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About Richard Beard
I figured out the software by translating a very short book by Andre Maurois, now available under the Translation tag above. This means I can move on to whatever else is on my mind. If I run out of ideas, the next pre-computer age blog I plan to translate is another very short book, this one by Henry Miller, also in French, entitled I’m No More of an Idiot Than Anybody Else.
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 I could live in this forever First, it must snow. It must snow a great deal.
Then you will need three small children. Close their school for the day, and find an expanse of snow-covered ground. Be the first there, because that makes it more fun.
Okay, I can’t do the instruction thing any longer, because it hurts. But this works best if you don’t have dogs – with dogs, you can never quite scoop up snow with abandon. However, you can be sure that some of your whites will go yellow. I recommend, before building an igloo, that you put down the dog. Igloos are a significant challenge. Respect the igloo.
As with all building projects, appoint a foreman. For best results select a woman, because it cuts out the arguing. Preferably a strong energetic woman from a country where the knowledge of how to build igloos is passed from generation to generation. Iceland and Greenland would be first choice, followed by the Scandinavian countries, though Switzerland will do at a pinch, and also possibly Southern Germany, the French Alps, and some regions of Italy and Austria.
Listen carefully to your foreman, then do what she says. Send the small children to collect huge amounts of snow. They will understand, especially if you can find a whelbarrow with a flat tire and an old broken bucket. One of the secrets is to think ‘cone’ and not ‘dome’, at least in the early stages. Another secret is to pack the snow in hard. This is an edifice, not a toy.
 Hearth and Home I can’t tell you any other secrets, because then I’d owe my soul to Smilla, Inuit Goddess of Feeling. However, I feel able to reveal that a wood-saw helps with the final stages, and also a frisbee or similar instrument.
Ah, now that’s a way to spend the day. School’s out again tomorrow. We’re going to build an ice hotel.
 not enough information I had an email from Dru that wasn’t from Dru. It was her daughter, ambushing Dru’s email account like a policeman at the door – Dru had spent the night at A & E, she was being kept in hospital, she had to have an operation.
This news came across like smoke signals from the young: the smoke was bad but the signals were cheery. The message ended:
P.s dru’s mobile is out of charge so don’t try to ring it L
What were the Indians trying to say? How bad is L?
I wouldn’t say I panicked, but I googled Bristol Hospitals and started with the Royal Infirmary, thinking I could work down from there. Right first time. They did indeed have a Drusilla Marland on the wards, and yes, I could speak to her on the old-fashioned telephone.
Except Dru wasn’t exactly on the wards, she was somewhere north of Planet Nebula. She was on the wrong side of most of Bristol’s Royal painkillers, but at least they’d done their job. Those gallstones were sending out pain that was no longer reaching the brain. Dru tells me (because she is still in there) that an operation is imminent.
She came back to earth just once, to report that the Trav was parked outside and had a ticket on it.
I did what everyone does with health problems and looked gallstones up on the Internet. They are very painful, the internet says, and the condition is twice as likely to be suffered by women as men. The operation is usually successful.
At Schloss Marland, I’m glad to say, normal transmission should shortly be resumed.
 waste of space Dru tells me, with all due respect, that I haven’t yet developed my blogger’s voice. She means that I write like I always write. I haven’t managed that intimate but off-beat tone that she does so well herself. But then Dru has unfair advantages as a blogger. She does loads of stuff. She’s been having an adventure-a-day, against doctor’s orders, since before blogs were first used as solid fuel. Take a look. This is how it should be done.
Instead of adventures, I make a habit of sitting at my desk doing nothing much, though I do have an idea for an art installation that will be a speeded-up film of my day at work. The lucky audience will get to see exactly how often I drop my head into my hands. It will be fascinating.
Meanwhile, and in the absence of shipwrecks and poetry readings, there’s Dru on a walk through Leigh Woods stumbling across ‘a stone. It’s Welsh slate, carved with the words AND STONES MOVED SILENTLY ACROSS THE WORLD. It was put there by Alyson Hallet.’
This stone serves the perfect function of public art, in that it’s not very noticeable or thoughtful. Public art needs to be inconspicuous. It gets installed in public places. If the passing-by audience become animated in any meaningful way then the council fears a traffic hazard or an incitement to vandalism. Public art is therefore chosen for being whatever art isn’t -passers-by must pass it by.
Fountains are the second-lowest point for public art - they often get turned off, as if they were never there. The highest contempt, however, should be reserved for public sculptures of human figures on town-centre benches. They’re rubbish art. But they’re also taking up a space on a public bench. What good to the public is that?
