APRIL 2025
A few weeks ago, we were out for lunch with my wife’s sister and her brother-in-law. She’s retired, but he’s a lawyer and shows little sign of slowing down. He also teaches at the university in the fine Spanish city where they live, and for some reason we got talking about taboo subjects for a lecturer. He listed sex, politics and religion. I said that was funny, because when I used to spend Friday nights drinking our beloved Wards beer in a pub called the Red House (in St Vincent’s parish, where my grandfather was born and raised) with various brothers and friends, we normally had three topics on the agenda: sex, politics and religion.
Since we were all very much single at the time, any discussions about “sex” were correspondingly theoretical (and would have been impossible had women been present – they would have laughed!), but politics and religion were pretty much no holds barred. We could all say whatever popped into our heads and no one was ever “cancelled”. I like to think that we listened to each other and sometimes changed our ideas, rather than simply taking turns to spout forth as politicians and people in general tend do.
Anyway, the Wards brewery was closed down when the company was swallowed up by a multinational and was deemed insufficiently profitable to keep the shareholders happy. And I’ve come to the conclusion that while revisiting sex, politics and religion in my monthly missive is perhaps slightly more appropriate than doing so in a lecture on Spanish law, it’s probably still not a great idea! For a start, nobody is drinking either Wards or anything else (are you?).
I think that finding a balance between fact and personal opinion is always problematic. I was put off seeing the new Dylan biopic, for example, when I read that it contained scenes and events that happen but could have happened”. I’m getting a bit tired of this kind of docudrama. As I get older think back to events I’ve actually witnessed, I find it harder and harder to remember what really happened, and this blatant pseudo-history just makes things worse. My uncle, a priest, used to talk about “revealed truth”, as opposed to hard facts, in the gospels. (Damn, I mentioned religion! one!) And while I don’t intend to explore that concept here, it seems to me that some of today’ filmmakers, instead of claiming to be telling a true story, should admit that they are “playing and preface their work with: “I’ve studied this subject and have messed around with you see things the way I do. Trust me on this!”
The result is that I’m beginning to think that when some key moment in history is said to be “well documented”, it could mean almost anything. Might it all be docudrama? History written by or for the winners or by frustrated authors who thought they could improve on mundane facts!
Returning to Dylan, when I read his autobiography, I was struck by a peculiar contrast between how driven he seemed to be to achieve a platform that would allow him to say everything that was bubbling up in his extraordinary head and how, having succeeded, he hated being regarded as a prophet and fled the limelight! I was vaguely reminded of it – please don’t laugh! – when I finished my first novel and thought to myself, “I’m not saying anything here!” And yet, when I revised the second draft, I found myself chopping pages and pages of what now read like turgid lecturing on subjects such as … sex, politics and religion!
Of course, authors from Orwell to Atwood have written works that are overtly political, but they have the skill to make us think, rather than beating us over the head with their personal opinions (although Animal Farm is a bit of a beating!). And perhaps knowing what not to say is one of the greatest challenges in writing, since many of us find it hard to keep our mouths shut (or fingers off the keyboard).
Anyway, more news on the Mars book next month. For the first time ever, Roland has surprised me. That’s how tough things are! And it’s slowed me down again, pushing the likely date for publication to the end of May/start of June, by which time I hope you’ll have been to Neptune and back and are ready for more.