Before I start, a disclaimer — my latest book written with Wim Meulenkamp, ‘The English Folly’, of course concerns itself with follies, but essentially it is about Presentism.

In case this -ism is unfamiliar to you,

‘Presentism is the introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past. For example, when writing history about slavery in an era when the practice was widely accepted, letting that fact influence judgment about a group or individual would be presentist, and thus should be avoided.’

I didn’t write this; I took it straight from Wikipedia.

Wim and I have been writing about architectural follies for coming up to forty years. Naturally we began by describing the buildings; if we’d been writing about mushrooms we’d be concentrating on the fruiting body before the mycelium.

This time around we decided to look at the people who built them, mainly dead white males from the eighteenth century.

It’s no surprise to discover that they didn’t adhere to our standards of behaviour. In fact most of them were appalling: vicious, savage, brutal and cruel. It’s hopeless to even begin to try and understand them, if your concerns are for things like state salaries for all and the better appreciation of the LGBTTIQQ2SA+ communities. There might be a fleeting look of puzzlement before they ran you through with their swords and killed you.

Anyway you’d be dead. With nobody to complain to.

If ‘The English Folly’ were a novel, the tales of astounding wealth, sexual perversion, murder, munificence, rape, insanity, brutality, slavery, religious mania, selfishness, snobbery, charity, suicide, generosity, theft, madness, wickedness, failure and eccentricity which unfold in its pages would be too concentrated to allow for the willing suspension of disbelief. All these sins and virtues, and more, are displayed by the characters in the book, some exhibiting several of them simultaneously.

America, that self-dubbed ‘Land of the Free and Home of the Brave’, the most scaredy-cat country in history, reveres its Founding Fathers. Out of the 56 signatories of the American Declaration of Independence, 41 owned slaves. That’s 73%.

They didn’t do so well with the Second Amendment, either.

But how can we criticise them from our lordly position in 2020, 244 years later? We live in a completely different world with different manners and morals. How can we possibly judge them? Some men tainted by slave ownership performed great deeds — even I, as a proud Welshman and European, can’t repress a tear when I read the words

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The pursuit of happiness had never occurred to any law-giver before.

But those uplifting words didn’t apply to black people because they weren’t considered to be completely human. It is inconceivable to us, but That Is How They Thought Then.

Presentism is hard to overcome. It is difficult to put yourself in other people’s shoes, tough to see the other side of a position you fervently believe in, inconvenient to discover that once admired figures had what we now see to be a darker side.

Some had a gut feeling slavery just wasn’t right. George Washington ordered the manumission of his hundreds of slaves — but not until after he and his wife had died.

These were crimes committed before they became crimes. Today we are accusing our ancestors of not living as we would like them to have lived. It’s Presentism, and it is not fair. Nothing is fair. We were not born into a fair world.

Look on their works, and look at yours. Do not despair. Your descendants will find something to despise about you. What did you do to prevent climate change? Or the population explosion?

The world isn’t black and white, it’s a rainbow of colours. Think before you condemn. Don’t be a Presentist!

‘THE ENGLISH FOLLY’ by Gwyn Headley & Wim Meulenkamp will be published by Historic England / Liverpool University Press on June 30th, 2020.

I’ll tell you how big the Beatles were.

In 1948 an American named Meredith Willson wrote a story based on his home town in Iowa.

He added songs, and lyrics, and worked it up into a full scale musical.

‘The Music Man’ opened on Broadway in 1957 and swept the board, one of the biggest successes New York had ever seen. It beat ‘West Side Story’ to Best Musical. It won five Tony Awards. It blew away the West End. It went down a storm in Australia. The showstopping song ‘76 Trombones’ was a worldwide hit. The cast album spent 245 weeks on the Billboard charts. A big Hollywood blockbuster movie with Shirley Jones and Robert Preston came out in 1962.

The whole caboodle made Meredith Willson a millionaire.

The following year four young Englishmen recorded one of the 22 songs from The Music Man and buried it on the second side of their second album. They never released it as a single.

And the widow of Meredith Willson said that that Beatles’ 2m 16s recording of ‘Till There Was You’ made more money for his estate than the entire income he took from the musical, the film and the #1 cast album.

