In the Valley

They were once the masters of the dank, damp places, undisputed lords of the river. They were magic and to be feared. If you were so brave as to cut one down the stump bled. The timber did not rot. The foliage was dark, the bark black, so black that, even in winter when the leaves had gone, the ground under the alders was always gloomy and oppressive.

The alders were here, of course, thousands of years before we were. Their pollen has been preserved in samples taken from peat bogs; their seed has been found among the earliest remnants of ancient man. At that time the whole of England was one vast forest. The dry ground was the scene of a strange, imperceptibly slow and protracted yet ferocious war of attrition waged between several species of trees. The prize was the possession of the landscape: the winner, in the first age, was the small-leafed lime. Then came men with their animals. Lime leaves were gathered as fodder. The lime’s defences were weakened and in came oak. Oak forest dominated England until the arrival of metal and the growth in the human population signalled its end.

But below all this, in the marshy places, where the soil was too wet to interest the farmers, the alders were yet safe. They survived here using the same weapon that had held off the limes and oaks: a special sort of root system that produces its own free nitrogen and enables the roots to withstand prolonged or even permanent immersion. The roots, together with the unique mixture of sedges and rushes which accompanies alder woodland, gradually consolidate the marsh, raising the level and sending the water elsewhere. Once the best ground higher up had been put to the axe, we began to drain the water-meadows, and to maintain this drainage the alders had to go.

Extensive alder woodland, or alder carr, as it is called, is now virtually unknown in England. The few alders that are left to us are thinly scattered along the margins of lakes and rivers, and only survive there by default. They are given gracious permission to remain, to represent their ancestors in the valleys where once they held sway. There is something sad about them now, as though they cannot forget past glories. The aluminium sign, “PRIVATE FISHING, NO DAY TICKETS, BY ORDER”, the two iron nails unfeelingly driven into the heartwood and allowed to rust, are just another humiliation, too minor even to notice or resent.

Even the river itself has been destroyed, an impossible act in the imagination of the ancestors. It is now a canal. The otters have gone, the trout, the variety of dragonflies. From the old times only the siskins really remain, ever faithful: small, acrobatic finches, streaked green, yellow, and black. With goldfinches and sometimes redpolls and blue tits they make flocks which move through the alder tops, prising the seed from the small, woody, cone-like lanterns of the old female catkins. The seed is rust-coloured and rich in oil, very nourishing for the finches on a dark November afternoon such as this. The siskins are especially busy, preparing for a long and chilly night spent immobile, losing heat, roosting high up in the alder branches. Their cry is a thinner, more metallic, version of the greenfinch’s wheeze, quite unmistakable, even when you and your bicycle are jolting and crunching along the towpath. You stop and look up, hoping for a glimpse of them at work. Alder seed is coming down in sparse showers. The seeds will float away if they hit the canal. Small as they are, much of their surface is given over to two minute waterwings. It must be hard work to eat enough to make a meal, but the siskins do it. In this, like the alders themselves, the siskins are too narrow and specialized. That is why they are relatively uncommon these days, much less plentiful than the goldfinches. The siskins’ diet is virtually restricted to the seeds of alder, birch, and of a few other trees; the goldfinches can take many other sorts of food besides: thistle and burdock seed especially, insects too. And, even among the alders, the goldfinches are more enterprising and opportunistic. At this very spot last winter a party of goldfinches was on the ice, picking up the alder seed where it had fallen. In this way the goldfinches saved themselves their usual exertions, and the food needed no special finding. It was there, spread out as though on a table.

The siskins are moving on. Dusk is approaching and you have only dynamo lights, not the safest way to illuminate rough ground, so perhaps you had better do the same.

(Introduction to these pieces; see all)

The Geese of Oxhey

When my novel, The Earth Goddess, was published in 1984, I'm pretty sure I was interviewed by a local newspaper in Watford, the Review. I can't imagine why else the editor should have invited me around that time to do a weekly nature-piece. The paper was one of the freesheets that so flourished in those days and so annoyed the town's householders who, every Thursday afternoon or evening, had to bend down and pick the thing off the mat.

My stuff hardly fitted with the other editorial matter, but I was glad of the £35 a column they paid me. The editor called it "Natureview", which wouldn't have been my choice, but there we are. The job lasted for just over a year, when I became the victim of a cost-cutting exercise. The paper itself subsequently folded, if you'll pardon the expression.

Anyhow, I was reorganizing my hard disc when I came across the files (originally composed on an Acorn Electron!). Many of the pieces are local, even parochial, in tone and content, but nonetheless may be of interest. Read in sequence, they form a sort of diary, and I thought it might be a nice idea to reproduce them here in chronological order. I have mislaid the original cuttings and am not sure of the date on which any given piece was published, though the sequence certainly began in November. If I publish one a week from now on, each will be appearing on its approximate 25th anniversary.

The Geese of Oxhey

Lying in bed, you hear it approaching from a great distance: a mad, clamorous honking as of two hundred unreasoning taxi drivers caught in a jam, but the horns are all mobile and airborne and pass just above the rooftops and on their way. You turn over and try to get back to sleep. There is nothing you can do about the noise, or the fact that it has woken you at daybreak many times before. If you live anywhere in Oxhey or West Watford or Rickmansworth you must resign yourself to the knowledge that you have geese for neighbours.

