If there are any number of Peter Pans, there are just as many Glyn Joneses. It must surely be the most common name in Wales, equalling no doubt John Smith in England. We decided in order to differentiate this Glyn Jones from the myriad other Glyn Joneses, I use my second name, Idris. That’s all very well but up to recently; published works were just credited to Glyn Jones. From now on it’s Glyn Idris, if not on the cover then at least on the title page, as I am the only one with those two Christian names in that order. Oops! Mustn’t say Christian. Will have the PC brigade up in arms. Sorry, forenames. Interesting thing about the name Idris, apart from the fact there used to be a soft drink by that name whose motto was “Idris when I’s dry”, except the name is not pronounced I but E. There is a theory that Wales was once invaded by Arabs as Idris is also an Arab name and, even though I don’t speak the language, I have been informed that Welsh grammar is very similar to Arabic. I can’t vouch for the truth of his statement. Jones is also a bit weird as there is (again I am informed of this) no J in the Welsh alphabet.
What a washout and a strange day it was Tuesday but very Greek. First of all we went to the local police station to try and renew our resident’s permits. In fact we’ve been trying to do it for a year but it’s like batting your head against that proverbial brick wall. There is no reason why any person in the station can’t do it but no, it has to be the secretary, and the secretary is the most elusive man on Crete. We did catch up with once but he wouldn’t do it on that occasion as he wanted his coffee. Having failed there we motored up to the Health Centre to get the results of my blood test (for sintrom) only to find they’re all on strike. That is the doctors will attend an emergency but nothing else. We did get the results but took them to Doctor Elizabeth for new instructions as to dosages. It was quite wonderful. When she saw Douglas her face lit up like a beacon. What a smile of welcome! Naturally she had to hear all about his treatment in England so I’m afraid patients waiting to be seen just had to be a little more patient.
On to the town hall to try and register to vote in local elections but once more came up against Greek bureaucracy and failed to do that. So we sat outside Mikey’s on the platea for the first time this year in beautiful sunshine. Greece does have its advantages.

I always suspected there were any number of publications of PETER PAN but never realised just how many. What an industry Mister Barrie’s play has turned out to be. My musical version having just been made available on Amazon, Douglas looked up PETER PAN and gave up after twenty five pages! I’m there, I’m definitely there, but having only just been published, I’m an awful long way down the list.
But bit by bit things seem to be happening, (thanks to the internet?) or is that wishful thinking after all these years? Three different queries on THE 88 from Ireland and from Ulster a lady writes to say she has seen the DVD of DOUBLE DECKERS and if she sends me a letter would I autograph it for her? This is very interesting because, although, when questioned, she says she bought the DVD from the official DOUBLE DECKERS website, we know nothing about it and this is the second time someone is making money out of my work, and the others involved, and we get nothing for it. The previous pirated copy was being sold on E-Bay and we managed to get it withdrawn. Also a company called Cherry Records have produced a CD of the music from the show and four of the songs (lyric wise) are mine but yet again I am seeing nothing for my work. The company insists they bought the rights outright from whoever had it previously who bought it from someone else who bought it from someone else and so forth down the line. When 20th Century Music, the original copyright (note spelling John) holders were approached we were informed that they don’t keep records going that far back to which my answer is crap! Would the small amount of money that could legitimately come my way really be such a big deal as far these companies are concerned?
The latest enquiry comes from Adelaide in Australia and concerns DOCTOR WHO. I must admit I do get chuffed when this sort of thing happens, especially if I can be helpful.
Many years ago when I was in MEASURE FOR MEASURE at the Open Space, Charles Marowitz asked me if I would like to play the ghost in his following production of Hamlet and the ghost being a rather small part I turned it down. It was definitely the wrong decision. Instead of being so hasty I should have asked to see his version of the play. Evidently the ghost was a major figure and the part was definitely worth playing. What an idiot I was. What brought this to mind was reading about Gordon Craig in the Ellen Terry/Henry Irving book and coming across the fact that a Polish director, Stanislaw Wyspianski round about 1910 had made the ghost the chief character in his production of the play, so Mister Marowitz wasn’t being exactly original. Am I right in believing that Tom Stoppard’s play ROSENCRANZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD was actually the second working of that theme? That there was an earlier version? I was told this by someone but have never bothered to check it out so it may not be true. Then, on the other hand, it might be. There really is nothing new under sun.

