Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country (2 page)

‘Hello Ian!’ I bellowed, at last spotting a new arrival who was known to me.

‘Hello Tony!’ Ian replied, looking – to my great relief – rather pleased to see me, ‘You know Victoria, don’t you?’

‘Yes, we’ve met before.’

I shook hands with Ian and Victoria Hislop. Ian and I had met in the 1990s when I’d appeared a few times on the BBC TV topical comedy show
Have I Got News for You.

‘I’m so pleased to see you,’ I said, ‘I didn’t bring anyone and I’ve been feeling like a lemon for the last twenty minutes, wandering around on my own. Do you mind if I latch onto you?’

‘Not at all,’ said Ian, my social saviour. ‘Latch away.’

At that moment we were ushered into a seated auditorium, where we were told the prize-giving ceremony would begin shortly.

‘Let me get you guys a drink,’ I said.

‘OK, we’ll go through, and we’ll save a seat for you.’

When I returned minutes later, walking with great care as I struggled with three glasses of wine, Ian and Victoria turned, waved and indicated the vacant seat alongside them. To my astonishment, next to that empty chair sat the beautiful girl from earlier. An adrenalin rush. My heartbeat skipped with excitement.

‘Calm down, Tony,’ I said to myself. ‘She’s bound to have a boyfriend.’

I’d learned to give myself this kind of emergency pep talk. Getting one’s hopes up too high had been a regular failing of mine when it came to the opposite sex. Lowering expectations, I had since found, moderated the pain upon rejection. Marginally.

Perhaps unwisely, I allowed my hopes to rise again as I squeezed my way up the aisle towards Ian and Victoria and noticed that there was a female sitting on the other side of the lady of my interest.

‘Aha! Good, no boyfriend,’ I thought.

I was at it again. How could I jump to that conclusion? The boyfriend could have myriad reasons for not being there. He might be working late, or be on an overseas trip, or he may even be one of the authors sitting on stage hoping that he was about to be presented with the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction. As I got closer to my seat, I became very nervous. I would have to be careful not to spill the drinks. I was a clumsy man even when sober and, because you sip more often when you haven’t got anyone to talk to, I’d been consuming wine faster than usual. But no, it didn’t happen. I didn’t make a fool of myself and spill wine all over the girl I wanted to impress. Instead, I calmly passed the drinks to a grateful Ian and Victoria and sat down, desperately trying to come up with a decent opening line to initiate a conversation with the girl beside me. To my delight, it wasn’t necessary.

‘You must be Tony,’ she said, with a heart-melting smile.

‘Yes. Yes, I am.’

What a lucky break. She knew who I was. Perhaps her colleagues had spotted me and had been telling her about my books. She could even be a fan. This would make things so much easier. I wouldn’t have to impress her or prove myself in these opening exchanges because to some extent, the groundwork would have already been done.

‘How did you know that I’m Tony?’ I enquired.

‘I tried to sit in your chair and Ian said that it was Tony’s seat. So that must be you.’

Ah. It was Ian whom she knew, not me. Never mind, I wasn’t complaining. This was a first for me. At last, compensation for all those times I’d longed for pretty girls to be allocated seats next to me on planes, coaches or trains, only to be presented with a fat bloke with body odour. There looked to be three hundred people or so at this event. That I should end up randomly being seated next to the person I most wanted to meet was finally my reward for having lived a relatively good life free from any involvement with international drug rings.

Whilst we waited for the formal proceedings to begin, I did what any self-respecting single male would do in a situation like this. I completely ignored the people who had kindly come to my rescue. I had no need for Ian and Victoria. They had served their purpose and should now drink their wines alone. I had more important business afoot. A foot away, in fact.

The object of my excited attention turned out to be called Fran. She was a mature student completing a PhD in biomedical imaging. Blimey, a bit too brainy for me, I thought. She told me about her passion for books and literature, and I remember spurting some rubbish about how I felt science, one day, would be able to measure the force of love. Anyway, whatever happened – and it’s something of a white-wine blur – things went well, because at the end of the evening we exchanged email addresses, and a courtship followed in which I was charmed not just by her obvious beauty, but by her giggles, her gentleness, compassion, astuteness and most impressively of all, her determination and desire to grow and improve herself as a person. It wasn’t a whirlwind romance because it was more measured – more of a ‘strong breeze romance’ – and within a year we had dated, made love, holidayed and moved in together.

I keep Ian posted of each landmark.

***

What I had eventually said to Fran over breakfast at our hotel in Puerto Princesa, on the penultimate day of our trip, was this:

‘We no longer need to live in London.’

‘What?’

Fran was relatively unsurprised by this, being used to the randomness of my thoughts.

‘We no longer need to live in London.’

‘That’s what woke you in the middle of the night?’

‘Yes. I had it all worked out. You’re finishing your PhD soon. I can write wherever I am, and I have to travel round the country for various shows anyway, so I’d just be doing that from a different starting point, that’s all. There’s nothing holding us to the capital anymore.’

‘Where were you thinking of moving?’

‘I don’t know. At three a.m. this morning, the South West was in my head.’

‘Perhaps that was your inner voice. I read this article a while back saying that we should try to listen to our inner voices.’

‘So, what do you think? Should we move? What does
your
inner voice say?’

‘Mine says I should have another breakfast pastry.’

***

My mind was particularly active as we sped down the A303 towards Devon. Actually, those of you who know the A303 will realise that very little speeding is done on that road. There are sections where this is possible, but with this particular road the Department for Transport prefer to offer greater variety, and there are plenty of opportunities to take a rest from speed to practise dawdling, queueing, and steering the car through meandering hilly sections.