They are Canada geese, big, handsome birds, brown and black and white. The flock numbers two or three hundred, and spends its time in a selection of favoured spots up and down the chain of gravel pits between Oxhey and Denham. The geese are discerning gourmets. They know all the choicest pastures. One of their favourites is the broad expanse of playing fields at Merchant Taylors’ School. There, while one or two keep watch with upraised necks and black, suspicious button eyes, the rest are browsing by the running track, expertly cropping the grass to a regulation length. It is an hour after dawn, a time at which, even in the autumn, few people are about. The sky is blue; the distant school, the cricket pavilion, the black, sawn-off uprights of the rugby goalposts standing about here and there on the field, are all made indistinct by mist. The geese continue to feed. The turf is littered with their large, greenish mutes; the flock has advanced across the running track, and crumbs of white adhere to some of the dark, webbed feet.

Suddenly another neck goes up, and another, and yet more. On the far side of the field, where the path adjoins the netting fence, the sentinels have seen the feared and hated shape. A man. With him is a lesser animal, a dog. The geese know what that is.

They wait, growing more restless, as the man approaches. He is walking through the dew, wearing gumboots and a green coat. He throws a stick and his dog runs for it. Now the geese are distinctly unhappy. One begins to honk, and others take up the complaint.

The dog is within a hundred and fifty yards, and behind the dog is the man. The dog makes a dash for the birds: in a rush of wings and honks they are taking flight, two hundred times fifteen pounds or more of goose. A ton and a half of them gaining air and space. From behind you can see the pattern made by their rumps and inner and outer tail feathers: intense black, a broad crescent of purest white, more black. The pattern is barely visible on the ground. It is made to be seen only in flight, a warning, an alarm signal, or something to follow, holding the flock together in its journeyings. These geese are not truly wild. They live as wild birds, but their forefathers were captives on ornamental lakes. Before that they really were wild, in North America, which is where each autumn the Canadas still travel down from the Arctic states to winter in Mexico and along the Gulf. In New England at this time of year the geese are passing through; in Old England they have no intention of going any further than over the hedge and away from the man and his labrador.

They circle the gravel pit and make as if to settle; but then, at some mysterious signal, a decision is made and they circle again, settling instead on the adjoining water of Hampermill Lake. By now the honking is reaching its climax. The other, more sober, birds of the lake – the solitary heron standing on a log, the grebes, the parties of mallard and shoveler – refuse to take note of the fuss. They have heard it all before. The geese are swimming about; some have climbed the bank and are already inspecting the pasture there. But the grass by the lake is inferior, fit only for the coots and moorhens to graze. Better pickings are not far away, just over there at Brightwell’s Farm, not a furlong from the northern margin. In groups of five, ten, twenty, thirty, the geese leave the lake, rise just enough to clear the yellowing hawthorn trees of the hedgerow, and settle once again to feed.

Feminism

Towards the end of the Second World War my mother went for a job interview. Her husband was serving in Egypt with the Eighth Army. She had not set eyes on him since early in 1940: and would not do so again until the end of 1945. Her current employer, a manufacturer of bombsights, was on the verge of bankruptcy caused by mismanagement and waste.

The interview was conducted by a Mr Weiss, a Viennese businessman who had escaped the Nazis by the skin of his teeth, his life having been saved by a phone call saying that arrest was only minutes away. He had fled Austria with his wife and two suitcases, together with her jewellery and whatever sum of cash he had been able, in the anxiety of the preceding weeks, to scrape together and convert into precious metal. His house, his thriving business, his extensive factory, Weiss had bequeathed to Hitler.

Soon after his arrival in London war had broken out and he had been temporarily interned as a suspicious alien. On release he had bought a manufacturing business in the town where my mother then lived. The business was very small, not much more than a kitchen-table outfit, but he was working it up and needed a personal assistant, a secretary, someone intelligent and responsible who, if he were away trying to drum up trade, could make decisions on his behalf.

My mother had left school at fourteen, when she was miraculously chosen from a snaking queue of girls and their mothers who had heard that a job was vacant in a box factory. By dint of voracious reading and night school she educated herself and became proficient in shorthand and typing, skills which in the 1930s could lift a girl out of the swamp and into the uplands of office work. The factory made boxes for a large and very famous London department store. At sixteen she was transferred to the store itself, being given, for her first day, the humiliating job of wandering the floors selling Boat Race favours – little ribbons in dark or light blue – from a tray suspended by a strap round her neck. She had been given this job because she was pretty: more than pretty, and she attracted a steady stream of customers, preponderantly young and preponderantly male. The following day she was found some proper work to do.

By this time her typing speed and accuracy were impressive, thanks to the night school, though she knew she had more progress to make. From the typing pool she soon found herself appropriated by a management type, the head of legal affairs, who needed a secretary. Quickly realizing what he had, this excellent man encouraged my mother in every fatherly way, and under his tutelage she began to learn a great deal about human nature, the judicious exercise of authority, and the way the world works. But in the course of time she was poached by someone higher up, the son of the owner, and then by the owner himself. In 1938 she married and left the company. Had she stayed, I don’t doubt that she would have ended up on the board.