A small pleasure or sense of satisfaction derived from writing an autobiography is the opportunity it gives of taking a little revenge on those who you feel deserve it. I think particularly of one Mary McCarthy*, of Ben (Know it all) Hawthorne, now Raymond of course and evidently a big cheese in New Zealand theatre, and Charles Osborne. Of course if they don’t get the book and read it they will never know what has been said of them but I have at least had the satisfaction of saying it. I don’t think I’ve been too vicious, certainly not as vicious as Ms McCarthy in reviewing my play “Early One Morning” when it went on at the Arts Theatre all those years ago. Admittedly the production was pretty awful but I don’t think it was the fault of the play so much as the direction, staging, and a totally inadequate actress. I haven’t got her down on my list because, poor dear, it wasn’t really her fault. She was simply a bad actress who wasn’t up to it. It happens. I suppose one of the problems with critics who have little if any knowledge of the mechanics of theatre, and that probably include a goodly percentage of them, see a play purely from an audience point of view, a personal point of view, Ms McCarthy’s expertise at the time was on the woman’s page of The Guardian and, because my play opened on the same night as two others, obviously thought to be more important, that is where the mainstream critics went and I got whoever the various papers had available to send along. Ninety percent of an audience don’t have any knowledge of the theatre either and why should they? They enjoy a play or they don’t but would probably be hard put to know exactly why it fails for them. Every night the audience is a different animal and actors to an extent have to temper their performances to each audience. I remember when I was at the Vaudeville many years ago understudying Peter Cellier and Alistair Sim of all people (Who could possibly understudy Alistair Sim and get away with it? Fortunately I didn’t have to, he never missed a performance), and I was sitting in the stalls during a performance in order to watch them at work. Derek Fowlds, who had been doing Jackanory on the BBC, was in the cast and when he appeared a woman behind me said in a loud voice, “I wonder if he’s brought his squirrel!” The animal in question was actually a most famous fox, Basil Brush – boom boom! Stupid woman. It was at this point that I suddenly wondered for a moment why I ever went into the theatre in any shape or form in the first place. Fortunately the feeling passed.

*Not the American author.

Strange how some names just lend themselves to punning. In the book on Meggie Albanesi I read she was in a Somerset Maugham play, “East Of Suez” evidently a great old hotchpotch of a play, directed by Basil Dean who had a reputation of being really hard on his actors. Surprising really considering he had been an actor himself, and in the cast was a young actor by the name of Kendell who was having a pretty torrid time until Maugham told Dean he was “burning the Kendell at both ends.” This reminded me of a theatrical story about Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall who were having an affaire and were both in a play called “Bell Book And Candle” which of course became known as “Bell Book And Kendall”.
There is a theatrical story about Dame Edith Evans which I’m sure is apocryphal though could be true I suppose. When she was at the Vic she was visited by an actress by the name of Mary Kerridge. There was a knock on her dressing room door and the timid voice of an assistant stage manager said, “Excuse me, Dame Edith, there is a Miss Kerridge on the stairs”, to which the grand Dame in that marvellous fruity voice replied, “Don’t both me with it, child, clean it up.”
Of all the cast of characters in the Albanesi book I suppose I knew the name of Basil Dean most of all because his production of “Hassan” touring South Africa when I was still a schoolboy was the first professional theatre I ever saw and I was hugely impressed by it; an enormous colourful production with special music by Delius, I can still picture it after all these years.
Big headlines in The Mail – “BBC man jailed for filming himself in bed with TV girls”. I wonder if it would have made such large headlines without those magic symbols BBC and TV. Now I know what he did was most unpleasant to say the least, one of his victims saying it left her feeling violated sick and dirty, another that it had destroyed her trust in men (?) and caused problems in her current relationship. It was a kind of rape in a way I suppose but with British jails bursting at the seams and the constant moaning about over crowding did it really warrant a prison sentence? After all, criminals who get up to much worse things are tagged (evidently for the most part ignored) let off with warnings, suspended sentences and community service and surely community service should have been the punishment in this case. All right, it was a case of voyeurism and carrying things to extremes but the British are still very leery when it comes to sex. Littlejohn puts it very nicely in his rewritten nursery rhymes for our times, “Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry, now he’s on the sexual offenders’ register”. At least in England they haven’t gone as far as throwing up their hands in horror and having conniptions at a three year old boy kissing a little girl as has evidently been the case in America. There was a time, (when I was a kid) when little boys were encouraged to kiss little girls. How the world changes.

Some time ago I thought of trying to write a chamber opera on the life of the artist Modigliani but have never found a way to do it. Maybe I just wasn’t really that enthusiastic. Other people have been though because in a newspaper article I read there have been nine novels, a play, a documentary, three films and, of course, biographies so I doubt this late in the day I will ever get around to it. It’s truly amazing when one thinks that in his lifetime he could not sell his art and gave away paintings to pay for meals and the moment he was dead they couldn’t go quickly enough at ever increasing prices. Admittedly his art is not everybody’s cup of tea but nowadays in the heyday of what is called conceptual art we have so called artists making fortunes in the most ridiculous fashion; fashion probably being the word for it. Do the emperor’s clothes come to mind?
The two journalists I miss who write for The Sunday Times are India Knight and A.A.Gill but I am compensated somewhat by another journalist whose column I read every Friday in The Daily Mail, the one English paper I take for reviews since boycotting The Times. This is Jan Moir who not only talks a lot of sense but who does it with panache and is always worth a chuckle somewhere down the line. The manager of a shop complained about a woman breast feeding her baby which has resulted in a positive furore; but if I may quote Miss Moir without breaching copyright, “This small incident has been the starting gun for a blast of instant maternal affront and Curse of the Mummy style fury. Emphasising once more that it takes a brave man – or woman – to get between the modern young mother and her perceived statutory rights. These include, as if we all didn’t know, the right to mow you down with a buggy if you don’t get out of the way quickly enough; the right to behave as if they have just given birth to the second coming of Christ instead of a farty little squirt called Sam.” I love it. She could have called it any one of a hundred boys’ names but Sam just fits the bill, like Coward’s “brittle”, and the description of “farty little squirt” is just perfect. I look forward to her column every week, that is when we can get The Mail. In the winter it’s not always available as the distributors in Xania seem sooner or later to fall out with every shop in Kalyves prepared to sell foreign newspapers. Silly really considering the hundreds of ex-pats how now live on Crete especially, or so it would seem, in this area called the Apokoronos.

