Time - The Greatest Thief of All

Thomas Eldridge. My 5th Great-Grand-Uncle

1752-1843

All Saints' Church, Lubenham, Leicestershire

Few things are more deceptive than memories.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Shadow of the Wind)

NOT MANY DAYS AGO, the 29 September to be exact, I noticed the date, the number 29, and there was a tintinnabulation, one that I had, apparently, missed the day before. On that day before, Monday 28 September, I had almost certainly come across the date, that number, 28. I'd have seen it on my computer screen. It was at the top of the Monday pages in the Radio Times. (I check for listings of interesting television programmes every morning as I drink my coffee, and circle them in blue ink; I never forget to do this.) On the television itself, I would have seen the date: 28 September.

I do not doubt that I saw 28 September 2009 any number of times last Monday. So what? My mother died on 28 September 1992, and this was the first year that I did not think of her passing when I saw the day and month. Seventeen years to forget? Or was it just seventeen years to not remember?

On Tuesday 29 September I thought: "Good grief! Yesterday was the anniversary of my mother's death. I missed it."

Perhaps if I lived in Bermuda where she is buried, I would have planned a visit to her grave days or weeks beforehand. Some day when she came to mind and I'd have remembered those last hot days of the summer of 1992 which my mother spent in the hospice as the cancers crawled through her body and, at about three o'clock in the afternoon on 28 September, reached her fingertips. They turned dark purple as I held onto them in the hour before she stopped breathing.

I remember that remarkably well.

The only sound, a loud gasp, from the older of my mother's brothers, also in the room. Not forgotten.

I actually have not a single photograph of my mother in my possession now. However, I can picture her in quite a few photographs that I grew up with, taken in her infancy and through the sixty-something years she lived. As I sit here, I cannot see her in my mind from general times in her life, as a person unposed, because her life, as it affected me, was a photographic plate exposed for about forty-two years (my age when she died). Except for that final moment. I can see her just dead on the bed. Eyes wide open. Back arched slightly. Her hair had been shampooed and cut by a hairdresser friend the day before (the friend refused to accept a fee for that) and my mother looked quite tidy, which was unusual for her.

James King. My 3rd Great-Grandfather

1790-1871

Whaddon, Buckinghamshire

I got to thinking about remembering the dead. One of my hobbies is genealogy and I know the names and some details of over 1,500 of my family members who have passed on. Because my mother's family, not too many generations back, emerges from titled lines, I have information on some of my ancestors that is in the history books. I can even visit rather ancient places where they lived, and died. Some are represented in carvings on their tombs. Quite posh, really.

My mother is in a whitewashed vault in St John's Churchyard in Pembroke, Bermuda. There is no obelisk or cross. Her name is engraved on a plaque attached to the end of the slab atop the vault. Mavis Eldridge 1926-1992.

My father is also buried in Bermuda. I'm not exactly sure of the day he died, but it was in the spring of 1996. His third wife had him buried in a shared grave, but had his name and dates engraved on a headstone. The stonemason got the dates wrong, had him born ten years after he actually was. I believe that was corrected. He is buried in St Paul's Churchyard in Paget, Bermuda. My father's second wife died in the 1980s, but I cannot recall the year, much less the date. She was buried in a parish grave, unmarked. Happens she is also in St Paul's Churchyard, but she was no longer married to my father when she died. The church building itself is between them.

I can conjure up the image of my father from certain occasions, and generally. Is this because I saw him so infrequently in my life, in his lifetime? And I can also picture his second wife, who I liked a great deal.

My various parents (and grandparents) turn up in my dreams and, sometimes, they remain in ghost form around me for a short while. Not so as to be unpleasant or unwelcome.

We've had several television programmes (here in Britain) this past fortnight on the subject of death. Documentaries on our attitudes towards death and dying over the centuries were particularly interesting.

I did not know that cremation has only really been a going concern in the UK for about 120 years, and that acceptance by some of the major churches, like the Church of England, is quite recent. Most dead folks here are cremated now. People still seem to look forward to a funeral service of some sort. Funeral homes now do most of the work. My great-grandparents would have been laid out in their coffins in the front room at home. Family and neighbours would have washed and dressed the body.

My mother's people from the 1800s onward, our closer relatives, Lancasters, Proctors, Cloughs, Heys, are buried in Haggate Cemetery in Briercliffe, Lancashire, and in Colne, Lancashire. I have seen some of their graves. My father's family can be found in Fulham, London after the 1850s. Before that, for at least a hundred years, our Eldridges were living and dying in Lubenham, Leicestershire, some rating stones in All Saints' Churchyard. The King family, my father's side again, were in Whaddon, Buckinghamshire. My father's parents are buried in Kent. He had a brother who died in Australia.

