Diary

Wednesday, 14th November 2007

Obviously if I smoke, there is a problem, but it will not be dispelled by finger-wagging. I am from a generation where nearly everyone smoked, and I have read somewhere that at the time of the Marshall Plan — announced when I was six, in 1947 — we smoked 90 per cent of our dollar earnings. I started in 1960. Two months later the cancer business was confirmed, and my mother went on and on. I stopped smoking by the method favoured then — staying in bed. Watch: nine. Fifteen hours appear to go by. Look at watch: ten. Feet took charge: you’d trot down to the tobacconist’s and get ten Senior Service at 1/6 which is 10p or thereabouts. Since then there have been heroic efforts to give up — Champneys, a Korean acu-massagist who walks on you, a wizard in Wembley with a character called Nosmo, and the small arsenal of cigarette replacements that are now available for nothing on prescription. None of it was any good. I did stop for a year, could write nothing memorable, and drank more than was good for me or anyone else. There obviously is some connection between smoking and brainwork, or even just having fun, but there you are.

In Turkey they are less impressed by health scares. Even the customs officers here smoke underneath notices saying ‘No smoking’, so I am staying here. The Turks’ response to silly rules is to ignore them, whereas I fear that the British middle classes have become so used to being bossed around that they will put up with anything. In north Oxford, there are now rats in the streets because some green-minded lunatics have decreed that perishable rubbish will only be collected every fortnight. The only possible answer to this sort of thing is micro-terrorism — a pair of dividers through their tyres, rubbish dumped in the councillors’ front gardens at dead of night. But the British middle classes would not do such things. Thank God for Turkey, where my rubbish is picked up every day as a matter of course.

On Remembrance Sunday our church was not only full, but overflowing into the yard. We have in Istanbul a splendid semi-cathedral, which was erected in the late 1860s as a memorial to the Crimean war. The architect, G.E. Street, was quite good — he did the law courts, and William Morris was his assistant. Our vicar, Ian Sherwood, is robust: no two-dimensional post-Darwin uplift (it is curious how the heart goes out of hymns after about 1860) but old-fashioned Middle-to-High Anglicanism, with majestic 17th- and 18th-century hymns. The 17th-century ones — John Mason especially — are superb.