communist Party of Great Britain never became a national force of any significance, despite the brilliance of many of its members and the influence they had in areas of civil society (for example in education, the writing of history, medicine, even the Church of England) in which they were prominent. Compare the CPGB’s irrelevance to mainstream politics in the UK with the huge influence the French and Italian communist parties had on their countries’ mainstream politics post-war. Perhaps it is simply that the British character abhors extremes. On the other hand, there is a distinct danger that Reform UK might become an influential force at the national level, repeating the success at local level which it demonstrated in the elections on 1 May this year, in which case my assertion that far-right extremism is more marginal in the UK than in mainland Europe would be destroyed. But historically there is a difference, and I’m not sure of the reason for it. It certainly isn’t anything to do with the inherent nobility of the British people or with ‘the British sense of fair play’.

Anyway, back to Céline. There’s no anti-Semitism in the book so far, 400 pages in. But the chapters set in Africa are dreadful to read, for other reasons. Beside the coruscating portrait of the racism, cupidity, corruption and incompetence of the French colonial regime (a stance which, ironically given Céline’s later writings, aroused the ire of the far-right, deluded as they were then, and all the way through to the Algerian war — and probably continued to be after that final defeat — by the idea that the French empire constituted une mission civilitatrice); beside that, the black people — les nègres — are presented either as hopeless children, or as savages and cannibals, or as just inclined to venality as the whites, or as willingly undertaking junior roles in the violence perpetrated by their colonial masters. There’s a passage in which a French officer orders that 20 lashes be administered to an African whom other Africans have successfully accused of some fraud. The squad of nearly naked African subordinates enthusiastically carries out the punishment. There isn’t a single African person presented with any kind of dignity, maturity or honesty.

I’ll finish the book, which contains some passages of beautiful description and, occasionally, of mordant humour, but I don’t expect to read another Céline novel.

We’re enjoying a period of glorious if intense heat. It’s 30 degrees, at least, outside. We go once a week to the little crêperie in Cléguer. It’s run by a charming though eccentric couple. Their desire never to have to work too late reminds me of my early years in France, when dinner was served at 7.30 and finished by 9.00, and if you made the mistake of turning up at 8.29 the patronne turned you away as if you’d insulted her by asking to see her bottom. Anyway, we feel sorry for the couple at the moment because we’re either the only customers, or we’re two amongst a very small number. It seems that the Bretons (who are always complaining about the heat — ‘Nous n’y sommes pas habitués’) don’t want to eat crêpes during hot weather. This despite the fact that the room is delightfully cool.

Not much productive activity on the literary front at the moment. Educationally, I’m waiting to see the proofs of the book of Michael’s lectures on children’s literature, which will be launched at Goldsmiths on 26 September. I’m also waiting to see another draft of a book about Michael’s father Harold Rosen’s life and work, which my friend Simon Gibbons is writing and which I’ve read in first draft; Simon will send me what he hopes will be the final draft. Also, I’ve put in a proposal to Routledge for the publication of a selective anthology of the writings of Douglas Barnes. I’ve done this with the help of Douglas himself, who is 97 or 98, sharp as a tack mentally though physically frail, and Tony Burgess, one of my co-editors on the James Britton anthology. It would be nice if Routledge said yes; the editing would be a winter job for me, and I could then say that I’d edited books, either alone or with others, on Douglas Barnes, James Britton and Harold Rosen (and on Lev Vygotsky, who was an inspiration to all three of those great figures in the English-teaching world of which I’ve been a part).

I finished Voyage au Bout de la Nuit, and I haven’t much more to say about it. The finally shocking thing is that at every moment when Ferdinand, the narrator, has to make a significant choice, to do what common morality would say was ‘the right thing’, he fails to do it. He’s in Toulouse and word is brought that an old woman has fallen down some steps in the crypt of a church; will he, a qualified doctor, please come? He takes the train to Paris. It turns out that the woman has been killed by the narrator’s friend — or, I think, his alter ego — Robinson. (Robinson has popped up everywhere that Ferdinand has been. It’s not possible that this could happen in a realistic novel.) Robinson has previously tried to kill the old woman, and Ferdinand knew of this, but didn’t report the intended crime to the police, so he is in some way complicit in the intended and then the actual murder. Ferdinand fucks women casually and with no sense of commitment or obligation. When he goes to Toulouse he fucks the woman with whom Robinson is supposedly engaged. She is passionately attached to Robinson, who runs away from her back to Paris. She follows him. When he refuses to agree to marry her and live with her, she shoots him while she, Robinson, Ferdinand and another woman are in a taxi, in the pouring rain, having come back from a funfair. She runs away. Other people carry Robinson’s corpse on a stretcher to the police station. Ferdinand, a potentially key witness to the enquiry into the murder, wanders off to walk by the Seine, and has to be sought to go and give a witness statement. No one in the whole book ever does anything admirable. One exception: a soldier in Africa who sends money back to France for the care of a niece of whom he is touchingly fond.

I can’t think of an equivalent example in the history of English literature: no English book that represented such an abrupt turning point in style. Perhaps that’s because style developed more gradually in English literature than in French. Shakespeare broke across all sorts of boundaries. Corneille and Racine, writing later, were still buttoned up in their Alexandrians.

The weather, to quote Oscar Wilde, ‘continues charming’. Hot but not too hot; we’re having a proper summer. I go to Marseille tomorrow, to see the family there and for the dental treatment about which I wrote earlier. Yesterday was the last of the fortnightly Italian lessons which I so enjoy, until September. Roberte Renaud runs the group, and also Cléguer’s jumelage relationship with Arzano, a town near Naples which has become, more or less, a suburb of the city. (The jumelage is why we have Italian lessons in a small village in Brittany.) She is a former directrice of the école primaire publique in the village, and much loved and admired. She’s a brilliant linguist. She’s sad at the moment, having lost her husband Jean-Pierre earlier this year.

Yesterday the car had its annual service and its bi-annual contrôle technique. All well. And we took delivery of a new dishwasher. The old one had done twenty years’ service. For a month, we imagined that it might be repaired; an expert visited three times. In the end he said that the thing needed new electronics, and Bosch no longer makes the electronic card for such an old model; he would look for a second-hand one. Weary of a month’s washing-up by hand, we said, ‘No thanks,’ and spent the money.

Here I am in hot Marseille. I’ve had two of my three dental appointments. The third and last will be next Monday when Dr Codaccioni, who is charming and brilliant, will fit the crown onto the base of one of my bottom-right molars.

Last night I went to dinner with my niece Tess and her baby Murphy. Murphy is nearly five months old, and now refuses to go to sleep. In the first months after her birth she slept all night. She’s not difficult; she doesn’t cry uncontrollably; but she’s so interested in life that her little bright eyes are wide open, taking everything in: the exhausting demands of motherhood. Tess has a harness in which the baby hangs, close to her breasts, which Murphy likes very much. But though she nods off for a few moments in this position, she soon revives. The only thing to do is to lie down on the bed with her until she falls asleep properly. This Tess was going to do as soon as I left. I walked back through the streets to the sound of 14 July fireworks from the Vieux Port.

On Sunday evening I took Sophie out to a splendid fish restaurant, La Marine at Les Goudes, a hamlet just within the city limits of Marseille towards the east. I say I took her out; yes, I paid, but she drove me there and back along the spectacular coast road, with the calm sea and the rocky islands and the setting sun.

I think my brother Andy has undergone an operation today in Bulgaria to take a biopsy from his cancerous prostate, in order for the doctors to decide which kind of hormone therapy will be most effective in continuing to slow the development of the cancer there and in other parts of his body. Unfortunately, the bone scan which he had last Wednesday revealed several secondary cancers in various places on his skeleton, including the pelvis. He’s impressively calm and philosophical about all this. He knows that his lease of life may not be long; of course, he and we are hoping very much to the contrary. He has the great good fortune to have two close friends, John and Tracey, with whom he is living and who will look after him whatever happens. In addition, Tracey is an experienced nurse who has seen cases like Andy’s many times. I think I shall pop over to Bulgaria at some time in the next few months to see them there. Andy is clear that he wishes to be buried next to his wife in the village graveyard where he used to live. The convention in rural Bulgaria (at least in the largely Roma village where Beryl lies, a few kilometres from the village where Andy now lodges in an apartment which he rents from John and Tracey on their property, and which he himself renovated, he having sold both the houses which he used to own in the Roma village) is that a burial takes place within 24 hours of death. So, no desperate flying all over the world ‘to be there’; no complex feats of organisation undertaken to achieve an appropriate send-off; no tensions between different friends and relatives with different notions as to what ‘should’ happen. I’ve said numerous times, when I’ve been involved in such feats of organisation, that in the aftermath of a death the modal verb ‘should’ does not exist. Anyway, as I say, let’s hope that Andy has years, not months, to live.