It is clearly becoming increasingly difficult to pop around to the graves of family members when the anniversaries of their deaths (and Easter Sunday) come around. I'm looking forward to being cremated, with no funeral service, and scattered off in the wild somewhere easily forgotten by a stranger.

Will anyone think of me when the anniversary date rolls around? I'm not sure that I give a hoot. I'd much rather somebody thought of me while I was alive to enjoy it. (I'm hoping for kind thoughts! Perhaps a postcard.)

Mystery's Rainbows and Unicorns

ALONSO: Give us kind keepers, heavens! What were these?

SEBASTIAN: A living drollery. Now I will believe
That there are unicorns, that in Arabia
There is one tree, the phoenix' throne, one phoenix
At this hour reigning there.

ANTONIO: I'll believe both;
And what does else want credit, come to me,
And I'll be sworn 'tis true: travellers ne'er did
lie,
Though fools at home condemn 'em.

William Shakespeare (The Tempest. Act III, Scene III)

I WAS NOT AN ONLY CHILD, but I was an only son. I was never interested in my sisters' toys, the few that they had, except for a two-storey dollhouse our grandfather had created from a crate by installing a floor half-way up. My grandfather was not particularly creative, though he was a compulsive collector of bits of wood (and boxes) that washed up alongside my grandparents' cottage in Bermuda. The dollhouse was not painted (protruding nails had been removed, and rough edges sanded smooth) or decorated in any way. It just sat on a stool waiting for dolls to move in. In truth, it remained a crate, but for a few months it was the subject of dreams. Mine. They remained in my head. Eventually the dollhouse, the crate, was filled with other detritus and placed in the basement.

I'd seen wallpapered rooms, chandeliers, finely upholstered furnishings, carpets from distant places (some flown in under their own steam from Arabia), curtains, pictures on the walls, a staircase linking the upper and lower floors, doors and windows and fireplaces.

My first toys can be identified because at my first birthday party they were laid out on my grandparents' lawn, along with a cake and some family friends and relatives, and photographed by my father. I had a large metal horse (painted with lead-based enamel, I fear), a couple of teddy bears, large blocks, a merry-go-round. The horse ended up with Lancaster cousins, the merry-go-round went to younger Eldridge boys; both the horse and the spinning machine made me feel ill.

I was quite young when I was given my first Meccano building set. Meccano toys have been around since 1901, so my father may well have played with them when he was a boy in the 1920s. Metal beams and bars and planks, nuts and bolts. There were axles, cogs and wheels and bits of string. One might build a sky-scraper (I didn't have nearly enough bits of metal to do that, but I had my imagination) or a motor.

Another toy, and this might be the equivalent of a video game in which the boy is to annihilate the enemy invaders by blasting them into cyber-space, or lop off their heads with an electronic axe, was a John Bull Printing Set. I could play at being a compositor, slotting rubber pieces of type into wooden blocks, then printing my great words with an ink-pad and bits of paper. Great words: I only had enough letters and blocks for headlines and "by Ross Eldridge". The stories existed, I'd dream them up. It may have been only about 1955, but I moved comfortably across the Universe. I was into UFOs. We all were; they started appearing about the time I was born.

In the late 1950s I discovered another building system: Plastic blocks very similar to the LEGO System, but made in the UK, designed for building accessories for toy train sets. I'd always wanted a toy train. Happens I never did get that train, but I became a compulsive purchaser of small boxes of wall blocks, or windows, or beams, or roof slates. These plastic blocks were marketed under the name Better Builder. I believe their British patent was eventually sold to the LEGO folks in Denmark. Better Builder did vanish, but not before I'd amassed a considerable quantity of blocks. I'd built tiny cottages at first, a few inches this way and that. Then I built railway stations and platforms for the trains I didn't have. I moved on to shops and mansions. After that, churches and modest cathedrals and castles. And every building had a story.

My Better Builder blocks, jumbled together in a large box, were passed along to my half-brothers when I was at college. I actually rescued most of the blocks when my brothers were too old (they thought) for them, and the box sat in my cupboard until about 1990 when I handed the business over to my nephew, who would have been about five. My sister had other ideas (or, rather, no ideas at all) and the Better Builder blocks, by then an antique of sorts, went in the trash. I still, in 2009, dream that I'm building grand country homes with my blocks.

It may be that my interest in words, as building blocks to language, communication, stories and ideas, began in dreams as I fastened my bits of Meccano or plastic to other bits to create something bigger that was almost out of my imagination's reach. Almost. I've struggled all my life to reach a place where I might be comfortable.