So there she was, in 1944, not just being interviewed by Mr Weiss but also – if he did but know it – interviewing him. She liked what she saw, she needed the job, and he offered it to her.

Mr Weiss wished to get back to the industry he knew best, making electrical fittings. That was what he had been doing in Vienna. A few months after the interview, he found some suitable premises, a smallish factory that had been used for light assembly. He assumed there would be no difficulty with the planning permission, with the change of use: what concerned him more was getting the necessary certification to make the metal parts for his plugs and sockets. Priority was given to “war work” – manufacturing directly related to the struggle against Germany.

To his surprise, the town council turned down his application for change of use. The factory was located at the end of a somewhat lowly residential street, but the use Weiss was proposing was no more disruptive than the last: he couldn’t make it out.

Meanwhile, the request for certification was in train. Having seen what had gone on at the bombsight factory, my mother had a jaundiced view about this. She reasoned also that electrical fittings were crucial to the war effort in many different ways, and had felt no compunction in applying for the most enabling permission there was.

The local official charged with dispensing such permissions was a man of about my mother’s age. Somewhat unconventionally, he invited her to lunch to discuss the matter, and during the conversation my mother mentioned her employer’s troubles with the town hall.

“Oh,” said the man. “That factory? He’ll never get his hands on it.”

“Really?”

“Course not.” He gave her a conspiratorial smile. “You know. He’s one of those.”

“One of what?”

“The Chosen.”

If her life had worked out differently, my mother might have been an actress. She could maintain a most equable front, no matter what was going on inside. At this critical moment she managed to produce a smile of her own, a counterpart of the one he had given her.

“Thompkins wants it,” he went on, thinking that he had achieved his goal and impressed her with his inside knowledge. “The builder. He’s on the council. The planning committee, as a matter of fact.”

“That explains it.”

“Oh yes. Thing is, he’s having trouble raising the money. We’re at the same lodge, you know.” The Masonic Lodge.

On my father’s left hand, somewhere in Egypt, was a gold ring. Its companion, in plain sight, was on my mother’s hand. The official reached in his pocket and brought out a comb, a woman’s comb, unused, in a paper wrapper. It was not easy to get such things in wartime. “Would you like this?” he said. “I came by it yesterday. I thought it might be of some use to you.”

My mother looked at the comb, gave another smile, and accepted, thinking of her friend Mr Weiss. Thereupon she skilfully steered the official away from asking for a date, but left him with a faint impression that such a request, in the future, might not be declined.

When she got back to the office she made a telephone call. During her time working for the head of legal affairs, she had had many dealings with London’s leading firm of planning consultants. She now engaged them on behalf of Mr Weiss and his application.

A few days later the certification came through. The proposed factory would have A1 Priority, meaning it would have no trouble sourcing machine tools, brass, steel – everything it needed. The day after that, Mr Weiss received a call from the agent handling the sale. Was he still interested? Another buyer was in the frame.

Instantly Weiss knew that the other buyer was offering less: why else should he have been called? He said he was engaged at the moment and asked whether he might call back in ten minutes. He needed time to think.

The planning consultants had by no means arrived at a definitive answer, but would if necessary go over the heads of the town hall and appeal to Whitehall. My mother had naturally divulged this to Weiss, but not the full contents of her lunchtime chat.

Weiss told her what the agent had said. What should he do?

“Buy it.”

He looked away, racked with indecision, and looked back again.

“You did ask me, Franz. I say buy it.”

He bought the factory, for the full asking price. My mother later learned, with quiet satisfaction, of the anger and discomfiture of Thompkins. The business was successful; she became a director and worked with Mr Weiss until 1954, when he died of a heart attack and his wife took over.

His wife was a different sort of woman altogether, and my mother resigned in 1955 to start her own business, but that, as you are already half expecting me to say, is another story.

Nausea

The R.M.V. Scillionian

As a landlubbing schoolboy, my first ocean trip was an occasion of interest and excitement. We were going on holiday to the Isles of Scilly, and the usual way to get there was on the R.M.V. Scillonian, a flat-bottomed steamer. She had to be flat-bottomed because of the shallowness of her berth at the main island, St Mary's.

We departed from Penzance at mid-morning. The month was August and the day sunny and warm, though a stiff south-westerly was blowing. I noticed that the stern was attended by an unusually large and eager crowd of gulls and, because of my interest in bird-watching, I left my family to their own devices and went to the rear of the vessel.

We had only just got under way. The crew were busy with this and that, and not wishing to impede anyone I found myself a vacant spot near the rail before pulling out my binoculars. Behind me, set into the deck, I had noticed and then given no further thought to a curious metal construction, a sort of square funnel about three and a half feet high, furnished with an overhanging pipe – a bit like a drinking fountain. Partly surrounding it was a tangle of steel cabling.

As we emerged from the lee and into deeper water, the number of gulls increased yet more, just as if they had been loitering all over the district, waiting for the ship to leave. Herring and great black-backed gulls predominated. Squawking, yelping or silent, they were fascinated by the broad, white, bubbling wake: and as we got yet further out and I realized we were at last on the open Atlantic, they were joined by gannets and fulmars. This was going to be good!