That’s how big The Beatles were.

Yesterday the UK government belatedly realised that anosmia — the loss of taste and smell — is an indicator for the Covid-19 coronavirus. This has been recognised by the World Health Organisation and other European countries for some months now.

I suffered from anosmia for a year directly after a ’flu jab in September 2014. Coronavirus is related to influenza. Why did professionals not make the connection? Here are notes from my diary:

SEPTEMBER 2014
Completely lost my sense of taste and smell shortly after my old folks’ free NHS ’flu jab. Medical health professionals tell me it cannot have had anything to do with the ’flu jab, and that I must have had a knock on the head.

OCTOBER 2014
Drove back from the Frankfurt Book Fair with Shatzkin as usual. I realised, as I gazed at the sumptuous lunch laid out in front of me by Alex Hanbuckers at De Herborist in the flat farmland outside Bruges, that I couldn’t smell or taste a thing. What a waste.

DECEMBER 2014
Still no sense of taste and smell. Between now and my ENT appointment we have the remains of the Christmas goose and a trip to Paris scheduled for Von’s birthday. I might as well suck wet cardboard. Von had a 2000 Ch. Grand Puy Ducasse for Christmas lunch, but it would have been wasted on me, so I had Plonco d’España instead. I was allowed one sip of her claret; of course I couldn’t taste a thing but the feel of her wine in my mouth was exquisite, completely different from the abrasive attack of the plonco.

SEPTEMBER 2015
After a year’s course of prescribed Flixonase nasule (sic) drops and stertorous sniffing of a home-made salt and boracic acid swill, my sense of taste and smell gradually returned in fits and starts round September. That was a year spent without it, a year lost for a gourmand like me.

It must have been caused by the ’flu jab. It cannot have been anything else. So I guess I must be immune now.

To the restaurants!

The first duty of a government is to protect its people.

As the death toll from Covid-19 in Great Britain climbs towards being the second highest in the world, it is clear that the present British government has failed catastrophically in their duty of care. They are killing us through their incompetence.

The reason is simple and straightforward. Never before has a British government been elected on a single issue platform. Whether you are pro- or anti-Brexit, this government was elected on a mandate to deliver Brexit. The Prime Minister therefore chose a cabinet of ministers whose primary aim was to achieve separation from the European Union.

Unfortunately any other abilities they could have possessed, such as competence, imagination or foresight were ignored. The NHS was seen as a campaign opportunity, a political football, not as a living entity requiring actual funding.

We are in the situation where we are being led by people who simply do not know what they are doing. They are out of their depth, promoted beyond their capabilities because they subscribed to a shared but irrelevant ideology.

The only trait our leaders share with the Chinese and Japanese is a fear of losing face. They are not brave enough to admit they need help, and will refuse to seek it. I am not hopeful for our future under this regime.

“Officialdom can never cope with something really catastrophic: what they are short of is imagination.” — Albert Camus, The Plague

P24:    ‘My money is on Purser to catch her.’
‘Mine is on the cat.’ He imagines the world below her: through the prism of her great eye, the limbs of agitated men unfurl like ribbons, yearning through the darkness. Perhaps she thinks they are praying to her. Perhaps she thinks she has climbed up to the stars. Perhaps the darkness falls away from her in flecks and sparks of light, the roofs and gables like shadows in water; and when she studies the net there is no net, only the spaces in between.

P34: ‘But my difficulty is, he wants me to do some very strange things. Things I never imagined a wife had to do.’

P46: … if God had wanted us us to wear coloured clothes He would have made coloured sheep.

P63: He thinks of Wyatt in his prison, as dusk slips through the runnels and estuaries of the Thames, where the last light slides like silk, floating, sinking; it is the light that moves, when the stream is still.

P101: ‘ — it must strike your Majesty that a rising, such as he advocates, cannot only be against somebody. It must also be for somebody.’

P102: — if you were thin air, suppose you were a spirit who could slide between blades of grass — then you would hear the aspirations of the dying, you would hear them cry to God for mercy.

P111: ‘He talks to a woman as if she were a town wall and he has to breach her.’

