Preface
Many books of quotations give you a collection of wise and wonderful sayings, which, although grand within themselves, may become somewhat dry as one wades through them and thus become useful as reference only. On attaining the milestone age of 60, I look back at the quotations I have collected over the past 50 years, starting with the very first one, given to me by my father when I was 10 years old:
“Know thyself, accept thyself, be thyself”
No, not Shakespeare, Alexander Pope
Why did I begin this collection of oddities, wisdom and nonsense? Because everything I have collected or created has meant something to me, then as now, and each quotation collected or created shows a moment in my personal development, sometimes happy, sometimes cynical, sometimes sad.
Who is this book directed to?
Encouragement to a ten year old boy to now start making his own collection to see where his life takes him, or perhaps for reflection with a 60 year old friend of where our lives conjoin and where they differ?
Or simply for me and to my wife Athena and our children, Stafford, Nicole, Scott and Russell and their children, too?
It’s me, - but it could be you. At least some of it may stir a chord, a memory, or perhaps evoke one. And I am offering it to you not as a dry collection, but as a story. I hope you enjoy….
Howard Cant 20th September 2006 (my 60th birthday)
l
If you can’t make it as a great man, at least be a good one
Penned by me on 1st September, the month of my 60th birthday; recognizing that the thoughts of greatness, thoughts that we all had when we were young, become reality to only a few; the highly driven, the ones that make their own luck and those that have the cojones to take the rough with the smooth and not let society or their peers grind them down. Men like Winston Churchill and Bill Clinton and Muhammad Ali and some others, rather few in my lifetime; but so it is in everyone’s lifetime.
Apropos nothing at all, and to begin on a rather uncharitable observation, but as I am now sixty, I really am allowed to say whatever I feel; I turned on a television news item yesterday, coming from the US of A and this thought hit me like a physical presence:
Why are the inhabitants of New Orleans so uniformly overweight,
- and so crass and not very beautiful?
I guess they won’t be stocking this book. But honestly, they are.
James Cagney, at around about the age of 60, I can’t vouch for the exact date, told the world, in one of his rare interviews of becoming modesty:
Say what you mean,
And mean what you say
This is what I intend to do in my little book of quotations and reminiscences. If I can’t do it now, when I’m sixty, when will I ever? I just hope Jimmy didn’t come from New Orleans.
I travelled from Phuket, Thailand to Seoul, Korea two days ago and was sitting in the Business Class lounge of Thai airways. I glanced at the TV screen listing the departures and I was struck by the thought, a thought that may have come to other frequent travellers:
What does it tell you about your past and future life,
When you sit for two hours in a Business Class Lounge
And, looking, for all of that time
At the departures information displayed on the TV monitor;
You do not see one single destination,
That you have not visited.
What does it tell you about your past and future life?
I’m working on a major project during my 60th year and I thought I might share it with you; just to motivate others. The project is to be able to view, once again, from a standing
position, an appendage of mine; without having a protruding mass prohibiting it from view. I know it’s there, I use it a few times every day, but I can’t remember when I last saw it from a standing position. Exercise in earnest tomorrow, Howard. Tonight, I’ll just have a small scotch and soda before retiring to bed to ensure the project is placed and sealed in its proper perspective.
‘Night all’
Any among you remember the TV actor who, in the early days of BBC Television made that phrase so popular, such a household expression? Ask me if it’s driving you daft. A clue; he was the very first TV copper and his name began with ‘D’.
One very important thing to remember when you are turning sixty (or maybe at any age, actually) is what dear, sad, wonderful, strong, yet ultimately pathetic Ernest Hemingway told us (in 1923) when we are inclined, often with a morbid curiosity, a beguiling sadness or a wish unfulfilled, to look back on our lives:
We can’t ever go back to old things or try and get the ‘old kick’
out of something or find things the way we remembered them.
We have them as we remember them and they are fine and wonderful
and we have to go on and have other things,
Because the old things are nowhere except in our minds now.
60 years of age, especially when you live, as I do, in Asia; as I have done for over 25 years and if you are blessed with grey hair, is a fabulous age. Money in your pocket, extraordinary respect given just because you are ‘old’, as long as you are also reasonably smart: not one of the grossly tummied, frequently unshaven, beer guzzling expats on a fixed income and regarding the talent (male or female) in the bars of Thailand (and elsewhere) as their own cookie jar. Dreadful people, not of the same biological family…. you wish.
Would that God had the gift tae gie us
Tae see ourselves as others see us.
This from the poet and earthy philosopher, Robbie Burns; the greatest of Scottish poets (actually not too many to choose from), and one of my Mother’s favourites. Mum was born and brought up in a not very well-off Glasgow family, ultimately living a most fulfilling life as a local Councillor, a Justice of the Peace and as secretary to my father who was in politics, both local and national; sitting as the Labour Member of Parliament for Stoke-on-Trent in England for 30 years, as well as having had a fulfilling previous career as a Senior Lecturer in Economics for Oxford and Keele (Staffordshire) universities. He achieved a double first at the LSE (London School of Economics – some claim it to be an even more prestigious university than either Oxford or Cambridge, especially for Politics, Philosophy and Economics) just after the Second World War. A war he was invalided out from, with a courageously gained torn cartilage - on the football field! In the Signal Corps he was; thankfully never got over to Germany in action, otherwise I might not be here. Mind you, he was always a tough act to follow, - I never paralleled his intelligence quotient, but I did have other things about me that, in time, he came to appreciate and respect. That’s a great moment for a son to experience, when your Dad says; ‘I really respect you, son.’ What was it that Mark Twain had to say? Ah yes….
