The Daily Novel

Y Mwnt is one of those places which will never be spoilt. To reach it you need to drive along a narrow winding lane with few passing places. There is only room for a dozen or so cars in the car park. And you need to walk down 139 steps to reach the beach. Unsurprisingly when we arrived there it was empty save for a middle aged couple and a solitary fisherman. Maybe he was trying to catch dolphins. We saw two on the way down, their heads bobbing out of the water as they swam across the bay.

It is a most beautiful spot. The sandy beach is perfect for sand castles and the sea is inviting. The waves are no more than a foot or two high, breaking gently over the rocks and withdrawing with a quiet contented murmur. In the middle of the bay there is a low island, grey rocks capped by smooth green grass. It is sculpted like the chest of a giant Amazon. From where I sit the left breast is perfectly formed. The right one has been sliced off to permit free use of the bow.

The last battle fought in these parts was in 1155 when a small force of Flemings, ancestors no doubt of some of those Belgians who later established an empire, attempted an invasion. They were easily routed by the Welsh. And for the rest of history no foreign invader has got anywhere near. The 250 foot hill, Y Foel, which flanks one side of the bay, was the site of an ancient cross. It was a staging post on the pilgrims’ route from Cardigan to St David’s Head.

The first church on the cliff top was probably built in the fifth century. The present chapel-sized Church of the Holy Cross was built in the thirteenth century. It is a small stone building, painted white with a grey slate roof. No tower. Just a small belfry from which the parishioners are summoned from the scattered hamlets around the bay. The graveyard bears witness to long lives, several exceeding one hundred years, lived in stress-free tranquillity.

It is now 1.30 PM. The middle aged couple are walking up the hill. The angler has packed up his rods and departed. We have the whole beach to ourselves to eat our sandwiches, except for a few sheep on one slope and the dolphins.

After lunch we climb to the top of Y Foel. Looking north the foreground is filled by a mixed herd of cows, black, white, brown and white and one entirely grey/brown calf. Beyond them a series of headlands around the sweep of Cardigan Bay. In the far distance the sun has highlighted the town of Aberystwyth, the ancient capital of Wales.

Looking west is a vast expanse of ocean until the sea finally meets a layer of grey cloud on the horizon. Above it the celestial artist has added some colour with streaks of water blue and a range of white cloud mountains. I would be happy to spend the rest of the day here. But the grandchildren are getting bored. So we pack up and head for the National Coracle Centre in Cenarth looking for some action.

Godfrey Hodgson takes a holiday from American politics to celebrate his local river.

‘Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria.’

