4 February 2012

Low life

Exeter airport. Check in. I’m booked on a domestic flight to Glasgow International and I’m travelling with hand luggage only. It’s a small, cheap rucksack. It contains a phone charger, a toothbrush, a plastic bottle of Head and Shoulders, a copy of the Sun, two tubs of Devonshire clotted cream, a pound of Devon cheese and three books.

The books are: a paperback biography of Robert Burns; a 1903 cloth-bound collection of Schopenhauer’s essays; and a Norton edition paperback anthology of English poetry. The Burns biography and the Schopenhauer are gifts for my hosts in Paisley, one of whom...

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High life

Gstaad
OK, sports fans! The Davos irrelevance is over, Gstaad is covered with the white stuff, and in St Moritz the Russian crooks are laying a Stalingrad-like siege to the town’s ultra-expensive boutiques. So what else is new? Gstaad covered with snow, that’s what’s new. Let’s start with Davos, where publicity-seekers such as George Soros posed and postured about being against income inequality. What phonies these bums are, just as bad as the Occupy protestors but with two or three private jets and large ugly stinkpot yachts. (Unlike Taki, who has a large but beautiful sailing boat.)

...

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28 January 2012

Low life

We parked the car and spent a carefree hour on the beach, Oscar and I. The beach was a crescent of pebbles three miles long, and we were the only people on it. A recent easterly gale had driven the tide much further up the beach than usual, leaving behind it a pebble ridge, ideal for granddads and two-year-old boys to fling themselves off, or roll down roly-poly fashion, which we did until granddad was exhausted.

Next we searched for suitable pieces for the driftwood bookcase granddad is making, and found a frayed and salted plank of eight by...

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High life

Edmund Wilson was America’s premier man of letters (The Wound and the Bow) during the mid years of the 20th century. To the Finland Station and Memoirs of Hecate County are still in print, as are his journals about the Twenties, Thirties and Forties. He was a literary critic par excellence, a friend of both Scott Fitzgerald (whose death at 44 years of age shook him greatly, as Wilson was one year older than the tragic Scott) and Hemingway, who counted Wilson as one of the few men he would not bully. Wilson was much married, his third wife being...

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Wild life

Wau, South Sudan

‘Let’s visit the brewery,’ said Ken when we reached Wau. We were dusty and parched. It was searing hot. Like a character in Ice Cold in Alex, I saw before me a mirage of the cap popping off a chilled bottle. ‘Yes,’ I croaked.

We had driven thousands of kilometres across South Sudan, which seven months ago won independence after half a century of persecution and war at the hands of Khartoum. On the road, we had met friendly, decent people struggling to create a new nation despite so many hardships and continuing attempts...

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Real life

The Volvo only went in to have a parking light changed but, of course, it ended up being taken to pieces.

Somehow, whilst fitting a bulb and then securing the exhaust pipe, which had come a bit loose, they found a leak from an indeterminate origin. It was probably the gearbox fluid, the mechanic explained. They would have to keep it in for a few days and send me a courtesy car.

A boy wearing an iPod turned up on my doorstep an hour later and nodded mutely towards a shiny new BMW coupé parked outside my house.

‘Oh no,...

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