15 March 2025
To my blank incredulity, I have won my second literary prize in sixty-six years! I took out a subscription last August to the excellent Time Haiku, submitted a couple with no great hopes even of acceptance, and the editor has just sent me a cheque as joint winner of the Haiku Award for that issue.
Since these were my first haiku ever published in the magazine, I can only surmise that an awful lot of its readers like and, as humans put it, ‘own’ cats. For the published text reads:
twenty years on
the cat’s paws just visible
in concrete
Calderonians with long memories may remember my jotting it down last summer; but I have tweaked it slightly. What amuses me is that the prize works out at a rate of £4000 per thousand words — which, of course, I have never been paid in my life before…
30 March
The best defended compost heap in Britain?
Our immediate neighbours at the allotments are Polish, Italian, Brazilian, Indian, Chinese and British. Whether this diversity is typical of allotments, I don’t know, but it certainly leads to a wide range of styles of cultivation and management, some of which may appear incomprehensible to the Britocentric observer. But then the cordon of perfectly cultivated stinging nettles round our own compost heap must seem equally eccentric to our neighbours. Are we growing the nettles to eat? (I’ve tried nettles and they are bland.) Is our compost so special that we are afraid of it being stolen? (No.) Are the badgers who ate our neighbours’ sweet corn and hen’s eggs deterred by nettles? (Possibly.)
The true answer is that this compost heap is complete and won’t be dug out until Christmas, so we can afford to let the nettles take over. And two years ago we had a large colony of caterpillars of this now scarce butterfly chomping away on the nettles:
In my youth, the Small Tortoiseshell was one of the commonest of British butterflies. Experts are not sure why its numbers have declined so sharply in recent decades, but a convincing hypothesis is that a fly that parasitizes them has become more common owing to climate change. So we should encourage any Small Tortoiseshell female passing through the allotment to lay eggs here, even if the numerous robins won’t help her caterpillars. Every autumn I cut all the nettles down and ferment them with comfrey leaves in a tub to mulch the rhubarb patches over the winter. Very effective.
17 April
Sam2 always gives me unexpected book presents, for example John Polkinghorne‘s Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction in Japanese, or a beautifully illustrated tome about Japanese vending machines. The latest is
Click the image to find this book on Amazon.
I’m really chuffed to have it, as I recall an ornithologist telling me in the 1960s that Ian Fleming, who loved birdwatching and lived at Goldeneye in Jamaica for three months of the year, stole 007’s name from the author of this book and I wondered what the book was like (it’s excellent). The edition Sam2 has given me is what I would call a photomechanical reprint of the 1936 original. It has an introduction in which one Sam Sloan quotes Fleming writing in The New Yorker: ‘I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened; I wanted him to be a blunt instrument […] when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, James Bond is the dullest name I ever heard.’ This doesn’t seem to have put the real James Bond off.
I was a fan of the James Bond spy novels, though I don’t much like the later films. I say ‘was’ a fan, because I haven’t read them for over sixty years. But I recently came across a letter Ian Fleming wrote me in the 1960s when I was editor of the school magazine, and this has given me an itch to re-read Dr No. I’ll blog a bit about the subject in July.
14 May
I am making a determined effort to sell my Russian library; which is not easy in the current climate. The Chekhov research part (392 books and thirty boxes of offprints etc) went to Nottingham University long ago, leaving 700 vols covering Russian literature, history and thought from the tenth century until now. I am selling for a variety of reasons. But I am not parting with those authors I really love and couldn’t live without.
Deciding who these are can be challenging. I am moving along the shelves, taking books down one by one, opening and flipping through them, ‘bringing them back to me’, noting from info on the flyleaf when I acquired them, whether they are inscribed by their authors, or have annotations…a slow process, especially when I suddenly decide I should re-read one! I’ve reached the late Soviet period, specifically certain women playwrights.
Nina Sadur is a rightly disturbing, utterly truthful and poetic writer whom I met in Britain around 1990. We instantly hit it off. Along my shelves, I came to the copy she gave me of her 44-page book of six short stories Ved’miny slezki (Witch’s Tears), published in 1989 at Novosibirsk in 50,000 copies, and I just had to take it down and re-read them:
Is she still alive, I wondered? No, she died in 2023, aged seventy-three… The next book on the shelf was a collection of plays by Liudmila Petrushevskaia. I think I was one of the first people to write about her plays in English, and I had some reservations. Is she still alive, I wondered? Yes, she is alive at eighty-six and since the 1990s has moved through story writing, novels, memoirs, painting, singing, animation… According to Wikipedia:
In 2023, Petrushevskaya announced that as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine she was no longer able to write, posting to social media that “This aggressive war, the sudden and inexplicable hatred by the majority of our (Russophone) nation for our neighbours and family, the Ukrainian people, have put an end to my profession”.
My reservations have deepened. Petrushevskaia’s statement defies rational analysis. What it unfortunately amounts to is the traditional Russian phenomenon of narod bezmolvstvuet (Pushkin, last line of Boris Godunov), meaning ‘the people say nothing’.
24 May
Are Donald Trump and his team as naive as they appear? This may be the most important issue in international politics for the next four years.
Trump has told the world that he is already getting tired of his fruitless efforts to persuade Putin to make peace and could walk away from the war altogether. What music to Putin’s ears! It threatens to split NATO and leave Ukraine with only a ‘coalition of the willing’ in Europe to back it. Donald, you don’t have the cards now: you have given them away…
So all Putin needs to do is make a few gestures like exchanging prisoners, and carry on battering Ukraine. Expect the war to continue worse than ever. As Zelensky has said, if it goes on for ten years ‘there will be nothing left of Ukraine’.