The reason for our visit to Devon was twofold. Shortly after the Philippines trip, friends had asked me to make an appearance at a small village in the southern reaches of the county, and we’d decided that we could make this trip the beginning of a house-hunting process that might take months, maybe even years. It might not be Devon where we settled, but it seemed as good a place as any to start. Neither of us had any particular connection with the area, but we’d always loved our visits to our friends Kevin and Donna and had stayed with them on quite a few occasions, just as we would this time. However, this visit would be a little different. We would take a couple of days to scour the area, to see if it could provide the change that we had discussed over a breakfast on the other side of the world.

By the time the road was leading us through Salisbury Plain, the nature of ‘change’ was preoccupying my mind. There has been plenty of evidence to show that a lot of us don’t like it very much, and I reckoned this was mainly because of fear. Fear of loss of face, fear of loss of control, fear of what will come next, fear of our competence to cope, fear that change will bring more work, and fear that everything will be different. It seemed to me that the only kind of change most of us like is the stuff that gets handed back to us in the supermarket after we’ve handed over our twenty pound note.

Be the change you want to see in the world
.

Such had been the message from Gandhi, the indomitable and yet benign freedom fighter from Gujarat – a phrase that was always ready and waiting in the wings to shine a spotlight on one’s hypocrisy. What this phrase meant was that if you wanted peace in the world, then it was no good getting angry about that unjust parking ticket. It meant that if you wanted better education for your kids, then you’d better start taking time out to teach them; and it meant that if you wanted to see the planet’s resources preserved for future generations, then you might need to do a tad more than buy one energy-saving light bulb.

At least that was my interpretation of what Gandhi had meant. As it happens, there is no reliable documentary evidence that Gandhi actually uttered the words ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’ in the first place. It’s far more likely that he said, ‘Blimey, that doughnut looks nice.’ The closest verifiable remark we have from Gandhi on the subject of change is this:

If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him . . . We need not wait to see what others do.

But let’s face it, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world’ is snappier, which is probably why someone who sought a simpler world had paraphrased the little man’s words.

‘Look! Stonehenge!’ said Fran.

She wasn’t hallucinating. This is where it is, just off the road to the right as you go west. It was built more than four thousand years ago by pagans who wanted to prove that although they couldn’t get the internet, they were still extremely good at lugging around exceptionally heavy stones. They also wanted to confuse academics and create accidents on the A303 as drivers looked across to admire a big and seemingly pointless arrangement of rocks. When I first drove past the stones, a quarter of a century earlier, I remember thinking how small they actually seemed. Somehow I had conjured up an image of them making a huge statement on the landscape, when they’re really rather modest. Not that I’ve ever seen them up close. I should have done it years ago, when they weren’t fenced off and you could clamber all over them and have some fun. Now it’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, fun is out of the question. Sites of significance require us to be sombre and serious, and ball games are generally not encouraged. Shame, some of the stones would make excellent goalposts.

As we moved from Wiltshire into Somerset, acre after acre of green fields spread like a quilt either side of the long spear of tarmac ahead of us. London was beginning to feel like a distant memory. In these parts there were trees instead of people, and nature had the tenacity to stand up and really get in your face. Gazing almost dream-like through the windscreen at the changing landscape, I felt different. More relaxed. More in tune with the philosophy of Gandhi. For a moment I felt like we were kindred spirits. I wasn’t so dissimilar to him – but for the gluttony, lust, height difference, and lack of any major convictions. Like him, I was someone who positively embraced change.

Or did I? I began to run things through in my mind. I’d lived in the same house for twenty-three years, I’d driven the same car for twelve, I’d had cereal and toast for breakfast for as long as I can remember, and I still deposited and withdrew money from the same crappy, corrupt, greedy bank that I’d signed up with as a student. Could this be the reason why I was now driving west? Was it time to shake things up?

Upon our return from the Philippines we’d had many a conversation about this, not all of which had been easy. Shortly after Fran had moved in with me, she’d asked me about my neighbours. I had been forced to admit that I only knew the ones on either side of me, and that my sole social engagement with them had been limited to conversations about fences or clarification on what days the bins were going to be collected. Fran thought this was a shame, and I had agreed, but I’d pointed out that this was simply what it was like in London.

‘Are you sure?’ Fran had questioned.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, what do you
do
about it? How hard did you work to get to know your other neighbours? Isn’t it down to you?’

Fran was right. Her gentle honesty had been one of the many qualities that had drawn me to her, and had motivated me to pursue the path to our current position in society – where we could refer to each other as ‘partners’. It’s a funny word, ‘partner’, suggesting that one might need to be a partner
in
something. A partner in crime. A partner in business. A partner in bridge.

What were Fran and I partners in?

Well,
life
I suppose.

Which made her question ‘Isn’t it down to you?’ so incisive. It had served as a reminder of how my life had begun to lose its way. Could it be possible that my path to a life of truth and integrity had become as circuitous as the road that was currently inching us towards Devon?

If so, I wasn’t ready to admit it yet, so when Fran’s question first landed, capitulation was not an acceptable option. I manipulated the discussion towards an area where I felt I would be more able to occupy higher moral ground.

‘There are more important issues at play in the world than whether neighbours talk to each other,’ I stated, with the bombast of a headmaster on his first day in a new school – desperate to assert authority. ‘There’ll be nearly nine billion people on the planet in 2050 and if people keep “consuming” at the rate we’re doing now, then we’ll need two and a half planets to provide the required resources. All our leaders do is bang on about growth. Growth, growth, growth. When are we going to accept the fact that we’re fully grown?’