The breeze had strengthened and there was a little spray, but not enough to cloud my lenses. What did make observation difficult was the growing swell. As I say, I had never been on a proper ship before and the sensation was new. ... All the way up ... all the way down ... all the way up ... all the way down ... all the way up ... Faithfully transmitted by the flat-bottomed hull, the regularity and amplitude were fascinating, caused as they were by moon-drawn combers which might have started in the tropics. A Manx shearwater appeared, and then two more. I took out my notebook.

Most of the passengers were on deck; some, like my family, had taken cabins and gone below. In breaks from my gazing, I noticed that not a few of the passengers were looking increasingly unwell. Then a man bent himself over the handrail and vomited.

He had apparently committed some sort of solecism, because he was immediately approached by a crewman who gave him a plastic washing-up bowl from a short stack he was carrying in his left hand. The crewman, aged about thirty and shabbily attired, proceeded to hand bowls to anyone who wanted one, and when he had exhausted his stack he went and got some more.

This poor wretch had the worst job in Cornwall, or England, or Britain, Europe even, or the world: when the bowls had been filled he had to carry them, two at a time, to the metal funnel and empty them. At the very first emptying the birds became even more animated. The overhanging pipe was by now pouring a stream of seawater into the funnel, flushing the contents down and, as I now realized, out, via a hatch a few feet above sea-level.

The previous night we had been lucky, and prosperous, enough to stay at the Abbey, one of the best hotels, if not the best, in Penzance. Our breakfast had been sensible and delicious. At other hotels and guest-houses in the town this may not have been the case. There, perhaps, the ritual of the Full English Breakfast had been observed.

The ritual unfurls as follows. Having entered the dining room, the communicant is greeted by any others who may be present with the phrase "good morning", repeated as necessary until he has gained his numbered table and his seat. Next he, or others, will say "looks like rain", "turned out nice again", or "bit of a breeze today", whereupon the room will lapse into silence, broken by low, half embarrassed murmurings from those tables holding more than one communicant.

Now enters the celebrant, in the form of the landlady or her husband, who makes enquiries of the newly arrived concerning their requirements as far as breakfast is concerned. Details vary, but the usual menu is this: orange or grapefruit juice (tinned) to start, cereal with milk and sugar, a cooked breakfast and, to finish, cold and soggy toast cut into triangles to be eaten with a scraping of butter and a ditto of largely rindless marmalade parsimoniously mined from a thimble-sized canister. To help all this down, working just like our seawater pipe, is a pot of strong tea served with milk and sugar, to taste.

The cooked breakfast is worthy of note. It comprises one fried egg, two or three rashers of greasy bacon, half a grilled tomato, a sausage. In the more depraved houses of worship there may also be half a slice of fried bread and even, speak it softly, a serving-spoonful of baked beans.

The whole meal then sits on the stomach while the gastric juices, never ones to shirk a challenge, go into a huddle and confer. The breakfast, meanwhile, becomes increasingly alarmed. Why is it so dark? What is that horrid smell? What does my future hold? Oh, if only I could regain my freedom and the light!

Normally, as you know, its fate is sealed. But today, inside those passengers who had accepted bowls, sundry breakfasts were sensing the possibility of hope, even salvation. With his nereids and his foamy train, hoary Neptune was coming to their rescue.

But you should never trust a Greek god. They are a bad-tempered, treacherous lot, and Poseidon – to the Romans, Neptune – is no different. He was going to set the breakfasts free, right enough, but only because he wanted them for his familiars, the birds.

It was the sausages they especially prized. Not that the rest of it was rejected, this revolting chum being tipped time after time into the funnel by my grumpy companion, working as he was in a Force Six south-westerly while contending with a tangle of cables that seemed intent on tripping him up.

I was far enough away that I saw no reason to move. I felt not the slightest qualm, and to my pleasure realized that I had been born with an immunity to seasickness. I was thirteen, in the A-stream, and brimming with the omnipotence of youth.

It is now necessary to move the narrative on. I am one quarter Irish, which explains this annoyingly polysyllabic loquacity as well as the discovery, when I finally visited the Auld Sod, that I adore the place. Rain-sodden and corrupt it may be, small, infested with priests, its politicians mealy-mouthed and loathsome, but there is something about Ireland and its people to which I respond at an atavistic level. I ascribe this to genetics. Despite my pathological Englishness, when I first saw the green patchwork of Erin from an airliner's seat, I thought "home".

Anyhow, in my twenties I conceived the idea of living there. I thought it a good plan to buy a fishing boat and take anglers out for day-trips. I wanted particularly to live at Kinsale.

I knew nothing whatever about sea-angling or boats, and not much more about Kinsale, which I had visited only once. Its location is picturesque, on the southern coast, with a superb natural harbour whose environs are largely green. The town with its Georgian architecture is a delight. I saw myself in a pepper-and-salt turtleneck sweater, drinking Guinness in one of its many bars, exchanging the craic, then going home to the lovely, red-haired, milky-skinned colleen whom I should have undoubtedly met and married. I gave less thought to the babbies that might have ensued, or to the day-to-day business of earning a living. Once I had the boat, everything else would drop into place.