I’m going out tonight to the little restaurant which Tess and her partner Stephen own, where the food is original and delicious.

The dental treatment in Marseille was concluded efficiently, and I now have a nice smooth ceramic crown in the lower right-hand side of my mouth, and no pain at all. I changed my mind about the return trip, and came back on the train a day earlier than planned. There’s one train a day running between Marseille and Rennes; after six very comfortable hours on that, most of which time I spent admiring the French countryside, I changed at Rennes for a train coming from Paris and going to Quimper, and was at Lorient at eleven o’clock at night. Mary was there to meet me, and I was back here half an hour later.

Since then, we’ve had David and Tom James with us for six days. David is delighted with the progress on his house in Pont-Scorff. The façade now looks handsome, with elegant granite facings around the windows, and the wall finished in a light yellow limewash. Work on the interior will start after the compulsory French three-week August holiday.

Last Monday was Helen’s birthday. She had the usual array of cards, gifts and messages. In the evening, as ever, we ate at Le Vivier. On Tuesday we went to Priziac to eat with Mary and Jacques and my cousin Ceri, who has been staying with them for a few days. Last night the three came here to dinner; Ceri returns to England today.

The summer continues to be lyrical, memorable, languorous. Day after day passes with temperatures in the mid-20s, often with a cooling breeze, and light clouds ‘moving at summer’s pace’, to quote Larkin. The only concerns in France as a whole, and they are major concerns, are the lack of water and the frequency of wildfires. There were conflagrations near Narbonne and Marseille in July, and this week there has been a huge, destructive fire in the Aude: the worst in France, I read, for 50 years. So far, Brittany has been spared, though I remember a summer two or three years ago when there were bog fires — in which, somehow, the ground itself catches light — further north from here, and the skies were darkened and the smell drifted down to us. And we notice that trees are dying, or looking as if autumn is already here, when we’re still in early August.

I’ve finished Thucydides, with enormous admiration. He’s tougher than Herodotus, less of a storyteller, and he doesn’t range across disciplines (as we moderns might call them), as Herodotus does, including geography and ethnography as well as history. He sticks strictly, and in exhausting detail, to the facts of the dreadful, wasteful war between Athens and its allies and Sparta and its allies. These alliances (who was on one side, who on the other) shifted all the time. It seems that no one trusted anyone. Mass murder was committed routinely. Those who wished to rush to war usually prevailed over those who recommended restraint. The parallels with today’s conflicts struck me even more forcibly than they did with Herodotus. One other refreshing difference between these two great writers: Thucydides, writing some decades after Herodotus, is scornful of the idea that the gods, or portents, or pronouncements from the prophet at Delphi, have any effect whatever on the course of events, except insofar as gullible people are prepared to believe them and to change their behaviour accordingly. ‘We humans, we alone, are responsible for our fate,’ he seems to be saying: a point of view which has been mine for most of my lifetime, since I got out from under the cloud of religion. For some reason the book stops abruptly, seven years before the war did. No one knows why, according to the introduction; perhaps Thucydides died.

Now I’ve started on Plato. For about 50 years I’ve had the Oxford University Press’s The Collected Dialogues of Plato, as translated, variously, by fourteen different people. My brother Peter gave it to me. I’ve glanced at it from time to time, but never given it proper attention. I shall write more about it when I get further in, but at the moment I’m grateful to have come across the place in ‘Apology’, Socrates’s self-defence at his trial, where he utters at length the words which have come down to us in short form as the aphorism ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. ‘If … I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others is really the very best thing that a man can do, and that life without this sort of examination is not worth living, you will be even less inclined to believe me.’

In the third dialogue in the book, ‘Phaedo’, I find some of Socrates’s beliefs, articulated in his cell on the day he was to be executed, with which I am enjoyably in disagreement. He believes that the soul and the body are two different things. I am a materialist: I believe that everything comes from the brain, and that there is no such thing as the soul. For Socrates, the soul existed before a person’s birth and will exist after a person’s death. Depending on how a person has lived, the soul might enter another living being, human or animal, or might, in the case of a philosopher like Socrates, go straight to be with God. (It interests me that the translator, who presumably knew what he was doing, uses the term ‘God’, singular and with a capital letter, as well as ‘gods’, plural and with a small letter, whereas I had thought that the religion of classical Athens was firmly polytheistic.) For me, the notion of transmigration of the soul is nonsense.

Socrates’s other major belief, as expounded in ‘Phaedo’, is that everything that we perceive in this life, whether it be an aesthetic quality like beauty, or a moral quality like goodness, or an intellectual quality like intelligence, or a mathematical quality like oddness or evenness in number, or a physical quality like largeness or smallness, is only a partial example, subject to the imperfection of human perception (though I can’t see how the imperfection of human perception would apply to mathematics), of ideal beauty, goodness, intelligence, oddness, evenness, largeness, smallness, which exists somewhere else. And the ‘somewhere else’ is where the truly good and wise soul goes to be with God. Socrates also offers an extraordinary account of the physical earth and heavens, saying that above our earth and sky there is a truer, more whole, more beautiful earth and sky, inhabited by people who have attained the state of grace enabling them to be there. His account of the underworld, meanwhile, reminds me of similar accounts in Virgil: gloom, murky rivers flowing in and out of Tartarus, flocks of dead souls waiting and hoping for reincarnation and accorded it, wholly, partially or not at all, depending on how they had lived their previous life: in fact, very like the Catholic notion of hell, limbo, purgatory and heaven. All nonsense, of course.

The end of ‘Phaedo’ is very moving, as Socrates calmly drinks the hemlock and lies down, while the friends and admirers who have spent his last hours with him are consumed by tears. His famous joke, just before the hemlock reaches his heart and kills him, is ‘Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget.’ People offered a cock in sacrifice to the god of healing when they were cured of a disease or illness. For Socrates, the passage to the better state of a next life was a form of healing.

‘Charmides’ is a fruitless search for the true meaning of temperance, which is the translator’s (Benjamin Jowett’s) attempt to render in English the Greek word sophrosyne. It’s the first time that Socrates is presented by Plato as writing and speaking in the first person. The dialogue begins: ‘Yesterday evening we returned from the army at Potidea, and having been a good while away, I [that is, Socrates himself] thought that I should like to go and look at my old haunts.’ It’s amusing that the fruitless search is being conducted by two older men in the presence of Charmides, an extraordinarily beautiful youth, who comes to sit down next to Socrates, who admits: ‘And all the people in the palaestra crowded about us, and at that moment, my good friend, I caught sight of the inwards of his garment, and took the flame.’ And at the end of the dialogue, the conversation between great philosopher and gorgeous young man is flirtatious in the extreme: ‘… the time for consideration has passed, I said. When you are determined on anything, and in the mood for violence, you are irresistible. Do not you resist me then, he said. I shall not resist you then, I replied.’ Whether they are referring to robust philosophical debate or to sodomy is ambiguous.

The seventy-fifth anniversary of my parents’ wedding.

I’ve now read Plato’s ‘Laches’, ‘Lysis’, ‘Euthyphro’, ‘Menexenus’, ‘Lesser Hippias’, ‘Ion’ and the very long ‘Gorgias’. My overall impression, so far, is not altogether favourable to Socrates. He engages in what I can only describe as false modesty in his encounters with his interlocutors, constantly telling them that he knows very little and that he is there to learn from them, while engaging in verbal debate designed to show his intellectual superiority. And I’m beginning to tire of one aspect of his ‘method’: to take physical analogies, referring repeatedly for instance to the work of doctors, carpenters, builders, shoemakers or shipbuilders as comparators of the work of the soul. I wrote the other day that I’m a materialist, a monist; I don’t believe in the existence of a soul as an entity distinct from the body.

Then Socrates says things which are just wrong. In his dialogue with Ion, who’s a rhapsodist — that is, one who gives public recitations of the work of poets, in Ion’s case only that of Homer — he states as fact that poetry isn’t an art; it's a form of madness or inspiration brought down to earth from the gods. This is an idea that has persisted. Shakespeare: ‘The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.’ Writing as a very minor poet myself, I can tell Socrates that the writing of poetry has nothing to do with madness and little with inspiration. The reason that I’m a minor poet is that ideas suitable to be made into poems come to me rarely. You could say that those rare visitations are occasions of inspiration; but then a great deal of art is required to turn the idea into a form presentable as a poem.