So said the ghost of Francesca in Dante’s Fifth Canto: that there is “no greater sorrow than to remember in misery the happy time”. With the greatest respect to Francesca and to the poet, I have learned that the reverse is true. There is no greater joy available in a time of misery than to remember a happy time.
About a year ago I committed myself to a project that would give purpose to my great love for the part of West Oxfordshire where I live. Three times and for some twenty years out of the last thirty-something, we have lived within a mile of the river Evenlode, and for most of the rest we lived within three miles of where that small but perfect stream loses its identity by joining the Thames.
One of my favourite books is Claudio Magris’s masterpiece, Danube. As a Triestino, Magris was bilingual in German and Italian, and with an acquaintance with Slav languages; villages where they speak Slovene are almost in the suburbs of Trieste, and there is even a Slovene Orthodox cathedral on the foreshore in that remarkable city. Magris took the Danube as his thread, and hung on it the whole bloody history of Mitteleuropa, with learned digressions on the fish, the navigation, the hydrology and the culture of the great river.
I formed a project of my own: to write as it were a mock-heroic version of Danube, exploring the course and honouring the history of our beloved little river. A neighbour who is a publisher has agreed to bring it out. We set out to walk the length of it in a series of circular walks. At that rate a two-mile stretch of the river was at least a four mile walk. The 42 miles (against the Danube’s 1,770!) would take ten or a dozen weekend walks.
We began with the little tributaries which come together west of Moreton-in-March. Only one has cultural dignity, the brook that runs down through the pleasure gardens of Sezincote, an Anglo-Mughal palace on the southern slope of the Cotswolds ridge that runs north-east from Stow-on-the-Wold to Moreton. It was built for a nabob, Sir Charles Cockerell, by his brother, the architect S.P.Cockerell, who later imitated the style for the Prince Regent’s Pavilion in Brighton.
Weekend by weekend we followed the little river, past Adlestrop, where Edward Thomas heard from the train “all the birds, Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire”, past Shipton, home of John Foxe, the author of the gruesome 16th century bestseller, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, past Ascott-under-Wychwood, where the martyrs were nineteenth century housewives, imprisoned for a week for supporting their menfolk in an agricultural strike, and compensated with scarlet petticoats by Queen Victoria, no less.
We followed the valley in a great curve round the northern rim of Wychwood, which locally we call simply The Forest. We skirted Chilson, where we used to live, past Shorthampton, tiny gem of a church with box pews and fourteenth century wall paintings, crossed the Coldron brook from a mushroom field on a footbridge, and marched up the mill field, between the mill race and the mill leet, into Charlbury. This is the largest of the “hundred little towns of stone” in Hilaire Belloc’s poem about the river. Charlbury has many claims to fame, including the proximity of Cornbury, where the village barber recognized Bonny Prince Charlie who was hiding there, and the patronage of the present archbishop of Canterbury, who had a weekend retreat here incognito. In our time, this was the home of W.D. Campbell, naturalist of prodigious learning who wrote the Country Diary in The Guardian for thirty years.
We duly admired the black Dexter cattle on Stonesfield Common, and revisited the Roman villa at East End. We paid homage to a private shrine, Rupert’s Beach. This is a sandy bend in the Evenlode near Combe mill, named after and beloved by my late Labrador collie cross. Once when I was filming an interview there about the rustic quality of my new life, two mute swans, cob and pen, sailed round the corner into shot, followed by their six cygnets; no assistant stage manager in history could have managed the timing more perfectly. We went as far as the ingenious works being carried out by the Environment Agency at the corner of Blenheim Palace, within sight of Bladon church, where Winston Churchill is buried. The Agency has deliberately slowed down the course of the river by heaping gravel on alternate banks to create an artificial meander, to the great benefit of fish and the whole food train, up to the otters who have come back from near extinction from dieldrin poisoning and are now recolonizing the Evenlode valley.
And that is as far as we got.
On January 12 we went for a walk, not along the river, but for a couple of miles. I remember congratulating myself, with a twinge of superstitious guilt, about how well I felt. Then I went to my office, sat down and signed off on one book, a biography I had been working on for five years, and literally finished a second, a history of the American feast of Thanksgiving. For good measure, I polished off a proposal for a third book to be sent to my agent in New York. I was so pleased with the afternoon’s work that I stood up, unwarily, planning to reward myself for my hard work with a celebratory martini, permitted only as a rare treat.
I tripped over a cable (still un-martinied, I need perhaps to specify). I fell heavily on both knees. I was carrying a parcel and could not save myself with my arms. The tendons connecting my kneecaps to my quadiceps were ruptured in both legs. I was taken to hospital, in great pain. My knees were brilliantly restitched. While I was in hospital, the doctors investigated my high nightly temperatures. They found I had a life-threatening abscess in my stomach and gut. Another operation, four hours long. Realistically, breaking my knees saved my life.
I was four months in hospital. Now, another four months further on, I am still learning, slowly, clumsily, and not without fear of falling, to walk, first with a frame, then with crutches, then with a cane and now, sometimes, cautiously and timidly on my own. (“How are you, grandpa?” asked my three year old grandson Angus. “I’m well”, I boasted. “I’m learning to walk”. “Oh, grandpa” — with a smile to show he had got the joke — “everyone knows how to walk!”
It will be a long time before I can walk the last four or five miles of the river bank, from Bladon to Cassington mill, for which the rent paid in Domesday Book was 175 eels. Realistically, I may never be able to manage it. But in a hospital bed, unable to move, and still today, hobbling round the house, to remember the tempo felice of our explorations along the Evenlode is anything but dolorous.

The early morning sun has picked out a curvy green plastic chair to be the focus of my attention. The sun shines on the arched back making it stand out from the green grass and the green leaved trees. If only I were a poet I could go on in this vein. But at least I can refer you to The Lime Tree Bower written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which had a lot about sunlight dappling through the trees.

That poem was written in the 1790’s. I am sitting on the doorstep of a Welsh cottage near Fishguard in 2006. Co-incidentally I can hear Holly’s voice reading from the guidebook. ‘Fishguard was the scene of the last invasion of mainland Britain. In February, 1797, around 2,500 French troops landed in a cove near Goodwick. The French were spotted by a group of local ladies, dressed in black with red shawls and tall black hats and were mistaken by the French as being English soldiers.’

Readers can sleep easily in their beds. If Bin Laden lands tomorrow at Fishguard the Jones family will be ready for him. Yesterday in Cardigan little Joe acquired a sword, a dagger and a bow and arrows. He is most taken by the bow and arrows. Clearly the blood of the British archers at Agincourt flows through his veins. If we train him up today he will be ready to stop Bin Laden in his tracks, impaling him with the plastic plungers at the end of his three arrows.

You may think that I write in jest. But this is a serious blog. And in the 1790s Coleridge, Wordsworth and the other Romantic poets were fighting to make the world safe for democracy. They were enthused by the spirit of the French revolution which had overthrown the French monarchy with it’s ‘let them eat cake’ political slogan. They hailed the new dawn just as enthusiastically as Labourites ushered in the Blairite third way in 1997.

