The Daily Novel

‘Why are you wearing my trousers?’, my wife screamed at me when I came down to breakfast on Saturday morning. We were rushing to get off to Charmouth to show our children and grandchildren the house we are in process of buying. Janet often puts a pair of my trousers on the bed when we are going away. Usually as a hint that the pair of cords I wear pretty well every day are looking a bit scruffy and that I should wear something else.

When she had cooled off, she said, ‘Well, they seem to fit you, so you might as well keep them on.’ My legs must have shrunk a bit as I have gotten older.

My mistake reflected the fact that my stress thermometer was at the top of the scale, after another week trying to arrange to sell our house in Gospel Oak and at the same time buy a small flat here and a bungalow in Dorset. During the week I had to pull out of a possible purchase of a flat in the next street because the survey and enquiries had made me realise that there were far too many unknowns for us to risk a purchase. So we had decided to rent a flat here for the time being, and had finally found one all the family liked on Thursday.

As we drove out of London, fifteen minutes late, the stress and strain of the last few days slowly began to ebb away. Going on this journey via the A316 and the M3 brought back all those feelings of gradually relaxing from the stresses of work life while we went to the seaside, to our favourite places in Dorset, Devon and Cornwall. I was sitting in the back seat along with little Joe, and his Dad, Lee, who had managed to make himself comfortable by folding up his long legs in the rather awkward middle position. As we moved from the motorway on to the A31 and entered the New Forest the sun broke through. Little Joe, who had been silently sucking his thumb, suddenly started to take an interest in the journey.

We were due to lunch on the way at the house of one of Holly’s friends, Kate, which is on the outskirts of Weymouth. Holly, who does not work on Fridays, had taken little Dulcie there the previous day. We arrived at precisely 1.30 when there was a touching scene as Joe and Dulcie celebrated their reunion with a rather awkward embrace. They both ran into the garden. Dulcie was soon screaming on the swing in the tree. Joe had taken off his shoes and socks and was paddling in the stream. I sat down at the table on the terrace in the warm Spring sunshine sipping a glass of wine and thinking I was going to love the tranquility of Dorset life.

There were only a few snatched moments of tranquillity for the rest of the weekend. When we arrived in Charmouth, we had to go round the house with the vendor, Linda, and decide just which of the fixtures and fittings she was going to take and which she was going to leave. And that we had to go through the other horrendous form where the vendor has to disclose to the purchaser things which deal with all manner of quite important legal things, including  ‘disputes with neighbours’. Is there anyone who has ever lived anywhere which has been entirely free of the occasional argument with  one of the neighbours?

When we had done it all I snatched a few moments to myself having a cup of tea and a fag on what I hope will soon be my terrace. Looking up to Strongborough Hill, watching the traffic snake down the A35, happily too far away to hear. Looking down on the Dorset cliffs and the children playing on the beach in Charmouth. Feeling the heat of the sun, which seemed as warm as June. Until a sudden hail storm drove me indoors.

But even that reminded me of my favourite Dorset novelist, Thomas Hardy, who wrote much about the way the powerful forces of nature affected the lives of us puny human beings.

The journey back reminded me more of how human beings have screwed up our present reality. Traffic jams all the way. First, caught up with all those people living in the neighbourhood returning to their homes from a mid-Sunday visit to the seaside. Then caught up in the Sunday evening trek back to London by those with second homes, who have to work in the City, Monday to Friday, in order to pay for them. It took us three hours to get there. But four and a half hours to get back.

C’est la vie.

Just come back from a joint birthday party for two friends who are a bit older than they used to be but are not afraid to celebrate it. Had a good time. But did not get pissed out of my mind. Though I did have some trouble in convincing one of my friends that a) I was not so pissed that I could not ride my scooter home and b) I was not as pissed as he was.

Mixture of journalism teachers and journalists, several of whom were pronouncing about blogging. Self-indulgence. Opinionated rubbish. No respect for fact. Certainly not journalism. Why did I not stop it and write a book?

Most of those present were far too busy to read The Daily Novel or any other blog. But I did make a rather weak attempt to tell them that my blog was not too different from the kind of personal columns I wrote in my years as a working journalist.

I don’t think I won any converts. So it was a pleasure when I arrived home just now to find an unopened letter on my desk from another ex-journalist, who, as it happens, now spends her time writing books.

She had sent me a cutting from no less an authority than the Times Literary Supplement for 23 February 2007. It was a review of a book called The Blog Digest. Twelve months of words from the web, published by The Friday Project. The opening sentence was: ‘Blogs are becoming hard to ignore these days.’ It went on to quote Tony Blair’s former chief policy adviser, Matthew Taylor. Taylor said that if you thought blogs were packed with a ’shrill discourse of demands’ and ‘a perpetual state of self-righteous rage’ then you were reading the wrong blogs. This book,  according to the TLS, is the perfect starting point for those who require help to separate the wheat from the chaff.