I live in a small town (almost a village) by the North Sea in a part of England that is just full of history. I have been including in my regular reading histories and biographies that chronicle the events, places and people of Northumbria. There are ghosts, if you believe in them, as I do, on every street and by the River and looking out from our castles. Ghosts that once had dreams.

There are also the buildings I have tried to build these sixty years. The fortresses of my dreams that began in books and stories told me by my older family members; the abbeys I had visited with my Nan Eldridge as a boy, and, since then, alone; the stations and museums and monuments I've walked about and revisited in the guidebooks.

I don't really enjoy home decorating programmes on the telly, my mental trips around my sisters' dollhouse were less about furniture and fittings than I thought, for those were always physically unrealised. Rather, my interest is now in the characters that tread the boards in those sets, which play out the games of life and death.

For every church I built with my Better Builder blocks, I invented congregations; for cathedrals there were pilgrims. Stations and halts had the trains full of passengers that I created in my mind. Nothing was empty. My Meccano winches raised buckets to workmen that I really could see for a time, to build higher and higher. Words, fitted together so as to be most pleasing, became stories and love-letters. I was never short of unicorns and rainbows.

Pretty As You Feel

Anne of Cleves

You're only pretty as you feel
Just as pretty as you feel inside
When you wake up in the morning
Rub some sleep from your eye
Look inside your mirror
Comb your hair
Don't give vanity a second chance
No no no
Beauty's only skin deep
It goes just so far 'cause
You're only pretty as you feel
Jefferson Airplane (Pretty as You Feel)

I AM WATCHING THE TUDORS. Series 3 has almost finished its run: Henry VIII has his son, by Queen Jane Seymour, but lost Jane just days later. That is historically accurate. On the television programme, Queen Jane was extraordinarily beautiful in life and death. After she's gone, as Henry mopes about the palace with his talkative Court Jester, the Jester says something along these lines: "Bad luck! You have a beautiful queen with fabulous tits; she gives you your son, and then she dies. Bad luck!" These were not quite the words we read in our history books when I was a boy, but they certainly describe the Queen Jane on TV. Apparently, according to the historians, diarists and portraitists, the actual Queen Jane was no great shakes. She was a bit of a meddler and was more Roman Catholic than Protestant supporter of her husband's Church of England. And her face never launched a thousand ships. She may have had fabulous tits.

Next week, King Henry is going to have a meet and greet with Anne of Cleves. Fifty years ago I first saw a film that was then old, The Private Life of Henry VIII, starring Charles Laughton. Laughton's real-life wife, Elsa Lanchester, played Henry's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves.

And here's a family story: My grandmother checked into a hotel in, I believe, New York City, back in the 1930s. She had made a reservation prior to her arrival. And what a fuss was made when she turned up! She was treated like a movie star! My grandmother's name: Elsie Lancaster. She was about two years older than Elsa Lanchester, and English born.

Elsa Lanchester was a not-so-unattractive Anne of Cleves. She was better looking than my grandmother. So it goes.

In The Tudors, the ugly Mare of Flanders, as Henry is said to have dubbed Anne of Cleves, is being played by pop musician Joss Stone. Ms Stone is quite easy on the eye, probably the delight of any number of teenage boys, and their louche grandfathers. Has the director told her to step in front of the camera and look as dreary as she can? Not from the film clips in the previews. Beauty is the new beast.

Let's talk Henry VIII in The Tudors. Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is playing the King, and he's about as unlike the Hans Holbein pictures that decorated my history texts and art books back in the day as one can get. I cannot say I like Holbein's cartoonish work. I rather like Rhys-Meyers in his films: He tends to androgyny, being both masculine and beautiful, someone one might find in an Edward Burne-Jones painting in full colour, or outlined by Aubrey Beardsley in black ink on white paper.

As Henry prepares to meet the unattractive Anne, he is in bed (on The Tudors at least) with his gammy leg playing up merry hell. In fact, slender, young, exquisite Rhys-Meyers is turning up, as if posed for the pre-Raphaelites, wearing nothing at all but for the smallest strip of cloth from the sheets he's reclining on covering (just) the Crown Jewels. The Tudors would have us believe that Henry VIII waxed all his body hair and glowed attractively, despite the painful eruption on his one thigh. And when the pain strikes Henry, I'm reminded that the French refer to the orgasm as la petite mort, or little death.