When I was fourteen, I thought my father the most stupid man in the world. When I reached twenty-one, I was amazed at how much he had learned in six years
Sadly, however, many sons feel of their father much the same as Peter Ustinov recollects in his autobiography, ‘Dear Me’, recording on the demise of this parent:
So vanished a man I never really knew, and whom I, like all sons everywhere, needed to know better. There is no fault attached to this. The need and awkwardness lie somewhere deep in human nature. The cross-currents of jealousy, of ambition, of protectiveness, of authority try and work under the level of consciousness however well they are controlled by breeding and usage.
His father’s dying words to Peter were:
I recognise you from my dreams
If those words were said to me in such a situation, they would forever haunt me.
For most of the past 10 years, I’ve lived in Thailand. I retired to Cyprus from Singapore when I was in my late 40’s, did many of the things I’d always wanted to do and that business had kept me away from. I acted in Shakespeare productions in a 3,000 seater Greco Roman Amphitheatre in Episkopi, Cyprus. Not before I had re-read and wondered, somewhat uneasily, about what that great character actor, Sir Ralph Richardson (1902-1983) had to say about his chosen profession:
Acting is merely the art of keeping a large group of people from coughing
A thought also rather keenly felt by William Boyd Gatewood (a not too well known author) when he declared in or around 1915:
Very few people go to the doctor when they have a cold. They go to the theatre instead
Not a lot’s changed in some respects in almost 100 years.
John Barrymore, not everyone’s favourite as an actor, or even as a person, had a gift, denied to many of us, of being able, succinctly, albeit often crudely, to exactly identify something about the theatre and the art of acting that pass by many calmer souls. As quoted in Anthony Quinn’s Autobiography, ‘The Original Sin’, Barrymore was heard to proclaim:
Anybody can make shit out of beauty; it takes great courage to make beauty out of shit
Not just an acting analogy, I feel. To achieve this takes good direction, but it is a truism, worth reflecting on, that no matter what a director may wish to aspire to, at the end of the day, as Martin Esslin in ‘The signs of drama’ would have us remember:
The actor is the essential ingredient around which all drama revolves. There can be, and there has been, drama without writers, designers, directors
– there can never be drama without actors
Our dreams of retirement in the sunny island of Cyprus soon waned as we became bored with the same food, poor wine and frequent impoliteness of the Cypriots, - but most of all we hated the ‘hunting mentality’ of grown men, dressing up in fatigues and shooting poor pretty little birds and thinking that all that was macho. But perhaps many of us Brits are, or have been just as bad; as Oscar Wilde put it:
The English country gentleman,
Galloping after a fox,
The unspeakable,
In pursuit of the inedible
So we left Cyprus; not before I was lucky enough to do Sir Toby in Twelfth Night and both twins (simultaneously) in ‘A Comedy of Errors’; chasing myself on and off the stage, racing round backstage to put on a different coat and hat and emerging as the ‘other’ Antipholus. Both plays ably directed by Colin Garland. But, for me, the best performance of my acting career came as John Proctor in ‘The Crucible’. I did a bit of Pinter too, perhaps more correctly, he did me. I know he is a brilliant writer, but, I sometimes feel, a rather sad and incomplete man, especially when he proclaims:
No matter how you look at it, all the emotions connected with love are not really immortal; like all other passions in life, they are bound to fade at some point. The trick is to convert love into some lasting friendship that overcomes the fading passion
So, back to the Far East for Athena and me; in our hearts we had never left. We settled in Phuket, we attempted to learn Thai; I did an Open University degree in English, History and the History of Art, then Athena needed to get me from under her feet, so I went back to work at the age of 55. I’ve done my retirement, loved it, may decide never to retire again; need to keep the brain active and the hand away from the lunch-time gins, which soon waste the entire day for so many retirees. But I still frequently walk on the beach with our dogs, in the early morning as the sun comes up. I penned this recollection on one such walk in January 2000, thoughts still as vivid today;
The beginning of the day
One of the most glorious, intimate ways in which to begin the day is to sit on a sweet sandy beach, with rollers bashing in. Gentle but bashing; watching, under shaded eyes against the brilliant early morning sun, a young, scantily clad girl, buttocks exposed, gamboling in the shallows with a dog. Tease and double tease.
And to know, - best of all,
That,
It is your dog!
Returning to Asia in 1998 was like coming home. In reality we hadn't been away too long, only since 1994 when we exited the sterility of Singapore, having spent a not too happy four year spell there; except for the sailboats we’d owned and the escapes they had given us as we journeyed around Singapore, with excursions into Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Our last boat was a 43 foot Beneteau Oceanis and we loved it. Just the two of us, sailing to Rawa island in Malaysia, with dolphins playing at the prow all through the night. Athena and I are incompatible in (at least) one respect. I like retiring to bed anytime between 10 and 11p.m., she doesn’t think about sleeping until way past midnight. So, it’s great on a boat; she takes the 11p.m. to 4 or 5 a.m. watch and I take the early morning, which I love the best. But as any serious boat owner will tell you:
The two most pleasurable days in boat ownership
Are the day you buy, and the day you sell
Leaving the boat one day and walking along the beach I saw two wondrous sights. The first was a large Thai lady on her motor scooter with a gorgeously full head of hair and a monkey sitting right on top of her head, picking at that gloriousness; then I saw, striding most purposefully along the beach, a very stern, bespectacled, young, almost breast-less Thai woman, with the following message blazing forth from her tiny T-shirted bosom:
Most people should be sterilized
I felt great empathy with her message. My thoughts were specifically directed, they came soon after 9/11.
