Author: dean

A day (at the beach) in the life of a grandfather…

The request always comes on one of those summer days that a grandfather loves—the air-conditioner humming softly, cricket in full flight on the telly, and the head laid back on the chair.

Enter the beautiful apparition of a daughter-in-law as welcome as the witches of Macbeth.

And with that most terrible of announcements: “The children want a picnic at the beach.”

Do they Indeed, the dear little souls. You should have noticed, Gramps. They’ve been hanging around with their buckets and spades and towels and thongs for hours

There is no escape. Everything has been thought of: the cordial splashing in its plastic container; the egg and cucumber sandwiches already oozing behind their wrappers; the plastic tablecloth, that poor mockery of etiquette; the rug and towels; the pocket-money sticky with lolly lust

And that most terrible of second announcements: “I’ll run you to the station because the children want to go by train.”

Why is it that children want to go by train to the beach?

One finds no esoteric excitement in the old steel bowels of a Red Hen for the Supertrain never seems to stop when it’s needed.

So I go because my wife spreads before me the awful alternatives—the rake and spade.

We reach the beach after some perilous moments; people trying to open sliding doors; loud remarks about other passengers (“Look, that funny lady has chins right down her neck”)

On arrival the children, one of each sex, Immediately disappear into the doubtful interiors of railway comfort stations while I hang around outside, drawing suspicious looks from other users.

But soon the sea front, the jetty shade, burdens deposited.

The children strip; it’s a race against indecency, thrusting small wriggling legs into costumes and then the awful smearing of sun lotions, ribbons of it geysering into the air, anointing seagulls and passing dogs.

Then the children are away, bucketing to the beach.

So why not settle down, with Harold Robbins and a cucumber sandwich? Lullaby yourself to the roaring transistor on the next rug.

But wait, there’s war at the water’s edge, assault and battery in the seaweed.

“We broke his castle because he wouldn’t let us play,” say the children, indicating ruined battlements and the howling defender.

“Are these yours?” asks an angry young woman with aggressive freckles.

“They are offspring of offspring of mine,” I say.

“Cut the carping, whale guts, and mind your brats, OK?” says this vision of motherhood.

“Go sand yourself, spotty siren, I hiss.

I join my militants and potter around with seaweed.

“You don’t put seaweed there, stupid,” says the younger child, “that’s the bedroom

I notice the sun is high and I look with terrible longing at tranquil fishermen high on the jetty above me, gods in a Valhalla of languid lines and uncomplicated lunch.

“Charmain is doing a wee,” says my older charge.

“Look, I’m making bubbles,” she says while other small children gather around, for they are all interested in tidal movements of the body.

Somehow I get them back to the rug, to the cucumber sandwiches and boiled eggs, one of which is secured by a smart dog which carries it off, tosses it scornfully in the air, sits in a puddle of water and then returns to shake sand over me in a paroxysm of canine displeasure.

We slog on through crunchy cucumber and sandy sausage roll, the children sitting on the tablecloth while I balance distribution on my lap, making the meal less than desirable under the Food and Drug Act.

The dog returns and my attempts to remove it results in its showing its whole dental range. I trade snarl for snarl and it retires to the nearest beach cricket, taking up its position at silly point.

High on the jetty, some relaxed devil has caught another fish and with never a glance at those beached and badgered and sea-affronted souls below.

Things follow with nightmare rapidity: the runny ice cream; the sunburn cream going rancid; the disastrous bathing; the rescue of Charmain from a crab at the expense of sports trousers. And isn’t rescuing a maiden in distress sport at its noblest?

“He’s wet his pants,” the maiden tells interested observers.

There’s not much more to relate except, of course, the lost thong. This thong is the most precious possession, beautifully and exquisitely made and personalised to the last strap; the piece de resistance of the supermart where it was bought with due attention to colour and toe-clasping torque. And now, gone, gone. So I look

“You lost something, mate?” asks a young man, an Adelaide Adonis and tidal tyro, threatening me with a faint whiff of exotic anti-perspirant.

And so homeward.

Have you ever carried a one- thonged greasy child with wet bathers oozing through her sunsuit; with the picnic bag, tickets and rug, and a terrible sense of grievance and deprivation?

Have you endured the humiliation of seeing other passengers shift seats to avoid this rancid and gritty crew?

Oh yes, we reached home safely. I can, however, tell you from a usually reliable grandfatherly source… it’s going to be a thong, hot summer!