Henry marries Anne of Cleves, but the marriage is not consummated and is quickly annulled. I have read that Anne not only stayed in England, but that she was welcome in the royal circles. In The Private Life of Henry VIII, Elsa Lanchester played cards with Charles Laughton, and they got on rather well. In real life, Elsa Lanchester's tell-all biography claimed that she'd been childless because husband Laughton was homosexual.

Caster Semenya

These past few weeks, we've had the sports scandal over South African runner Caster Semenya. Semenya won a notable race, though she did not quite break the world record for that distance. Semenya was running as a woman. Now, to be quite honest, nearly all female sprinters and distance runners seem scrawny to me, though many, most even, look feminine. Caster Semenya didn't, not to my eyes, and others thought the same. Was Semenya a girl after all?

Is it racist, as the South African government is claiming, to question the gender of a black runner who ticks the female box when she's filling in her race application form? Race as in running, not as in ethnicity. I believe the question was raised because it was thought Semenya might be taking drugs. Is it racist to wonder about that?

As the world knows, Caster Semenya has been discovered to have no internal female organs (womb and ovaries), but has a couple of male parts (testicles) tucked up inside. She is getting an extra dose of testosterone, three times the usual amount, which is almost certainly affecting her performance on the track. Is that a problem? Should her female competitors have the right to inject themselves with the stuff to make their performance on a par with Semenya's?

The doctors claim that Semenya's undescended testicles are a cancer risk, and should be removed. That would, I'm thinking, affect her hormone levels which will affect not just her physical being, but her emotions. The South Africans, who have a pretty shoddy record when it comes to treatment of females, claim that there is no such thing as a hermaphrodite, so hands off Semenya… she's a South African girl. Many South African men believe having sex with a virgin child can cure AIDS. The last President of that country refused to believe that HIV and AIDS were connected. Don't forget female genital mutilation. Will Caster Semenya suffer for South Africa's blinkered outlook on life, indeed ignorance?





So, a magazine shoot and cover featuring Caster Semenya all dolled up. She's not as gorgeous as, erm, RuPaul and Wendy Williams, but, apparently, she loves the look they've given her.

I hope that Caster Semenya manages to lead a healthy life, and that sensible medical science can help her if she needs it. And if she feels fabulous, at home in her girlish body, rather than her boyish one, I hope the world will let her be. Perhaps South Africa can lead the world in accepting people for what they are, how they are born, what they feel themselves to be. Out of Africa … Tolerance.

The White Whale Rises Still

BLUE TURNED TO GREY and rain threatened. I made a mug of milky coffee and switched on the television. I usually, early in the morning, have a look at the overnight news headlines on the BBC or Sky. However, I'd left the channel setting at ITV3 when I went to bed last night and that's what came up on the screen. Before I could switch, I saw Up Next: Moby Dick.

John Huston's film of Herman Melville's novel was released in 1956. That year, my father took me to see the movie at the Playhouse theatre in Hamilton, Bermuda. I'd have been all of six years old. I did not see many movies at the Playhouse as a boy because it was pulled down and an ugly office block built on the site at the top of Queen Street. I saw 20,000 Leagues under the Sea there, again with my father, and Lady and the Tramp. The older of my sisters came along to Lady and the Tramp.

Those three films are the earliest that I recall, and they all made a big impression on me. I liked everything about Lady and the Tramp: the music, the story, the spaniel. We had a spaniel at home. I've not seen that film all the way through since the 1950s, and don't wish to. The snippets I've come across haven't moved me at all, and I no longer like the music.

20,000 Leagues under the Sea is memorable for the giant squid squeezing the Nautilus submarine. I just loved that bit. I liked Captain Nemo, even if he was supposed to be evil. This is a film I've seen a number of times over the years and I never tire of it. Nowadays, I'm not so sure that I'd even part company with Nemo on his political views. James Mason seemed perfect in the role; I was disappointed to find him a bit sappy in Journey to the Centre of the Earth a few years later.

Moby Dick has not come up in television reruns very often, though three times this year. I saw a remake, a mini-series, starring Patrick Stewart, a few years ago which left me cold. Not because Stewart failed in any way, but, for me, Gregory Peck was, is and always will be Captain Ahab. He is as attached to my mind as securely as Ahab was stapled and lashed to the whale at the end of the movie. If you say the words "Moby Dick" to me, in a cinematic sense, of course, I immediately see Peck under all those ropes while a rather limber whale takes aim at the Pequod. He seems to be crucified there. Is that the reward for having only one aim in life? Death.

I've never read Herman Melville's books, and I am probably at the right stage to do it now. I know Moby Dick has a good deal about the whaling industry in it. The religious symbolism would interest me too; it's not just Christian sects that are woven into the story. I imagine that Melville, perhaps unintentionally, shows us the psychological make-up of some strong characters. And there are references to slavery.