By 1797 the romantic poets were beginning to have their doubts. Reports from Paris revealed that the revolutionary politicians had become drunk with power. In between squabbling amongst themselves they were imposing an official terror regime that was far worse than anything the Bourbon kings had thought up. A bit like Manchester 2006 where new Labour is justifying its new police power to combat the forces of evil even at the extent of violating our civil liberties. They remain blissfully unaware that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are increasingly unpopular with the electorate. And that people are getting increasingly alarmed at the way the government’s rhetoric is alienating British muslims. No-one likes politicians who tell electors how they should bring up their children.

Behind the scenes in Manchester it is a different story; politicians stabbing themselves in the back and in the front. (The Blairites and the Brownites could have run rings around the Jacobins.) It is, of course, the behind the scenes events which have made the front pages of today’s newspapers. While Gordon Brown was making his bid for power with a thoughtful keynote speech, a reporter was in the same room as Cherie Blair, the wife of the prime minister. According to the reporter, when Brown got reached his climax, Cherie exploded: ‘that’s a lie’. Seven hours later Cherie denied having said any such thing, but by then the journalists had sent the quote around the globe, and it still dominated today’s newspapers.

Brown’s speech had become a public relations disaster. And we are going to see futher speculation over the next few days, weeks and months about which other Labour leader would be better than Brown. I am not going to speculate on possible names. I am going to return to events in 1797 in Fishguard.

The French army was quickly routed. The hero of the day was a heroine. ‘Armed with only a pitchfork, Jemima Nicholas detained’ one group of French soldiers. The French formally surrendered in the Royal Oak pub and Jemima was given a bravery medal and a lifetime pension.

Jemima showed the local lads that women could be effective leaders. This week in Manchester, 209 years later, none of the serious contenders for the job of Prime Minister is female.

That’s progress for you, folks.

Tany Bryn. Ah, what it is to look at Wales as a truly foreign country. No longer the Land of my Fathers. And, as if to re-inforce my unblemished Englishness, Holly is reading one of the Christopher Robin stories to Joe. What could be more English than that?

I am sitting in the doorway smoking my first fag of the day and gazing out at a rain soaked woodland glade topped by looming black clouds. To my left a tree heavily laden with clusters of unpicked apples. Overhead two crows cross the stage from my right, swoop around and exit from my view at the far left. They make no sound. There is no sound apart from the thumping of Dulcie’s feet on the wooden floor.

The scene reminds me of many Welsh holidays. Holly is still reading out loud, and I quote the sentence I hear, ‘It is a dull autumn day.’ Days of un-relieved gloom. Or days of glorious laziness when there is no necessity to do anything. No point in rushing to the beach. Or driving further up into the hills to see the view.

It reminds me of another such day near Dolgelly. My father’s younger sister was staying with us in a house we had taken at Ochr Y Foel and we had had a succession of rainy days. To relieve the boredom Dulcie (my aunt not my granddaughter) and I were doing a bit of research to find the house where my grandparents spent their honeymoon, called Rhyderwinion. We knew it was in the valley with a view of Caeder Idris, not too far away from Dolgelly.

The house was the summer home of a Mr Lockhart. Nellie, my grandmother, was their nanny. She had moved with them from Edinburgh, where she had been born, to Wolverhampton. There she had met my grandfather, Frank, who eked out a living doing odd jobs for the well-to-do. Lockhart’s wedding present to them was a week’s bed and board in his holiday house in Wales in the summer of 1900.

The house was not marked on any of the maps I had. We had not been able to trace any Lockhart in any of the local records but we had a rough idea where the house might be. That we found it was a triumph for serendipity rather than systematic research. I suddenly saw the name on a gate as we drove slowly down a winding lane.

We walked through the gate and immediately had a view down the valley towards Cader Idris. My heart was actually beating faster as we walked down the drive. The house was now a home for a few juvenile offenders, and the social worker in charge showed us around. I stared down the valley and tried to imagine what it might have been like in my grandparents’ time. Queen Victoria was still on the throne. They must have arrived by train at Dolgelly. But how did they get to the house? I could not see my grandfather lugging a suitcase around the country lanes. But maybe the Lockharts had someone they employed to look after the house, who would have met them at the station with a pony and trap.

Now I can see my grandfather. He never earned much money but he enjoyed being squired around. He also had a commanding manner. The locals probably thought he was one of the toffs as the pony and trap turned in through the gates. My grandfather would have waited for the driver to hand Nellie down from the trap. And then stepped down himself, and fished in his waistcoat for a coin to put in the man’s hand.

Mention of Nellie makes me realise that there is still a blemish on my English pedigree. Nellie was Nellie Skinner, a Scotttish lowland clan. So there must be some Celtic blood in me somewhere. But not the stuff that flowed through the veins of Bonnie Prince Charlie and his ilk. The Skinners were Puritans through and through and no doubt marched against the King to rid the realm of singing and dancing and boozing.