In ‘Gorgias’, Socrates insists that an evil person must be miserable because he is evil. One of his interlocutors, Polus, cannot accept Socrates’s statement that ‘the man and woman who are noble and good I call happy, but the evil and base I call wretched’. Polus refers to an appalling man, Archelaus, the ruler of Macedonia. He has achieved absolute power by the most atrocious means. Is he therefore miserable? For Socrates, yes; for Polus and for another interlocutor, Callicles, a pragmatist frankly irritated by Socrates’s endless logic-chopping, Archelaus and similar people are blithely untroubled by any form of remorse at what they have done. Reflecting on this disagreement by reference to leaders in our own day, I’m with Polus and Callicles. Putin, Lukashenko, Erdogan, Orban, Netanyahu, Trump, Xi Jinping, the rulers of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Iran and numerous African dictatorships aren’t assailed by guilt at the thought of the brutalities they’ve committed or authorised in order to get and maintain their supremacy. At the end of ‘Gorgias’, Socrates is obliged to repeat, at length, his conviction that there will be a judgement after death; the evil will get their come-uppance then. The similarity between this supposition and the Christian doctrine of the Last Judgement is striking, as I wrote the other day.

‘Gorgias’ covers lots of topics. Socrates is of the view that rhetoric is ‘a routine’. There I agree with him, if he means rhetoric designed merely to stir up a mob, or to persuade a jury to vote one way despite the balance of evidence to the contrary: a form of verbal trickery much in use by politicians and barristers. Later on in the dialogue, he admits that rhetoric, if genuinely intended to serve good ends (Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address? Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech?) is an admirable undertaking and worth learning. He’s very down on cookery; for him it’s another routine, of lower esteem than medicine in the care of the body. Modern attitudes to public health would disagree.

Socrates is like Jesus in his insistence on the rightness of turning the other cheek. He’s an idealist, not in the philosophical but in the popular sense. Alas, the whole of history, in the pessimistic light in which I more and more tend to see it, is a heap of evidence giving the lie to such innocence.

Today is the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It’s at least 40 years since I wrote the little poem ‘Feast of the Assumption’ when we were in Tuscany at Ferragosto. I think it was in 1984, when we were staying in a village half an hour south from Florence, and Helen was studying for her MA in the main room of our rented house and I was writing in the bathroom. Anyway, not many people in largely atheistic France imagine that Mary ascended to heaven and was crowned queen there, but they’re happy to have a long weekend, since today is Friday. The Italian name originates with the emperor Augustus, who gave the common people a day off on 1 August (the month itself named after him, of course) after their labours to bring in the harvest. The Catholic church, piggy-backing as so often on previously pagan feasts, changed Ferragosto from 1 to 15 August to make it coincide with the celebration of the lady’s ascension and assumption.

Back to Plato. ‘Protagoras’ is largely concerned with the questions ‘What is virtue?’ and ‘Is virtue teachable?’ There’s a long digression in the middle into literary criticism. Protagoras, Socrates’s interlocutor, begins by saying, ‘In my view, Socrates, the most important part of a man’s education is to become an authority on poetry.’ I might agree with that, though not many people would. Protagoras refers to a poem by Simonides which, he says, however beautiful and well written, is inconsistent. In the poem, a sage called Pittacus first says that it is hard for a man to become good. Later, the poem casts doubt on Pittacus’s wisdom that ‘To be noble … is hard.’ The discussion between Protagoras and Socrates then turns on the difference between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’: might this difference resolve the apparent inconsistency? By the end of the dialogue, as often, we’re not sure whether anything solid has been decided. I think that, on the whole, Socrates sticks to his initial view that virtue isn’t teachable. He certainly doesn’t believe that he or Protagoras have arrived at a satisfactory definition of virtue. He says, just before the end, ‘I should like to follow up our present talk with a determined attack on virtue itself and its essential nature. Then we could return to the question whether or not it can be taught …’

One statement in the dialogue which gives me great trouble is that no one commits evil voluntarily. That is, everyone from the individual murderer and rapist through to mass murderers like Stalin, Hitler or Putin commit their acts in the belief that they are doing the right thing; or, if they are mad, their recourse to an evil act is not a voluntary decision. I find that statement difficult to stomach, in that it seems to let the worst people off the hook. But I suppose Socrates would say, ‘Whether or not you find something difficult to stomach is not the point; the point is, is the statement true?’ Were Stalin or Hitler, is Putin today, when he’s going to meet Trump to talk about Ukraine, never assailed, however briefly, by the certain knowledge that they were or are doing evil?

‘Meno’ is largely a reprise of ‘Protagoras’, in that the same two questions about virtue are debated further. Meno is initially quite sure what virtue is, and gives a series of examples of virtue in practice: for example, the virtue of a man is to govern a city well; the virtue of a woman is to govern a household well. Socrates, as often, is after, not examples of what the outcomes or manifestations of virtue might be, but what is the thing itself. He cites as comparators ‘colour’ and ‘shape’. We can easily give examples of both these qualities: ‘white’ or ‘square’. But to define the thing itself is more difficult, perhaps impossible. This passage of the dialogue is an example of Plato’s (or was is Socrates’s, and is Plato merely the amanuensis?) theme that the things of which we are aware as humans, whether they be physical or metaphysical things, are merely imperfect forms, partially perceived, of ideals which exist somewhere else. The question, ‘Where is the “somewhere else”?’ is, if not answered, at least obliquely referred to in the passage where Socrates asserts, mystically, that knowledge is recollection of things known by the soul in a previous life. All nonsense, of course. He puts some geometric questions to one of Meno’s slaves, a boy who has had no education whatever, and the boy does, at least in part, answer correctly once his previous incorrect answer has been pointed out. Socrates takes this as proof that the boy is drawing on knowledge which his soul has brought with it from a previous life.

At the end of the dialogue, we are once again no nearer to the truth. Socrates says, ‘If all we have said in this discussion, and the questions we have asked, have been right, virtue will be acquired neither by nature nor by teaching. Whoever has it gets it by divine dispensation without taking thought, unless he be the kind of statesman who can create another like himself. Should there be such a man, he would be among the living practically what Homer said Tiresias was among the dead, when he described him as the only one in the underworld who kept his wits — “the others are mere flitting shades”. Where virtue is concerned such a man would be just like that, a solid reality among shadows.’ It’s interesting and surprising that Socrates uses the example of the wise statesman as the only exception to the rule that virtue is ‘acquired neither by nature nor by teaching’. The exception doesn’t work for me. And of course I have a simple answer to the question, ‘Is virtue teachable?’ The answer is, ‘Yes. By example.’

‘Euthydemus’ is a good example of why most people think that philosophy is a waste of time and intellectual effort. Two clever-clever brothers show, successfully, that they can make fools of anyone they encounter in verbal jousts. Indeed, they manage to make a fool of Socrates for a while. But Socrates comes near to the truth when he says that the brothers’ account of themselves ‘looks well rather than truly is well’. Strangely, however, he is critical of those ‘whom Prodicus called the frontiersmen between philosophy and politics’. Socrates wants philosophy to be a purer, a higher thing. I remember writing in a previous Occurrences that the only philosophy which I have got time for is one that asks the big questions like, ‘How is a state best governed? What is the just society?’, and doesn’t bother itself with logic-chopping and dancing exquisitely around the meanings of words. So for me, there is an inevitable and desirable connection between philosophy and politics, as so many university courses, notably PPE at Oxford, recognise.

I suppose I ought to acknowledge, and I do, that ideas which I can easily agree with or disagree with, two and a half millennia after they were expressed, were extraordinarily original, ground-breaking, in the context of their time. Perhaps the very idea of debating metaphysical questions, of reflecting on our condition, of arguing about the state and governance, was new, at least in the West. My ignorance of the work of the pre-Socratic philosophers, an ignorance I might or might not get around to mending, is the reason for my ‘perhaps’.

I mentioned my pessimism at the end of the entry before last. No clearer evidence in support of a tragic view of human affairs could be provided than the sight of the President of the United States welcoming a war criminal, Putin, to their meeting in Alaska, and stepping with him along a red carpet into the President’s bullet-proof car. I’m sure that, within the next few days, the two of them are going to propose an end to the war in Ukraine on the basis that the war criminal would have the whole of the Donbass, including the parts which Russia hasn’t already occupied, and Crimea. This really is the moment when Europe must stand up and refuse such a betrayal of a sovereign country which, so the European leaders keep saying, it will never abandon. Alas, I have the deepest doubts about Europe’s willingness and, more to the point, its practical military capacity to enforce a complete Russian withdrawal from the country the war criminal has invaded. Socrates speculates about a golden age which existed at some time in the remote past; he says that he and his contemporaries are living in an iron age. At least iron is a metal. We’re now living in a plastic age: easily bendable, where no statement or action has any trustworthy solidity.

I’ve enormously enjoyed ‘Cratylus’, because it’s about language. Socrates wants to know how everything and everyone came to have a name. Did the gods, or some ancestors vaguely defined as legislators, give people and things their names? The relationship between a thing and its name (the name being what modern linguistics would call a thing’s ‘referent’) is analogous, for Socrates and presumably for Plato, to the notion, which I’ve mentioned before, that every thing and every quality that we perceive now, with our limited powers of apprehension, powers which differ from person to person, is but an imperfect form of the ideal essence of the thing or the quality, which exists elsewhere.