The book was first published, in England, in 1851. So I gather Melville was writing it in the few years before that date. He was at sea in the early 1840s, I believe. The 1840s were a time of religious turmoil, with sects spawning breakaway sects. Even people like Joseph Smith, with little formal education, thought and spoke in terms that seem religious to me now. There was some obsession with religion. Might guilt have finally set in for slavery, if not for the slaughter of the Native American peoples? And, apparently, that sort of thing, on the printed page, sold.

So, what was Moby Dick? I dare say that one can call the whale a great many things. And the terrible white whale lives on, with Captain Ahabs rotting under ropes, and countless drowned bodies scattered among driftwood in the high seas. The object of one's revenge, an obsession. One might call it Afghanistan in 2009.

Dee Time

I WAS TELLING A FRIEND the other night that a hero of my teenage years had just died. Who was it? Simon Dee. Who is Simon Dee? Never heard of him.

And I suppose if one didn't live in the UK between about 1964 and 1974, one might have completely missed the rise and fall of Simon Dee.

He was born in Ottawa, Canada, in 1935, and his real name was Cyril Nicholas Henty-Dodd. After his national service in the RAF in the 1950s, brief stints as a photographer's assistant, model, labourer, leaf sweeper in Hyde Park and a vacuum cleaner salesman (he reckoned he'd had fifty jobs in his lifetime), Cyril reinvented himself as Simon Dee (Simon was his son's name, and Dee from Dodd) and was one of the two first DJs on Radio Caroline, and his was the first voice heard from the pirate radio ship in March 1964.

I never heard Simon Dee on Radio Caroline, but I did come across his name in the magazines. By 1965 he'd come ashore and was working for the BBC and Radio Luxembourg. Simon hosted Top of the Pops at times, and started to keep some very famous company, and became a celebrity in his own right.

I watched Dee Time, Simon's twice-weekly chat show. His was the first chat show on British television. In fact, I tried not to miss one of Simon's shows as he almost certainly had the most famous and notorious along for a chat. Simon interviewed everyone from John Lennon to Jimi Hendrix at a time when I worshipped these hit-makers.

Simon Dee had a public school education apparently, but his accent was mid-Atlantic. That might have been an attraction for me being somewhat mid-Atlantic myself. He was awfully good looking, took chances, and you had to like somebody who was driven out of the studio after each show by a beautiful woman in an E-Type Jaguar.

Apparently, Simon Dee was the model, the inspiration, for the character Austin Powers. Simon had a few minor roles in films, and was considered as a possible James Bond. He looked the part, having fine features and looking not at all like Austin Powers.

I suppose I had something of a crush on Simon Dee, or a fascination a little beyond my control.

Simon Dee's career had gone tits up by 1970. He had misjudged his employers and his worth, and was soon out of work. He'd been well-paid by the standards of the day, £250 a show, but had spent it all. He went on the dole, worked as a bus driver briefly, and by 1974 was in gaol for tax offences. He had other brushes with the law. And he vanished.

Simon Dee lived alone in a tiny flat in Winchester at the time of his death, very suddenly from cancer, aged 74. He'd become a recluse. He'd been one of the Beautiful People in the 1960s. People who knew him towards the end of his life said he just didn't bother with those days when he'd been a shining star. The way a soldier might not speak of his time on the battlefield.

I find I cannot switch off the 1960s quite so easily.

A Last Grasp at Summer

Great North Bike Ride approaching Amble

GNBR cyclists crossing Braid to Amble

GNBR cyclists come up into Amble

GNBR cyclists in a jam, Amble's Queen Street

WELL BEFORE THE SUMMER HOLIDAYS ENDED, I was ready to head back to school, always a new form and new challenges. That was fifty years ago and I'm not so brave, and I have so many summers behind me, and precious few to look forward to, even if I live well beyond my parents' allotted life spans. One could get quite depressed over this sort of thing.

This is the August Bank Holiday weekend, and it has generally been a fair-weather time, though, looking out my kitchen window in late afternoon on the Sunday, the sky is leaden. My neighbour just loaded up the clotheslines in the courtyard with a couple of baskets of laundry. That seems to be inviting the rain, indeed, daring it. I dashed over to the minimart for some milk and a Lotto ticket earlier than usual, taking no chances. The forecaster on the BBC says it will be unusually warm tonight (though not compared to some places I have lived, we're going to be about 55˚F) and muggy. The forecasters don't use the word muggy too often. England is famous for its rain, but it's rarely oppressively damp. Muggy. The map shows great blobs of blue, for moisture, moving across the Isles from west to east tomorrow. We may reach 60˚F.