 

Max Fatchen

Other people get  publicity for their overseas trips, but my wife is disappointed about the low PR our last excursion generated.

It’s all contained in her “My Trip” journal, some 180 piping-hot-prose pages of the devastating doings of two Antipodeans who never turned at single head in Piccadilly and weren’t even worth a horse’s snort at the Trooping the Colours.

Yet, here and there is the drama—not high society, or name-dropping or garden partying, but rather timetable traumas, bus bungling and passport pyrotechnics; no leaping up in the best seats at Covent Garden and shouting “bravo” for some prima donna on the high C’s; but more likely an altercation at the strip-and-sip in Soho.

No hovering head waiter re- commending the hasty tasty at the Cafe Royal, but more of a stumbling into the cafeteria of some London railway station and meeting your gastronomic Waterloo while someone rushes over saying, “I’d know that accent anywhere” because he feels alone and has just been lost by British Rail.

Take the heading under HAR- RODS, in my wife’s diary:

“I said ‘I’m going to Harrods today’ and Max said, ‘You’ll go over my dead body’ and I said ‘Why not? We’ve still got some travellers’ cheques’ and he said ‘Travellers cheques are for. travelling so let’s be on our way’”

“So I made him take me to Oxford Street although he kept shouting ‘That’s the way with you women, you’re just down-right Selfridge.’”

Then there’s the entry TOWER OF LONDON: “He so embarrassed me by asking a beef- eater if he’d like an old battle-axe.”

And WESTMINSTER ABBEY: “I got an awful shock when a guide came up to me and said: ‘Have you seen the nave?’ I screamed, ‘Not for five minutes, what’s the beggar been up to now.’”

That gives you a small idea. It’s not a work of literature, my wife’s trip, but when we get into the English countryside and a village which we will call Slough-in-the-Wortle just for the hell of it, she goes into full flow about the watercress sandwiches and how Dick Turpin ravished a wench in the area.

There was a lot of it about then, watercress I mean, and things haven’t got any better.

There were a lot of martyrdoms we found, quite apart from those people who had faced Freddie Trueman. We did all the cathedrals and every book in my library has a holy book-mark.

We also have the greatest collection of pictorial tea towels from the Old Dart—abbeys, stately homes, romantic Wessex quotations from Thomas Hardy (remember, his wife was always saying “Kiss me”).

There was Stratfording the Avon and punting on the Thames, although the day I went there wasn’t a bookmaker in sight.

A nasty swan took to me at one river and I muttered “Swan Upping” fiercely under my breath.

My wife had a rapturous moment in 10 Downing Street. All she did was to give her surname in a husky voice. People came rushing with autograph books, Of course, coming from South Australia we know all about Maggies.

We went down to Brighton, to see the Royal Pavilion, which my wife thought was a Chinese take away, They got pretty shirty at the postcard counter but, after all, we were researching in depth and you can’t help getting out of it sometimes.

Then we went to Land’s End and my wife kept asking what the islands were in the distance and the guide told her. She seemed a bit annoyed, but if you ask a silly question you’ll get a Scilly answer.

Mind you, my wife loved the Cornish countryside and thought every man she met was Poldark and handsome.

We played golf in Devon, but had some difficulty with the Devonshire tees.

Still you can’t have everything, what with gazing at the dappled English countryside, knowing all the old inns and outs and observing the Morris dance, although I thought it was an awful lot of fuss to make over an old car.

Still we were normal, intelligent Australian tourists, in a country where they play football with no hands.

We didn’t get asked to that big place at the top of the Mall, or is it at the bottom? My wife left two pages for it. There’s the pathetic little entry: “Maybe next time”.

Still I kept her away from the expensive stores. Which was pretty Harrod of me!

 

Max Fatchen

Nobody has thought of offering an alternative Games site out in the old paddock by the schoolground where I won the obstacle race 50 summers ago.

Sport, like everything else, has become so sophisticated: where is the egg-and-spoon race where one cracked more than a smile? The bags of fun in the sack race; the race for mothers, that squealing skittering onrush of homemakers which children regarded with a mixture of awe and disquiet that underneath the “have you washed-your-hands” disciplinarian there still lurked the last madcap remnants of girlhood?

There was also the flag race when pony riders thrust flags on long staves into barrels.