P176: The scuffling and haste, the sudden vanishing of papers, the shushing, the whisk of skirts and the slammed doors; the indrawn breath, the glance, the sigh, the sideways look, and the pit-pat of slippered feet; the rapid scribble with the ink still wet; a trail of sealing wax, of scent.

P220: There is always a current of disturbance, till a house settles about you: till your dog finds its way to the hearth and the sheets to the beds, the beef to the table.

P241: ‘You speak of new times and new engines. These engines may rust before you have wheeled them to the fight. Do not join battle with the noble families of England. You have lost before you ride out. Who are you? You are one man. Who follows you? Only carrion crows, bone-pickers. Do not stop moving, or they will eat you alive.’

P244: He pictures the bolts, hurled by the gods, falling through the crystal spheres where angels sit and pick the fleas from their wings: hurtling, spinning and plunging till, with a roar of white flame they crash down on Whitehall and fire the roofs; till they rattle the skeleton teeth of the abbey’s dead, melt the glass in the workshops of Southwark, and fry the fish in the Thames.

P248: At times he sent Him special requests, which the less well-connected call prayers; and always, until the last months of his life, God fell over Himself to make sure Tom Wolsey had what he wanted.

P257:    ‘My lord cardinal — ’
The cardinal turns his face, mild: ‘What? Drink up, Dr Barnes. And take the chance. You only get one.’

P280: Ambassador Chapuys, you notice, has not exactly said he is dead; he has only let him fall, as it were naturally, into the past tense.

P411: What’s left of that boy? Only his glance around a room to note the exits, his dislike of having people moving behind him.

P422: The day not his day, when they told him his wife was dead, and the day not his day, when his daughters were sewn into their shrouds and carried to burial: two lost little girls, weighing nothing, owning nothing, leaving barely a memory behind.

P503: In the song school the notes are painted on the wall so the whole group can learn at once. When they are well learned, the notes are whitewashed over. But none of the songs vanish. They sink deep, receding through the plaster, abiding in the wall.

P548:    ‘You Irish,’ the eel boy would say, ‘you flying smut from Satan’s forge; I’ll pillock you, I’ll fillet you, I’ll set your hair on fire.’
And in reply he said naught. He never said ‘I’ll spit you, I’ll stab you, I’ll carve out your bloody beating heart.’
Till, of course, he did.

P568: Friendship swears it will stand and never alter, but when the weather changes men change their coat.

P597: ‘The Venetians, you know, they draw a line on their ships to see that they don’t overload them. I have no load line. Or none that the king can see.’

P607/609: [I spotted a typo! Twice! Vicegerent instead of Viceregent! But then I checked: Vicegerent is the official administrative deputy of a ruler or head of state: vice (Latin for “in place of”) and gerere (Latin for “to carry on, conduct”). So there. Who knew?]

P661: It’s the sudden heat that shocks you, the contaminating swill across the stone. You bend and pull out the knife. Something comes with it: a loop of his tripes. Your first thought is for the blade. You wipe it on your own jerkin, an efficient action, one-two. You don’t look down: but you feel him at your feet, a lumpen mess. At once you offer a prayer.

P679: When he was weak from fever the past broke in, and now he has no defence against his memories, they recapitulate themselves any time they like: when he sits in the council chamber, words fall about him in a drizzling haze, and he finds himself wrapped in the climate of his childhood.

P681: Now his houses have plums ripening from July to late October, fruits the size of a walnut or a baby’s heart, plums mottled and streaked, stippled and flecked, marbled and rayed, their skins lemon to mustard, russet to scarlet, azure to black, some smooth and some furred like little animals with lilac or white or ash; round amber fruits dotted with the grey of his livery, thin-skinned fruits like crimson eggs in a silver net, their flesh firm or melting, honeyed or vinous; his favourite kind the perdrigon, the palest having a yellow skin dotted white, sprinkled red where the sun touches it, its perfumed flesh ripe in late August; then the perdrigon violet and its black sister, favouring east-facing walls, yielding September fruits solid in the hand, their flesh yellow-green and rich, separating easily from the stone.

P715: He goes to the window. In the park the trees are marrying the shadows. You can’t see where the rain ends and the shadows begin.

P717: The dead are more faithful than the living. For better or worse they do not leave you. They last out the longest night.