Sir Peter Ustinov, who died in 2004 at the age of 83, lived in a world where it was said that he could ‘make anyone laugh’, but there was a serious side to his soul that gave us many opportunities to reflect upon the mad extremism of our world and its abrasive religions and cultures:
No extreme fascinates me. I think it’s all wrong because it’s all too easy. These louts, anarchists or whatever they are, who go out into the streets to riot and break windows, don’t have to think anymore. They’re following instructions. Well, that’s easy. And the storm-troopers I saw in Germany as a boy, all shouting ‘Germany Awake!’ It gives them a sense of communal core, and there’s nothing more exhilarating for a certain clot-like mentality, than the sound of boots marching all together, ‘and you’re part-of-the-machine-and-it’s-wonderful’. In point of fact, it’s the isolated voice which can’t even be heard in the crowd, which is really the most vital of all.
Even perhaps too simplistic, today, Sir Peter; with the absolutely careless barbarism and terror of Al Qaeda and the like. I sometimes feel that:
The only global movement worthy of financial support is that of
providing funding for the sterilization of extremist Muslims
But how to find them and differentiate them from the not-quite-so-extreme Muslims?
I’m sorry if that statement incites you. But I suggest, it should only do so if you are yourself an extremist, thus proving the truth inherent in the quotation.
Maybe I should talk with the girl in the T-shirt!
When you reach the age of 60 and you live abroad in a warm and unregimented environment, you look at the England of today and compare with the England you remember as a youth. It gives rise to thoughts such as I experienced when in England on Boxing Day, 2001:
England now, is a prison for me,
Its jailors are…
Television and Cold and Foreigners and Darkness
And, - Family and Haste and Pressure.
England now is a prison for me.
England has lost its manners, relinquished its mannerisms,
Its identity.
England now is purely a geographical term.
Patriotism survives but little, in pockets.
In the Establishment, in the Castles and in the Creeds,
Of the Monarchy
It does not survive in its Parliament,
The Mother of all Parliaments
Englishness is dead, - or almost dead.
The Young, the Immigrants, the Thrusters,
The Takers, the Unmannered, the Slothful,
Idle, Hopeless, probably think,
If they think at all,
That it is a good thing.
Good?
Goodbye.
Simply Goodbye!
Oh England!
To England!
Maybe Enoch Powell, that distinguished and greatly controversial British Statesman (much more than a politician), who died from Parkinson’s disease in 1998 at the age of 85, may have said it better:
England is a stage on which the drama of English history was played and the setting within which the English became conscious of themselves as a people…when politicians and preachers attempt to frighten and cajole the English into pretending away the distinction between themselves and people of other nations and other origins, they are engaged in undermining the foundation upon which democratic government by consent and peaceable civilized society in this country are supported. Those who at the end of the twentieth century wish to keep alive the consciousness of being English, which seemed so effortless and uncontroversial to our forefathers, will discover that they are called upon, if they take their purpose seriously, to confront the most arrogant and imposing prejudices of their time.
Not all of my quotations are so heavy. Have a drink!
ll
Sir Arthur Helps, sometime confidant of Queen Victoria who entrusted him with preparing an appreciation of her husband’s life and character; so she must have trusted his perspicacity; lived from 1813 to 1875. He penned two plays, ‘King Henry the Second’ and ‘Catherine Douglas’. Neither in these, nor in his only other dramatic effort, ‘Oulita the Serf’ (1858) did he display any real qualifications as a playwright. He had a few good friends, some at court, but he was also smart enough to recognise, as some of us might, that:
People speak of the sadness of being in a crowd and knowing no-one.
There is something pleasurable in it too
Friendships are dramatically important to one’s development; both as a maturing person and as a caring individual, especially when making a new country one’s home. I don’t have many friendships; I wonder what that says about me. Actually, I can only think of a couple of real friends, the ones that you look forward to staying in your house for more than 24 hours continuously. The ones that don’t become like fish. You know, go off after only two days. The ones you want to chat to, to debate with, to become comfortably inebriated with. Only one or two for me. Richard Davenport-Hines writing a biography of the Macmillan family put it thus:
Friendships should be the study of every biographer. The way a man relates to other people and chooses attachments is as eloquent of character as anything else
What is it that is the mainstay of friendship? Is it commonality or even contrast of ideas? Is it a shared secret? I rather believe, with Oscar Wilde, that:
Ultimately the bond of all companionship, whether
in marriage or in friendship, is conversation
Obviously, we want our friends and acquaintances to respect and to like us, as J. Petit-Senn perceptively pointed out:
It is almost impossible to find those who admire us lacking in taste
Relating to other people can become compellingly eloquent through body language, especially body language displayed by the subconscious copying of the stance and behaviour of others; body language that may sometimes form a remarkable empathy because it is immediately and unconsciously copied from the company of another person. EM Forster in ‘A Room with a View’ put it thus:
She stopped and leant her elbows against the parapet of the embankment.
He did likewise. There is at times a magic in identity of position;
it is one of the things that have suggested to us eternal comradeship
For me, however, many of the great friendships of the world have not always occurred between humans. I rather like James Herriott’s friend Cedric in ‘All Things Wise and Wonderful’:
You couldn’t help liking Cedric when you got to know him. He was utterly amiable and without vice and he gave off a constant aura not merely of noxious vapours but of bonhomie. When he tore off people’s buttons or sprinkled their trousers,
he did it in a spirit of the purest amity.
I truly relate to why Tom Hanks, in the film ‘Castaway’ was distraught and devastated as he lost his companion overboard when escaping from the island that had contained them for so long. His companion had been a football, to whom he had given life and personality, a face and a character. A companion who had sustained him in the dark days and nights of his isolation. A companion with whom he spoke and shared his fears, his successes, his failures. To have lost him, at that juncture, just when he was in reach of being saved, was more heartbreaking than many a human loss.
Maybe it’s a terrible admission, but I’m 60 and I can look at myself and my feelings totally honestly and I know that:
I can dispassionately watch the TV news and see men killing women and children and each other in Iraq, in Palestine, in Africa and feel nothing.
I watch as an animal, wild or tame, is being maltreated and I feel fury.