They rode snorting, wild-eyed ponies with outrageous fringes and someone’s saddle usually fell off. Perhaps the one belonging to the blonde girl and it fell off strategically so that she was cushioned by the ready arms of half a dozen young farmers who had been hovering, waiting for this kind of signal. Was it pre- arranged, we innocent children wondered?

Was it part of the mysterious world of display and courting?

And threading the needle? Heavens woman, do you know what a needle is? I was only saying to the tame moth that dwells among my socks and makes a nice living eating heels: I said to him, “needles bring only shrieks and vapours from the avant garde wife these days.”

Take it away, don’t let me see it, those days are over (they shriek).

The obstacle race was the crowning glory for, if you were clumsy, you could combine your weighty and unresponsive limbs with the obstacles.

Somehow I fell through pig nets in the manner born; I crawled under tarpaulins like a great centipede under a floor-board; and I went over the top. of the rope ladder obstacle while the frame from which it was suspended bowed like an archer’s at Agincourt and even the judges at the finishing line averted their eyes.

There was also the eating the apple in the tub and I went after that bobbing orb like a porpoise after a pilchard, my nostrils flaring and blowing great gouts of water over my competitors.

The terrible snapping of my Jaws on my ruddy-skinned prey was like the shutting of a bear trap.

I suppose the mixed three-legged race drew my attention to the marvellous excitement of the proximity of a girl. I raced with a girl called Kath who was forward where I was shy, who had steel muscles in her legs that worked like pistons.

Certainly I demanded hours of practice from her and we ran three-legged down the country roads, our arms around each other, conscious of the wind in the roadside pepper trees and the beautiful unison of dirty knees.

Sure. I skinned her ankles but she struck me affectionately with her schoolbag weighted with a couple of stones, and who was I to complain.

I shall never forget the race, the gut feeling I had when the starter dropped his handkerchief.

We were away in a beautiful concert of white socks and sandshoes, our rivals panting beside us. I knew how Ben Hur must have felt. How our footfalls thundered.

All this is but an exaggerated aside, to say the world gets too serious about its Games.

I cannot find any three-legged race listed for the Olympics. Nor apple-in-the-tub.

Just the same mad confrontations, the clamouring national anthems, the electronic timers.

Where is she now, my fair partner of the three-legged race? Probably slaving over a table of toffee at the school gala day.

I understand there’s still a lot of it around.

 

Max Fatchen

It was described as a small, energetic low, moving to the north east.

It suddenly appeared and surprised us all It surprised the slow, basking sea under the influence of that climatic layabout, the slow-moving high.

It unshackled the sky. It fell like tears of contrition for the dry spell, it fell on parched shrubs and impatient farmers. It kissed brollies in Rundle Mall, scudded clouds low over Adelaide Airport and took the creases out of my newly dry-cleaned pants.

The sea stirred itself and became rough; the farmers went out and fingered their tractors. Not yet, not yet, cawed the dusty-throated crows above the dry paddocks.

It must rain for a week, said the farmers and graziers, throbbing with anxiety to go farming and grazing again.

But my neighbour came in trembling to say that his new lawn was wearing a watery diamond on every pale blade. I made him instant coffee and his hand shook slightly as he dunked a thanksgiving biscuit. He hasn’t seen rain for so long and only this week his lawn was in intensive care and we took turns with a transfusing hose.

Of course, the slow-moving highs had dominated the weather, sauntering hands in pockets across the continent for weeks, pausing to watch the Nullarbor mirages; then turning the skies bland and blue over the restless peninsulas, Yorke and Eyre. There were mutterings in Maitland and Moonta and the farmers looks in Snowtown were enough to melt the Franz Josef Glacier, wherever that is.

The slow-moving highs yawned and extended a lazy ridge, their variable winds sighing and not knowing which way to blow.

Might as well cross Into Victoria and loll about in the Western Districts in the Mal country.

It’s a long way across the continent. There’s inland trajectory, don’t forget, and the fun of being on television and being scolded by Keith Martyn. Or Bained on the ABC breakfast session.

And then came the small, energetic low with its fronts and troughs. I’ve fronted a few troughs myself in my day but we were all glad about the small, bouncy low, moist as a wife’s eyes during The Restless Years, with clouds as full-bellied as a beef-and-burgundy man.

Mind you, said the farmers, it wasn’t enough. But the small low tripped and dripped, troughed and fronted, and spangled the trees so that my poodle had to investigate the ground with a new intensity because so much moisture made it difficult to tell what was what.