Amble had a pretty brilliant spring and early summer. May and June were quite warm and very sunny. I got a rather awful sunburn this year, and still have a bit of a tan after a rainy July and a so-so August. I think Amble was not unusual in its weather this year. Of course, Cornwall tends to be warmer and sunnier (why else the tourists and second homes?) and Wales is squishy with rain. Scotland seems to have drier areas, and it can be quite warm there in summer, but one has to deal with the midges. I'd rather freeze in the dark, thanks.

My flowers bloomed early and withered a month ago. The blackberries in the hedgerows have just about finished. I did get some for my cereal. We had some high winds in Amble earlier this week and more than a few leaves were loosened. Last year there was a day and a howling gale and autumn happened in hours rather than weeks. Autumn of 2007 had been glorious and golden. One wonders what the next few weeks might bring. Will our greenery be reduced to sticks and odd berries? Last year Cailean, only six months old, discovered the joy of burrowing into heaps and layers of leaves on the pavements and lawns. By November he was ploughing into his first snow.

I've just received a copy of the Alnwick Playhouse's schedule for the autumn and winter, at least through January 2010. A good deal of Christmas fare. It's not easy feeling in the Christmas mood on the penultimate day of August. Two months from now, I'll be in better shape for that, I imagine. I'm going to see a Fleetwood Mac tribute in mid-September with some mates, and will probably be wearing a sweater with my jacket, but it takes an overcoat to get me fancying Silver Bells and Pantomimes.

Today, in the northeast, we've had The Great North Bike Ride. This is a 54 mile bicycle ride (not a race) from Seahouses, a coastal village north of Amble, down the coast road to Tynemouth Priory. The cyclists pass through Amble, entering the town on the Coastal Path, crossing the Braid by the Marina, going over the narrow walkway bridge across the Gut, a little stream, then through the town's narrow streets and off to the south to the next town.

The cyclists waved as Cailean and I watched them on the loose gravel along the River Coquet, I took a few photographs.

The regular Sunday open air market was on today, and a fair in aid of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. We have an RNLI station here in Amble. There were simulated rescues in the Harbour involving people, boats and a helicopter, and activities, games and the like at the back of the beach. I passed on this, though I could see the helicopter as I live close to the Harbour.

Our main drag, Queen Street, and the Town Square, were packed with pedestrians and vehicles, including cyclists, today. Unfortunately, not all our shops opened for the day and there were unattractive shutters rolled down. A more tourist-conscious town council might have tried to get everything open and sparkling. Amble never quite makes it as a picture postcard.

And at the end of the day the helicopter will fly away, the cyclists will be near Newcastle, the day-trippers will have moved on, and the visitors staying at our caravan and camping sites will be planning their voyages back to less exciting places inland tomorrow. Schools will soon resume classes.

At the beginning of August, Selfridges's famed emporium on Oxford Street in London opened its Christmas shop. What the hell? I thought. They have artificial trees, ornaments and lights, and other decorations on sale so early because, they say, the many tourists are interested, and the pound is favourable to folks from overseas with stronger currencies.

Then, a fortnight ago, the city of Rochdale in Lancashire put up its public Christmas decorations. When people said they thought four months might be a bit too early, Rochdale said it was putting up decorations for all the faiths that celebrate something between now and the year-end. And it's cheaper to get the whole lot up together when the earliest festivals begin. I'm sorry, but I don't want to see Santa Clauses and Snowmen on the utility poles in mid-August.

In another town, shops that sell Christmas greeting cards were warned that if they put out their stock before the first of November, their shops would be vandalised. Their letterboxes would be super-glued shut. Sounds reasonable enough to me, but I'm not going to damage the local Oxfam which has its cards inside when illuminated snowflakes are decorating Rochdale's shopping district. And I don't believe Selfridges is making a bomb selling white, glittering reindeer to Americans and Saudis right now, no matter what they'd have us believe.

I have been buying books for the winter. Most are second-hand from Barter Books in Alnwick. And I have some DVDs to watch and re-watch. I've bought a new tweed jacket to replace the one I've had over twenty years which had become rather worn and, to be honest, difficult to button up. My overcoat will last another year, and I have warm-weather accessories. Cailean's two overcoats are almost "as new."

I had best finish this up, Cailean wants to nip outside for a pee, and I should have a cup of tea and some biscuits. I turn into my father at this time of day.

Summer's lease hath, indeed, too short a date.

America: Glittering Towers & Dead Flowers

Friends tellin' me that maybe I need
Some psychiatric help
Yeah they're always so quick to tell you
Just how to get on with it
But I look into the mirror
And all I see is age, fear
And agony.