Socrates engages in a firework display of learning about the etymology of individual words. I suspect (but I don’t know, because I have no Greek) that most of his assertions are made up. Essentially, he says, the present form and spelling of words can be traced back to the underlying meaning or concept which gave birth to the word. One example: after offering one theory of the origin of the word ‘soul’ (ψυχή), and then dismissing it, Socrates says to Hermogenes, one of his two interlocutors in the dialogue, ‘What is that which holds and carries and gives life and motion to the entire nature of the body? What else but the soul?’ Hermogenes: ‘Just that.’ Socrates: ‘And do you not believe with Anaxagoras that mind or soul is the ordering and containing principle of all things?’ Hermogenes: ‘Yes, I do.’ Socrates: ‘Then you may well call that power φυσέχή which carries and holds nature [several words in Greek follow, presumably meaning ‘carries and holds nature’, which it would take me too long to transliterate], and this may be refined away into ψυχή.’ Incidentally, when Socrates asks whether Hermogenes believes that ‘mind [my italics] or soul is the ordering and containing principle of all things’, he comes very close to my materialist position, that, so far as humans are concerned, it all starts, continues and ends with the brain.

When Socrates is in doubt about an etymology, he sometimes ascribes the doubt to the word’s foreign origin. There is conversation about different dialects of the Greek language. At one moment, near the end of the dialogue, Socrates comes close to saying, perhaps without realising it, that Greek is inherited from Phoenician, which is inherited from Egyptian, where, at the beginning, letters were indeed pictures of the thing they represented. That is just my inference, but it goes back to the relationship between forms and ideals. Very near the end, in an insight which goes beyond language, he says that we can never really know what things are like: ‘Nor yet can [things] be known by anyone, for at the moment that an observer approaches, then they become other and of another nature, so that you cannot get any further in knowing their nature or state, for you cannot know that which has no state.’ This wisdom is two and a half millennia before Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, and the Hawthorne effect, which I first became aware of in the context of educational research, which says that once a researcher starts looking at a child’s behaviour, the behaviour changes from that which prevailed before the researcher arrived.

One thing I love about Socrates: just when you’ve almost lost him, he puts his foot on the ground. ‘Neither will he so far trust names or the givers of names as to be confident in any knowledge which condemns himself and other existences to an unhealthy state of unreality; he will not believe that all things leak like a pot, or imagine that the world is a man who has a running at the nose.’

My father’s birthday: he would have been 101 today.

Plato’s ‘Phaedrus’ I find a puzzle. The writer of the introduction tells me (not that I’m obliged to agree with her) that it is ‘one of the greatest of the dialogues’. There are long disquisitions on the nature of love. Love, in the sense of sexual desire, is a strictly male, homosexual business; women hardly get a look in, and when they do it’s for the grudging reason that, well, the race does need to be propagated. Phaedrus recounts to Socrates, to the best of his memory, a speech he has just heard given by Lysias, whom he describes as ‘the ablest writer of our day’. The argument is essentially that it’s more worthy for a beloved, who will be, naturally, a handsome boy, to yield to the desires of a man who is not in love with him than to those of one who is. Socrates listens, says that Lysias’s speech fails because it is only about physical desire, and then makes two speeches of his own, first on the dangers of love and then, contrary-wise, praising love in sublime terms, with all sorts of mystical nonsense about how physical desire is the first step upwards towards a true understanding of essential beauty. Yes to the physical effects of sexual desire: ‘first there come upon him a shuddering and a measure of that awe which the vision inspired, and then reverence as at the sight of a god, and but for fear of being deemed a very madman he would offer sacrifice to his beloved, as to a holy image of deity’. But no to the idea that physical desire for another body is the initial gateway to something purer and higher. Socrates’s second speech, though represented in English in prose, struck me in reading it as somewhat ‘poetical’, high-flown. Sure enough, in the later part of the dialogue it seems that all the preceding speeches are but examples of the slippery business of rhetoric; Socrates knew what he was doing in laying that trap; you can convince anyone — or, at least, most people — of anything if you’re clever enough with words. Rhetoric which really aims to present the truth in a persuasive way is admirable, of course; but much rhetoric merely deceives.

There’s very good advice about how a speaker should pay attention to the needs and level of understanding of his audience. And there’s a marvellous story, very near the end, about how an Egyptian who’d invented writing (and we know that the Egyptians were one of the first civilisations to invent writing, and that the Greeks owe it them, via the Phoenicians, as I wrote yesterday) went to the Egyptian king and told him of its marvellous benefits: ‘Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories; my discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom.’ The king was sensible enough to respond immediately that, on the contrary, people ‘will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.’ Far superior to writing is dialectical speaking (of the sort, presumably, of which Socrates was a master): ‘The dialectician selects a soul of the right type [‘soul’ here, I think, meaning ‘receptive audience’], and in it he plants and sows his words founded on knowledge, words which can both defend themselves and him who planted them, words which instead of remaining barren [as ‘dead’ written words do] contain a seed whence new words grow up in new characters, whereby the seed is vouched immortality, and its possessor the fullest measure of blessedness that man can attain to.’

Writing as a writer, I feel a bit put down by this, although I find the later part of the dialogue, which like the whole of ‘Cratylus’ is about language, much more interesting than the earlier. And at the very end of the piece, Socrates offers a prayer to the god Pan, who’s one of the divinities worshipped at the place in the countryside where he and Phaedrus have been conversing. Part of the prayer goes: ‘May I count him rich who is wise, and as for gold, may I possess so much of it as only a temperate man might bear and carry with him.’ I agree with that.

‘Symposium’ is famous, quite straightforward, and often very funny. Some men get together, most of them hung over from the previous night’s drinking, and decide to drink some more, though ‘it was unanimously agreed that this was not to be a drunken party, and that the wine was to be served merely by way of refreshment’. My experience of gatherings where wine is generously served suggests that the best resolutions about moderation in drinking often go by the board once the grape takes its effect. So, I think, was the case here.

The body of the text, which is not strictly speaking a dialogue at all, is a series of speeches on the nature of love, physical and/or spiritual. The funniest is that given by Aristophanes, the writer of comedies, who has to postpone his contribution because he’s assailed by a fit of the hiccups. Eryximachus, who’s a doctor, takes Aristophanes’s turn, having given him advice on how to quell the hiccups. When recovered, Aristophanes speaks next, offering the engaging idea that once, in the far distant past, there were three kinds of person: male, female, and ‘there was a third which partook of the nature of both.’ (Is this transsexuality avant la lettre?) ‘… each of these beings was globular in shape, with rounded back and sides, four arms and four legs, and two faces, both the same, on a cylindrical neck, and one head, with one face one side and one the other, and four ears, and two lots of privates, and all the other parts to match … And such, gentlemen, were their strength and energy, and such their arrogance, that they actually tried … to scale the heights of heaven and set upon the gods.’ Zeus and the other gods couldn’t tolerate this, of course, so the creatures were chopped in half. ‘Now, when the work of bisection was complete it left each half with a desperate yearning for the other, and they ran together and flung their arms around each other’s necks, and asked for nothing better than to be rolled into one. So much so, that they began to die of hunger and general inertia … the race was dying out.’ Zeus felt sorry for these unfortunates, and ‘moved their members round to the front and made them propagate among themselves, the male begetting upon the female.’ Aristophanes elaborates on his theory, which takes into account homosexual love between men and between women as well as heterosexual love; it explains why different people fall in love in different ways. It's a tour de force of absurdity.

Socrates is (almost) the last to speak. His offering describes the wisdom he has obtained from ‘a Mantinean woman called Diotoma — a woman who was deeply versed in [love] and many other fields of knowledge.’ Essentially, the speech is an assertion that ‘the beauties of the body are as nothing to the beauties of the soul’, although it’s perfectly clear that the beauties of the body have a powerful attraction for Socrates. The complexity of his nature — a lover of young men who refrains from the sexual expression of that love — is confirmed when his young lover Alcibiades gatecrashes the party, drunk, and tells the gathering how he practically offered his body to Socrates: ‘I took him in my arms and lay there all night with this godlike and extraordinary man … when I got up the next morning I had no more slept with Socrates, within the meaning of the act, than if he’d been my father or an elder brother.’

More revellers burst in, most of the original party fall asleep, but Socrates is still talking, now about tragedy and comedy. ‘… as he clinched the argument, which [Agathon and Aristophanes] were scarcely in a state to follow, they began to nod, and first Aristophanes fell off to sleep and then Agathon, as day was breaking. Whereupon Socrates tucked them up comfortably and went away … after calling at the Lyceum for a bath, he spent the rest of the day as usual, and then, toward evening, made his way home to rest.’ He obviously had a remarkable physical constitution to go with his unequalled intellectual talents.