The low didn’t stay all that long It arrived with a crack of thunder and left with a flounce of cloud and a scurry of rain. It dropped a quick kiss on Stirling and waved to the mallee farmers.

The sea sang, the Murray mouth opened and gargled a bit and washed some of the sand from its tonsils. The tides be- came urgent, mullet stirred, and kangaroos at Flinders Chase wrinkled noses in the rain.

The farmers began looking at their tractors like a groom looks at his bride, and some said, this was not a break in the season but maybe a chink through which the rain would finally dribble.

Why, one farmer told me, the tropical inflow could meet an intense low and there would be a passionate bedding in the Bight. His eyes were full of hectares of hope.

But, anyway, my neighbour’s lawn is a tender green and has stopped whimpering at nights. It sat up yesterday and took a little fertiliser. All because of the small, energetic low.

Now the low is well on its way I suppose Melbourne has boen visited and rained on and it’s probably going Hamer and tongs there right now. This was one low that didn’t slip disgracefully away to the south-east.

Soon it will be in the Tasman or maybe it has dissipated, off Sydney. Sydney is very dissipated and most people are under the weather there.

But everyone stand for the small, energetic low.

It has gone now. But as my shining new rainwater receptacle sang, tanks for the memory.

Max Fatchen

Getting people off in trains and aircraft has become rather an art with me.

Indeed. I make the modest boast that none of my people has missed a train or aircraft yet, although I have reduced those concerned to a mass of nerves, to say nothing of an uproar of shouted hysteria.

In my spectacular farewells railway guards become shivering wrecks, locomotive drivers keep jumping down to check the brake shoes, air pilots keep counting their engines and my relatives, on their bended knees, beg me to stay at home.

But inevitably I go, driving all the shouting, weeping, nervous throng before me, hours ahead of time.

I work out a rigid schedule of getting there; I cannot tolerate the late arrival, the person who makes the train as it begins to move; the one who comes running from the air terminal, censured by the hot eyes of air hostesses and pilots already on their check lists.

I am a hurly-burly early bird, a panic merchant with panache, a clock-watcher of rolling eye and sweat-beaded forehead, and I can reduce any group of comparatively sane travellers to gibbering wrecks, locking themselves In their train compartments or galloping into the aircraft before the seats have scarcely cooled.

I saw off my grandchildren with parental escort at Central Station, Sydney, recently and I must say it was one of the loveliest panics I have witnessed.

Already I had checked the brake shoes of the Southern Aurora, tested the temperature of the drinking water and inspected the ashtrays when my irresponsible family announced it was retiring to the refreshment room.

“What!” I cried, “with the train only an hour from departure?”

What if the service was slow, what, if by some sudden quirk a NSW train started before time.

My young nearest-of-kin invited me to take a banana skin and walk the handrail of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, a loving thought, I’ll admit, but anyway there was plenty of time to catch the bridge!

I was on pins and needles in the railway refreshment room and skidded my tray around the bend to the cashier with the flair of a grand prix driver.

I must say that the cashier regained her poise from the sudden shower of pineapple juice with commendable speed, returning my chocolate eclair from the till, along with the change, without comment.

I explained that we were racing for a train. There was no time to lose, I said. Already the diesel was standing at Platform One and the signal lights were reddening and greening, the carriage attendants pacing beside their tea urns and heavens only knows where it would all end.

Calm yourself, said the woman, as I dashed to the nearby table, my knife and fork chattering while I sipped tea from the tray because there wasn’t any left in the cup.

The grandchildren were already heavily involved in thick milkshakes which they sucked with agonising slowness, their bright, wicked eyes traversing my quivering jowls.

“We won’t miss the train,” their mother said. “Drink your drinks, children. This is but your grandfather with his pre-departure nerves, Old Panic Stations himself”

She proceeded to drink her coffee in measured, spaced sips. eyeing me in that cool, nerve-racking way that daughters-in- law have when handling the Over Sixties.

Finally I got them all under way, ushering, pushing, clock-pointing, chair stumbling and generally making an exit comparable with the last moments of the Titanic.

Outside, to my horror, I found the entire family hooked on a magazine stall, turning leisurely pages, or with noses into comics, and I can tell you I almost swooned on the spot. The platform was a kilometre long if it was a millimetre and here they were fiddling while the diesel burned.