Recently, I read an odd little book by Misha Defonseca called ‘Surviving with wolves’. It is her account of the time when, as a young and terribly lonely seven year old child during the ravages of the Second World War in Europe, she lived with wolves as her only family, as she trekked across Belgium, Germany, Poland and the Ukraine:
I can still see that magnificent creature (the wolf that befriended her, but was shot and killed by a hunter) hanging from a hook. Years later, I thought, ‘What men do to animals, they’re also prepared to do to humans; they hang people in the same way. Man is the despicable predator of the world. He has learned nothing. He is destroying a beautiful world because he’s jealous of it. He is destroying animals because he cannot run as fast as they do, because he doesn’t have such a keen sense of smell and cannot hear as acutely. He’s jealous of the trees, which are tall and lovely. Man is colourless.
He is full of vice. How can I be a human being? It’s impossible.
I’ve never been able to cure myself of thoughts like that.
But not all animals are loveable, which brings us to Jones’s goat and, as this is a rather lengthy quotation, I would like to recommend a G&T or whatever your favourite tipple might be to enjoy it to the full. The quotation comes from Laurie Lee’s autobiography of his childhood years – ‘Cider with Rosie’:
But there was one real old pagan of flesh and blood who ruled us all for a while.
I had fallen half asleep across the table, when Marjorie suddenly said, ‘Ssssh!’
Then Dorothy said, ‘Hark!’
and Mother said, ‘Hush!’ and the alarm had us all in its grip.
Like a stagless herd of hinds and young our heads all went up together.
We heard it then, faraway down the lane, still faint and unmistakable
– the drag of metal on frosty ground and an intermittent rattle of chains.
The drag of the chains grew louder and nearer, rattling along the night,
sliding towards us up the distant lane to his remorseless, moonlit tread.
‘Jones’s goat!’ – our Dorothy whispered; two words that were almost worship. For this was not just a straying animal but a beast of ancient dream, the moonlight walker of the village roads, half captive, half rutting King. He was huge and hairy as a Shetland horse and all men were afraid of him. Daughters and wives peeped from darkened bedrooms, men waited in the shadows with axes. Meanwhile, reeking with power and white in the moon, he went his awesome way….
‘Did you ever see a goat so big?’ asked Dorothy with a sigh.
‘Just think of meeting him coming home alone…’
‘Whatever would you do?’
‘I’d have a fit. What would you do Phyl?’
Phyl didn’t answer: she had run away, and was having hysterics in the pantry.
I just love his descriptive writing capacity. Life is made up of the facility we have to recognise ability, even genius and, if we can avoid being jealous of something we don’t ourselves possess, then we can truly relish it.
How do we follow Jones’s goat? Maybe with one’s own list of ‘goats’ - of the human variety. Who would you put into your goat book? – Powerful, scary, rutting, stupid? On second thoughts, perhaps a goat is not so stupid, not like a sheep. Anyway, in my goat book I’d probably put Picasso; he drew some pretty scary stuff, was a powerful force both as a person and in the art world, and certainly did more than his share of rutting. Ernest Hemingway would also be in my book, although he’d probably have shot anybody who called him a goat, but I think he fits the bill; as does one of the greatest rutters of all time; JFK. A splendid White House Rutter, but also a scary politician and, indisputably powerful. There have been successors in that White place, but never as competent nor as frequently goatish as he. As Mae West said, obviously thinking of rutting:
Too much of a good thing is…..wonderful!
I wonder how many of us would have enjoyed meeting and being with Mae West? I feel to do so would necessitate a person of sexual erudition somewhat beyond the norm, especially when we remember her most famous quote:
Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?
Whatever she did and however she lived her life, she managed it to be a long and interesting one, dying at the age of 87 in 1980
One of the most controversial stars of her day, Mae West encountered many obstacles, including early censorship and sexism. I wonder how much of a soul mate she would have found in Oscar, especially when he said:
I can resist anything except temptation
It could have come from either of them, don’t you agree?
lll
I’ve spent one and a half years now in Korea, having the doubtful accolade of being the only Western CEO of a wholly Korean owned company – the Young In Group; at this moment consisting of 5 companies, whose activities range from importing and distributing scientific instruments to manufacturing the same or similar and to creating antibodies for research that may, one day, eradicate the terrible diseases of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and Cancer. Experiencing prolonged periods – frequently three weeks - away from my wife, Athena, makes the passage below even more poignant, in a world gone mad with Islamic extremists, where no one’s wife is safe, nor those inhabiting the used-to-be pure world of children and childhood. I found it in the autobiography of Sheila Hancock and John Thaw, written by her on his death at the age of 60, dead of cancer. At the time he was the most famous actor on British TV. The book is a sometimes difficult but outstandingly real read. Sheila was sent the passage by a well-wisher after John’s death, when she was simply unable to bear the grief. The passage originates in ‘The Smoke Jumper’ by Nicholas Evans. It goes…
If I be the first of us to die,
Let grief not blacken long your sky.
Be bold yet modest in your grieving.
There is change but not a leaving.
For just as death is part of life,
The dead live on forever in the living.
For all the gathered riches of our journey,
The moments shared, the mysteries explored,
The steady layer of intimacy stored,
The things that made us laugh or weep or sing,
The joy of sunlit snow or first unfurling of the spring,
The wordless laughter of look and touch,
The knowing,
Each giving and each taking,
These are not flowers that fade,
Nor trees that fall and crumble,
Nor are they stone
For even stone cannot the wind and rain withstand
And mighty mountain peaks in time reduce to sand.
What we were, we are.
What we had, we have.
A conjoined past imperishably present.
So when you walk in the woods where once we walked together
And scan in vain the dappled bank beside you for my shadow,
Or pause where we always did upon the hill to gaze across the land,
And spotting something, reach by habit for my hand,
And finding none, feel sorrow start to steal upon you,
Be still.
Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Listen for my footfall in your heart.
I am not gone but merely walk within you.
Beautiful though tough, yet sustaining; reminiscent at times of Shakespeare’s songs or sonnets. Not, however, to be read when you are alone and have had one glass too many. I challenge the toughest amongst us not to…….
At this moment, just as I had typed that quotation on my laptop, I opened a page of one of my collections and found an old Irish proverb, the page just opened at it, honestly. What a positive balance it offers to the previous quotation and a challenging legitimacy:
Dance as if no-one is watching,
Sing as if no one’s listening
And live every day as if it were your last
Go on, bloody do it!
And remember, when you’re dancing in front of anyone, the quotation from Samuel Johnson, writing in the mid 18th Century:
The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good
When Athena and I came ‘home’ to Phuket we rented a delightful small one story house with a large untamed garden. There was no hot water in the house; no-one had ever thought that hot water was necessary in such a warm climate. – The house was at least 15 years old and had done very nicely without it, thank you very much. But warm water, courtesy of admonitions from Athena, was installed shortly after our arrival there. Greasy dishes and greasy bodies respond better to hot than cold water, to that I can attest. But it did seem, at the time, that I was giving in to something I really didn’t want to give in to.
Our nearest neighbour was a strikingly tall, black American named Ted, who had once been a cop on the beat, probably in one of the most difficult cities in America. An LAPD style of individual if ever there was one. We never truly discovered where he had practiced his profession, he didn’t communicate much. Rather, he simply lay in his hammock for much of the day, from time to time raising himself to create a wonderland of stuffed or ceramic and bronze animals, complete with extensive fairy lights, throughout his ‘estate’. There were monkeys climbing trees, giraffes drinking from make-believe streams (concrete across the width of his garden, painted blue), tigers preparing to pounce and all nature of fowls sitting and swooping. He could make anything out of a coconut, and frequently did. Then he painted it pink, or red, or orange, or blue, or whatever. You didn’t mess with Ted:
Black Ted
Black Ted is seventy-four years old
They call Ted, ‘Black Ted’,
Because he is,
Black.
Ted, resting in his hammock all day,
Or painting,
Has had his life.
But he has a better one now.
Life, that is.
Ted is gentle, friendly but not familiar,
Unfamiliarly friendly;
Black Ted.
Ted needs his own space.
Black Ted is gentle, but perhaps,
Sometimes,
Not kind.
Ted needs his own space
And,
He takes it.
Neighbours can be great objects of fun and discussion, of hate and of love; of assistance and of distress. We all remember the good ones and the bad ones. Laurie Lee (again, - he’s just so good) in his autobiography, ‘Cider with Rosie’, introduced us to some of his:
From the age of five or so I began to grow acquainted with several neighbours – outlaws most of them in dress and behaviour – whom I remember both by name and deed. There was Cabbage-Stump Charlie, Albert the Devil and Percy-from-Painswick, to begin with.
Cabbage-Stump Charlie was our local bruiser, - a violent, gaitered, gaunt-faced pigman, who lived only for his sows and for fighting. He was a nourisher of quarrels, as some men are of plants, growing them from nothing by the heat of belligerence and working them daily with blood. He would set out each evening, armed with his cabbage stalk, ready to strike down the first man he saw. ‘What’s up then, Charlie? Got no quarrel with thee.’ ‘Wham!’ said Charlie, and hit him. Men fell from their bicycles or back-pedalled violently when they saw old Charlie coming. With his hawk-brown nose and whiskered arms he looked like a land-locked Viking; and he would take up his stand outside the pub, swing his great stump round his head and say, ‘Wham! Bash!’ like a boy in a comic, and challenge all comers to battle. Often bloodied himself, he left many a man bleeding before crawling back home to his pigs. Cabbage-Stump Charlie, like Jones’s goat,
set the village to bolting its doors.
Now, this small house of ours in Phuket with its one-off neighbour had, as I mentioned before, a substantial garden, untamed; that we in our wisdom decided to tame. So, we went about it with vigour; more vigour than craft and, after straining the odd back here and cutting fingers on thorns there, I came to the unoriginal conclusion that what we needed was a gardener. So, as it always is in Thailand, once the requirement is mentioned to anyone Thai, up one sprung within nanoseconds, who, working as he was at The Royal Meridian Yacht Club just down the road, was willing to come, once every week on his day off, for the princely sum of 1,500 Baht, or about 40 US dollars per month, ten per day. I still have him and he now works for us in our second home in Phuket, which has a much smaller garden, but today he enjoys the exorbitant salary of 2,500 Baht or about 63 US dollars a month. Where did I go wrong?
Actually, he wasn’t our first gardener, but the first guy lasted one month only; so I disregarded him in this narrative, although, the following was penned in his honour in November 1999:
I have a gardener,
Who has mastered,
Lethargy
He is the envy of cats.
It takes my gardener,
More than,
Five minutes
To work up to having;
A contemplative cigarette
The cats admire him.
I have a gardener,
I had
Deep in my memory somewhere, I recall a line from a play:
Please come into my garden, I would like my roses to see you
I can’t remember, for the life of me, where it came from, but it does sound rather like Oscar Wilde, or maybe Noel Coward? – If anyone knows, please e-mail me and put me out of my misery. – It’s all to do with the memory of a 60 year old, I guess! However, age is purely in the mind of the statisticians; we all remember and those of us sixty plus, remember it best that:
You are only as old as the woman you feel
Hence the activity of many Western geriatrics, especially in Thailand; gosh, they are so often such dire sights. Their families would disown them immediately if they could but see them in their new habitat. However, perhaps James Thurber, writing in 1957, has a most significant point:
I’m sixty-three and I guess that puts me in with the geriatrics.