I doubt whether the author has yet come across this blog. But it is comforting to know that someone out there  thinks that some of us us chaffers are capable of producing a crop of wheat occasionally. And that some of us produce rather less chaff than appears daily in the newspapers.

But not this late at night after a party.

Good night.

Our kitchen was awash with conversation at 7.30 AM this morning. Cousin Jane and her bloke, John, have just arrived from New Zealand. There is much to catch up with because it costs too much and takes too long to come that often. Jane was last here for her father’s funeral in December 2004, which was shortly before I got locked up in the Royal Free for Christmas.

 But my mind is far away from that this morning. I was woken by the buzz. As I walked into the kitchen I took in the scene. Brother Roger is lecturing John standing centre stage. Janet is pouring tea front right. Beyond them Jane is sitting at the table in intimate discourse with my daughter Kathy. The French windows make something like the painted backdrop in a theatre. The bird table is empty but a very fat robin is perched on the incinerator. The forsythia is halfway towards the yellow blaze of glory which brightens our garden towards the end of winter.

 The sun is streaming in through the windows. I am conscious that this is the last time Jane will be in this house, to which she has been coming regularly for the thirty-one years we have lived here. For most of that time she was living a mile or two away in Muswell Hill. I am even more conscious of the fact that it one of the last times I will see this scene myself.

 I am drowning in nostalgia. Our prospective purchaser was here on Thursday morning to tell me what she wants and what she does not want of our curtains, fixtures and fittings. She wants to remodel the bathroom where stands my six-foot cast iron bath. Bought for £50 thirty years ago from a lady who was gutting a house she had just bought near Ken Wood. That gives me a truly manic idea. Maybe I can take the bath with me.

 So must close now and go and study the surveyor’s report on the Charmouth bungalow and hope it tells me the dimensions of the bathroom and whether it is big enough to take the only bath I have ever had in which I can lie full length and gaze out at the trees and the rear windows behind them.

Sally Hunt has won the election for the first General Secretary of the new University and College Union. It was a close run battle. Hunt, who has been with the Association of University Teachers since 1995 and General Secretary since 2002, got 7,605. Roger Kline, a long standing NATFHE organiser was close behind with 6,151 votes. Peter Jones, another NATFHE man, who has worked in further as well as higher education, collected 2,494. That suggests a lot of members voted tribally since NATFHE had a bigger total membership.

But this interpretation is really only a guess because only 14 per cent of the 116,000 membership voted. Perhaps they were put off by the 164 pages of election statements. If they were it is shameful. If university teachers cannot take the trouble to read the material to inform their decisions, what hope for democracy.

Yesterday a very nice young lady from the Inland Revenue rang up and told me that she had found a mistake in my self-assessment tax return completed on 31 January. Would I mind if she corrected it for me? I did not mind at all. I had assessed myself as owing £792.24 whereas according to Revenue calculations I had only owed £8.38. So I am to be sent a cheque for £783.86.

That will cover the cost of the survey I have just had done on the flat I am buying in the next street. But it is also a bit worrying. If my calculations of my tax return were so hugely wrong what about my calculations about my house sale and purchases? Maybe I am in process of bankrupting myself.

Watch this space.

That worked. But the blog layout is still spoilt. And when I do view post from the Dashboard it routes my to my typingbytouch web site.

Anyone got an any ideas about what is going wrong?

Just as things seemed to be going swimmingly on my house deals I am beset by troubles on all fronts. Blueyonder abuse reported lots of pinging on my firewall and thinks I might have become infected with the MSBlast worm. Last night I was getting warning of devastating attacks. So I downloaded Norton on my main machine. It took my money but refused to install. Maybe it is something to do with the fact that I am using Mozilla Firefox instead of Internet Explorer.

So I went to bed.

This morning I was still getting terrifying warning messages. So I got out my laptop and my horror that gave warning messages to. I had a preinstalled free offer of Norton which I did manage to install along with the updates. But something had gone wrong with the layout of my blog. The sidebar section has disappeared and the blog stretches across the whole screen. Maybe that is to do with virus or maybe to do with an attempted redirection I had tried.

Went back to my desktop and all the threatening messages had disappeared. Is it possible that the Norton on my laptop has also cured my desktop via the wireless net work? But the layout of my blog is still screwed up.

Then my scooter refused to start. Either the electronics have gone bananas or the battery has run out. Have put it on the changer. Will now try to get this online.

My brother Peter has started his own blog about caravan accidents, about which he knows a lot. Will do something about this when I have time. Meanwhile his blog is at this address. We are experimenting with photos. This is him below.

Ask you will see he is much better looking than me, and looks younger, although he is three years older.