I flung myself at the magazine stall owner and bought every-thing in sight.

“Well, that worked, didn’t it?” the family told each other, clutching their prizes and at last allowing themselves to be ushered trainwards by old sweaty hands himself.

How I got them to their carriage and finally their compartment, I’ll never know.

There was one last terrible moment when I got stuck in the narrow corridor when another stout person attempted to pass me. I had a terrible picture of us being locked all the way to Albury and both of us past our prime, but with a last heave and lunge we broke loose and I fell out on to the platform, alone at last.

I staggered wearily to wave at the young making faces at me from the window and their parents serenely pointing with marked amusement at the clock face.

A whistle shrilled, green lights glowed, the Southern Aurora passed into the Sydney eventide among the sparkling high-rise neoning the bold night. Wearily I fell moaning on to a passing luggage wagon and it was kind of them to wheel me back to the railway refreshment room.

So, if you want a spectacular and passionate speeding of your departure, if you want a really scarifying send-off, call this prince of punctuality and I’ll put the matter in train.

 

Max Fatchen

Ever since my wife read the story from Gill Martin in London (The Advertiser, 11/10/83) that courtliness and romancing are back in vogue I have been told to lift my game.

In other words, more hand-kissing and less finger-licking

How about a few nice compliments? Why not a stroll in the moonlit garden? Why not, at least you can’t see the weeds at night.

Every man should a-wooing go and one should persevere, dear. I shall sweep her off her feet, I swear it, even if I have to use a fork-lift.

“There was a time,” cried my wife, “when you came knocking on my door, grovelling before my father, praising my mother’s cooking and throwing me glances that singed the curtains. Do you remember what my father said when you asked for my hand?”

“Yes,” I cried. “He said, Take both of them. You look as if you’ll need them”

She wasn’t finished with me yet.

“And what do we have now?” she asked. “A great form slumping and grumping. Wherefore art thou, Romeo? What climbs my balcony now apart from kikuyu grass.”

So goes her complaint.

She can be very persistent. She said: “Once there were stars in your eyes. Now only contact lenses. Once you threw yourself at me. But not now. The walls would never stand it.”

Perhaps we men do subside in marital apathy, which is just another name for my TV chair.

“Do you remember,” she whispered during a commercial break when you took me dancing and I came home with hammer toes? But you’d made the effort. What do you make now? Not even money.”

She tossed her head and I caught her spectacles in a low diving catch.

She said: “Bring me home something besides the dry-cleaning. Something that shines and sparkles, something that illuminates the innermost recesses of our being, something that lights our dull old globe.”

So I took her home the bill from ETSA. Nobody can say that I don’t try.

I suppose I’ve lost some of my daredevil self. The spring in my step has turned to autumn, my high noon has become low cunning.

My wife said: “I ask myself, is this the man I wedded? Then I read our marriage certificate and can hardly believe my eyes”.

I knew we were in for some drama.

She said “I wait, trembling for your arrival, watching with thrilling heart the sudden kindling of your embrace, the pounding proximity of self, and through my modestly lowered lashes I see your mouth pursing with passionate information, the burning question trembling on your lips and then, falling at my feet those torrid words what’s for tea?”

So she has taken to reading romantic novels, the betrayal of servant girls by harsh Victorian masters, the family sagas, the young men who run away disgraced and return fall of honour, driving their carriages madly to the stately home.

“Cynthia, I’m back. Forgive me, forgive me, and the butler announcing Master Derek is home, Miss He has come back.”

“Can’t you go away somewhere.” my wife cried, laying down her novel “and then return to me. Go somewhere, make your fortune. To some far romantic place.”

Well, how about Gawler?

Recently she sat on the TV set right in the middle of a one-day match. I somehow got the message that she felt that cricket was beneath her.

I suppose I’m a heartless brute.

One woman wrote:

“I wouldn’t touch you with a 40-metre pole. I bet you bite your nails too.”

What does she think I am, a Nail Chauvinist Pig?

A woman neighbour told my wife, “Your husband certainly doesn’t grab me.”

She responded. “My dear, I can’t even get him to grab ME!”

So more romantic notions, more courtliness and why not! Sir Galahad is not dead. After all, Sir Walter Raleigh was the first man to spread his cloak to keep women away from the pools. As King Alfred said, you can’t have your cake and heat it.

“Shall I greet you tonight with a flower in my hair?” my wife asked.