I am not quite the dreamer you might suppose: I was not going into this venture alone. No. I had a prospective partner, a very good friend, who was just as interested in this nonsense as I was. He would put up half the cost of the boat – or be liable for half the loan, more like – and would take it in turns with me to stand at the wheel.

Before making a detailed business plan, a spot of due diligence is useful. We decided that one of us should reconnoitre.

From Heathrow I flew to Cork. I got into an elderly Mercedes taxi driven by a large and helpful middle-aged woman. We set out for Kinsale. I asked her advice about accommodation and learned that little was to be had, despite the fact that we were well before the holiday season and I had been expecting vacancies. There was a Hollywood fillum being shot on location around Kinsale, and the fillum people had filled up the hotels. But she did know of a guest-house where I might find a bed.

I have stayed in much worse, and the landlady was kind. In the evening I decided to go for a drink at the main hotel and there, sure enough, in the large and mirror-lined bar, were the fillum people, standing around with wine-glasses, the actors – some of whom I recognized – now and then taking surreptitious and satisfied glances at their own reflections.

I slept reasonably well and in the morning was served not with a full English, but a full Irish breakfast. The Irish certainly know how to stuff themselves. The homegrown produce is first rate and I couldn't resist any of it. The packed lunch looked just as tempting. In plenty of good time, I set out for the quay and secured the place I had booked on the N., which turned out to be a somewhat decrepit craft twenty-five or thirty feet long. I was issued with my sea-angling rod. One by one the other tourists arrived – notably a corpulent German in one of those black plastic trawlermen's coats – until there were seven of us all told, including the skipper.

Assisted by his boy, who remained ashore, he cast off and we chugged out into the harbour. The sky was overcast and a sort of resentful, oily film covered the water. It began faintly to drizzle. Just as with the Scillonian, when we emerged from the shelter of the headland, the swell started to grow.

Our quarry was the mackerel. The skipper knew just the place. He stopped the boat, parked it, or whatever the term is, and may have let down a sheet anchor, if I remember aright, or even knew what one was. At any rate we were in one spot. Unexpectedly he did not switch off the diesel engine. He left it ticking over, perhaps because it was a bugger to start and he did not fancy being lost at sea. The craft, as I have said, was somewhat decrepit and I could smell fumes.

We tourists got on with our fishing. My line disappeared into the greenly translucent swell and I had nary a bite. I found myself feeling not exactly OK. Queasy is the word. Meanwhile the others were regularly hauling mackerel on board. It seemed to me pointless and disgusting, not to say cruel, to kill these beautiful animals for such little reason. If they were to be eaten, that would have been another matter: but this was so stupid. I was especially appalled by the German, who seemed to have a knack for this, and at intervals swigged milk from a pint bottle. He said nothing except "ja" or "nein", although later he may have said "Gott in Himmel!"

Look here, there's no point spinning this out any further. What with the swell, the fumes, the taciturn skipper, the flopping fish and their blood and scales, the revolting German, and not least the collapse of my dream, I began to feel really awful. Worse. It may have been before, or just after, I threw up, that I wished myself dead. Whatever depths of dejection or despair I have reached since (and there have been many) I have never so fervently and thoroughly wished for oblivion as then, there, on that repulsive boat. I had taken an instant dislike to the skipper. It occurred to me, as I slowly and permanently reeled in my line, that my proposed boat would have operated in competition with him and with several others, natives whose livelihoods depended on their hard-won trade. That being so, might my boat, one night, have mysteriously burned itself down to the waterline, or simply disappeared and been sunk?

At thirteen, even eighteen, you imagine yourself invincible. There is nothing you cannot achieve. All you have to do is set your mind to it.

Your first intimation that the world might not agree often takes the form of an envelope with the wrong exam results. Or it could be some other form of rejection: hundreds, even thousands, are available. After the first, there are others. Sometimes you have to reach your mid twenties before the message gets fully through.

As the aeroplane descended, coming in to Heathrow, I found myself smiling. I was looking down at the scruffy landscape of reservoirs, gravel pits, rubbish dumps, traffic and pylons in which that sprawling airport is set, glad to be home again and very glad now to be, at long last, on the right route for adulthood.

An Evening Spin

One evening last September, my bike ride was oddly transformed. I cycle for pleasure as well as exercise, normally covering about fifteen or twenty miles. The most I can do before getting knackered is about twenty-three. My ride is solitary: I use it for day-dreaming. If I ride in company that's impossible, so I don't at all mind cycling on my own.

Except for the occasional White Van Man and the execrable state of the tarmac, the lanes round here are ideal. Narrow and lined by hedgerows, farmland, copses, woods, small settlements, they are in many places quite steep, which provides a handy bit of interval-training as well as some exhilarating descents. I have worked out a series of routes which require me at worst to cross a busy road.

One of my favourites takes me to the village of A. I was four miles out when I came upon another cyclist, a man in his thirties, standing astride his machine and puzzling over a map. The scale was inadequate and showed only the largest lanes. He was looking for B, which hardly even rates the name "hamlet". I told him it was near A, which itself was not marked, said that that was my destination, and did he want me to show him the way?