This is not just a galloping assumption. I have some evidence.

First, Nellie’s face, a picture stoical suffering. She had much to complain of because my grandfather held court at the Ring o’ Bells, where he spent most of his wage packet. He went on drinking when his wage packet was empty, because he was much in demand. For the stories he told, the monologues he recited and the songs he sang. While my grandmother toiled over the kitchen sink and heated the water in the copper, ready for his bath on the kitchen floor.

I met several of the Skinners from Edinburgh. One anecdote will suffice to show what they were like. A visit in my boyhood from the only prosperous Skinner, who had emigrated to South Africa and had become the secretary of the cemetery and a burgher of the local church. He came to our house for lunch one Sunday. As we were starting lunch he looked at my father and said: ‘Shall I say grace.’ It was not a question. And he intoned a long verse with a pompous gravity which left my sister spluttering in her soup.

Later that week, Nellie’s widowed sister, who was then living with them, because she had no money of her own, took them, and me, on a visit to another relative in Walsall. On the way there the South African Skinner paid the bus fares for all of us with a flourish. On the way back, the conductor stopped at his seat to collect the fares. He turned around to my great-aunt sitting behind and said: ‘Mary, your turn to pay now.’

So I don’t think I am going to spend much time researching the Skinner side of my lineage. I have to get used to the fact that I come from a long line of white anglo-saxon protestants. But I don’t have to bore myself to death finding out any more about them than I already know.

Tany Bryn. On Friday morning we crossed the new Severn suspension bridge into Wales. Not one of the world’s great bridges but still pretty spectacular with the thin strands of steel gleaming in the sunshine. Along the boring M4 motorway but the place names evoke memories. Of the Welsh mining valleys. Of the post-war Welsh iron and steel works at Margram. And yet another pang of unrequited love at Bridgend. A girl from there was in the geography department at the University of Birmingham in my first year. One day we ran down the corridor and ended up in each other’s arms. A brief embrace. Never, alas, repeated.

Her name, as it happens, was Ann Hughes. My full name is Robert Hughes Jones, Hughes being my mother’s maiden name. And thereby hangs this tale. Which is also a journalism lecture about never making assumptions without checking and double-checking.

For all my life I have assumed, as have my brother and sister, that we had Welsh ancestry. Both Jones and Hughes are amongst the most common of Welsh names, and there was constant migration from the time of the industrial revolution from impoverished Wales to the increasingly industrialised West Midlands. All my father’s family was tall. But my mother’s family were not so tall, so she looked as if she could have come from the small Celtic folk of Wales.

However, some years ago, my cousin, Colin, who is a vicar, did some exhaustive research into the origins of the Hughes family. He discovered that as far back as he could go, and that was to the fifteenth century, the Hugheses had always lived within a few miles of Wolverhampton. In the fifteenth century they were at Wednesbury, which none of my readers will have heard of, because it does not have a football team. It is a small town about eight miles from Wolverhampton.

It was not until Friday evening that I realised that I was still clinging on to my childhood assumptions. I was having dinner with my daughter’s family whom we had joined in Tenby, a seaside resort on the South Wales coast west of Swansea. It was my daughter’s bloke, Lee, who fertilised the seeds of doubt growing in my mind. Maybe father’s ancestors did not come from Wales either.

The only thing I know for certain about the Jones family history is that my great-grandfather was born in Walsall, six miles from Wolverhampton, in 1840. This is knowledge I have been brought up with. Because in the family album there was a faded photo of my great-grandfather standing in a door-way, which he was too big to get through. He was big all round. Well over six-feet in height, and broad with it. His obituary says that at 35 stone he was one of the stoutest men in the kingdom. It also says that he was taken to the cemetery the night before. According to family myth this was because he was too big for a hearse so that his body had to be transported in a furniture van.

So now, putting my academic hat on, the balance of probability is that neither side of my family came from Wales. Mr Griff, next door neighbour to my family home in Wolverhampton, was really Welsh and still had the accent to prove it. He was about half the height of my father. And half the height of his wife, the Wolverhampton girl he had married. Great grandfather Jones was a giant. Which does not prove he did not come from Wales, but it certainly means it is not likely.

How much it matters where our ancestors came from is a matter for argument. But it is mandatory for anyone who claims to practise journalism not to perpetuate myths he knows to be false. I write this in a remote cottage near the northern coast of South Wales, where little Dulcie and bigger Joe are running around in delight, far from the noise of traffic, far from the sight of other human beings. They must be brought up on truth not discredited family myths.

That means I shall have to tell them about all this, since it must rank as one of the biggest mistakes of my life.

How can I ever excuse my stupidity. I could put it down to my own fear of being just plain boring. It is boring being a Jones. The Wolverhampton of my youth was a pretty boring place. So I was a sucker for the dream that I might have been descended from the Celts with their gift for music and writing.