But if there were fifteen months in every year, I’d be only forty-three
Phuket is an island of endless oddities, some delightful, some less so. Where in that scale do the Ladyboys, the ‘Katoeys’, come, I wonder? The beautiful boys who want to be and look like beautiful women. Lost forever in a neverland. Pretty, but sad:
There but for the grace of God, go we
But it does rain a hell of a lot here in Phuket. It’s not enough to pretend that the rain is ‘warm’ or ‘warmish’, it is incredibly tedious; especially when golf is planned, or a nice sit by or in the pool with glass in hand, reading the latest killing machine book, penned by ex-SAS masterful storyteller, Chris Ryan. Who, by the way, I used to think, writes confounded self perpetuating violent rubbish. But now, I’ve undergone a wonderful metamorphosis and sincerely appreciate his fantastically urgent pace and sheer unrelentingly grabbing pressure. I wonder if he writes standing up. Give me his next book, anytime. BUT, as I said, sitting in the pool, reading novels between the months of July to November in monsoon plagued Phuket, can be a bit iffy. GK Chesterton (1874-1936), larger than life, both physically and mentally, when watching a tremendous rainstorm, alas, not in Phuket, said it thus:
I don’t care where the water goes if it doesn’t get into the wine
Delightful man and outstanding writer, who was always able to make fun of himself:
I always enjoy myself more than most, there’s such a lot of me having a good time
When I was younger, I used to play a game of ‘who would you like to meet, if you could meet anyone in the world?’ – At first, for me, it was Churchill and Hemingway and Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, but then I graduated to GK and John Major and Frank Muir. But I never ever, ever, wanted to meet Margaret Thatcher.
Ray Leonard, onetime heavyweight champion of the world was once asked ‘Do you want to become a great man?’
‘Man’, he says, ‘I’m just a fighter. That’s all. If you want to know about greatness, watch Muhammad Ali. Watch people around Ali. If you put him in a hall of people with Castro and Gorbachev, everybody’d flock to Ali. That’s greatness.’
CS Lewis must have played this game at some time or another (perhaps we all do) for, in 1942, he had this to say:
I would go a long way to meet Beatrice or Falstaff or Mr. Jonathan Oldbuck or Disraeli’s Lord Monmouth. I would not cross the room to meet Hamlet.
It would never be necessary. He is always where I am.
It’s funny how we change, isn’t it? If I were to play the game today, I’d probably want to meet the unsung heroes and the ones that never make it into the spotlight. The guys and girls who saved so many lives in the dreadful Tsunami of 2004, which claimed some of my friends but from which Athena and I had a lucky escape. – The right place at the right time for us, but not for so many others.
Yes, that’s the type of people I’d now feel privileged to meet.
But John Denver will forever remain on my ‘must meet’ list.
Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy
A man who proved in life to be the total antithesis of Oscar’s description of one of his acquaintances;
He hasn’t become prominent enough to have any enemies.
But none of his friends like him.
No one could ever say that about John Denver, beloved by all, a man who brought so much real joy through his songs to so many people; a man wretchedly snatched from this world in 1997. Some others departing in 1997, not including my father who also died that year, were, in my opinion, not such a great loss to mankind. Oops!
I guess I’ve proved OW right again,
We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell.
Thanks, Oscar.
lV
For those of you willing to open mindedly enjoy the on-going mysteries of the East, there is so much still to learn, to try to understand. But it is really difficult to grasp the essence of some countries or cities no matter how long you live there. We might believe, along with Rupert Brooke, that it is quite pointless to attempt to understand a city during the daytime for:
Cities like cats, will reveal themselves at night
Most of us do our sightseeing during daytime hours and the sadness of so many beautiful cities in our world now is that they share the common grief of night-time menace. There are many fewer cities in the world today that my wife and I can wander around without compunction after ten o clock in the evening than there were in our youth. Sad.
I have had the great good fortune to live in England (now no longer England, - see above!) Hong Kong (loved it), Singapore (too restrictive and robotic and unfriendly), Cyprus (great at first but then waning with repetitiveness and becoming boring), Thailand, (always, always great and surprising and just a little bit more than a little bit crazy, frustrating, challenging, sensuous and fun), and Korea (what does one really say about Korea?) I’ve lived in Korea for more than one year now, although I frequently visited between 1980 and 1990, when it was such a different place; then there was great poverty, lack of electricity and very little heating except in the hotels; smelly taxis running on gas, rampant prostitution, a great divide between the haves and have nots. Today, however I feel it is:
Clean, generally; everything works, probably the most efficient airport in the world, but too controlled and going the way of Singapore. The people are long on etiquette but short on manners; car, taxi and especially bus drivers are all selfish to the extreme, but maybe they have to be so because of the relentless traffic, both night and day. But the people are so grim, no smiles for the passing stranger, as in Thailand. Everything, everybody is far too serious; there is little evident joy in the land; understandably if you consider its history of occupation and oppression by the Japanese and the
communist insurgency of the 1950’s.
Then, what about Japan? Shirley Maclaine, in her well written biography ‘Don’t Fall off the Mountain’, tells of the time she spent there with her much loved yet peripatetic husband and daughter;
Japan is a land where time has no urgency, where the important thing is human relations, where friction must be avoided at all costs, and where a highly ritualized sense of courtesy has developed to eliminate it. In Japan, courtesy has an aesthetic value far greater than good manners in the West. A negative truth is frequently subordinate to the virtue of courtesy. Courtesy, therefore, is more of a virtue than honesty.
Are the Koreans and the Japanese very alike? They would claim not to be, but, to the untutored Westerner the similarities are striking and somewhat disturbing. But then, are they also like other races too? Simon Winchester writing of his travels through Korea in the 1980’s in his book entitled ‘Korea – a walk through the land of miracles’ gave us this insight:
‘The Koreans are so like the Irish’, someone had said to me back in Cheju. ‘They’re sweet and sentimental. They’re sad. They sing songs, and sad songs too. But if you get them angry, you’ll be terrified. They have a kind of anger that is unforgettable. They completely lose control of themselves. They’ve no idea what they are doing. It’s a frightening sight. Never make a Korean angry. You’ll come off worse if you do’.
