Overcast with no break in the clouds, the distant roll of thunder and heavy intermittent showers and all because we arranged to have the garden turned over today. The ground will be so wet the rotovator will no doubt get well and truly stuck and no one is going to work in this weather anyway. This is after days and days of no rain. Needless to say the day is also very chilly.
Having finished, for the moment with The Cinelli Vases I was wondering what I would work on next – if anything.
It is now three minutes after one. At ten fifteen this morning just as I had written the above we had to turn off everything electrical as the thunderstorm got closer and closer and there is always the possibility of having your computer, telephone or anything similar well and truly zapped. It’s a case of better safe than sorry when forked lightning is mucking about right over your rooftops.
So where was I? Oh yes, what to write next if anything. I say if anything because I thought The Cinelli Vases might be my swansong. I would love to do a screenplay on Panos Karnezis book “The Maze” and in fact did start on it just for fun as it were. His writing is so vivid it almost lifts itself off the page in moving pictures and it is about a harrowing time for Greece; the defeat of its army by Turkey in the nineteen twenties after a simply stupid decision with, the encouragement of Lloyd George, to invade Anatolia resulting in the sacking and burning of Smyrna, a once splendid cosmopolitan Mediterranean city, the displacement of entire communities, murder, mayhem, and rape that are the accompaniment of so many military campaigns, and the British and Americans who had ships at Smyrna do not come out of it lightly.
Nobody can ever say I don’t try. Months sago I sent my play “Rosemary” to the London management looking for a new play for Daniel Radcliffe for a splendid juv role if he can handle it, and then to Vanessa Redgrave’s agents because I thought she would be simply splendid in the eponymous role. Now a combination of Daniel Radcliffe for the young generation and Vanessa for the older and you have without any doubt a surefire hit on your hands – providing the play is good enough of course and, though I say it myself, I honestly believe it is.
Has there been any response? Like hell there has. One sends out the scripts (at enormous cost!) for them simply to disappear into the wild blue yonder.
So am I going to write something else? Yes, I think so. I believe, if time does not run out on me, I am going to write a biography; not of someone famous, not of someone great, not of some well known historical figure in public life or the arts or the military, but of an unknown Cretan palakari. There is no English translation for this – just think of the most masculine, majestic, noble, man you can think of and that is a palakari. This morning among my e-mails was this – ‘Hello Glyn,
In life you are never lost, you are temporarily uncertain. Giorgis.’
I had already decided that ‘Temporarily Uncertain’ is (was?) to be its title but more of Giorgis next time.