If I could just remember what it was like
When I was younger
Before all the joy and happiness
Was replaced with hunger
Now all I've got to show for the seeds that didn't grow
Is agony.

Eels (Agony)

I BELIEVE I FIRST WENT TO AMERICA in 1969 or 1970. I had to take several large envelopes containing typed copies of the financial statements of the company that eventually became American International Group from the Bermuda office where I was working to the offices of the company that was our largest shareholder, C.V. Starr, in New York City. The financial results were not produced on a particularly timely basis as the company was then a private concern and not beholden to SEC regulations and a large shareholder base. More than three months would pass after any reporting period before we'd finish consolidating the international operations and type the statements. These statements, an original and nine carbon copies, would be distributed to the company executives. Maurice R. Greenberg, the Chairman, in NYC, would get the original copy, Ernest E. Stempel, the President, in the Bermuda office, would get the first copy. As the carbon copies became less distinct, the recipients were of diminishing importance.

I was given a day's notice that I'd been chosen to take, by hand, the statements to Mr Greenberg and the C.V. Starr executives in their offices at 102 Maiden Lane. I think the trip must have been rushed as the company car took me to the Bermuda Airport at some speed and I went straight over to the departure gate and boarded my flight, clutching my envelopes. Two hours later I was at JFK feeling very much the foreigner. I got myself a yellow taxi cab and was taken to Central Park South and checked into the rather old hotel our company's lesser employees were housed in. I was on a floor which seemed like a long way up.

My reservation at the Barbizon Plaza had been for a single room. However, I'd privately arranged to meet a friend in New York City who would stay with me for my three days in town, then fly back to Bermuda with me. I changed the room to a double and charged the difference to the company. They never queried this. The next day my friend travelled over to Maiden Lane with me to deliver my envelopes; we were given a private tour of Greenberg's office as he was not in town. Then we went to see a risqué movie in Times Square. When in New York City…

As a schoolboy, ten or more years before, I had been warned, as all the male pupils were, never to sport a crew-cut or American-style haircut. Later, I was threatened with expulsion for having a Beatles' haircut. So it goes. If we used American spellings or expressions in our English classes we were automatically failed. We did have a few American pupils at Warwick Academy and I imagine they had a difficult time reinventing themselves to gain passing marks. Coming from an English family, it was normal for me to churn out the right stuff.

We had American friends as young children; all were from military families stationed at the US Air Force Base or Naval Operating Base. The neighbourhood in which I grew up had a number of homes let to the US Coast Guard, the folks next door were Americans. White, of course. The Bermudian children were always welcomed in the homes of their American neighbours, and we would be bundled in station wagons and taken to Horseshoe Bay for barbeques and beach parties. The Americans never seemed short of food, and a variety of it, and they looked a good deal healthier than we did.

Our American neighbours, the Coast Guard families, left in the early 1960s. I did write to one friend, Gayle Easter, for a few years, her family was relocated to the US Gulf Coast and then Rhode Island as I recall. My last contact with Gayle was in about 1974, she was working at the Doubleday publishing house in New York City. Where might she be now?

By the 1970s I had made other American friends outside the US military, I am still as close as can be to a few of them. These were friends I shared books, art, films and travel with, all rather international in outlook. They are in this blog, in some fashion, most of the time. In my mind, always.

I had American relatives as a child. My grandmother's cousin, Mrs. George Hill, who we called "Auntie Lily", had left Lancashire for New York back in the 1920s. Lily had red hair, was deaf as a post, and visited Bermuda from time to time. She lived on Staten Island and had two sons, Donald and Jack Hill. Lily's granddaughter came to Bermuda at least once, a bit of a hippie-chick. Where might they be, if they are alive?

In 1974 I joined that most American of religions, the Mormons. I travelled to Utah for the first time in 1978. I found, looking in the phone books, Lancashire surnames. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young sent many missionaries to England, in particular to the north-west, and the Lancashire folks took the ships from Liverpool to the USA and crossed the Continent, many on foot, eventually turning up in Utah Territory. My grandmother told me that when she and her siblings were small, in the very early 1900s, if they misbehaved their mother would threaten them: "The Mormons will come and take you away!" They took me 70 years later. So it goes.

I'd studied the American War of Independence at Warwick Academy, and wasn't particularly excited by it. I do recall that when the War was won and the American Founding Fathers were sorting things out, they offered to make George Washington their King. Washington declined, bless him. How things might have been different! Did he consider the fact that he had no son when he said he thought not?

