The Gravy Train

In these hard economic times when the arts are suffering cuts and redundancies there are still individuals who know how to milk the sacred cow, make hay while the sun shines or, rather, dig their greedy little piggy snouts in the trough (Three clichés in a row, whatever next?) There are bankers, industrialists, big business men, con-artists, politicians and, in this particular instance, I am referring to a lady who has herself been a part of the Arts Council and has in consequence reaped a rich reward. Who cares what is happening elsewhere and who’s to say she shouldn’t ride the gravy train? (Another cliché for you.)

The lady’s name is Andrea Stark who left her job with the Arts Council on a Friday, picking up a six figure redundancy cheque and on the Monday started a £95000 a year post as chief executive of High House Production Park, a workshop for the performing arts! Do I hear someone mention the glass ceiling here? As I read it for six months she had been on a fully paid sabbatical from the Arts Council while at the same time doing the High House job.  She knew she was in line for that magnificent pay-off and, sabbatical or no sabbatical, remained a member of the Arts Council long enough to ensure she got it.

Now she has obviously done nothing illegal but pardon me if I can’t help wondering whether our modern society is going stark staring mad and just where does the morality lie in her type of behaviour? If what I have read is true the facts speak for themselves. If I am in error perhaps Ms Stark would like to put me right and I will apologise.

In the meantime I will continue to think of her as a not very nice human being. That’s the mildest way of putting it. I could think of more explicit adjectives. Fortunately there are still those for whom money, more than they need, more than they can possibly use, is not the be all and end all in life. (More cliché?) I think of those who give large chunks of their fortunes to charity and on a smaller but equally praiseworthy scale someone like David Headly, owner of Goldsboro Books who has turned down the chance of making £100,000. He bought 250 signed copies of JK Rowling’s book before she was revealed as the author. They are signed “Robert Galbraith” and, once the cat was let out of the bag, (cliché’ again – you’re getting bored with this aren’t you?) They’ve been selling on e-Bay for over £1000. The shop had sold 130 signed books before Rowling was unmasked but the remaining 120 were sold at the cover price despite being worth about £120000.

Headly kept four copies, one for himself, the others for his staff. Now I have no doubt there will be those who consider him to be a total klutz for not grabbing this opportunity but I for one, in comparison to the lady above, have nothing but admiration for him and it’s a great pity there aren’t more like him.

Christopher Beeching has criticised my Blogs. He says I just sound like a querulous old man so my books must be the same and no one will want to buy them. Well no one’s buying them anyway but I’m sure it’s not because I’m a querulous old man but because there is no incentive. Rowling’s thriller sells like hot cakes (cliché) riding on the back of Harry Potter. Would it have done the same signed Robert Galbraith? Somehow I doubt it no matter how good it might be.

Well I am here to tell you my books make no pretension of being literature but they are (well the Thornton King series anyway – comedy thrillers) light, witty, entertaining, pacey, and fun; ideal summer beach reading and those who have bought them and found reading them on trains and planes, buses and trams, have been considered slightly mad laughing out loud. What more do you want?  Comedy thrillers are hardly likely to be intellectually demanding.

Unfortunately my website is well out of date. I have just looked up books by Glyn Jones on Amazon to discover there are ten thousand four hundred and sixty eight Welshmen of the same name, all scribbling away and the only book of mine found among that lot is my autobiography NO OFFICIAL UMBRELLA. I have recently started to use my middle name, Idris, as I haven’t discovered another Glyn Idris Jones though more than likely one is lurking somewhere. I should have changed my name years ago – too late now.

Well, if anyone’s interest has been piqued (second definition) these are the Thornton King Private Eye titles:-

DEAD ON TIME, JUST IN CASE, DEAD ON TARGET, THE CINELLI VASES, CELLULOID & TINSEL and the latest, written but not yet published, MEN AND THEIR TOYS.

Maybe Mister Headly would like to stock them at Goldsboro Books?