Except when cars prevented it, for the next four miles we rode abreast. Cyclists belong to a sort of fraternity, helping one another out with punctures and the like: before long we were chatting away. He turned out to be an interesting guy, a professional diver hired by archaeologists working on wrecks and inundated cities. His hobby is to take his car, and his bike on a rack, to some unfamiliar part of the English countryside, then pedal around absorbing its character. He is fascinated by our complex geology and our even more complex land-use. Human influences, going back even beyond the Neolithic, blend with the natural to produce a unique sense of place which varies almost by the half-mile. A bike is the next-best way to sample it; I suppose he hasn't the time to go on foot.

We came to the turnoff for B, where he was parked, and amiably diverged, no doubt for ever.

In my whole life I had never before met a stranger in this particular way.

The sun was setting by the time I got back to the village of C, two miles from home. Preceding me I saw another cyclist. I caught up, said a passing "Good evening!" and was still overtaking when he asked whether I knew of anywhere local to eat. I slowed down and told him he was heading in the right direction, for D, and suggested that he should at all costs avoid the Red Lion and use the other pub instead.

His bicycle was a silver-grey Raleigh, vintage 1996 or so, with a Sturmey-Archer three-speed hub: the sort of boneshaker I might nip down to the shops on, but wouldn't want to ride all day. He himself was also silver-grey, a lean sixty-something in glasses, and looked like a professional type -- an architect or engineer, perhaps. At first I thought his accent was Dutch, but he said he was Danish. He was staying at the bed-and-breakfast in C. I know the owner and have seen the accommodation, and surmised that he could have done a lot worse.

He was clearly well educated and spoke perfect English. "I am very hungry," he said, "for I have cycled today from Gravesend." Seventy miles, maybe more. "I have just had a shower and now I wish for something to eat and perhaps a beer."

"Indeed. Um ... what brings you to C?"

"I am touring. It is how I like to spend my holiday. Tomorrow I am going on to Reading." Forty miles. At least. I thought of the way there -- the dual carriageways, the towns, the thundering lorries -- and wondered whether this conversation was really happening. I dared not ask him the next incongruous point on his tour: Birmingham?

He had no lights on his bike, no panniers, just a parcel-rack. He was wearing a polo shirt and slacks, loafers, no socks. I mentioned the fact that it would soon be dark; it did not concern him.

By this time we had reached the turnoff for my own village, and once again I diverged, permanently, from a newfound acquaintance on a bicycle. He went sailing on towards his supper: and I never heard any local talk of a Danish tourist being squashed.

I have no reason to suppose he was lying. I accepted the bizarre events of the evening as yet another serving of the strangeness of this world. Really, truly, one has not the faintest idea what is out there.

But, of course, to find it you have to get on your bike.

An execration of public libraries

You will not find a more passionate advocate of literacy than me. Reading is the key to so much -- education, enlightenment, defence against tyranny -- that I am anguished by the thought of its decline. Books can entertain and delight, transport and comfort us. Truly, as the motto on that series has it, Everyman, I will go with thee, and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side. I was blessed to have been born into a house full of books, but I soon used them up, and after that my chief haunt was the public library.

This was a fusty place of parquet floors and silence. All the librarians but one seemed to be spinsters, with every connotation of that word. The exception was their leader. He wore a discreet blazer and an old boys' tie from the grammar school. He sometimes worked on the front desk, with the rubber stamps and the plywood trays of cards. His sternness concealed a kindly nature. "You again?" he would say, looking down.

Developing the argument

Times change. The library is no longer silent, and it no longer favours books. Indeed, the stock at my local libraries is dwindling. As books fall to pieces, they are unlikely to be replaced. I search the shelves for quality: and find most of it has been relegated to a cramped section labelled Classics.

The building, now, hardly merits the name "library" at all. It is a media centre, a shop, a nexus of propaganda and control, by government both local and central.

Much space is taken up by stands of music and films. These are rented out, directly competing with private companies; the titles on offer cover the whole spectrum of taste. More space is occupied by tables of PCs giving "free" access to the internet. The other week my home connection went down. I needed the Web, so I went to the library, but stayed as briefly as possible, for I was surrounded by children playing noisy online games and found it hard to concentrate.

Yet more space is given over to racks of greetings cards for sale, also in competition with nearby businesses. And regularly, laid out on trestles or even on one of the counters, I find a display of jewellery, or clothing, or craftwork, produced locally and put on subsidized sale.

Subsidized, of course, by taxpayers, because we supply the premises. I think particularly of an elderly council-tax payer, a widow perhaps, who cannot afford to heat her home. Her wretched pension is no longer even supplemented by the wretched income from her savings, thanks to Brown's bullying down the bank rate. She has received, last month, a whopping demand from the council, and if she can't or won't pay up they'll put her in jail.

And don't get me started on the multitude of nannying posters and leaflets and the smug, right-on ecosystem of which they form a part. It's as if the studio of You and Yours has, like some technicolor nightmare, come to life, the air pervaded by an unspoken injunction that we must be grateful.