George Washington's family comes from the north of England and the family's coat of arms, with its stars and stripes, was adapted for the American flag. I suppose that was a nod to the General that he was comfortable with. Thomas Jefferson used a coat of arms that he may well not have been entitled to. There are more than a few Americans in 2009 looking for their coats of arms, titles, tartans, castles and manor houses, and links to the British Royal Family, an entry in Debrett's. One might buy a peerage on E-Bay if one has the dosh. Do they want to be like us?

When many, most, people hear my accent they start to say: "Oh! Are you Amer…?" And by then I'm looking over the top of my glasses and flashing the message: "I dare you…" with my beady eyes. And the person offers: "Canadian?" hurriedly. Years of watching American television in Bermuda are responsible for my Amer… I mean Canadian… accent. I believe I still write in UK English, and I use English words and expressions. Why should I care?

I care because I'm no huge fan of America. From the get-go the Founding Fathers seemed to radiate a superiority (never mind Jefferson's hypocritical blathering about equality!) over their fellow citizens, friends and foes. The Electoral College was conceived as a way of keeping the riff-raff out. Their heirs seem little better. The phrase "We know better than you do what is good for you…" might be carved over the doors into the Congress. The current dictatorial Leader in Bermuda was a US Citizen until it was pointed out he could not also swear allegiance to the Crown as a member of Bermuda's Parliament. Nevertheless, he rules as an American president might. No matter how close equality seems, it is always wrenched away by those in power. There is little peace in the American system, there never has been, all is confrontational.

The Woodstock generation now bears arms because it is a right. Why not show Jesus carrying a gun? You know he would. Well, you follow him, act for him, so your teenagers get your guns from the locked cabinet using the obvious key and jump in a beat-up Ford and drive to the high school.

Wait just a minute! You say. We are a Christian people, we follow a God of mercy and compassion and love who says to all: Come unto me!

Do I have hope for the Obama Administration? Not a whole lot.

A few days ago the Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, granted convicted Libyan terrorist Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, responsible, it is said, for the Lockerbie airline bombing twenty-one years ago, an early release from his life sentence because al-Megrahi has terminal cancer. An action based on compassion and mercy. The American Government threw a fit before and after the release. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressured the Scottish Government not to release the terrorist, and now that it has happened the Director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, has blasted both Scotland and the United Kingdom Government. American citizens are being urged by some to boycott British and Scottish goods as a protest. Cancel the kilt, forget the Lairdship.

Back on 11 June of this year, a CIA aeroplane brought four Chinese Uighur detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where they had been held for seven years as terrorists, after being captured in Afghanistan, to Bermuda under cover of darkness. Only Bermuda's autocratic Leader, Dr. Ewart Brown, and his unelected henchman Colonel David Burch knew about the Uighurs' transfer. Burch was on the aeroplane. The Chinese say that these Uighurs are members of an Islamist separatist movement that is listed by the United Nations as a terrorist organization. The USA apparently thought they were terrorists; why else hide them away at Gitmo for all those years? Why not invite them to Disneyland if they were pukka?

The British Governor in Bermuda, the British Embassy in Washington DC, the British Government in London, had been told nothing of the Uighur deal. One knows that the Americans are aware of the Bermuda Constitution which states that Bermuda, a British Overseas Territory, cannot discuss foreign policy matters with other governments without the British being involved. Obama and Clinton praised Bermuda for its compassion in taking in the Uighurs, ignored British protests, and said that America was a safer place with the Uighurs in Bermuda (they would not be permitted to travel to the USA, where they are not wanted). To this day, the Americans are stalling on giving the British authorities information on the four Uighurs dumped in Bermuda. Of course, the British have been left dealing with an angry Chinese Government. The Uighurs have no passports, the Bermudian Government doesn't issue passports that are non-British.

Where are the Americans? Praising Bermuda's compassionate acceptance (albeit illegally manufactured by Obama, Clinton and the CIA and FBI) of dodgy Uighurs that the Americans dare not permit on US soil. And criticizing the Scottish and British for the compassionate release of a dodgy Libyan who has a few months, apparently, left to live. Last week the new American Consul General in Bermuda, Ms. Grace Shelton, when asked if the Uighurs might be taken to the USA and resettled in a Uighur community near Washington DC said: "I think they are working and doing well here in Bermuda. We are satisfied with that." How dare she be so patronizing!

Should the Uighurs have been spirited into Bermuda by the CIA? No! Should al-Megrahi have been released early? No! His case was on appeal, I think that process should have been completed before any release was considered. Should the Libyans have thrown such a party for al-Megrahi on his return? No! Three wrongs don't make a right.