Summer has ended and autumn has begun. The long drought is over. There have been several heavy downpours in recent days, and this afternoon we have le crachat Breton: the lightest of drizzle, barely visible from inside the house, but distinctly capable of dampening a person after ten minutes’ exposure.

Deirdre Finan was here last week, as every year, and on Friday we’ll welcome Heather and David Loxton for a few days.

I’ve been busy proof-reading Michael Rosen’s book of lectures about children’s literature. It’s to be called Adventures in Wonderland: An Introduction to the History and Theory of Children’s Literature. The main title was my idea. It’s now gone to press, and the launch will be at Goldsmiths on 26 September. I’ll pop over to London for a few days for that, come back on the 27th, and a few days later we’ll make our way down to Italy, to Puglia, where we’ll have two weeks with Glenda and Julian Walton in a trullo (a traditional Pugliese house) owned by a friend of Glenda’s.

Mary and Jacques are in London at the moment, organising the sale of Mary’s house. It’s an asset she managed to rescue from the wreckage of her first marriage. The money from the sale will be handy for both of them (especially since Mary won’t have much by way of a pension), although she will pay capital gains tax, since the house isn’t her principal residence. While they’re in London they’re decorating our flat.

My friends Francis and Alain have done more forestry work in the garden: not as much as they did this time last year, but still substantial. During last winter a huge oak fell from the bank dividing our property from Jean and Annick’s, fortunately onto our side. In falling, it brought down an adjacent sweet chestnut. Then there was a dead oak on the bank dividing us from the road, and a third oak, smaller, which had already fallen. I may have written before that the usual field divider in Brittany is the talus: a bank of earth and stones into which trees are planted, with the idea that their roots will secure the structure. Years ago, when many people worked on the land, it was a winter job to coppice the trees to make faggots for the fire, and to prevent them from growing too big. Of course that doesn’t happen now, so the trees do grow too big for the talus in which they’re planted. They become unstable and inclined to topple over during a storm; something which has happened to us several times in recent years.

A while ago, Routledge responded to the proposal for an anthology of the writings of Douglas Barnes, which Douglas, Tony Burgess and I had submitted. They want a detailed list of chapters, with abstracts, before considering publication. We’ve said that we’ll provide that by the end of November. I’ve bought five of Douglas’s books, second hand, and I’m about to start reading them, and re-reading the two works of his that I do know: Douglas’s contribution to Language, the Learner and the School and his From Communication to Curriculum.

Not much else to report, apart from the fact that the fête de Saint Guénaël went very well on Sunday. About 600 people ate lunch, we sold nearly 1,300 euros-worth of wine, cider and water to people going to eat, the bar did a roaring trade, as did the makers of crêpes, and Pascal who runs the tombola. I think the overall takings were about 14,000 euros (a record), so the profit will be between 4,000 and 5,000 euros, all of which goes to the upkeep of the chapel. The most important thing about the fête is its conviviality. I love being part of it.

Here we are in Puglia with Glenda and Julian Walton. The trullo we’re in is a delight. The central part of the house has three conical roofs, in traditional style, and that is where Helen and I sleep. On either side are modern extensions, elegantly done, and the whole place is comfortable without being luxurious. The grounds have olive and fig trees, and there is a swimming pool, which I’ve entered only once, for the water is chilly as autumn progresses. The local town, Ceglie Messapica, is, like hundreds of medium-sized towns in Italy, a mixture of charmless if comfortable blocks of flats built since the Second World War, where most of the population live, and a historic centre of winding narrow streets, ancient little houses and grander palazzi where one can get pleasantly lost. Here wander the tourists, like us, following maps on mobile phones, seeking ‘authenticity’ in restaurants and shops selling local wine and olive oil.

We’ve been to Ostuni, Locorotondo and Lecce. All are crawling with tourists (again, like us), but worth the visit despite the inconvenience mentioned by Sartre (l’enfer, c’est les autres). Ostuni, la città Bianca, is quite near the sea, as white as its name, and if you get away from the centre there are lost little alleys which don’t look much different from what they must have looked like five hundred years ago. Locorotondo is on a hilltop, smaller than Ostuni, also limewashed white, and exquisitely beautiful. Lecce is a major city whose large historic centre is of honey-coloured limestone, and a wonder of the world. The Piazza del Duomo is one of those spaces, like the Piazza del Campo in Siena, which makes you gasp the first time you enter it. Unlike the Piazza del Campo, there’s only one way in and one way out. We were content to admire the baroque cathedral, the bishop’s palace and the former seminary from the outside, although Glenda and Julian did pay to enter the cathedral. My usual behaviour with churches in Italy is to admire their exterior. Inside are tawdry pieces of sanctimonious junk featuring Christ’s lingering execution and the physical mutilation of saints: bizarre horrors whose suffering and cruelty are celebrated as badges of honour in one of the world’s major religions. Attempts at modernism only make matters worse. There are exceptions, usually in little overlooked Romanesque churches with simple round interior arches, a font, an altar and not much else.

The launch of Michael Rosen’s book at Goldsmiths on 26 September went well. There were about 200 people there, including plenty of younger folk (although it was nice to see a few old chums too). Michael and I did a double act, me picking out themes in the book and him reading out brief passages. He’s a natural entertainer, so there were plenty of laughs, and I’m happy to play the role of straight man to his funny man. We sold about 100 books on the night, so we weren’t being extravagant to do a first print run of 150.

I flew back to Brittany the next morning, Saturday, and on the following Tuesday we began our long drive down here, stopping at the château in the Cher where we’ve already stayed twice this year, at a hotel near Aix-en-Provence, a hotel in Parma, and an albergo diffuso at Termoli on the Adriatic coast. I hadn’t heard of alberghi diffusi until we got there, but now I see them in all the towns which attract foreigners like us. Entrepreneurial people buy up little houses or flats in ancient town centres, no doubt for a song since the former owners want to live somewhere more comfortable and convenient, restore them tastefully and rent them as hotel rooms scattered around the nearby streets. Our apartment was beautifully done, with brightly coloured tiles on the floor, a well-appointed bathroom, and a view over the Adriatic, which that evening was wild with a strong cold wind blowing off the sea and big waves crashing against the protective town walls.

I’m reading the short stories of Cesare Pavese, in a double volume which I took from Myra’s library, together with a book of his poems. So far, the stories are melancholy accounts in which people, including the narrator in some cases, fail to make satisfying connections or relationships with fellow humans. Wikipedia tells me that Pavese killed himself in 1950 at the age of 41. He had suffered at the hands of the fascist regime, being imprisoned and then exiled to the south, as so many opponents of the government were, but, though sympathetic to the anti-fascist cause, he wasn’t active in opposing Mussolini and later the Germans. His imprisonment and exile were imposed simply because he had a letter in his possession from a political prisoner. He avoided being drafted into the Italian army because of ill health. He spent part of the war years in a hospital, being treated for asthma. After the war he joined the Italian Communist Party, and worked on its newspaper, L’Humanità. Novelist, short-story writer, poet, critic, translator: this prolific, troubled man now has a reputation as one of 20th-century Italy’s greatest literary figures. I shall persist.

Two days ago we made the mistake of going to Alberobello, perhaps the most famous tourist destination in Puglia, with its remarkable cluster of about a thousand trulli. The attempt to park was the first difficulty; for some reason most of the car parks had been closed, perhaps because the authorities had decided that ‘the season’ was over. When finally we found a space, we realised that we were merely four individuals amongst many thousands of visitors, most shuffling forward in large groups, following a guide carrying a flag, and all wearing some kind of identifying badge on a lanyard, I suppose to remind themselves which party they belonged to. They had obviously been released from coaches parked further off, having previously been released from block-booked hotels whose board and lodging formed part of their experience of ‘bellissima Puglia’. Most were obese. All were fixated on their mobile phones, as if that reality were more authentic than the theme-park ‘reality’ around them. I was so depressed by the sight that I couldn’t go further than the edge of the centro storico, while the others braved the crowds for three quarters of an hour. Never was Sartre’s cynical summing-up of the human condition more accurately exemplified. One important thing I learned, however, from the big board welcoming people to Alberobello. The reason for the existence of these beautiful conical structures is that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the then lords of the area levied a tax on all the houses. The trulli were constructed without mortar, so when word got about that the tax gatherers were coming (the local landowners warned the peasants who worked the land for them), the trulli were simply dismantled, only to be reconstructed when the tax gatherers had gone. Where the people lived while the tax gatherers were in the district, it didn’t say. Perhaps they slept in the landowners’ barns. I find it hard to believe that an early form of tax avoidance was the reason for the construction of trulli across the whole region. In any case, when the Bourbons became lords of the land in 1797, they abolished the tax. Now, you can see brand-new trulli all over the place, built with mortar, of course. Our trullo has mortar, though it isn’t brand-new.