P794:    ‘We are playing chess in the dark.’
‘On a board made of jelly,’ he says.
‘With chessmen of butter.’

P817:    A clerk comes in. He greets him in Welsh. ‘Give you good morning, Gwyn. Nice sunny weather.’
‘None of that,’ Norfolk growls. ‘Get this fellow out and send another scribe.’

P827: [An actual typo: Byran for Bryan]

P849:    ‘You shouldn’t believe in ghosts,’ he says uncertainly.
‘I don’t,’ Martin says. ‘But who are they to care, if I believe in them or not?’

P850: The chroniclers tell us that in the reign of the third Henry, the king punished his servant Hubert de Burgh, Earl of Kent, starving him out of sanctuary and throwing him into a deep dungeon. [Hubert de Burgh built the first recorded folly, Stultitiam Hubertum.]

P854: you should never play chess with a prelate, they always have a pawn in their sleeves.

P861: So I won’t see August, he thinks. The hares that flee the harvester, the cold morning dews after St Bartholomew’s Day. Or the leaf fall, the dark blue nights.

P870: It occurs to him that when he is dead, other people will be getting on with their day; it will be dinner time or nearly, there will be a bubbling of pottages, the clatter of ladles, the swift scoop of meats from spit to platter; a thousand dogs will stir from sleep and wag their tails; napkins will be unfurled and twitched over the shoulder, fingers dipped in rosewater, bread broken.

I’ve just re-read BRING UP THE BODIES by HILARY MANTEL, because I bought The Mirror & the Light, the third book in the trilogy, and before reading it I thought I’d read the oeuvre again. It is a spectacular piece of work, and just as I did with Wolf Hall (link back at the top left hand corner of this page) here are some passages that have made me laugh, cry or gasp.

Next up it’s The Mirror & the Light.

P4: now the sky is so clear you can see into Heaven and spy on what the saints are doing.

P45: They claim they’re living the vita apostolica; but you didn’t find the apostles feeling each other’s bollocks.

P62:    ‘Any foreigner would fear Norfolk.’
‘And any Englishman too. With good reason. Now the duke is like one of those giant cannon the Turks have. The blast is shocking but it needs three hours’ cooling time before it can fire again. Whereas Bishop Gardiner, he can explode at ten-minute intervals, dawn to dusk.’

P71: His petitioners send him malmesey and muscatel, geldings, game and gold; gifts and grants and warrants, lucky charms and spells.

P81: one forgets what England is: how broad the fields, how wide the sky, how squalid and ignorant the populace.

P95: If someone said to Lady Rochford, ‘It’s raining,’ she would turn it into a conspiracy; as she passed the news on, she would make it sound somehow indecent, unlikely, but sadly true.

P105: What’s the market price of Berkshire wool? Do you speak Turkish? Why not? Who does speak Turkish? Who was the founder of the monastery at Hexham?
Seven shilling the sack, and rising, Majesty. No. Because I was never in those parts. I will find a man if one can be got. St Wilfred, sir. He closes his eyes.

P126: He thinks, what would the cardinal do? Wolsey used to say, ‘Never let me hear you claim, “You don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.” Find out.’

P129: But now the duke snarls, ‘Get back to your abacus, Cromwell. You are only for fetching in money, when it comes to the affairs of nations you cannot deal, you are a common man of no status, and the king himself says so, you are not fit to talk to princes.’

P175: Jane Seymour, alone of the ladies, does not move. She stands and looks at Henry and the king’s eyes fly straight to her, a space opens around her and for a moment she stands in the vacancy, like a dancer left behind when the line moves on.

P188: He fears no one alive except Henry Tudor, who could at a whim take his dukedom away, but he fears the dead. They say that at any of his houses at close of day you can hear him slamming the shutters and shooting the bolts, in case the late Cardinal Wolsey is blowing through a window or slithering up a stair. If Wolsey wanted Norfolk he would lie quiet inside a table top, breathing along the grain of the wood; he would ooze through a keyhole, or flop down a chimney with a soft flurry like a soot-stained dove.

P206: The Commons. God rot them. Their heads are empty. They never think higher than their pockets.

P241: Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it worked. ‘Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all.’

P266: ‘Nothing is forbidden to George, you see. He’d go to it with a terrier bitch if she wagged her tail at him and said bow-wow.’

