Wake up. This is essential. It’s a Saturday, traditionally a day of rest for many people, but for me there are only two types of day: the days when my PA, Rob Wilkins, is in; and those when he isn’t.
Generally speaking, I write every day of the week, subject to family considerations, and today I am writing a first draft of a new book, which is fun, and so I lie in bed, cheered by the click of the kettle and ready for the first cup of tea of the day. Then into the bathroom, shower, trim moustache, and sort out the morning pills, mostly concerned with blood pressure, now quite under control.
Of the other three, one copes with the occasional bout of sciatica and the other two stand between me and the inexorable progress of Alzheimer’s.
And since I am a man in his sixties, some of the mental space at this time of day is directing venom against the drug companies that hermetically package their wares in plastic and metal laminations, which require weight-lifter strengths and a safety net to disgorge them, instead of the little pillboxes that everybody could open without resorting to scissors.
I discuss plans for the day with Lyn, my wife, then attack The Times while finishing a bowl of the bowel-scouring muesli that, I am assured, must be doing me some good. Then out to feed the chickens and other creatures on a beautiful late autumn day.
Apart from the vegetable garden, which is sacrosanct, we run the property for the wildlife, by and large, which means we get hedgehogs and, in our barn, barn owls. Everything’s a bit scruffy, but it’s such a wonderful day that you have to be glad to be born and don’t even mind other people having been born either.
And then, as P. G. Wodehouse might have said, it’s Ho! for the chapel, the grandiose name for the building that combines my study and library where the computers will get fired up and some writing will ensue.
Oddly enough, Saturdays and Sundays are good days for a writer like me; weekdays are so often punctuated with phone calls it’s easy to forget that you are supposed to be working on a book, and even though Snuff, my latest book, is out there and in the public domain, there is still some PR activity that I must attend to in the strange, postnatal world that an author slides into when the latest baby is snatched away.
Of course, the cure for this is to start writing something else, but for the sake of my health, and my eyesight, I periodically put on something warm and go outside to chop logs, which is very satisfying, with a nice little curry at lunchtime.
A walk in the afternoon, which is never predictable because here in the countryside you are bound to meet people you know, and the etiquette of the countryside means you should stop and chat.
After that, feed the chickens for the second time, do a bit of gardening while the light allows, possibly back up to the chapel to read the e-mails (and ignore them! This is the weekend, for heavens sake!) and, eventually, back to the house for the rest of the evening.
We have a vast repository of old DVDs, so, if we’re not going out or have other plans, we pick one we haven’t played for some time. The absolute rule, however, is that I must always catch the news at ten p.m. I was a journalist once and the stain never leaves you.
The last act of the day is a kitchen full of cats clamouring to be fed and then upstairs, shower, then bed—a four-poster, sufficiently big that we both have room to stretch out. Wonderful. A quiet day this, with time to think and enjoy life. Nothing much has happened, and sometimes that’s a really good thing. I’m glad that there are days like this.
DAYS OF RAGE
On Alzheimer’s, orangutans, campaigns, controversies, dignified endings, and trying to make a lot of things a little better
ON EXCELLENCE IN SCHOOLS. EDUCATION: WHAT IT MEANS TO YOU
Department for Education and Employment, July 1997
[Alongside this piece by Terry were contributions from a dozen other figures—including Trevor McDonald, Keith Waterhouse, Carol Vorderman, Arthur C. Clarke, and Stephen Hawking]
Much I learned at school didn’t do me any good. They did it in the wrong way—imagine, for example, giving Pride and Prejudice to teenage boys! There were so many other things they could have done.
First, you build a library, then build the school round it. You make sure that the kids can read adequately, write coherently if simply, and at least have a good enough grasp of simple maths to know when a pocket calculator is lying. Then you show them how to use the library, and you don’t let them loose on the Net until they can read and write and have grown up enough not to confuse data with information, otherwise they’re just monkeys in a banana plantation.
And don’t forget workshops and studios. I met a skilled draughtswoman who never had the chance to find out what she was good at until, on a no-hope work experience placement, she ended up making the tea in a drawing office where, one day, she took an interest.… There must be many like her out there. Tens of thousands of people never find out what their talent is. Where else are they going to find out but at school?
THE ORANGUTANS ARE DYING
Mail on Sunday Review, 20 February 2000
This was written a few years ago. How have things changed? There have been small victories achieved by patience and careful negotiation, and my hat—all my hats—are off to the people who have engineered them.
Even so, the central facts don’t change. The orangutan needs the forest. A lot of forest. And humans want it, too, both for what it can make and what’s left when it’s been felled. You don’t have to be much of a pessimist to wonder about the likely life of the species as a truly wild creature. A field here, a plantation there … and eventually, the apes will have nowhere to retreat to except the reserves. That’s around the time we’ll need a miracle.
Maybe half of them went in the last ten years. In another ten, unless there’s a miracle, look for them only in zoos and a few parks. And this is one of our relatives I’m talking about here. There may be as few as fifteen thousand of them left. That’s the fan base for a third-rate football club.
Forget all that stuff about how much DNA we share. It does not mean a lot; we share quite a lot of DNA with rats, and more with goldfish than you may think. Orangutans are like us. They are intelligent. They use their imagination. They think and solve complex problems. They have personalities. They know how to lie. It’s simply that their ancestors stayed in the trees while ours climbed down to tough it out on the plains.