Seeking relief from ‘les autres’, we drove on to Cisternino, a hilltop town a few kilometres away, where the tourists (I have to keep saying ‘people like us’) were far fewer, and the full beauty of the place, with its limewashed ancient houses, often seeming to climb up over each other, its narrow streets and tiny quiet squares, could be enjoyed. We lunched there, deliciously and somewhat excessively, to the extent that we ate very little when we were back in the house that evening.

I’ve already written that in this region of Italy (and perhaps it’s just an extreme version of what is to be seen everywhere in the country) the towns on the tourist routes have exquisite centri storichi, which draw the visitors, cheek by jowl with modern, charmless blocks of apartments where most of the people live. I found myself saying, in jest, as we walked through the modern parts, ‘I wonder whether, in four hundred years’ time, people will gaze at these buildings in awe and admiration, and ask themselves why it isn’t possible to build in the 25th century as beautifully as was done in the 20th and 21st.’ And of course I knew the answer to that speculation. Lecce, Locorotondo, Alberobello, Ostuni and Cisternino were all built using the local materials available at the time. Why did they get it so right and why have we got it so wrong? Is it just the dramatic increase in population? The arrival of new technologies and materials, such as ready-mixed reinforced concrete, which are so convenient and cheap (whatever their environmental impact) that they have rendered the vernacular and organic obsolete and expensive? Of course there are beautiful examples of modern domestic architecture here and there, but the vast majority of mass-produced dwellings in the ‘international’ style are an offence to the eye, however comfortable they may be to live in.

One more sad thing to say about Puglia: people leave their rubbish everywhere. On the autostrade and in their service stations, waste disposal and recycling are impeccably organised. But the sides of the ordinary roads are littered with plastic bags containing rubbish of all kinds, and in every available corner you might see abandoned tyres, building materials, occasionally even fridges and washing machines, just left there. Yes, there are waste bins for paper and for plastic, as well as for general rubbish. There may well be recycling centres at the edge of the towns, though I didn’t notice one at Ceglie Messapica. But it’s as if the peasant mentality of a century ago, when most waste either rotted or rusted, and when there was less waste anyway, has survived into our era, when people have much more, especially much more that won’t degrade for several lifetimes, if ever. I’m sure that the authorities are aware of the problem (it isn’t doing the region any favours from the point of view of tourist income), but it is, as the Italians would say, una sporcizia.

I am so much enjoying Pavese’s stories. His portrayals of the people, culture and customs of Piedmont, urban and rural, in the first half of the last century are wonderful. He is a neo-realist, I suppose, in that the stories don’t necessarily or at all have ‘an ending’: they are the literary equivalent of a painting (perhaps Dutch?) where a lot is going on, and the eye wanders from event to event. I’ve just finished a long story, ‘Notte di festa’, which is set on the feast of San Rocco, 16 August, and is a masterpiece of its kind. I think I’ll translate the stories, for my own satisfaction, although no doubt someone published an English translation a long time ago.

Last night we ate for the second time in the restaurant in Ceglie Messapica which, we all agree, is our favourite, and we shall do so again on Friday. On Saturday we depart, Glenda and Julian by plane from Bari to Stansted, we by road. We’re staying on Saturday night in a hotel near Chiusi, the town at the edge of Tuscany where we used to meet friends coming by train to spend time with us at Rodellosso. On Sunday we drive up the autostrada to Parma, to the same hotel that we stayed in on the way down. We’re giving ourselves two nights there, so we can see Parma properly on the Monday.

We got back home on Friday. In the event, we stayed three nights in Parma, because, having arrived on Sunday evening, we realised that the city’s principal museum, La Pilotta (I should say, rather, the three museums, one library and one theatre which comprise the Complesso Monumentale which bears that name) would be closed the next day. So on the Monday we enjoyed wandering around the impressive historic centre of the city, and visited the cathedral and the church of Saint John the Evangelist. On the Tuesday we went to La Pilotta. The building itself is a monument to the grandeur, one might say the megalomania, of the Farnese family. It is vast, and looks to be made of the same kind of brick of which Siena is constructed. It was never intended by the Farnese dukes to be a palace; oh no, they already had one palace in the park across the river (which still stands) and another between La Pilotta and the old city (which has been demolished). La Pilotta was an armoury, stables, barracks, accommodation for the ducal court’s vast numbers of servants and hangers-on, and a place for playing games. The name refers to ‘the noble game of “pelota” which was played in the courtyards on particular occasions’ (so the pamphlet describing the complesso tells me). The building was badly damaged in the Second World War, as the Germans retreated northwards, destroying as they went.

The Farnese Theatre is quite stunning. It is made of wood and painted plaster, and was constructed inside the former armoury. It reminded me a bit of Covent Garden. Its floor area must be similar, although it isn’t so high. It was built in 1618, so that Ranuccio Farnese I could impress Cosimo Medici II when the latter stopped in Parma on his way from Florence to Milan. Typically, the visit didn’t happen, so the theatre was only inaugurated ten years later. ‘The theatre was designed by Giovan Battista Alcotti who created the first enclosed space for performances equipped with an engineering system for moving scenery.’

The National Gallery contains some utterly wonderful works of art: Italian religious paintings, especially of the Sienese school; altarpieces by Correggio transferred from local churches; Dutch realist works; an exquisite Leonardo drawing of a young woman; Hans Holbein’s portrait of Erasmus; a Canaletto (of Venice of course); and a great deal of mannerist stuff which leaves me cold. The collection has a turbulent history. The earliest part of it came to Parma when the Farnese family moved there in the 17th century (I can’t be more exact). In 1734 the dynasty came to an end, the Bourbons took over and shipped the whole lot to Naples. Fortunately, there was an enlightened Bourbon couple (in both the popular and academic senses of the adjective) who from 1748 rebuilt the collection. The next thief was Napoleon, who saw to it that many of the newly acquired works went to Paris (where some of them still are). Once again, an enlightened person, Maria Luigia of Austria, got most of them back, and began to found the collection as it now is.

There’s an impressive archaeological museum and an awe-inspiring library, whose thousands of calf-backed volumes are inaccessible except by ladder. The last institution in the complesso is, I would bet, the least visited, but in some ways the one that moved me most. The Bodoni Museum is a tribute to one of Parma’s great sons, the printer, typographer, type-designer, compositor and publisher Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813). The museum contains one of his printing presses, a selection of his punches and matrices, hundreds of his actual lead letters, punctuation marks and ‘flourishes’, and, most impressive of all, several of the absolutely beautiful books he made, for example a large volume containing Homer’s Iliad, another containing Dante’s La Divina Commedia open at the first page, and several volumes simply illustrating the huge range of typefaces he had created, represented in numerous languages and different scripts. Wonderful.

The restaurant attached to the hotel where we stayed, Ristorante Cocchi, served delicious, delicate food, attesting to Emilia’s reputation as one of the centres of gastronomy in Italy.

Then a night in Provence, then a night in the château in central France where we’ve stayed several times now, then home. Autumn is fully here. Many of the trees are half-clothed, and there are chestnuts rotting everywhere on the roads.

We got back to London last Sunday. All is well in the flat. Helen was delighted to see it newly decorated. Mary and Jacques, the decorators, came to dinner last night so we could celebrate their work. They haven’t yet sold Mary’s house in Camberwell, but they’re relaxed about that. It will sell some time, probably next year, and they have their house in Priziac. They also go frequently to Marseille (they’re going tomorrow) to see family there, and usually stay in Sophie’s flat.

Today Susanna Howard (co-executor with me of Myra’s estate) and I went to the burial ground in Buckinghamshire where Myra and her partner James Berry are buried. We’ve commissioned a wooden memorial to them both, which was installed at the head of their grave as we watched. It has their names, dates, professions (‘Poet and Writer’, ‘Educationist and Poet’) and a quotation from one of each of their poems.

There will a little gathering there tomorrow for friends of them both. I would normally be present again, but Hazel Taylor, a dear friend of mine for 50 years (and a good friend of Myra’s) died on 23 October, two years to the day after Myra died. So Helen and I will be going to Hazel’s funeral in south London. Until two or three years ago, she was a member of our Ros Moger Terry Furlong Group, which funds scholarships under the auspices of the Canon Collins Trust for students from southern African countries to study for higher degrees in South African universities. Hazel made several generous contributions to the fund.

I enjoy being back in Camden Town. It’s ‘my manor’. I meet lots of people I know, which can only happen in a great city when you’ve lived in one district for a long time. We shall go to Daphne’s tomorrow evening to eat, which will be a cheering experience after attending a funeral on what, so we are warned, will be a day of heavy continuous rain.