Well, I am not grateful. Indeed, I am doubly ungrateful. If the library system is subsidized by the taxpayer, it is even more heavily subsidized by the content-providers. Notable among these are authors, whose own average income makes that of our elderly widow look positively plutocratic.

Going deeper

For the patient reader who has got this far, a few words about the economics of authorship are in order. Consider a hardback retailing for £17.99. For a middling or beginning author, a royalty rate of 10% is about the best to be had. After the agent's cut, the author might be credited with £1.49.

That is for a copy sold at full price. The collapse of the Net Book Agreement and the rise of discounters is pushing per-copy rates ever lower. On such deals, the author receives 10% of the price received; maybe as low as 40p on a £17.99 copy. Paperback rates are even worse, since 50% must typically be given to the publisher of the original hardback.

Let's pretend the library pays full price for the book. If, over its lifetime, it is lent out 150 times, that copy will effectively generate the author 1p a loan. An unknown number of other copies will not be sold.

For decades, authors' groups pressed for an end to this injustice. Their scheme was called Public Lending Right. It provided for authors to be remunerated from central funds for every notional loan. By the 1980s the campaign was bearing fruit, and the culture minister of the day, Paul Channon, started a consultation process.

I wrote to him. He replied. I can still remember one line of my acknowledgement: "Your answer is every bit as flat and evasive as I had feared it would be."

I had argued against Public Lending Right. I saw no reason why it should be paid from the public purse. No reason why the reading matter of the prosperous should be subsidized by the poor and by those who never set foot in a library. No reason why anyone who could afford it -- excluding the young, pensioners, and those in full-time education or on benefits -- should not pay a reasonable sum per loan.

Like most consultation processes, this one was probably a sham. The present PLR scheme was brought in. It involves a largish staff, computers, hefty admin costs. The per-loan rate is insultingly low, and in no way compensates the author or indeed the publisher for the consequent loss of sales. With rewards for writing as low as they are, every sale counts.

You might argue that libraries provide a showcase for authors. That readers are willing to borrow a book they would never risk buying. Perhaps so, but that is still no reason not to charge a commercial loan-fee. Librarians make one for a CD. Why not a book?

Deeper still

Now we come to the real problems with libraries. The first is editorial control. Someone you don't know, in some government-funded office, decides which books will and will not appear on the library shelves. If a book is panned in the Library Journal, or even if it just receives a dismissive "not a necessary purchase", it's doomed, as least as far as the "showcase" is concerned.

The next is the devaluation of what writers do. An attitude has arisen that books should be cheap, if not completely free. The corollary of this is the destruction of talent. No one who has not started a literary career from scratch can know how grindingly depressing it can be. Just finding an agent can take years of expense, submission and rejection. And at the moment, the publishing industry is in a tailspin. Times have rarely been worse. Authorship has become Hollywoodized: because of the economies of scale, publishers only want bestsellers.

Who knows how many writers just give up? Who knows what books have been lost to the world? Not all the blame can be laid at the library's door, but some of it certainly can.

The future

I believe that little or no case can now be made for public libraries as an agent of literacy. Most literature in the public domain is freely available on the net. Do you want a copy of Paradise Lost? Choose one here. In a few years' time electronic publication will be the norm. Ebook displays will have developed to the point where any sort of print can be perfectly reproduced on a screen.

Years ago, the public library system was one of the glories of our culture. It enabled the working class to better itself -- although here I involuntarily think of Leonard Bast in Howards End. Still, it was a profound force for good.

But as I said earlier, times change. And it's time we called time on the libraries.

The power of Facebook

I gave away my TV set three years ago, mainly because I rarely watched it, but also because many of the programmes offended me. In my innocence I wrote to TV Licensing to tell them that I would no longer be sending them the annual licence fee due in the UK from anyone who watches television. The money funds the BBC, whose shameless output of government propaganda was a further disincentive for me to keep the thing.

TVL’s reply, in so many words, called me a liar and a cheat. They said they would be sending someone to inspect my home to check up on me.

As you may imagine, I did not take kindly to this, nor did I take kindly to the stream of subsequent letters from TVL, all more or less bullying and intimidating. My Member of Parliament was of no help whatever, but facts gleaned from the internet provided me with the necessary defence. I was finally compelled to write a suitably insulting letter to the BBC itself, since when TVL have left me in peace.

The Corporation has made of me an abiding enemy. I look forward to the day when it is destroyed or broken up. For a rehearsal of some of its faults, see this post by Jonathan Miller.

Recently, anti-BBC sentiment has been spreading more widely, catalysed by a scandal. Two radio presenters left obscene messages on the answerphone of Andrew Sachs, an elderly, respected, and much loved British actor. One of the presenters, Russell Brand, informed Mr Sachs in graphic terms of what he had got up to with his granddaughter, while the other, Jonathan Ross, who is paid £6 million a year by the BBC, sniggered and egged him on. Brand has since resigned from that show, and Ross was suspended for three months without pay.

The resulting furore, initially handled with dismissive arrogance, revealed just how far the BBC has fallen in the national esteem. It has given rise to a Facebook group whose members have pledged to stop paying the licence fee.

