Scots need a day more than the Welsh and the English to get over their Hogmanay celebrations so they are allowed a second week of double bank holidays. Heidi was less fortunate and was expected back at Thomas Peacock Secondary School on the morrow. My first task of the day was to get her to Narberth Station on the Swansea to Haverford West line. Being a punctual traveller myself I got her there half an hour early. The station was deserted. Heidi's ticket had been booked over the internet several weeks before so nervousness set in after a few minutes sitting in the car with the engine running contributing to global warming. Mobile phones are a godsend in these situations. We phoned the telephone number on the platform and to our surprise it was answered immediately...and, yes indeed, the train would be arriving at ten o’clock. Clearly we live in a golden age...and this particular call centre did not sound as if it was in Bangalore or Mumbai.
The unlikelihood of so prompt and efficient a response put me in mind of John Seymour’s novel Retrieved From The Future. John Seymour died last year at the age of 90. I am writing this weblog a few miles from his Welsh farm where his wife Sally is being looked after by his daughter Jane after suffering a stroke. John’s book had come up in conversation when Heidi and I were staying in Purton with John Papworth last week. John Coleman had been extolling the virtue of the book...his publishing firm New European Publications had published it. But the book merits high praise. The German version crept into the charts and the book is high on my recommended reading list. But I disagreed with John Coleman about the realism of the Seymour scenario where he has half the population of England wiped out as the cities fade away not with a bang but a whimper the first winter after the oil tankers fail to arrive. The townies either starve or freeze to death so we avoid marauding gangs from the cities menacing the countryside. I don't think our rural villages or Kirkpatrick Sale's ecosteries will have such an easy time of it. But our lucky generation can continue to count their blessings for the time being.
The train came. Heidi left. I moped. Christmas puddings and mince pies had halved in price since Christmas so I bought some brandy butter and did some serious comfort eating. It was a beautiful day and I should have gone running. But there you are. Instead I spent the day reading Tony Benn’s autobiography Dare To Be A Daniel. Heidi had bought me the book for Christmas but this was the first chance I had as she had been determined to finish it before leaving.
Tony Benn was born in 1925 so it is probably too late to draft him back into high office but for my money he probably rates as one of the best prime ministers this country never had. A doctoral thesis on why he never made it would make interesting reading. I met Tony Benn at Harvard Law School back in 1984. I had bought a splendid old eleven room Victorian house at 6 Forest Street in Cambridge in 1980 just off Massachusetts Avenue between Harvard Square and Porter Square on the edge of the law school campus so was in the area. At the end of his talk Benn went round the assembled company with his collection tin. He was MP for the Chesterfield mining constituency and the Miners Strike had just begun. It would last almost a year and end in the disappearance of the coal mining industry. Now Big Global Oil and Scottish Oil have peaked and the West finds itself dependent upon Russia and Ukraine managing the pipelines and Saudi Arabia continuing to swap oil for fighter aircraft the questions are again being asked about the wisdom or folly of the Thatcher Government's apparent victory over the miners twenty years ago. Time will tell.
I have been a fan of the film director Oliver Stone for many years and took the chance of watching the DVD of Alexander. I was disappointed. The set pieces were fine but I am tired of bloody battles. The rest didn't really seem plausible. He was Alexander The Great after all...and there are rather a lot of Alexandrias around...eleven at the last count. The movie industry's obsession with warmongers worries me. Lord of The Rings seems to be nothing but battles and C.S. Lewis' Narnia, though better, still has the feel of a James Bond or a Star Wars movie. I don’t know why producers and directors don’t skip the battles and have a runner reporting to the camera the way Shakespeare does in his stage plays. Having a talking head would save the studios an awful lot of money. Charging elephants and ever more elaborate special effects can't come cheap.
Nigeria has a finger in both pies...global oil and global media. It now comes third behind Hollywood and Bollywood in film production. Heidi and I had the good fortune to spend some time with Dele Oguntimoju and his wife Ester last week. They were staying in another wing of the Papworth Mansion. Some weblog postings later this year might even come from the village where Dele was brought up and has just built himself a new house. Funny old world. Heidi was home safely by six o’clock...and I cried myself to sleep four hours later.