I fear that, as the end of the year approaches, the 2025 diary will be shorter than usual. The main reason (apart from my standard excuse of laziness) is that, as I expect I’ve written before, the shock of Trump’s victory in November of last year, and his behaviour since, plus the numerous wounds which Labour has inflicted on itself since its magnificent victory in July of last year, plus the terrifying fact that a populist, xenophobic party is leading in the opinion polls in the UK at the moment (so it seems that ‘populist’ is popular), have caused me to retreat to the small circles where I might be able to have some influence. I find that the emotional commitment to Labour and to centre-left parties around the world, which I’ve sustained for about 50 years now, has become too painful to bear. So I don’t watch the news, and I don’t buy The Guardian (though I have the paper’s online version as the splash page on my browser). It’s not that I have, in practical terms, retreated from my commitment to Labour. I’ll never join another party, and I continue to make a monthly contribution as well as paying the full membership fee. It’s just that my political position now is nothing more ambitious than that I will support and vote for the least bad party capable of gaining and using power within the parliamentary system. Which is, as they say, a low bar.

But which is not to say that Labour has no achievements to be proud of in its 18 months of government. The abolition of the two-child limit for child benefit; the new employment rights for workers, which will finally become law next year despite the stubborn resistance of Conservative peers in the Lords; the much better relationship with the EU; the progressive re-nationalisation of the railways as the train companies’ time-limited franchises end. But Labour isn’t good at publicising these achievements; the Tory press has only one purpose in mind, which is to discredit Labour at every opportunity (and Labour has offered its enemies in the press numerous such opportunities); and, at the moment, a party led by a racist, with no policy other than to foment rage and indignation against asylum seekers, commands more support than any other. It’s true that Labour doesn’t have to fight a general election for another three and a half years. If in the next year or so it can really get a grip on the problem of illegal immigration (the word ‘illegal’ has only become legalistically correct since a law passed when the Tories were in government), while respecting our commitments in international law, the tide may turn in its favour. At the moment, beneath the skin of the ‘civilised’, ‘tolerant’ attitudes on which the British like to pride themselves, the xenophobic dog is snarling. In towns all over England (though not in London and other great multi-ethnic conurbations), flags of St George and Union Jacks have begun to appear on lampposts and other bits of public property (often, in the case of the lampposts, at half mast). ‘Aren’t you proud of your country?’ the racist will say. This sudden resort to flag-flying reminds me of the hatreds still festering in Northern Ireland and — much more sinister — of the last scene in the film Cabaret, in which apparently innocent young white men sing ‘Tomorrow belongs to me’ as swastika flags appear in the background, one after the other.

That may be a melodramatic comparison. If — God (who doesn’t exist) forbid — Reform UK, possibly enlarged by defections from the right of the Conservative Party, assumed the government of the UK in 2029, I don’t imagine that anything remotely approaching the horrors enacted by the Nazis would occur. But such an eventuality would certainly allow the hundreds of thousands of racists in the UK to perform racist acts and utter racist abuse with greater impunity. And, of course, the mundane but necessary business of governing competently would immediately be shown to be beyond Reform’s powers. On a much smaller scale, the party’s incompetence has already been demonstrated in its management (or mismanagement) of the councils whose control they won in elections in the spring.

Update on the proposed anthology of Douglas Barnes’s writings: on 4 December I sent to Routledge the additional material which the commissioning editor for educational research had requested in August: a list of chapter titles plus abstracts for each chapter, plus a complete sample chapter. In fact, I had already put together a draft of the whole book, because I found that I couldn’t make a selection in the abstract (in the other sense); I had to get my hands on the stuff. So it’s been a lot of work during the autumn. A week later the commissioning editor (not the August one — a replacement) wrote casually to say, in effect, ‘Sorry, but this is all on the wrong form. Please resubmit it on a different form.’ I was furious. After brooding on the matter for 24 hours, and talking to Tony Burgess about it, I did as I was asked and sent it off with a savage email, which I reproduce here.

‘I’m attaching the standard monograph form as you requested. But before you read it, Tony, Douglas and I would like answers to three questions.

When you wrote to us on 13 November, introducing yourself as [the previous person’s] replacement as Editor, Education Research, you had obviously, as a competent commissioning editor, read the email trail which you inherited from [the previous person], including our proposal as sent to [a different commissioning editor] on 22 June, and [the previous person’s] reply of 22 August requiring a substantial amount of new material. As you know, we provided that new material on 4 December. Why did you not signal on 13 November that you needed the information on a different form?

Why, when [the previous person] wrote on 22 August requiring the new material, did she, the then Editor, Education Research, presumably fully aware of the specific form required for submissions for research monographs, not ask us to put the submission onto the appropriate form? Will you please ask her?

Finally, why, when [the different commissioning editor] wrote to me on 26 June acknowledging receipt of the proposal we had sent on 22 June, did she not mention that it needed to be on a different form from that which she had sent me on 23 May? Perhaps she didn’t know that Education Research uses a different form? Will you please ask her?

The attached form is, as you suggested, largely (but not entirely) a cut-and-paste job from the material you have already received. In my view, however, you are now in possession of a single unwieldy document, largely duplicating material previously sent to you as separate attachments, when what you had before was (and is) a coherent group of documents of manageable length. Whether you are going to send only this new document to reviewers, or the new document plus — now repetitive — attachments, is a matter for you. 

If this book came to pass, it would be the sixth which I have published with Routledge in recent years, either as lead author or co-editor. My personal relations with [the different commissioning editor] have always been of the friendliest and most mutually respectful. But the history of my formal dealings with Routledge is littered with accidents and incompetences on the publisher’s side: for example, whole sets of contracts lost, pitiful efforts at marketing despite my sending to Routledge enthusiastic reviews of my books which I myself had sent to journals. And overall, there is a sort of de haut en bas tone of voice which Routledge’s documents take towards authors and editors — ‘You must do it this way; no other way’ — as if the publisher were a military officer addressing a platoon of recruits, rather than an organisation dealing with people who are, at the very least, its intellectual equals. It would be nice to feel that our working relationship from now on, whatever decision you make, will mark a break from that history. 

So, answers to the three questions please; and then we await your response to what I sincerely hope is the last version of our submission.’

I get angry like that sometimes. I can’t bear ‘the insolence of office’, and I tried hard never to be insolent when I had office myself. There was no reply from Routledge for four days, but then the current commissioning editor replied in the most conciliatory of terms, with no bridling or defensiveness, and promising to give serious attention to my criticisms. So I forgave her immediately, and on we go. But I expect that it will be months before we get any kind of light, red or green. If the light is green, the anthology will already be there, although there will then be the tedious business of negotiating financial deals with the rights holders of Douglas’s various books. I think Douglas will be 99 next year, and of course I hope he gets to 100 and beyond. I really would like him to see the anthology while he’s with us.

I’m reading and very much enjoying Richard Holmes’s new book. It’s a biography of the young and middle-aged Tennyson, focussing particularly on his struggles to square the new scientific understandings — on geology and astronomy, for example — being published and popularised in the first half of the nineteenth century, with Christian faith. These were struggles in which numerous great figures in that century (Darwin and Hardy, to name but two) were engaged. Nearly two centuries later, I’ve made up my mind in favour of atheism and rationalism, but because of my religious upbringing I understand and sympathise with the agonising dilemma which Tennyson and his contemporaries faced. I think that Tennyson, unlike Hardy and Darwin, did try to hold onto faith despite all the evidence to the contrary. That certainly seems the conclusion of his beautiful late lyric ‘Crossing the Bar’, which I read at my father’s funeral. (My father, to the end of his life, irrationally hoped that ‘intelligent design’ might explain the existence of the universe.)

This reminds me that I’ve interrupted my reading of Plato. I will get back to it in the New Year.

We came here last Sunday, taking the usual two days and staying at our usual hotel near Avranches. Since then, Christmas has come and gone. On Christmas Eve we ate smoked salmon, brill, cheese and fruit salad; yesterday we ate a guinea fowl, preceded by foie gras and more smoked salmon, followed by more cheese and then Christmas pudding with, as ever, my own brandy butter. We exchanged presents on Christmas Eve, and gave each other packed stockings on Christmas morning, after we had woken up to snow! It was only a light covering, and it disappeared during the day, but it was a beautiful sight to see as we got up, bang on cue for a white Christmas. And there was a third session of present-giving over champagne before the meal last night. Helen’s biggest present to me was the complete Oxford edition of the writings of Aristotle. I know, I know: I haven’t even finished Plato yet. But as my remaining time on the planet diminishes, it seems more or more important to read only the big, world-changing stuff, and Aristotle is certainly big and world-changing. I gave Helen two pieces of jewellery, bought from a shop in Hackney which she favours, and various cosmetics.