Are the European powers capable of giving Ukraine the assistance it needs to win? From about 2010 it was blindingly obvious that Russia was rearming and it was clear from Putin’s rhetoric and half-baked ideology what it was for: to invade sovereign, democratic countries and recreate the Greater Russia of his ghastly hero, Alexander III (a kind of Soviet Union without communism). Nothing was done in Europe to stop him: the seizure of Crimea was not contested with action, nor did NATO bring up forces in 2021 to the Zuwalki Gap and the Polish border near Brest, say, that might have deterred the invasion of western Ukraine. We are told that Germany, Poland and other mainland countries are frantically rearming. Can they do it fast enough to save Ukraine, the Baltic states, and the rest of us? Europe’s record of propensity to act against dictator-aggressors is not good.
I have thought for about fifteen years that European countries including Britain should raise their defence spending to at least 5% of GDP and prepare to defend themselves against Putin, not rely on the US, so in that respect I have agreed with Trump. He has done Europe a brutal favour by focussing its mind on self-defence. But again, will there actually be a ‘coalition of the willing’, including Britain, and will it be up to the task?
Putin has too much to lose from making peace with Ukraine and thanks to Trump’s naivety he believes he is winning. There is no alternative, then, to Ukraine and Europe fighting on to victory — without America, if the great card player so insists.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
My bond with Bond
On receiving for this year’s birthday James Bond’s Birds of the West Indies, I decided to read an Ian Fleming Bond novel for the first time in sixty years. It turned out that my 1962 copy of Dr No is the only Bond left on my shelves, although at the time I read at least four of the others and certainly owned more than Dr No. It’s quite possible that I hung on to the latter because the film of Dr No came out in the same year, I saw it, and as a fourteen-year-old boy was particularly impressed by the paperback’s cover:
As you may recall, avians (not to say birds) play an important part in Dr No. There are the cormorants who excrete the guano that Julius No mines, there is the colony of Roseate Spoonbills on Crab Key Island that the Audubon Society is passionate about conserving, and other species flit through the novel. I am delighted to tell you, from consulting Bond’s Birds of the West Indies, that Fleming’s references to them are accurate.
Moreover, I did not find the novel as bad as I was expecting. It is laughable that Evelyn Waugh should criticise the ‘sadism’ of the Bond books when his own satire is horribly sadistic and his Catholicism so morbid. There is humour, a delight in beauty, a great sensuousness and quickness in Fleming’s writing that Waugh was wise never to attempt. I enjoyed all that in my re-reading of Dr No, but my interest flagged halfway through when the fantasy and fake psychology took over. The problem is genre. The early chapters set in London and Kingston are pacy, they show more than tell, and the details are beautifully observed; so these chapters read like a very good realistic novel, at least as good as Graham Greene. Superhuman endurance, a fire-breathing dragon, a man with his heart on the right, a giant squid in an underwater cage, a naked blonde Venus, Julius No’s obliging seven-page account of his life and beliefs, belong in the genre of the spy fantasy novel — a genre I can’t really connect with and one that I’m sure Waugh had no time for.
Dr No was the first Bond film and when it appeared a cult of it, the novels and Sean Connery broke out at my school. No doubt it was the violence, action, suspense and sex that kept us turning the pages, but I feel it was really the chic of it all that grabbed us most: the Sunbeam Talbot, the Royal Blend cigarettes, the caviar double de Beluga, the Floris Lime bath essence and Guerlain bathcubes, the Walther PPK 7.65 mm, the Vesper Martini… It was a kind of consumer fetishism to go with the sexual. Boys started wearing blue Sea Island cotton shirts with black knitted ties and looking coolly tough.
Our English master did not approve of the novels (he was a Leavisite). I must say the phenomenon intrigued me so much that, using several carbons, I bashed out on my typewriter a questionnaire intended to discover whether and why the boys in my year were so taken by Bond. I thought the results would make an interesting article for the school magazine. Extra cachet, it occurred to me, would accrue if I could interview Fleming during one of his visits to Sandwich Bay. He was a member of Royal St George’s Golf Club and a boy in our class even had a relative who was the model for Alfred Blacking in the famous Goldfinger golf match! So I wrote to Fleming. Knowing his popularity and busy intercontinental life, I did not seriously expect a reply. Yet one came:
The letter is a model of writerly patience, politeness and straight talking towards a fifteen-year-old nuisance. I assume it was typed by a secretary, as the layout and accuracy look professional. ‘Opera’ here means ‘works’ and his use of the word is perhaps deliberately uncondescending to a grammar school boy. But what touches me most is that when Fleming came to sign he decided it should end in an exclamation mark, so he put the top part of that in by hand. I also liked his pun on bondage. Above all, his sheer kindness in writing and sending the Harvard parody staggered me. Naturally, I thanked him.
I am jolly glad I kept Ian Fleming’s letter, because I was far more cavalier as a teenager about binning or giving things away than I am now. I abandoned the Bond questionnaire because it was too time consuming. Not one sample has survived. The Harvard parody, by Christopher Cerf and Michael K. Frith, was in the form of a Signet-style paperback called Alligator. It was amusing, but I lent it to someone and never saw it again. I wrote a sketch on consumerism in Bond for That Was the Week That Was and never even kept a copy. I also wrote a long parody myself called something like Basil Don Bond and the Mystery of Crane Fly Island. It was written on a whole quarto pad of Basildon Bond. My mother came across it in my room, read it, and vehemently declared it ‘a waste of paper’! Needing to get it out of the house, therefore, I passed it to a schoolfriend, who chortled over it. Unfortunately, when he left home for university his mother came across the manuscript, read it, and threw it out with his other debris. This was perhaps connected with the fact that the last two sentences — and the only words I can remember — were:
Ah, youth!
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.