But I have to tell them, and readers of this blog, the plain facts. I am a lad from Wolverhampton. I am the descendant of generations of lasses and lads from the insular West Midlands. Researching my family background has not brought a tear to my eye. Unlike, Jeremy Paxman, I have not discovered anything moving or exciting. Even as I write this I am yawning from sheer boredom.

Journalists and journalism are facing an unprecedented level of attack in terms of public cynicism, legal constraints and the political spin designed to bolster support for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the media’s watchdog role is dying through lack of use.
This form of undercover journalism, which challenges the activities of the dominant institutions in our society, is on death row. Since the late 1970s there has been a decline in investigative journalism in the world’s media, particularly in America and now in Britain
The demand for instant news diverts journalists and news organizations from their role of detecting, investigating and exposing society’s ills, which requires long and patient work by a team of journalists, in favour of the more easily produced, audience-friendly task of light entertainment and live reporting. News has now become a business force, focused on profit and political spin, rather than keeping the powerful in check.
Investigative journalists used to be the feather in the cap of any well organized newsroom, with some of the most famous being Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein exposing the scandal at Watergate in America. Seymour Hersh on the My Lai massacre, Wilfred Burchett, the first Westerner to enter Hiroshima in September 1945; Israeli journalist Amira Hass, reporting from the Gaza Strip in the 1990s, to name but a few.
The most prolific purveyor of investigative scoops, in Britain in the last century was the Daily Mirror newspaper, whose innovations, which included the now widely imitated, ‘shock issue,’ in which page after page was devoted to a single subject, usually exposing some social evil. The then editor, the legendary Hugh Cudlipp, called it an “exercise in brutal mass education”.
The first shock issue in 1960 was a searing account of the suffering of horses shipped from Britain to the butchers of Belgium and France. This was followed by scandals of poorly equipped youth clubs, cruelty to children, pollution, the suicide club of teenagers on ton-up motorbikes and the neglect of old and lonely people.
“Forward with the people!” said one masthead, during this time, which encapsulated the democratic role that journalists played in representing the public against the pillars of power.
However, in today’s more modern society such journalism, particularly by the popular press, has been confined to digging up dirt and revealing secrets about the private lives of the rich and famous, the Royal family, politicians and rock stars. The resignation of Paul Foot in 1993 brought an end to the Daily Mirror’s tradition of hard-hitting political investigations and marked a rapid decline that beset all news outlets. With the quality press, technology, competition and new owners have acted to curtail investigative work.
Investigative journalism defines what it is to write in the public interest and to be part of a democratic society. Democracy is founded on a number of principles, one of which is the accountability of elected representatives and civil servants to the people. Investigative journalists are among those best placed to expose it and ensure that justice is done.
But the politicians have hit back, as they did at the turn of the last century in America. Then, the Republican President, Teddy Roosevelt, turned the tables on the investigative journalists who had exposed the underside of American capitalism. He labelled them muckrakers, who were only concerned with digging up dirt. Today governments are seeking new and improved ways of restricting journalists, in what they report and in their working practices. And they are building on public dislike of the intrusion into private lives and the hounding of individuals for relatively minor sexual misdemeanors to suggest that all journalists are underhand and dishonest.
News of the World reporter David McGee found himself in the dock after his investigation into the failings at Woodhill Prison, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire. McGee had taken a job guarding prisoners. After months undercover he took photographs of Ian Huntley, who was serving a life sentence for murdering two young girls in Soham, in his cell. The pictures were published in June 2003, and prompted a Home Office review of prison security.
He got the job in his own name, providing passport ID showing his profession as a journalist. Yes, this was illegal but if one man with a camera can get in that position, what is stopping a crazed feminist protestor in a shell suit and a claymore, or an armed terrorist?
Moreover, due to his investigations he managed to reveal the problems with security and administrative procedures – he was working in the public interest. This did not stop, however, McGee being charged with taking a camera into prison, very minor offence. The government is punishing investigative journalists for pointing out that they are not doing their jobs properly.
Legal proceedings, in my view, should not be taken against investigative journalists, if they have acted in-line with what it means to write in the public interest and they have followed the guidelines set out by the NUJ, governing body
Another example is the BBC’s Real Story documentary, ‘Detention Undercover,’ took nine months of investigative research, including three months of secret filming to reveal asylum seekers and immigrants being racially and physically abused by security guards in a Cambridgeshire detention centre.
The programme’s findings were presented to the Home Office and also to the private security company who employed the guards whose deplorable behavior had been caught on camera. As a result, a number of employees were suspended. This is another classic example of investigative journalists providing a public service by using methods, which stretch the laws of the land. Investigations by undercover journalists have the potential to reduce crime, improve national institutions and the people who work in them.
Journalists must be free to identify problems and investigate them using whatever methods are necessary. They should be free to publish or broadcast their stories their stories when those stories are in the public interest, without fear of censorship, recrimination or penal sanction.
And journalists need to be supported by the public when governments and big business, try to use the law against them for doing their most essential job, uncovering the abuse of power.