As usual (except not last year when we stayed in London because of my brother Andy) we took a hamper of British goodies up to our neighbours Jean and Annick: Christmas pudding, mince pies, stilton cheese, chocolates, Scottish shortbread biscuits, crackers; plus a bottle of Italian wine brought back from Puglia. They gave me a scarf, Helen a shawl, and both of us a magnificent bottle of Banyuls which they had bought when down near Perpignan in the autumn with their old teaching colleagues from Algeria (now a diminishing band). As usual we then went for a walk by the sea, which was dead calm. The wind was perishing cold, so we didn’t stay long.

We shall take a similar hamper up to our other, younger neighbour (I won’t name names) and his children when they come back from the Isère, where he was born and grew up. He, his children and his parents are spending Christmas there with the wider family. It was a shock and a sadness to us when we learnt in May that his wife had left him and the children just before Christmas last year, and gone off with her boss at the estate agent where she works. Our friend was prostrate with grief and incomprehension, made the worse because his wife was saying to everyone who would listen that this was an agreed separation, amical; after more than 20 years together they had taken a mutual decision to part. Which they hadn’t. We looked after him as best we could in the months we were here, having him to dinner once a week. He often wept. He’s much better now. He told me that he’d scolded his daughter (aged 12, I think) when she remarked, ‘Maman a fait caca dans la rue.’ I don’t know whether that’s a phrase in common French use for a person’s stupid, embarrassing and hurtful act, or whether it was the girl’s original coining. But I think she was right. Our friend is upright, faithful, good-humoured, omnicompetent in practical ways, an exemplary father, with a responsible job working for the environmental services in Lorient. Helen said, incredulously, ‘And she preferred an estate agent to him?’ Tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner: not in this case, so far as we’re concerned.

This morning (bright and freezing cold) I saw the most impressive sight up the road near the dustbins. I had stopped there to put some stuff in the recycling bin. From the field across the road there ascended a huge flock of birds, who circled and landed again. I thought initially that they were all starlings, so a ‘murmuration’. Yes and no: although there were thousands of starlings, there were also hundreds of lapwings. I stood for several minutes, trying to work out whether the starlings were attacking the lapwings, or whether the two kinds were co-existing happily. I think, without being sentimental about wild animals, that the second hypothesis was the true one. I couldn’t see any evidence of aggression. Although, like most people, I am in awe of the sight of huge flocks of starlings (and I wrote a little poem called ‘Aloft’ about them years ago), I had never before seen two species together in such numbers. After that I drove on to Cléguer and gave a pot of stilton cheese to Chloë, the chemist. When I first went to her, again years ago (‘years ago’ is a phrase that old people use more and more), she told me that when she was a child her father used often to go to England for his job. He always brought back stilton cheese. It was a happy childhood memory. So I bring her the same every year. Two days before Christmas I gave Valérie in the post office three bottles of wine, again as every year. She does favours for me which could only be done in a small place where people know each other. When we’re in London she arranges for our post to be delivered to our neighbours here. She supplies a box and sticky tape (no charge) when I need to send a parcel. If I’m sending a big batch of letters all at once she sticks the stamps on for me.

It's been a thin year poetically, but I’ve managed two sonnets in December, both for and about Helen, and only a week apart! I’m letting them cool, like cupcakes, before asking Mark to put them on the website. And I’m pretty sure that next year I’m going to publish (I hope with Chalkface) last year’s ‘An A-Z of Greek Mythology’ with illustrations, one for each character: poem on the recto, illustration on the verso facing page. At the moment I’m minded to ask the woman who did the cover illustrations for Adventures in Wonderland to do the illustrations for me, if she’s not too expensive. I think she’s looking for work. Paul Ashton has found numerous images of the characters, sculpted, engraved or painted, on the internet. They’re all ancient. He’s also going to look for other representations from more recent centuries. Then I’ll send them to the illustrator, with the poems and prose versions of all the stories. It’ll be my first illustrated book.

Yesterday and today have been the most beautiful days: cloudless, bright and frosty in the mornings, but with a warming sun in the afternoon; warming that is if you are well wrapped up and doing something. On both afternoons I’ve worked in the garden. Because I wasn’t here last year at this time, no pruning or clearing of leaves was done in the flower borders. Somehow, the flowers struggled through this summer, but a major pruning and clearance job was necessary. I’ve done two of the borders now; two more to go. Physical work, even of the most unskilled kind, is deeply satisfying as long as you don’t have to do it too often. As I write (5.25 pm) the blood-red sun is sinking into the valley beyond the wood, and there is a sharp half moon in the still blue sky.

Earlier today I passed the place where I saw the starlings and lapwings together. This time there was a flock of cattle egrets: beautiful, elegant white birds, so called because when cows are in the fields (they’re indoors in sheds at the moment) the birds perform the valuable task of eating the insects which torment — or at least irritate — the beasts.

Mary, Jacques, their daughter Tess, Tess’s partner Stephen and their delightful now 10-month-old daughter Murphy flew up from Marseille yesterday. Mary and Jacques’s car was at Nantes airport. They drove on from there to Priziac (which, I may well have written before, is half an hour up the road from here). Tess, Stephen and Murphy will stay for a week. So far as I can tell, Tess and Stephen’s restaurant in Marseille is a success. I don’t think they’re making much money yet, because of the huge debts they took on to launch the project, but I don’t get the feeling that it’s going to fail, as so many restaurants do. They can afford to leave it for a few days in the hands of their staff.

Mary and Jacques live in a hamlet called Morgant, containing two houses: theirs and their neighbour Monique’s. This afternoon we went up there for a cup of tea and some seasonal mince pies and cake. Monique came to tea too. She is a charming and impressive woman in her eighties, a widow, with several grown-up children, numerous grandchildren and, I think, one or two great-grandchildren. One of her sons, I think in his 50s, with children of his own, divorced or separated from his wife, previously lived with her because he was a hopelessly addicted alcoholic. No one else would tolerate him; she did. I don’t think he was violent towards her when he came home drunk, but in every other way his behaviour caused her constant trouble and anxiety. I know (tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner, as I wrote the other day, without, in that case, endorsing the phrase) that he had had an operation years ago to remove a brain tumour, and this may have provoked his addiction. Anyway, he often went to a ruined house in a field a few kilometres away, where he met other alcoholics for a long drinking session. Sometimes he would make it home after these bouts; on other occasions he would be found lying in a ditch beside the road (I saw him there once), and the police or the paramedics were called, and he ended up in a police cell or a hospital bed for a night or two before appearing at Monique’s front door. One day this summer he went to the ruined house, and never left it alive. At some point that day or that night, an argument developed amongst those gathered there, which turned violent, and one or two of the other drunks hit him repeatedly and so brutally that he died then or later. When they saw what they had done (the phrase reminds me, disrespectfully, of the Lizzie Borden rhyme), the one or two murderers left with all the others. The dead man’s body was discovered the next morning; I think (from my memory of reading the article in the local paper describing the events, which Monique showed me; and which is why I’m not breaking any confidence in giving these details) a passer-by found him while on a walk with his dog.

Mary and Jacques have spent a lot of time with Monique since the murder. I’ve sat with her a couple of times. She is torn between grief and relief: grief at the dreadful circumstances of her son’s death; relief that no longer does she lie in bed at three in the morning wondering if her son will come home, and what state he’ll be in if he does. She says, ‘I can sleep now.’ Several weeks after the death, he was buried in the commune’s cemetery, following a proper Catholic funeral service, as Monique and the rest of the family wished. Somewhat macabrely, the police have told her that they may have to dig him up again if further pathological investigations are necessary. One of the suspected murderers is in prison awaiting trial (he of course denies that he had anything to do with the killing). The last I heard, the police are still looking for a second man, who managed to flee the area. Justice will be slow.

The year has run away with me again! This evening we’re going up to Priziac to celebrate New Year with those I mentioned a couple of days ago, plus Annie and Jean-Louis, Jacques’s sister and brother-in-law, who live in Marseille most of the year but also have a house in the north of Brittany.

In addition to the two sonnets which I wrote about on 26 December, I’ve done a poem called ‘Precocious’, suggested to my mind by, on the one hand, the joy of seeing dwarf daffodils nodding their heads, as they do in a particular place every year when we drive to the sea on Christmas Day; and on the other hand the clear evidence of destructive climate change now that so many plants, which shouldn’t appear until well into next year, are already in full flower or even blown over. The poem contains contrastive reference to Hardy’s great poem ‘The Year’s Awakening’. And I’m well into another poem, suggested by Helen’s telling me that the hymn ‘Glad that I live am I’ was frequently sung in assembly at her primary school. I hope to finish it tomorrow when we get back from Priziac. So, a bit of a spurt poetically. Adieu, 2025!