 'there are no winners' As a sportsman, I am a member of the ‘ -y’ family. I’m related to Straussy and Backy. In our small sub-species, Homo Olympiens, there are three primary families. We are joined by the ‘-o’ family (Wilko, Johnno) and the ‘-ers’ family (Aggers, Athers).
We get along famously, because these sporting nicknames are names stripped down. They are names in the dressing room in their jockstraps. They’re no respecters of names. On the team-sheet nobody escapes – the system is automatic and egalitarian, and amid the mud and studs everyone is quickly allocated to one of the families.
The same does not happen in individual sports. One of the horrors of golf coverage on the TV is the smarmy use of first names – ‘Tiger’, ‘Lee’ – as if everyone was on first name terms. You’re not fooling anybody.
I’m thinking about this because I was surprised to be referred to on the net as Beardy. Over on his excellent blog designed for auto-didact, spliffy, anti-establishment ranting polymaths (who like trains), Ian Marchant reminded me (and all those in his wide constituency) that I’d offered to take the Physical Education Classes at the Free University of Radnorshire.
(This will be free like the National Gallery and not like Westminster Abbey, which is free except if you don’t pay you can’t go in. At the National Gallery there’s no bullying, and you’d have to have a heart of socialist stone not to bung a few coins in the tin or pay a couple of quid for some overpriced postcards).
But Ian is right. I have put myself forward as the Professor of PE at FUR. He was therefore correct to give me my active sporting name, and you know what, Marchers? That’s going to be the first class we take, before preparing for the more philosophical Race With No Finish Line (practical).
What are team nicknames all about? They announce an intimacy. They also infantilise, which makes them true. Those of us who like games and rolling about on grass are in touch with our inner child. A baby name is the best we deserve, and there is no room for airs and graces.
I was reminded of this once in the letter pages of the Times. A show-off Dad proudly wrote in to say that his eight-month old son was a keen fan of BBC’s Test Match Special. Not only did he like to listen to every ball of a Test match, at the age of eight months, but only the day before he’d uttered his first words: ‘Aggers.’
The next day another reader replied that his son, too, was eight months old and listened to every ball of the Test match. His first words were ‘Christoper Martin-Jenkins.’
 'no, after you' Last night I introduced the fantastic Robert Goddard, who was giving the NAW lecture at the Birmingham Book Festival. He’s a speaker who can make a 500 seat auditorium seem like a living room, partly because he knows what he’s talking about.
A crime writer, he says, has to get things right. And to get things right, it helps to be the kind of person who protects detail like others feel for kittens. If temperamenally you enjoy searching out errors in ancient train timetables (Bradshaw’s (d.1961) for maximum satisfaction) , you could do worse than try your hand at a crime novel.
Also, it’s always reassuring when at a public event a professional storyteller turns out to be brilliant at telling stories. The one I enjoyed most involved the correct etiquette for a gentleman who wishes to show a lady through a revolving door. His dilemma is that he needs to help with the door, but without pushing in front.
The correct solution, apparently, is for the gentleman to enter the revolving door alone, complete four fifths of a cycle (alone), and then to allow the lady to enter the empty section in front of him. He may then complete the cycle, following the lady graciously into the lobby.
Alas, this kind of attention to detail is rarely easy to follow in practice. Other people are ignorant and push in front. And ladies are not as patient as they used to be.
I had a similar dilemma come up in Becoming Drusilla. I can never remember whether the man (if he’s a gentleman) is supposed to walk on the right or the left of his companion. In my mind I have memories of two conflicting possibilities:
‘The man walks on the outside [next to the road] to protect the lady from wheel splash. Or the man walks on the left [which will sometimes be shopside], keeping his scabbard clear, ready at any moment to safely draw his sword and defend the lady’s honour. Or is that the right, freeing the sword arm?’
Looking back on this, I don’t think a gentleman would stand on the right. Even though the sword-arm would be free, the sword in pulling clear might rent and slash the lady’s clothes (crinoline, hopefully) in the act of being honourably drawn.
The answer to this dilemma has since revealed itself. A gentleman should stand on the left of the lady, but should always walk on the right-hand side of the road. Then everyone’s happy.
I should be writing crime novels. I’m that kind of guy.
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About Me
About Richard Beard
I'm a novelist and non-fiction writer, and Director of the National Academy of Writing. As time goes by I'm gradually transferring the material from the old site (stories, articles, squibs) into the categories tabbed above. There's information on each of my books, with summaries and reviews, and now that I'm permanently back in the country I'm available for events and readings. Email me using Contact, below. I'll get back to you.
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