I agree, and I’ve had first-hand experience of this phenomenon. In a somewhat heated business discussion some time ago, the Korean negotiator was becoming increasingly loud and morose; suddenly he stood up, glowered over me for a second, then went to his office door and with a slippered foot, smashed the thick glass in the frame with a tremendous fury filled kick that would have broken a man’s back; shattering splinters and wickedly sharp glass daggers all over the floor; then he marched out of the room. Stupefied, nay terrified, I and my companion were speechless. The following day we resumed our negotiations, quietly and politely; the glass had been replaced and we finally concluded the deal. It was astonishing.
Koreans fart in lifts. Actually they fart anywhere, the men, I mean. The worst of all is in a closed car or a lift and it’s considered impolite of you if you wind down the window or waft your nose with a bunch of papers!
Would that God had the gift tae gie us
To smell ourselves as others smell us
Sorrie, Robbie.
Yet, in Korea there is a tremendous sense of soul, of sadness, of history; indeed, once outside the city centres, a true sense of concentrated calm and peacefulness. Korea once clung to the epithet of the land of the morning calm, the land of mists. Not quite so much today, perhaps, but there is a self-effacing beauty redolent amongst its people who still embody the feelings displayed by their poet Yi Hwang (1501-70):
Let my house be morning mists,
And my friends the wind and moon;
While the land is at peace
I’ll decline into old age.
Just one thing I ask of life:
That my faults may disappear.
In complete contrast, I can sum up all that Thailand means to me in the following apparition, seen in Phuket in November 1999:
Caught in the headlight beam
Tonight,
Caught in the headlight beam,
Were reflectors
Wrapped around the,
Feet;
Of,
Elephants.
Crossing the road, from left to right.
When
You;
Have seen,
Reflectors on the feet
Of elephants.
What is there left in life to see?
I’ve spent quite a bit of time in America too, and now to lose my American readers, I must agree with Oscar when he noted:
Of course America had often been discovered before Columbus,
but it had always been hushed up!
We are living in an age of much bad press for America and the Americans, but it is their own fault. I like many individual Americans I have met over the years, but their collective arrogance is mind numbing and in deep contrast to the Asian races. Nelson De Mille, writing in his novel ‘The Charm School’ had one of his characters say this about the self-proclaimed master race:
It is only since I’ve had to deal with hundreds of Americans that I’ve grown to hate them, hate their culture, their filthy books and magazines, their shallow motives, their selfish personalities, their total lack of any sense of history or suffering, their rampant consumption of useless goods and services, and above all, their
plain dumb luck in avoiding disaster.
My own feelings are more simplistic,
The tragedy of the world is that the Americans
are trying to run it and the British no longer do
Bye, American readers.
Sorry, that was decidedly charmless. I didn’t really mean it. Let us do better and agree with Albert Camus, when, in his novel ‘The Fall’ he told us that charm is:
A way of getting the answer yes without having asked any clear question
Welcome back Americans and let me also befriend the Jews for a while. I just love this extract from Erich Segal’s ‘Acts of Faith’,
Molly was in a state of agitation, for she had just learned one of the most
fundamental and least discussed rules of Jewish marriage.
It was a man’s duty to make love to his wife on Friday night – a commandment based directly on Exodus 21:10. Moreover, this obligation could not be fulfilled in a perfunctory manner, for the Law demands that he ‘pleasure’ her.
A woman may even sue her husband if he does not.
This, Deborah noted, partially explains the reason for giving husbands a hearty meal. And the smile on a Jewish woman’s face when she prepares it.
What are the requirements, other than Friday nights, for a happy life?
The mutual love of one person for another
Good health
Sufficient cash flow not to worry about paying a travel bill or making a spontaneous purchase
Smiles
Sunshine, for at least five hours every day
Good books
Good music
Facility in the language of one’s adopted country
Good wines, readily available
Quietness
Solitude when necessary
A few good friends
To know yourself and to be yourself
Not to hurt others
To have the company of animals
To be massaged by a beautiful girl twice a week
Smart clothes
A clean uncluttered mind
Children and grandchildren that want to be with you
In my ‘real’ home in Phuket, I have all but two of the above, but I’m working on them. How unbelievably fortunate I am.
A further requirement of mine is embodied in the wise words of John Donne, (priest, poet and preacher) written so long ago (1631) but still true today, at least for me:
To live in one land is captivite
Nevertheless, wherever we live, whatever we do, we will live longer than our allotted three score years and ten if, as well as doing the in-diet or the yoga class or breathing in the aromatherapy oils, we remember the simple advice given by William Henry Davies in his famous poem, circa 1900, entitled ‘Leisure’:
What is this life, if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare?
No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.
No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.
No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like stars at night.
No time to turn at Beauty’s glance
And watch her feet, how they can dance.
No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.
A poor life this, if full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
I rather bastardized another well-known verse in January 2000, sitting watching the waves sweep in and then ebb back on the beach at Nai Harn Bay; late in the afternoon, when the lobstered tourists had rushed back to their rooms for the Aloe Vera gel. It kind of describes and brings together both of the above quotations. At the time, I just had to write it down, and I really meant it then and I really mean it now, and it makes me happy, not sad:
The Sensuist
If I should die, think only this of me
That there’s some corner of a golden beach
That is forever Howard.
There shall be in that rich sand
A richer soul interred,
A soul whom Asia succoured, made aware;
Gave once her roads to roam,
Her senses to enjoy;
A body of Asia’s, breathing Phuket air,
Washed by the waves, blessed by tales of joy.
