Keith among the islands

Posted on March 29, 2003 by acb

What you get when you click more was published in the Independent on Sunday as a travel article, on March 15th, 1992. It isn’t, really.

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Eeek!

Posted on March 29, 2003 by acb

I see that Ros Taylor has linked to this site from the Guardian’s travel section. I had better put some travel journalism up here, then. Give me half an hour, will you?
I’d do it at once, but I was at the Athenaeum last night, which should be the subject of a travel piece itself, and I seem to be rather shaky and distant from the world this morning. Only trout or youth will cure the condition, so I will have to go fishing shortly.

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the balance of forces

Posted on March 26, 2003 by acb

I was talking to Dr Longley yesterday and the conversation, unavoidably, came round to the war. “I was on the fence”, he said, “until the bloody French pushed me off. Now I think that anything that gets rid of Saddam is a good thing; and they can get rid of every other nasty little dictator if they want to.”

I had a small moment of revelation. I too was on the fence until pushed off; but I was pushed off in the other direction, by the neocons. Don’t get me wrong about the French. I grew up in a diplomatic family. My parents spoke French in front of me for years, when they didn’t want to be understood. So I have known almost since I could talk that the chief aim of British foreign policy must always be to find out what the French are up to and stop them. But I am more frightened and more disgusted by Richard Perle than by Jacques Chirac.

It is humiliating to admit that this is how we make our minds up on great matters of state. It’s also realistic. Britain has no independent course and let’s not pretend otherwise. In fact, my question is whether anyone in this country made up their minds by attraction rather than repulsion? Very few, I’d think, and almost none of the opponents of the war.

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robust criticism

Posted on March 25, 2003 by acb

Even when I was very young and in a terrible hurry I don’t think I ever wrote anything quite this savage. I certainly never got it published. But in those days the web didn’t exist.

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A question answered

Posted on March 24, 2003 by acb

Q: Why does America need allies?
A: So there is at least one army which won’t spoil the war by firing back.

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technological superiority

Posted on March 24, 2003 by acb

One area in which America continues to rule the world: the manufacture of first-class fly rods. Not all of them are overpriced, either. For my birthday, my wife had our friend Howard Bethel make me a four-piece four weight rod. If you need a rod built, Howard is the man. We met him in about 1989, when I blew the advance for a bad book on the Church of England on a trip to Montana.

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nemesis

Posted on March 24, 2003 by acb

Well, the morning was rolling along fine, until I had a perfectly classic conversation with an editor. She started by saying “I really love the piece”, and within ten minutes had got to “The boxes are fine. We can keep the boxes!”

What I liked was that when I shouted with laughter at this perfect score, she saw the joke too. Ah well, the trout are safe for another day then.

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good press

Posted on March 24, 2003 by acb

Just when I thought the worm book was over in this country, along comes a delicious review in the Sunday Times. And I caught three trout over the weekend, but that is a subject for a later entry. First to finsih an obituary which is a year overdue. I’m very happy about that. It’s someone I like and esteem. I don’t want her to die. But it would be good to have the damn obit filed away.

It occurs to me that I am starting this week writing an obituary for the Times, and will finish it with a supper at the Athenaeum. Also the Oxford Union wants me to speak as “one of Britain’s best-known atheists”. Shit! Mother! Where did I go wrong? I don’t want to be respectable. Solvent, yes. Able to travel — that’s a necessity. And — all right, admit it — I want to turn down a knighthood, as Neal Ascherson did.

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And, while in Sweden

Posted on March 21, 2003 by acb

It turns out the whole country has been mapped, online, at an almost unbelievable level of detail. How detailed? Well, on some of these maps I could point out exactly where you must stand to catch a fish. There are only two snags. They don’t load very quickly, and they probably aren’t much use if you don’t speak Swedish. They are still wonderful, though.

Sweden is a very much bigger country than almost everywhere else in Europe. Why can’t we do this here?

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What midsummer should be like

Posted on March 21, 2003 by acb

These pictures bring back a whole lost world. If you don’t have broadband, don’t bother. I’ve never heard of any of these bands myself, but I have no difficulty believing them. Every weekend, on the open-air grounds in summer known as “Folkets Park” in small towns all over Sweden, there would be bands like this, and in the bushes, furtive vodka. The music? well, it went with the haircuts.

The only thing that makes me suspect it might be fake is that so many of them are fat. I don’t remember anyone in Sweden being fat in the late Seventies. That came in a gugrgling whoosh in the Nineties.

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