The group has grown with astonishing speed. Currently it numbers 221,637, representing, if all the members do indeed withhold payment, an annual loss to the BBC of about £30 million. Now, this is only about 1% of the sum raised by the licence fee, but it is still a fair chunk of change. Without it the BBC will have to make some major readjustments in its spending plans. If the group ever reaches its stated goal of 10 million members, the BBC’s licence-fee income will be halved and the organization will in all likelihood collapse.

I have been following the development of this group with interest. It gives a hint of things to come.

In Britain, as in most developed countries, we are sitting on what newspapers usually call a “demographic timebomb”. There are too many old people. Increasingly, younger workers will be paying more and more tax to support them. This is likely to give rise to much resentment, since not a few of the elderly have made little provision for their own support, having swallowed the cruel lie that the state would look after them.

There will come a point when this resentment crystallizes into a political movement; when overworked and penurious young people decide to stage a tax strike. The television licence fee is officially classified as a tax, and a strike is exactly what is happening right now on Facebook.

If you are 50 years of age or over, living in a developed country, and have no savings, this may be a very good time to reassess what your future holds.

Finding Free eBooks

Finding Free eBooks is a great new blog for ebook fans. Quote:

[It] will list websites LEGALLY distributing free ebooks, mostly novel length fiction. Each site will have a blog entry so you can sign up for the rss feed and be notified of new additions.

I want to support independent authors, I'm especially interested in linking to them. I will add individual author sites and multi-author sites (if they offer something different from the ones already listed) distributing free ebooks legally. I will also add time limited promotional give aways. Please send an email if you want to submit a site or an update.

I am not very good at determining genres, so if you want to suggest some for particular authors, please do! And don't strictly count on my genre labels, look around at all the authors listed.

Also check out the limited time offers label. These are generally promotional offers from booksellers (but not always). Books with this label have no other labels so they won't come up in any other label searches. They may or may not still be available when you are here.

Your comments are welcome and encouraged, thanks for visiting!

What's really neat about this site is the use of Blogger labels to classify each post. Here is the current label-list:

.app (1)
.doc (2)
.epub (4)
.fb2 (1)
.html (14)
.jar (1)
.lit (3)
.lrf (4)
.mobi .prc (11)
.pdb (4)
.pdf (12)
.pkg (2)
.rb (4)
.rtf (4)
.txt (5)
.xhtml (1)
.ztxt (1)
adventure (2)
audio (5)
classics (4)
crime (2)
custom pdf (6)
fantasy (1)
fiction (25)
historical (1)
horror (3)
humor (4)
limited time offers (4)
mainstream (4)
modern (19)
multi-authors (9)
poetry (1)
romance (2)
science fiction (13)
single-author (15)
supernatural (1)
suspense mystery (3)
thriller (5)
tutorials (1)

Say you're looking for titles available as plain text (.txt). Click the appropriate label, and up come five options. Or if you're a SF fan - up come 13 suggestions. It's simple, clever, and, like the whole site, it works a treat!

eBooks Just Published

Independent ebook authors, and adventurous readers looking for their work, should without fail check out eBooks Just Published, a recent venture by Mark Gladding of Tumbywood software.

This site allows authors to submit announcements of their new work. The books are categorized according to genre, and readers can vote for their favourites.

Browsing eBooks Just Published feels a bit like browsing a book store - except that all the books on offer are electronic and, most importantly, DRM-free. The format allows each book to be presented in its best light, showing jacket art, blurb, and any other text the author feels appropriate, up to a limit of 400 words.

By subscribing to the RSS feed, readers can have details of new releases sent automatically to their email client.

I can attest that Mark is very helpful to authors like me, who are not particularly computer-savvy. He quickly resolved a problem I had with registering; from then on, the whole process was smooth and easy.

It's a great idea and, so well executed that I think it will soon become an established feature of the ebook landscape. Thanks, Mark!

Ebook displays in the recession

I have just received this email from a reader, which I reproduce with his permission:

I have just read The Penal Colony and really enjoyed it.

Usually when I read a book by a new author (to me) and enjoy it I go straight onto Amazon and purchase every single book by that author. But currently I am going through a little bit of a financial problem that is preventing me from buying as many books as I want to. I bought the Sony Reader to allow me to read all the classics that I should have read years ago but never got round to, such as 1984, etc. When I found out about Feedbooks I couldn't believe my eyes.

I have now downloaded all your books and I am looking forward to reading them over the next couple of days. I felt your 'fee' was too low so have doubled it, I would love to have given more but I am not able to just now. However in the future I will continue to purchase your books as quickly as you can write them.

I enjoyed The Penal Colony and would love to know what happened to Routledge.

Anyway, I really hope your endeavour with shareware books is an incredible success and catches on in a big way.

What author could fail to be delighted by such a message? But for me, this is also proof that the shareware model really can work for fiction. It also suggests that, as the recession deepens and people examine their budgets more carefully, the ebook -- especially the freely available, non-DRM ebook -- will seem an ever more attractive proposition. Ebook displays are still expensive, but give comfortable access to an ocean of free and inexpensive reading. When times are hard, traditional book-buying (unlike cinema attendance) takes a hit. It will be interesting to see what happens to sales of ebook displays.