Digitalisation

What a palaverina! The computer genius in this house (thank the good lord for him) decided to change computers. I still don’t really know why. I have inherited Chris’s machine, Chris has Douglas’s and D himself has mine – I think that is how it is. Anyway to begin with it created a million problems because when it comes to computers, as I have remarked before, I am a Luddite and the complete A1 klutz. Changing computers is all very well but changing individual programmes is another matter altogether and to begin with  I was lumbered with a whole lot of Chris’s material, then half the amount as Douglas worked on it and, finally, it was cleared. Sounds like Scientology dunnit? It scared me half to death when I saw him taking two of the computers apart but, unlike all the king’s men and all the king’s horses, he put them back together again and all was well. I am not the only klutz in the world though. I don’t know what has happened in the rest of Greece but in our tiny corner of Crete going digital has been greeted by howls of anguish as televisions no longer worked, this despite the fact that we had two year’s warning. Eventually when the penny dropped Spiros in the hardware shop was selling decoders at the rate of knots. Holiday makers paying over a thousand euro a week for their villas with all mod cons and probably including satellite must have been furious.

 Sharp has released what it says is the biggest LED TV screen in Europe – ninety inches! In the UK according to research (the world is choc-a-bloc full of eager researchers all beavering away) 6% of television sets sold are over fifty inches with the market evidently growing though still, as they call it, a “niche.” The trend for large TVs is larger in the states. This evidently is down to people having larger houses with larger rooms that can accommodate them, particularly as they get slimmer and slimmer. (The TV sets not the people who tend to get larger and larger anyway.) Naturally the new sets can do more and more magical things other than make breakfast and have sex but do you really want to watch three channels simultaneously? Haven’t our brains got enough to cope with as it is? I remember way back in 1953 watching the coronation on a little black and white screen with an enormous magnifying glass in front to enlarge the picture. The set itself was as big as a medium size cabinet. What an advance in technology there has been since then.

Mentioning brains I read an interesting article which asks did our puny brains evolve with a predilection to be obsessed with celebrity? The question is put by anthropologist James Tehrani and I quote – “Fame is a powerful cultural magnet. As a hyper-social species, we acquire the bulk of our knowledge, ideas and skills by copying from others, rather than through individual trial-and-error. However, we pay far more attention to the habits and behaviours demonstrated by famous people than those demonstrated by ordinary members of our community. It follows that things are much more likely to catch on if they are associated with someone who is well known for one reason or another - even if the association is erroneous,”

But I haven’t been entertained by celebs or VIPs on an ultra-large screen. On the contrary YouTube and the small screen I see before me at this moment has provided me with movies I would never have otherwise watched, in particular Westerns, like catching up once again with “High Noon” and an interesting little historical piece, “The Great Train Robbery” ten odd minutes filmed in 1903, the very first Western.   

Watched a movie called “Armageddon.” Fantastic enormous explosive effects, cast of thousands, and a boring load of rubbish. On the other hand a war film “Hell In The Pacific” (what a dreadful title) just two characters stranded on an island, an American and a Japanese and totally engrossing from beginning to end despite neither of them speaking the other’s language. I see I can also watch “The Burmese Harp” and I wonder if I will find it as wonderful as when I saw it in Hampstead so many years ago and was left speechless by it. Among other films mentioned I talk about it in CELLULOID & TINSEL, Thornton King’s private eye adventure number five.

Finally, talking about size once more (!) have seen a photo of a production of “Rose Marie” in Doncaster in1949 with a cast of eighty! 1949, only four years before I landed in London and, today if you submit a play with more than two characters to a management it would more than likely not even be read. Timing is all. I submitted my play “The River Of Sand” to Granada Television once. It came back with a note like that famous American saying about “Gone With The Wind” “Who’s interested in the civil war?” only this read “Who’s interested in South Africa?” This was before Soweto after which everyone was interested in South Africa.

Ailments

Was it Bette Davis who said growing old is not for cissies? Well, whoever it was they couldn’t have said a truer word. My handwriting has been deteriorating for some time and has now become virtually illegible. It’s a scribble I can’t even read myself. So hoorah for a keyboard! Except that now my fingers are so stiff as I sit here I am finding it even difficult to type. If I lose that ability completely, well… let’s not even think about it. This stiffness is a strange turn-up for the books because up to now my hands have been so shaky (hence the illegible writing) that holding a cup of tea without spilling any is not easy. And because of the rat poison blood thinner I take every day (Sintrom) the skin on the back of my hands has turned black and I have leopard spots all the way up my arms. It’s not helped either by the skin being like tissue paper and should one of Wagner’s claws when playing accidentally get me that means a scab – once the blood has stopped flowing - and there are a number of them. Pretty isn’t it? Pretty it is not.