P299: Something happens to Anne then, which later he will not quite understand. She seems to dissolve and slip from their grasp, from Kingston’s hands and his, she seems to liquefy and elude them, and when she resolves herself once more into woman’s form she is on hands and knees on the cobbles, her head thrown back, wailing.

P331: He once thought it himself, that he might die of grief: for his wife, his daughters, his sisters, his father and master the cardinal. But the pulse, obdurate, keeps its rhythm. You think you cannot keep breathing, but your rib cage has other ideas, rising and falling, emitting sighs. You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone.

P348: A statute is written to entrap meaning, a poem to escape it.

P351: Look, he says: once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of an enemy, that destruction must be swift and it must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction, you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought, his heir under your protection, his money in your strong room and his dog running to your whistle. Before he wakes in the morning, you should have the axe in your hand.

P366: He is the overlord of the spaces and the silences, the gaps and the erasures, what is missed or misconstrued or simply mistranslated, as the news slips from English to French and perhaps via Latin to Castilian and the Italian tongues, and through Flanders to the Emperor’s eastern territories, over the border of the German principalities and out to Bohemia and Hungary and the snowy realms beyond, by merchantmen under sail to Greece and the Levant; to India, where they have never heard of Anne Boleyn, let alone her lovers and her brother; along the silk routes to China where they have never heard of Henry the eighth of that name, or any other Henry, and even the existence of England is to them a dark myth, a place where men have their mouths in their bellies and women can fly, or cats rule the commonwealth and men crouch at mouseholes to catch their dinner.

P369: When Gregory says ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when he says. ‘Are they guilty?’ he means ‘Did the court find them so?’

P390: One of the burial party said, fetch the queen, she knows their body parts;

P395: now she must make shift over the rough ground, picking her way in her little lady’s shoes, with her body hollow and light and just as many hands around her, ready to retrieve her from any stumble and deliver her safely to death.

PP394-398: The execution of Anne Boleyn.

I’ve just re-read WOLF HALL by HILARY MANTEL, which ten years ago I chose as one of my ten favourite books. I’m glad to report my opinion hasn’t altered. This is in preparation for reading The Mirror & the Light, but next up it’s Bring Up The Bodies.

To show you what I love about the book, here are some passages that have made me laugh, cry or gasp.

P31: He can draft a contract, train a falcon, draw a map, stop a street fight, furnish a house, and fix a jury.

P37: The thing people don’t understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad capitaine says so, you are shifted abruptly in the middle of the night into some indefensible position, so you never really sleep, your equipment is defective, the gunners keep causing small unwanted explosions, the crossbowmen are either drunk or praying, the arrows are ordered up but not here yet, and your whole mind is occupied by a seething anxiety that things are going to go badly because il principe, or whatever little worshipfulness is in charge today, is not very good at the basic business of thinking.

P40: By seven, he is shaved, breakfasted and wrapped beautifully in fresh __________ linen and dark fine wool.
[Try and guess the adjective she uses to describe his linen, one word which magnificently encapsulates Cromwell’s rise from butcher’s son to Earl of Essex.]

P52: He’s never taken much notice of Cavendish, a sensitive sort of man who talks a lot about table napkins.

P117: The English will never be forgiven for the talent for destruction they have always displayed when they get off their own island. English armies laid waste to the land they moved through. As if systematically, they performed every action proscribed by the codes of chivalry, and broke every one of the laws of war. The battles were nothing; it was what they did between the battles that left its mark. They robbed and raped for forty miles around the line of their march. They burned the crops in the fields, and the houses with the people inside them. They took bribes in coin and in kind and when they were encamped in a district they made the people pay for every day on which they were left unmolested. They killed priests and hung them up naked in the marketplaces. As if they were infidels, they ransacked the churches, packed the chalices in their baggage, fuelled their cooking fires with precious books; they scattered relics and stripped altars. They found out the families of the dead and demanded that the living ransomed them; if the living could not pay, they torched the corpses before their eyes, without ceremony, without a single prayer, disposing of the dead as one might the carcasses of diseased cattle.

P118: There cannot be new things in England. There can be old things freshly presented, or new things that pretend to be old.