Phil Simms is an undergraduate student in the Department of Journalism, City University.

It’s not a long walk across the sands from the car park at Bigbury-on-Sea to Burgh Island. But the gusting wind is buffeting us in all directions and it is not easy to keep your balance and avoid the ruts from the four by fours. It is just the right kind of wind to provide some excitement for the surfers. To the east, where the surf is at its roughest, a race develops between the man on a sailboard and a surfer towed by a billowing blue sail. Both are whisked over the roaring surf out to sea, leaving their own trails behind them.

We press on across the sand towards the large hotel shining white in the sunshine. Our goal is the bench in front of the pub adjacent. The Pilchard Inn, dated 1336, is a solid stone building which looks good enough to last another 670 years. We sit down and look back. Centre view there a group of a dozen or so managers, we had seen earlier, are standing in a circle. All but one are men in their middle forties. They are being briefed on the basics of surfing as part of what is probably a team-building course.

They march, carrying their surf boards, in a stately crocodile down to the sea to the west, where the surf, sheltered by the grey chalk cliffs, is less violent. Soon they are in the sea floundering around clinging to their boards. A few manage to ride the waves, crouching on the boards hands and knees. There is one star, who stands erect, and surfs in again and again. Obviously a true fat cat in the making.

On the walk back the wind is really getting up, threatening a storm. This time we feel battered rather than buffeted. And a thin film of sand blows beneath our feet and ripples across the length of the beach. Bliss it is to reach the shelter of the rocks on the other side where we sit down and I light a fag in the stillness. One family is lying on the sand finishing their lunch. In front of them two Jack Russell terriers, leads hooked around a stick in the sand, are chasing each other round in a circle, yapping all the way.

Suddenly the sun breaks through again. I feel a warm glow on my cheeks, reminding me of winter days crouching beside the fire making toast with a long brass fork.

Later we walk back up the hill turning for one last look at the sea. The managers have given up trying to learn how to surf. They are clinging to their boards giving us a cameo picture of a gaggle of fat cats floundering in the sea. Engaging, no doubt, in team building chat with lots of positive feedback as to how brave and adventurous they all are.

It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that there are very few journalists whose day-to-day work is worth republishing after half-a-century or more. And it’s just as much of a commonplace that, of the tiny band of mid-20th-century hacks whose work lives on, none is of greater contemporary relevance than George Orwell.

Yet Orwell’s journalism, or at least his everyday journalism, is not read as widely as it deserves to be. Lots of people are familiar with his novels (particularly Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four), his three great books of reportage – Down and Out in Paris and London, The Road to Wigan Pier, and Homage to Catalonia – and his most anthologised essays, most of them written for small-circulation literary journals.

But unless you have worked your way through the final ten volumes of Peter Davison’s magisterial 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell, published in the late 1990s, the chances are that you haven’t come across more than a smattering of the extraordinary quantity of exemplary journalistic jobbing that Orwell did for most of his life as a writer.

Everything is in Davison, of course, but because it is spread through ten volumes, interspersed with letters and fascinating ephemera, it is just a little difficult to take in. There was a generous selection of Orwell’s journalism published in four volumes in the 1960s as Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, edited by Ian Angus and Orwell’s widow Sonia, but Sonia’s criteria for inclusion and exclusion were strange in the extreme. In the 1980s, the New Statesman produced a slim pamphlet of Orwell’s contributions to its pages and the writer W. J. West edited two volumes of Orwell’s broadcast scripts for the BBC in 1941-43. And a couple of years ago came a collection of his reviews and reportage in the Observer.

All this was marvellous – but there was a glaring gap. The routine journalism on which Orwell’s reputation is primarily based is not his work for the BBC or the Observer, let alone his half-dozen reviews for the New Statesman, whose editor, Kingsley Martin, he famously detested. Rather it is Orwell’s columns for Tribune, the Labour left weekly, 80 of which appeared under the rubric “As I Please” between 1943 and 1947.

The columns for Tribune are justly feted. The range of subjects he covered was extraordinary: it is difficult to think of anyone before or since who could write about so many different things. As his friend Julian Symons wrote: ‘He discussed a hundred subjects, ranging from the comparative amounts he spent on books and cigarettes or lamenting the decline of the English murder from the days of Crippen to a casual wartime killing to the spawning of toads in spring.’

But it isn’t just Orwell’s versatility that stands out. The columns are also remarkably original and written in a taut, demotic journalistic style. As another friend, George Woodcock, put it: ‘He could always find a subject on which there was something fresh to say in a prose that, for all its ease and apparent casualness, was penetrating and direct.’