And think, this heart, all senses still remain,
A pulse through the eternal heart, and more.
Gives always new, the thoughts of youth compelling;
Asia’s sights and sounds,
And dreams of dreams divine.
And joy, and friends and sex and gentleness;
My heart at Peace, under an Asian sun.
William Wordsworth in 1798 wrote, in his ‘Lyrical Ballads’
All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
.
I disagree; even bad poetry such as mine can claim the same spontaneous overflow
Let’s begin to leave this chapter with a wiser man than most of us, a well-travelled man, an individual who had a genuinely individualistic way of working with and looking at other races; perhaps one might also say, a truly English way. As he said:
Everyone has a right to pronounce foreign names as he chooses
Who else but Churchill! And, I suspect he would rather agree with Sir Walter Scott when the latter proclaimed during his travels:
I begin to find that too good a character is inconvenient
Then there was the time that Belloc, travelling in Europe, met up with Chesterton and Henry James and the culture of the new and the old world turned topsy-turvy. Chesterton was sitting with Henry James when this ‘person’ appeared. Chesterton had believed Belloc to be in France walking with a friend, but the pair, having run out of money, had landed back in England, many days unshaven and in borrowed clothes, looking like tramps. Describing the incongruity of the scene, Chesterton many years later, wrote:
Henry James had a name for being subtle; but I think that situation was too subtle for him. I doubt to this day whether he, of all men, did not miss the irony of the best comedy in which he ever played a part. He left America because he loved Europe, and all that was meant by England or France; the gentry, the gallantry, the traditions of lineage and locality, the life that had been lived beneath the old portraits in oak-pannelled rooms. And there, on the other side of the tea-table, was Europe, was the old thing that made France and England, the posterity of the English squires and the French soldiers; ragged, unshaven, shouting for beer, shameless above all shades of poverty and wealth; sprawling, indifferent, secure. And what looked across at it was still the Puritan refinement of Boston; and the space it looked across was wider than the Atlantic
V
Can you imagine what Oscar Wilde would have to say about the long running British soap, ‘Coronation Street’? – I almost wasn’t quick enough to switch it off the other night when it attacked my television set. Heart stopping stuff. And as for ‘Eastenders’; my goodness! What kind of world do the people that watch this terrible and tortuous claptrap inhabit? It is apparently a ‘true to life’ depiction, which, if it bears any reflection to reality, can only precisely describe and perpetuate everything that is wrong with the country called England. I truly cannot believe that real people actually behave like this in the privacy of their own home; that they are so unwaveringly foul and unpleasant to one another as this dreadful television programme presents. I sincerely feel that if any of my children watch either of these programmes, then they have wasted the education and opportunities we gave them. I guess I’d better not ask. However as John Mortimer in his autobiography, ‘Clinging to the Wreckage’ reminds us:
No one, in the whole chequered history of censorship, has ever questioned
anyone’s right not to read a book, to stay away from a play or not to visit a cinema.
No one has ever suggested the compulsory sale of television sets without the
button necessary to switch them off if you don’t like the picture.
Thank you, Sony and the rest, for that button.
I remember the birth of television, in a true commercial sense, in England. The year was 1953 and the Queen was to be crowned. Everyone that could afford to bought this small black and white tube, often surrounded by ostentatious wooden cabinetry and the whole family, with the neighbours who couldn’t afford, sat down to watch. After a while, I have to admit, it became somewhat boring for a seven year old, so I went out to play. But these were the days of Muffin the Mule and TV decency. When the National Anthem was played at the end of transmission for the day and a quiet authoritative voice came on to remind you:
That is the end of programmes for this evening.
Please turn off your set. Goodnight everyone
How lovely.
Then, in time, decency in television programmes began to disappear and censorship had to take its place. I go along with censorship if, without it, human dignity is despoiled. GK Chesterton would have us accept that:
When people begin to ignore human dignity, it will
not be long before they begin to ignore human rights
Thinking of the world’s conflicts, of man’s inhumanity to man, of a world that breeds suicide bombers and irrational hatred, based on religious bigotry, Chesterton has a point.
What else is there to say about censorship? So much I guess, although living in Asia, one’s mind is constantly in a state of flux, varying between it’s OK to have the bar girls and the Ladyboys try to grab, admittedly always in friendship, for your exclusive jewellery, to the conviction that you don’t stop at the scene of an accident to assist, just in case, as a Westerner, you might be blamed in some way for having caused it. Just because you can afford to pay. John Mortimer again,
It has been said that it is a strange anomaly of the censoring attitude that murder is against the law, but it is no crime to write about it. Sex is not against the law,
but to write about it has often been held a criminal offence
Laurie Lee, talks of his view of crime as follows. Laurie was born in Gloucestershire in 1914 and died in 1997 after completing a somehow not quite fulfilling life, never reaching the fullest potential he seemed capable of. He went to fight in the Spanish Civil War (did he know Hemingway?), but his health was not good enough to continue; then he made documentary films for the General Post Office during the Second World War. His best writing was indisputably between 1959, when he penned the autobiographical ‘Cider with Rosie’ and, ‘As I walked out one Midsummer Morning’ in 1969. He made the point that:
It is not crime that has increased, but its definition.
The modern city, for youth, is a police trap.
Our village was clearly no pagan paradise, neither were we conscious of showing tolerance. It was just the way of it. We certainly committed our share of statutory crime. Manslaughter, arson, robbery, rape, cropped up regularly throughout the years. Quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad; some found their comfort in beasts; and there were the usual friendships between men and boys who walked through the fields like lovers. Drink, animality and rustic boredom were responsible for most. The village neither approved nor disapproved, but neither did it complain to authority. Sometimes our sinners were given hell, taunted and pilloried, but their crimes were absorbed in the local scene and their punishment confined to the Parish.