VIEWPOINT
Our columnist considers how all experiences, good and bad, shape our lives – including his unsuccessful attempt to become a spy
Experience is everything is the mantra at Saga, and I suppose it’s right: even those things you have not enjoyed have formed a part of you (though, I could have done without the Parkinson’s.)
I have lived my life in pursuit of experiences; even those that I would blush to recall publicly have had an influence, and for that I am grateful. I hope the person who knitted the Remembrance Day topper for the gold pillar box in Hay-on-Wye – permanently gold to celebrate Paralympian Josie Pearson – feels the same way. It must have taken weeks to knit. (Have you noticed the way in which smaller communities pay much more attention to the duty of remembrance than metropolitan conurbations? I presume Hay would have sent an ill-fated Pals’ Battalions to war: there was hardly a lamppost in town without a poppy, weeks after Remembrance Sunday.)
I had gone to the Welsh borders with my partner to listen to a couple of friends talk about their books at the town’s winter festival.
I love the borderlands. The Black Mountains were suitably majestic, fires were roaring and Hamza Yassin, that nice young wildlife cameraman, had turned on the village Christmas lights (slightly too early in my book, but heigh-ho).
Somehow my partner and I ended up sharing the Swan Hotel’s solitary (rather narrow) single bed. Head-to-toe sleeping was a new experience, not one either of us is desperate to repeat. But the festival was jolly and, watching a nine-year-old ask Stephen Fry who his favourite Greek hero was, I was reminded about the brilliance of books. What is it George R R Martin said? ‘A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.’ I think he might be right. Speaking of life and death, I doubt
I am the only one caught up in the new series of Slow Horses [on Apple TV+]. It is excellent. The protagonists, all troublesome or reject spies sent in disgrace to Slough House, are labelled losers but they don’t let it get them down. They understand the code of loyalty is loyalty to the people you know. If I had ever been a spy, I, too, would have ended up in Slough House.
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