What’s more, despite the diversity of subject matter, they form a single coherent body of work. In the words of the literary critic D. J. Taylor in his recent Orwell biography: ‘One of the most engaging features of the column, read sequentially, is the sense of dialogue, points taken up, conceded or refuted, continuity rather than a trail of pronouncements which the reader could take or leave as he or she chose.’

Tribune was, as it remains, a political paper, but Orwell rarely dealt directly in his columns with the subject matter of most political journalists: elections, debates in parliament, legislation, policy pronouncements, ministerial appointments and so on. Nor, for the most part, did he use his Tribune column to examine in detail the latest developments in world affairs.

Nevertheless, his columns were intensely political – even, paradoxically, when they appeared to have nothing to do with politics. Orwell was writing as a democratic socialist for democratic socialist readers, and his role as he saw it was to provoke them, to get them to think about what politics is and what it can and cannot achieve.

If there is a single theme that runs all the way through Orwell’s Tribune columns from 1943 to 1947, it is that the left needs a more nuanced conception of politics. Democratic socialism is not just a matter of the Labour Party adopting the right manifesto, winning a general election, nationalising the means of production and creating a comprehensive welfare state (although it is all these). It also involves telling inconvenient truths – about the nature of Soviet communism, about the economic consequences of decolonisation, about the extent of popular anti-Americanism in Britain. It means, among other things, reforming the press, defending the right of anarchists to sell seditious literature and countering racial prejudice. Moreover, a lot that is important in life cannot be reduced to politics. Great writers can be very right-wing; people will never tire of celebrating Christmas by eating and drinking too much; and the arrival of spring will always be a source of wonder.

Sixty-odd years on, Orwell’s emphases on the lacunae of left politics and principles, rather than the programmatic core of 1940s democratic socialism or the week-by-week flow of events, makes his Tribune columns more accessible than anything written by his contemporaries. Not everything he discussed is still current. The Soviet Union and British empire are long over, the Cold War has been and gone, and the best writers in Britain have not been right wing for some time. But totalitarianism and imperialism are still very much with us, and Orwell’s commitment to telling inconvenient truths, his warnings about the slipperiness of political language and the sensationalism of the popular press, his concerns with racism and religious intolerance and his conviction that there is more to life than politics as traditionally conceived are as relevant today as they were in the 1940s.

The idea of putting out a collection of all Orwell’s Tribune columns is hardly original. Bernard Crick, still Orwell’s best biographer, suggested it more than 20 years ago, and he was not alone. But Tribune, which holds copyright on the Orwell it published, was in no state to sort it all out then – and it was only a little more than a year ago, when Politico’s, an imprint of Methuen, jumped at the idea of putting all Orwell’s Tribune columns into a single volume, that the idea began to be made concrete. It has been a bit of a rush, but Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please” and other writings is coming out next month, and I can’t think of a better way of celebrating Tribune’s 70th birthday at the beginning of next year.

Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please” and other writings, edited and introduced by Paul Anderson with a foreword by Michael Foot, is published on 25 September.

Paul was deputy editor of the European Nuclear Disarmament Journal 1984-87, reviews editor of Tribune 1986-91, editor of Tribune 1991-93 and deputy editor of the New Statesman 1993-96. After leaving the New Statesman he wrote (with Nyta Mann) Safety First: The Making of New Labour, published by Granta Books, and worked as a sub-editor on the Times Educational Supplement and the Guardian (where he still does shifts during vacations). He joined City in 2000 and is currently working on a history of the British left and the Soviet Union.

When America bombed Afghanistan in 2001 and invaded Iraq (with the help of the UK) in 2003, most of the mainstream media were on hand to celebrate the “victories” in the rapid, heroic “wars”. But as those conflicts drag on and the toll of civilians and soldiers mounts to appalling levels, it is noticeable how the media have become coy about the w-word. For “war” is rarely mentioned in the coverage.

In effect, these two conflicts have become “non-war” wars. Take for instance The Guardian’s coverage of Afghanistan on Thursday September 14. A 14-paragraph page lead headed “Nato faces crisis as calls for troops goes unanswered” describes the conflict as “the biggest test facing the alliance in its 57-year history”. The “recent offensive” against the Taliban is said to be “going well” by a Nato spokesman. But nowhere is the war word mentioned. An editorial in The Guardian on the same day describes Nato as “helping bring peace and stability to Afghanistan” while the “intervention” “is deploying massive firepower and measuring its success in dead Taliban”. Intriguingly, the Taliban are said, en passant, to be fighting a “fully-fledged guerrilla war”. But nowhere is the w-word associated with the Nato forces.

On September 7, a page two report in The Sun on Afghanistan nowhere included the word “war”. In The Guardian of the same day, its report on the deaths of three British soldiers in Afghanistan mentioned “clashes” and “fighting” – but never “war”. The Observer of 3 September was typical in reporting “operations against Taliban insurgents”, a “vital and dangerous mission” and “an offensive against hideouts of Taliban insurgents” – but again the paper was strangely coy over the w-word.