“Provided it’s self-raising.” I responded.

Keep Cupid in the kitchen I say. rotter that I am.

 

Max Fatchen

We are in a much-surveyed society. People are always trying to bring us down to ticks in a column; to put us among the percentages of affirmative or negative; to gallop us willy-nilly into some poll or other.

Strangely, they have passed me by; I have been left unsurveyed, uninterrogated and no- body has asked me for a thing except money. Yet I am one for airing my views. I have a lot of views and even more air.

Now it has happened. In an Interstate airport departure lounge. Questioned and collated at last.

The courteous woman questioner interrogated me on my travelling habits which, as anyone knows, are highly questionable anyway.

She called me “sir” which was a mistake because it makes me arrogant and big headed.

I waited for the first question as a cricketer awaits the first delivery, leaning slightly forward in my seat, my eyes on the interviewer and my mind poised ready to give the full face of my intellectual bat to whatever she tossed up.

“Have you been out of the country lately?” she asked.

“I’ve been asked to leave a number of times,” I said, “But this is my land. Mine, mine, you understand. My sweat has sunk into its soil, my taxes into its Treasury. My rates have built its roads. My power bills have lit its streets. My water fees have saturated its mains. Next question.”

“Have you been to a resort lately?” she said, keeping her nerve.

“I’ve been to the last resort,” I said. “I am always there, strolling the boulevard of bafflement, promenading in fiscal peril, surfing on the seas of uncertainty, trying to keep my head above water. All that glistens is not the Gold Coast, girl. Next question.”

“Do you carry your credit card?”

“Why should I take a card.” I cried, “The cards are always stacked against me. Other people always have them up their sleeves. Not even a royal flush in the toilet.”

I sat there, poker-faced.

She was a trier, this girl, flinging all her training into the fray, remembering the warnings of her instructor about the hard cases, the tangent shooters Such was I.

She took a deep breath: “What did you do on your last holiday?”

“Mostly I sat on a jetty,” I cried, “a poor splintered rampart, redolent with memories and smells, a graveyard of decaying squid. No glittering casino here with the call of the croupiers. No Richard Burton arriving in his luxury yacht with Liz on the bridge. Not your Monte Carlo. Instead at the mercy of tide and super- mart, at the whim of finicky fin, taking the ruff with the smooth.

 

Max Fatchen

***INCOMPLETE***¹

(Des Colquhoun AM: 1931-2005 was a journalist colleague of Max and co-columnist at The Advertiser)

Oh, capricious fate. On a day The Advertiser is in high spirits over its part in freeing Edward Splatt², we lose some of our heart.

Max Fatchen retires today. And The Advertiser will never be the same again.

A newspaper is many things and requires many skills. But I know of no other paper that can boast the unique talents of Max Fatchen, the bard of Smithfield, wherever that is, and of all SA.

Max has been a journalist all his life. He’s covered the big stories and the hard ones. But his greatest gift to us has been his inimitable verse, in which he turns the events of the day into perceptive fun or poignancy.

That, and his infinite ability to people and places to life by fondly smithing words on the anvil of his keyboard. And he has cheered us on hard days with so many belly-laughs—with a belly like his there could be no other kind.

God knows where it all comes from, this abundance of ideas expressed with a literary richness rarely found outside the theatre. But it has long added a significant dimension to this paper in mirroring the spirit of our community.

Max loves the sea. One of our colleagues asked the other day: “How can be describe the sea so often so splendidly and never repeat himself?” How Indeed? But he’s up every day before dawn to start the restless pacing in the slippers of his mind. He works on his pieces on the Smithfield station and on the train to work.

Deadlined inspiration

Then the real pacing begins, a profound swanning between the newsroom desks, and perhaps a few visits to the canteen for sustenance; deadlined inspiration is a consuming parasite, and Max is not a bad consumer himself.

Max will stop and say hullo to workmates, his solemn blimp of a face plumping into a comfortable smile. He’s always interesting and interested, but while you chat you can sense the relentless preoccupation with his real purpose: to write.

When he’s not writing he fiddles nervously with whatever tie he’s selected from the worst collection in the country. No, the world. But in the irrational eddying tensions of a newsroom he is our Gibraltar, there and sane when madness flies.

He is a gentleman, and gentle man who has made a sweet virtue of loving to be loved. In appearance and personality, he could have been a monk though I have caught him… ³