But we are both having as much fun with this blogging lark as we did constructing two-valve radios when we were boys.

Got my UCU votes in to Electoral Reform Services just in time. A journey which should have taken me fifteen minutes took nearly three quarters of an hour. Roadworks everywhere. First problem was suicide bridge, which takes me over the A1 towards Hornsey, when it is not closed one way against me. Which it was this morning.

I followed the diversion up to Highgate. At the next junction there was no diversion sign telling me which way to go but since I had the essentials of the map in my head I took the right turn and was again riding along in plenty of time. Until I got confused at yet another diversion and realised I was heading in the wrong direction and might have overshot my target.

To read the map on my scooter is a time consuming exercise. I have to stop the engine, click three times to put the alarm in the correct mode, open the underseat boot, take off my helmet, put on my spectacles so that I can see the small print in the AtoZ.  So I usually manage by memory, road names and signposts. There are almost no signposts in this area of London, with local names like Hornsey written on them, although you do see some directing you to the A10 and many directing you to the Superstore.

As I was passing a bus I had a  brainwave. I stopped turned around and looked back. Sure enough Hornsey was there on the list of destinations. So I soldiered on hitting dense traffic. After a while I feared that I had overshot my destination. So I shouted at a fellow scooterist in the jam. He jerked his thumb in the reverse direction. The bus must already have passed Hornsey.

I did a U-turn and within a few yards actually came to a sensibly signposted junction. The left turn said Hornsey, 1 1/2 miles. I still had nearly ten minutes left but I felt I could make it. Until I overshot and got lost again. This time I stopped and got the map out. I was only a few hundred yards away, but to reach Clarendon Road I had to do some twists and turns. But I made it just in time.

On the way back I hit another unexpected diversion, but this time I took the right turnings and arrived back home in precisely 16 minutes. And had time to reflect that London is not so bad after all. It is a glorious sunny morning. And one of my diversions had taken me up around Alexandra Palace from where the views over London are spectacular. So in a kind of way I actually enjoyed my frenetic ride.

Woke up early not in a cold sweat but with a troubled conscience. Realised it was 7 March and that I had not done my promised blog on the first ever elections for my new trade union, the University and College Union. So now too late for me to influence any of the electorate who reads this blog. But still time to cast my own vote. Because the deadline is noon and it will only take me 15 minutes on my scooter to deliver my forms to Electoral Reform Services in Hornsey.

So have now read the literature and cast my votes. It took rather more than five minutes. There are 100 candidates for 33 posts, and the manifestos and biographies of the candidates cover 164 pages of A4. Which means I had to read getting on for 80,000 words!

First decision I had to make was for the job of General Secretary. There are three candidates. Took me no time at all to decide where to put my number one. The General Secretary of my old union, the Association of University Teachers, Sally Hunt. I have known her for many years because on her first day of work for the AUT as London organiser she had to come and help me dealing with a very delicate inter-union problem at City University, where I was then President of the AUT branch.

 She showed an unusual capacity to understand the complexities of this situation in the five minutes it took us to get to the meeting room. She showed an even more unusual capacity to understand how my curious mind works. So we have been firm friends ever since.

 I was about to put my number two against Roger Kline, the leading candidate from NATFHE, with whom AUT merged to form UCU last year. I had met Kline at a hustings at University College recently and liked him and what he had to say. But then I remembered that the number two vote can be important in an election based on the single transferable vote. I think Hunt is the best candidate, as do many people in both unions, but if most of the membership votes tribally, Kline will win, because NATFHE has more members. So I decide to vote tactically for the third dark horse candidate. It also amused me because he bears the same name as my brother, Peter Jones, though he is no relation.

 Deciding how to vote for each candidate was, in fact, an interesting exercise. It made me realise just how many criteria I use in coming to such decisions. One or two decisions I made on personal grounds, like my number one vote for Alan Carr from the Open University, a former AUT national president whom I have known for many years. He is a friend of mine, but then that is partly because he shares many of the same values as me, in relation to what is most important in running a good trade union and fighting for academic standards.

 I tried to make sure I was voting for an equal number of candidates from the old universities and the former polytechnics. I used positive discrimination for ethnics and women, who are still thin on the ground in the top echelons. I favoured candidates whose biographies showed they had done casework: this involves fighting on behalf of members who are under threat because they have become ill, have had personal problems or have become the victims of bullying or personality clashes. I took into account not only what people said they stood for, but the tone in which they made their assertions.

 This democracy business takes a long time. But it is time well spent. And though you could write a computer program which would feed all these criteria into the computer and give you a precise print-out telling you where to put your vote, I can’t help thinking that the imperfect human mind working in a more mysterious way gets a better result than one you would get by such quantification.

 Though I can’t prove it.