P121: ‘Are you bound for Frankfurt this year, Master Cromwell? No? I thought the Cardinal might send you to the fair, to get among the heretic booksellers.’

P219: May I suggest to Your Majesty that, if you wish to see a parade of the seven deadly sins, you do not organise a masque at court but call without notice at a monastery? I have seen monks who live like great lords, on the offerings of poor people who would rather buy a blessing then buy bread, and that is not Christian conduct. [ … ] The monks take in children and use them as servants, they don’t even teach them dog Latin. I don’t grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness — their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt.

P231: ‘Look there at my daughter-in-law Anne,’ More says. The girl lowers her eyes; her shoulders tense, as she waits for what is coming. ‘Anne craved — shall I tell them, my dear? — she craved a pearl necklace. She did not cease to talk about it, you know how young girls are. So when I gave her a box that rattled, imagine her face. Imagine her face again when she opened it. What was inside? Dried peas!’

P247: He thinks, if you were born in Putney, you saw the river every day, and imagined it widening out to the sea. Even if you had never seen the ocean you had a picture of it in your head from what you had been told by foreign people who sometimes came upriver. You knew that one day you would go out into a world of marble pavements and peacocks, of hillsides buzzing with heat, the fragrance of crushed herbs rising around you as you walked. You planned for what your journeys would bring you: the touch of warm terracotta, the night sky of another climate, alien flowers, the stone-eyed gaze of other people’s saints. But if you were born in Aslockton, in flat fields under a wide sky, you might just be able to imagine Cambridge: no further.

P260: What was England, before Wolsey? A little offshore island, poor and cold.

P277: ‘No father wishes to see his son less powerful than himself.’

P407, P414: Gambling is not a vice, if you can afford to do it.

P408: Two hours, two kings. What do you know, Walter? He stands in the salty air, talking to his dead father.

P446: ‘Hans wants to paint me.’
‘I hope he can run fast,’ Richard says.

P534: You learn nothing about men by snubbing them and crushing their pride. You must ask them what it is they can do in this world, that they alone can do.

P570: The rocking of the boat beneath them is imperceptible. The flags are limp; it is a still morning, misty and dappled, and where the light touches flesh or linen or fresh leaves, there is a sheen like the sheen on an eggshell: the whole world luminous, its angles softened, its scent watery and green.

P605: ‘My husband used to say, lock Cromwell in a deep dungeon in the morning, and when you come back that night he will be sitting on a plush cushion eating larks’ tongues, and all the gaolers will owe him money.’

P610: The fate of peoples is made like this, two men in small rooms. Forget the coronations, the conclaves of cardinals, the pomp and processions. This is how the world changes: a counter pushed across a table, a pen stroke that alters the force of a phrase, a woman’s sigh as she passes and leaves on the air a trail of orange flower or rosewater; her hand pulling close the bed curtain, the discreet sigh of flesh against flesh.

P624: But Norfolk himself comes to him, when it is over, and says, Cromwell, I swear upon my life that one of the monks spoke when his heart was out. Jesus, he called, Jesus save us, poor Englishmen.
‘No my lord. It is not possible he should do so.’
‘Do you know that for a fact?’
‘I know it from experience.’

P634: ‘Are you not afraid of the pain?
‘Oh yes, I am very much afraid, I am not a bold and robust man such as yourself, I cannot help but rehearse it in my mind. But I will only feel it for a moment, and God will not let me remember it afterwards.’

TEN BEST LISTS

A decade ago a lady got up to offer me her seat on the bus. I realised this was the beginning of the end. So I compiled a list of my ten favourite books before the Grim Reaper came calling, promising to follow it up with films and records.

I posted the list as this blog, and looking at it again ten years on, I wouldn’t change a thing.

I might comment that two years later the world suddenly recognised John Williams’ Stoner for the masterpiece it is, but it was virtually unknown when I wrote the blog. I’d read it in 1972, thanks to Sue Watt-Lawrence’s recommendation.