Health! Now suddenly I have developed edema and it is not only the feet that are horribly swollen and ugly but the legs have doubled in size with the amount of fluid. This is not good news. I have also reached that time in life when I can suddenly lose balance and go toppling over and once you start to topple there’s no stopping it. It’s like dropping a bottle of milk and watching it in slow motion as it descends to shatter on the floor and there is nothing you could have done about it. And the worst aspect of it is that once down it is almost impossible to get up unless there is something, like a peace of furniture for example, against which one can use the strength in the arms to hoist yourself up because there is no strength in the legs and one is floundering like one of those beetles on it’s back unable to turn over. Some years ago an ex-pat, Arthur, originally from Yorkshire, (spoke Greek with a Yorkshire accent) was telling us he was reluctantly leaving Crete and going back to the UK because his wife had died and he had reached the falling over stage, Eleftheria’s late mum, Maria had a couple if falls which meant a broken pelvis and after being discharged from the hospital she was still in terrible agony. Chris and Douglas used to go over to help Eleftheria put her to bed: siga, siga; slowly slowly, every little movement so painful. Once she was in and settled that was it for the night, there would be no more movement. When Maria died we went over to the house for what I suppose one could call a sit-in. Coffee, wine, tsigouthia, biscuits, etcetera were available and there were a number of ladies seated around the open coffin and every now and again one of them would talk to the corpse as if she really could hear her. That was the first time and we have attended others since. In Crete once you’ve gone you are put away pretty quick, no hanging about. Then according to the Orthodox Church you start your long forty day journey to meet your maker. In our little corner of the world there have been six deaths which is not surprising considering they were all in their eighties. Agathe just down the road is hanging in there at 96. Her sister, Anna, one of my very very very favourite ladies of all time also had a fall that proved fatal. Unfortunately we were in Athens at the time and by the time we got back Anna was already gone. Hers was a corpse I could have talked to without feeling foolish. I still miss her dreadfully. Growing old is eventually a problem for most ex-pats because most come over here already at retirement age singly or as a couple and when one of them dies what happens to the one who is left? Especially if they have failed to integrate into Cretan society. I am not in the least bit religious. To be honest I am an atheist plain and simple; when you’re dead you’re dead, but that doesn’t stop us from taking part in certain aspects of Cretan life which usually involves the church in some way or other. Jesus is everywhere on this island. It never ceased to surprise me while I was still mobile enough to get to the church that at Easter, the most sacred time in the Greek calendar, we have been the only ex-pats at the midnight service year after year. Christ is risen. He is truly risen. Kiss kiss. And we carefully walk home with our candle lit by the holy flame all the way from Jerusalem (?) and mark the sign of the cross on the door lintel. We tie a bunch of wild flowers on the handle of the front door every first of March. And if the young papas wants to bless our house with a sprig of basil and holy water, even though he knows we’re not orthodox, why not? It’s not hypocrisy if it gives him some satisfaction.

We have two lesbian friends, beautiful people and I don’t necessarily mean physically, who have been together for 45 years. They have had this big house built with swimming pool and a beautiful garden the size of a small park and the time is coming when they will have to think on what happens when one of them goes. They want me to write something in ‘No Official Umbrella’ but if they leave it much longer it won’t happen. As it is I would have to get someone else to write the dedication and scribble my signature beneath. I am extremely fortunate in that I have not one but two who watch over me with love, diligence and a great deal of patience. They cannot be thanked enough. I am also thankful that whatever ailments I suffer at the moment none involves pain.

Talking of books, monthly returns from the printers both in the UK and the states informs me that ‘Celluloid & Tinsel,’ the penultimate Thornton King adventure has hardly left the ground. A round robin was sent to all friends, acquaintances, and associates but it seems they’re not exactly in any rush to get their hands on a copy. What does one do if even friends can‘t be bothered? Am now polishing number six which will be the last in the series, but six is a nice round number.