A couple of weeks ago I was e-mailed a video titled “Islam” by a Dutchman who has surely put his life on the line for it. It is a quite terrifying document, quotes from the Koran pounced upon by mad mullahs to excuse suicide bombing and to encourage all the other atrocities now associated, firmly established in everyone’s minds, with this religion. Evidently mad mullahs are of the belief that Islam will take over the world but then they are not the first to suffer that delusion, especially as they can’t make accord amongst themselves but Shia and Sunni are constantly at each others throats. Among the horrifying images of murder and mayhem in this documentary there is the picture of a woman holding up a large banner which reads “To hell with freedom.” I have seen this one before as it was taken during a Muslim march for peace in London a short while ago. Other banners in this peaceful demonstration threatened hateful forecasts of many dire happenings to unbelievers but, on seeing this banner “To hell with freedom” a second time I was struck by the irony the woman obviously cannot see that it is that very freedom which allows her to stand in a public place in London and display her hatred. Surely Armageddon can’t be too far off.
Douglas caught the red-eye from Chania this morning to fly to Athens and from there to London, to Exeter, to Torquay, quite a journey for the first of his cancer check-ups. It’s a long way to go and expensive for a more or less day trip and a quick finger up the bum but keep our own fingers crossed that he is given the all clear. This will happen again in another two months and another two months and another two months and then six months. Until this happened to him, and as long as I still have to live I don’t think I will ever forget that moment when the oncologist said straight out with no beating about the bush that dreaded word, we have heard of so many people who have had it and come through so our thoughts will definitely be with him tomorrow as we wait for the good news.

No great surprise as the rain, a nice gentle rain, hasn’t stopped all day. I wanted it for the garden but what I didn’t want was the cold that has come with it. It really is a wintry day and the central heating has been turned on again after days without, and I guess the fires will have to be lit as well. It’s been threatening to rain for well nigh a fortnight but at the end of each day what clouds there have been have cleared, that is until today. Yesterday I asked if anyone thought it was going to rain and the answer was no, so I decided the pots had to be watered: ‘but’, I said, ‘if I do, I bet you it will rain’, and so it came to pass. There’s coincidence for you. Maybe I should be called the rainmaker. Which beings me somehow, don’t ask me how or why? to that horny old question of fate – is it in our stars or is it not? I have been thinking of it quite a bit lately. After all, unless you believe in reincarnation, you don’t have any choice of to whom, where, or when you are going to be born. Maybe in the seventh age of man one tends to these kind of thoughts, but what really caused the recent bout was reading of the death of Henry Irving’s younger son, Laurence. He had been touring the United States with his theatre company and was due to sail back to England on a ship that went by the name of “Teutonic”! (Doesn’t sound too good, does it?) but he was in a hurry to get home where he was working on and wanted to finish a play so exchanged his and his wife’s tickets for a ship called “The Empress of Ireland” sailing three days earlier. In thick fog it was rammed amidships by a loaded Norwegian coal ship and sank with the loss of a great many lives including Laurence and his wife. The rest of the company sailed home on the Teutonic. His older brother, Harry, died a few years later of leukaemia. I know what made me put coincidence and fate together, it was reading about Laurence Irving in “A Strange Eventful History”, the dramatic lives of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, by Michael Holroyd. It has been my bedside reading for quite a while now, a few pages at a time before sleep, and it is quite a hefty tome, I still have some way to go but it is fascinating, quite a cast of characters, as I suppose only theatricals can be. And back to coincidence. Isn’t it weird how you can say play a piece of music you haven’t listened to for years and immediately you start hearing it again all over the place? I am reading all about the Irving/Terry ménage when two publications by the Society for Theatre Research land on the doorstep, the one about an actress I knew not off by the name of Meggie Albinoni and when was her period and who was she sometimes mixed up? Ellie Irving and Christopher St.John who was by the way actually Cristobel, a very plain lady who evidently hated men and who was in love with Ellie, though whether that love was consummated who knows? I have no doubt the Irvings will pop up again soon in another publication. Oh, it already has – I have a biography of the two Irving brothers ready and waiting for when I finish “A Strange And Eventful History.”