Of course I never got round to posting my favourite films and records. So now I shall make amends. Ten years later I’m still hale and hearty, and I thought — why leave it at films and records? I’m going to post my Top Ten of everything I can think of, starting with
Follies
Fonts
Films
Pop Records
Classical Pieces
Hymns & Carols
Welsh Tunes
Paintings
Trees
Wines
Beers
Dishes
Cars
and any more subjects I can think of where I can list my favourites. Because for certain these lists will not be the Ten Best Ever Of All Time, just ten of the things that have pleased me a lot.

So here goes. Let’s start with Films:

1946 A Matter of Life and Death (Powell & Pressburger)
1952 The Sound Barrier (Lean)
1953 Le Salaire de la Peur (Clouzot)
1954 Them! (Douglas)
1963 It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (Kramer)
1966 Un Homme et Une Femme (Lelouch)
1999 L’Humanité (Dumont)
2001 Spirited Away (Miyazaki)
2006 The Lives of Others (von Donnersmarck)
2017 Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (McDonagh)

It’s hard to choose just ten, isn’t it? Some crackers have been cast aside. But ten it is. I wonder what I’ll think in ten years time? I wonder what you think now?

The architect and grotto builder Vernon Gibberd has died aged 88. One of the earliest members of the Folly Fellowship, he was our first and only Grot Secretary.

I went to his memorial service in Monmouth on Monday, and he gave me one final gift. As I drove into town, I saw a tower on a hill. Immediately we veered up the nearest drive and into a stable yard. ‘Ken Ay hilp you?’ enquired a woman rather grandly.

‘Oh yes, please, I’m writing a book for Historic England (forgetting for a moment I was in the Land of my Fathers) and I’d love to know more about that tower on yonder hill’ (I can speak English as well as anyone).

‘This men will hilp you,’ she declared and marched off.

‘Global, this place is,’ he smiled. ‘We’ve got the Japanese coming next week.’

I smiled and nodded incomprehendingly. ‘Can you tell me about that tower up on that hill?’

‘Noo-o-o-o,’ he said. ‘Lord Llangattock built that. Rolls-Royce.’

‘Err … can I get there?’

‘Yee-e-e-s. Go to Orchard Farm. They’ll let you in. Next drive along.’

I thanked him, and as I was getting back into the car I turned back. ‘Why the Japanese?’

‘It’s global,’ he said again. ‘This,’ indicating the stable block, ‘is where Queen recorded ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’!’

The famous Rockfield Studios, home to Dave Edmunds and many more rock icons! I had no idea.

We drove up an assault course of a drive, fording small lakes and ravines. Mrs Farmer at the top was warm and welcoming, offering me a pair of wellies to negotiate the half mile more to the folly. As I was decked out in full funeral kit, I had to decline, but she told me more about Caxton’s Tower, as it is called. It was built by Lord Llangattock, father of C S Rolls, the founder of Rolls-Royce, in the 1870s. There’s a statue to Charles Rolls in the centre of Monmouth. The tower was recently bought by an Englishman to turn into a holiday home, but his wife didn’t care for it and it hasn’t been touched for three years. And that’s all we know, so far.

I’ve seen most follies in Great Britain and I know of several I haven’t seen. But this one, I am ashamed to say, was completely unknown to me.

So thank you Vernon. I am sure you guided me to this.

GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation, and the GDPR law passed last year was intended to prevent unscrupulous people sending out scam emails with intent to defraud.

So far this week (it’s Wednesday morning) I have been asked to join a dating club (14 times), to invest in a film about Brian Epstein with a 103% ROI, to invest in student accommodation in Leeds, a luxury apartment block in Gravesend (hello?), to buy Viagra and Cialis, to go clay pigeon shooting on the Thames for £299 a head, have a glass of champagne on HMS Britannia (also for £299), to buy a new business phone system and much more.

To my mind all these offers are illegal, unwanted, unsolicited emails and they contravene the GDPR law. So who do I complain to?

Nobody. Unfortunately that part of the law wasn’t drafted. This law was passed by lawyers for the benefit of lawyers and to cause responsible companies to spend time and money ensuring they are compliant. It doesn’t apply to individuals.

If you’re not a responsible company, just ignore it and carry on sending out your spam emails. There’s no one to complain to, and nobody is enforcing the law. They tell us they’ve issued €54 million in fines so far, but €50 million of that was from France to Google.

What a waste of OUR time and OUR money.