Intriguingly, The Guardian of September 4 quoted prominently the views of the new head of the British army, Sir Richard Dannatt, that British soldiers “were not fighting the fourth Afghan war”. So “war” can be mentioned – but more easily in the negative. A Guardian leader on the same day (merely echoing Dannatt) commented on “full-scale combat operations” and suggested that jibes about refighting Britain’s imperial wars were just that – “jibes”.

And in the reporting of Iraq, while fears of “civil war” are increasingly in the news, the attacks by the British and Americans on local insurgents are rarely defined as “war”.

Yet while war is rarely mentioned in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan, “militaryspeak” is paradoxically everywhere in the coverage of modern Britain. Time after time, Fleet Street trots out the dull, all too predictable, unimaginative metaphors of warfare, fighting and battle. Looking at just a recent crop of mainstream newspapers there are countless examples – across all the sectors, tabloid, mid-market and “up-market” and in all areas: sport, politics, business, arts reviewing, travel writing.

Politics is everywhere represented as warfare by other means. Take for instance, the Mirror’s coverage on September 5 of the leaked Downing Street memo, outlining Tony Blair’s departure plans. It talks of the “machinations in the No. 10 bunker” over the “battle plan”. And the Blair/Brown spat is constantly represented as “warfare”. The Observer of 3 September headlined a three-page feature on the Labour leadership crisis “The Final Battle” while the standfirst spoke of the “brutal endgame” and the intro of “old-fashioned political warfare”. Similarly, the Daily Star on September 4 talked of the “war of words” between the opposing camps.

After six junior ministers quit on September 6, the “war” coverage reached hysterical heights. Under the front page splash headline “Dirty War”, The Sun highlighted the “guerrilla war” being waged within the government while political editor George Pascoe-Watson reported the Chancellor’s acolytes using “dirty bombs” to dump Blair from office. A Guardian headline referred to the Blair/Brown camps engaged in “political warfare” while reporters Will Woodward and Patrick Wintour examined attempts of Blair’s allies to quell the “civil war”. A Cabinet aide comments: “This is a military organised coup.”

Mindless military metaphors also tend to dominate coverage of newspaper circulations. For instance, on 3 September, in a piece headlined “London faces war of the free newspapers”, Mark Kleinman in the Sunday Times reported on “the opening shots of London’s latest media war” as the Metro and Lite faced new competition from City AM and Thelondonpaper. Over in the Independent on Sunday, Jane Thynne reported on the capital’s “freebie war” with all eyes on the “battle of the free newspapers”. On 28 August the Guardian reported on the “war of words” between Associated Newspapers and News International over the freebie launches.

George Orwell was always keen to stress journalists’ responsibility to preserve high standards of English. A new collection of his brilliant “As I Please” columns in Tribune (edited by Paul Anderson) is published by Politico’s next month. And in these he constantly harangued the perpetrators of bad grammar.

In “Politics and the English Language” of April 1946, Orwell called for an end to “dying metaphors”, “pretentious diction”, “meaningless words” and the jargon of political writing. He wrote: “In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible…Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” He called for us all to “jeer loudly” whenever we heard or read some “worn-out and useless phrase”.

Orwell was always optimistic in his language campaigning. He argued that “the decadence of our language is probably curable” and he highlighted the way in which a few “silly words and expressions” had been discarded from the language through “the conscious action of a minority”. So is it not important now to jeer every time we see a crass, militaristic metaphor – and work as journalists in every possible way to eliminate them from our language?

• Richard Keeble is Professor of Journalism at Lincoln University and taught at City University from 1984 to 2003.

It is our first day in Roseland. We are sitting drinking tea at the New Inn overlooking Carne Bay. The evening sun is bright but no longer scorching. Most people are gathering their belongings and walking slowly up the hill. Unhurriedly. From time to time they pause, turn around and look back at the sea. Reluctant to leave it.

My wife and I are sitting side by side looking out at the sea and the cliffs. Suddenly I start laughing quietly but convulsively. A tear starts to trickle down my cheek. Janet enquires why I am laughing? I tell her that it is the blog I have just finished writing in my head. I explain that I cannot tell her about it because I am afraid I would then forget it and it would be lost forever.

She feels frustrated by this. So I enlist her help in finding words to describe the noise of the waves we are both enjoying so much.

The waves are lazily splashing over the heads of the few remaining swimmers in the sea. The sound they make as they begin their slow contented retreat is difficult to describe but there is no need. You have all heard it. And you all know that the slow movement of this oceanic symphony is one of the most soothing sounds nature produces. Nothing better for calming a troubled mind. Nothing better to induce feelings of utter contentedness.

This is not the blog that made me laugh. It is an entirely different one. And it is the first time in the forty-one years we have known each other that we have collaborated in writing an article.